[7] It’s surprising Errol Flynn didn’t make more screwball comedies, because he’s completely at home in this ‘who’s duping who’ comedy, outrunning the guard dogs, shaking hands with people in side-by-side moving cars, and carrying on romantic telephone conversations with two women simultaneously. In Four’s a Crowd, he’s teamed with his regular leading lady Olivia de Havilland, as well as Rosalind Russell (in a newspaper …
[4] I want to like a Marx Brothers movie. Really, I do. But this is the third for me (after their earlier efforts, The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers) and so far, no dice. In this, their first film written specifically for the silver screen (and not based on a play or vaudeville act), the brothers stow away on a transatlantic cruise where they constantly outrun …
[4] Groucho, Chico, Zeppo, and Harpo are back for their second big-screen soire. This one hangs loosely on a stolen painting plot, with Groucho playing a returning safari hunter at a rich aristocrat woman’s house where all the action takes place. Like The Cocoanuts before it, Animal Crackers still suffers from being an un-cinematic Broadway stage adaptation. It’s just hard for vaudeville acts like these …
[4] Ethan Hawke stars in this action comedy about a shy high school boy whose older brother sets him up on a date with the girl next door. While Mystery Date starts out like a John Hughes movie, it quickly transforms into a proto-Tarantino flick when Hawke’s character gets mistaken for his brother, whose been living a shady lifestyle behind the family’s back. Cue the …
[7] Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft star as leaders of a Polish theater troop forced to entertain the Nazis while simultaneously plotting their escape to Allied territory. You might think the material is too heavy for a comedy, but To Be or Not to Be manages to stay light and breezy without being disrespectful. It certainly helps that most of the laughs come at the …
[6] Charlie Hunnam (Sons of Anarchy, Pacific Rim) stars as Frankie, a hapless fellow who is constantly humiliated on camera by his older brother, Bruce (Chris O’Dowd). After one of Bruce’s videos became an internet sensation, Frankie went into isolation. But now that Bruce is getting out of rehab, their mother (Nora Dunn) convinces Frankie to give his brother a second chance. Unfortunately, Bruce is …
[8] Tim Robbins (The Shawshank Redemption) stars as an unwitting mail room clerk thrust into the office of CEO at a mythical uber-corporation when the board members decide to send the company’s stocks into a nose dive. But the board, headed by a coolly evil Paul Newman, doesn’t count on their newly anointed dim-wit to invent the next materialistic rage — the hula hoop. Under …
[6] A nasty heiress (Goldie Hawn) falls off her yacht and gets amnesia, only to be discovered by a handyman (Kurt Russell) she once screwed over. To get revenge, he convinces her that she’s his wife and the mother of his three unruly sons. Overboard‘s screenplay mines the tried-and-true ‘fish out of water’ scenario to great effect, but make no mistake about it — this …
[6] Julie Andrews stars in this 1920s madcap musical as the title character, a woman looking to land a job and a husband in the big city, but ends up embroiled with a nefarious white slave trader! Mary Tyler Moore is underutilized as the woman Millie has to rescue from slavery, but Carol Channing chews the scenery in a bizarre Oscar-nominated performance only she could …
[8] George Cukor directs from the play by Philip Barry (The Philadelphia Story), giving Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant a chance to shine in this screwball romance. There’s not a Hepburn/Grant pairing I don’t like, and this one comes with a great supporting performance by Lew Ayres as Hepburn’s sobriety-impaired brother. Grant plays a somewhat Bohemian man who falls in love with a rich socialite …
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