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View Full Version : Best Comedy Tournament: Round 1 - Group T



mae
03-09-2015, 05:25 AM
For the Round 1 polls, please vote for up to six titles to move on to the next round. You can vote for less, but please make sure you are not voting for more before clicking that Vote button. The poll will be open for one week. The top six titles will be moving on to Round 2.


http://ww2.hdnux.com/photos/24/20/33/5310173/3/622x350.jpg
Shaun of the Dead (2004) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaun_of_the_Dead)


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-lmF5DAssU

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/d/dd/Almost_famous_poster1.jpg/220px-Almost_famous_poster1.jpg
Almost Famous (2000) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almost_Famous)


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgjFYmuXbro

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/5/5b/O_brother_where_art_thou_ver1.jpg/220px-O_brother_where_art_thou_ver1.jpg
O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_Brother,_Where_Art_Thou%3F)


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHvsRFItCw0

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/3/31/Raising-Arizona-Poster.jpg/220px-Raising-Arizona-Poster.jpg
Raising Arizona (1987) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_Arizona)


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AIfVoGUs6c

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/0/04/Animal_Crackers_Movie_Poster.jpg/220px-Animal_Crackers_Movie_Poster.jpg
Animal Crackers (1930) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Crackers_%281930_film%29)


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ykYqkECz9E

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/b/b9/Hangoverposter09.jpg/220px-Hangoverposter09.jpg
The Hangover (2009) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hangover)


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZc39afdeXU

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/5/50/Pink_Flamingos_%281972%29.jpg/215px-Pink_Flamingos_%281972%29.jpg
Pink Flamingos (1972) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_Flamingos)


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUd_6FF4AtM

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/1/14/Revenge_of_the_pink_panther_ver3.jpg/220px-Revenge_of_the_pink_panther_ver3.jpg
Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenge_of_the_Pink_Panther)


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdUCi4ZklL4

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/6/6b/Hot_Shots_part_deux.jpg/220px-Hot_Shots_part_deux.jpg
Hot Shots! Part Deux (1993) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Shots!_Part_Deux)


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FkxFFAHMws

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/7/7c/Forgetting_sarah_marshall_ver2.jpg/220px-Forgetting_sarah_marshall_ver2.jpg
Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgetting_Sarah_Marshall)


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4xD8ZMdJms

Theli
03-09-2015, 06:50 AM
Shaun of the Dead and Hot Shots part Deux (better than the original IMO) for me!

mae
03-09-2015, 07:08 AM
Voting for five: O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Raising Arizona, Animal Crackers (can we get the fucking Marx Brothers into Round 2?), The Hangover, Forgetting Sarah Marshall.

divemaster
03-09-2015, 07:12 AM
Went with:

Shaun of the Dead
Raising Arizona
The Hangover
Revenge of the Pink Panther

fernandito
03-09-2015, 08:15 AM
...Hot Shots part Deux (better than the original IMO) for me!

Das right. Das wassup. :thumbsup:

T-Dogz_AK47
03-09-2015, 10:01 AM
Went with:

Shaun of the Dead
Raising Arizona
The Hangover
Revenge of the Pink Panther

I have one movie that I nominated in this poll.... and you voted for it. LOL! :lol:

I thought you said I had shit taste in movies?? :P

Tommy
03-09-2015, 10:21 AM
No actual footage of Pink Flamingos in the Pink Flamingos trailer :rofl:

divemaster
03-09-2015, 11:25 AM
Went with:

Shaun of the Dead
Raising Arizona
The Hangover
Revenge of the Pink Panther

I have one movie that I nominated in this poll.... and you voted for it. LOL! :lol:

I thought you said I had shit taste in movies?? :P

Ah,

I likely misspoke. It's not so much your taste in comedies (or even movies, perhaps) but more of your entire body of work over the last year or so and the way you present your opinions.

Mattrick
03-09-2015, 11:57 AM
Voted: Almost Famous, O Brother Where Art Thou?, Forgetting Sarah Marshall

BROWNINGS CHILDE
03-09-2015, 01:04 PM
Hangover and Raising Arizona

DoctorDodge
03-09-2015, 01:21 PM
Shaun of the Dead and Almost Famous.

mae
03-10-2015, 07:52 AM
The Marx Brothers are being ignored again:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m9DjG3QRzs

Girlystevedave
03-10-2015, 07:55 AM
Glad to see Shaun of the Dead doing so well. :)

mae
03-10-2015, 05:01 PM
Glad to see Shaun of the Dead doing so well. :)

Really surprised it's doing so well.

