The musings of Sean Paul Murphy: Editor, Producer, Screenwriter, Author. Or, Hollywood -- and beyond -- as seen from an odd little corner of northeast Baltimore, Maryland.
TV Free Baltimore just did a great interview with some of the members of The Lafayettes, a Baltimore, Maryland, based group that recorded for RCA/Victor records. Their song, "Life's Too Short,' was a hit all around the country, and massively popular abroad. The song was featured in the film Tin Men by Barry Levinson and Hairspray by John Waters.
Although they are not frequently discussed today, they developed an appreciative fan base including Marshall Crenshaw, Brian Eno, Robert Plant and The Beatles. The Lafayettes are mentioned in Mark Levinsohn's great book The Beatles: All These Years. Tune In:
"The Beatles' intense drive to stay one step ahead of every rival (and they were already at least fifty clear) was taken to extremes by Paul in July/August 1962 when sleuthing songs unknown or unconsidered by others. A good find was "Nobody But You," a B-side by a group from Towson, Maryland, called the Lafayettes. Beyond a mawkish introduction, this was a strong call-and-response number in the style of Kansas City. “
Being covered by the Beatles. Not bad.
The songs "Life's Too Short" and "Nobody Like You" were both co-written by my friend Lee Bonner, who also co-wrote and directed my first feature 21 Eyes. I am glad to see him and the other guys getting a little well-deserved recognition!
I've already written blogs about Bob Dylan and The Beatles, it is time to fill out the musical trinity of the 1960's rock and roll with a blog about The Rolling Stones.
I am not saying the following records are the best Rolling Stones albums. Anyone can compile a list of their most critically acclaimed albums. It's been done before and the choices are obvious. This is a list of my favorites. Albums that speak to me for one reason ore another. This is more a feel list, than a quality list. My choices are more about who I was and what I was doing at the time when I first heard them. As a result, these are the ones I am most likely to throw into the CD player. (Yes, I still have CDs!)
5. BRIDGES TO BABYLON, 1997
Each summer when "legacy" bands hit the road for their tours, you have to ask yourself whether the group is still the old band whose music you loved. The Doors without Jim Morrison? Queen without Freddy Mercury? The Who without Keith Moon? And John Entwhistle? How about the two versions of Yes on the road? Which one is legitimate?
I essentially stopped listening to The Rolling Stones after Bill Wyman left the band. I was way too young to be bothered by the transition from Brian Jones to Mick Taylor. Granted, Brian Jones had a wider range as a musician, but you can't argue with Mick Taylor's playing. I didn't mind the transition from Mick Taylor to Ron Wood. Ron Wood was certainly no Mick Taylor, but his playing meshed excellently with Keith Richards. But I drew the line with Bill Wyman. To me, the Stones were always about Keith playing against the rhythm section of Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman, while Mick Jagger pouted and postured. To me, the thrill was gone when Wyman left.
I didn't get this album when it was first released. I picked it up over a decade later and I was surprised by how much I liked it. One of my complaints about the Stones was that they remained very superficial and juvenile, refusing to grow up with their audience, as Elvis, Dylan and John Lennon had. I mean, geez, they were still using sex as a car analogies on their previous album Voodoo Lounge. This album, probably as a result of Richards' brush with death, showed some surprising, if defiant, maturity.
On the negative side, the music isn't driven as much by the familiar sound of the twin guitars of Wood and Richards. And it had more credited bass players than their were songs..... Bill, where are you?
4. STEEL WHEELS, 1989
If you were a Rolling Stones fan at the time, you must have been caught up in the excitement surrounding the release of this album. The band seemed dead. It had been three years since their previous album -- the mean-spirited and underwhelming Dirty Work. For a while, it looked like all we were going to get were lame Mick Jagger solo albums....
I had no mixed emotions when this album came out. It was a taut, well-produced album. The songs seemed well thought out and constructed. 98 Rock, my local AOR radio station, went very deep on the album. Better yet, the band went on a massive tour to promote it. I saw them in Washington, D.C. I'm glad I did. Bill Wyman would leave the band soon afterwards, and it would be another five years before they released another album.
