Tag: comedy

2024 Summer Movie Talk – Part 2

photog Current Events, Movie Reviews, OCF, Reviews , , ,

2024 Summer Movie Talk – Part 2

Comedy

I’ll list what I think are among the best or the most popular or the most interesting comedy movies in approximately chronological order.  I’ve reviewed a number of these movies so if you want my detailed opinion, you can do a search on the site.

  1. IT’S A GIFT (1934)
  2. A NIGHT AT THE OPERA (1935)
  3. MAN ON THE FLYING TRAPEZE (1935)
  4. THE BANK DICK (1940)
  5. ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN (1948)
  6. THE ODD COUPLE (1968)
  7. BLAZING SADDLES (1974)
  8. YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN (1974)
  9. MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL (1975)
  10. GHOSTBUSTERS (1984)
  11. PLANES, TRAINS AND AUTOMOBILES (1987)
  12. BEETLEJUICE (1988)
  13. UNCLE BUCK (1989)
  14. GROUNDHOG DAY (1993)
  15. SO I MARRIED AN AX MURDERER (1993)
  16. AUSTIN POWERS: INTERNATIONAL MAN OF MYSTERY (1997)
  17. THE BIG LEBOWSKI (1998)
  18. OFFICE SPACE (1999)
  19. GALAXY QUEST (1999)
  20. SHAUN OF THE DEAD (2004)
  21. IDIOCRACY (2006)

Now this is just my list.  Your list will be different.  It has to be.  More than any other genre comedy is incredibly personal and therefore subjective.  It is also age specific.  My children would list twenty movies from 2000 to the present day that I haven’t seen nor would want to watch.  I have tried to leave out comedies that I consider marginal that happen to overlap with my most active movie watching era.  So, I haven’t included “The Blues Brothers,” “Caddyshack.” “Stripes,” “Animal House,” “Meatballs,” “National Lampoon: Vacation,” “Trading Places” and a bunch of other movies from my heyday.  I put Ghostbusters in as the best representative for that era.  Someone else would have chosen otherwise.

I hope my list will inspire a million spirited comments.  Everyone has their favorites and their turkeys.  Unlike politics we can all have our opinions on comedy movies without fear of doing any damage.  Have at it.

The High Cost of Loving (1958) – A Movie Review

photog Movie Reviews, Reviews , , , ,

“The High Cost of Loving” is a mild comedy of errors about the home and workplace tribulations of Jim Fry (Jose Ferrer).  Jim’s a purchasing agent for the Lynden Company which has just been purchased by Associated Industries.  Through a series of accidents and misunderstandings Jim gets the impression that he’s about to be fired.  And naturally this is simultaneous with the news that his wife Ginny is going to have a baby.

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

This comedy of errors begins with Jim not getting invited to a lunch where the executive board of Associated will meet the assistant directors (like Jim) who are being considered for promotion in the new corporate environment.  And after this first slight, several incidents provide reinforcement to the idea that the new management intends to terminate Jim.  And of course, this makes him jumpy and increasingly bitter and causes trouble between husband and wife.

In addition, Jim’s work friend Steve has a wife Syd who in addition to being Ginny’s friend is also a blabbermouth who can’t help but say the wrong thing about the events going on at Lynden Company.

Finally, after Jim has come to terms with his worries and resolved to do whatever is necessary to save his job, he reaches his office in time to see a painter scraping his name off the window.  Incensed, he sits down at this desk and writes a scathing letter to the new president of Lynden Company expressing his outrage at what he thinks is the company’s ingratitude toward him.  He stomps over to the president’s office and gives the letter to the secretary there.  Just then the president and his boss from Associated Industries walk in and hurry Jim into the office to inform him that an error occurred keeping Jim off the list of invitees for the lunch with the executive board.  And then they inform him that he’s been promoted to Director of Purchasing.  After some embarrassing moments he retrieves the letter and manages to convince the president that the letter he wrote should be returned unread.  And tranquility is restored on the business front for Jim.

The movie ends with Ginny allowing Jim to regale her with tales of his oratorical prowess at the infamous “lunch” followed by Ginny pulling a prank on him.  She pretends that the letter he reclaimed from the president’s office was not the one he wrote but a magazine subscription form letter that must have been on the president’s desk.  After debunking her joke the movie ends with a romantic scene between husband and wife as their lives settle into a new and happier circumstance.

