Tag Archives: cabin boy

Wild Hogs (2007)

bubulIn this movie, set in 2007, late in the second GWB term, which I watched at 1.25% speed in the bath, three craven, late-career, white leading men from 70s, 80s, or 90s Hollywood who really seem to need irl paychecks go on a movie motorcycle trip from Cleveland to Venice Beach with their mutual friend Martin Lawrence. They call their movie friend group, which finds its primary expression in weekend rides, “the Wild Hogs.”

Eventually the Hogs run into Ray Liotta in New Mexico. Ray Liotta is the leader of a “real” bike gang, the Del Fuegos, founded by his father, Henry Fonda (Boomer pausing the movie screen to gesticulate and exclaim: “it’s an Easy Rider reference!! I got the reference!!”). Liotta gets mad that the Wild Hogs are poseurs, and steals one of their motorcycles to “teach them a lesson,” which in turn leads to the destruction of his biker bar, creating beef. Then the Del Fuegos and the Wild Hogs spend acts two and three figuring out who’s actually authentic/who’s actually a man via bluster and violence in a town that’s having a chili competition. It blows over when Henry Fonda eventually shows up to chide Ray Liotta, telling him the bar was “a shithole” (Trump vox) and that he made a ton of money on insurance when it burned down. Ray Liotta says “Sorry pop,” and that’s it. The Wild Hogs prove they are the “real men” and finish the ride to Venice Beach, where Gen X and early Millenial women in bikinis smile at them and wave. Over the end credits, Ray Liotta’s bar is rebuilt by “Extreme Makeover Home Edition” into something that looks like a Guy Fierri restaurant or something.

The other Hogs are William H (“Hilliam”) Macy, John Travolta, and Tim Allen. Macy is sort of the central character; he plays “a computer programmer” who is “afraid to talk to women.” He is introduced in a cafe, where he is using a desktop implementation of Siri called “Mac,” via an open interface that looks something like Audacity. When he tries to seem like a cool computer guy, it misunderstands his command to “open Internet” and searches for “alternative sex,” immediately opening a million “popups” for things like “kinky granny” sites, which all play sound. As he struggles to close the popups, he spills coffee on his computer, which resembles a gray-bodied plastic 2003 HP Pavilion (not the aluminum-bodied Powerbook G4, and certainly not a 2007 white MacBook). The coffee spill causes his computer to spark and emit smoke; everyone in the cafe is disgusted at the display. Later, in his enthusiasm for the bike trip, he gets a bicep “tat” of the Apple rainbow logo. The joke is that Macy doesn’t understand that the rainbow is a symbol of gay pride, and that the Apple logo is not a tough enough tattoo for a biker to have; it’s that kind of movie. And the whole thing also just rings completely false because the rainbow logo was retired in 1998.

Macy’s character is portrayed as earnest, loving, and naive. He admires his male friends, and is on a quest for Maleness via getting laid not unlike Chris Elliot’s in Cabin Boy. (At the time I watched this, Macy was embroiled in the celebrity pay-to-play “college admissions scandal,” which felt cartoonishly appropriate to his presence in this movie.) Meanwhile, Travolta plays the group asshole, and goes all-in on straight-ahead, “no homo” bro masculinity, played with zero irony for laughs. Travolta repeatedly dismisses Macy’s naive comfort with his own body and earnest male admiration for his friends in homophobic terms. There’s even a lengthy interlude in Act 1 with a gay motorcycle cop (played by character actor John C. McGinley (Point Break)) who keeps trying to get the Hogs to have an orgy, and they have to figure out how to escape without appearing not-gay, so as not to rouse the ire of law enforcement and get a ticket. The whole thing is about as endless-feeling and lurid as Jack Nicholson in the dentist’s chair in the OG Little Shop of Horrors (1960).

That Ray Liotta’s bar is remodeled from “a shithole” into something completely plastic-looking by an HGTV show is weirdly descriptive of this entire movie’s thing: that artificial suburban consumer reality is ultimately the measure of what’s right, manly, and good. Ray Liotta reenters this reality and signals his true beta status by crying tears of joy; he and his criminal biker gang were cowardly lions after all. And the Wild Hogs were right to be prepared to stand up to them in violent conflict all along: that’s what “real men” do.

Is this convincing to anyone? Who does this fantasy belong to? Does anyone watching the movie actually think the bar is better off after this weird renovation? Do they believe that either model of “the biker” depicted here is somehow “authentic?” Do they believe that any of these men are “real men?”

