Top 5 Comedies

Brodie Fanns!

Happy New Year to you all, and welcome, to the first official movie blog of 2008. Well, at least the first entry in MY blog. I was going to go with a Top 10 of 2007 list, but that list isn't complete yet. How is the list not complete when we are currently 3 days out of 2007? Well, here's the thing about the theatres up here. If it's an indie flick, it probably won't get released up here until about a month after it gets released everywhere else in the known world. So I was waiting till I got word on Juno and Sweeney Todd before I made my final list. So I'm going to see Juno, I'll finally get to Charlie Wilson's War, and word is still pending on Sweeney Todd. Hopefully by next week I'll have a final list. But rest assured it's a good list. I also want to see No Country For Old Men again. And I'll get a review out for it this time. I didn't get one out last time, because I just plain old forgot and then it left my immediate memory. But it was good.

Anywho... today's post. Top 5 Comedies, a supplemental list to my on going Top 100 Favourites.

5) A Night at the Opera

If you were to make a list of the Top Comedy Films of All Time, and you did NOT include a Marx Brothers film, your list would be incomplete. You can make a case for just about anyone of their films. From Duck Soup to Animal Crackers to A Day at the Races, they're all classics. But my personal favourite is A Night at the Opera. It's got classic site gags, amazing physical comedy (as seen in the clip) and some of the best one liners ever put to film. It's classic.



4) The Princess Bride
Such a brilliant lampoon of fairy tale romances. The humour is in it's subtlety. It pulls no punches, yet never reaches for a joke. The film and the actors let the jokes happen naturally, and is a true testament to it's comedic worth. And with a cast that includes Peter Falk, Billy Crystal, Wallace Shawn, Cary Elwes, Andre the Giant, Mandy Patinkin and Christopher Guest, how could it NOT be funny?



3) Airplane!
A comedy of words. Every joke seems like a silly little aside till they get to the pay off. My favourite joke is Striker's drinking problem. It's a film that rewards the audience. If they're patient enough to wait for the laugh, they're going to get a BIG damn laugh. It's a lot of build up to a lot more funny.




2) Shaun of the Dead
So... I noticed that this list is parody heavy. But here's the thing about all of these parodies. It takes the genre norms that they're satirizing, and twists them just so to make it funny, and expose the ridiculous cliches of these genres. And this one does the finest job. It completely satirizes the modern crop of zombie movies, while keeping true to the ground-rules set by Zombie-guru George A. Romero. And of course, it's British, and if there's one thing they do right, it's comedy. Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost are essentially Britains answer to Judd Apatow, Seth Rogan and... let's say Paul Rudd, and to be quite honest, they're funnier.



1) Young Frankenstein AND Blazing Saddles!
I really couldn't decide between these two masterpieces of comedy. They're equally brilliant, Mel Brooks at the height of his career, top of his game. Gives a big middle finger to the PC squad and poses the question... would these films even get made today? The answer, depressingly, is no. They wouldn't. They are so outrageous, so raunchy, so lewd, crude and rude, they would never get made in today's overly-PC world. And that is why they are classics. They not only capture their respected skewered genres, but they're also time capsules of a simpler time. A time when people knew how to be funny. Mel Brooks. Gene Wilder. Madeline Khan. Terri Garr. Cleavon Little. Richard Pryor. Marty Feldman. Peter Boyle. Harvey Korman. Take a bow. You all deserve it. I applaud you.

So here's two clips for you... One for Young Frankenstein. One for Blazing Saddles.

Young Frankenstein


Blazing Saddles


So there you go... the 5, or 6 as it were, funniest films ever made.

Just bust a gut laughing all around.

Happy New Year, Brodie Fanns!

BONG HiTS 4 JESUS!

-Brodie Mann