3. STICKY FINGERS, 1971
I really didn't get into this album until I learned to play the guitar, and it is the guitar playing that brings me back to it again and again. Powered by the band's most politically incorrect single, Brown Sugar, and one of their most sensitive ballads, Wild Horses, this album is a rich sonic experience. This was Mick Taylor's first complete album with the band, and his country blues playing propels it, interlacing beautifully with Keith's own playing. Despite the presence of a few rockers, this is mainly a mellow album. Druggy, some might say. Forget some: it's what most people say. Questioned endlessly about the drug references, Keith complained that people were reading too much into it. "It's not the Bible," he said.
2. SOME GIRLS, 1978
In 1978, The Rolling Stones needed a hit. Their previous three albums, Goat's Head Soup,It's Only Rock 'n Roll and Black and Blue all featured some good tracks, but the albums themselves failed to set the world on fire. Mick Taylor was gone and replaced by Ron Wood, who, while not a standout guitar player, meshed beautifully with Keith Richards. In the general marketplace, rock was losing ground to disco, and acts from the sixties were being ridiculed by the punks. So what could a poor boy do?
Everything was on the line and the Stones delivered a lively and entertaining disco tinged album. The former street fighting men moved into the nightclubs powered by their massive, danceable hit Miss You. This song proved to be their last Number One hit in the United States.
The tracks don't have the weight or gravitas of some of their edgier material, but the quality remains consistently high, as opposed to other albums where the lyrics to the filler tracks often have a "first thing to come to mind" feel. The lyrics also display a sense of humor often absent from their work. This is one of the few albums I never find myself tempted to hit the skip button on.
1. LET IT BLEED, 1969
To me, the early Stones have always been a strange mish-mash. On one hand, the band positioned themselves as a white boy blues/R&B combo but they would alternate that material with openly poppy songs like Get Off My Cloud. Don't get me wrong, their poppy material was pretty good and inventive, but it led to some inconsistent albums.
Some people opine that the Stones didn't find their own specific voice until the Beatles began disintegrating. I disagree. I would credit their more consistent voice to the rise of "rock" in the late sixties, as opposed to the more chart oriented rock 'n roll. They found their natural voice in the what would be defined as the AOR format, and this album hit that bulls-eye. It was hard rock that tipped a hat to all of their influences, like the Chicago blues of Midnight Rambler, and the country blues of Love in Vain. Plus, the album features their best song: Gimme Shelter.
I topped my list of my twenty favorite Beatles songs with A Day In The Life. I called that song rock 'n roll's apocalypse. Gimme Shelter, the Stones' moodiest and most foreboding song, captures the dark side of 'sixties and might have surpassed A Day In The Life, if the last verse didn't back away from the darkness....
Great album. Every song is a classic.
Honorable Mention:
EXILE ON MAIN STREET, 1972. I know the critics love this album. I understand why, too. However, I find the vocals and mix too murky for sustained listening. I traded my CD of this album to my brother Mark for Frampton Comes Alive and never looked back. EMOTIONAL RESCUE, 1980. This one is not a critical darling, but it is a sentimental favorite. Back when I was in Amway, we listened to this album constantly while we were driving up and down the East Coast for events. (Other big Amway driving albums were The Blues Brothers Soundtrack, John Cougar Mellencamp's Uh-huh, and, strangely, Wham! Make It Big.) BEGGARS BANQUET, 1968. Lots of classic tracks. Perhaps my favorite of their 'sixties albums after Let It Bleed. It would make my Top 10. Maybe my Top 6. DIRTY WORK, 1986. A sentimental favorite because I remember driving around with a friend of mine listening to it the day it came out. Hard to listen to now. Angry and mean-spirited even by Rolling Stones standards. TATTOO YOU, 1981. The album seemed like a return to rocking form after Emotional Rescue, but we later learned most of the songs were simply ones that didn't make the cut on previous albums. BLUE & LONESOME, 2016. I really admire that the Stones did this back to their roots album that covers many classic blues songs. When they covered songs like this early in their career, they always seemed like they were posing. Now, however, it feels completely authentic.
My novel Chapel Street is now available! You can currently buy the Kindle and paperback at Amazon and the Nook, paperback and hardcover at Barnes & Noble.
Who doesn't love to laugh? I know I do. I grew up during in a great time, when the television was filled daily with Three Stooges and Laurel & Hardy shorts, and there was always a Marx Brothers or W.C. Fields film playing somewhere. And let's not forget Abbott & Costello, Martin & Lewis, Ma & Pa Kettle and, of course, Francis The Talking Mule. Comedy was king. As a youth, I started collecting silent comedies on Super 8mm and discovered the comic trinity of Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd.
