A return to the early 1980s: The End of Oak Street and Wet Hot American Summer, the 25th Anniversary

The End of Oak Street will be burnished forever in my heart as one of the most fun experiences I’ve had in a movie theater, ever. David Robert Mitchell has written and helmed what, for me anyway, is the best movie with dinosaurs since Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (I had to put Spielberg’s name in front of that because if there’s a franchise I really don’t care for, it’s the entirety with exception of that first film…okay, I actually kind of liked the second one and I enjoyed the third one as a regressive child at heart, but are they worthy successors? Nope.)

Mitchell’s work grounds the action in the Platt family fraying at the seams with Denise having written a first draft of a novel based on their lives and Greg taking part-time gigs to cover for having lost his job weeks before and the simmering contempt Denise seems to hold Greg in for not looking at the situation and admitting that it is unmanageable because of this. Consequently, Greg hid his job loss in order to not upset Denise, but as she said, she’s capable of handling more than he can.

That Denise and Greg are played by Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor bringing their best shows this is not a slumming paycheck movie. It’s refreshing to see McGregor play a normal guy who’s lost his job, drinks covertly, and is quietly falling apart. Even if his American accent is dodgy, his pathos is tactile. Because we live in the Era of Peak Hathaway, though, if she weren’t as generous an actor as she is, this would be her movie to walk off with, but that’s not the case.

The ensemble is rounded off with Maisy Stella as daughter Audrey and Christian Convery as Brian, both of whom play two kids who are rightfully fretting over their parents potentially splitting up. Something that Denise sees and Greg willfully does not. 

Mitchell doesn’t treat the family angst as something to get through, but as the glue that holds the plot - such as it is - together. All anyone needs to know is that a portal or portals opened in our world and switched out the Platts’ neighborhood for a late Cretaceous Era one, complete with raptors, ankylosaurs, pteradons and a bunch more, just going about their business. The vegetarians eat the growth, the carnivores eat pets, carrion, and people. It’s delightful!

Seriously, it is! When the camera pans back to take in the neighborhood, it’s like a kid’s daydream of what would happen if dino-predators came back; you see raptors running after humans too slow to get away and dragging them back to feast and other, larger beasts just lumbering around from out of the Cretaceous undergrowth down the paved street and across various people’s yards. 

The little kid in me was ecstatic and the - perhaps somewhat stunted - adult was genuinely entranced by how well Mitchell wrote the family dynamic into each frame without giving way to melodrama. He purposefully allows them to do all the dumb things you see in every monster movie, but it makes emotional sense, so you go along with it.

I’m not about to spoil anything in this movie because it is so much fun and everyone should go in cold (as opposed to, say, The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day which are such powerhouses that enough people have seen them and are so thematically rich that I decided to spill all the beans I could). 

Suffice it to say that each character beat lands and once you’ve bought into the premise, the shock of someone being eaten and the devastation it leaves, sticks with you. 

The End of Oak Street was produced by J. J. Abrams’ Bad Robot Studio and it is frankly, better than any Abrams movie I can think of. Don’t get me wrong, I liked the first two Star Treks well enough, but I don’t think that much of his Star Wars sequels. I did enjoy Mission Impossible III, but for the most part, I find him straining to be clever when I wish he’d just be original. Super 8 was the best thing he’s done (Lost aside and besides, that’s episodic TV) cinematically. 

The difference is in how Mitchell brings the same sense of impending doom into the domestic world/adventure of the Platt family. The film plays like It Follows, only instead of a metaphor for STIs or “primal anxieties” about intimate relations or even economic anxiety, the dinos are symbols of the forces that tear families apart  and ourselves. I could go heavier on this, but then, I’d miss mentioning how fine everyone is. 

Maisy Stella was an absolute surprise to me. She handled that sense of a what it’s like to be young person leaving high school but not being able to go to Cornell where Carl Sagan teaches (honestly, I harbored the same dream…and I was older!) With the film opening on a neighborhood party, we see all the dynamics between the Platt kids and their peers and you sense right away that Audrey is getting the short end of the stick in terms of best friend as well as not being able to attend the university of her choice. 

Brian feels the strain of his folks more acutely. He’s younger and bullied and his friends reminded me of the Stranger Things kids without any sense of heroism or spine. In other words, just dumb kids. But Convery nails the fragility and fraught nature of being a young sensitive teen and I realized that I’d seen him before and really liked what he brought to the table in Del Toro’s Frankenstein most recently, but also The Monkey and yes, even Cocaine Bear!!! Sadly, I haven’t seen any of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, so I can’t speak to how he does in those, but his work here is on point, for sure.