Still Servant
03-10-2015, 05:21 PM
I don't think I will vote for this group.

I think I'll just have a nice cold pint, and wait for all of this to blow over

mae
03-10-2015, 05:34 PM
The placement of titles is completely random but check out the similarity in the posters for Animal Crackers and The Hangover :)

mae
03-11-2015, 07:58 AM
The Marx Brothers are being ignored again:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m9DjG3QRzs

No reaction? :unsure:

mae
03-13-2015, 04:58 AM
This is closing on Monday morning, so we need to break that tie for sixth. Need more votes!

While I liked Almost Famous well enough, I didn't find it altogether very funny or an exceptional film. Maybe I was missing something...

P.S.: Need just one vote to push the Marx Brothers at least into a tie for sixth. How can we move on to the next round of a Best Comedy Tournament with no Marx Brothers? That's just nuts. Cocoanuts!

Girlystevedave
03-13-2015, 05:58 AM
While I liked Almost Famous well enough, I didn't find it altogether very funny or an exceptional film. Maybe I was missing something...



I really never understood the hype around Almost Famous. I thought it was just okay at best. :orely:

mae
03-13-2015, 07:37 AM
Animal Crackers is now tied for sixth :excited:

http://commentaramafilms.blogspot.com/2013/05/guest-review-animal-crackers-1930.html

“Zany” is not a word I use often (or ever) but it’s probably the best word to describe the Marx Brothers. Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and Zeppo got their start on the vaudeville stage, found success on Broadway, and later transitioned to movies. 1930’s Animal Crackers was their second film, based on the 1928 play written by George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind with songs by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby. Oh, and it’s also hilarious!

Rich widow Mrs. Rittenhouse (Margaret Dumont, who else?) is throwing a lavish party at her Long Island mansion. Groucho plays the guest of honor: Captain Jeffrey T. Spaulding (the “T” is for Edgar), a famous explorer who has just arrived from Africa. Zeppo plays Jamison, his secretary. Chico plays Ravelli, a musician who haggles with Spaulding over how much it’d cost not to play. Harpo shows up simply as “The Professor” (of what?). Also in attendance is art snob Roscoe W. Chandler (Louis Sorin) who will be exhibiting a famous painting, Beaugard’s After the Hunt. Mrs. Rittenhouse’s jealous neighbor Mrs. Whitehead (Margaret Irving) hatches a scheme with her friend Grace (Kathryn Reece): assisted by Mrs. Rittenhouse’s butler Hives (Robert Greig), they will replace the painting with Grace’s art school forgery, thus making a fool of Mrs. Rittenhouse. Meanwhile, Mrs. Rittenhouse’s daughter Arabella (Lillian Roth) is in love with starving artist John Parker (Hal Thompson) and they come up with an idea: replace the painting with a copy he made in Paris. Chandler will pay him a large commission after seeing how talented he is, and John and Arabella can be “married and divorced in no time.”

Most of these plot details are meaningless – it’s just an excuse to let the Marx Brothers run wild with their dexterous wordplay, physical gags, and all-around anarchy. This was their second of five movies made for Paramount. Once they moved to MGM, studio guru Irving Thalberg made them include more traditional tropes like “romantic subplots” and “sympathetic characters.” But here, it’s all fun and games, with the painting acting as the MacGuffin. Groucho’s future theme song “Hooray for Captain Spaulding” makes its debut here, as does Harpo’s blonde wig (he wore a red one in their previous film, The Cocoanuts) and Chico’s signature tune “I’m Daffy Over You.” As per usual, Chico is obsessed with food: his first line is “Where’s the dining room?” and during a bridge game when Mrs. Rittenhouse says they play for “small stakes,” Chico asks, “And French-fried potatoes?” Harpo is often seen chasing after an attractive blonde and frequently offers up his own leg to people as a salutation. Zeppo, who only made five films with his older brothers, is the straight man. He doesn’t get the girl but he does get a classic scene wherein he writes a letter dictated by Groucho. (More on this later).

