Amph What was the last movie you saw? (Ver. 2)

Airplane

 

Yes, but despite it being released in 1980 I think that should be seen as a 70s comedy. Probably when it was filmed, anyway

 

The movie:
The soundtrack: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_nmPdw94-SmiPNIA7vFiCAx_NpKZrlfKbM
"The Compleat Beatles" is available at the Internet Archive.

 

The first Naked Gun is still pretty funny and OJ Simpson mostly isn’t in it. Although now we’re just naming ZAZ hits.

 

Quite a lot, actually. I find that most of them are likable even if they're kind of dumb, and there are a lot of genuine classics from the decade. Airplane, Caddyshack, A Christmas Story, This Is Spinal Tap, Ghostbusters, Back to School, Adventures in Babysitting, Planes Trains and Automobiles, Scrooged, The Naked Gun, Major League, The Burbs, Weekend at Bernie's, and Uncle Buck, at a quick glance through my Letterboxd, are all excellent comedies, and there are plenty more that I enjoy.

Deliverance. I can't really review Deliverance without disclosing my relationship to the film. I first saw Deliverance as a teenager with my parents, when my mom rented it because she knew it was a famous Burt Reynolds movie from the seventies. So we went in expecting something along the lines of Smokey and the Bandit, and suffice it to say, we were not prepared to see Ned Beatty get raped by hillbillies. It was hilariously awkward, my mom hated it, my dad and I laughed at how ridiculous the whole thing was, and to this day, Deliverance is a go-to family in-joke any time we have to reference a movie or wonder what to watch. So I can't exactly approach it objectively given what a massive punchline any reference to Deliverance is to me.

But on its own terms, it's a pretty good movie, though I think the extreme praise for it overrates it (Ben Mankiewicz, presenting it on TCM, suggested it was the second-best film of 1972 behind The Godfather). It presents four men who go on a canoe trip down a dangerous river. They're brought together by ordinary guy Jon Voight, but the real force behind the trip is Reynolds, an impulsive, opinionated alpha-male type who wants to glory in the beauty of the river before it's dammed up. They're really not prepared for the challenge, and they end up in trouble, but an unpredictable sort, as hostile hillbillies rape Beatty and threaten Voight before Reynolds shows up and rescues them. Then there comes the debate about what to do: do they report the crime, or, as Reynolds suggests, do they hide the body and carry on, mistrusting that whatever insular backwoods cops and redneck jury they'd have to deal with in that jurisdiction would give them a fair shake? It's here that Reynolds is at his best, making it clear just how far out there he is with his blasé reaction to killing a man. His character is half buffoon, half psychopath, the idiot blowhard who got them into this situation and the remorseless maniac who seems to be enjoying it.

The film takes on a sort of fever dream quality as they argue, take on the nightmarish task of burying the body, and then, as they go downriver, Ronny Cox, the one member of the group who argued for going to the authorities and who seems overwhelmed with remorse for the situation, lurches out of the canoe as they go through dangerous rapids and wreck. Reynolds, disabled by injury, insists Cox was shot by the hillbilly who ran off, and a paranoid nightmare ensues as it's left to Voight to protect the group from a threat that may or may not exist. He ends up killing the man after all, and now it's all just a litany of things to hide and cover up when they finally make it back to civilization and have to explain themselves while trying not to incriminate themselves.

It's a dark, disturbed and disturbing film. In a sense, it's about the hubris of these city boys thinking they can just go off on a dangerous trip as a lark being punished by the backcountry; in a sense, it's about their manhood being challenged; in a sense, it's about their paranoia and suggestibility in the hands of Reynolds turning the whole thing into a costly web of lies and violence. It's interesting, but it's not quite as engaging as you would hope, maybe because Voight's character doesn't feel quite well-developed enough to carry the movie, maybe because the scenario is so left-field and extreme. But, hey, it was a much better viewing experience this time, and at least now I can properly appreciate it as more than just a punchline.

 

Mr. Lucky. It's one of the odder concepts for a World War II movie, a criminal romance-comedy about charity work, but it more or less works despite being enormously predictable. Cary Grant plays a gambler who comes up with a con to raise the cash he needs: he'll run a casino night for a war relief charity and skim off the bulk of the proceeds. Everything that you would predict happens in the movie happens. Relief volunteer Laraine Day is suspicious of him, but eventually falls for Grant's charms. Grant falls in love with her, and after the reality of the war sinks in to him, he has a change of heart and backs out. There's some amusing business with Day making Grant learn to knit for the charity and Grant becoming a knitting connoisseur and passing it on to all his criminal buddies, but also a lot of stuff that's only middling. It's generally a forgettable romance-comedy with a convoluted, clumsily constructed ending, but you can never go entirely wrong with Cary Grant, so it ends up passable, but nothing more.

 

Watched Return of the Jedi on VHS yesterday, I dug it out of a 1995 boxset that I haven't watched for years. I was disappointed to find it was the cropped 4:3 version - because A: I was sure I didn't have any 4:3 copies of the films and B: it made me think that I should hunt around on ebay and replace it with the widescreen 1995 boxset that came out at the same time. I watched it all the way through and the box says its modified from its original release, so it got me wondering - do they move the picture around when its cropped so you see whats central to the scene on the screen?

