Archive for the ‘Comedy/Laffs’ Category
Friday, June 24th, 2022
SISTER ACT was released on May 29, 1992 and is of course the Golden Globe nominated feel-good fish-out-of-water comedy smash hit starring Whoopi Goldberg (last seen in THE PLAYER) as a lounge singer who witnesses a murder is put into witness protection pretending to be a nun in a convent and then ends up leading and reworking their choir. It’s not the type of movie I usually review, and I don’t really know how to dig as deep into it as I do on some of these, but I want to write about it if only to make this point: this, the most mainstream middle-of-the-road normal movie in this summer of ’92 retrospective so far, has kind of the same story as the (no pun intended) most alienating one, ALIEN 3, which came out the week before.
Think about it. Deloris is trying to escape from an unpleasant situation (dating mobster Vince LaRocca [Harvey Keitel in the same year as RESERVOIR DOGS and BAD LIEUTENANT]) when catastrophe forces her to seek shelter and live primitively within a tight knit community of same-gendered (female in this case) devout Christians. She’s made to look like them (wearing a nun’s habit rather than having her head shaven) and is unwelcome to some, particularly the person in charge (the Reverend Mother [Maggie Smith between HOOK and THE SECRET GARDEN] rather than the warden). But she ends up using her unique skills to lead them all in accomplishing the seemingly impossible (in this case making their choir sing well rather than killing a xenomorph without weapons). (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Adam Greenberg, Bill Nun, Carrie Fisher, Emile Ardolino, Harvey Keitel, Kathy Najimy, Maggie Smith, Nancy Meyers, Paul Rudnick, Reno, Robert Harling, Wendy Makkena, Whoopi Goldberg
Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Reviews | 14 Comments »
Thursday, June 23rd, 2022
“It’s gonna get weird now, isn’t it?”
I know I’m way behind on this summer retrospective, still doing May releases well into June, but some new information and my perfection-ish-ism have forced me to skip back a little bit. It turns out there was another lowbrow comedy released in May (approximately May 15th) but in a limited enough capacity that it didn’t show up on any of the lists I used for research. Unlike ENCINO MAN this is one that I did see – more than once – after it came out on video, and it’s a better representation of what I personally was into at the time. But I can’t argue whether it’s better or worse than ENCINO MAN. That is for each individual patron of the arts to decide for themselves. What’s relevant here is that it’s very on brand for Weird Summer. Arguably too much so. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Andy Warhol, Crispin Glover, Fred Myrow, Howard Hesseman, Karen Black, Trent Harris, Utah
Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Reviews | 6 Comments »
Wednesday, June 15th, 2022
“We found him. We can do whatever we want with him.”
ENCINO MAN is I guess a landmark in 1990s American cinema because it introduced “the Pauly Shore movie.” Then in his mid-twenties, Shore was the son of The Comedy Store owners Sammy and Mitzi Shore, so he had started doing standup and hanging out with Sam Kinison as a teenager, developing his surfer dude/stoner/Valley Boy persona “The Weasel” – one of those characters who has a certain way of talking and catalog of slang and catch phrases that seem to be beloved by somebody somewhere, but to those of us who came in late it’s unclear whether you had to be there to get it or if there even was a joke in the first place.
He had been in a few movies, including 18 AGAIN! and PHANTOM OF THE MALL: ERIC’S REVENGE, but his big break was in 1989 when he became an MTV VJ, in character. A year later they gave him his own very popular show called Totally Pauly. When ENCINO MAN was in development at Disney, the head of Hollywood Records got Jeffrey Katzenberg to watch Totally Pauly and then put Shore in the movie. He didn’t want to play the caveman, so the filmmakers worked with him to rewrite the protagonist’s best friend character to be a weird guy who says “nugs” and “weez” and stuff in such a way that it’s clear that it must be funny. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Brendan Fraser, J. Peter Robinson, Jeffrey Anderson-Gunter, Ke Huy Quan, Les Mayfield, Mariette Hartley, Megan Ward, Michael DeLuise, Pauly Shore, Ric Salinas, Richard Masur, Richard Montoya, Robin Tunney, Rose McGowan, Sandra Hess, Sean Astin, Shawn Schepps, Sicily Rossomando
Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Reviews | 21 Comments »
Wednesday, May 25th, 2022
“Like Popeye says, ‘I yam what I yam,’ right?”
On May 1, 1992, Fine Line Features released Jim Jarmusch’s NIGHT ON EARTH on a mere 40 screens. By comparison, LEAVING NORMAL was released to 362 screens on the same day, and nobody ever heard of that one. But this was a well marketed limited release – I knew NIGHT ON EARTH existed, and in fact went to see it on one of those 40 screens, specifically the one that was upstairs at Seattle’s Harvard Exit Theatre (1968-2015).
