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This week, the men of GLoP take on two topics they know a lot about: the best of movies made about New York City and their favorite, most re-watchable movies. And yes, they delve a bit into the contre-Trump of the week, too.
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Must be my dreams/nightmares of it that are in black & white.
For those of us who were in college, living in fraternity houses when the movie was made, when the drinking age was 18, Animal House is in many ways as much a documentary as it is a parody. Even to those who attended college in the modern age where drinking is not allowed on or off campus, I don’t understand how the comedy can be missed – on that score I think you’re in the minority, @kylez. Check out the catalog of contemporaneous reviews summarized in the Animal House entry in the Unimpeachable Source, Wikipedia. I remember reading the Time Magazine review when the movie came out, and the reviewer praised Belushi as likely the best physical comedian since Jackie Gleason.
I’ve never paid much attention to the Police Academy movies. I don’t know if the environment they satirize is as universally relatable as is college and fraternity life.
If you saw it late in life, it could be hype backlash, IE a lifetime of people telling you how great it is means you’re disappointed when it turns out to be merely good. I felt the same way about Caddyshack the first time I saw it as an adult, but it grew on me after seeing it a couple more times.
Or, it’s just not your type of humor. I still can’t figure out why so many of my peers think Dumb and Dumber is a “classic” or how anyone with an IQ above room temperature can think Adult Swim is entertaining, so obviously tastes vary.
High expectations is a huge factor. I agree on dumb and dumber. I think I laughed out loud once in the whole movie. Home Alone was another one – I had people telling me how great it was, finally saw it, just didn’t get it.
On the other hand, some of my favorite movies are ones that I went into not expecting much. Notting Hill, for example.
Guy I worked with lent me a disk of some adult swim cartoon series – “aqua Team Hunger force” (or something like that). I watched half of one episode and decided there weren’t enough drugs in the world to make that entertaining to anyone over the age of 20.
If you saw it late in life, it could be hype backlash, IE a lifetime of people telling you how great it is means you’re disappointed when it turns out to be merely good. I felt the same way about Caddyshack the first time I saw it as an adult, but it grew on me after seeing it a couple more times.
Yes.
and i was just thinking after writing the above that Caddyshack might be the same for me, which i’ve still never seen.
“They can’t do that to our pledges. Only we can do that to our pledges.”
I guess you had to be there.
One of my all-time favorite lines (and I use it far too frequently at work).
“You [redacted] up – you trusted us.”
also “do you mind if we dance wif yo dates?”
“Nedermeyer” (AKA “the Maestro”, for you Seinfeld fans) used to own a restaurant in town until he moved away a few years ago. He was also a regular caller to a local morning radio show for movie reviews and Hollywood talk. Big time leftie, but fun. He said the best two bits of advice he ever got from directors for acting were:
“You’re an actor – try acting like a good one”
and
“Don’t just walk around the stage saying your lines. I can hire the janitor to do that”.
I read Tony Hendra’s book Going Too Far shortly after it came out. It’s his history, semi-autobiographical, of “Boomer Humor.” He was one of the writers on Animal House; in his effort to describe what they tried to do with the movie (as well as his opinions of P.J. O’Rourke, Second City, SNL, National Lampoon, etc), I lost a lot of enthusiasm for the film. Few things kill a joke’s power faster than explaining it.
There are moments in the film I appreciate. “Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?” is a great line. As is “Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.” But I haven’t gone out of my way to watch the film in years. Clips, occasionally.
A lot of “Boomer Humor” is crass. I’m a tail-end Boomer demographically, but I relate more to older Gen-X. Growing up sneaking peeks at National Lampoon on the magazine racks, watching films like Blues Brothers and Animal House and Kentucky Fried Movie and Airplane!, and TV shows like SNL and Second City. Listening to comedy albums from Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor, Shelly Berman, Stan Freberg, Alan Sherman, Spike Jones, Firesign Theater, Steve Martin, Robin Williams. Reading and memorizing “The official Polish/Italian Joke Book” and its cousins – which would probably get you sent to a Hate Crime Reeducation Camp for even owning these days. Playing with Garbage Pail Kids and Topps Wacky Packages. MAD and Cracked magazines. revivals of The Three Stooges for physical humor. Gross-out humor played prominently. Even the “adult” humor was juvenile.
This isn’t to justify it, just to note the culture in which we grew up. Humor – including grossout humor – was everywhere in those days. Animal House tried to be grossout with political messaging. Sometimes the latter drowned out the former.
Animal House didn’t at all resemble my 80s college experience, which looked more like the films Revenge of the Nerds, The Sure Thing, Real Genius, and PCU.
Caddyshack is basically Jerk vs. A**hole, with Bill Murray being funny enough to single handedly save the whole movie.
(Okay, the pool scene was pretty good too. That’s how gross-out humor should be done.)
He was also “the master” (the chief badguy vampire) in the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.