Stuart Gordon's Family-Friendly Ray Bradbury Adaptation The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit Is Exuberant Fun for the Whole Family
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
I think sometimes about the surprisingly central role that LSD guru Timothy Leary has played in the life and career of “Weird Al” Yankovic and by extension, myself.
The origin story of Jay Levey, Al’s longtime manager and the co-writer and director of The Complete Al and UHF begins, unexpectedly but delightfully enough, with him encountering one of Leary’s countercultural manifestos while bumming around the country as a young man.
Levey was so intrigued by the elfin hippie icon that he decided that he needed to meet with him. Unfortunately Leary happened to be incarcerated at the time but Levey was persistent and determined so he first became Leary’s friend and then his manager.
Managing Timothy Leary led to managing another American icon in Dr. Demento. Demento led inevitably and triumphantly to Levey managing “Weird Al” Yankovic and Al escaping the comedy music ghetto and becoming a mainstream superstar.
And it all started with a kid picking up a paperback book in a fit of youthful curiosity and engaging with it in a way that would not only change his own life but also a series of other lives as well, including my own.
Thanks, Dr. Leary! Your words very indirectly led me to collaborate extensively with the most sober man in pop music.
That’s the beauty of a book. Or a movie. Or a website. Or an online column. They have the magical power to catch fire in our imaginations and take us to new and strange and wonderful places.
I’ll never forget what I felt the first time I held a copy of The Onion in my hands some time in the early to mid 1990s. I didn’t just think it was funny. It SPOKE to me. There was something about it that resonated deep within my soul. It legitimately changed the course of my life and career.
I would like nothing more than for my own work to affect people that way. Nothing makes me happier or prouder than hearing that You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like Me or one of my books about “Weird Al” Yankovic changed the way someone thought about the world and made them less judgmental and more appreciative and open-minded.
When Stuart Gordon discovered H.P. Lovecraft it was undoubtedly a similarly transformative moment. Gordon had found his muse, his great gloomy gothic god of dread and terror.
I’m sure there are multiple generations of horror filmmakers whose lives were changed when someone showed them a beat up videocassette of The Re-Animator or From Beyond.
The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit, Stuart Gordon’s 1998 adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s short story "The Magic White Suit” and play The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit is about the magic to be found in inanimate objects that have the power to transform our humdrum lives and see the world in a new, more joyful and exuberant manner.
The inanimate object in question is the titular item of clothing, a snazzy white suit so bright that it glows. It’s not just snazzy; it’s miraculous but it costs one hundred dollars, which is more than the film’s struggling dreamers can afford.
So Gomez, a mustachioed trickster figure a scenery-chewing Joe Mantegna plays with great relish and a mischievous twinkle in his eyes, hatches a kooky scheme. He finds four other men with roughly the same proportions as himself. They’re all roughly the same height and weigh pretty much the same and all can afford to put in twenty dollars for one-fifth ownership in the dazzling titular garment of wonder.
The friends buy the suit and agree to share it amongst themselves over the course of a single surreal evening. Think of it as a Brotherhood of the Non-Traveling Suit.
Hunky troubadour Dominguez (Esai Morales) puts on the suit first and becomes a Los Angeles pied piper uniting his neighborhood and his community in celebratory song and dance. Through the suit, and the power of friendship and belief, he’s able to briefly realize his dreams of becoming an entertainer.
Satiated, Dominguez then gives the suit to his friend Villanazul (Gregory Sierra). Villanazul is a poet, an intellectual and a public speaker who tries to change the world with his words and his ideas. Because he is a poet and an intellectual he is of course doomed to perpetually fail but in his magical white suit of joy the underdog becomes the subject of intense public fascination and obsession.
People start listening to him for quite possibly the first time in his life. He feels validated and seen and it only takes magic to make that happen. Villanazul then hands the suit over to Martinez (Clifton Collins Jr.), a hopeless romantic who uses it to impress a beauty he has been pining for from a safe distance.
Gomez is so blown away by the power of the suit that he initially plans to make off with it so that he can have all of its ungodly power but finds that he cannot betray his friends or the bond the suit has engendered.
Edward James Olmos is unrecognizable as Vámonos, the wild card of the group. His skin a dark shade of black due to the mud seemingly caked onto every free inch of his body, Vamanos cuts a Pigpen-like figure. He’s not just dirty; he’s dirt personified. He has attained the ultimate level of filth. He’s not just dirty; he IS dirt.
But he has twenty dollars and is roughly the same height and weight as the film’s other main characters so he’s given a chance to experience the suit’s magic firsthand as well.
Vámonos immediately does EVERYTHING that he’s ostensibly forbidden to do. He’s a hurricane of chaos and disorder forever threatening the lily white purity of the ice cream suit.
Everyone is good here but Olmos steals the film as a rambunctious, rampaging id who continually inserts himself into the dreams and schemes of folks who are wise to be wary of him.
The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit is terrific but it’s also terrifically slight. It runs a mere seventy-eight minutes and seems to be lacking about fifteen minutes in its third act. But Gordon’s uncharacteristic foray into family-friendly entertainment is otherwise a low-key triumph, a happy, upbeat and spectacularly likable exercise in casual magical realism that proves once again that Gordon could do more than just make folks puke with disgusting horror movies.
The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit is a lovely little crowd-pleaser that unfortunately did not get a chance to please theatrical crowds because it went direct to video despite a cast full of familiar faces, a famous director, a legendary screenwriter, good buzz and stellar reviews.
I can’t say that I’m terribly surprised. Five Hispanic men of modest means sharing a garment over the course of an evening isn’t exactly Star Wars when it comes to commercial subject matter.
But I was thoroughly won over by The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit all the same. Between this and Gordon’s story credit on Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, it turns out that a guy famous for making fucked up movies for jaded adults was good at making innocent movies for children as well.
Would you like a book with this exact article in it and 51 more just like it? Then check out my newest literary endeavor, The Joy of Trash: Flaming Garbage Fire Extended Edition at https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop and get a free, signed "Weird Al” Yankovic-themed coloring book for free! Just 18.75, shipping and taxes included! Or you can buy it from Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Joy-Trash-Nathan-Definitive-Everything/dp/B09NR9NTB4/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= but why would you want to do that?
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