Bad Movies We Love: High Strung
Bizarrely, supporting characters find a way to appear in High Strung. Thane's superior at the children's book company, a humorless powersuit named Melanie (Denise Crosby), hates Thane's work and defends the brand's best-known star, Happy the Clam. ("I will not sit here and listen to you badmouth Happy the Clam!" is the movie's coup de grace.) Thane prefers more practical children's book ideas like How to Start the Family Car for when "someone chokes on a chicken bone" and "there are no adults around."
Other drop-ins are weirder: Fred Willard shows up at Thane's apartment as an insurance salesman. Thomas F. Wilson (Biff in the Back to the Future movies) plays Thane's lone friend, Al. And in one odd dream sequence, a young Kirsten Dunst appears. (We've done three Bad Movies We Love, and Dunst has already come up twice. Statisticians, mark up the books.) The finest cameo, though, belongs to Carrey, whose glowing visage interrupts the film at random intervals and shocks us out of Thane's cynical hermitage.
While we wait the length of the movie to discover just why he keeps popping up in Thane's mind, it takes but one glimpse to realize Carrey's greatest talent: He can do scary. Dumb and Dumber and Liar, Liar are choice, but it's Carrey's menacing stare in The Cable Guy -- first witnessed in High Strung -- that sticks years later. You'll see bits of that in I Love You, Phillip Morris, too, but without the sub-human rubberface. Like Andy Kaufman, Carrey is in touch with something deeply maniacal. Oh, REM, explain it to us!
Anyway, lo and behold, Thane "confronts" Carrey at film's end. Wowzers, turns out he's Death! Spoiler: Death thinks Thane is too annoying to deal with and lets him toil in civilization for eternity. Teehee. Pardon the annoying intro in the following clip.
High Strung would be screwball existentialism if it weren't also so ghetto, you know? Still, we earned our share of Sartre by way of the sardonic, and if you can't respect shoestring-budget action and Oedekerk's wild gesticulations, you deserve to come down with amnesia, wash ashore in a new town, and be forced to watch Bad Movies We Hate like The Majestic. I said it, Martin Landau.
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Comments
Oedekerk isn't the director; Roger Nygard (The Nature of Existence) was.
Right. But he is a writer/director/comedian. I will clarify.
No joke: I own this movie. I own it on videocassette and I am totally giving it a watch before I see Phillip Morris.
Another fun story: I met Denise Crosby at a convention once and told her I never watched Star Trek, but I loved her in High Strung. She damn near fell out of her seat and was super flattered. She said she loved working on this movie and was so glad someone saw it. (She is SUPER nice, btw.)
To say I was obsessed with Jim Carrey when I was a teenager would be a vast understatement. I can't even tell you how heartbreaking it was to see him fall from grace following The Truman Show (except for Eternal Sunshine, which also had Kirsten Dunst in it).