This movie is a bit of fluff.  A Shakespearian title would be “Much Ado About Nothing.”  It’s such a mild comedy with so little consequence about the plot that you might think it isn’t worth the trouble to watch it.  I’ll disagree.  I don’t suppose that the word charming has much currency today.  But that is the word that comes to mind.  And for once my tastes and Camera Girl’s agreed.  I guess that makes this domestic comedy a good date movie.  The relationship between husband and wife is so attractively drawn that we both found ourselves laughing at the same scenes.  And each of us defended our side of the battle of the sexes when it inevitably emerged.  But we equally agreed that the marriage on display was refreshingly healthy.  Jose Ferrer directed himself in this movie and I believe he also had one of the writing credits.  I give him high marks for the little touches he added to the domestic scenes.  The scenes where husband and wife wake up and stagger through their groggy routine were well scripted and enjoyable.  And finally, the thing I noticed was that the world of 1958 America was a thoroughly pleasant place.  Even the anxiety of losing a job takes place in surroundings that trumpet a peaceful and well-ordered world.  And Jim is worried about losing his job because of competency not diversity, equity and inclusion considerations.  Ah, simpler and better times.

An Oasis of Comedy in a Desert of Woke Offense

photog Current Events, Humor ,

Joe Rogan has opened a comedy club in Austin TX that encourages comics to be funny.  What a concept!  Actual comics have abandoned LA and New York City for a place where they can dare to mix comedy with reality.  It’s nice to find little shoots of hope in a hellish landscape.

The History of Dunwich – Part 1 – It’s Annoying Origins

photog Humor, Life in Dunwich, My Fiction, photog's Corner , , ,

The origins of the site on which Dunwich sits are shrouded in mystery.  A mystery based on profound indifference and shoddy scholarship.  Legend claims that in the earliest epoch it was the Latrine of Yog Sothoth.  It is believed that the current stratum of bedrock is completely composed of metamorphized coprolite.  Professor Obadiah Bishop of Miskatonic University spent forty years of his academic career studying this coprolite formation and determined that it was almost entirely composed of triceratopsian dung formed from an exclusive diet of poison sumac.  This is thought to explain the funk that emanates from the ground, groundwater, crops and inhabitants of the present day site.  It is also believed to explain the almost constant, frenzied scratching that all Dunwichians indulge in.

The original human inhabitants of the area were members of the Pocnipnarrawampamuckutucs (sometimes shortened to the Muckutucs) tribe.  The Muckutucs were despised by the other tribes because they smelled awful, had thirteen fingers and two rows of teeth.

When the first European settlers arrived, they interbred with the Muckutucs and their descendants had twelve fingers.  Which was an improvement.  But no teeth.  Which was not.  Over time these anatomical oddities became the hallmark of the Dunwichian ancestry and somewhat explained their status as loathed outcasts and pariahs.  Suffice it to say that the rest of New England chose to avoid Dunwich like the plague.

But the American Revolution saw a change.  The patriotic fervor that swept through the rest of New England did not neglect Dunwich.  A company of stout Dunwichians headed up by “Captain” Nehemiah Hoadley marched east to reinforce the colonial army at Lexington.  But when the Boston regiment got a look at the Dunwich contingent approaching from the west, they abandoned their ambush of the British and blasted away at these toothless mutants, mowing them down to the last polydactylous humanoid soul.  After this Dunwich refused taxation by the US government until almost the time of the Civil War.

It was during the nineteenth century that the first truly disturbing events began to occur in and around Dunwich.  In 1824 on the site of Phineas Goodgroates’ orchard, a thousand ton, three-hundred-foot-long caste-iron cylinder fell out of the sky and flattened Phineas’s apple trees and because he was apple picking that day, flattened Phineas too.  This metallic meteor came to be known as the Codpiece of Cthulhu because of the inscription on its side identifying it as such.  The arrival of this piece of sartorial ironmongery was taken as an event of ill-omen.  Opinions varied, although with respect to Phineas all agreed it was definitely a bit of tough luck for him.

But by 1830 the populace had calmed down and normalcy reasserted itself until in the fall of that year when Caleb Sillwright’s turnip patch was similarly bombarded by the aptly named Moustache Comb of Azathoth.  At this point there were calls to abandon Dunwich altogether or at least to install some kind of gargantuan clothes rack above the town in the hope that the Elder Gods would take the hint and stop dropping their effects on Dunwich.  Luckily, cooler heads prevailed.

To be continued.

