Night At The Roxbury 4k
Etta Lesniak
A Night at the Roxbury is a 1998 American comedy film based on a recurring sketch on television's long-running Saturday Night Live called "The Roxbury Guys". Saturday Night Live regulars Will Ferrell, Chris Kattan, Molly Shannon, Mark McKinney, and Colin Quinn star. This film expands on the original Saturday Night Live sketches where the Roxbury Guys were joined by that week's host, and bobbed their heads to Haddaway's hit song "What Is Love" while being comically rejected by women at various clubs.
Other roles include Jennifer Coolidge as a police officer, Chazz Palminteri's uncredited role as gregarious night club impresario Mr. Benny Zadir, and Colin Quinn as his bodyguard Dooey. Ex-SNLer Mark McKinney has a cameo as a priest officiating a wedding.
Steve and Doug Butabi are sons of a wealthy businessman and in their spare time, enjoy frequenting nightclubs, where they bob their heads in unison to Eurodance, a European subgenre of electronic dance music, and fail miserably at picking up women. Their goal is to party at the Roxbury, a fabled Los Angeles nightclub where they are continually denied entry by a hulking bouncer.
By day, the brothers work at an artificial plant store owned by their wealthy father, Kamehl. They spend most of their time goofing off, daydreaming about opening a club as cool as the Roxbury together, and Doug using credit card transactions as an excuse to flirt with a card approval associate via telephone that he calls "Credit Vixen." The store shares a wall with a lighting emporium owned by Fred Sanderson. Mr. Butabi and Mr. Sanderson hope that Steve and Emily, Sanderson's daughter, will marry, uniting the families and the businesses to form the first plant-lamp emporium.
After discovering that they might bribe their way into the club, the brothers drive around looking for an ATM slamming on the brakes again and again while in traffic causing them to get into a fender-bender with Richard Grieco. Grieco explains to the girl with him in the passenger seat that his Ferrari is a racing car and therefore illegal. To avoid a lawsuit, Grieco uses his fame to get them into the popular club. There, they meet the owner of the Roxbury, Benny Zadir, who listens to their idea for their own nightclub. He likes them and sets up a meeting with them for the next day. The brothers also meet a pair of women at the Roxbury: Vivica and Cambi, who see them talking to Zadir and think that the brothers are rich. The women later sleep with Doug and Steve, leading the brothers to think they are in serious relationships.
On the way to the after-party at Mr. Zadir's house, the brothers annoy his driver and bodyguard Dooey by making him stop to buy fluffy whip and making jokes about sleeping with his parents. As revenge, the next day, Dooey refuses them entry into Zadir's office for their meeting. He tells the brothers that Zadir was drunk out of his mind last night and does not know who they are. In reality, Zadir wanted to see them, but does not have their contact information.
Vivica and Cambi break up with the Butabi brothers after realizing they are not actually wealthy. Afterwards, the brothers argue over who is at fault for their sudden misfortune and Doug moves out of their shared bedroom and into the guest house. Meanwhile, Steve is forced into an engagement with Emily by his father. The wedding is held in the backyard of the Butabi residence, but is interrupted by Doug. The brothers reconcile and leave, but their friend and personal trainer Craig, reveals his feelings for Emily, and marries her. Afterwards, Grieco consoles Mr. Butabi to help him understand that Steve was not ready for marriage, and that Butabi is too hard on Doug.
In May 2019, Kattan claimed in his memoir that he was pressured by producer Lorne Michaels to have sex with Amy Heckerling so she would direct the film (although she ultimately only produced, rather than directed it).[7]
A Night at the Roxbury was heavily panned by critics. On review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes, it received a rating of 11% and an average rating of 3.4/10 based on 55 reviews. The site's critical consensus reads: "A Night at the Roxbury has the same problems as the worst SNL movies: one-note characters and plots unreasonably stretched to feature length runtime".[8] Anita Gates of The New York Times acknowledged the film's appeal, but reasoned that it was "a lot like the brothers themselves: undeniably pathetic but strangely lovable. Still, do you really want to spend an hour and a half with them in a dark room?"[9] Roger Ebert observed that "the sad thing about A Night at the Roxbury is that the characters are in a one-joke movie, and they're the joke... It's the first comedy I've attended where you feel that to laugh would be cruel to the characters."[10]
One thing that I do not miss about my old life as the head writer for The A.V. Club was the stomach-churning anxiety I used to experience just before doing an interview. This was particularly pronounced if the interview was in person.
