Movies I Watched in December, Part 2

Part two of the classic trilogy. Isn't that usually the best part?


Well, we’ve watched this one more than a few times, haven’t we? It’s one of Allie’s go-to choices for the Marx Brothers (her other, “Monkey Business,” will make its triumphant return in the January recap), and since I think it’s probably the purely funniest Marx movie, I never argue when she wants to give it another spin. This time around, I watched it with my copy of the excellent book “The Annotated Marx Brothers” handy, so I was able to keep track of all the arcane references and bits of oddball trivia. (Did you know the professor whose class gets interrupted is played by Robert Greig, who also played Hives the butler in “Animal Crackers” AND played the eloquent butler who speaks up for the dignity of the downtrodden in Preston Sturges classic “Sullivan’s Travels”? These are the sort of facts I like to keep in my head instead of, say, my in-laws’ birthdays or when my daughter’s school starts.) By the way, despite what you might think after checking out that poster above, this is NOT a horror movie. Those faces ... yeesh! Especially Chico!)

Pretty solid rejiggering of the R-rated superhero comedy that, thankfully, I was able to take my aforementioned daughter to. It wasn’t quite as much fun as the original, filthier, gorier version (it’s surprising how many laughs turned out to be the result of all that CGI blood spatter), but it was an entertaining enough way to (a) pass a couple of hours and (b) strengthen that all-important father-daughter bond. The new scenes, with Deadpool and Fred Savage re-creating the narration chunks of “The Princess Bride,” worked well, and one of the biggest (albeit cheapest) laughs came when Fred talked about how he wanted to fight Matt Damon, only Deadpool kept bleeping out the word “fight” so it sounded like, well, you get the idea. Some wise person pointed out, by the way, that delivering a PG-13 version of the R-rated original might not have been as much an effort to grab younger viewers as it was an effort to harvest money in the lucrative Chinese market. Makes sense to me.

Great Christmas movie, and great movie period, written by (the aforementioned) Preston Sturges and directed with some genuine panache by Michell Leisen. I write about this every year when TCM shows it during the holiday season, and this year they finally re-released the Blu-ray so I was able to snag a copy of my own in case I want to watch Stanwyck and MacMurray trim the tree in, say, August.

Before “Star Wars” took over my life in 1977 (you might think I’m exaggerating, but I assure you, I am not), this was one of my all-time favorite movies, right up there with “The Bad News Bears” (still surprisingly great) and “Bugsy Malone” (still astonishingly weird). Watching it now, after more than 30 years, a few things strike me: One, it’s no wonder Kurt Russell became a star. Even in this (let’s be honest) extremely mediocre movie, he stands out thanks to his genuine charisma. Two, even in what was obviously a pretty low-budget effort, Disney was able to corral a murderer’s row of character actors to fill out the cast: Joe Flynn, Cesar Romero, Dick Van Patten, Eve Arden, Kathleen Freeman, Phil Silvers, William Schallert, Dick Bakalyan, Gordon Jump, Harold Gould, Ronnie Schell, James Gregory, Bert Mustin and the great Art Metrano. Three, I once considered this the epitome of fast-paced, action-packed comedy. I was wrong. It's slow, it's obvious, and there's surprisingly little action (except for some goofy fight scenes and Joe Flynn in long underwear wrecking a boardroom table.) I have to admit, though, it’s still pretty entertaining on a purely nostalgic and “what the hell?” level.

Up next: That best comedy of the year I promised I'd write about in this post, plus the most comic-booky super-hero movie I've ever seen, that movie about the kid who wants a gun more than anything in the whole wide world, and that movie about a guy who wants power more than anything else in the whole wide world. Spoiler alert: They both get what they want.