Now is the Heating System of My Discontent Turned Glorious Prose by This Sun of a Gun

photog Current Events, Humor, OCF , ,

Camera Girl and I are huddled together over mugs of tea trying to stave off hypothermia.  The heating system finally gave up the ghost last night and the house has settled down to ambient temperatures.  We slipped below fifty-five degrees a little while ago and I’ve begun to understand how the Donner party got to where they did.  I got off the phone with the “tech manager” a while ago and she was very sympathetic to my plight.  I didn’t swear at the woman so that speaks well of me but I did question the competency and integrity of the company.  Their pre-recorded message that plays while you’re on hold tells me that they are growing by leaps and bounds and have branches from Vermont to Delaware.  Thinking about the viability of every state in that area doesn’t increase my confidence in the business model or mission statement of the “Company.”

This stream of consciousness post is meant to document my descent into cold induced dementia.  Now I can fully understand Joe Biden.  His brain is frozen and no meaningful thinking can occur.  I forgive him for everything except for the child sniffing and for his cruelty to Corn Pop.  Soon I will send Camera Girl off to one of her daughters’ houses to survive.  I will stay here and sacrifice myself as a protest against the cruelty and incompetence of “Big Oil” or, more accurately, “Small Oil.”

My only regret is that I couldn’t live to see Liz Cheney drummed out of the Republican Party and booted out of Congress.  Wait, that’s not true.  There are other things I wish I could have lived to see.  For instance:

  • Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, AOC and Liz Cheney forced to work as Amway reps.
  • The ZMan move out of Lagos on the Chesapeake
  • Joe Biden audibly fart during the State of the Union address.
  • Kamala Harris run away screaming at a press conference and never be heard from again.
  • Lori Lightfoot, Anthony Fauci, Beto O’Rourke and Bill deBlasio arrested for impersonating human beings.
  • The Mario Cuomo Bridge renamed the Tappan Zee Bridge, Andrew Cuomo renamed Tappan Zee and Chris Cuomo legally renamed Fredo.
  • The Squad deported to wherever anyone is willing to take them.
  • Fredo, Don Lemon, Rachel Maddow, Joe Scarborough, Anderson Cooper and Chris Hayes forced by court order to serve for five years as dunk tank clowns in a travelling carnival.

Tell the world my story.

Gutfeld Breaks Through the Late Night Comic Ratings Game

photog Humor, Reviews, TV Reviews , ,

I started watching Greg Gutfeld back in 2010 when he had his 3 am comedy Red Eye on Fox News.  With his small ensemble of regulars and a bunch of Fox News and right-wing and libertarian guests the show was an incredibly refreshing change from the lefty late night hosts that had already become too unbearable to listen to.

It was obviously a show that was produced on a shoestring budget and existed without any of the heavyweight advantages that the networks can provide to an entertainment show.  We weren’t going to see any movie stars or top echelon politicians on this show.  Instead you had a folded newspaper with paper eyes taped on used as a ventriloquist dummy while one of the cast represented the views of the New York Times in a silly voice.  Or there would be a video of robots in their parents’ basement, reciting the talking points of George Soros’ Media Matters in a cadence that sounded like HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

This was not a show that could compete with The Tonight Show or even Conan O’Brien.  I even remember a clip of David Letterman making fun of Greg’s name and calling him a nobody.  But it was often very funny.  Gutfeld was a social liberal by all appearances.  I’d say he was a libertarian.  But he wasn’t attacking the Right.  After a few years when the show ran out of steam and several of the regulars left so did I.  But my impression was that Gutfeld was not against us and was doing the best he could to speak to more than the left side of America.  And for that I give him credit.

In the last few years Gutfeld has been ubiquitous on Fox News.  He’s a regular on their talk show “The Five.”  And he now has his own late night comedy show that is much better supported by the network than Red Eye was.  And after viewing a few episodes I see that Gutfeld knows where his audience is.  I don’t doubt he’s still the same guy but he’s towing the line and giving Donald Trump his due.  And that’s good.  Gutfeld is far enough to the right of the rest of Hollywood and the Media to be considered one of us.  I wouldn’t want him deciding policy but I’m more than happy to see him telling jokes on a late night show.  After all Johnny Carson was probably a liberal.  But he tried to be an equal opportunity mocker of the left and the right.  I can live with that.

Now that Gutfeld is making real headway I hope Fox News supports him and provides whatever leverage they can to get him good guests.  Who knows maybe one day he can have Donald Trump on the show.  That show I’d watch.

So good luck to Greg.  He’s the only one of those comics worth spit.  Hopefully he can showcase a lot of the little comics on our side.  That would be a worthwhile endeavor.  Build our own platforms.

Quote – The Vegetable Motif

photog Book Reviews, Literature, Reviews , , , ,

“A costermonger, roused, is a terrible thing. I had never seen the proletariat really stirred before, and I’m bound to say it rather awed me. I mean, it gave you some idea of what it must have been like during the French Revolution

From every corner of the hall there proceeded simultaneously the sort of noise which you hear, they tell me, at one of those East End boxing places when the referee disqualifies the popular favourite and makes the quick dash for life. And then they passed beyond mere words and began to introduce the vegetable motif.

