Reader Anne-Kari recently suggested that we talk about
Favorite and least favorite movies within specific genres (drama, b&w, scifi, comedy)?
So that’s what we’ll do all this week, starting with:
What are your all-time favorite and least favorite comedy movies?
As pure comedy goes, I might pick Midnight Run as my favorite. It never ceases to be hilarious even upon the 100th re-viewing, and it’s endlessly quotable, with applications for all sorts of real-life situations. “There were some good-lookin’ chickens back there” comes in more handy than you might think.
Least favorite: Anything Adam Sandler has touched, with so few exceptions that they’re barely worth mentioning.
Your turn…
(If you have a suggestion for a QOTD, feel free to email me. Responses to this QOTD sent by email will be ignored; please post your responses here.)
My favourite has always been Airplane!. Quotable? A bit too much. I could watch and bust a gut every single time. Nothing about it gets old, like that huge “Where’s Waldo?” spread where you know his hiding spot yet you find something new and interesting in the photo every time you look at it.
Least favourite is along the same lines, but goes waaay off mark: Date Movie. Similar style. But the problem is that instead of “Where’s Waldo?” it’s a page out of People Magazine, only a thousand times less pleasant. I laughed once, maybe.
I agree with 99% of the “Yes” movies that everyone has posted so far! I would add to those a few movies that aren’t necessarily always considered comedies: “Serenity” for its surprising laugh-out-loud moments, “Being There”, “Home for the Holidays”, “Casablanca”, “Zero Effect”, and “Harold and Maude”.
As for my least favorite, again I agree with the crowd here. Pretty much any of the ‘humiliation humor’ movies fail to amuse me and often piss me off: “Something about Mary”, “Along Came Polly”, “American Pie” etc. I also loathe loathe loathe all those stupid unfunny spoof mashup movies – “Scary Movie”, “Date Movie”, “Vampires Suck”, and so on. Obviously these horrible pieces of crap make piles of money, since I see on IMDB that frikkin’ “Scary Movie 5” is coming out in a few months.
Let me tell you a story.
I’ve seen a lot of great comedies which I’ve loved–Duck Soup, His Girl Friday, Animal House, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, Dr. Strangelove, It Happened One Night, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Sullivan’s Travels, Annie Hall, Arthur Christmas (and yes, I really do think it’s that good), City Lights, The General, One Froggy Evening–but my favorite? Why that would be John Landis’s “Schlock.”
Haven’t heard of it, have you?
It was John Landis’s first movie, made with his buddy Rick Baker, in an ape-man suit. It was the first movie anyone ever made that duplicated the Mad magazine approach to jokes and comedy. It just missed its time, I think, coming out a year prior to “Blazing Saddles,” when the critics could only see that it was crudely made (yes, it was), and no one who was distributing it had any idea what on earth to do with it.
I was lucky to see it at a special show at a packed repertory theater in Houston, filled with savvy folks who *did* get it, and we all laughed ourselves sick. It was unlike any comedy Hollywood had ever even considered.
It is not a great movie, although it has some great bits in it, which still work. (Watch the scene with the blind man, and how the ape-man deals with a rude driver.) Still, we’re talking favorites, and for some reason, it’s still mine.
It was out on DVD for a while, although it’s gone out of print and has become insanely expensive. Look for it at your favorite obscure-movie rental outlet. It’s worth the trouble to find it.