Over the Easter weekend, I saw two comedies on the big screen. This is the first double-movie weekend I’ve had in a long time—I used to go once a week or every other week, but I haven’t been motivated to leave my DVD player much in the last year. Good comedies are scarce in recent months, so most of my movie choices have been from the comparatively consistent flow of good and great dramatic and genre movies.
On Good Friday, I saw The Grand, an improvised mockumentary a la Christopher Guest. Directed by Zack Penn, it boasted a cast including a few of my favourites: David Cross, Woody Harrelson, Dennis Farina, Michael McKean, Judy Greer, and Ray Romano, with many other fun performances. It wasn’t a great movie, but it wasn’t terrible, either. I’m not sure how Penn’s methods differ from Guest’s, but Guest can always find the comedic gold with his actors through conflict. I don’t think Penn did that as well as Guest can, so other than David Cross’s Larry feuding with Gabe Kaplan’s father character, the other characters didn’t really bicker or fight, so it lacked the punch and pathos of a Guest movie has in spades. I’d recommend The Grand as a rental as it was a lot of fun just the same—Michael McKean’s absent-minded developer steals his scenes, as does Werner Herzog. Dennis Farina isn’t given much to do, as is Judy Greer, which is a shame given how much fun those two actors can be.
The other movie, Be Kind Rewind, laid an egg on Easter Sunday (sorry). I really wanted to like this movie—I hoped it would be like watching Channel 101 on the big screen. It ended up being more like Channel 102, sadly. The plot is goofy enough, but Michel Gondry (who I only know from the marvelous Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) wastes the talents of Jack Black and Mos Def by chasing what should have been a subplot as his main plot.
This movie has more loose ends in it than any movie I’ve ever seen. I suspect this movie was butchered in the edit bay because the creator of Eternal Sunshine couldn’t have created such a sloppy mess here, right? Let’s see—a romantic subplot is set up in a charming little scene and then completely ignored… Black’s character takes on a power station and gains superpowers in a hilarious sequence that is later nullified with a funny pee scene)… a rival video store run by another kindly neighbourhood man which seemed to be set up as a possible merger partner and therefore a solution to the other store’s closing—what the hell was the point of introducing all of this if nothing is done with it? The story of Black’s character taking on the power station and the superpowers he gains would have made for a much better comedy if they’d stuck with that as the main plot. The making of fake movies was funny the first time (Ghostbusters, which was featured in the Be Kind trailers and got me excited about seeing it), but the other movies weren’t funny not because they weren’t funny but because they showed not the finished movies but the making of them--in a fucking montage!
I’d recommend you wait for Be Kind to wind its way into the discount DVD rental pile. There are a few things in it well worth seeing (Jack Black and a chain-link fence is one lighting-fast but hilarious visual gag), but I wished I’d had a scan button in the theatre.
So what’s a guy to do after watching 2 disappointing movies? Fire up the DVD player and watch some proven comedy.
I watched all three seasons of Bottom over the last few weeks, and it restored my faith in character-based comedy after Sunday’s fiasco. Bottom ran for 3 seasons in the UK, written by and starring Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson, our heroes from the last entry.
The two leads, Richie and Eddie, are much less angry than Rick and Vyvyan, but the relationship has some similarities. Richie and Eddie are flatmates in a rundown London neighbourhood, with Eddie supporting them with his welfare cheques. Rick comes across as the bitchy wife type, and Eddie is an alcoholic who prefers spending time with his buddies Spudgun and Dave Hedgehog (the latter played by the Young Ones’ Christopher Ryan).
Mayall and Edmondson did a number of tours in the UK with the characters, and the show has a definite theatre feel to it—most of the scenes take place in the living room/kitchen area of their multi-floor flat.
On tour, the two were noted for being able to drop the script and improvise around flubs, comment on the performances, etc., before returning to the story. I think you can see the results of this in the three series of the TV show. All 3 series (1991, 1992, 1995, with 6 episodes each) were good, and there was no decline in the quality of the show. The last episodes are as funny as the first ones, and they spend more time outside of the apartment.