I’m not the guy to analyze these movies for their serious themes and socio-political subtext. I’ll leave that to the armchair deconstructionists! For me, the Marx Brothers represented pure id: they say what they mean, they don’t care about social conventions, and they always come out on top, usually in spite of themselves. They’re not mean-spirited and, for the most part, they only pick on people who deserve it. I once showed a friend Duck Soup wherein Chico and Harpo make life miserable for a lemonade vendor. This guy didn’t do anything and my friend was right to label Chico and Harpo “sociopaths.” But in this movie, their target is Chandler, the pompous art patron who has some secrets of his own. Chico says Chandler looks familiar, and then accuses him of being a fish peddler named Abe Kabibble. (This name is based on a comic strip character, Abie the Agent, and was the source of James Bond producer Albert R. Broccoli’s nickname “Cubby.”) Groucho also gets a scene with Chandler, which gets more absurd as it goes on. At one point, Chandler accidentally refers to Captain Spaulding as “Captain Chandler,” causing Groucho to break the fourth wall and ask for a program.

Andrew and I once discussed why too many characters in comedies today aren’t as sympathetic as the characters played by Bill Murray and his cohorts 30 years ago. Aside from acting skills, the characters in those comedies were usually upwardly mobile. They had a plan: make money, get married, etc. The Blues Brothers wanted to save their orphanage, Peter Venkman wanted to see his new ghost-busting business succeed, etc. A lot of characters today are content to sit around and do nothing, blaming society for their failings. Or they buck the system and succeed with no consequences. In these films, the Marx Brothers usually recognized who needed their help – the lovelorn couple, for instance – and who deserved their scorn – the pompous, the phony, and the hypocritical. But they were pro-active and as much as they winked at the camera, they were also sincere. To a point anyway. Groucho might profess his love for Dumont but at least he’ll admit he’s in it for the money!

Also, too many comedies today – especially those awful ____ Movie spoofs – mistake pop culture references for jokes. The Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team had a name for this: “Knocking Down the Posts.” In other words, “It's not enough to set up a parody, you have to do the jokes. In Airplane!, mere recognition that the girl chasing the plane was a spoof of a particular movie (Since You Went Away) was not in itself funny. The laughs came only when she began Knocking Down the Posts.” One of the most bizarre scenes in Animal Crackers features Captain Spaulding flirting with Mrs. Rittenhouse and Mrs. Whitehead. He then proceeds to have a “strange interlude” in which he recites a serious monologue that ends with stock quotes. This is a parody of Eugene O’Neill’s 1928 play Strange Interlude which featured the same device. There are also lighting-fast references to The Beggar’s Opera, Fuller brushes, vaudeville actor Chic Sale, and a then-controversial book titled The Companionate Marriage. These references work in context and are rarely acknowledged as gags – they’re simply part of the conversation.

The gang gets in some great physical schtick as well. Groucho faints when Chandler points out a caterpillar on his lapel. Harpo starts shooting at the guests as soon as he arrives. Harpo and Chico play bridge with Mrs. Rittenhouse and Mrs. Whitehead wherein Hives attempts to set up a card table but Harpo keeps kicking its legs up, Chico and Harpo contort themselves on a couch, and Harpo repeatedly punches Mrs. Rittenhouse in the stomach! Chico’s reply: “He thought it was contact bridge.” In yet another case of Chico mangling the English language, he reminds Harpo to “scrumble” up the cards. Chico also gets some time in at the piano. As he plays, he admits that he forgets how the song ends, then realizes he went past the ending, then boasts that he once kept this up for three days. Harpo also gets in on the piano (and harp). He spins the piano seat and sits, waiting for the seat to reach him. Chico plays The Anvil Chorus which causes Harpo to go crazy and Groucho to use a woman’s leg for musical accompaniment. One note about Chico: while his Italian accent was obviously fake (and even questioned by Chandler), Italians loved him – they enjoyed seeing “one of their own” get the better of his WASPy superiors.

Groucho delivers one of his most famous monologues in this scene, featuring the now-classic joke, “One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don’t know.” His next lines are, in my opinion, equally funny: “We tried to remove the tusks but they were embedded so firmly, we couldn’t budge them. Of course, in Alabama the tusk-a-loosa. But that’s entirely irr-elephant to what I was talking about.” He follows up with a line that I’m surprised made it past the censors: “We took some pictures of the native girls but they weren’t developed. But we’re going back again in a couple weeks!” Groucho later has Zeppo take down a letter to his lawyers: the Honorable Hungerdunger, Hungerdunger, Hungerdunger, and McCormick. The letter is full of out-of-context business jargon (“i.e., to wit, e.g., in lieu”). Ultimately, in a typical sign of Marx logic, Groucho tells Zeppo to make a carbon copy and throw the original away, then to throw the carbon copy away and just send a stamp. The joke has now closed in on itself.

