IT'S ABOUT THE MUSIC!!!

As a movie lover, I find myself torn between being terribly frustrated at squandered potential and cutting movies and their makers enormous amounts of slack for having ambition. There's enough shared ground in that Venn diagram—ambitious movies that succeed—that the outlying, non-shared parts aren't too annoying, but periodically I see a movie and go “Movie . . . why can't you have succeeded in your aims?” One such is Eddie and the Cruisers.

The story of a popular, groundbreaking rock 'n' roll band torpedoed by the untimely death of its saxophone player and disappearance (and presumed death) of its frontman/musical mastermind Eddie Wilson, Eddie and the Cruisers is immediately in a gigantic hole dug by co-writer/director Martin Davidson's decision to appropriate Citizen Kane's structure; journalist Ellen Barkin's investigation of the story by interviewing the remaining band members serves as the picture's skeleton (and the interview with Eddie's girlfriend and backup singer is almost shot-for-shot the bit where the guy interviews the Marion Davies character in Kane, but without the flair). While the decision to bite Citizen Kane displays impressive ambition, you've got one big condom to fill if you're going to rip off Citizen Kane. And Eddie and the Cruisers just ain't quite packin' that much heat.

Apart from the derivative structure and occasionally stiff performances (though Michael Pare, in spite of some clunky line readings, is absolutely perfect as Eddie), the biggest problem the picture has is with the music. John Cafferty & The Beaver Brown Band, who wrote and performed the original songs, had a couple moderately successful singles on the soundtrack with “On the Dark Side” and “Tender Years,” the Cruisers' two big in-movie hits, but the reason for this is that the soundtrack dropped in the mid-80s, and Cafferty et al's sound bore an immense similarity to a certain Mr. B. Springsteen and the merry band of E Street, who enjoyed some success at the time. For what they were—Bruce-y mid-80s Jersey rock—“On The Dark Side” and “Tender Years” are not bad at all; in fact they're just as good if not better than Bruce's shittier stuff of the period. On its own merits, it's one of the better original (except for a couple covers by Cafferty et al) song score soundtracks you'll find.

Only problem is, music in 1963 (when the movie takes place) sounded fuck-all like music in 1983 (when the movie was made). Not only is two decades a long time, the first of those two was The Sixties. And we all know that during The Sixties . . . Everything Changed. Boomer hyperbole aside—if there were as many fucking people at Woodstock as those one-rusty-brain-cell-havin' ass motherfuckers claim, Abbie Hoffman would have been elected God—popular music basically has to be divided into pre- and post-60s, and not just because of the Beatles, but the ensuing Brits, and Dylan, Motown, drugs, the Velvet Underground, drugs, and drugs and a few other individuals, genres, and movements I'm probably forgetting. (Ed. Note: coughcoughdrugscoughcough). Not only all that, but then there was the 70s, with even more shit.

Something I remember faintly, that scared the living shit out of music nerds like my dad (who, rest in peace, was a massively accomplished and passionate music nerd) was that in the late 70s and early 80s so few people actually gave a shit about the history of music that whole genres were in danger of dying out. Steely Dan griped about this in “Hey Nineteen,” with Donald Fagen's kvetch that the teenager he wanted to fuck killed his boner by not knowing who Aretha Franklin was. Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi, two music nerds in good standing, formed the Blues Brothers and exhorted audiences to buy rhythm and blues records. These noble efforts—and others with other endangered genres—eventually paid off, as while the study of music history remains a niche interest, it does exist.

But there was another problem, that plagued every single movie made about music during that no-giving-a-shit late 70s/early 80s period. No one paid any attention whatsoever to the fact that recording and amplification technology took just as massive a leap during that same time span. You don't need to be a sound nerd (even an amateur one like me) to tell the difference between a Beach Boys record from 1963 and a Duran Duran record from 1983. Even if you don't know a mic from a mixing board, they just fucking sound different. This brings us back to Eddie and the Cruisers: no visible (or, more appropriately, audible) effort was made to make a record made in 1983 sound like it did in 1963. It doesn't even sound like a conscious choice to highlight how revolutionary the Cruisers were, either: the early part of the movie sounds like Springsteen covering Dion and the Belmonts, the middle part where the Cruisers get big sounds like Springsteen road-testing future B-sides, and the later part where they get “weird” sounds like Springsteen paying homage to the Doors but making the fatal mistake of not getting high first. It ultimately reads as pandering to the Bruce-mad masses rather than giving a fuck about getting it right.