The last thing I wanna say here is that Davey and I are originally acquainted from being “noise babies” in Philly who also played board games, but we got to know each other by doing a low-level east coast tour together. I had to get out of bed to check if that tour was in 2007, and whether we were plausibly on the road ourselves while the Wild Hogs were fighting Ray Liotta, but it was in 2008. Still, pretty tragic to think that this is the “road movie” we’re left with to describe this time.


harmsFour middle-aged friends hit the road on their motorcycles to rediscover themselves and maybe America.  This is the base outline for Wild Hogs a movie made in the waning years of the Bush administration, right before things got inconceivably weird for the baby boomers.  I’d heard Wild Hogs was something in the vein of Grown Ups 2, a film equal parts psychotically banal and malevolent. While it does share those qualities it doesn’t possess that film’s sheer volume of incoherent bad vibes, leaving it a mere pretender to the crown of that brand of psychedelically-bleak Americana.  So while I mentally group Grown Ups 2 in with Lars Von Trier and similar punishers, Wild Hogs I found more akin to something like Sixteen Candles; a middling comedy with toxic overtones that get more pronounced and poisonous over time. The movie’s only saving grace is to witness its obsessive focus, with every joke and plot development all stemming from the question of “How to be a Man.”

Wild Hogs believes men should be devoted to one another entirely, but express affection for each other sparingly. The two most common responses for those who break discipline and cross these boundaries is derision or violence.  The movie posits one other notable response, typified by its “gay biker cop.” This character’s sole function is to appear whenever our crew of “normal men” get anywhere close to being unguarded with one another. It’s one of Wild Hogs’s wilder fantasies, that a gay authority figure will show up and try to hang out with you and your friends whenever you stray the slightest amount from violently rigid heteronormativity. But there’s something there: the looks of disgust mixed with terror on our heroes faces really capture the white baby boomer fear of marginalized groups attaining authority over them.

I should note here that Martin Lawrence is also a Wild Hog, which to some folks might blow my white boomer thesis out of the water.  There is one reference in the film to him being black, which is William Macy’s character saying that the only thing he could think of was “black jokes” when he was trying to talk to a girl he had a crush on.  The point Wild Hogs makes here, about how racism can be fueled by male fragility, and how a veneer of equanimity will be suspended for any reason, is real insofar as this mindset goes. No one else calls Macy out when he says this, despite dogging him every chance they get for the rest of the movie.  So this isn’t really Lawrence’s movie, and although he’s a part of the gang, the fact that he’s black puts him socially below William Macy’s motorcycle-crashing, accidental-porn-watching fool in terms of worth to the group. 

This idea of openness and comfort being the enemy of discipline which in turn would disrupt a rigid hierarchy enforced by derision and violence is Wild Hogs and the at-large baby boomer take on masculinity in a nutshell. While you can‘t entirely blame an entire generation raised by soldiers (many of whom fought in a war themselves) for feeling that being a man means being a part of an army engaged in an endless war against everything else, it is possible to reject this idea… and many have. However Wild Hogs emphatically does not.  

Luckily we don’t have to subsist on a world filled with Wild Hogs insights alone. While arguably every year in film can be looked at in terms of how it represents a shift in the contours of masculinity, 2007 has it very much on its mind.  There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men both come out, and both interrogate the consequences of this mindset of endless war to different ends. 2007 was also the year that Superbad was released, written by two millennial men, and ending with the two male leads gazing into each others eyes in bed and telling each other that they love each other. At the end of Wild Hogs the gang regained their manhood, but outside the film, what that meant became less valuable and more unrelatable and pointless with every passing year since.

Cabin Boy (1992)

We watched this one via @walnutbatard , who also provided this introduction. 

Cabin Boy stands out as a movie that often requires a good amount of credit extended towards its creators, faith that there’s something covert or even diabolical about all of it despite every reason to believe that isn’t the case. This is of course a lot for a movie to ask, particularly in 1994, and may explain its quantum state as both one of the most derided and appreciated comedies by the few Boomers and Gen-Xers (respectively) who remember it. Its fans were invariably familiar with Elliot & Resnick’s chocolatey fingerprint on the Letterman Show (1982-1989) as well as their own network TV show “Get A Life” (1990-1992), which was somehow well-regarded but of course doomed from the start. Its detractors many and merciless, almost certainly including the guy credited for the “Fantastic Fun!” byline on the The Mask poster, which came out a few months later.

The appeal of Chris Elliott to me, and to a slightly lesser extent Cabin Boy, is that i just can’t pin him down. Despite everything I have seen (or possibly because) I still do not have the faintest idea what this person’s actual personality is like, when he’s trying to be funny, trying to be annoying, or just kinda let go of the wheel. That mystery is pretty rare, and to me, that’s the good stuff. Even when it’s the bad stuff.


