MEATBALLS, Ivan Reitman’s follow-up to the hugely successful ANIMAL HOUSE (which he co-produced), is less frantic and more sentimental but definitely in the same mould. Relying on juvenile, bawdy humour and the hip, anti-establishment attitude of ANIMAL HOUSE, MEATBALLS is set in a summer camp for misfits overseen by head counselor Tripper (Bill Murray in his first starring role). His objective for the summer is simple – to have more fun that last year and get into the pants of the head female counselor (Kate Lynch).
Tripper runs the place as a kind of hybrid of M.A.S.H. and television’s Hogan’s Heroes, to the everlasting anguish of the owners. No rules. No discipline. No hangups. Just lots of fun orchestrated by “Hawkeye Hogan.” The main plot involves the rivalry between Camp North Star, and a rich, mean camp from across the lake. Each year the rich kids humiliate the poor ones at an annual Olympics-style event. This year, Tripper is determined to take his team all the way, and his motivational rallying cry to his team of losers in one of the film’s funniest scenes is “It just doesn’t matter!” The main sub-plot involves a quiet, introspective, homesick boy, Rudy (Chris Makepeace just prior to his starring role in MY BODYGUARD), and Tripper’s attempts to draw him out. It’s Rudy who wins the marathon on the final day of the Olympiad to win the trophy for North Star.
Almost everything else involves short comic vignettes loosely tied together with a series of overlapping minor subplots, most of them involving romantic and competitive confrontations, and the humour is mostly slapdash and slapstick. Tripper and his buddies pull pranks on the camp director, such as carrying his bed with his snoring body on it out to the woods or place it on a raft
in the middle of the lake. The guys do the traditional panty raid on the girls’s cabin with disasterous results. Yet, the film never lingers on any one joke, and if one fails there is another close behind. You don’t feel you’re being taken for a television sit-com ride in spite of Elmer Bernstein’s maudlin music, which smacks of phony dramatics.
By then Makepeace was going through puberty and Murray gave him his first shave.
Despite its critical drubbing – it has been described as adolescent fun and games for the easily amused – MEATBALLS remains one of the most popular Canadian films of all time, and is thankfully free of the usual grossness and cynicism of many later teen comedies (such as the PORKY’S trilogy and AMERICAN PIE series). Its success rests mostly on the shoulders of Bill Murray, who gives a high-energy performance that rises above the clichéd script. However, Murray was uneasy at first, and did not agree to do the film until he showed up on the third day of shooting in the Hawaiian shirt he would wear throughout the film. The filmmakers had banked on him saying yes; the film would have collapsed otherwise. The emotional centre of the film – Tripper’s bondng with Rudy – was an afterthought, with the crucial scenes written and filmed in a studio in Montreal long after the shooting ended on location in the cottage country north of Toronto.
By then Makepeace was going through puberty and Murray gave him his first shave. The filmmakers also dodged the bullet by hiring seasoned Toronto stage actress Lynch for the part of Tripper’s love interest. The role was originally written as a carbon copy of Hot Lips Houlihan from M.A.S.H. – brash, buxomy, repressed and stupid. Lynch objected and convinced director Reitman that if Murray was going to fall in love with her character, then she must be more sympathetic and appealing, rather than a cranky bitch. And she was right. MEATBALLS won Canadian Genie Awards for its screenplay (by the late Harold Ramis, Daniel Goldberg and others), lead actress (Lynch) and the Golden Reel Award for the top-grossing Canadian film at the domestic box office for 1979. It propelled Reitman, producer/writer Goldberg and Murray into very successful Hollywood careers. Making use of the same creative team of Ramis, Goldberg and Murray, Reitman followed up Meatballs with the American army comedy Stripes two years later, then the mega-hit GHOSTBUSTERS in 1984 and the lesser GHOSTBUSTERS II in 1989.
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