I don’t know why, but somehow I had got it into my head that the first thing thrown at Tuppy would be a potato. One gets these fancies. It was, however, as a matter of fact, a banana, and I saw in an instant that the choice had been made by wiser heads than mine. These blokes who have grown up from childhood in the knowledge of how to treat a dramatic entertainment that doesn’t please them are aware by a sort of instinct just what to do for the best, and the moment I saw that banana splash on Tuppy’s shirtfront I realized how infinitely more effective and artistic it was than any potato could have been.

Not that the potato school of thought had not also its supporters. As the proceedings warmed up, I noticed several intelligent-looking fellows who threw nothing else.

The effect on young Tuppy was rather remarkable. His eyes bulged and his hair seemed to stand up, and yet his mouth went on opening and shutting, and you could see in a dazed, automatic way he was still singing, “Sonny Boy.”

Then, coming out of his trance, he began to pull for the shore with some rapidity.   The last seen of him, he was beating a tomato to the exit by a short head.”

(from “Jeeves and the Song of Songs”

by P. G. Wodehouse)

Max Boot REPAIRman

photog Current Events, Humor, OCF , ,

(Wide shot of Max Boot in his “REPAIR” blue overalls and hat.)

Max Boot (MB) – Hi, everyone out there in TV land, I’m Max Boot and you probably remember me from such zany adventures as Fallujah Redux, Green Zone Follies and Libya for the Win.  We’ve had such good times over the years patrolling all the sandy areas of the middle east and bringing democracy and transgender rights to every corner of the Muslim world.  Why, I just can’t imagine where the time has gone.  But now I’m here on a much more serious subject.  White supremacists and anti-war fanatics have struck at the most sacred symbol of our nation, Dick Cheney.  Not directly of course.  They wouldn’t dare come after the Deadeye Dick.  He’d give them a face full of buckshot like he did that guy at the quail shoot.  But the cowards have attacked his daughter, Liz, the delicate flower of our movement.

Because of this I’m here today to rally all of you to our cause.  We are building a new party.  I wanted to call it the Party of War but you know how these babies can be.  “Oooh!  War is scary,” the say.  So, we’ve named it the “REPAIR” party which stands for “Stand Up Republic & The Republican Political Alliance for Integrity and Reform.”  Wow, that’s a mouthful.  And really the letters don’t line up to the acronym.  War would be so much easier.  Well, whatever.

So, we’re here to repair the Conservative movement.  We will lead them back to the sanity of military transgenderism.  That’s right.  I’m here to say that once we’ve transgendered everyone in the US military we’ll be ready to clean up the world.  Well, maybe not immediately.  That surgery hurts like a bastard, I’ve been told.  But shortly after we’ll be bringing our new rainbow brigade to a Red State near you where we’ll smoke those white supremacists out of their hiding places and fix their wagons.

But first we’ve got to win this war, I mean, campaign.  We’ll be launching our own slate of candidates and telling the country about our platform.  We’ll start with Liz Cheney.  She’ll join our party and we’ll invade Wyoming with our campaign army and we won’t leave until victory is declared.

You might be asking yourselves, “Why is old Max Boot wearing a mechanic’s uniform.  Well, that’s easy to explain.  REPAIR is the acronym for our party and this uniform reminds you that I’m here to repair the United States.  And whenever you see one of our commercials or go to our rallies, we’ll all be wearing the uniform.  Of course, if you see Evan McMullin, his uniform will say Evan or Ev maybe.  If Tom Ridge is there it’ll say Tom or Tommy maybe.  If Anthony Scaramucci is there it’ll say Anthony or maybe Tony.  He’s Italian you know and they shorten it that way you know.  If Liz Cheney joins us, I mean when she joins us, we’ll give her the gender appropriate sizing version of the uniform.  A little looser here and tighter there.  Well, maybe not tighter anywhere.  It’s hard to get enough exercise in Congress.  Even Deadeye put on a pound or two.  In fact, you know if Dick was wearing a wig, he’d look a lot like Liz.  And there’s nothing wrong with that.  One day he may wake up and say, “I’ve changed my mind.  Call me Erica.”  Boy that would be something.  Really something.

Well, that’s neither here nor there.  First things first.  If you send us a check for a thousand dollars, we’ll send you a REPAIR ball cap in your very own size.  If you send us ten thousand dollars, we’ll personalize the cap with your name on it (four letters or less).  And if you send us one hundred thousand dollars, we’ll send you the entire uniform with your name on the pocket (no limit on letters!).  So that’s the deal.  Operators are standing by for your order.  So, join the REPAIR crew and help us fix the mess we’re in.

