Category Archives: Dan Aykroyd

Trading Places: A Christmas Classic Worth Celebrating

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Black Friday has passed, but Americans still need something to fight about. Christmas has arrived, so fighting over the best Christmas movie seems like the logical next step.

If you are fighting the War On Christmas Movies, you probably fall into one of five camps:

1. Your Favorite is “It’s a Wonderful Life”: That means you have probably watched all of the AFI List specials.

2. Your Favorite is “Home Alone”: You grew up in the 90s. Also, you have a thing for setting up booby traps in your house.

3. Your Favorite is “A Christmas Story”: You will watch it during the entire 24 hour block that runs on TBS on Christmas Day. Also, you’re probably Jewish and couldn’t convince anybody else to go see something in theaters that day.

4. Your Favorite is “Die Hard”: You understand that “Die Hard” isn’t a Christmas movie in a traditional sense. But you don’t care, because you are way too cool for school.

5. Your Favorite is “Jingle All The Way”: Haha we get it. You like being ironic and you probably own a pair of bacon socks from Urban Outfitters and also you’re probably me.

However, I would like to stage a coup, and add a sixth film to the battle. Would anybody care to join me on Team “Trading Places”?


Okay, “Trading Places” isn’t the most traditional Christmas story. Like “Die Hard,” Christmas is more of a backdrop rather than front and center. But the holidays are an open and inviting time, just not for your drunk uncle who won’t stop talking about Obamacare.

In “Trading Places,” two rich old men with too much money and time on their hands want to settle the nature vs. nurture debate once and for all. So they find their lab rats in the form of stock broker Louis Winthorpe III (Dan Aykroyd) and homeless criminal Billy Ray Valentine (Eddie Murphy). Louis finds his money, safety, and sanity all gone. Billy Ray, meanwhile, ends up with millions. The way in which this all transpires is actually quite brilliant and elaborate. Along the way, you’ll get a glimpse of a young Giancarlo Esposito, and way more of a glimpse of Jamie Lee Curtis than you probably ever expected.

“Trading Places” came out in 1983, and is one of the best comedies of the 1980s. It is part of the trend of 80s comedies about how entertaining it is to make fun of the country club crowd. It has been playing on Comedy Central a lot lately, and it gets much better after multiple viewings. It contains some of the best work from all of its stars. It is also a sad reminder that Eddie Murphy was once one of the funniest people on the planet. “Trading Places” is a bit different from the likes of “Caddyshack” and “Ghostbusters.” A lot of jokes fall through the cracks upon a first viewing. It has a much drier sense of humor than most other mainstream American comedies of that time. Well, now that I think about it, watching all three of those movies back to back right now would be pretty awesome.

Anyway, “Trading Places” might be dark for a Christmas movie, but it still embodies the holiday spirit in a way that no Christmas movie starring Tim Allen ever could. “Trading Places” is a film about a bunch of completely different people coming closer together to defeat a common enemy. Who ever thought a businessman, a hobo, and a prostitute could get along? Well, the holidays are a time to put aside your differences and revel in warmth to escape the cold, dark winter.

While you might not have wanted your Christmas movie of choice to feature a lot of talk about whether or not man is good or evil, maybe you might want one where all the Scrooges get screwed to put you in a good mood. It’s nice that the moral in the end is that sometimes, stock fraud is okay.

Plus, if you wanted a good reminder of a few of the racist jokes you might hear during the holidays, look no further than Aykroyd’s blackface. It’s pretty offensive, but also really funny. It’s a forgiving time of year. So you can be forgiven for laughing at it.*

*You can still laugh at it any other time of year. In fact, the great thing about “Trading Places” is that unlike other Christmas movies, you are still legally allowed to watch during any time of the year that you want.

Movie Review: The Campaign

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“The Campaign” didn’t necessarily need to exist. Jay Roach could have just shot footage of Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis together in the same room, and I still would have bought the ticket. However, the fact that “The Campaign” gives them a purpose makes it all the better.

At this point, political satire has nailed down all of the main points pretty well: politicians will do anything they can to win, and they will also take any excuse to label their opponents as Communists. But the devil is truly in the details, and the challenge is in finding ways to make stale jokes seem fresh. The best example might be when Cam Brady (Will Ferrell) accidentally punches a baby in the face. The baby punching isn’t the funniest part; the fact that the scene is played out in slow-motion really seals the deal. And here I thought that showing the clip on every single talk show would make it less funny in the actual movie.

