Lacey Bridges
If there’s anything that’s wrong with today’s comedies – and I’m not just referring to the Wayans’ output or anything produced by both or half of the Farrelly Brothers – it’s that they play less like a fully-formed feature film, without satisfying jumps from A to B to C, and more like a stitched-together assemble of skits. That works fine for “Funny or Die” (and let’s admit it, the online home of comedy vids is wiping the floor with most full-length comedy films) but for a 90-minute movie? Not so much.
That’s probably a big reason why, when film fans talk about good comedies, they almost exclusively refer to the film’s of the ‘80s and ‘90s. While recent comedies like “Ghostbusters”, “Trainwreck” and “Let’s Be Cops” failed to deliver on the promises their hefty marketing budgets promised, classic comedies like “Private Benjamin”, “National Lampoon’s Vacation”, “Sixteen Candles”, “Office Space”, “Home Alone”, “Weekend at Bernie’s”, “Planes, Trains & Automobiles”, “Mallrats”, “Overboard, “Twins” and “See no Evil, Hear No Evil” still not deliver laugh after laugh, but hold your attention throughout.
One actress who has blessed us with more than a few classics is Goldie Hawn, and while promoting her upcoming movie “Snatched” noted that it’s because of today’s lackluster scripts that she rarely works. “Snatched”, it seems, is the first script that actually made her laugh, and worked as a full film, in a long time.
The actress tells Cinema Blend :
“Things have changed a lot. I look at story, right? All movies for me were always about story. And comedy went with that, with character development, story… because you could turn anything into a comedy. And every movie that I had done or produced I could tell as a drama. And some people didn’t recognize it. But the drama is what grounds the comedy.
And so today I don’t see that as much. You can go out there and you can be funny, and you can do sketches, and things, but somehow they don’t quite link together to create a real story. And I think we are storytellers! That’s who we are as filmmakers. So I miss that. Because it’s easy to get a cheap joke, but how does it connect to the next piece of it, and what does it add up to.
So this particular movie had all the bones and everything to be, what I perceived the movie, to be something that you remember. A lot of movies you don’t remember, but when you look at movies like ‘Trainwreck’ which was really funny, it was out there, it was crazy, Amy [Schumer] was doing the best of Amy. But there was pathos, those scenes with the father were really deep scenes. That’s what you remember, and that’s what your brain remembers, because it hooks on to what you’re experiencing emotionally. So that’s the long and the short of it.”
Here are three Goldie Hawn comedy classics worth catching up with if you’ve forgotten just how significantly more funnier her films were to most contemporary comedies.
https://youtu.be/elHoRhGrTiE
