comedy

Casper

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Casper. Amblin Entertainment 1995.

Before watching the movie:

To be completely transparent, I do recall wanting to watch this movie and being in the room trying to watch it shortly after it came out. But it was a very large room with a lot of other things to do and I was very young and had a short attention span, and I don’t remember much beyond the fact that it was on the screen. I have much clearer, more recent memories, of a tie-in Pepsi commercial than I do of the movie itself. So I consider it more fair to review this as a “first time” watch than as a rewatch.

That said, this was probably my introduction to the world of Casper, though I may have seen some of the tie-in TV series. It looked so current and yet I’m sure I was also aware it was a property that had already been around.

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Napoleon Dynamite

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Napoleon Dynamite. Napoleon Pictures 2004.

Before watching the movie:

This movie took my school by storm. I saw nothing that appealed to me, but even as someone whose reaction to hype is to become more determined to avoid it until it goes away, the power and longevity of the hype was starting to wear me down, until a peer whose opinion I respected told me “watching it will take 20 points off your IQ”. So I decided it had nothing for me, and eventually the hype went away. The cult stayed, but they got quieter.

By now, the main evidence this movie was popular is the occasional Vote for Pedro reference drifting by like a tumbleweed. Perhaps that means it wasn’t as formative as some other movies I could have included this month, but when I think of movies my generation loved, this is at the top, even if it never sold me.

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Garden State

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Garden State. Double Feature Films 2004.

Before watching the movie:

I honestly have no idea what this movie is. I think this movie fixed in my mind that New Jersey is called the Garden State, and it stars Zach Braff apparently trying to do something more serious than Scrubs. I seem to recall that it might be a road movie?

Beyond that, the only thing I associate with this movie is that it keeps coming up as an underappreciated failure that millennials love.

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Gigli

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Gigli. Columbia Pictures 2003.

Before watching the movie:

I have to confess that I thought this was a completely different kind of movie. I thought it was a carefree European romcom somehow that everyone hated for some reason. I thought it was in Paris, I thought Gigli was the girl’s name, and I didn’t really know anything else. Both of those things were wrong. In preparing to watch I have discovered that it’s more of a seamy crime comedy I guess? I wonder if I was mixing it up with another romantic comedy. I highly doubt it was Surviving Christmas. Probably Gigi.

Picking out posters, I do think that the marketing was partly to blame, at least what marketing I saw with the media I had access to in 2003 for an R-rated movie.

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Hudson Hawk

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Hudson Hawk. Silver Pictures 1991.

Before watching the movie:

I don’t know much more about this than that it’s an infamous, ill-advised flop. I think it’s some kind of throwback to noir or heist movies, but it (the movie) went wrong. All I know for sure is that this is really not what people wanted to see from Bruce Willis.

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Victor/Victoria

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Victor/Victoria. Ladbroke Entertainments 1982.

Before watching the movie:

I have a dim memory spatially associating the existence of this movie with the existence of Amelie, but I wouldn’t have been in the space I’m thinking about seeing posters of them (elementary school restroom hallway) after Amelie came out, and I don’t believe they would have put, really either of them, in that place. Anyway, I remember very slowly learning of the existence of this show and some time later actually digging just deeply enough to know what the title meant.

I expect some degree of playing with gender roles if the core of the plot is a woman impersonating a man in order to get work, and that’s about all I can guess at. I’ve seen surprisingly little of Julie Andrews’ work for how much she is an institution in entertainment.

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Night of the Comet

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Night of the Comet. Coleman and Rosenblatt Productions 1984.

Before watching the movie:

I’ve heard this movie mentioned here and there but never that much about it. I didn’t even know the thing that happens the night that the comet comes is zombies until I was looking for zombie movies.

I really don’t know what else to expect. There’s a comet, and something happens, and zombie apocalypse, and it’s considered pretty good but not good enough to be that remembered in the mainstream.

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Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny

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Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny. Red Hour Films 2006.

Before watching the movie:

I’ve appreciated Jack Black’s work for a while, and while I haven’t really gotten much into his work in Tenacious D, I have heard some of their bigger singles. But rock culture, even affectionate parody of it, has not been much of a draw for me. So I really don’t have much of an idea of what to expect except rock comedy and they’re probably losers in over their heads somehow.

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Amélie

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Amélie. UGC/Canal+ 2001.

Before watching the movie:

I recall pretty well the appearance of this movie on the media landscape. I don’t think I saw any trailers, but Audrey Tautou’s face was suddenly in a lot of places. I never got any sense of why people loved this movie, but it looked like a painting and was probably a romance, so I never really took an interest in it. But it kept being out there, and when I decided to do a tour of foreign-language movies, this was an easy pick.

I have to wonder if I’d have been more enticed by a direct translation of the French title. “Amélie” tells me nothing except that it’s about a girl named Amélie. “The Fabulous Destiny of Amélie Poulain” at least conveys some kind of tone and direction.

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Steamboat Bill, Jr.

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Steamboat Bill, Jr. United Artists 1928.

Before watching the movie:

I didn’t really have any interest in this movie until very recently, though I had been aware of the title. It always seemed a little odd to me that Buster Keaton had at least two movies with “Junior” tacked on to them, and as I was disappointed that Sherlock Jr. didn’t have any connection to the Great Detective other than the protagonist being a detective enthusiast and dreaming himself into a detective adventure and didn’t even get the reference being made to “Steamboat Bill”, I never bothered. Until I learned about its connection to “Steamboat Willie”.

This is a particularly momentous year for the Public Domain as, after buying an extension of copyright law multiple times to prevent it, “Steamboat Willie” and therefore at least the early form of Mickey Mouse has lapsed in copyright and now belongs to everybody. What I didn’t know was that the title of that short was a reference to the song “Steamboat Bill”, and there is debate whether Keaton’s movie was an inspiration for the short, as they were released the same year. Apparently the copyright of this movie was not renewed and so expired in 1956, but the connection certainly got my attention.

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