The episodes aren’t as tightly plotted as The Young Ones. Sure, there’s a main plot for each episode, but the scenes feel more like distinct sketches. In one episode (Smells), for instance, after returning home after not picking up women, the boys head out and obtain a spray that will make them irresistible—and then head off to the pub to test it out. The apartment, sex shop, and pub scenes could all stand on their own as sketches, and you could remove any one of those and still have a pretty funny episode (which would still make sense plot-wise).
There’s still a lot of violent slapstick, toilet humour, and two people who hate each other yet couldn’t function without the other. Edmondson and Mayall were inspired to write the show after appearing in a production of Waiting for Godot, and there is a certain bleakness to the characters’ lives. However, instead of lives of quiet desperation, these guys live lives of loud desperation. Definitely a highlight of 1990’s British comedy just as The Young Ones was in the 1980’s.
I haven’t seen the Bottom movie, Guest House Paradiso, which followed the TV series in 1999, but it’s definitely on my list, as are the taped performances from the 5 tours. Next time I’m in England I’m going to be buying some region 2 DVDs….
Friday, March 28, 2008
Friday, March 14, 2008
The Young Ones
Ask us who our biggest influences are, and we’ll likely include The Young Ones near the top of the list, along with the Marx Brothers, Laurel & Hardy, Abbott & Costello, Rush, etc.
We often have to explain who The Young Ones are—the show didn’t run here in Canada until the 1990’s, long after they’d left the air in the U.K., and only on MuchMusic, Canada’s music video channel, at weird hours. The show centred on four college roommates (a revolutionary poet, a punk, a hippie, and a con artist) who, for me, personified the punk aspects of the new wave of British comedy in the late 70’s and early 80’s.
For more information about the show and its place in the history of comedy, check out this Wikipedia article.
I once worked with a real-life anarchist, and he was the one who recommended The Young Ones to me. I bought a VHS tape of the first 3 or 4 episodes, and I loved it. I eventually got all four tapes to complete the collection.
So why The Young Ones?
First, the show is very funny. I still laugh after many repeated viewings. Like all great comedy, it’s not predictable, and the inherent friction between the four main characters drives the show and the comedy. The Young Ones was my first forays into the 80’s new wave of British comedy, so it was as refreshing to me as Monty Python’s Flying Circus was when as a kid I saw the reruns on PBS.
Second, for a TV show, there was a lot of physical comedy. TV relies heavily on the verbal branch of comedy, so I’m always pleased when I see good physical comedy on a TV show (Three’s Company, for instance, is one old show I’ve rediscovered as a great source of slapstick—John Ritter was one of the greats). In its day, the usual grim types criticized The Young Ones for the cartoonish violence, as was Rik Mayall and Ade Edmundson’s earlier work with as the Dangerous Brothers. But the violence is so over the top that a small child can tell that it wasn’t real or to be emulated. Rick embeds a pick ax in Vyvyan’s skull, yet Vyvyan survives. Vyvyan is the most violent, frequently using his trusty cricket bat to restore or destroy order, but he resorts to using frying pans and even a window to punish Neil, the hippie, for being himself. The Young Ones were so physical that there were a lot of master shots and medium shots to capture the action, and very few closeups as you find with most verbal comedy. As a result, the show often feels like a filmed stage play rather than a sitcom.
Third, the structure of the episodes was disjoined and surreal. The A-plot revolved around that week’s adventure with the four main characters, but it the writers weren’t afraid to make the plot somewhat non-linear, such as “Bambi” where the boys conduct a mission to the laundromat, then hop on a train to be on a gameshow. The writers also interrupted frequently with cutaways and brief b-plots. The diversions varied, ranging from live action scenes to the use of puppets (including Vyvyan’s pet hamster Special Patrol Group as well as skating vegetables, a shark, filmmaking flies, and cannibalistic rats). The live action scenes usually segued between scenes of the main plot and had nothing to do with the rest of the show. My favourite is the Narnia parody in “Flood.” Alexei Sayle would also appear, as their landlord Jerzy Balowski or one of Balowski’s relatives, and do a standup bit, sing a song about his Doc Martins (“Oil”), or even become part of the A-plot. The structure reflects how they wrote the scripts: Ben Elton would take the material Rik Mayall and Lise Mayer had written together and incorporate it into the material he’d written, making for a melding of styles, plots, and ideas. This was no American sitcom with a strong A-plot supported by a comic-relief B-plot.