This is Jarmusch’s fifth film. It’s possible I’d seen STRANGER THAN PARADISE and DOWN BY LAW already, but I suspect I rented them after seeing this. (I know I’d never heard of PERMANENT VACATION and saw MYSTERY TRAIN later.) So I may not have realized that by his standards it was kind of commercial: in Winona Ryder (who had BEETLEJUICE, HEATHERS and EDWARD SCISSORHANDS under her belt and was about to do BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA) he had his biggest movie star to date, and despite its simplicity it sure seems to have a bigger budget than his previous films, since it’s filmed on location in four different countries. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: anthology, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Beatrice Dalle, Frederick Elmes, Gena Rowlands, Giancarlo Esposito, Isaach De Bankolé, Jay Rabinowitz, Jim Jarmusch, Kari Vaananen, Matti Pellonpaa, Paolo Bonacelli, Roberto Benigni, Rosie Perez, Sakari Kuosmanen, Tom Waits, Tomi Salmela, Winona Ryder
Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Drama, Reviews | 15 Comments »
Tuesday, May 24th, 2022
“I didn’t choose any of this, you know? This chose me.”
Friday, May 1st, 1992 was day 3 of the L.A. riots. The day Rodney King said “Can we all get along?” President George H.W. Bush invoked the Insurrection Act, so California Army National Guard and federal troops were activated under the newly formed Joint Task Force Los Angeles. In L.A. and San Francisco, NBA and MLB games were moved or postponed. Van Halen, Metallica, Guns N’ Roses and the WWF all cancelled events. Tension and shock spread across the country.
But also some people went to see movies. Mostly BASIC INSTINCT, which was still #1 in its seventh week. And a very small number of people must’ve went to see LEAVING NORMAL, a perfectly sweet little comedy-drama about white women. Maybe it wasn’t the best time for it. It was not a big enough release to make it onto the box office charts, and I honestly don’t remember ever hearing of it before researching this series. But if I’m gonna do Weird Summer I better cover a movie about leaving normal.
Actually it’s about a young woman named Marianne (Meg Tilly, PSYCHO II) and an older bar waitress named Darly (Christine Lahti, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE FABULOUS STAINS) deciding to leave a small, boring town called Normal. But I think we all get the implication. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Brett Cullen, Christine Lahti, Ed Solomon, Edward Zwick, Eve Gordon, James Eckhouse, James Gammon, Ken Angel, Lenny Von Dohlen, Maury Chaykin, Meg Tilly, Patrika Darbo, Peter Anderson, road movie, Rutanya Alda, W.G. Snuffy Walden
Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Reviews | 7 Comments »
Monday, May 23rd, 2022
BORIS AND NATASHA, a.k.a. BORIS AND NATASHA: THE MOVIE, went straight to Showtime, but I’m counting it as a Weird Summer movie because it first aired on April 17, 1992, and presumably kept playing in subsequent months. And yes, it’s a live action movie centered on the villainous spy characters from The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, which is a pretty weird idea.
That beloved Jay Ward cartoon was 30+ years in the past at the time, but still showing in reruns. I know I watched it in the ‘80s. I remember having a t-shirt with Rocky and Bullwinkle parodying the ENDLESS SUMMER poster, even though I didn’t know what that was. It was a great show, so I’m not complaining, but my parents’ generation gave us their nostalgia as hand-me-downs, and we took it. I had Gumby shirts too. I never got Showtime, though, so I never saw BORIS AND NATASHA: THE MOVIE, and couldn’t exactly picture how you’d make a movie about them.
Actually it’s not a terrible comedy premise: what if Boris and Natasha were given a mission where they had to pretend to defect to the U.S., but then they started to like being American? This isn’t as common anymore, but they used to make these movies based on old TV shows but with some high concept way to set it in the modern world. They did it for DRAGNET and after this THE BRADY BUNCH and FAT ALBERT and much later 21 JUMP STREET. CONEHEADS was another one that actually has a premise pretty similar to this one.
Wait – isn’t that kind of what The Americans is about too? Is The Americans a remake of BORIS AND NATASHA: THE MOVIE? (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alex Rocco, Andrea Martin, Anson Downes, Anthony Newley, Brad Hall, Charles Martin Smith, Christopher Neame, Corey Burton, Dan Bradley, Dave Thomas, Jay Ward, Joel Soisson, John Calvin, John Candy, June Foray, Larry Cedar, live action remake of cartoon, Paxton Whitehead, Rance Howard, Sally Kellerman, Sherman Oaks Galleria, Sid Haig
Posted in Comedy/Laffs | 12 Comments »
Friday, May 13th, 2022
“Just like you said, the wind’s shifting. Everyone’s gonna get it.”