It's a shame because the character of Eddie Wilson is a very promising one. They got the perfect actor, in Michael Pare, to portray Eddie: he's stunningly beautiful (yeah, that's not a typo, fuck off), wears a leather jacket like a god, looks perfect miming guitar and lip-syncing, and projects the necessary simultaneous emotional vulnerability and insecure intellectual and artistic ambition necessary to make a proper Rock Star. He makes a plausible type for an ambitious blue-collar artistic type from the early 60s—someone who likes rock 'n' roll and doo-wop but read some poetry books and has a burning urge to try something new. He's two hits of acid, a bottle of Scotch, and a more privileged background away from being Jim Morrison. It might have made for a more interesting story to follow Eddie Wilson a little further into the 60s to see how the changing times shaped his music, outlook, pharmaceutical experimentation, and so forth. It is, however, plain fact that with the paradigm shift made by Western popular music in the middle 60s, there is no way whatsoever that the singer from a bar band never seen playing a concert outside its home state, with a total of two hit singles in 1963, would suddenly be #1 and the biggest rock star in the world 20 years later. He would need to have been famous for longer, and to have had a national profile. That the movie attempts to sell us what it does is a similar lack of attention to detail.

Oddly, in spite of all this ranting about the flaws, I do rather enjoy Eddie and the Cruisers. Martin Davidson's lack of attention to details that would have made his movie better seem more like things that never occurred to him due to intellectual and aesthetic limitations rather than deliberate oversights made out of pure commercial venality. That is to say, his idea to make his fictional band equal parts Dion & The Belmonts, The Doors, and Bruce Springsteen (his own professed vision) is not the problem. That that mix of influences is a paradox of anachronisms, impossible due to the laws of cause and effect, is. But, weirdly, I cut Davidson a bit of slack for not realizing that the whole thing was a Kobayashi Maru, partly because he does understand the genuine excitement inherent in loving music, and comes very close to being able to articulate it, despite his limitations.

I also give Davidson a lot of retrospective credit for refusing to have anyfuckingthing to do with the sequel. The original, for all that was wrong with it, was still a real movie. It had the consistent solid performance you get out of Tom Berenger that you always get. Ellen Barkin managed to make a character that was kind of a dipshit interesting by being Ellen Barkin. Michael Pare wasn't particularly polished but he was exactly right as Eddie. Joe Pantoliano plays creeps so well that anytime a movie has within it a creep of that particular high-pitched amoral “don't leave your daughter alone with him” rodent-like variety, it should be called “the Joe Pantoliano character” (this will be applicable when he's no longer in ten movies and three TV shows a year playing the part himself). And the last scene, where Eddie watches Ellen Barkin's TV report through a store window and smiles, is actually kind of a cool twist; after the whole thing where Joe Pantoliano faked being Eddie and that was supposed to make us think that Eddie was dead, having him actually be alive and living in quiet anonymity was kind of cool. Kind of. Mildly. Like the rest of the movie.

But the sequel. Whoa. Fuck.
Eddie and the Cruisers II: Eddie Lives! is a staggering feat of retardation. It is bad in just about every way a movie can be bad. Every time I've seen it—and, oh, do I love returning to it and sipping from its exquisiteness—I end up spending the entire movie screaming in agony, laughing hysterically, and generally scaring the shit out of any civilians in the room. Let us count its glories:

--It's a cash-in on a movie that barely made back negative costs
--None of the famous people who were in the first one returned
--They had to cut around Berenger in the flashback scenes because he refused to let his likeness be used.
--They doubled down on the anachronism and had a “lost recording” of Eddie Wilson jamming with Bo Diddley and an all-star team of black musicians that sounded like a fucking deep cut on fucking Phil Collins' 1985 No Jacket Required. This was not only totally anachronistic but five years late to a record that wasn't even hip when it was new. Though “Take Me Home” was great in that one scene at the end of the Calderone two-parter on Miami Vice.
--The rest of the new songs are goddamn awful, but everyone oohs and ahhs about how great they are, much like everyone talking about how beautiful that potato-faced twat in The Room is.
--It was shot in Canada because it's cheaper to shoot in Canada.
--There are “non-union” Canadian equivalents (they're probably in Canadian SAG, I'm not calling them scabs, I'm just being mean) for Rosanna Arquette, Billy Dee Williams, and River Phoenix, all of whom they probably could have gotten fairly easily if it had been a real movie.
--Even though Eddie is supposed to be the biggest rock star in the world, talked about in the same breath as Elvis, no one notices when Michael Pare is walking around Montreal with that stupid fucking mustache. That stupid fucking mustache is not only fucking stupid, it's the flimsiest disguise since Clark Kent's glasses.
--Furthermore, even if we posit that everyone in Canada is either retarded or blind, we're supposed to accept that they're so fucking tone deaf that even though Eddie is fucking touring and playing fucking gigs where he's the fucking singer, no one notices that he sounds exactly fucking like the biggest fucking rock star in the world until that chain-smoking broad talent booker at the end of Act Two. Child please.
--Rick Diesel

