The Week That Was - July 14, 2025

This past week we were up north at the family cabin celebrating the 50th anniversary of my parents nuptials (BIG UPS, MOM AND DAD!). Then on Friday we headed back to the Cities to meet up with friends who were visiting MSP for the first time, so we hit up Meteor and Young Joni/back bar, which were fantastic as usual. If you are in the Cities and haven’t been, squeeze in Young Joni or at least the back bar while you can people, the staff are great there, even if Ann Kim might be a polarizing figure locally.

So between all that and a labor-intensive podcast edit, I didn’t have a ton of time to watch stuff.

Film

Just One of the Guys (1985) - We covered this one for the newest Unkind Rewind ep (listen/watch) with old friend Stewart Parker, who was actually joining us for the second time, as he was one of the guinea pigs for our test episodes we recorded but haven’t released—the goal is to eventually have them as bonus content for a Patreon feed. Now for those who may not have a frame of reference for what Just One of the Guys is, well, you clearly didn’t have access to HBO for the decade that followed the release of this film because this film made nine times its box office in aftermarket grosses, thanks in large part to its rating (PG-13), which meant that it could be aired during the day on HBO, which subsequently meant that a generation of horned-up latchkey kids watched it every time it was on because, well, there’s about three seconds of nudity that has become legendary because of its availability at 4:26 PM to a generation of youths who otherwise had to hope they’d stumble across a cache of smut hidden in the woods or left near a dumpster.

A reductionist read of that could lead you to believe that this film succeeded because of one—er, two things and two things only, but this flick isn’t without its charms. Tasked with making Tootsie in a high school by Columbia Pictures (never say studio execs weren’t always shamelessly ripping off every idea they could because they lacked imagination…), director Lisa Gottlieb and her writing partner Mitch Giannunzio rewrote six drafts of Dennis Feldman’s original script which had gotten a Buddy-punchup from now-disgraced(?) Full House creator Jeff Franklin with the premise being a modern retelling of Twelfth Night with a dose of Nellie Bly's brand of undercover journalism thrown in for good measure. The film often feels Frankensteined, but there are a handful of scenes that work pretty well, and it’s not hard to see how a better film could have come from the premise. It’s also got some solid supporting performances from William Zabka, Sherilyn Fenn, Clayton Rohner, and Deborah Goodrich to go along with Joyce Hyser’s lead performance which, while a bit uneven, mostly works. Hyser had been dating Bruce Springsteen for a few years when this was shot, so there’s an added wrinkle of weirdness here knowing that Springsteen was occasionally hanging out on set, to make no mention of James Brown working with Rohner to choreograph a dance sequence that was left on the cutting room floor.

This is not high art by any stretch of the imagination, and it being the most requested film at HBO per HBO exec Michael Fuchs may not make complete sense without the presumed cause being the aforementioned nudity-plus-rating rationale above, but this is mostly fun and succeeded entirely on its own merits, as Columbia was a complete disaster at the time, and new management had pushed all their chips in to promote their other undercover journalism feature that had John Travolta doing an exposé on gyms as the new singles bars in the sweaty, groin-thrusting drama Perfect. Perfect bombed, Just One of the Guys kept building an audience at the box office based on strong word-of-mouth, and Columbia just dug themselves in deeper over the next couple years, infamously torpedoing their own exorbitantly expensive film Ishtar by feeding story after story of dysfunction to the press before it was ever released.

There’s much, much more on the background of this and how it plays today in our episode of UKRW, so if you also have a relationship with this film, I think you’ll have fun with it. If you don’t, why not change that, and then listen to the pod? Tubi, Archive.org

My Mom Jayne (2025) - At this point, I have a somewhat conflicted relationship with Mariska Hargitay, as I’ve made the arguable mistake of having to analyze her work as an actor playing a single character for 26 years and counting into an onerous job that might not end for me until the middle of the next decade. Many of her mannerisms and speech patterns have grown to slightly bother me at times, which is entirely a problem of my own creation that really shouldn’t be read as a reflection of her but rather as a symptom of my voluntarily undertaken illness. So my reaction to this very personal documentary about her very famous mother is all being inescapably viewed with that coloring some of my feelings.

This mostly worked, and I think there is some interesting familial territory being explored here. Not unlike Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield was painted into a corner by the studio system and wasn’t allowed to be who she wanted to be. She was used up and spit out by a bunch of terrible men, with only Mickey Hargitay coming out of this all looking OK. I don’t want to get too into spoiler-y territory, as if you haven’t watched her on her press tour or listen to her on podcasts like WTF, you may not be privy to what all is discussed herein. If I hadn’t been aware, I probably would have found this more emotionally affecting, though that’s not to say that there weren’t some dusty moments in the room. The specter of a famous mother, who died while driving a car with Mariska and her two brothers surviving in the back seat, looms over Hargitay’s life, which is odd for a person who doesn’t have any memories of that mother, but it makes total sense. It can be a discomfiting realm to be privy to, but that’s what arguably makes this documentary work. HBO Max