One Near-Hit, One Bomb, One Classic

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….