Cabin Boy is about a fancy lad who prays to not break a sweat. Trained in the ways of polite society, he tries to take a trip to Hawaii, but is tricked by David Letterman and gets on the wrong boat. Once out to sea he accidentally kills the previous Cabin Boy, whose place he is forced to take, and sets the ship on a course for the Devil’s Triangle, where heavy shenanigans await. The ship is manned by an extremely sick crew of cool fisherman, who take every chance they get to humiliate/maroon/attempt to murder the Cabin Boy.  There’s also a cool cross-pacific swimmer collected from the sea, who sadly morphs into an uncool love interest. Most of the film is pretty funny stuff, with many scenes currently mulling like a fine wine in my mind-bottle (giant getting choked to death with his own belt… *kisses fingers* ; tobacco-spitting cupcake… bravissimo!). These moments of deep weirdness are the best parts of the movie; every scene bears a bountiful capacity for surprise.

However, at a certain point someone decides that Cabin Boy should start to resemble something of a normal movie, and that ends up as a tale of how a Cabin Boy becomes a Cabin Man.  Once the transition to manhood happens, the movie trades in many of its good jokes for jokes about how Cabin Boy is suddenly a man with respect and admiration, which overall are not as funny. This is also where the movie introduces the gag where he stands on his love interest’s back while she swims him places, which made me extremely bummed, and that I probably could have overlooked, except for the fact that it’s repeated for the movie’s last shot. So while there’s lots to recommend in this story, and it’s an undeniably important missing link in the evolution of comedy between 90s dumb man style and 2000s Adult Swim “dumb man” absurd style, it leaves something of a bad aftertaste.

Respect must be given to the wild trick this movie plays: I found the Cabin Boy delightful at the beginning of the film, where he’s deservedly hated by all, then disliked him in equal proportion to the increasing respect he gains as the story progresses. Was the darkness I felt at the ending born of having exposed myself as a bloodthirsty ghoul who hates Cabin Men everywhere, and wishes they would stay in a state of arrested development?  Or did this feeling come from the fear of one day being forced to become a Cabin Man myself? Am I a Cabin Man already, who the world loves but I despise? Did I just not like the ending of the movie because it seemed flimsy and rushed? Do humans have the capacity for change on a meaningful level, or do our experiences only affect the world’s perception of us, while we are trapped as fundamentally unchanging persons? Ultimately these big questions the film poses were inconsequential for me, since I was there for the yuks, and they’re where the yuks dropped off.  But if you’re up to the task, take a ride on this wrong boat, as there are wondrous sites to see.


Compared to Blockers (2018), which I also watched the other night, Cabin Boy had more jokes per minute, and more of them were funny. But unlike Blockers, which is still relatively fresh except for the already-anachronistic “butt chugging” part, chunks of Cabin Boy are past the expiration date. It features no women other than Ann Magnuson, an island goddess who Chris Elliott has sex with to become a man (until which point he is dismissed as a girl, a woman, a sissy, etc.), and Melora Walters, a swimmer whose back Chris Elliott stands on to get around. If the hypothetical reader is interested in separating rotten pieces from parts that’re totally still good, like mold from a dumpstered Trader Joe’s cheese, there’s a lot left over to get a lil stupid and enjoy here. But if you’re not interested in dumpstered cheeses I 100% get that.

Ann Magnuson has an erotic scene with David Bowie in major “billowing curtains” movie The Hunger (1983). I spent a while thinking about what it would be like to follow that eleven years later with an erotic scene with Chris Elliott, and realized this isn’t unrelated to the 2009/2019 pics I’ve lately seen ppl training the surveillance algorithms with in my social feeds – like, everyone I know is doing the transition from “I was young and kissed Bowie” to “haha I guess I’m still out here kissing Chris Elliott” in their own way right now. While this transition out of hot youth into whatever’s next has a tragic quality, I like that it’s also basically comedic and unknowably confusing. “It me” : A grinning six-armed god (age 35) on a magic island (no roommates other than my partner) married to a giant (having a full time day job) and seducing Chris Elliott for fun (doing a movie blog). That’s you too, when you think abt it.

That’s my review of “aging,” what else about Cabin Boy? Four of the five main characters are grizzled old fishermen led by Brian Doyle-Murray, and the ship most of the action takes place on is a chaos zone. The basic unromantic unpleasantness of the set and supporting cast have a fun tension with the naive staginess of Chris Elliott and the overall production design, especially e.g. the extremely fake ocean. There’s little to no action of consequence – it’s just a mixed bag of scenarios at sea, ranging from the typical (sailor songs; getting hammered below deck) to the slightly weird (fat-cheeked angry-blowing Harryhausen clouds; Dr. Jacoby as a merman) to the Mel Brooks-ian (Mike Starr as a giant… salesman?! A mafioso style… limo driver?!) to the befuddling (glacier monster fought with a coffee urn; heatstroke tobacco cupcake). In total it reads as “weird trip,” a movie feeling I love, but it def suffers from the matter of Chris Elliott’s manly education causing the best jokes to get front-loaded and the least funny, most bleak stuff to end up in act three. So if you do eat this cheese be warned that the last bites are where most of the mold is.