The biggest problem with making a list of comedies is deciding what actually is a comedy. How many laughs are needed to turn a drama into a comedy? What about funny musicals? Or funny horror films? It calls for some very subjective judgments.
I am not going to handcuff myself with as many self-imposed restrictions as I did when I made my lists of horror films. My decision concerning what is a comedy will be decided on the basis of the individual film. However, I will try to restrain myself from flooding a decade with the work of a single comic visionary. For example, I am not going to put six Marx Brothers films on my Top 10 Comedies of the 1930s list. I will only pick one of their films as representative of their work during the period.
Also, I am going to try to rate the films in the context of their times. Therefore, expect to see some films on the lists which would be considered politically incorrect today. I will, however, discuss the controversy concerning some of those films when it seems appropriate.
So here we are in the 1950s. Let me just say that this was a dismal decade for comedy. I suppose the general middle class striving for conformity during the Eisenhower years, coupled with the underlying tensions of the Cold War, didn't inspire general hilarity. I nearly combined this decade with the 1940s in order to find ten true comedy classics. However, I felt that would be a disservice to that decade. The 1940s weren't a ground-breaking decade for comedy, particularly during our involvement in World War II, but they had a better array of comedies than the 1950s.
Bob Hope plays a comic who is recruited to impersonate a spy and gets mixed up with Hedy Lamarr.
I mainly remember the aged Bob Hope of his late television specials, telling one-liners holding a golf club while leering suggestively at the buxom young starlet of the moment. Once upon a time, however, he was a movie star and he made some pretty good movies, both on his own and teamed with Bing Crosby. Hope's comic film persona was interesting because he usually played a coward, which was unique at the time. Woody Allen claims his on screen persona was based on Hope's.
I liked his movies of the 1940s and 1950s. They were mostly solid -- his movie work in the 1960s was a different story. I'm not saying My Favorite Spywas the best of the lot. I essentially drew this title out of a hat. To me, they were all pretty much the same.
Based on the life of the true Frank B. Gilbreth, Sr., (Clifton Webb), a pioneering efficiency expert, who puts his theories to work raising his large family often to humorous or embarrassing results.
The arch sense of superiority personified in Clifton Webb will no doubt alarm today's Patriarchy Police, but fear not, wife Myrna Loy, is no push-over, and perfectly capable of taking over the large brood on her own. However, there are times when it looks like she'd happily slip into her Nora Charles persona and have a nice stiff martini. A fine, sentimental family film set in 1920. Sort of a poor man's Life With Father.
Remade in 2003 with Steve Martin and Bonnie Hunt in the leads.
A broke singer, Dean Martin, teams up with a star-struck goofball, Jerry Lewis, and his Great Dane, on a cross-country trip to Hollywood.
Martin & Lewis were the cutting edge of comedy in the 1950s, whether in the movies, on television or in the nightclubs. I liked them quite a bit when I was younger, but they do not hold the same appeal to me now. Generally, I like the Martin & Lewis films better than the solo Lewis efforts. I think Dean Martin gave the films a solid grounding. Plus, he's Dean Martin. You'd have to step up to Frank Sinatra to find someone cooler at the time.
Spencer Tracy must deal with the emotional difficulties and organizational challenges of giving away his beloved daughter, Elizabeth Taylor, in marriage.
This is a solid, likable traditional comedy. It is well-written and well-played and currently serves as an insightful look into social and matrimonial mores of the time. Still, if you look at my lists of the upcoming decades, this is exactly the type of Hollywood product I have been excluding in favor of edgier comedies. Unfortunately, there weren't many edgy comedies in the 1950s. So this film stays.
Composer/Womanizer Rock Hudson and Interior Designer/Prude Doris Day find themselves sharing a party line and take an instant dislike to each other. As a practical joke, Hudson pretends to be a Texas millionaire to seduce her, but, you guessed it, true love ultimately ensues.
This film is typical of the mid-brow Hollywood naughty sex farces popular at the time, which featured very little naughtiness and no sex. This film was huge success and resulted in a number of pairings of Rock Hudson and Doris Day in similarly themed films. Hudson and Day reportedly got along very well and exhibited a likable onscreen chemistry. (Of course, one watches their films today with a bemused cynicism now that we know Hudson's preferences lay elsewhere.) The two are ably assisted by Tony Randall and Thelma Ritter. An enjoyable film boosted up a few extra notches on the list because the director, Michael Gordon, was born in my native Baltimore, Maryland!
