Catherine O'Hara was a terrific comedic actress, known for Beetlejuice, Home Alone, Schitt's Creek and all those mockumentaries she did with Eugene Levy, et al.
Me, I knew her best from Second City Television, where she usually played grandiose characters with no talent and a complete lack of self-awareness — Lola Heatherton, for example.
SCTV was to Saturday Night Live what Mozart was to a toddler banging on a tin pot with a wooden spoon ...
I admit, though, I was a bit surprised by how many tributes and deep-dive analyses of O'Hara's life and career accompanied her passing — in Atlantic magazine, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and others. She was great, no question. Still ...
But, of course, she was the mom in Home Alone, a cultural touchstone for a generation. And while the movie centers on the kid and his buffoonish tormenters, Catherine O'Hara gives the movie its heart. I mean, she's not going to win any awards for Mother of the Year, and she's as unhinged as anybody else — maybe more so — but she'd also do anything to rescue her son.
And that's what writers have noted over and over again — O'Hara's gift for finding the humanity in even the craziest characters.
So, my pick for best supporting actress (comedy) in 1990 — Catherine O'Hara (Home Alone).
Which, of course, wasn't my pick a week ago. Well, that's the Mythical Monkey's dirty secret — nothing is final, ever, until (presumably) I die or the world ends.
There is no received wisdom, dispensed by priests or politicians, only the diploma you work for and never receive from what my Depression-era dad called "the college of hard knocks." Or as Somerset Maugham put it, "The path to Salvation is as narrow and as difficult to walk as a razor's edge."
That applies to movies as well, as far as I can see. Sure, you can study film in school (I studied law and the Philadelphia redhead) but you still have to watch the movies, with your opinion of the latest one informed by what you've seen before, and what you've seen before re-evaluated in light of what you've just newly seen.
Your knowledge of the movies — and your take on them — is forever in a state of flux. Just like life.
It never ends. Until, finally, it ends. Every man owes a death, Shakespeare said, and if you pay that debt today, well, you don't have to pay it tomorrow.
Or something like that.
In the meantime, you walk the path, always approaching, never arriving ...
She had a face like a bulldog, with a lantern jaw, bulbous nose, and heavy bags under deep-set eyes. Her pear-shaped body sagged, her voice growled, and the characters she played often wore their clothes as if a field of potatoes crawled into a burlap sack and was too tired to climb out again.
But she was a gifted actress — Buster Keaton often called her "the greatest character comedienne I ever saw" — and for a brief time, from 1931 until her death in 1934, Marie Dressler was the most popular actress in America.
Dressler got her start as part of Mack Sennett's stable of comic actors that included Charlie Chaplin, Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, Mabel Normand, Gloria Swanson and the Keystone Kops.
In 1914, she starred in history's first feature-length comedy, Tillie's Punctured Romance, which also starred Chaplin in one of his earliest roles.
By the end of World War I, though, Dressler had pretty much disappeared from the movies.
Reduced to working as a maid, Dressler later admitted she found the fall from stardom so devastating, she seriously considered suicide.
But back when she was still a star, Dressler had befriended a young, struggling writer from San Francisco named Frances Marion, and when their roles were reversed and Marion was the top writer in Hollywood and Dressler was out of pictures altogether, Marion remembered her old friend and began including parts for her in various comedies.
When Marion was adapting the Eugene O'Neill play Anna Christie as the vehicle for Greta Garbo's sound debut, she expanded the part of an over-the-hill hooker specifically with Dressler in mind.
It was a pivotal opportunity for Dressler and proved to be her comeback role.
In the film, Dressler steals every scene she shares with the more-celebrated Garbo. To be sure Dressler possessed a theatrical talent that straddled the divide between the silent and modern eras, but I distinguish in my mind between an actor who chews scenery (Garbo, still relying on exaggerated, silent film techniques) and a character who chews scenery (Dressler's self-described "wharf rat" who hides her pain beneath a swaggering pose of indifference).
Garbo eventually shed the exaggerated techniques that had served her well during the silent era and mastered the subtleties of the new sound medium. But not before Dressler had bested her in their one head-to-head outing.
Dressler starred in a dozen movies over the next three years, including Min and Bill (another Frances Marion screenplay) which won her an Oscar.
