Savage Steve Holland, Now
BETTER OFF DEAD, TRAILER, 1985
This week I had the thrill of popping my
Better off Dead cherry. Though
Fast Times at Ridgemont High and
Ferris Bueller are two of my all time favorites, somehow writer/director
Savage Steve Holland's 1985 breakthrough comedy slipped passed my radar. Lane Myer, played by a bright-eyed seventeen-year-old John Cusack, is on the verge of suicide: Lane's sweetheart dumped him for a jock on the same day he was passed over for the high school ski team. Lane's just an average high school kid in suburbia, USA, plus a mom who naively cooks up green-slime for dinner, a best friend who confuses snow for blow and a neighborhood newspaper boy who's out for a paycheck. It's a bizarro world where Savage's interpretations of teen love and heartbreak, jock-jerks and geek-losers, dysfunctional family and the underdog hero are twisted with dead-pan absurdity. A classic.
Yesterday Savage Steve Holland and I sat down for coffee and talked about all sorts of nonsense, like how he used a motorized toy car to animate the green slime in that infamous
Better Off Dead dinner scene and what he's up to now. These days Savage is directing
Big Time Rush, a sitcom about the adventures of four teen guys who also just happen to be Los Angeles' latest pop sensation. (I officially have a crush on band-member Carlos Pena after being introduced yesterday afternoon). And of course, the show is done with that same "Savage" quirkiness that makes
Better off Dead my new favorite.
lauren - 11.12.2010 File under - People