That was the case when I interviewed Amy Heckerling and Chris Kattan when they were in Chicago promoting A Night at the Roxbury in 1998, when I was twenty-two years old and a relative newcomer to pop culture writing.
Kattan and Heckerling apparently had sex on a couch in her office but she ended up only producing A Night at the Roxbury. Incidentally the two movies I was thinking about writing up today were Stuart Saves His Family and A Night at the Roxbury, both of which were co-written by men who had secret sexual relationships with Heckerling. Harold Ramis, the co-writer and director of Stuart Saves His Family even had a secret child from his secret affair with Heckerling.
In A Night at the Roxbury, however, they are pretty much the same but also somewhat different. Doug Butabi (Chris Kattan) is the brains of the operation, an idea man whose one idea involves opening a club where the outside is the inside and the inside is the outside.
What they do have are dreams. Or at least one of them has a dream. Doug stumbles closer to achieving his stupid, stupid dream when the brothers get into a minor traffic accident with Richard Grieco (THE Richard Grieco), who gets them into the Roxbury, where they meet a powerful club owner played by Chazz Palminteri who inexplicably takes a liking to them and agrees to take a meeting with them.
So they have sex with them with the implicit understanding that doing so will help them financially or in some other way. When they discover that the man-children live with their parents and have no money or power of their own they are mortified.
The easily led dumbass is convinced to marry Emily for the sake of his family and his business. The brothers have a fight on account of the third act needs conflict, which the film otherwise desperately lacks.
I have a lot of affection for Kataan, if only because he seems content to be a washed up has been instead of pivoting towards being a right-winger like so many other irrelevant comics. Also, I always thought he was a very gifted physical comedian. His work as a reanimated corpse in Monkeybone is kind of breathtaking.
One notable thing about this movie was the soundtrack album, which was a pretty damn good compilation if you liked that dance-club genre (Cyndi Lauper covered "Disco Inferno" for it!) and which also took the unusual step of stringing all the songs together end-to-end into one long club mix.
I had no way of knowing just what a strange proposition that would prove to be. In his memoir, which I really should read and write about at some point, Kattan writes that Lorne Michaels pushed him into having a sexual relationship with Heckerling, the red-hot director of Fast Times at Ridgemont High and 1995\u2019s Clueless so that she\u2019d direct A Night at the Roxbury.
Will Ferrell\u2019s friendship with Kattan apparently ended over his relationship with Heckerling. That helps explain why the duo promoting A Night at the Roxbury was not its two stars but rather a star and a producer.
If I were honest, I would have responded, \u201CGod no! It\u2019s terrible! It\u2019s a movie based on a sketch where two guys bobbed their heads in time to music. How could it NOT be godawful? Jesus, you know that you\u2019ve made just a worthless, worthless, brutally unfunny piece of shit. Why would you even ask me I question like that? Let me ask YOU a question. Do YOU like the movie? Are you proud of it? Is this what you envisioned when you were given seventeen million dollars to make a major motion picture?\u201D
I am not brutally honest, however. I hate conflict so I said something along the lines of \u201CSure, there were things about it I liked\u201D then singled out the two least terrible elements of the movie, one of which was a super-timely Say Anything homage and the other of which was Richard Grieco\u2019s cameo.
I vaguely remember asking why they changed the setting of the action from New York to Los Angeles and Heckerling said something to the effect that if it was set in New York they\u2019d have to deal with the whole Bridge and Tunnel thing, where people from less exciting, important boroughs venture to Manhattan to seek their fortune and pursue their dreams, so it was easier to just set it in LA.
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