Monday, July 03, 2006

Movie Log: Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, Ferris Bueller's Day Off

Still continuing my streak of watching the comedies I liked when I was young...

Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid was my mid-week movie last week, and it wasn't nearly as funny as I'd remembered. This is the one Steve Martin and Carl Reiner cobbled together in black & white around snippets of various famous old actors in old movies. As someone (Samuel Johnson?) once said about the singing pig, it's not done terribly well, but one is impressed to see it done at all. I might be ready to see it again in another twenty years, but not before.

Ferris Bueller was the movie for last weekend -- I think I saw it last Friday night. It's breezy and pleasant, but Bueller himself is less a character than a plot contrivance (not only doesn't he change, he literally can't change, given the premises of the movie). It was an incredibly popular movie when I was in high school, of course; we all wished we could be as cool, in control, and on top of everything as Ferris was. Seeing it again as an adult, though, he seems a bit smug and shallow, despite his big "life goes by fast, and if you're not careful you might miss it" speech. Or maybe that's why he seems smug and shallow: his idea of "not missing" life is to avoid his actual real life (and anything that might smack of consequences) to run off into fantasy-Chicago for the day.

So: two movies that were pleasant enough to watch again, but were notably disappointing.










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