Max Boot out!

Need A Laugh?

photog Current Events, Humor, Movie Reviews, Reviews, Trump, TV Reviews , , , ,

In the classic movie “The Caine Mutiny” the petty tyrant Captain Queeg assigns the deceptive title of morale officer to one of his unfortunate junior officers.  His responsibility in this position was to ruthlessly enforce the dress code down to the buttoning of shirts and the length of hair on the enlisted men.  Whereas this was a mockery of the concept of morale I believe that a morale officer is exactly what the country needs right now.  And to a large extent that is what President Trump has been attempting to do with his COVID-19 press conferences.  He’s trying to provide helpful information and an optimistic assessment of the progress we’re making in the dreary business of navigating through the pandemic swamp.  But we need more than that.  Trapped in our homes and deprived of even the opportunity to work we need some distractions.  We need some entertainment.

In a happier time, even just a short generation ago we could turn on the television and we would find on every network at least one show that was funny enough to distract us.  Back in the early 1990s you could watch Home Improvement with Tim Allen as a tv dad with his wife and three boys stumbling through the foibles of American family life with gentle humor and a very muted take on the battle of the sexes and the revolt of the young against their parents.  Later on, you could still laugh at the misanthropic but relatively harmless antics of Seinfeld and his neurotic associates.  Even during the 2000s you could see a show like King of Queens where the humor was more like a pitched battle between the husband and wife and the dysfunctionality of the older generation was on full display with Jerry Stiller’s portrayal of Arthur Spooner more resembling a mental patient than a normal adult.  But it was funny and the characters somewhat resembled real people.

That doesn’t seem to be the case anymore.  The loss of any originality on network television seems to have killed off the sitcom.  The stupidity of the writing and the restrictions on the plot dictated by political correctness have rendered these shows unwatchable.  Maybe the better writers have moved over to cable stations like HBO and Netflix but the darkness of most of what passes for comedy on cable is pretty extreme.

And that is where we are.  As a society we are surrounded by joyless dysfunctional productions that are supposed to be entertainment.  The action shows aren’t good but they’re just supposed to tell a simple story of good versus evil.  That’s easy enough to do.  Comedy is harder.  It takes intelligence and an actual sense of humor.  Those two things are mostly absent now.  But that’s what we need.  A good laugh.

Luckily, there is a lot of old comedy available.  And there is probably something there for all tastes.  Everything from the tame antics of the Marx Brothers and Abbott and Costello and the screwball comedies of the 30s and 40s, to the early modern comedy of George Carlin, Mel Brooks and Rodney Dangerfield, to the outrageous Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy, right up to the current rants of Dave Chappelle.  Of course, the definition of funny varies enormously depending on the audience.  It’s probably safe to say that generational tastes will divide the audience into several camps.  But what is undeniable is that the modern entertainment industry has destroyed comedy.

But we still need a laugh.  So, go looking for something that is funny and put it on and have a good laugh.  You need it and the rest of us do too.

What I would recommend is do a search online for what movies, tv shows and comedy recordings are considered the funniest for the time periods when your concept of comedy was formed and see if you agree with the opinion.  Look at general lists of comedies for these time periods and make a list of your own favorites.  Then rent or buy or stream a few of these comedies together in your own film festival.  Make sure you have your favorite popcorn or other snacks and enjoy.  Maybe tell a friend or two and have a virtual movie festival in separate homes.  You can make a deal to swap favorites and compare notes after the fact.

Just to show that my heart is in the right place I’ll throw a few out.  Now mind you, I’ll start off by saying my tastes are peculiar.  But there they are.  I’ll go with two W. C. Fields movies, “It’s a Gift” and “The Man on the Flying Trapeze.”  I always enjoy his henpecked husband routine and the melodramatic actress who plays his wife in both these movies is perfect.  I love telling Camera Girl that she treats me just as badly as Field’s wife in the movies.

Add in the first installment of the “Thin Man” series.  And finish off the early movies with the Marx Brother’s “A Night at the Opera.”  For the later decades we could take a couple of Bill Murray movies, say “Ghostbusters” and “Groundhog Day.”  Maybe add a Jim Carrey movie, say the “Mask.”  And finish off with a cartoon that’s mostly a comedy like “The Incredibles.”  For a classic tv series I’d go with Jackie Gleason’s, “The Honeymooners.”

If you have any picks you’d like to volunteer leave them in the comments and share the wealth.