I also have to mention P.J. Byrne as the annoying next door neighbor; he kind of reminds me of Stephen Tobolowsky, and he’s just enough of a sad sack that you almost feel sorry for him after Denise stands up to him for threatening Starbuck, the Platt’s family dog and Brian’s best buddy.

Lastly, there’s a late addition to the family in the form of Jeanette played by Jordan Alexa Davis. She turns in a rock solid performance as a child who’s been orphaned by dinosaur. To Mitchell’s credit, you feel for her when she’s reluctant to join the Platt family at first (well, the kids) and when the whole family is reunited after being separated (see ostensibly dumb decision above; however, not gonna say why). 

The economy of the film lies in keeping the action restricted to the core four people and the unrelenting assault of the prehistoric creatures on the neighborhood, which could reasonably explain why the neighbors don’t band together. This keeps exposition to a minimum (even the wormhole stuff is treated as such a conjecture, it doesn’t really matter how this all happened). 

Mitchell used Mike Gioulakis as his cinematographer and it’s a great choice. They had worked together on It Follows, but Gioulakis has worked with M. Night Shyamalan on Split, Glass, and Old and Jordan Peele on Us. He’s got great visual chops. Some of the best use of diopter lensing I’ve ever seen, where it manages to encompass the whole of the action with the kind of vaguely periferal stretch you might sense at the edge of your vision if you saw a neighborhood friend being picked apart by a flock of pterodactyls.

But I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the sound design; no less than the impressive special effects (the second film of the year with major effects that were clean and felt like they had weight), what you hear is as important as what you see. I think the nod goes to Paula Fairfield who has a resume that includes Game of Thrones, Agatha All Along, 3 Body Problem, and House of the Dragon. You could go back as far as her work with Paul Thomas Anderson on Hard Eight, but I have a special fondness for her work on Aronofsky’s Mother! and her work with Robert Rodriquez (the two Machete films and Alita: Battle Angel, the most overlooked and underseen action movie I can think of offhand).

It’s just so satisfying. Also, the needle drops were fun; but since the movie goes diegetically silent after a point, you don’t have a lot of time to revel in nostalgia. 

And that brings me to my last point. I don’t feel like this was a nostalgia trip, at all. It’s as if Mitchell was bent on making a movie in 1982 and bringing it to it some pretty timeless concerns. Nor does it have an Abrams or Zemeckis like slavishness to Spielbergian technique. No doubt, Spielberg was an influence, but this is a far more original film than what I’ve seen from Abrams and distinct from Zemeckis (whose work I run hot and cold on).

The Other Feature of the Day: Wet Hot American Summer (2001)

There is nothing I can say that everyone else who’s seen and loved this flick has said. It’s the collective fever dream of David Wain, Ken Marino and Michael Showalter realized by one of the single greatest comedic casts ever assembled. Don’t like 80s summer camp movies? Then you’ll love this flick! You do like ‘em? You’ll love this flick!

I first saw it on DVD, a zillion years ago. Liked it, didn’t love it (I was distracted). Then watched it a second time and wondered what the hell was wrong with the earlier me. This time around, I caught even more stuff and I think I may just have to watch it again before the year’s out.

A round of applause (stand up, dammit) for Janeane Garofalo, David Hyde Pierce, Michael Showalter (he co-wrote it and gave himself a cherry role), Marguerite Moreau, Paul Rudd, Zak Orth (J.J. Forever!), Christopher Meloni (oh, buddy, if you never did Law & Order, this and Harold and Kumar would cement your legacy), Molly Shannon, Ken Marino (see also, Showalter; also, proof that Marino was jacked at one time), Joe Lo Truglio, Michael Ian Black, Amy Poehler, Bradley Cooper, Marisa Ryan, and my unrequited love, Elizabeth Banks (Cocaine Bear again!!!)

No deep analysis here, at all. Just that, like The End of Oak Street, it’s less a nostalgia beat than a film that felt like it was a lost find from 1981. 

 - McKinley needs to experience “The Ultimate”!

 - You mean “penis in vagina”?

 - No, dickhead — sex.

Or 

“Well, guys, we made it to the end of the summer in one piece, except for a few campers who are lepers.”

Or

• Hey, penny for your thoughts.
• Beth, tomorrow is the least of our problems.
• Don’t tell me, oh, don’t tell me, don’t even tell me you have crabs!
• No… Yes, but that’s not the point

Or

• In your dreams, douche-bag!
• Douche-bags are hygienic products; I take that as a compliment. Thank you.

Or

Oh, you get the idea. It’s just genius. Just fucking genius.