In Min and Bill, a comedy-drama also starring Wallace Beery and Marjorie Rambeau, Dressler plays a dockside innkeeper who is raising the daughter of a prostitute as her own. As the girl grows up, Min (Dressler) does everything she can to protect the girl, eventually sacrificing herself for the girl's happiness.
The final shot of a deeply-conflicted Min — I'll let you discover the movie's plot twists on your own time — is the best acting of Dressler's career.
The film was a huge hit, and at a time when Norma Shearer, Marlene Dietrich and Joan Crawford were plying their trade, Dressler became the biggest star in Hollywood.
Emma secured her a second Oscar nomination, and the classic dramedy Dinner at Eight gave Dressler her best-known role, that of an aging stage actress reduced to begging favors of her closest friends.
Even people who don't know Dressler's name remember her in that film's last scene with up-and-coming Jean Harlow.
"I was reading a book the other day," says Harlow as the unforgettable social-climbing vamp, Kitty Packard.
"Reading a book?" says Dressler after the greatest double take in movie history.
"Yes. It's all about civilization or something. A nutty kind of a book. Do you know that the guy says that machinery is going to take the place of every profession?"
Dressler looks Harlow up and down and then says, "Oh, my dear, that's something you need never worry about."
A year later, Dressler was dead of cancer. She was 66.
This review is adapted from my (in)famous eight-part, 12,000 word essay on the Marx Brothers which you can start reading here ... if you're so inclined.
After the Broadway success of The Cocoanuts, playwrights George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind set to work on a follow-up, aided by songwriters Harry Ruby and Bert Kalmar.
Concluding that the Marx Brothers played best as a collision of anarchy and high society, they set the play on Long Island at the estate of a stuffy socialite (Margaret Dumont). Groucho, as African explorer Jeffrey T. Spaulding, was the guest of honor, with Chico as Emanuel Ravelli and Harpo as The Professor providing the weekend's musical entertainment.
"I used to know a fellow who looked exactly like you by the name of Emanuel Ravelli. Are you his brother?"
"I am Emanuel Ravelli."
"You're Emanuel Ravelli?"
"I am Emanuel Ravelli."
"Well, no wonder you look like him. But I still insist there is a resemblance."
"Heh, heh, he thinks I look alike."
The play was a big hit and included some of Groucho's most famous monologues, including a description of his most recent safari ("One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don't know"), a letter to his lawyer, and a spoof of the Eugene O'Neill play Strange Interlude, with Groucho addressing the audience directly.
There were also subplots involving the socialite's daughter, a painter named John Parker and a wealthy art collector who in a previous life was Abie the fish peddler. Unlike the movie version, there is also a journalist character modeled on gossip columnist Walter Winchell, several songs and a final act revolving around a costume party.
The play opened on October 23, 1928, at the Forty-Fourth Street Theatre and played 171 performances. As with its predecessor, Animal Crackers acquired several gags along the way, including this speech which a despondent Groucho ad libbed the night his savings were wiped out by the stock market crash of October 1929:
"Living with your folks. Living with your folks. The beginning of the end. Drab dead yesterdays shutting out beautiful tomorrows. Hideous, stumbling footsteps creaking along the misty corridors of time. And in those corridors I see figures, strange figures, weird figures: Steel 186, Anaconda 74, American Can 138..."
Shooting of the film began at Paramount's Astoria Studios in Queens, New York, at the end of April, 1930.
Most of the cast of the Broadway show was retained for the film. One exception was the part of the socialite's daughter, here played by Lillian Roth. An alcoholic who would later be the subject of the film I'll Cry Tomorrow, Roth claimed in her autobiography that she was sent to work with the Marx Brothers as punishment for her bad behavior.
Roth said working with the Brothers was "one step removed from a circus." She wrote:
"First Zeppo, the youngest, sauntered into the studio, about 9:30. At 10 somebody remembered to telephone Chico and wake him. Harpo, meanwhile, popped in, saw that most of the cast was missing, and strolled off. Later they found him asleep in his dressing room. Chico arrived about this time. Groucho, who had been golfing, arrived somewhat later, his clubs slung over his shoulder. He came in with his knees-bent walk, pulled a cigar out of his mouth, and with a mad, sidewise glance, announced, 'Anybody for lunch?'"
