Post by teleadm on Feb 2, 2019 23:07:46 GMT
I just saw it (finally!) and wrote some comments on the “Now Playing” board:
I finally saw this—it’s taken long enough, as I’m a big fan of the Boys, but there were only two theaters in Boston playing it for a while, and it finally moved to one closer to me.
I’m not sure if I liked it or not. The beginning and end were very good—the end actually had the audience in the theater clapping, a nice sign—and the performances were fantastic, as everyone’s saying. But the middle has this fervent, very modern desire to demythologize them and their friendship, to the extent that it rewrites history to do it.
Of course, I didn’t expect it to be perfectly accurate to their lives, but the writer’s goal is so mind-numbingly obvious here: we’re doing The Sunshine Boys, which, needless to say, is just not who or how Stan and Babe were. The biggest example is that in counterfactually keeping Stanley bitter and resentful about Zenobia, the script neglects the fact that Stan and Babe worked together for eight pictures for Fox and MGM, long after Zenobia! Or how about all of Babe’s other film appearances, including as John Wayne’s sidekick in The Fighting Kentuckian? How about Atoll K?
None of this would be so bad if the obvious reason weren’t this horrible extended sequence in the middle of the movie in which Laurel and Hardy yell and curse at each other. They might not have been saints (who is?), but they were friends, not resentful partners thrown together by fate, as the film portrays them (and then walks back on for the ending). It’s one sequence, admittedly, but it’s so bad and tonally off that it threatened to derail the film altogether.
The picture also comes off as slight; as Jep Gambardella notes, it’s such a straightforward biopic that it’s missing something, a je ne sais quoi that makes it stand on its own as a good movie. Heart, yeah. It’s missing heart, somehow, until those last few minutes, beginning with that wonderful scene when they come off the boat in Ireland (which actually happened, by the way).
It’s annoying, this movie. So much of it is so good, but it never fulfills its potential, and it makes that tragic mistake halfway through. (It’s also so predictable as to be insulting to the viewer’s intelligence.) Yet the performances are so good, and its heart is (that one sequence notwithstanding) so much in the right place, that I didn’t dislike it either. But I also didn’t love it.
I’m not sure if I liked it or not. The beginning and end were very good—the end actually had the audience in the theater clapping, a nice sign—and the performances were fantastic, as everyone’s saying. But the middle has this fervent, very modern desire to demythologize them and their friendship, to the extent that it rewrites history to do it.
Of course, I didn’t expect it to be perfectly accurate to their lives, but the writer’s goal is so mind-numbingly obvious here: we’re doing The Sunshine Boys, which, needless to say, is just not who or how Stan and Babe were. The biggest example is that in counterfactually keeping Stanley bitter and resentful about Zenobia, the script neglects the fact that Stan and Babe worked together for eight pictures for Fox and MGM, long after Zenobia! Or how about all of Babe’s other film appearances, including as John Wayne’s sidekick in The Fighting Kentuckian? How about Atoll K?
None of this would be so bad if the obvious reason weren’t this horrible extended sequence in the middle of the movie in which Laurel and Hardy yell and curse at each other. They might not have been saints (who is?), but they were friends, not resentful partners thrown together by fate, as the film portrays them (and then walks back on for the ending). It’s one sequence, admittedly, but it’s so bad and tonally off that it threatened to derail the film altogether.
The picture also comes off as slight; as Jep Gambardella notes, it’s such a straightforward biopic that it’s missing something, a je ne sais quoi that makes it stand on its own as a good movie. Heart, yeah. It’s missing heart, somehow, until those last few minutes, beginning with that wonderful scene when they come off the boat in Ireland (which actually happened, by the way).
It’s annoying, this movie. So much of it is so good, but it never fulfills its potential, and it makes that tragic mistake halfway through. (It’s also so predictable as to be insulting to the viewer’s intelligence.) Yet the performances are so good, and its heart is (that one sequence notwithstanding) so much in the right place, that I didn’t dislike it either. But I also didn’t love it.
this is just a reflection after seeing John C, Reilly and Steve Coogan on BBC The Graham Norton Show, as I understood it it's not about their classic movie shorts, it's more about the time when they traveled around Britain and Ireland, and for the first time getting to know each others, at least that is how it was presented, offcourse I don't know if that is refelcted in the actual movie you have seen.
The tour might have gone beyond Britain and Ireland, since I've heard they toured Scandinavia too, I've heard about it, and some sell autographs very expensivly.
October 1947 in Göteborg or as you call it Gothenburgh on some maps
Posing for a once serious weekly magazine (it had became a porn magazine by the 1970s when I was young)
"Den som inte Halvan tar" is a reference to a Swedish drinking song, as we called Laurel and Hardy "Helan och Halvan" translated to "The Whole and the Half", so the song goes that if you don't drink the Half you can't drink the Whole, not sure if that made it sense translated.