Pee-wee's Always Travelling

When travelling on that long dusty highway, never forget the value of novelty gag products or the kindness of hairstylists and bombshell bank robbers. Pee-wee Herman survives a dangerous journey by remembering these things in 2016's Pee-wee's Big Holiday. I'm pleased to say this is a good movie. It's not the kind of comedy where you should expect to be constantly laughing but kind of marvelling at the endless ingenuity of its voraciously sincere, absurdly campy screenplay by Paul Reubens and Paul Rust.

First time director John Lee has nothing on first time director Tim Burton, sadly, who came out of the gate triumphantly on Pee-wee's Big Adventure. Lee directs Big Holiday with average competence but you can see why he hasn't gotten much work since. The music, too, fails to live up to Danny Elfman, though it tries.

Fortunately, Reubens' writing has personality to spare. The film opens with the most wonderfully deadpan dream sequence of Pee-wee bidding farewell to an alien friend reminiscent of E.T.

When he wakes up, he goes through his morning routine with an assortment of cgi gadgets that pale in comparison to those in the 1985 film. But things pick up soon enough when Joe Manganiello shows up and starts the main plot of the film.

Manganiello, an actor best known for roles in Magic Mike and True Blood, plays himself in Big Holiday, seemingly a more famous version of himself. I wonder if, when Reubens wrote the screenplay, he expected to be able to get bigger celebrity cameos. The production story on the Wikipedia entry mentions Reubens approaching various celebrities over the years who declined working with him. I suspect Manganiello's role was meant for a Brad Pitt or Ben Affleck. On the other hand, I think Manganiello works better. It's slightly more believable that he and Pee-wee suddenly become best friends.

I've seen one episode of True Blood and I just thought it was okay. But from what I know of Manganiello and Deborah Ann Woll, the cast of True Blood seems to have been really fun behind the scenes. That is, if you like Dungeons and Dragons, which they both do. Manganiello has been trying to get a Dragonlance movie made for years and I've been rooting for him. That's basically all I knew about him before I watched Big Holiday. But he does a good job in the film, playing it absolutely straight.

He invites Pee-wee to his birthday party in New York. So, leaving the small town of Fairville for the first time in his life, he sets out on arduous journey for the Big Apple. It's basically a road movie similar to Big Adventure featuring episodic encounters. One of my favourites was a gang of girl robbers who looked like they came out of Russ Meyer and Ed Wood movies.

The one in the angora sweater is Alia Shawkat from Arrested Development, possibly the biggest star in the film after Manganiella. She starts to fall in love with Pee-wee because, it turns out, her name is also Pee-wee. The chemistry between the two is really sweet but Mr. Herman only has eyes for Mr. Manganiello.

Wikipedia quotes a lot of reviews talking about gay subtext. I mean, sure, it's campy. But couldn't you make a movie about two guys who are ardent friends that isn't gay? Wouldn't it look like this? Reviewer Nico Lang said the film's, "simultaneously incredibly gay and not gay at all." I'd say that's about right. It goes hand in hand with the generally light or deadpan touch in the writing. So much of the comedy isn't in the execution but in the very fact that you're watching this happening at all. I mean, like the scene where Pee-wee goes to a snake farm. Pee-wee's terrified but the place is mostly filled with novelty gags, like a barrel labelled "Water moccasins" that turns out to be filled with water and a pair of moccasins floating at the top. It's not that the joke is funny, it's that it exists in a movie at all. Somehow it seems like magic, like Pee-wee himself.

Reubens in 2016 was 64.. He still looked the part but he seemed to have a hard time pulling off all of Pee-wee's vocal mannerisms. He's got the spirit, though, and he comes off as a slightly more sedate and kind-hearted Pee-wee. It's good to see him.

Pee-wee's Big Holiday is available on Netflix.

Paul Reubens

Artistic genius lies in making the ambiguous meaningful. Paul Reubens, who died on Sunday, achieved this with his most famous role and creation, Pee-wee Herman.

I mean, what is Pee-wee, exactly? Is he a big child? Is he an adult who acts like a child? Is he a slightly perverted and imaginative adult? No one answer fits and arguably the character's appeal went into decline once pop media tried to box him in as a children's character. It's hard to say what the trajectory would have been because his, and Reubens', career was cut off prematurely when Reubens was arrested for masturbating in an adult theatre.

Although he was ridiculed for a long time, there was also a lot of public sympathy for him and, of course, now it seems monstrous that he was even arrested and made to feel embarrassed for something so human and, really, private, even if the theatre was technically public. It's no wonder he felt traumatised for years.

Part of the reason it was such a big scandal was that he was perceived as a children's character. But he didn't start that way. For many years, Pee-wee was an adult act, filled with sex jokes and innuendo.

But then he became a mainstream success. Pee-wee was the main character and Reubens was the star of Tim Burton's debut film, 1985's Pee-wee's Big Adventure, and that's how I discovered him as a kid. I was a big fan of the movie and became obsessed with the song "Tequila" featured in the film. I was six years old and I think I gravitated to the absurdist humour of the film, the surprising route it took through scary scenes and funny scenes and sweetly romantic scenes, the ambiguity in just what kind of story it was and what kind of character Pee-wee was supposed to be. The movie isn't really a "type" any more than Pee-wee and that made it exciting. Nothing fit together in an obvious way and yet it all made perfect sense on a deeper, almost subliminal level.

I appreciate the subsequent TV series, Pee-wee's Playhouse, more as an adult than I did as a kid. Now I can appreciate the ingenuity of its design and format but when I was a kid I usually turned off the TV when it came on, or found something else to do while I waited for The Real Ghostbusters or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to come on. It was a kid's show, it wasn't a dangerous rule breaker like Big Adventure, and I wasn't interested.

Pee-wee finally made a come back of sorts in 2010. It's sad now looking at Wikipedia and the list of all the projects Reubens tried to get off the ground with the character--a Playhouse movie, The Pee-wee Herman Story (a dark take modelled on Valley of the Dolls). I remember Jud Apatow was supposed to direct a new Pee-wee movie and gradually that project was shunted aside until it was taken on by a first time director and released on Netflix as Pee-wee's Big Holiday to little fanfare (I still haven't seen it myself).

To-day, many of Reubens friends and acquaintances are talking about what a good, kind man he was, how he had an extraordinary capacity for remembering people's birthdays. He must have been celebrating other people all year. He's well worth remembering himself.

X Sonnet #1723

A Grecian bladder holds the oats of Scott.
When black replaced the red, a label burned.
Forget the stripe, the crowd demands a spot.
A vase replaced in time's a vessel earned.
Adventures wound the tape for ice and snow.
Prepared to voyage late, she packed a flask.
But bourbon burned the dreamer's only beau.
So gin is all her heart would think to ask.
An errant smell arrests departing words.
But what could lurk beneath the rotten house?
An evil slug accosts the nervous herds.
No path avails the thin and thirsty mouse.
A bike's beyond the grasp of ardent hands.
A desert glow escapes the closing sands.