In technical terms, Animal Crackers is far superior to The Cocoanuts — better sound, better sets, more movement — but where you rank it in the Marx Brothers' oeuvre depends in no small part on what it is you value in a Marx Brothers movie.
Animal Crackers is the most quotable of all their films, with every line, particularly those from Groucho's monologues, a winner.
And in terms of having worked out in advance what they were going to do, it's the most polished film they made before moving to MGM in 1935.
Personally, I rank it third behind Duck Soup and A Night At The Opera.
But if what you respond to is the sense that anything can happen, as it often did when the Brothers were ad libbing, subverting not only the society the Brothers moved in but the conventions of film itself, then you might find the anarchic quality of their subsequent Paramount era pictures more to your taste — perhaps one of those the Marx Brothers made next, Monkey Business and Horse Feathers.
Rank it where you will, though, the movie was a big hit, grossing over $3 million, fourth among those movies released in 1930.
Note: For the 1936 re-release of Animal Crackers, several double entendres were cut from the original 1930 release — including the line "I think I'll try and make her" from Groucho's song "Hooray for Captain Spaulding." For years the cut material was assumed to be lost but in 2016 an original print turned up at the British Film Institute and is now available as part of The Marx Brothers Silver Screen Collection Restored Edition.
This review is adapted from my (in)famous eight-part, 12,000 word essay on the Marx Brothers which you can start reading here ... if you're so inclined.
By the time they filmed their first movie, the Marx Brothers were a well-oiled comedy machine with 25 years on the vaudeville circuit and three smash Broadway hits to their credit.
The Cocoanuts was worth the wait. It was one of the biggest hits of the year and, more importantly, introduced Americas to a brand of humor they had never seen before.
The movie was based on the stage play of the same name, a musical comedy (nominally) written by George S. Kaufman.
With half a dozen hits in five years, Kaufman was one of the leading young playwrights working on Broadway and his quick wit turned out to be a perfect fit for Groucho, who years later referred to Kaufman as "his God." (Kaufman later went on to win two Pulitzer Prizes.)
Kaufman built the play around the then-ongoing real estate boom in Florida and those of you familiar with the movie know the basic plot — with the help of a couple of disreputable guests (Chico and Harpo), the owner of a ramshackle hotel (Groucho) attempts to con a wealthy society maven (Margaret Dumont) into buying a worthless real estate development.
As always, though, the plot of a Marx Brothers production is simply a framework for a lot of gags, and The Cocoanuts featured some of the best of the Brothers' career.
"Think of the opportunities here in Florida. Three years ago, I came to Florida without a nickel in my pocket. Now? I've got a nickel in my pocket!"
"That's all very well, Mr. Hammer, but we haven't been paid in two weeks and we want our wages!"
"Wages? Do you want to be wage slaves, answer me that."
"No."
"No, of course not! Well, what makes wage slaves? Wages!"
To Kaufman's consternation, the Brothers also tended to ad lib throughout the show ("I think I just heard one of the original lines," he quipped at one performance) and in fact the best-remembered bit in the entire show — the "why a duck?" sequence — evolved from just such an ad lib.
The Cocoanuts ran for 377 shows before heading out on the road, a stripped-down production Groucho called "inferior," by which he meant that the chorus girls were neither as pretty nor as willing as their Broadway counterparts.
The audiences weren't inferior, though. The road show version of The Cocoanuts was big business, and the Los Angeles opening was attended by the likes of Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and Greta Garbo.
United Artists had first approached the Brothers a year earlier about turning The Cocoanuts into a film (imagine the Marx Brothers and Charlie Chaplin working out of the same studio), but balked at the Brothers' asking price of $75,000 for the film rights.
Paramount's Adolph Zukor balked, too, but then found himself upping the offer to $100,000 during dinner with a particularly eloquent Chico.
In January 1929, with the Brothers still performing their follow-up hit Animal Crackers on Broadway every evening, filming of The Cocoanuts began at Paramount's Astoria Studio on Long Island, New York. Paramount's east coast studio had been used for years to film New York-based acts such as W.C. Fields, but it had yet to fully convert to sound (or even sound proofing) when principle photography began.
Most of the filming took place in the early morning before the noise of traffic made sound recording impossible.
