16. That Thing You Do!

Dismissed as fluff by critics and audiences alike, That Thing You Do! is perched delicately on the pop culture crest of rock and roll as fad and lifestyle, jazz as high art and street art, and the first wave of the one-hit wonders. First-time feature film writer/director Tom Hanks does not make the Woody Allen mistake of casting himself as the lead in a role he was so clearly meant to play.  Instead he casts new(ish) face Tom Everett Scott as the Tom Hanks guy, a good-hearted, artistic, sensitive guy who is also sensible and gentlemanly. The catchy title song was played a thousand times a day on the radio in 1996 and maybe that kept everyone away.  If so, it is their loss.

It's not just good because it's an exuberant breath of fresh air and has great production design. It's good because it takes a tale of naïve ambition and incredible good fortune and turns it into a perfect time capsule parable of its time, with fleshy characters and
themes of success versus fame versus art, and the marriage of jazz and rock and roll.

Hanks's unerring eye cast such then-obscure and now-desirable stars as Ethan Embry, Steve Zahn, Tom Everett Scott, and Jonathan Schaech, who fulfill the boy band credo of four different types to appeal to all different folks, with easy, natural chemistry.  And then he taught them to play their instruments over 5 weeks. Liv Tyler's groupie girlfriend, in those innocent pre-Rolling Stone days, adds poignancy.

Hanks makes this big splashy colorful movie feel like an intimate indie film.

It's a story that was lived out hundreds of times in the 1964 in which it was set (with impeccable detail), and again in the mid-eighties after the next major rock musical innovation. Instead of jazz, the 1980s had electronica scooping every one-hit wonder out of the bars and bowling alleys of America and England.

Sheer, pure teenage joy is difficult to sum up in words, let alone successfully recreate with a team of 200 union artists. The scene that brings That Thing You Do! home for me is the scene where the band’s song gets its first radio airing. I won't tell you any more, in case you haven't seen it, but it is a sequence like that which brings us to the movie theatres. (Karina Montgomery)