News You Can Bruise for 2021 November 4 (entry 0)

Thu Nov 04 2021 20:53 October Film Roundup:

• The Incredible Shrinking Woman (1981): An entertaining directorial debut from Joel Schumacher. Lily Tomlin is always fun, and the over-the-top consumer satire here prefigures Robocop. Tomlin plays a dual role—double the Tomlin, double the fun!—and also has a cameo as an obnoxious telephone operator. I have since learned that this was one of her Laugh-In characters, which has merely solidified my desire to never watch Laugh-In or learn anything about it.

  As for Charles Grodin's performance, I'll say that he's never funnier than when he's playing deep in love with a woman one-fifth his size. Which brings us to...

• The Great Muppet Caper (1981): I don't think this one holds up very well. I don't hate it; it has my favorite Muppet celebrity cameo (a bizarrely uncredited Peter Falk), and the Nicky/Miss Piggy romance really is transgressive. The secret for human actors in Muppet movies is to commit 1000%, and Grodin gives at least 1002%. But it's disjointed (IMDB trivia says it's two screenplays stitched together) and big sections suffer from the Muppet curse of "too many humans, not enough jokes."

  The famous bicycle scene is really technically impressive, but looking back on it, how much do I care about technical accomplishment in a Muppet movie? It's not packed with gags, and it doesn't advance character or plot. When I write a scene with someone on a bicycle it's because that person really needs to go somewhere, on a bicycle. And I don't even have a real bicycle! I'm using nothing but words! But you don't see me showing off.

• We started watching His Girl Friday (1940) but Cary Grant's character is such a jerk we stopped after about ten minutes. I'm pretty sure we did this exact same thing back around 2007, so I'm making a note of it here to avoid a future repeat.
• For The Love of It (1980): A bad title for a bad TV movie that was more or less fun to watch. We subscribed to Paramount+ for a month to watch season 2 of Lower Decks (good stuff BTW, but once again the back half of the season is way better than the front half). This made it to the top of our movie list based on the very interesting streaming service description, which I won't reprint here because it's a) a huge spoiler for the ending, and b) incredibly inaccurate when applied to the movie as a whole.

  That's the kind of slapdash approach to filmmaking you're in for here. We were scratching our heads the whole time. The screenwriter wrote a lot of Batman 66, and it shows: there's Batman 66 fight scenes, Batman 66 chases, Batman 66 villains, and Batman 66 gags. Star Jeff Conway would go on to play Zack on Babylon 5, the kind of security officer who gets tricked by Kermit the Frog, a man so guileless that when my memory goes, the last thing to leave the Babylon 5 wing will be the riff I did of Garibaldi shaking his head and saying "I need a smarter henchman."

  I can't say this movie wasn't fun—it was very fun—but there's a thousand better ways to spend your time even if you just want to watch a stupid comedy.

• College (1927): Now here's a stupid comedy that's old, and therefore highbrow. There's a Pre-Code dirty joke in a title card, there's some good Buster Keaton gags, and where would we be without the traditional blackface scene? We'd be in a movie I could halfheartedly recommend, is where we'd be. As it is... just wait for it to enter the public domain. It'll only be a few years, and then you can have a good time watching just the last 20 minutes of this 66-minute movie. For a real challenge, just watch the last 45 seconds, because this thing goes to warp speed at the end!