As a finished product, The Cocoanuts suffered from all the problems associated with early sound pictures. Primative sound recording equipment required the camera — and thus the actors — to remain rooted in place, a particular problem for Groucho who had trouble finding his marks anyway.
In addition, early microphones picked up sound indiscriminately. To muffle the sound of crinkling paper, every telegram, letter or map you see was soaked in water before each take (there was no muffling the sound of the crew's laughter, however, which ruined many takes).
The initial cut of The Cocoanuts ran nearly two-and-a-half hours, quickly trimmed after a preview to 96 minutes, mostly by dropping musical numbers. The film premiered in New York on May 3, 1929. The Brothers, who were performing down the street in Animal Crackers missed the show, but their mother Minnie was in attendance.
New York's critics were, at best, mixed in their reviews — prompting the Brothers to offer to buy back the negative from Paramount so they could burn it — but in the rest of the country, The Cocoanuts was a sensation.
Only two years into the sound era, movie audiences had never before seen, or more to the point, heard anything like Groucho's nonstop wordplay, and the film wound up grossing $1.8 million on a budget of $500,000, enough to rank seventh on the year's list of top-grossing films.
So where does The Cocoanuts rank among Marx Brothers films?
In the context of the times, there was nothing like it. Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd had made better comedies during the silent era, but (naturally) nothing relying on lightning quick verbal wit.
On the other hand, the Marx Brothers themselves quickly surpassed The Cocoanuts with their next film, Animal Crackers (more about that later), and would continue to surpass themselves with the likes of Monkey Business, Horse Feathers, Duck Soup, A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races.
Not until the dud Room Service in 1938 did the Brothers fall short of their own lofty standards. After that, the Marx Brothers made a series of serviceable comedies (mostly to keep the spendthrift Chico out of hock).
Should you see The Cocoanuts? Absolutely! And then see Animal Crackers and keep seeing the Marx Brothers until there are no more then start over again.
And why a duck? Cause if you try to cross over on a chicken, you'll find out why a duck!
The story of a girl from the country who makes it big in Hollywood was a staple of the silent era — see, e.g., A Girl's Folly, Souls for Sale, The Extra Girl, Ella Cinders — so much so that when Marion Davies (with King Vidor directing) spoofed the genre in the 1928 silent comedy Show People, everybody in town was in on the joke.
Look for cameos from just about everybody who was anybody including Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, John Gilbert and even Marion Davies and King Vidor as themselves.
While she is mostly remembered now as the inspiration for the no-talent opera singer in Orson Welles's Citizen Kane — a grossly unfair characterization if that's what Welles really thought of her — Marion Davies was actually a very good comedic actress and this movie was the best showcase of her talent.
In between binge-eating and binge-napping, Katie-Bar-The-Door and I spent our Thanksgiving holidays binge-watching Aaron Sorkin's The Newsroom, a short-lived cable series now streaming as part of our Amazon Prime subscription.
Made for HBO, The Newsroom followed the ups-and-downs of a band of idealistic cable news reporters trying to put on a worthwhile show in an era characterized by insipid junk-news pandering. Jeff Daniels won an Emmy playing the face of the franchise, the grumpily affable Will McAvoy; Emily Mortimer played his ex-girlfriend-turned-producer; Sam Waterston was their boss.
The series also featured fine supporting performances from Oscar winners Jane Fonda and Marcia Gay Harden.
By and large, the critics hated the show — finding it preachy and pretentious — and in the 25 episodes that made up its three seasons, it never attracted a large enough audience to make anybody forget The Sopranos.
Katie and I, on the other hand, liked it — a lot.
It's not that we're devoted fans of Aaron Sorkin. Back in the day, we occasionally dipped into The West Wing without ever really carving out time for it, and what little we saw of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, we frankly despised.
This, though, we fell in love with.
Katie thought The Newsroom was a warm, witty drama that didn't overstay its welcome. She liked spending time with the characters, especially Olivia Munn's intellectually-brilliant, socially-clueless, hilariously-deadpan Sloan Sabbith.
Me, I saw it as a screwball comedy in the tradition of His Girl Friday and The Front Page — tales of bumbling reporters, puffed up with self-importance and seriously lacking in self-awareness, who somehow manage to get a quality newscast out on a daily basis. The comedy is punctuated by moments of dramatic relief — war, death, national crisis — but the show never strays far from its classical Hollywood roots when fast-talking actors like Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell wisecracked their way from scoop to scoop.
