ntnon

Marriage, Italian Style seems more of a soap opera than a comedy per se, but the comic moments are frequent and amusing. Probably the best to me is the final photographs, where Don Dummi looks searchingly at each son in turn as the camera captures it all..!

pacaway

Wasn't a whole lot of comedic value in Friends With Money. Comedy sure covers a wide spectrum of content.

mrcellophane

I've been using the challenge to watch my backlog of 1960s sitcoms: The Addams Family (carried over from the Horror Challenge), The Dick Van Dyke Show, and Get Smart. I also started rewatching The Venture Bros. today before heading off to work.

Yesterday, I did watch a couple of films: Double Wedding (1937)and The Ladykillers (1955). The first film stars William Powell and Myrna Loy and casts them as hate-at-first-sight opposites; he's a flaky bohemian and she's a calculating businesswoman. While Libeled Lady and The Thin Man are my favorite Loy/Powell pairings, this was pretty darn good and quite funny, though there was quite a few domestic violence gags which always make me squirm a little. However, everything was all in good fun.

Warning to all: MAJOR spoilers for The Ladykillers (1955) ahead:

The Man with the Golden Doujinshi

Hot Ice was awful. Truly, truly awful. 1 hour and 40 minutes of a film included in an Ed Wood Jr box set that isn't really even an Ed Wood Jr film. It's about a diamond heist that takes place at a ski resort.

The beginning starts off with a poorly written scene with an interpol agent, just to show us how really wanted the diamond thieves are. After that, there's something like 30 minutes of scenes with other guests that is only there to pad out the film and to show that one of the bands has a singer that wears real diamonds when he performs, just to show us that there's a bunch of diamonds to steal. And for some reason, one of these guests gets lost out in the snow while skiing. Don't worry, at the end of the 5 minutes we have to sit with it, she's rescued and completely unharmed. After this, the film loses focus on all these guests and their plans which is fine, because the movie really doesn't have anything to do with them. In fact, you can skip the first 35 minutes of the film to get past all of this and you won't have lost anything. The only thing you'll miss from watching the first third of the film is the feeling that you've sat through 2 hours of the most boring movie in the world, while considering if you just want to turn it off and never watch it again.

Things pick up after that but it's still poorly paced. Then near the end of the film, you can tell nobody reviewed the product before it was released, or they just completely lost interest and couldn't pay attention anymore, because the movie repeats just under 2 minutes of itself of the middle and end of a chase scene. Even I didn't notice the jump in what was going on and the instant change of the music until I saw a passenger on a snowmobile hit a tree branch again, followed by the guy driving it to stop after a while and notice he wasn't there anymore.

Even then I still had to rewind it to actually make sure the film accidentally repeated itself and wasn't some sort of joke that fell flat.

Eventually it ended with the pair of diamond thieves sitting in a hotel room that looked like the same exact one they were in when they movie started, even though they were supposed to be someplace else.

This is the only review I plan on doing since I doubt I'll watch something as awful as that again.

Dimension X

Why didn't you save that one for April? Now you made me want to watch my copy.

Indy24LA

I've had Monkey Business (1952) for about a year now and here's the perfect chance to watch it.

The Man with the Golden Doujinshi

I hope you do a writeup for it as well. That first 30 minutes was simply brutal. I had to watch some comedy TV just to keep myself from dropping out of the challenge. After that I had a few more breaks as I went along but it felt so good when it finally ended.

The actual diamond heist wasn't bad, it's just all the lack of comedy and action surrounding it.

Dimension X

Okay, you talked me out of watching it. I'll wait until the Drive-In Challenge. I'll be more forgiving of it then.

wishbone

Look, maybe my balls don't itch.
All balls itch! It's a fact!

The wit and wisdom of Buddy Griffith

shadokitty

No first time views today, but some good rewatches. Caught a couple Three Stooges shorts, and then watched MIBII and MST3K version of Gamera.

ntnon

...which boxset, please? I don't recall that film in any of my sets.

EDIT: Found it. "Big Box of Wood." Why don't I have that...? Hmm...

shadokitty

Just watched a DVD that I bought years ago, but never got around to watching till now, Something, Something Dark Side. Thought it was a very funny parody of Empire Strikes Back.

MrTerrific

Black Adder will always be one of my favorite television shows. I'm watching in preparation for the new Richard Curtis film About Time.

ntnon

The Black Adder or all the Blackadders..?

KaBluie

What are some 1890 & 1900 comedies?

LJG765

I haven't had the fastest start for the challenge but did get a couple movies under my belt. Watched "Hudson Hawk" and "Heathers" today. "Hudson Hawk" is not the greatest movie, but it does make me laugh in places. If it wasn't quite so slapstick, I think that would have brought up the general ratings a lot.

"Heathers," I really don't find a lot wrong with, if anything. I enjoy the whole, dark movie.

coyoteblue

Had a good night. Watched a movie that sits at the edge of Bob Hope's classic period, Alias Jesse James (1959). Bob went to the western well one last time; it's a good movie but not as good as Paleface(1948) or Son of Paleface (1952).

Followed it up with a W. C. Fields movie, You're Telling Me (1934) and short, The Golf Specialist (1930).

pacaway

Got in 3 political comedies today.

Dick: first time view. Really good film with a ton of stars, many before they were famous, or at least well known.
Duck Soup: first time view. Only my second Marx Bros movie. Very enjoyable.
Dave: many, many views! A family favorite. Happy to have a good reason to watch it again.

mrcellophane

That's probably my favorite Marx Bros. film. It took me a couple of their films to get the humor and the bits, and now I really enjoy their films. Hmmm… I should rematch something from the ol' collection for the challenge. Perhaps A Day at the Races!

I have been neglecting the themes and watching whatever strikes my fancy. Today, I watched a Ma and Pa Kettle on Vacation was pretty silly and slight - even by Kettle standards. After that, I watched Dance, Girl, Dance which was pretty interesting. I had seen clips for a film class but hadn't watched the film in its entirety. I'm not sure what to think about it. Then I watched Grandma's Boy starring the amazing Harold Lloyd (as well as a baby and schoolboy that do a good job emulating his mannerisms). Great film! May have to show this to my Chaplin-obsessed friends.

The Man with the Golden Doujinshi

My theory on Cocoon is that someone saw a 2 minute skit of old people acting young and thought it was the funniest thing ever and believed that almost nobody else in the world had ever seen such a sight. The person thought that the joke must be shared with the world and what better way to do that than to somehow get the joke in a movie.

The person also liked sci-fi and alien movies, so the story was written as follows:
When filming, other than when the old people act young (which he spent days focusing on), they gave everyone the above script and told them to ad lib everything.

ntnon

Here's the "full" list...

At the very least The Mechanical Butcher and a couple of the Gardener shorts were definitely on YouTube last year, and probably still are.

shadokitty

I seem to recall Interrupted Lovers on YouTube at one point as well.

shadokitty

I'm almost through disc 1 of Vandread and this morning I watched the first of my unwatched episodes. On another note, both of my Three Stooges sets came in the mail and I figured up how many shorts I own now, unless I have repeats, I have about 56 Stooges shorts on DVD. And there are plenty to watch on YouTube as well.

BobO'Link

You're giving that film *way* more credit than I ever did... What amazes me is there was actually a sequel!

The Man with the Golden Doujinshi

I will never understand the popularity of that thing.

I went in as a kid to see a film about aliens and instead got a film about the elderly in Florida.