Oh, in case you were wondering about the plot, Chandler encounters both art forgeries and decides that John Parker’s work is excellent. A happy ending for the young couple! The film itself is rather anti-climactic… disappointing considering the stage version ended with a lavish costume ball. The brothers walk into the scene singing “My Old Kentucky Home.” Police Inspector Hennessey (Edward Metcalf) tries to arrest Harpo for stealing the original painting (he and Chico had swapped the paintings earlier), but Harpo pulls out a Flit can and renders everyone unconscious. He then sees the blonde he was chasing earlier and knocks himself out, landing in her arms.

The Marx Brothers are not for everyone, but anyone who wants to go into the comedy business would be wise to study them: don’t treat your audience like idiots, don’t be mean-spirited unless there’s a point to it, inactivity is anathema to good storytelling, and either every cow is sacred or none of them are. (Said the graphic design student with no comedy experience, save for improv classes!)

As a child, I thought of this movie as “the boring one” but watching it as an adult, it’s one of my favorites. (Here’s a cool annotated guide!) It’s actually one of the longer Marx Brothers movies (at 97 minutes – only A Day at the Races with its interminable water ballet sequence is longer) but it really flies by, despite its stilted, stage-bound direction. I will now close with a question Spaulding asks Chandler after pummeling him with another rambling speech:

“Now, uh, you tell me what you know.”

Just reading that made me smile.

Mattrick
03-13-2015, 08:46 AM
This is closing on Monday morning, so we need to break that tie for sixth. Need more votes!

While I liked Almost Famous well enough, I didn't find it altogether very funny or an exceptional film. Maybe I was missing something...



Not very funny? Perhaps a re-watch is in order pablo!


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgMlyvq2oNo


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEAIVXJ1Qds


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fkn9M3KAsxA


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nvuv0357O8I

DoctorDodge
03-13-2015, 12:22 PM
Mattrick! I didn't know you were an Almost Famous fan!

;)

Seriously, definitely one of my favourite films ever (and I've watched British films). While it's not a laugh a minute, the laughs it does get in are absolutely brilliant.

"He's okay...he is on acid, though...I can't really tell. How do you know when it's kicked in?"

"I AM A GOLDEN GAWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWD!"

mae
03-14-2015, 05:42 AM
There were plenty of funny moments in Almost Famous, I just didn't think of it as a comedy per se. Maybe it's just me. Shrug. After all, I consider The Graduate and American Psycho comedies. Humor is very subjective.

Mattrick
03-14-2015, 11:04 AM
Mattrick! I didn't know you were an Almost Famous fan!

;)

Seriously, definitely one of my favourite films ever (and I've watched British films). While it's not a laugh a minute, the laughs it does get in are absolutely brilliant.

"He's okay...he is on acid, though...I can't really tell. How do you know when it's kicked in?"

"I AM A GOLDEN GAWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWD!"

I've watched it so many times my disc doesn't work haha. "DON'T DO DRUGS!" I love Mcdormand in it so much. "I'm sorry....rock stars have kidnappped my son." *black students mind is blown, blonde student deliberates before writing it as a note* haha

mae
03-15-2015, 08:48 PM
Still tied here but one vote for Animal Crackers settles it. Do the right thing, people!

mae
03-16-2015, 05:34 AM
The poll has closed. The following five titles are moving on to the next round:


Shaun of the Dead (2004) 63.33%
The Hangover (2009) 56.67%
Raising Arizona (1987) 43.33%
O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) 40.00%
Hot Shots! Part Deux (1993) 33.33%


The following two titles will face off in a tiebreaker for the last spot:


Almost Famous (2000) 26.67%
Animal Crackers (1930) 26.67%


And the following three titles have been eliminated:


Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008) 23.33%
Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978) 20.00%
Pink Flamingos (1972) 6.67%

Mattrick
03-16-2015, 05:46 AM
Forgetting Sarah Marshall is gone? And Hot Shots: Part Deux advances? Maybe if Sarah Marshall fired chickens like arrows? lol

fernandito
03-16-2015, 07:57 AM
Nothing in Sarah Marshall is as funny as chicken arrow lmao.

Mattrick
03-16-2015, 07:59 AM
I think Jason Segel's penis would disagree haha

fernandito
03-16-2015, 07:59 AM
Yeah, that is pretty fucking funny lol.