Absolutely nobody else read The Newsroom that way, but who are you going to believe, me or nobody's lying eyes?
Anyway, it's a freebie included with a subscription to Amazon Prime. If that's your streaming service of choice, check it out.
While I'm a forgiving critic, I don't think I'm prone to hyperbole. So when I tell you that I think The Good Place might be the most ambitious comedy ever made for network television, I'm not one of those idiots who hail the latest as the greatest simply because I haven't seen anything made before yesterday afternoon.
All thirteen episodes of The Good Place are available for streaming at NBC.com, on demand or, I think, Hulu (I'm old — I don't get Netflix or Hulu or any of those streaming platforms).
Tomorrow is the fiftieth anniversary of the network premiere of Lost in Space. To celebrate, I'm posting a series of essays including this one which is brand spanking new.
When, lo these many months ago, I first began this series of essays about Lost in Space, it was mostly from nostalgia, revisiting a show that I loved as a kid. And I've enjoyed the effort.
But in the long run, pure nostalgia has little purchase on my brain, else I'd be raving now about Nanny and the Professor. The question is whether Lost in Space holds up now, viewed with adult eyes — and more to the point, your eyes.
It depends, of course.
If your measuring stick is so-called serious science fiction, Star Trek, say, you're almost certain to be disappointed. Although the two are often yoked together — they both aired in the mid-1960s — Star Trek and Lost in Space were in fact conceived as very different shows, mining wholly separate veins to tell different kinds of stories.
At its best, Lost in Space was a fairy tale filled with monsters, magical devices and moral lessons wrapped up in a vaguely science fiction setting. Other times, it was a slapstick comedy featuring a transgressive psychopath and a wisecracking, passive-aggressive robot — Red Dwarf by way of Pee-Wee's Playhouse. And the rest of the time, it was a traditional television Western with gunfights, frontier hardships and passing troublemakers (riding rockets instead of horses) in an outer space situated somewhere between Dodge City and the Big Dipper.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
Rod Serling, who defined science fiction as "the improbable made possible" and fantasy as "the impossible made probable," made a fortune writing in both genres. The point is to tell a good story and if in the process you can peel back the bark of polite society to reveal the human truth underneath, then you've really got something. Fairy tales endure because they allow us to confront our darkest fears — death, failure, loneliness — at a comfortable, magical remove.
For example, "My Friend, Mr. Nobody", about Penny's not-so-imaginary imaginary friend, is at its heart a poignant story of childhood loneliness and the struggle for purpose and relevance. "Wish Upon a Star" uses an unexplained alien artifact that grants every wish to explore the impact of greed on a group's sense of community and individual responsibility. And "Follow the Leader", a story ostensibly about Professor Robinson's possession by a hostile alien spirit, becomes a somber, frightening parable of "alcoholism in the nuclear family."
These stories, along with many others, used elements commonly associated with fantasy to say something true about basic human experiences such as family, community, courage, survival, sexism, and even death.
Admittedly, Lost in Space wasn't, shall we say, well-grounded in scientific accuracy. It was the sort of show that thought a radio telescope is a telescope with a radio on it. Nor did anyone seem to consider whether building an interstellar ship to transport but a single family made much sense. Generally, we prefer to clothe out scientific impossibilities — warp drives, light sabers, dinosaur clones, liquid metal terminators — in the garb of plausible mumbo jumbo.
But scientific plausibility, I contend, is beside the point. I mean, have you gone back and watched an episode of The Twilight Zone recently?
A greater stumbling block for many is Dr. Smith, the most famous — infamous — character on this or any other show. He was lazy, whiny, selfish, conniving, an all-around irritant. But might I suggest that instead of running away from Smith, you should embrace him as television's first true anti-hero.
Think about it. Long before The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Dexter or any of the other truly bad men of television's new Golden Age, indeed, at a time when Hollywood was only just beginning to shed the strictures of the Production Code, a major network built a show — a family show, mind you — around a villain who week-in and week-out plotted to murder, kidnap, betray, ransom and otherwise sell out the series' ostensible heroes. And he never received his comeuppance. There was no precedent for him.
Groundbreaking.
