HEAVEN CAN WAIT (1978)

Los Angeles, California 1978. Due to a Heavenly boner, professional football player Warren Beatty’s soul is mistakenly removed from his body nearly 50 years before he is supposed to die. By the time the blunder is discovered Beatty’s body has been cremated. A representative from Heaven, James Mason, tells Beatty that his soul can be placed into the body of somebody that is about to die. Mason and Beatty, now invisible, journey back to Los Angeles where a wealthy industrialist has been drugged and left to drown in his bathtub by his cheating wife, Dyan Cannon, and his evil secretary Charles Grodin. So, while the millionaires soul leaves the body (to be tortured forever in the fiery pits of Hell, I assume), Beatty’s soul slithers in (via the butt?) and takes over. Anybody with an I.Q. over 17 would naturally get rid of the people who literally just murdered the former resident of this body, but nope, not Beatty. Instead, he befriends Grodin and spends his time reading business reports while the dastardly duo continue trying to kill him!

The older (and more attractive) I get, the more I find myself absolutely fascinated with 1970's Cinema.  I don't know exactly what it is, but there's just something so unique about the films of that era.  For example, HEAVEN CANNOT WAIT is not particularly good.  In fact, the story is dumb, the direction is average and it's not even an attractive movie to look at (example: Heaven is just an empty soundstage filled with fog), but yet...it was nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture!  It even won for Best Art Direction-Set Decoration.  Which doesn't even make sense, cause it was hard for me to even take screenshots for this review due to the fact that the entire film was so drab looking.  There were zero visually standout moments.  (And don't even get me started on the fact HEAVEN CAN WAIT beat out Woody Allen's gorgeous INTERIORS in that category.)

Anyway, even though HEAVEN CAN WAIT is not a great movie and the story is just a series of plot holes and it probably didn't deserve even one Oscar nomination let alone nine...I still enjoyed it.  Warren Beatty is charming, the comedy is so unfunny that it's kinda amusing, impressive cast, completely illogical romance story.  Worth checking out, but it could definitely be remade into something better.

THE GRASS IS ALWAYS GREENER OVER THE SEPTIC TANK (1978)

I've gotta be the wrong audience for this one. For as much as I love old made-for-TV movies (especially from the late 1970's / early 1980's) and enjoy both Carol Burnett and Charles Grodin, I never even laughed once during this "comedy".  Or even came close to smiling.  The entire story is fucking ridiculous and makes no sense.  A single income family (working husband, stay-at-home mother and three children) live in a small apartment in New York City, so, to make their lives better, they move to the suburbs.  Alright, nothing wrong with that, that happens all the time.  Problem is once these idiots move into the house that they had built to their specifications, they automatically somehow still don't have enough room!  And now, the mom (and aspiring writer), who is left home alone during the day time, is forced to set up her small foldout table and typewriter in the garage!  Dude, you have an entire two-floor, multiple bedroom house all to yourself...why are you out typing in the garage?  At the same time, the father complains non-stop about how far away he is from the office and how the commute is killing him.  Well, fuckface, why did you move so far away?  Naturally, to simplify their lives, they adopt a large dog.

There's tons of other anti-funny things going on in this movie like the hilarious moment when the garbage disposal kicks up something and Carol runs across the kitchen and jumps up on the counter or the whole side-splitting subplot about Carol's emotional support relationship with a local stay-at-home dad or the disturbing (I mean knee-slapping) time when the youngest child puts a sign in the back window of the station wagon saying he's being kidnapped! Good times.

Vintage cars, wacky dog montage, a long drawn out scene about the importance of life insurance, Eric Stoltz underused, that one kid from AIRPLANE!, dead script, average acting, unsatisfying ending that didn't resolve anything!  As negative as this review is (and it damn sure is), I'm actually fascinated by this entire movie and why it was even made.  Like what was the point?  Who knows.  I'm sure there's plenty of people out there that love it and laugh their testicles off watching Charles Grodin dump fertilizer on Carol Burnett's typewriter.  I'm not one of them.  

Also, did houses in the suburbs back in 1978 actually have septic tanks?  And in the front yard of all places!  This movie is set in a large, planned suburb outside of NYC (although it looks suspiciously like a pre-POLTERGEIST Simi Valley, California to me), you'd think it would have the infrastructure for a combined sewage system.