As the war in the Pacific winds down, LT J.G. Douglas Roberts (Henry Fonda) longs to be transferred from his cargo ship to a war ship, but the Captain (James Cagney) refuses to let him go.
I debated quite a bit about whether this film truly fit in the comedy genre. In a stronger decade, I would have left it off the list, especially after listening to the DVD commentary track by Jack Lemmon. According to Lemmon, this film was a true passion project for Henry Fonda, who originated the role on Broadway, and he resented and resisted the comedy director John Ford was adding. That said, the film was very funny. It's hard to resist a film where William Powell, Mr. Nick Charles himself, creates a bottle of scotch from simple ingredients on the ship. (This was Powell's last film. He was one of my favorite actors of the period and I was glad to see him go out in style!) Still, the film is probably more of a drama than a comedy.
BTW, John Ford fell ill during the production and Mervyn LeRoy was forced to take the helm. Joshua Logan also apparently directed some scenes.
Originally Uncredited: Story and Screenplay by Dalton Trumbo
A romance blossoms between a bored princess, Audrey Hepburn, and an American newspaperman, Gregory Peck, in Rome.
Like Mister Roberts, I only reluctantly place this film on this list. It's a great movie, don't get me wrong, but I always considered it more of a romance than a comedy. Audrey Hepburn, essentially an unknown in America at the time, gives an Academy Award winning performance that made her a star. Gregory Peck knew she was good during the shoot, and insisted that the studio put her name above the title. The film is also enhanced by the Italian locations.
The writing credits are a little sketchy. Dalton Trumbo, one of the blacklisted Hollywood Ten, wasn't credited for the story or the script initially. Ian Hunter was apparently acting as his front, but I don't know whether Hunter or Dighton actually contributed to the final screenplay.
An impoverished postage-stamp-sized European country declares war on the United States with the hope of getting Marshall Plan-style assistance after their defeat. However, their inept military commander inadvertently wins the war when he captures an American scientist and his super weapon.
What's up with Jack Arnold? Not many directors can shift effortlessly from sci-fi classics like Creature From The Black Lagoon and The Incredible Shrinking Man to a smart satirical comedy like this, and later transition to low brow television fare like Gilligan's Islandand The Brady Bunch. Amazing. Well, one way or another, he hit a home run with this satirical film. Of course, it didn't hurt to have Peter Sellers playing three different roles (a feat he would soon repeat in the mighty Dr. Strangelove.) This is a great little film that keeps the comedy up front and the message in the background.
Two desperate musicians, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, pretend to be women in order to join an All Girl Band to escape from Chicago after witnessing a gangland murder. Complications arise when Curtis falls for the singer, played by Marilyn Monroe.
Billy Wilder is one of the true geniuses of American cinema, but, sadly, he doesn't get the same recognition as John Ford or Alfred Hitchcock or Howard Hawks or even Cecile B. DeMille. I think it might be because of his wide range of styles and subject matters, united only by sharp writing, crisp direction and knowing cynicism. This film is perhaps Wilder at his most light-hearted, and most daring. I am surprised they managed to get away with Joe E. Brown's famous last line of the film.
Wilder was aided by an excellent cast. I think this is easily Tony Curtis' best performance. Jack Lemmon, a rare actor who could play comedy and drama equally well, was at top form here. However, Marilyn Monroe provides the heart of the film. Wilder famously found dealing with her extremely frustrating, but he got her best performance out of her. She achieved maximum Monroe in this film.
A conceited movie star, Gene Kelly, half of a romantic duo with Jean Hagan, falls in love with a budding actress Debbie Reynolds, as they make the transition from silent films to talkies.
This is arguably the greatest film ever made. It is definitely the best musical, and the comedy is equally strong. It is funny and joyful and always a pleasure to watch. The songs are great. The script is fantastic. The performances are all wonderful, especially newcomer Debbie Reynolds who manages to hold her own with old pros Gene Kelly and Donald O'Connor. This is the film I recommend to people who tell me that they don't like musicals.
Interestingly, no one involved thought much of this film. Gene Kelly had just come off An American in Paris, which, in the opinion of everyone, was the truly important film. That's where Kelly, and MGM, thought the musical genre was headed. They hemmed in the Broadway Melody dream sequence into this film to give it some of that An American in Parisgravitas. That sequence, though tolerable, was the only wrong tonal note in this entire film.