Its also made me realise something else, it must mean that the versions of all the films we were renting on VHS all through the 80's and recording off the TV must have been 4:3 versions too, which means I wasn't watching any widescreen versions at home until it became a thing in the early 90's and they started to come out on VHS in widescreen format.

 

Yes, they did.

 

Groundhog Day.

 

Don't forget Ferriss Beuller's Day Off!

But the last movie I watched all the way through was Sceond Chances, based on a true story, about a girl with a broken leg and a horse also with a broken leg who triumph over adversity. Good family film.

 

I suppose comedy is a genre thats very much of its time as times and tastes change and I think its a genre that arguably dates more than any other. Not sure about you, but I grew up in the 80's so I still enjoy watching a lot of the comedies from that era. Favourites of mine are films like Trading Places, Fletch, Planes Trains & Automobiles, Ferris Bueller, Crocodile Dundee, National Lampoon, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels... Then you get the crossover films like Ghostbusters, 48hrs, Beetlejuice, Midnight Run, Beverly Hills Cop from that era too.

 

GD was from 1993.

 

Your "reviews" are always fantastic, but this one is really wonderful. Thanks for sharing!

 

1993 was still the 80s. I mean, this came out in 1993...

 

I watched, "Totally Killer", ostensibly a comedy/horror film with a time travel twist that includes very few actual jokes outside of pointing out the offensive things people causally said in 1987. Good thing society is much more well behaved in 2023!

 

I did grow up in the '80s (I'm Gen-X. I suspect a lot of people here are ). I didn't mean to imply there aren't any good '80s comedies--there are a few of that list I like--just that they're rare and, as you say, many haven't aged well.

 

Groundhog Day is a nineties film, but an "eighties comedy" in the genre sense -- it has the sensibility and feel in common with the stereotypical eighties comedies it's linked with. I'd argue Animal House is in a similar boat in the other direction -- it's a late-seventies film that served as a sort of godfather to the genre of raunchy, rebellious, but fundamentally warmhearted teenager comedy that characterized the eighties. You get a lot of that blurring around the edges when you're using decades as a shorthand for sensibility.

 

Planes, Trains & Automobiles is one of my two or three favorite comedies of the eighties. Both Martin & Candy were geniuses who struggled to find films that knew how to really utilize them. But this movie gets them and they are both really at the height of their respective powers. It's right up at the top of the list in my opinion.

 

Is it just me - it may be - or are we seeing less big screen comedy over the last few years (not talking COVID impact here)? It feels to me like we are - maybe they are going right to streaming? Or am I just suffering from selective memory? Seeing all the comedies listed above got me thinking about this - and yes, those are the standouts, but that is kind of the point. There were a lot of lesser comedies trying to cover the same ground, not nearly as good, often leaning harder into raunch and such.

Or maybe, if my premise isn't flawed, its that while we have many more screens than was true "back in the day", we don't really have many more MOVIES, and those we do get are expected to be "big box office" performers?

Apologies for the aside!

 

I feel the same and when I posted about the 80s comedies i was thinking about what genres came after. Jim Carey had his run in the 90s with some good comedies, then you have the teen gross out stuff like American pie and van wilder type stuff at the turn of the millennium. Will Ferrell was doing his thing in the early -mid 2000s, but after that I’m struggling to think of anything decent since?

 

I think the last real comedy “wave” was the Judd Apatow R-rated bro comedy with heart style that petered out in the early 2010s. There hasn’t really been a successful style of comedy since. There are probably a few things going into that. One is blockbusterization: anything that’s not a blockbuster is getting squeezed out of theaters and onto streaming, where it’s harder to make a splash. And with so many blockbusters adopting the “flippant action-comedy” mode, it feels like comedy is getting further squeezed out by comic book movies and wacky action movies trying to horn in on its territory (the 2023 version of 21 Jump Street would be directed by David Leitch, not Lord and Miller). The streaming model has also probably pushed more comedy talent toward sitcom work. The sitcom that generates a hundred episodes subscribers just play on repeat is the streaming ideal, not the one-off movie (which is a further way comedy as a whole is struggling — how many new sitcoms are actually successful vs. people playing their chosen comfort food of ten-to-twenty-year-old network sitcoms (Friends, The Office, Parks and Rec, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, pick your poison) on repeat?).

There are other contributing factors too. Criticism of wokism is usually overdone, but there’s probably something to the idea that the fear of saying something offensive or controversial and the push toward a sort of lecturing moralism puts constraints that are especially rough on comedy. The new comedic sensibility, such as it is, of ironic, self-aware commentary and obsession with social issues doesn’t seem to have generated any really successful cinematic approach to comedy beyond the self-aware action movie. Romance-comedy feels like it is suffering from the fact that romance itself is struggling in an increasingly isolated world in which no one is quite sure how it should work anymore. The reliance on recycling IP in Hollywood has also made it difficult for new comedy to find space — why take a risk when you can just try to reboot Ghostbusters again?

I think there have been a lot of factors converging in the last ten years that have made it very hard for cinematic comedy.

 

Most genre movies essentially being self-parodies certainly didn't help the parody-movie industry, that's for sure.

 

For all tl,dr people: We are awaiting Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker's decision to make Rush Hour 4. That's the future of comedy.