Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. You can play along by picking three movies that fit the week's theme and writing a bit about them - it's fun!
This week on Thursday Movie Picks, we are covering one of my favorite topics: Movies About Movies. It's always fun when Hollywood turns its lens on itself, allowing us to see the inner workings of how our favorite pieces of entertainment get made. Some of my favorite movies are about movies, but I've used them already for this series, so I decided to eschew those in favor of ones that I really like but haven't talked much about here.
Bowfinger (Frank Oz, 1999) Bobby Bowfinger is a movie producer who has finally saved up enough money to direct a film of his own - just north of $2,000! The only problem is, he needs a big company to handle the distribution. He gets one executive to agree, but only if he gets Kit Ramsey, the hottest action star around, to star. When that doesn't happen, Bobby decides to film the movie guerilla-style without Kit knowing. The problem is, Kit is already paranoid, and the film's alien invasion premise makes things worse, so he goes into hiding, forcing Bobby to hire a look-alike to finish the film. This very funny satire features Eddie Murphy as both Kit and his look-alike Jiff, Steve Martin as Bobby, and Heather Graham and Christine Baranski as two of the actresses working on the film. Bowfinger mostly forgotten now, which... honestly feels about right. It's not one of the greats. But it is REALLY funny, and more than worth a watch.
For Your Consideration (Christopher Guest, 2006) Leave it to Christopher Guest and his bitingly funny repertory troupe to make one of the most cutting satires about the film industry. No one is safe in this scathingly hilarious movie about a small, slightly overly self-important independent film that gets turned into the talk of the town because of one blogger's comment about it maybe being in the hunt for an Oscar. All the Guest regulars you know and love are there: Parker Posey is again a stand-out as the ambitious younger star on the rise, and Eugene Levy, Jane Lynch, Fred Willard, and John Michael Higgins reliably steal every scene they're in. But the genius Catherine O'Hara gives the performance of her career as the steadily working but un-famous character actress Marilyn Hack. She gives a completely vanity-free performance, exposing every nook and cranny of Marilyn's psyche as she is suddenly thrust into the spotlight. It's a brilliant performance in a killer movie.
Tropic Thunder (Ben Stiller, 2008) The novelty may have worn off a bit on this one, but I still laugh at pretty much anything, from Ben Stiller's maniacally committed action-hero posturing to Tom Cruise's delicious flights of fat-suited cursing to, above all, Robert Downey Jr.'s demented comic genius as an Australian method actor playing an African-American. Tropic Thunder may be a little bit stupid, but it's goddamned COMMITTED to it, and it plays like gangbusters for me, every single damn time.
Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. You can play, too - just pick three movies that fit the week's theme and write a bit about them!
This week on Thursday Movie Picks, we're going back to our childhood days. I had a LOT of favorite movies as a kid - my sister and I wore out so many VHS tapes (yes, I'm that old) that I STILL have some movies memorized (most of them Disney animated classics). And while a lot of them were kids movies (anything and everything involving the Muppets), some of them were... well... a bit odd. And those are the ones I'm sharing with you today.
The Addams Family (Barry Sonnenfeld, 1991) One of the best films to be based on a comic strip, partly because its punctuated with little scenes that play out just like reading a Sunday morning comic, and partly because it so deftly brings Charles Addams's signature morbid sensibility to the modern world. Yes, the Addamses become even more anachronistic, but the actors involved have such a perfect understanding of the proper tone that it works like gangbusters. Anjelica Huston and Raùl Julia are utter perfection as Morticia and Gomez, and Christopher Lloyd is a delightful Uncle Fester, but it's young Christina Ricci who steals the show and beyond-morbid daughter Wednesday. When I was a kid, I was most fond of the various Rube Goldbergian contraptions in the Addams mansion as well as Wednesday and Pugsley's bloody performance at the school play.
Father of the Bride (Charles Shyer, 1991) I was only seven years old at the time, so I had no clue that this was a remake of the wonderful Spencer Tracy film, but even so, I still enjoy this one. Steve Martin is a wonderfully affable lead, easily sympathetic even when he's being idiotic or mean, and his chemistry with Diane Keaton is just wonderful. And the story is timeless and pretty much foolproof. Even despite Martin Short's best attempts (I loved him when I was a kid, but good GOD he is OVER THE TOP here), this is an easy, breezy delight.
The Birdcage (Mike Nichols, 1996) Okay, so I was twelve when this came out, so maybe this is stretching the "childhood" definition a bit, but... my sister and I loved this movie so much that despite both of us owning it on DVD, we met up at Metrograph in NYC to see it on the big screen last year. And the fact that we were twelve and ten when we saw it probably tells you all you need to know about how we were raised. It's still amazing to me that this movie was as huge a hit as it was, since despite coming from a major director and starring major stars it was a remake of a French farce about a gay couple, one of whom is a drag queen. Would this even get made today? I almost doubt it would be as big of a hit if it was, and that's saying something about film distribution and marketing today. I'm not even entirely sure how much I really understood everything going on in this the first time I saw it, but credit to Elaine May's screenplay: Funny is funny, and The Birdcage is FUNNY. And also heartfelt where it needs to be.