"Of all the many myriad characters that I have played in my life," Jonathan Harris said later, "he surely is my favorite. I like to feel that I would never in a million years have done what he did," but then added with a twinkle, "Maybe. You never know."
Still, context is everything and as you watch Smith do his nefarious thing every week, you have to ask yourself why the other characters put up with him.
The Robot's relationship with Dr. Smith, I think we instinctively get. They're Abbott and Costello, a wisecracking odd couple who fundamentally loathe each other but can't function apart. "He was my alter ego," Harris said, "and he was wise to me and a danger to me. Always calling him those dreadful alliteratives to keep him down so he wouldn't expose me."
Will's relationship with Smith is a bit harder to explain. While no responsible parent would allow a ten year old to run around with a middle-aged man of such dubious moral character, I certainly don't agree with those weisenheimers who've joked that Smith was an intergalactic pedophile. Nor do I wholly agree with Bill Mumy's assessment of Will as "young enough to be naive and manipulated." Nobody's that gullible, especially not a kid as bright as Will Robinson.
No, personally, I think that while Will was smart, honest, brave and resourceful — "smarter than the adults," Mumy said — he was also recklessly adventurous, and far from being Smith's pliable dupe, he (perhaps unwittingly) sought Smith out as a scapegoat for all the trouble he'd be getting into anyway.
"[He] knows he's got the answer that they don't," Mumy said, "and is he going to sneak out and save their butts or is he going to stay in like dad says and let everybody get messed up?"
That's why we put up with this odd relationship — we know that Will wants it's that way.
Less explicable is why the rest of the Robinsons put up with Smith. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me once a week for three straight years and that's just pathological. Maybe their willingness to overlook his repeated attempts to screw them over was meant as a sly commentary on society's tendency to pay lip service to simple virtues while rewarding psychopathic behavior.
How better to explain Donald Trump?
"Lost in Space's vision of a totally ill-prepared family blasting into space with a demented egomaniac along for the ride," wrote Hugo-award-winning author Charlie Jane Anders, "is intrinsically subversive, when compared to more militaristic (or professionalized) views of space exploration. Basically, Lost in Space is the apotheosis of camp — and it's a gloriously weird vision of our future among the stars."
But will you like it? Ultimately, your willingness to embrace — or at least tolerate — the campy aspects of what television historian James Van Hise called "TV's first science fiction sitcom" will determine whether you'll enjoy more than a handful of episodes.
Camp is deceptively easy to write and almost impossible to pull off. It's based on a broadly winking compact between the performer and the audience that not only does nothing on the screen really matter but also that we're fools for ever thinking it did. Done well, camp can deconstruct a genre to reveal the eternal human truths underneath and make us laugh in self-recognition. But done poorly, as unfortunately it most often is, the result is an undercooked dish of lazy contempt that's hard to swallow.
The byplay between Smith and the Robot was often brilliant and when served up as a counterpoint to the more serious scenes — check out the aforementioned "Follow the Leader" or the third season episode "The Anti-Matter Man" to see what I mean — the comedy could punch up what might otherwise play as earnest, stodgy or worse, ludicrous. But as much as the writers tried, you couldn't build entire episodes around it, any more than you can build a song on nothing but a drum solo.
The problem was not that the series got campy, the problem is that the writers got lazy — I mean, seriously, an episode starring a talking carrot? Come on! — and Irwin Allen, who was at heart a kid with a sweet tooth for schlock, let them get away with it.
Still, it made for decent ratings — finishing in the top 35 in each of its three seasons (Star Trek never finished better than 52nd) — and fifty years later, the brilliant episodes are still brilliant, and the not-so-brilliant ones, well, Smith and the Robot at the very least make me laugh. That's more than good enough for me.
Somewhere between the start of this series back in March and part 3 here, I stopped seeing Lost in Space with the nostalgic eye of a boy and found myself appreciating it with the discerning eye of a grown man. Nostalgia is a double-edged sword, giving value to old ties and traditions, but robbing you of the pleasure of the moment you're living in (Christmas, anyone?). I'll miss the Lost in Space that played for so long in my less-than-perfect memory, but I welcome the pleasure I've felt at discovering something new, something that I missed the first time around.
Lost in Space isn't quite the series I remembered. But I've grown to love it again, in some ways more than I did before. Maybe, given a chance, you'll grow to love it, too.