The Young Ones was a big influence on our first video effort, Babysitters. We wrote the script separately—Mullet was two time zones away that summer—so we unknowingly emulated the way the writers worked on the show.
The Young Ones’ spirited anarchy puts it in the same part of town as the Marx Brothers. They attack the status quo with a glee and energy that draws the audience in—you find yourself rooting for them. It’s classic outsider humour—us versus them—and we identify with the outsiders in this case. The four leads are all poor (except maybe Mike who seems to be running some sort of underworld empire at times), and they end the series as homeless bank robbers on the run. They follow the tradition of the Marx Brothers, who frequently played penniless immigrants who conned their way into the halls of the wealthy.
Even when they are shown amongst their fellow students, the Young Ones maintain their outsider status. The party they host in “Interesting” reveals Rick to be awkward in a social situation. Later, Rick is mocked by a bomb-plotting anarchist after he discovers Rick is just a posturing rebel. Vyvyan’s friends are violent punks, the extreme outsiders, yet he admits he’d like to join the police force. Neil’s hippy friends seem the most like him, but in another episode, “Cash,” he becomes a police officer and arrests them at another party. Mike is the only one to not have outside friends shown in the episodes, but he seems to be the most connected of the group (has employees running a roller disco, got Bambi a TV commercial job, and is blackmailing the dean).
The Young Ones has a strong political streak, with frequent references to Margaret Thatcher’s government. Being Canadian, I can easily substitute “Thatcher” for “Mulroney,” and I immediately remember a time when a conservative government polarized the country during the economic and political turmoil as well as the Cold War rumblings of the 1980’s. The show contains the uncertainty and pessimism of the early 80’s quite well.
When The Young Ones first aired in 1982, the top sitcoms here in North America were Family Ties and Cheers, alongside existing shows like MASH, Buffalo Bill, and Webster.
When the second series of The Young Ones ran in 1984, Who’s the Boss, AfterMASH, and Night Court were starting out here. None of these shows were anything like The Young Ones, so it’s little wonder that the show didn’t air here until long after—and on specialty cable channels. Fox apparently made a pilot for an adaptation of the show with only Nigel Planer crossing the Atlantic, but the network decided not to make it a series.
Next time, a rambling look at another Mayall/Edmondson collaboration, Bottom.
We often have to explain who The Young Ones are—the show didn’t run here in Canada until the 1990’s, long after they’d left the air in the U.K., and only on MuchMusic, Canada’s music video channel, at weird hours. The show centred on four college roommates (a revolutionary poet, a punk, a hippie, and a con artist) who, for me, personified the punk aspects of the new wave of British comedy in the late 70’s and early 80’s.
For more information about the show and its place in the history of comedy, check out this Wikipedia article.
I once worked with a real-life anarchist, and he was the one who recommended The Young Ones to me. I bought a VHS tape of the first 3 or 4 episodes, and I loved it. I eventually got all four tapes to complete the collection.
So why The Young Ones?
First, the show is very funny. I still laugh after many repeated viewings. Like all great comedy, it’s not predictable, and the inherent friction between the four main characters drives the show and the comedy. The Young Ones was my first forays into the 80’s new wave of British comedy, so it was as refreshing to me as Monty Python’s Flying Circus was when as a kid I saw the reruns on PBS.