It shouldn't come as a surprise that the screenwriting team, Betty Comden & Adolph Green, were nominated over their career for two Academy Awards. What is surprising is that they weren't nominated for this film! (They were nominated for their scripts for The Band Wagonand It's Always Fair Weather.) Fortunately, the Writers Guild of America gave them an award for the script. Writers know.
This is a must-see!
Honorable Mention:
LIMELIGHT, 1952. This is one of my favorite Chaplin features, but it's a drama not a comedy. Chaplin's 1957 film A KING IN NEW YORK didn't make the list because it was more bitter than funny (not that Chaplin wasn't entitled to a little bitterness!) SABRINA, 1954. A romantic comedy starring Humphrey Bogart and Audrey Hepburn told through the cynical eyes of Billy Wilder. PAT AND MIKE, 1952, Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn starred in a series of battle of the sexes style comedies during the decade, but, sociological benefits notwithstanding, I don't think they are funny enough anymore to make the list. ABBOTT AND COSTELLO GO TO MARS, 1953. Abbott and Costello were the top comics of the 1940s, but were pretty much a spent force by the 1950s. HAVE ROCKET -- WILL TRAVEL, 1959. I really love that The Three Stooges managed to score a second career in features after their shorts started playing on television. But their late features are all strictly kid stuff. MA AND PA KETTLE GO TO TOWN, 1950. I enjoyed Ma and Pa Kettle back in the day, but they don't rise to the classic level. Ditto FRANCIS, 1950, and the other films about that Talking Mule. Speaking of talking animals, I always had a soft spot for the 1950 Jimmy Stewart film HARVEY, where he has an invisible six-foot rabbit as a best friend. Keeping the animal trend alive, there's 1951's BEDTIME FOR BONZO. This film, about a professor raising a chimp like a child, was viewed as the nadir of Ronald Reagan's acting career. When he was first running for President, the Democrats showed it before their convention hoping to humiliate Reagan only to discover it wasn't that bad. But it's not good enough for this list either! Speaking of apes, there's MONKEY BUSINESS, 1952, featuring Cary Grant as a scientist whose chimpanzee discovers the fountain of youth. With direction by Howard Hawks and a script by Ben Hecht, it is one of the last of the original screwball comedies, and, as a bonus, it also features Marilyn Monroe. Perhaps I should have put this in the Top 10, but it's no Bringing Up Baby.
My novel Chapel Street is now available! You can currently buy the Kindle and paperback at Amazon and the Nook, paperback and hardcover at Barnes & Noble.
Becoming a 2012 winner of the Kairos Prize for Spiritually Uplifting Screenplays was one of the most exciting moments in my writing career. MovieGuide gave me and the other winners the royal treatment in Hollywood. It was amazing. You can read all about my experiences here: Winning The Kairos Prize.
The contest has changed considerably since those early days. Now there are two categories: Beginner and Established. Plus, they only have one winner now in each category, as opposed to three. However, I am sure the recently announced semi-finalists will be as excited as I was back in 2012. I want to congratulate them all!
Here are the semi-finalists in both categories:
Kairos Prize® for Beginning Screenwriters
A SONG ON THE WIND by Sharon Baker
THE GREAT by Marshall Foster and Ben Davies
COLORBLIND by Pamela Peak
DEAREST DADDY GOD by Stephanie Sharp
GRACE BY NIGHT by Nathan Leon
MULENGA by Karen Aaker
SIR KENDRICK AND THE CASTLE OF BEL LIONE by Jess Stainbrook
Congratulations, and I look forward to seeing your movies!
And for those of you who entered and didn't win: Don't be discouraged! Taste is a very subjective thing. For all you know, your scripts might be better and more marketable than the winners. You won't know until you start sending them around. So do it!
Who doesn't love to laugh? I know I do. I grew up during in a great time, when the television was filled daily with Three Stooges and Laurel & Hardy shorts, and there was always a Marx Brothers or W.C. Fields film playing somewhere. And let's not forget Abbott & Costello, Martin & Lewis, Ma & Pa Kettle and, of course, Francis The Talking Mule. Comedy was king. As a youth, I started collecting silent comedies on Super 8mm and discovered the comic trinity of Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd.
The biggest problem with making a list of comedies is deciding what actually is a comedy. How many laughs are needed to turn a drama into a comedy? What about funny musicals? Or funny horror films? It calls for some very subjective judgments.