At the 65th Academy Awards, the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar went to a French film – the historical drama INDOCHINE. I’m sure it was great, but people like me didn’t know to pay attention to movies like that. We paid attention to the French film that we heard was really cool looking and darkly funny and had something to do with cannibalism. That was DELICATESSEN, the feature debut of directors Jean-Pierre Jeunet & Marc Caro, which Miramax released in the U.S. on April 3, 1992, a year after it came out in France.
I don’t know how many screens it played on, because it didn’t make enough to show up on the box office charts, but I think it traveled around for a while. I remember seeing ads for it at the arthouse theaters – it was a much discussed cult movie of its time. Since this is maybe the most interesting of the April releases that kept playing into the summer it seemed like the best way to kick off this 1992 – Weird Summer series. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: cannibals, Dharius Khondji, Dominique Pinon, Jean-Claude Dreyfus, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Marc Caro, post-apocalyptic
Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Horror, Reviews | 19 Comments »
Friday, April 29th, 2022
I was thinking about STREET TRASH (1987) after I revisited the TOXIC AVENGER series a couple months back. I had seen the movie as a teen and all I really remembered was a part where some dude is taking a piss and his dick gets ripped off and a bunch of guys play keep away with it. Of course, any movie would be proud to have a memorable scene like that, and most filmmakers would tip their hat to it, just out of professionalism. But it is widely known that TOXIC AVENGER director Lloyd Kaufman hates STREET TRASH and the people behind it. I heard him grumble about it at a book signing, and he refers to it sometimes in his books, without really going into specifics. People ask him about it in interviews, but he’ll just make a joke. The best explanation seems to be that he thinks it’s a rip off of the Troma style. Also, there was apparently some incident involving its “little shit” director Jim Muro on an episode of The Morton Downey, Jr. Show.
It definitely traffics in a similar in-your-face repulsiveness/taboo-violating to the Troma movies. It takes place among a community of homeless alcoholics in Brooklyn and uncomfortably blurs the line between offensive caricature and (very mildly) sympathetic portrayal. I can’t think of a character in the movie that’s not intentionally repellent, but the movie at least recognizes that they’re up against a cruel and unjust world. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bryan Singer, David Sperling, J. Michael Muro, Tony Darrow, Vic Noto
Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Horror, Reviews | 16 Comments »
Wednesday, April 27th, 2022
I’m going to start this review nice and then get all my complaints out and then be nice again. THE UNBEARABLE WEIGHT OF MASSIVE TALENT is a fun movie with the irresistible gimmick that it stars Nic Cage as himself (or, I guess, “Nick Cage,” according to the credits). It’s pretty funny and kind of sweet, it allows him to refer to his “nouveau shamanic acting” process a couple times, references some of his movies, even has a de-aged and sometimes mega version of himself as his invisible spirit guide, “Nicky.” It’s a nice mainstream acknowledgment of what used to be a somewhat fringe opinion: that Nic Cage is brilliant and awesome, whether as an action star, as a work-a-day b-movie headliner, or as an eccentric weirdo.
The plot involves Cage at a low point because he’s been rejected for a role he wants really bad (directed by David Gordon Green, who wrote the foreword to Seagalogy, which means I’m two degrees from Nic Cage), he’s running out of money, and his daughter Addy (Lily Mo Sheen, UNDERWORLD: EVOLUTION) and ex-wife Olivia (Sharon Horgan, GAME NIGHT) are fed up with him. So he agrees to accept an offer to attend a rich dude’s birthday party in Mallorca for a million dollars. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: David Gordon Green, Ike Barinholtz, Katrin Vankova, Lily Mo Sheen, meta, Nicolas Cage, Pedro Pascal, Sharon Horgan, Tiffany Haddish, Tom Gormican
Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Reviews | 32 Comments »
Wednesday, April 20th, 2022
We’re all sad that Bruce Willis has retired, and more than that to have confirmation of his long rumored cognitive issues. He’s still there, and unable to say goodbye. It’s crushing.
The upside is how nice it’s been to have everyone on the same page again and celebrating his great career and all the happiness he’s brought us over the years. That made me want to watch something of his I’d never seen before – thanks for the recommendations, everyone. I decided to check out Blake Edwards’ SUNSET (1988), since it’s from that period when Moonlighting was still on the air, and I truly believed Bruce represented the maximum coolness potential for a human being. The earlier Edwards/Willis joint BLIND DATE has a terrible reputation, but I liked it, so SUNSET seemed worth a try. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Andreas Katsulas, Anthony B. Richmond, Blake Edwards, Bruce, Bruce Willis, Dermot Mulroney, Henry Mancini, James Garner, Joe Dallesandro, M. Emmet Walsh, Malcolm McDowell, Mariel Hemingway, Richard Bradford, Rod Amateau, Tom Mix, Vernon Wells
Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Mystery, Reviews | 31 Comments »