Sullivan's Travels (1941)
Tired of churning out crowd-pleasing comedies such as Ants in Your Plants of 1939, director John Sullivan (Joel McCrea) vows to make an important movie about economic injustice and class struggle. Unfortunately for him, his only brush with poverty is the first of every month when he mails an alimony check to his ex-wife. So he and a down-on-her-luck Veronica Lake set off on a cross-country adventure to learn what's-what. The result is the best comedy of Preston Sturges's illustrious career.
"What do they know in Pittsburgh?"
"They know what they like."
"If they knew what they liked, they wouldn’t live in Pittsburgh."
8½ (1963)
Everyone is ready for Guido (Marcello Mastroanni) to direct another hit movie — the cast, the crew, the press, the studio, his wife, his mistress, his other mistress. Everyone except Guido, that is. He thinks and thinks, and hasn't got an idea left in his overstuffed head. My favorite Fellini film, chock full of those crazy visuals (a man floating through the sky like a balloon, anyone?) that make Fellini so much nutty fun.
"I don't understand. He meets a girl that can give him a new life and he pushes her away?"
"Because he no longer believes in it."
"Because he doesn't know how to love."
"Because it isn't true that a woman can change a man."
"Because he doesn't know how to love."
"And above all because I don't feel like telling another pile of lies."
"Because he doesn't know how to love."
Stardust Memories (1980)
By 1980, Woody Allen was sick of making funny movies, sick of a public that only liked funny movies, and above all, sick of a universe that only makes sense as the punchline of some sort of decidedly-unfunny, existential joke — so, of course, he made a comedy about it. The critics blasted Stardust Memories in its initial release but its stature has grown over the years. Or anyway, I like it, which is all that really counts, right?
"But shouldn't I stop making movies and do something that counts, like-like helping blind people or becoming a missionary or something?"
"Let me tell you, you're not the missionary type. You'd never last. And-and incidentally, you're also not Superman; you're a comedian. You want to do mankind a real service? Tell funnier jokes."
The Simpsons "Krusty Gets Busted" (Season One, Episode 12) (1990)
Laughs are all well and good but what about poetry, what about literature, what about not getting another pie thrown in your face? Sideshow Bob (the voice of Kelsey Grammer) is fed up and he frames his boss Krusty the Clown, takes over the show and talks to the kids about feelings and philosophy and crap like that. Probably the best episode of The Simpsons first season, way back when the show was actually funny.
"Yes I admit it, I hated him. His hackneyed shenanigans robbed me of my dignity for years. I played the buffoon, while he squandered a fortune on his vulgar appetites. That's why I framed Krusty. I would've gotten away with it too if it weren't for these meddling kids."
"Take him away boys."
"Treat kids like equals, they're people too. They're smarter than what you think! They were smart enough to catch me!"
Top Five (2014)
Comedian Andre Allen (Chris Rock) doesn't feel funny anymore, and who can blame him — his movie's a flop, his love life is a TV show, his relatives have their hands out, and his fans just want him to put the bear costume back on. But, hey, at least his day can't get any worse. Right? Raunchy, hilarious and a pretty biting send-up of modern culture, Top Five was last year's most overlooked comedy.
"You coming to the party right?"
"Some people got to work. I'll tell you what — I'll come to your next bachelor party."
"That's not funny, man."
"Tell me somethin' — your next wife, she gonna be white or she gonna be Asian?"
"It's still not funny, man."
"Oh, it's only funny when you say mean shit. Right?"
Named for Katie-Bar-The-Door, the Katies are "alternate Oscars"—who should have been nominated, who should have won—but really they're just an excuse to write a history of the movies from the Silent Era to the present day.
To see a list of nominees and winners by decade, as well as links to my essays about them, click the highlighted links:
Remember: There are no wrong answers, only movies you haven't seen yet.
The Silent Oscars
And don't forget to check out the Silent Oscars—my year-by-year choices for best picture, director and all four acting categories for the pre-Oscar years, 1902-1927.
Look at me—Joe College, with a touch of arthritis. Are my eyes really brown? Uh, no, they're green. Would we have the nerve to dive into the icy water and save a person from drowning? That's a key question. I, of course, can't swim, so I never have to face it. Say, haven't you anything better to do than to keep popping in here early every morning and asking a lot of fool questions?
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