I am not going to handcuff myself with as many self-imposed restrictions as I did when I made my lists of horror films. My decision concerning what is a comedy will be decided on the basis of the individual film. However, I will try to restrain myself from flooding a decade with the work of a single comic visionary. For example, I am not going to put six Marx Brothers films on my Top 10 Comedies of the 1930s list. I will only pick one of their films as representative of their work during the period.
Also, I am going to try to rate the films in the context of their times. Therefore, expect to see some films on the lists which would be considered politically incorrect today. I will, however, discuss the controversy concerning some of those films when it seems appropriate.
Here's my list of the top comedies of the 1990s. During this decade, the most popular comedies at the box office were by Jim Carrey and Adam Sandler. I saw all of their films in the theaters. However, checking my contemporaneous notes, I never gave any of them more than two-and-a-half stars out of four. Nostalgia has not further endeared their films to me. Therefore, I have not included any of their films in the Top 10, making this list my least reflective of the taste of the time.
A outsider joins a group of upper-class Manhattanites during debutante season.
This is a great little film. There is no group of people I could care less about than Manhattan debutantes, but this film completely drew me into their world. The Oscar-nominated screenplay was one of my favorites of the decade. Personally, I think Whit Stillman was born in the wrong decade. I think if he had been working in the 1930s, he would have been one of the top staff writers at MGM. Sadly, although I enjoyed his other films, none of them quite reached these heights.
A British swinging-sixties spy, Austin Powers, goes into deep freeze in order to battle his nemesis, Dr. Evil, who has done the same. They are both unfrozen in the 1990s to find an entirely different world.
This is a consistently funny fish-out-of-water spy spoof. The film, which didn't do much at the box office, became a big hit on DVD and generated two sequels. This is my favorite Mike Myers film. His work has been extremely spotty, but I am genuinely surprised by how few starring vehicles he ultimately made.
*Tommy Blaze, who shares some screenwriting credits with me, claims he wrote the original script that Myers adapted.
Accidentally left at home by his parents during Christmas vacation, eight-year-old Macauley Culkin must protect his home from two determined burglars, Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern.
I thought this film was hilarious when I first saw it in the theaters, but it didn't really stick with me (and I found the sequels unnecessary.) However, a recent holiday viewing of the film guaranteed its place on this list. It resembles an old school Warner Brothers cartoon as the boy inflicts slapstick violence on the bad guys that would have killed a normal person fifty times over. Rarely do modern films rely so heavily on slapstick. I am happy to honor it here.
A small town Pennsylvania band in the early 1960s finds themselves on track to become one hit wonders after winning a local talent contest.
This is one of my favorite films of the decade. It is an amiable, easy-going film with just enough tension to keep the plot going. It's hard not to like this film. In fact, when we discussed the film on the Yippee Ki Yay Mother Podcast, it turned into a total lovefest. Here's our discussion:
A puppeteer, John Cusack, discovers a portal that allows a person briefly into the mind of the actor John Malkovich, who, obviously, plays himself.
There's nothing derivative about this film. Who makes a film about a puppeteer? When he arrives at the seven-and-a-half floor of his workplace, you know you're in uncharted waters. It definitely reflects the combined idiosyncratic visions of both the director and the writer. Particularly the writer. He would receive Oscar nominations for three of his scripts, including this one. (He would eventually win for 2004'sEternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which was not a comedy so don't expect to see it on my list of Top 10 Comedies of the 2000s.)
When rejected by a major star for a role in his film, an unscrupulous independent filmmaker decides to shoot the action around him in real life. This task is aided when they hire his naive, lookalike brother as a production assistant.
I was going back and forth between this film and L.A. Story, 1991, for the list. I chose this film because it's funny and it captures the mindset of many a low budget independent filmmaker. Also, after later seeing Eddie Murphy's brother Charlie talking about his Hollywood adventures on Chappelle's Show, I have to think Eddie was spoofing him in this film. Plus, you have to applaud Martin and Oz for their thinly-veiled, but obvious, takedown of Scientology. That was extremely brave at the time.
A former bowling hustler, Woody Harrelson, who lost his hand, finds a promising but naive Amish bowler, Randy Quaid, and tries to take him to the World Championship.
