The Red Menace, one of the sales guys at my job, strolled over to my desk yesterday with a look of simultaneous confusion and dread upon his face and asked me, the design 'ho house's resident movie geek, if I knew anything about a re-launch of the Three Stooges in a feature film from the Farrelly Brothers. Blanching to near the color of my rapist great-great-grandfather at the thought of so unnecessary an abomination, I investigated this rumor and was horrified to discover that it is indeed true: the Farrelly Brothers, the guys behind DUMB & DUMBER, KINGPIN and THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY have been given the green light to put out a contemporary feature film that looses the legendary and uber-violent Larry, Moe and Curly in the 2000's and all I have to say to that is, "Why?"The Three Stooges are no one's idea of either high cinema or intelligent comedy, but to many of us in the viewing audience, especially those of us packing a Y chromosome, their antics are some pretty funny shit and are classics of stupid/guy humor for a reason. They were also very much a product of their era, a time when slapstick was not only generally accepted but also worked as a viable genre and the same cannot necessarily be said today. But these days the knockabout slapstick that was the Stooges' stock in trade has been supplanted by the vulgar gross-out or the hapless, arrested development man-child, both sub-categories of humor that are as much a part of their era as the Stooges were, so I have serious doubts about whether the Stooges will work today. The Farrelly's desire to make a Three Stooges film may indeed be a sincere expression of love from a pair of fans, but unless they've got some serious lightning in a bottle I'd bet good money on the film being nothing more than another name-recognition cash-in that will suck out loud.
Oh, and the icing on this potential shit cake is that Los Hermanos Farrelly are rumored to be eyeing both Sean Penn and Johnny Depp as headliners. No. For the love of all that is holy, nooooooooo!!! Save me, Jeebus!
The only place I recall Three Stooges slapstick working in the modern day was Bruce Campbell, what, fighting his own severed hand, I think, in "Evil Dead"?
ReplyDeleteThat was in EVIL DEAD II and it was definitely Stooges-influenced. And fucking funny!
ReplyDeleteI read something a few years ago (I think in the New Yorker?) about the script they have planned for this project, and it actually sounds really good if they do it right: it would be paced as several Stooges shorts of their traditional length, with each one of the guys acting in character but with subtext and after-the-camera-stops scenes that show their progression from Ted Healy's sidekicks to leading men in their own light to dwindling after Curly's stroke.
ReplyDeleteAs someone who thinks that Curly Howard is unfairly ignored by the Chaplin/Keaton/Lloyd/Arbuckle fans, I would like to see a movie that actually addresses the tragedy of his last years, and the 'meta' aspect of the script sounded like it could be good.