This last is particularly special. Bernie Coulson's turn as Rick Diesel in Eddie and the Cruisers II: Eddie Lives! may well be the most schizophrenic, confusing performance in cinema. There are isolated scenes that Bernie Coulson plays fairly well; there's one band rehearsal fight late in the second act where he and Michael Pare actually do a decent, organic job of yelling at each other, but it's brief. Most of the movie leaves us to revel in one of the worst-written parts ever committed to page in any medium, a character with inconsistent, changing motivations based in no one's most feverish delusions of real life, played by a young, energetic actor whose inexperience led him to rocket around the movie like a pinball coated in nitroglycerin, overacting fiercely. His accent is equal parts Canadian, Sean Penn in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and not-half-bad New York, but frequently braying in an overwhelming Phil Spector Wall of Sound (wall of Canadian/Californian stoner/surfer drawl?) way that drowns all else out.

Also complicating things is the fact that Eddie, posing as Montreal construction worker Joe West, might be the most emo fucking fagbasket ever. (Ed. Note: the barrage of superlatives and the frustration-induced homophobia are things you need to have seen this singular motion picture to understand). In a direct contradiction to the end of the first movie, which showed Eddie mildly pleased that people were finally hearing and appreciating his music, the Eddie of the sequel—and it's not even altogether clear whether the audience is supposed to know it's Eddie; the people who made this piece of shit were such dumb, cynical, incompetent profiteurs one never knows—starts practically sobbing in public whenever someone on TV starts talking about him or the Cruisers. He leaves a liquid lunch with his construction buddies to drive from Montreal to New York City just because an Eddie Wilson lookalike contest is mentioned on TV. Rather than enter and win (which would have been awesome) he mopes around the periphery and then drives back to Montreal. And doesn't get fired for missing half a day of work at the building site (they specifically mention it being lunch).

Contrivance brings an “artist” into Eddie's life (Rosanna Arquette's non-union Canadian equivalent), and some of the worst dialogue ever written about the arts (Ed. Note: there's more hyperbole to come, I'm telling you, this movie really is that bad) ensues. Nothing about Eddie's new girl, or the snooty, baselessly elitist Montreal art world to which she aspires rings true at all. Her paintings are awful. She comes across more like a white-collar executive type, and after a certain point is only there to say stuff like “What are you talkin aboot, Joe?” and “You need to do what you believe in” and “Tell them who you really are” (this last after Eddie, tears in his eyes like every other scene, confesses his true identity).

Plot necessity draws Eddie back to music, in the form of a mildly wanky but extremely polished bar band, featuring one Mr. R. Diesel on lead guitar and Billy Dee Williams' younger non-union Canadian equivalent on saxophone. Eddie, in a candid moment, tells the sax player he reminds him of Wendell Newton, the sax player from the Cruisers (whose smack OD was an inciting event in Eddie flipping his shit and going Brian Wilson in the studio for an off-screen year in the first movie). The sax player—the only smart person in the whole movie—immediately goes to himself “Is this Eddie?” Eddie and Rick Diesel talk a little trash, leading the sax player, who sees an opportunity to test his thesis that this is Eddie, to suggest that Eddie sit in with the band. In a ludicrous scene in which Eddie jerks off shamelessly with a guitar, he improvises a slick, professional recording of a terrible white blues song, and convinces Rick Diesel to start stalking him to get him to join his band. After a shameless and interminable bout of Hamletting, Eddie agrees to join and assume control of Rick Diesel's band, retaining Rick Diesel—whom Eddie accuses, hilariously, of excessive guitar masturbation, when all Eddie does is jerk off with his guitar whenever he picks one up—and the Billy Dee sax player, 86ing the rest of the group. They hire a shirtless butt-rock drummer (for some bizarre reason), an Australian bass player with hair like the middle Heather in Heathers (the one with the football player boyfriend), and River Phoenix's non-union Canadian equivalent, a classical pianist. They proceed to rehearse the shit out of Eddie's terrible new songs (and holy fuck are they bad), and start touring under the name Rock Solid. Yes, Rock Solid. Yes. Wow.