I had a hard time choosing between this film and the Farrelly Brothers' other monster hit There's Something About Mary, 1998. That film had Jonathan Richman acting as a greek chorus, but this one had Bill Murray. Billy Murray wins hands down. I found the Farrelly Brothers' work madly inconsistent. I didn't discover the source of the difficulty until I started paying attention to the writing credits. It seems to me that the film they wrote entirely themselves aren't as funny as the ones that other people wrote.
A frustrated high school teacher, Matthew Broderick, sets in motion a self-destructive chain of events when he conspires to thwart the campaign of an annoyingly overeager student, Reece Witherspoon, for class president.
Alexander Payne, and his writing partner, Jim Taylor, first rose to fame with Citizen Ruth, a satire about abortion. Obviously, they are not afraid to take down sacred cows. This film, however, is my favorite. It is very dark and wanders into taboo sexually areas, but very funny and acerbic. They say John Hughes really had an insight into teenagers of the 1980s. I hope Payne and Taylor's vision isn't quite as accurate!
A lazy sixties reject, Jeff Bridges, is forced to play detective after he accidentally becomes embroiled in a case involving the missing wife of a millionaire and a soiled rug.
The Coen Brothers are geniuses. They have had the longest run of genius in modern cinema. Think about it. How many of their independent filmmaking peers who arose with them in the mid-1980s are still consistently making great films? Not many. Granted, they have had their share of misfires, but they are always fascinating and relevant. Last week I just saw their new Netflix film The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. It was marvelous. All I could think was that no other filmmakers could have captured the delicate balance of perfectly being the thing that you are satirizing.
That said, The Big Lebowski left me cold on the first viewing. I didn't dislike it. But I didn't like it either. The extraordinary praise it received was always greeted by an arched eyebrow from yours truly. Then I saw the film again, and I liked it more. I saw it again, and again, and again. It rose in my estimation with each viewing until I am surprised that it doesn't top my list as the best comedy of the 1990s. Then, however, I remember the film at the top of the list....
A self-centered, narcissistic television weatherman, Bill Murray, finds himself endlessly repeating Groundhog Day in Punxsutawney, PA.
This is not just one of the best comedies ever made. It is one of the best movies ever made. The script, by Danny Rubin, is a work of genius. I had read a great deal about it. The studios wanted an explanation -- a gypsy curse or something. The writer was fired from the project. Other people were unsuccessfully brought in. Eventually, Rubin was brought back to restore what everyone had loved about the project in the first place. It was a rare screenwriting happy ending! Plus, if you did had to take on a co-writer for a comedy in the 70s, 80s or 90s, you could certainly do worse than the great Harold Ramis! A lot of the credit for the success also goes to the cast. Great performances by all involved, particularly by Bill Murray was perfect for the role. The role was the culmination of the persona he had been developing since the late-70s, with an extra heaping of arrogance.
This film has been much-imitated, but never surpassed. In fact, my writing partner Tim Ratajczak and I were offered the opportunity to write a faith-based rip-off. We declined. (Other people who had fewer scruples and wrote this film, which I did end up editing.....)
Honorable Mention:
DUMB AND DUMBER, 1994. If you had to include a Jim Carrey film, I guess this would be the one. The recent sequel was a very sad affair. A shark once jumped can never be unjumped. HAPPY GILMORE, 1996, would be my choice for an Adam Sandler film, although THE WEDDING SINGER, 1998, was a little less schtickier. CITY SLICKERS, 1991, was a good middle of the road Hollywood comedy. Baltimore's own John Waters managed to deliver a mainstream comedy with an edge with his PECKER, 1998. FLIRTING WITH DISASTER, 1996. My favorite film by the inconsistent David O. Russell. Really enjoyed Tea Leoni. Wish she stayed with comedy. James L. Brook's AS GOOD AS IT GETS, 1997, was probably the best romantic comedy of the period with a great, scenery-chewing turn by Jack Nicholson. I really liked OFFICE SPACE, 1999, but I don't worship it the way others do. Maybe it's a generational thing. WAITING FOR GUFFMAN, 1996, was a very funny mockumentary in the vein of Spinal Tap, but this group's real moment of genius would come four years later. People really loved or hated THE CABLE GUY, 1996. Today it's sometimes considered the birthplace of the Judd Apatow school of comedy, that reigned supreme until the recent collapse of the whole comedy genre during the current decade.
My novel Chapel Street is now available! You can currently buy the Kindle and paperback at Amazon and the Nook, paperback and hardcover at Barnes & Noble.
