Film Review: SKIPPY
Reviewed by Kayt
An Independent Film with Red Elvises in its best scene!
Starring: Joe Convery, Timothy Patrick O'Brien, Paget Brewster, William Sadler and Robert Nassry
Written by: Joe Convery
Directed by: Denis Adam Zervos
Date listed at end of credits: 1997 (For some reason, the release date listed in the
“Indie Films” section of The Internet Movie Database is 2001)
Most recent airing: Showtime, in June, 2003
What we have here is your basic silly, slapstick comedy about a nice guy who just
doesn’t “get it.” At all, ever. He never gets a break because every time he thinks he’s a
little bit ahead, something else happens, either to him or because of his misunderstanding
of the situation, to screw it up. Now I don’t want to say this movie is really bad except
for the one scene readers of this review will want to see, the one where the
pre-2001 lineup of Red Elvises performs at Club 217, but, well… okay, I’ll just hit the
highlights of the plot and let you be the judge.
Skippy Doolittle is the above-mentioned nice guy who apparently has no job training or
aspirations for any particular field or career. This could be because of his total lack of
any sort of Life-Survival brain cells or common sense, but it could be because he’s just that
sort of goofball character written before Adam Sandler made the genre cool. A likeable,
happy-go-lucky, luckless moron with a heart of gold. Anyway, at the beginning of “Skippy”
we see him working on the East Coast as a carnival worker, guessing various facts about
any hapless person he can manage to drag up to his work area. He has a small dog, at least
temporarily, that looks like a Jack Russell terrier, and while he’s talking to a friend and
ogling some girls, the dog somehow eats his cell phone. What do you think happens next?
Right, the cell phone rings. That’s how we know the dog ate it, see, because the camera
focuses in tight on the dog’s stomach, which vibrates. Just like in a cartoon where phones
jump up and down when they ring, like they don’t in real life. Skippy attempts to answer
the phone by talking to the dog’s stomach, then into its face, and then, when the person
on the other end says he can’t hear him, Skippy flips the dog around and talks into its
other end. Aha! Clear signal at last! You saw that coming, didn’t you? Too bad the cell
phone company folks didn’t think of that one with its incessant “Can you hear me now?” ads!
>From there, the movie gets better. No, really. Skippy decides to move to Hollywood and
pursue an “America’s Sweetheart” type film actress, Julia Fontaine, who, we later see,
is only sweet when the cameras are rolling. He gets a job as a valet, parking cars, and
when a guy drives up and jumps out of a zippy little red sports car, tosses keys and
money to Skippy and says “Keep it…” meaning, presumably, the change, Skippy thinks he
means “keep the car” and this newfound transportation makes him very happy. He calls his
friend from the carnival to offer a ride to Hollywood but the friend can’t make it, so
Skippy takes off on his own. Soon, he encounters a pretty girl hitchhiking by the side
of the road, stops to give her a ride, and she easily fools him into making it possible
for her to take off in the car without him. After a couple of hitchhiking attempts of
his own, Skippy eventually arrives on Hollywood Boulevard, conveniently in front of Mann’s
Chinese Theatre, where he explores the hand and footprints in the cement. He soon finds a
place to live, with a guy even more odd than himself, named Larry, who offers him a tiny,
junk-filled room in his apartment for $300 a month, and the two of them set off to find
Skippy a job. The offbeat temp agency they go to is run by a blond guy named Ringo who
never touches a drumstick or sings any Beatles songs . He must be the Anti-Ringo. (If
you’re too young to remember the Beatles go ask your mom…nevermind). Ringo sends Skippy
out to a series of jobs, as a diner waiter, a gas station attendant, a process server
and more, none of which Skippy has any luck keeping. But never fear, actress Julia
Fontaine is looking for “a regular guy” to date, and Skippy is determined to be that
guy! So he decides to emulate Brandon Chase, Julia’s ex-boyfriend, and goes to his gym
in Venice to try working out. That, of course, leads to disaster and other gym hijinks
as Skippy and Larry coerce a trainer to follow Brandon around and teach Skippy how to
work each machine and perform each workout exercise Brandon does. It's also a scene that
accomplished nothing much, has no real point and is never heard from again.
Meanwhile…the inescapable subplot…Julia Fontaine is not only an off-camera raving bitch
who verbally mistreats her perky blonde personal assistant, Jane Brooks, but she also
has a stalker. The stalker’s name is Mad Max and he has the smallest part of any bad guy
on film anywhere. His photo is shown on television not long before he gets arrested. I
thought he sufficiently resembled Skippy enough to turn the plot toward the old “mistaken
identity” ploy, but that must have been merely a coincidence of casting, because it didn’t
go that way at all. In fact, there was a real surprise twist toward the end involving the
stalker and who hired him, but I wouldn’t want to give away the only real suspense of this
movie by revealing that. Not just yet, anyway.
