They All Laughed
1981, Peter Bogdanovich
versus
Gremlins
1984, Joe Dante
They All Laughed - silly
Gremlins - surprising
So, Ben Gazzara plays a ladies man, John, makes sense, eh? He picks up a hot 23 year old cabbie and develops an odd relationship with her, he has another attractive young ex that conflictedly pines for him, then he lands an old Audrey Hepburn character that brings nothing to the film. John works with Charles (John Ritter) as detectives. Ritter plays Charles just as we'd expect him to - the naive straight-guy [hello Cera and Bateman] with lots of "body comedy", and yeah, it doesn't really work watching him fall over and bump into things every few minutes. There is some other detective dude that looks like some character in a Miyazaki film, he has the massive head of curly hair, roller skates, picks up ladies at will, wears sunglasses, and smokes the dope. The men more or less snoop on ladies, but the ladies are pretty up on stuff, too (well, probably more than the guys). The dialog is pretty bad, tries for some witty, quick exchanges, but they come off just stilted; other times the dialogue is just bad. I have a feeling there might be something worthwhile about the pic, but it escapes me...i guess the way it moves through The City is kinda nice. The film feels like a bad Altman, and I don't really like Altman.
I probably haven't seen
Gremlins since it was released and had no real memory of it, it really surprises me that this is a PG film, scary and some pretty gory kills for a kid-flick. I never associate this one with good cultural criticism, but the film ends on the lazy message delivered by the Grandfather, something about the stupid Americans not responsible enough to deal with the Other; tied into that, there is also the critique of consumer culture and money grubbing. There are some cool shots, mostly close-ups of the creatures. At 1:45 the movie is about 30 min too long. It is still pretty darn entertaining and won't mind revisiting it soon, I'm not sure I get the raving love for it, but it is pretty good and easily makes it by
They All Laughed. Sorry rouj, why do you like this one (or did you just want to see it in for some other reason)?
i'll take another number