TDM: Total Dad Movies with Tooky, Dave, & Mike
Mike and Dave are two Gen X Dads who grew up watching movies because there was nothing else to do. Tooky is a Millennial dad-in-training who grew up with the internet, and thus never needed to watch ROAD HOUSE on cable. Mike (a standup comedian) and Dave (an improviser and occasional academic) will present Tooky (comedian, social critic and dad-in-training) with a new (old) movie every week and answer the important questions: Are white people ok? When did Nic Cage become a whole thing?Are these movies good, or are Mike and Dave wallowing in toxic nostalgia? Every Tuesday, TDM promises to bridge the generation gap, one dad movie at a time.
Intro/outro music: "It's Almost Late Night" from the album WE HAD A GOOD RUN by Dave Rabinow, available at www.daverabinow.com
TDM: Total Dad Movies with Tooky, Dave, & Mike
ELECTION
Been thinking a lot this week about MADAME WEB, which (spoiler alert!) isn't a good movie, but seems to double-suffer from the background radiation of institutional misogyny. MADAME WEB isn't your enemy, fellow nerds - it's the (male-dominated) studio that serves it to us, undercooked and leaking on the plate.
You know what I didn't understand in 1999? Tracy Flick is not a villain. Tracy's meme-ification - used to mock women of ambition, most notably in 2016 - echoes my profound misunderstanding of the film. She's a victim and a warrior, and yes, very often those two things, when combined, can produce a personality that might grate on you. But our entire culture routinely victimizes women and demands that they become warriors to achieve anything. There is no such thing as a lady Paul Metzler (Chris Klein) - something writer/director Alexander Payne (with co-writers Tom Perrotta and Jim Taylor) understands. Meanwhile, the real damage is being done by the seemingly-content men of the world - your Messrs. McCallister (Matthew Broderick) and Novotny (Mark Harelik). Reese Witherspoon's Tracy Flick is perhaps the finest performance of the storied actor's career: fully-physicalized, deeply specific, and universally resonant. At least, it was for me, 25 years after I first watched it. Tracy Flick isn't your enemy, friends - if anything, she's the one who is gonna pull us out of this mess.
Anyway, here's 1999's Election.