Name Dropping

It’s a time for holiday cheer, so I figured I would get in the mood by canoodling around the house humming two of the Golden Globe-nominated songs from that magnum opus Burlesque, “Bound to You” and “You Haven’t Seen the Last of Me,” until I remembered, who the hell has ever HEARD of these songs much less knows how to sing them?
No, let’s try another tack—all the laugh-out-loud comedies of 2010 that have given us such a rollicking time and provided much needed belly laughs,

Maybe if I recall the good times we all had at the screen hilarity that lightened our heavy loads, that would definitely put me in a more convivial frame of mind. Until, I thought, has there really BEEN a single comedy this past year that has been any good? Not really, even when a Hollywood heavyweight like James L. Brooks—the guy, after all, who gave us Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News and As Good As It Gets-- produces such a tepid Reese Witherspoon -Paul Rudd-Owen Wilson-Jack Nicholson vehicle like How Do You Know, we know it’s been a tough year.

Funny, but James L. Brooks will likely get another pass, but when an enduring master like Woody Allen  produces genuinely funny, if inconsequential, films like, say, Hollywood Endings or Whatever Works, he’s harpooned again for producing “just” another mainstream comedy, and not another masterpiece like Annie Hall, Manhattan or Hannah and Her Sisters. The double standard is alive and well in Hollywood and simply making audiences laugh is apparently no longer enough.

But it was certainly enough for two wonderful comic artists who recently died—actor Leslie Nielsen and writer-director Blake Edwards . Nielsen, a sturdy, nondescript movies and television leading man of the 1950s and ‘60s, reinvented himself as a brilliant, deadpan farceur with 1980s’s Airplane! a relentless exercise in sight gags, puns, non sequitors and manifest foolishness. As many of us do, Allen was among those who copped to having a soft spot for Airplane! And Nielsen surely--whether or not you call him “Shirley”—helped showcase this new genre spoofing disaster, cop and other films.
And Edwards (a recipient of an honorary Oscar in 2004), who helped make his name with such classics as Breakfast at Tiffanys, Days of Wine and Roses, 10 and Victor/Victoria, left behind perhaps a more indelible—or at least funnier—mark as the creative force behind the Peter Sellers Pink Panther films.

One of the better Mel Brooks comedies, 1981’s History of the World: Part I, has a delicious vignette on the French Revolution, complete with memorable lines (“don’t get saucy with me, Bearnaise!” and, of course, “it’s good to be the King”). You’ve got to hand it to those down trodden late-18th-century French; they knew how to settle a score with the aristocracy. Now, during these profoundly hard economic times, when avaricious corporate/financial interests and dunderhead politicians are turning millions of hurting middle-class families into the new peasant class, I suppose we should be grateful that no one today is storming the Capitol.
But I do wonder: do they still have guillotines?