Fishing with John is the first TV series to show up in the Criterion Collection, and possibly the strangest. The show's premise is actor/musician John Lurie taking his famous friends out fishing. Apparently he wasn't much of a fisherman, but the show is narrated in a way to assume that all of the sitting around and talking on boats is part of a larger, dramatic story. It's such an odd conceit that I'm still trying to figure out if this is brilliant or annoying.
The people John takes out of his fishing expeditions are Jim Jarmusch, Tom Waits, Matt Dillon, Willem Dafoe, and Dennis Hopper, with Hopper getting an extended two-part episode in Thailand. This film hinges on John's interactions with each guest, and it's not surprising that the shittiest episode is the one where a guest was forced on him by the financiers. John wanted Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, but the financiers instead demanded Matt Dillon, so we get an episode with is largely the two of them sitting on a boat not talking to each other, and John dancing around like an idiot try to get something, anything usable for this episode. I wanted to single this one out because before I found out about Dillon being forced in, I remember hating this episode because of how dull it was. In every other episode John has a nice, easy-going chemistry with his guests, with the Dafoe and Hopper episodes being particularly fun, and you're watching this show just to see these two people hang out and shoot the shit. When you get an episode where there's clearly no chemistry between the two, it's painful as hell to try watching.
My favorite episode has to be the one with Willem Dafoe. Dafoe actually seems to be enjoying himself, with John clearly miserable. Maybe it's the Herzog man against nature aspect to this episode that helps it, but it's hilarious seeing Dafoe with a huge grin on his face, cheerful as hell and offering friendly suggestions while John sits around scowling and bitching about the cold. The Tom Waits episode is interesting mainly because apparently Waits hated doing the show and according to John didn't speak to him again for two years. Once again, without knowing this beforehand, when I saw the episode Waits looked annoyed and disinterested throughout. I have nothing to say about the Jarmusch episode except that Jim looked way too stylish to be on a boat trying to catch a shark.
The voice over in the show exists to both parody the standard voice over that you get in nature shows, and to also force a plot onto each episode. Sometimes it works, other times it doesn't. In particular, the voice over in the Thailand episodes was grating, especially when talking about the "squid-worshiping" monks. I know it's supposed to be funny, but given that this was a religious community that seemed very polite and welcoming and probably didn't know that they were being mocked, it came across as mean-spirited and ignorant. In fact, a lot of John's interactions with natives abroad rubbed me the wrong way, but I'm guessing that this will vary for each viewer. I did like how John was able to turn a series of conversations with his friends (and Dillon) into stories, and it really shows how editing can turn a random series of shots into a narrative.
I think this show, overall, was a bit too "cute" for my tastes. Growing up in the 90s I've been hammered over the head with irony so often that a premise like this one is immediately off-putting. It's a fun show, and the conversations are entertaining, but the overall tone of this series is frankly annoying. You have to be willing to buy in on the humor of this show to really dig it. I found like I liked parts of it but hated others, so it's an odd entry in the collection. Everything about it feels so light and airy, like it's nothing more than a goof, so it feels like the least essential entry in the collection so far. It's not the worst, mind you, but this is the first one that I feel someone could easily skip and not miss anything worthwhile.
This one is going to be ranked low, though not at the bottom. I didn't hate Fishing with John, but I have no desire to watch this again, and I don't see myself recommending it to anyone. It seems like one of those shows that it's more fun to talk about than to watch. I'm going to put it at #38, in between Summertime, which I thought was pretty good, and Alphaville, which I hated.
The List
Next time: I feel like eating a giant pig's head with the Lord of the Flies.
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