Originally Posted by Baby Lee:
Almost all of Woody Allen's comedy is because he's neurotic and overthinking.
Maybe it makes him an idiot or weirdo in the eyes of some, but the entire genre is different from the Will Ferrell model where the stupidity is the humor. Not that either is superior to the other, just wildly different in approach
I never could stand Woody Allen. Ever. Even before I knew what a fucking creep he really was. [Reply]
Originally Posted by Baby Lee:
As for Airplane! ease yourself in with Naked Gun, then Top Secret! then try it out. It's pretty much just puns and punchlines wrapped around a plot device of the typical air disaster drama. You might need to be acclimated to a pun and punchline type of movie to get into the mood.
As for Caddyshack, ease into it starting with Fletch, then the Vacation and Christmas Vacation movies [skip European and the subsequent straight to video shit] then Animal House. It's a zeitgeist of counterculturals and rebels subverting tradition comedy. Hard to see how you appreciate Eddie Murphy and Ferris Bueller without appreciating Caddyshack when you appreciate the context.
As for Monty Python, I don't know what to tell you. I personally cannot conceive of respecting the comedic sensibilities of someone who doesn't appreciate Python. Maybe the 'chance' you've given it thus far just hit all the most wrong notes, but Python is unquestionably undebatably funny regardless of acclimation or context.
Hey, fuck you, buddy!
Jk.. you didn't answer the most important question, though: (would Big be considered a comedy in the traditional sense?)
And what about Back to the Future? What differentiates a pure comedy from a movie with comedy in it. [Reply]
Originally Posted by ThaVirus:
Hey, fuck you, buddy!
Jk.. you didn't answer the most important question, though: (would Big be considered a comedy in the traditional sense?)
And what about Back to the Future? What differentiates a pure comedy from a movie with comedy in it.
The idea of pure comedy has kind of lost lustre [at least for me], for many of the same reasons you criticize comedies from 'before your time.'
Traditional comedies, according to 'experts' are like Some Like it Hot or Marx Brothers farces.
Marx Brothers because they are just vehicles for schtick, . . usually vaudeville acts adapted to cinema. 3 :-), Laurel and Hardy, etc. where kind of like Airplane! is just a vehicle for puns and visual gags, the stories of these acts are just vehicles for their respective acts [physical comedy of the :-), straight man and hambone of Laurel and Hardy, quipster and pranksters of the Marx Brothers].
Traditional comedies like 'Some Like it Hot' are supposedly about pacing, the humor of the situation/narrative itself, and a happy ending, more than specific gags or scenes that actually make you laugh. The IDEA of two dudes impersonating ladies to evade the mobsters tracking them down is what makes it a comedy, and the happy/ironic ending is supposed to make it a classic comedy.
At some point though, all the comedic premises and the vaudeville acts built around them, had been recycled and repurposed and generally exhausted, . . and there had to be a new creative direction.
One of those new directions was the slash, as in action/comedy, rom/com, drama/dy, etc. Where comedy seasoned the other genres of film rather than defining the entire film.
Big would be a fantastical rom/com. The magic, the romance and the comedy takes turns entertaining you from scene to scene, rather than any single narrative genre. [Reply]
Since the topic has taken a slight diversion, I re-watched The Apartment with Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine recently. A classic romantic-comedy that holds up very well six decades later.
Sheldrake: You know, you see a girl a couple of times a week, just for laughs, and right away, they think you're gonna divorce your wife. Now I ask you - is that fair?
Bud: No, sir, it's very unfair. Especially to your wife.
Shirley MacLaine said in an interview that one of the few times she didn't fall for a male lead was with Lemmon and Jack Nicholson, of all people. Lemmon plays a good hearted, but ... (I hate to use this phrase, because it's thrown out so often) beta male. Kind of a slightly less neurotic Woody Allen.
Originally Posted by Baby Lee:
The idea of pure comedy has kind of lost lustre [at least for me], for many of the same reasons you criticize comedies from 'before your time.
I actually didn't criticize movies before my time. Idk where Stewie got that from. [Reply]
Originally Posted by ThaVirus:
Yeah, funniest part of the movie for me. That sidearm toss is everything.
The form is great but it's the fact he puts his silverware on his own plate THEN grabs Kips steak to chuck that really makes it for me. Movie is full of subtle things like that. [Reply]
Originally Posted by Baby Lee:
Almost all of Woody Allen's comedy is because he's neurotic and overthinking.
Maybe it makes him an idiot or weirdo in the eyes of some, but the entire genre is different from the Will Ferrell model where the stupidity is the humor. Not that either is superior to the other, just wildly different in approach
Woody was the greatest comic alive in his prime. [Reply]
Napoleon Dynamite is one of my favorite movies. Uncle Rico limping in after the time travel experiment is one of my favorite scenes.
On the bigger picture, I think movies like Big and Back to the Future are indeed comedies. All comedies have plots and there's a continuum of the number of laugh lines in them. Some are comedy first and some are more subtle [Reply]
I honestly kind of resent Napoleon Dynamite, because living in other places besides Idaho people assume Idaho is just like that movie. Which don't get me wrong a lot of what is depicted in the movie is accurate to small town Idaho, but there is also a ton of difference between those small towns in Mormon country over on the other side of the state, and the small towns surrounding the Boise area(where I've exclusively lived in my time of living in this state).
Like yeah sure there was the kid in high school that gave a class presentation on the latest John Deere tractor line, and yeah sure there were kids with 40 year old GMC pickup trucks that had shotguns and rifles in the back window so they could go pheasant hunting after school, but things were also decidedly a bit more urban and modern than what was depicted in the movie. [Reply]
Originally Posted by Rain Man:
On the bigger picture, I think movies like Big and Back to the Future are indeed comedies. All comedies have plots and there's a continuum of the number of laugh lines in them. Some are comedy first and some are more subtle
Yeah, I think it is largely subjective. A lot of movies don't fit in a neat box that is so easily defined.
I think Big and Back to the Future are definitely comedies, they've just got a bit of a stronger or more serious plot.
There are some movies in which the plot is weak and is clearly just a vehicle to tell some jokes. Movies like The Hangover, Anchorman, and Ace Ventura stand out to me here.
Then you've got movies with a legit plot that tells jokes along the way. I'd throw Big and Back to the Future in this category. I'd also throw movies like Hitch and The Proposal in this group. [Reply]
