Recent movies play '70s pop culture for laughs

Recent movies play ’70s pop culture for laughs

”What on earth could I have been thinking?” That’s what many people ask when looking at snapshots of themselves taken between 1969 and 1977. But savvier students of pop culture are also moved to muse, ”If I’d have saved all that crap, I’d be rich.” There’s no denying that ’70s detritus has acquired a hip cachet all over again, so long as the stuff is worn or arranged with a postmodern smirk.

The Brady Bunch Movie — like I’m Gonna Git You Sucka, The Spirit of ’76, and Dazed and Confused before it — brandishes that smirk, and like the rest, it tempers the irony with a sense of celebration. Naturally, The Brady Bunch Movie is the most video friendly of the lot. One of the canniest things about it, in fact, is the way director Betty Thomas reproduces the TV show’s bland pastel visual style for scenes set in the Brady home. But when her camera ventures elsewhere, the look turns grimy, as the out-of-it-even-for-the-’70s Bradys confront life in the ’90s.

The Brady Bunch TV series (which ran from 1969 to 1974) took its central premise (widow and widower, each with three kids, marry to form a family) from such popular movies as 1968’s Yours, Mine and Ours and With Six You Get Eggroll, and then had its squeaky-clean protagonists adopt the era’s emblems of hip. One of the more alarming examples: the ridiculous Afro sported by patriarch Mike Brady (Robert Reed on TV) is reproduced on movie dad Gary Cole’s head.

The movie’s weakest invention turns out to be its innocuous depiction of the present day (a carjacker character resembles a model more than a criminal). But its inspired bits of business — giving Marcia a lesbian admirer, casting RuPaul as a guidance counselor — are almost genuinely subversive. In a bow to the current obsession with dysfunctional families, here the rivalries between the kids — most vividly middle sister Jan’s jealousy of older sibling Marcia — are brought to the fore, Oprah-style.

Eve Plumb, the series’ original Jan, has a cameo as a militant in the spotty but sidesplitting I’m Gonna Git You Sucka, and her appearance helps underscore the huge gap between the funky garishness of ’70s African-American culture and the have-a-nice-day variety preferred by the Bradys. Spoofing the clichés of blaxploitation movies, Sucka features enough big hats, bright colors, and uncomfortable footwear that cultural anthropologists could mistake it for the real thing. Here urban avenger Jack Spade (writer-director Keenen Ivory Wayans) gets advice from Jim Brown, Isaac Hayes, and Antonio Fargas, all riffing on their ’70s alter egos, Slaughter, Truck Turner, and Huggy Bear. When Brown advises Spade that ”every black hero needs theme music,” you get the feeling Wayans, who later made the blaxploitation wannabe A Low Down Dirty Shame, isn’t kidding.

But artifacts and personalities aren’t enough to carry every ’70s homage. Witness The Spirit of ’76, created by Lucas Reiner and Roman Coppola (the two cowrote the script; Coppola executive-produced, Reiner directed; yes, their dads are whom you think). The premise bodes well: Astronauts of the future are sent back to 1776 but wind up landing two centuries later than that, where they must contend with Grand Funk Railroad’s rendition of ”The Loco-Motion” and other horrors. Casting Partridge Family heartthrob David Cassidy was a good idea, but it would have been a better idea if he’d played an icon of the era instead of one of the time travelers. References to est and disco, along with someone’s mint collection of Kiss posters and other memorabilia, get tossed out willy-nilly; the movie’s only unifying force is that smirky irony.

The irony that animates Dazed and Confused is of a deeper variety. Writer-director Richard Linklater’s freewheeling account of the adventures of a group of ’70s high school kids on the last day of school has plenty of period detail, against which Linklater limns a familiar but freshly drawn array of characters (jocks, nerds, and stoners), all pondering their futures. Linklater recognizes the double bind his people face as they try to find meaning in a cultural context of almost numbing superficiality, but he doesn’t scoff at their efforts, nor does he deny the goofy fun that the cultural context could offer. Which may be, in fact, what we still like about the ’70s.

The Brady Bunch Movie: B
I’m Gonna Git You Sucka: B-
The Spirit of ’76: C-
Dazed and Confused: B+