RADIO DAYS

LOOK, I’M WOODY. HOWDY, HOWDY, HOWDY.

Starring Lil’ Scotty Evil

Trailer

Y

  14. It’s scientifically proven. 14 is the number of acceptable, enjoyable movies you have to make before you can produce a selection of clips about your childhood and present it to producers as some form of entertainment to be sold, clips without the sniff of a plot and only the broadest of caricatures to hold the bits together. Like memory it’s a sensory experience; anecdotes float and churn, mixing fiction with fact and a healthy overlay of cultural waypoints, from War of the Worlds to The Shadow, Glen Miller to The Flight of the Bumblebee. Essentially it’s Uncle Woody sitting you down at the buffet and forcing his childhood on you, but he’s got balloons tied to his face and his arms keep spasming and knocking the salmon over; it’s fun. Not funny, not always, but fun, with a coal engine of warmth and a vat of one liners held back from his other pictures, some clearly drawn from real life. It’s certainly one of his easiest films to love, so suffused with happy memories and sing songs that you wonder how the man who came to make it ended up spending his entire life in therapy as well as producing endless pieces about his churning, eternal depression. Then halfway through it hits you; the family and assembled peoples of the film huddle around their radios, glued to the story of Polly Phelps, a girl who fell down a Pennsylvania well, and she dies, and another childhood ends. You see how deeply this director feels things, how his calculations and endless homages hide an emotion that dates back to his earliest days. It’s a glaring tack of reality in a corkboard stuffed full of fun, but it’s the memory that sticks out farthest, giving some heft to an otherwise fluffy photo album. But it’s beautifully shot, it features a tiny Seth Green and it’s LOVELY.