pacaway

I guess I've made a mistake. Being the Buddy Movie theme night, I thought I'd watch a classic that I've never seen. I always assumed that Lethal Weapon was somewhat of a comedy. I was about 3/4 of the way through when I realized I better check imdb and allmovie.com to make sure this qualifies. Neither site mentioned it as a comedy. how could I have been so mislead all these years, thinking that this movie was an action comedy? Of course I had to finish watching it and am now too tired to watch anything else.

coyoteblue

Wildcard it.

Got four in tonight. The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash (1978), a couple of silent shorts and last but not least, Danger 5 - "Lizard Soldiers of the Third Reich".

Danger 5 is a great series about a 5 person multi-national task force, fighting World War 2 in the Sixties, whose missiion is to 'kill Hitler!'; only 6 episodes long (7 if you count "The Diamond Girls" web prequel) and it's all available online! You can find "The Diamond Girls" on their youtube channel, Dinosaur and the rest of the series is on hulu - Danger 5.



Tomorrow I think I'll watch the Italian Spiderman.

Cardsfan111

Others may chime in, but I wouldn't raise an issue if you counted it. A quick search revealed that Wikipedia lists the sequel as an "Action Comedy".

I wonder if you might have been thinking about the parody, Loaded Weapon 1.

Dimension X

It's been awhile since I last saw it, and maybe the comedy came more in the sequels, but I'm with Cardsfan111, go ahead and count it.

pacaway

I watched the trailer and it definitely tries to give a comedic spin.

BobO'Link

It's been a long while since I've seen that one but I've always thought of it as a comedy/crime/drama/buddy film. I'm with the others in that I'd count it.

wishbone

Lethal Weapon II, especially with Joe Pesci's character, seemed more comedic than the first movie but I see no problem with including it for this challenge.

shadokitty

Just finished my Three Stooges Spook Louder DVD. Full of giggles in every short. It was mostly Shemp shorts and one Curly short, but I'm fine with that as, maybe I'm in the minority here, but I like Shemp just as much as Curly.

BobO'Link

I started Volume 8 of the Stooge shorts for today's theme. I've never been a huge fan of Shemp and the first few shorts of this volume somewhat explain why. So far 3 of 4 are remakes of earlier shorts but that's not Shemp's fault but the studio. It also didn't help they'd changed directors about the same time and were forced to work with a much lower budget. That's not to say the were "bad" but just "different" than what we kids were used to tended to prefer. They was more talk and less eye-gouging/zaniness. When I was a kid a Three Stooges short or two came on almost daily day so it was easy to see one of the remakes, sometimes within days of each other, and go "I *think* I've seen this one but it looks different".

Over the years I've gained a appreciation to what Shemp brought to the act and find I like the shorts with Shemp better than when I was a kid. Still it's not easy to break the recognition factor to the older, and usually superior, versions of those shorts which were remakes.

Now that that's out of the way I can say they are still one of the funniest comedy teams of all time with either Curly *or* Shemp (the less said about Besser the better IMHO). While I *do* enjoy their feature films (mostly out of nostalgia) I'm not much of a Curly-Joe fan either but tend to like him better than Joe Besser.

mrcellophane

I watched the Harold Lloyd Collection that I received as a prize for participating in the challenge last year. This was my first introduction to Lloyd, and I laughed myself silly throughout most of the shorts. His antics are up there with Chaplin and Keaton. My favorite short was "Bumping Into Broadway" which has some really inventive sight gags as Lloyd's character attempts to evade the police after accidentally gaining entrance into an underground casino and winning it big. "Grandma's Boy" is also brilliant and worth watching. I'll definitely watch more of his films in the future.

I'm also working my way through the second season of Get Smart which was a childhood/early teen favorite that I watching of Nick-at-Nite. While I enjoyed them then, I get a lot more of the jokes and gags now. I also appreciate Barbara Felton's role as the straight woman more than I did. She has this poise and husky voice that somehow work amid the antics of Maxwell Smart. It's a fairly thankless role, but she makes it really interesting.

Dimension X

It seems that a lot of those later Shemp films weren't just remakes, but were just the old films with Shemp's newly shot scenes added into them (in place of Curly's scenes). I'm pretty sure I've seen the pie fights from old flicks reused (with Curly edited out and shots of Shemp throwing a pie or receiving a pie to the face added in).
Glad you liked it. I really like Harold Lloyd, and I was hoping when I picked that as a prize last year that whoever got it would like it. For me, that's the hardest thing about picking the prizes - worrying if what I pick will be something that other people would like to own and watch.

BobO'Link

Yes, that's what was done for the most part but they also changed the endings and a few gags to make them feel a bit different. Just enough that you would *think* you've seen it before but couldn't be 100% sure. A few remakes originally had Shemp instead of Curly. For example, Fling in the Ring (1955) is a remake of Fright Night (1947) which was Shemp's first film with Moe and Larry at Columbia and Of Cash and Hash (1955) is a remake of Shivering Sherlocks (1948) which had reused the "Man Vs. Soup" gag from Dutiful But Dumb (1941), this time with Moe instead of Curley. The endings of both "remakes" are different and Of Cash and Hash did not include the "Man Vs. Soup" gag. The Pie Fight sequence was reused many times in both Curly and Shemp films.