Second, for a TV show, there was a lot of physical comedy. TV relies heavily on the verbal branch of comedy, so I’m always pleased when I see good physical comedy on a TV show (Three’s Company, for instance, is one old show I’ve rediscovered as a great source of slapstick—John Ritter was one of the greats). In its day, the usual grim types criticized The Young Ones for the cartoonish violence, as was Rik Mayall and Ade Edmundson’s earlier work with as the Dangerous Brothers. But the violence is so over the top that a small child can tell that it wasn’t real or to be emulated. Rick embeds a pick ax in Vyvyan’s skull, yet Vyvyan survives. Vyvyan is the most violent, frequently using his trusty cricket bat to restore or destroy order, but he resorts to using frying pans and even a window to punish Neil, the hippie, for being himself. The Young Ones were so physical that there were a lot of master shots and medium shots to capture the action, and very few closeups as you find with most verbal comedy. As a result, the show often feels like a filmed stage play rather than a sitcom.
Third, the structure of the episodes was disjoined and surreal. The A-plot revolved around that week’s adventure with the four main characters, but it the writers weren’t afraid to make the plot somewhat non-linear, such as “Bambi” where the boys conduct a mission to the laundromat, then hop on a train to be on a gameshow. The writers also interrupted frequently with cutaways and brief b-plots. The diversions varied, ranging from live action scenes to the use of puppets (including Vyvyan’s pet hamster Special Patrol Group as well as skating vegetables, a shark, filmmaking flies, and cannibalistic rats). The live action scenes usually segued between scenes of the main plot and had nothing to do with the rest of the show. My favourite is the Narnia parody in “Flood.” Alexei Sayle would also appear, as their landlord Jerzy Balowski or one of Balowski’s relatives, and do a standup bit, sing a song about his Doc Martins (“Oil”), or even become part of the A-plot. The structure reflects how they wrote the scripts: Ben Elton would take the material Rik Mayall and Lise Mayer had written together and incorporate it into the material he’d written, making for a melding of styles, plots, and ideas. This was no American sitcom with a strong A-plot supported by a comic-relief B-plot.
The Young Ones was a big influence on our first video effort, Babysitters. We wrote the script separately—Mullet was two time zones away that summer—so we unknowingly emulated the way the writers worked on the show.
The Young Ones’ spirited anarchy puts it in the same part of town as the Marx Brothers. They attack the status quo with a glee and energy that draws the audience in—you find yourself rooting for them. It’s classic outsider humour—us versus them—and we identify with the outsiders in this case. The four leads are all poor (except maybe Mike who seems to be running some sort of underworld empire at times), and they end the series as homeless bank robbers on the run. They follow the tradition of the Marx Brothers, who frequently played penniless immigrants who conned their way into the halls of the wealthy.
Even when they are shown amongst their fellow students, the Young Ones maintain their outsider status. The party they host in “Interesting” reveals Rick to be awkward in a social situation. Later, Rick is mocked by a bomb-plotting anarchist after he discovers Rick is just a posturing rebel. Vyvyan’s friends are violent punks, the extreme outsiders, yet he admits he’d like to join the police force. Neil’s hippy friends seem the most like him, but in another episode, “Cash,” he becomes a police officer and arrests them at another party. Mike is the only one to not have outside friends shown in the episodes, but he seems to be the most connected of the group (has employees running a roller disco, got Bambi a TV commercial job, and is blackmailing the dean).
The Young Ones has a strong political streak, with frequent references to Margaret Thatcher’s government. Being Canadian, I can easily substitute “Thatcher” for “Mulroney,” and I immediately remember a time when a conservative government polarized the country during the economic and political turmoil as well as the Cold War rumblings of the 1980’s. The show contains the uncertainty and pessimism of the early 80’s quite well.
When The Young Ones first aired in 1982, the top sitcoms here in North America were Family Ties and Cheers, alongside existing shows like MASH, Buffalo Bill, and Webster.
When the second series of The Young Ones ran in 1984, Who’s the Boss, AfterMASH, and Night Court were starting out here. None of these shows were anything like The Young Ones, so it’s little wonder that the show didn’t air here until long after—and on specialty cable channels. Fox apparently made a pilot for an adaptation of the show with only Nigel Planer crossing the Atlantic, but the network decided not to make it a series.
Next time, a rambling look at another Mayall/Edmondson collaboration, Bottom.
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