At the beginning of “The Campaign,” Ferrell’s Brady is going around telling everyone from auto workers to Filipino amusement park ride operators that they are the “backbone of America.” Political junkies will be surprised by how well versed writers Chris Henchy and Shawn Harwell in American political jargon. This isn’t quite “The West Wing” penned by comedy writers (“Parks & Rec” and “Veep” are more in that league). It’s more like if “Step Brothers” focused on a bunch of Washington insiders. That is very high compliment.
I think this is my favorite performance that I have seen from Ferrell in quite a few years. He is in his element as a Ron Burgundy-type politician with less of a heart. Cam Brady is a congressman for a small district in North Carolina. His years in Washington have turned him into a corrupt womanizer. Despite a sex scandal involving a voicemail on the wrong person’s machine (to be far, who still uses an answering machine?), Brady runs totally unopposed.

In Washington, the Motch Brothers (which sounds an awful lot like Marx Brothers when said out loud), senior congressmen played by Dan Aykroyd and John Lithgow, look for a way to bring cheap, illegal Chinese labor to the Carolina district. Aykroyd plays a version of one of the men who made him homeless in “Trading Places.” How the tables have turned. The Motch Brothers’s plan is almost a cartoonishly evil plot. I could picture them coming up with this on Looney Tunes before getting blown up by some disguised dynamite.

The Motch Brothers decide their plan will succeed if they bring their own player into the race. They go with Marty Huggins (Galifianakis), who takes ‘inexplicable choice’ to a whole new level. Huggins, who is a variation of Galifianakis’s Seth Galifianakis, is the effeminate tourism director of Hammond. He knows many interesting facts about the town, such as the one regarding the time that Rosie Perez stopped in town because she needed to use the phone. They say people resemble their dogs, and Huggins is essentially a pug walking on its hind legs. His family, meanwhile, could have their own reality show. Galifianakis is a great comic actor because everything he does as Huggins perfectly fits the character right up to the way he runs, which can be better described as skipping with style.

“The Campaign” is a little like a political “My Fair Lady,” with Huggins learning how to walk, talk, and dress like a politician. Dylan McDermott gives a subtlety hysterical performance as Huggins’s campaign manager. He’s a man who often acts much more like a spy. Perhaps one of the funniest scenes in the movie is when he shows up in Cam Brady’s shower, seeing as he doesn’t even seem to open the curtain in order to get in.
Will Ferrell continues to amaze me in the sense that he always seems to star in the projects that he wants to star in. He seems to enjoy putting himself into “gross-out” stories with a very heavy social context. Even when he doesn’t write a movie, it seems as if he did. And now, I’m starting to feel the same way about everything Galifianakis does as well. After all, Galifianakis is a native of North Carolina. However, Ferrell isn’t actually a scumbag in real life.
“The Campaign” goes beyond the politics that push the plot forward. Roach allows a lot of the humor to come from the moments when the characters aren’t campaigning. In simplest terms, it’s about a lot of odd, funny characters doing odd and funny things. “The Campaign” may be a plot-oriented comedy, but something that stood out to me was that it was willing to take a break from itself in order to show the Huggins family dinner. And when one of his children starts confessing his darkest secrets, it appears that everyone goes off script. And for that it works all the better.
The living embodiment of Awkward Family Photos.
“The Campaign” obviously comes out during an election year, and it was definitely released at this time for a reason. It shows a sense of unabashed idealism that can only be found in a movie. However, that is the end. The means show a more bitter look at politicians. This time, there is no knight in shining armor. Everyone realizes that the only way to win is through dishonesty. Yet, despite all of Marty Huggins’s idiosyncrasies (to put it lightly), he becomes the movie’s hero because he is the innocent. Every comedy needs one. He is the only man in the room who actually wants to make good things happen. 
To me, “The Campaign” wasn’t as subtlety brilliant (there, I said it) as “Step Brothers.” And it definitely didn’t have all of the memorable one liners of “Anchorman.” And as far as political satires go, it doesn’t quite reach the top on a scale of one to “Election.” It doesn’t reinvent the wheel on political satirizing, but then again, I never should have assumed it would. It crams more laughs into 85 minutes than any other comedy this summer. And it wasn’t a sequel, prequel, remake, or comic book adaptation of any sort. 
Sometimes, a good comedy doesn’t have to tell a story that hasn’t been told, but rather make us laugh at jokes we’ve never heard. “The Campaign” may be flawed, and maybe it would have been  better with Adam McKay in the director’s chair, but I can say this: it certainly is pure. The political parties of the two candidates are mentioned only once and never again. Maybe that’s because campaigns are rarely about actual issues nowadays. Regardless, this is a comedy about the ridiculousness of American politics that anyone of any ideology can sit down and enjoy. That is, as long as you have a sick sense of humor.
If you liked this movie, you’ll also like: Anchorman, Step Brothers, Walk Hard, Zoolander, Trading Places