In all fairness to Shemp, the Curly short Hoi Polloi (1935) was remade, although without use of stock/old footage, as Half-Wits Holiday (1947) and several shorts from the Curly era reused entire gags, as stock footage, from earlier shorts. Notably the opening carpenter sequence from Pardon My Scotch (1935) (a sequence in which Moe broke 3 ribs falling through the table but actually completed the scene before passing out and being rushed to the hospital) was used intact as the opening sequence in Dizzy Detectives (1943).

Dimension X

Wow. Great post. Very informative. If I have the time, I may check out a few of those back-to-back now that I have titles to look for. Thanks.

ntnon

BoxOfficeMojo has it on their "Buddy Comedy" list, too.

pacaway

Now THAT makes me feel better! Thanks, ntnon!

shadokitty

Joe Besser was always my least liked Stooge too. Would have quoted but my laptop is still down and I access DVD Talk on my iPod. I own Grandma's Boy and knew Shirley Jones was in it, which makes me never look at Partridge Family the same way again btw, but who did Harold Lloyd play?

BobO'Link

I totally lost you on that one. Harold Lloyd died in 1971 and didn't have an association with either the Stooges or Grandma's Boy unless one of his shorts was used on a TV screen in the film.

The Stooges Three Smart Saps borrows a routine from Harold Lloyd's The Freshman, in which Curly's suit comes apart at the seams while he is on the dance floor. That's the only association I know of between the 2 acts although they probably knew each other as there aren't too many years between their ages (he was 4 years older than Moe) and all of them were early pioneers of comedy film.

coyoteblue

I read someplace (wikipedia maybe), that Mantan Moreland was in the running for Shemp's replacement, but they went with Besser instead. You can only dream of what could have been.

BobO'Link

Yes, that was in a biography on Moreland written by film historian Michael H. Price. It was disclosed by Moe in a 1971 interview he did with Price.

As you said... One can only dream of what could have been...

I just watched the last short with original footage of Shemp, the 1965 For Crimin' Out Loud which was another remake of a earlier short with Shemp. Only the first 5 minutes or so is new footage with the bulk coming from the original Who Done It? (1949). It is more obvious as it's on DVD in WS format and the earlier footage, being originally shot in academy format, is very cramped with *lots* of cut off heads. It's kind of sad as the next 4 utilize the infamous "Fake Shemp" before we move into the Joe Besser era.

Dimension X

I think he may be making a joke about the two identically named films (Grandma's Boy (2006) which co-starred Shirley Jones, and the Harold Lloyd film Grandma's Boy (1922)).
It looks like someone doesn't need to win a copy of the The Three Stooges Scrapbook. Are you one of the authors or something?

Dimension X

I see that Harold LLoyd's An Eastern Westerner (1920) and Buster Keaton's Go West (1925) are on TCM tonight.

BobO'Link

Ahhh! I don't know a lot about Lloyd's films and totally missed that one! (Smacks head... light comes on)
I'd *love* to win a copy of The Three Stooges Scrapbook!

I'm no author, just a huge Three Stooges fan (see Avatar and name). I do lots of reading about the shorts and keep a number of sites bookmarked that have good information about them.

ntnon

Watched a couple of library films with wonderful comedy casts over the last few days:

The Big Year... weird idea for a film, but it works. And the cast is a fascinatingly diverse picture of American comedy: Jack Black, Steve Martin and Owen Wilson as the main cast (and on the DVD cover), while the narrator is John Cleese; Joel McHale, Jim Parsons, Rashida Jones and Dianne Wiest also turn up. And - as near as I can tell - despite being a modern comedy film in which husbands routinely wander off for days/weeks/months, I didn't see any of the wives having an affair. About time, too. (Plus, it was full of mostly-friendly - rather than just cutthroat - competition.) There's also a novel(ty) closing credits montage of all the birds featured in the (narrative of the) film - including the Bobolink - which was a nice idea. It's a slight film, not overly comedic, not a particular stand-out, but I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would.

Sort of a cast-companion piece (in no real sense) to Yellowbeard, starring the last generation of British comedic talent: Graham Chapman, Peter Cook, Nigel Planer, Marty Feldman, Eric Idle, Susannah York, John Cleese, Spike Milligan, Cheech & Chong and... James Mason. The plot is fairly straightforward, and it's the main cast that make it worth watching. And who should turn up dressed as a shark but David Bowie!

shadokitty

Watched my first John Candy and my first Luke Wilson movies of the challenge today. Got the Great Outdoors a few years ago for Christmas and always enjoyed watching that movie. Also caught Idiocracy on Comedy Central today. While nothing special, it did elicit a few chuckles from me.

wishbone

Don't forget Mr. Prostitute!