Eddie, on top of being so emo it's like he stepped out of some alternate world remake of The Outsiders by Douglas fucking Sirk, is a fascist asshole with the band. He barks nonsense about being “in the pocket” at them when they're like “dude, we're miming along to the slickly produced, hideously mixed pre-recorded track, ease up.” He throws gigantic shitfits about everything from playing gigs to going on tour to playing some Montreal music festival to recording a demo—I guess because he's scared to face the world or something exasperatingly stupid like that—but always goes along with it.

The whole movie, two record company reptiles (one of whom is supposed to be the one who refused to release Eddie's Brucian Wilsonsteen album in the first movie, but played by a different actor, making all the flashbacks confusing) have been ruthlessly exploiting Eddie's music in ways that involve cameos by everyone from Martha Quinn to Larry King to the above-mentioned Bo Diddley. After Rick Diesel surreptitiously sends them a covertly-recorded demo tape, they jet on up to Canada.

Eddie shaves off his mustache and begins to confront his past, first in a scene with Sal—his boyhood chum and bass player from the Cruisers with a nauseatingly self-effacing streak—that is the gayest thing in existence that doesn't involve one guy's dick going inside another guy. Every shot looks like they're going to jam their tongues in each other's mouths. This would all be fine except Sal's kids are standing ten feet away out of frame, which makes it hilarious: “Mommy, why is Daddy making out with that man in the leather jacket?”

So the big concert happens, complete with repeat performances of Rock Solid's two terrible songs and some jaw-dropping editing (they frequently cut from Eddie holding his guitar by his side to a shot of Eddie strumming like hell and then back to him holding the guitar) followed by Eddie revealing his true identity to a cheering crowd. This brings up the best part of the whole shitty movie: it ends right at the interesting part! What the fuck happens when someone whose most interesting feature was the mystery surrounding his disappearance and presumed death returns? I DEMAND ANSWERS!

There are all kinds of other stupid/terrible things in Eddie II. There's this amazingly bad scene where Eddie and his girl are sitting by a stream on a snowy winter day (neither of them are visibly cold at all) talking in refried Springsteen lyrics about New Jersey and then, randomly, Billy Dee the sax player starts playing his sax—which sounds like he's playing in a recording booth in a studio—and posing on top of a promontory. Eddie points this out to his girl, and the camera pans over to watch him posing, in one of the most hideously photographed shots ever (the white off the sun hitting the snow is blinding, and not on purpose). Rick Diesel barges into a date Eddie's on with his “artist” girl to, obliviously, talk about the band (in another parallel to The Room, with Rick Diesel playing Denny). The whole mythology of the missing tape is laughable to anyone who knows anything about music; Eddie summoning the likes of Bo Diddley and King Curtis to a jam session in the middle of the night in Lakehurst, New Jersey is fucking absurd, not to mention the song they “improvise” sounds like, and is just as over-produced as, a bad Steve Winwood solo track (Ed. Note: the phrase “bad Steve Winwood solo track” is meant to inspire every last bit of cold, horrified disgust as you just experienced).

And yet . . . there's no such thing as not watching Eddie II whenever it comes on cable, or not clicking play when you see that it's on Netflix Instant (which it is, not that I'm suggesting that you watch it or anything). Live-tweeting it the other night was a blast. There really is something about a gloriously, legendarily bad movie. Good movies, genuinely good movies, are a wonderful thing to experience, but so are their counterparts on the opposite end of the quality spectrum. Eddie and the Cruisers II: Eddie Lives! is just about as bad a movie as you'll ever see. It has no reason to exist. It has Rick Diesel. It is, as an experience, a delight of the kind only the greatest superlatives can describe.

Eddie indeed lives, but that is his greatest tragedy. This ridiculous movie is the most perfect example yet that, the Rolling Stones exemption notwithstanding, rock stars are not meant to ever be old. They are supposed to be frozen in time, perfected by the lens of memory. There is no value in a comeback, in returning to reality, other than by making the version from the past seem even better, and that is the greatest achievement of Eddie II and the proof of its timeless shittiness: it makes the first one look really, really good.