In the process of trying to socialize Skippy to a more “girlfriend-ready” level, Larry takes
him to a bar called Club 217 where a really terrific band just happens to be playing. This
is the scene Red Elvises fans will wait to see, because Our Favorite Band are onstage,
complete with a large yellow and red poster from the “Surfing in Siberia” era, playing what
pretty much sounded to me like “Three Russians” and then one other song. The only bad thing
about this scene, well, other than it being too short, of course, is that the camera isn't
on Red Elvises for the entire scene. It’s on the actors for too long, for yet another
“Skippy’s so dumb, look at him misunderstanding a basic part of human life again”
bit. While clubbing, Skippy overhears a conversation in which a guy calls a girl “stupid”
and she falls for him anyway, so of course he concludes that insults are the key to picking
up girls in bars. He should have asked Igor and Oleg, they would have had much better advice
on that, I’m sure! But no… he starts talking to a girl, and things seem at first to be going
all right, and then he adoringly tells her she’s really stupid and well…you can imagine the
result. Suffice to say Skippy goes home with only Larry that night.
After Skippy makes an audition tape for Julia’s “Regular Guy” contest, complete with his
frantic weird squirming after a bug gets down his shirt, he gets a phone call telling him
he won the contest. When he meets Julia he falls hard for her. They have a press conference
to announce Skippy as the winner, punctuated by another murder attempt as a hired thug
throws a knife at Julia. Later on, he gets a phone call inviting him to lunch with Julia at
a restaurant on Ocean Avenue, so he’s nine kinds of excited. He goes to the restaurant by
skateboard and there’s actually a funny moment when he hands the skateboard to the valet
parking attendant at the curb. Julia isn’t there yet but Skippy is met by her assistant,
Jane, who we can tell would be really pretty without her glasses and with a little more
confidence in herself, and the two of them get to know each other a little over drinks.
Shirley Temples, that is, for Skippy, lots of them. Jane reveals to him that she really
wanted to be an actress but became a personal assistant instead. By the time Julia and her
manager arrive, Skippy has a rather urgent need to visit the facilities, but first they
insist on making numerous champagne toasts. Skippy finally makes his escape and in his
frenzy runs into the Ladies Room. Bathroom humor hijinks ensue when Skippy does himself
up in very impromptu drag, including toilet paper rolls on his chest, to get out past the
women in there.
Not knowing what to wear to the Oscars with Julia, and apparently never having seen an
Oscar telecast where the men all wear tuxes or other types of suits, Skippy dresses up
in a gold skintight outfit and goes as an Oscar. No one bats an eyelash, and at an
after-party he meets a real live Hollywood producer who doesn’t just say emptily “We’ll
do lunch…” but actually listens to his film pitch. We had not know until this scene
that Skippy even had any film ideas to pitch, but along the way he has developed quite
an implausible one that sounds possibly even worse than this movie. So, the ending…do you
really want to know? Since “Skippy” isn’t the easiest movie to find and see, I’ll provide
a very brief rundown of the ending at the bottom of this page. Just scroll down to read it,
or stop after the next paragraph…your choice!
Needless to say, while it has a few amusing moments, the best thing about this flick is
that Red Elvises are in it. The worst thing, aside from the so-called plot, is that they
aren’t in it ENOUGH. They’re only in that one scene and they have no lines. I still think
Skippy could’ve gotten some very cool advice on women from our guys, at the very least. And the
soundtrack could have definitely used a lot more kick ass rock ‘n roll from Siberia.
Red Elvises are also, as far as I could see on Showtime, not listed on the end credits.
It’s worth seeing, if you have a strong tolerance for screwball, screw-up, slapstick
comedy bordering on the really-stupid-but likeable-main-character type of movies,
especially if you’ve set out to see everything in which the band has appeared. Red Elvises
get more onscreen time in “Skippy” than they did on Fox’s “Fastlane” earlier this year,
but less, I think, than in “Six-String Samurai.” And even though they had no lines in
this one, they were at least singing and generally being their very entertaining selves.
That’s about it…hopefully the little dog in the first scene went on to grab some better
roles at least! Don’t forget to scroll down if you want the ending revealed.
The Ending: It turns out that, although we’ve been led very forcefully to believe that
it was Julia’s ex-boyfriend Brandon who hired the thug to stalk and made murder attempts
on Julia, it was actually Julia herself who hired the stalker, in an ill-planned attempt
for publicity and sympathy. Skippy is recruited by cops for no apparent reason to help
bust her and she ends up getting arrested along with the thug, after Brandon is arrested,
presumably to throw her off. Also, predictably after the lunch scene, Skippy and Julia’s
assistant Jane fall madly in love. After Julia’s exposure as a scam artist and her arrest,
Skippy calls the producer he met at the Oscar party, who was originally looking for an
unknown actress for his new movie, “The Ingenue” and had instead cast Julia. Skippy of
course suggests Jane for the part now that Julia is a jailbird. In the very last scene,
somehow, totally inexplicably, Skippy and Larry have become “co-producers” of the movie
(all that bad temp work must have given him the needed experience – too bad I didn’t
think of trying for a job like that!), complete with director’s chairs and bullhorns,
and they are directing Jane in the starring role. Jane has shed her glasses and has on
a lot of makeup and a short red dress, and soon she rides off to lunch sitting on Skippy’s
lap on a golf cart. Larry also rides off on the golf cart with a girl named Natasha
on his lap. So boy ends up with girl and we have a Happy Hollywood Ending! Watch for it
on cable TV somewhere…hopefully it will be on again soon.
|