Posts Tagged ‘Comedy’

The Trouble with Harry (1955)

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Arnie (Jerry Mathers) is the first to have trouble with Harry.

Arnie (Jerry Mathers) is the first to have trouble with Harry.

The trouble with Harry, not to put too fine a point on it, is that he’s dead. And not only is he dead, he was inconsiderate enough to leave his body lying around, causing no end of problems for the living. Captain Wiles (Edmund Gwenn) thinks he accidentally shot Harry while rabbit hunting, Miss Gravely (Mildred Natwick) thinks she killed him with a hiking boot, and Harry is found and hidden, buried and unburied, more times than anyone cares to remember. Captain Wiles, Miss Gravely, artist Sam Marlowe (John Forsythe), and Harry’s estranged wife, Jennifer Rogers (Shirley MacLaine), try to figure out who exactly killed Harry, what to do with his troublesome body, and how to keep Deputy Calvin Wiggs (Royal Dano) in the dark. Meanwhile, love blossoms between Sam and Jennifer and between Captain Wiles and Miss Gravely, and a millionaire art collector (Parker Fennelly) becomes interested in Sam’s work.

Fletch (1985)

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Chevy Chase proves, once again, that cocaine is a hell of a drug.

Chevy Chase proves, once again, that cocaine is a hell of a drug.

Fletch (Chevy Chase) is an undercover reporter, trying to expose drug ring at the beach. One day, Fletch is approached by Alan Stanwyk (Tim Matheson) who claims to be dying of cancer and wants Fletch to kill him. Fletch, immediately suspicious and sensing an opportunity to put on a great many disguises and make a great many snarky comments, turns his muck-raking eye on Stanwyk and starts to unravel the tangled connections between the drug ring and Stanwyk.

May (2002)

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Canady girls start training for a life of piracy at an early age.

Canady girls start training for a life of piracy at an early age.

May Dove Canady (Angela Bettis) had an isolated childhood with only one real friend: Suzy, a doll in glass case. As her mother told her, “If you can’t find a friend, make one.” She works in a veterinary hospital with Polly (Anna Faris), who seems attracted to May but makes fun of her weirdness. Then one day she meets Adam (Jeremy Sisto), a mechanic who claims to “like weird.”

All May really wants is to fit in, to connect to someone, but the more she tries, the more put off people are by her; it’s ironic that she’s most conventionally attractive once she stops pretending to be “normal” and just turns all the crazy dials to eleven (the oddly anachronistic slang is a touch of genius, by the way).

Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)

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You can’t expect to wield supreme executive power just ’cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!

Probably the most quotable comedy of all time, and definitely one of the top three funniest. Like all Python films it’s a bit front-heavy — most of the most memorable bits are in the first third of the film — but it holds together surprisingly well for a film that’s basically a series of sketches with only minimal amounts of plot stringing them together. The Pythons at the height of their powers were funnier than just about anything before or after. There’s a kind of effortless whimsy and freedom to the structure of Holy Grail that is very attractive, and that no-one, not even the Pythons themselves, has ever really managed to duplicate.

Barbarella

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(Roger Vadim, 1968).

Jane Fonda sleeps her way across an alien planet looking for Duran Duran and falls in with some loopy revolutionaries. The visuals are over-the-top, the effects are cheesy, Fonda is sexy, and the writing is naïve in that endearing 60s-science-fiction way. A fun way to spend 90 minutes.

Rating: ★★★☆☆