OFF THE SHELF – Issue # 9: THE FARRELLY BROTHERS COLLECTION
Just to clear up some confusion, regarding exactly what I’m doing here week after week (for 27 bloody weeks it’d seem!), these are the DVDs that I own – for whatever reason – and that make up the various (or twenty-seven, to be exact) sub-sections within my DVD collection. So, with that in mind, there really isn’t much point in using ATB space up to say things like “Dude, how could you miss out on including such and such or this or that or the other?” Well… quite simply… It’s because I don’t own it. If it’s not on the shelf, then it’s not included in the run-down each week. It would probably be more productive if you think I’m missing a title to recommend it to me and spare a couple of sentences trying to put the “hard sell” on it to me. Obviously there’s going to be outright disagreements but that’s what makes it all interesting! You know me, I’ll never miss an opportunity to expand the ol’ DVD collection so, as I said, don’t attack me for what’s missing, attack me for what I think, or what you think, of what I’ve got and recommend to me what you think I’m missing!
Anyway, this week, and to make up for the hefty issues the last few weeks, we’re moving one of my short and simple columns up a few weeks to give regular readers a break by way of the issue’s smaller size. We’re looking at the work of another of my favourite directors – specifically The Farrelly Brothers.
I know the Brothers have got a lot of “haters” but I, for one, am prepared to stand alone and declare them one of the freshest, most original directors in the field of comedy to date. In the same way John Landis provided an exciting comedic perspective in the late 70s and very early 80s before losing his way by the 90s, the Farrelly Brothers are the shot in the arm that the comedy genre very much needed.
As someone who works on a daily basis with people with severe or profound learning difficulties (or “retards” as Matt Dillon’s Healy in There’s Something About Mary would say!), I feel their film-work with people with such difficulties is awe-inducing and flies right in the face of the cinema-going public’s prejudices. It’s too easy to disregard this as “tokenism” to counter-act the politically-incorrect stuff that surrounds the rest of their movies. It’s not a case of that. By using people with learning difficulties in the way they do and using their films to highlight certain causes they’re tackling political correctness by way of political incorrectness. Sort of like coming back from a negative with a positive and vice versa.
They have taken what was once considered gross-out comedy touchstones and politically-incorrect-no-go-areas and threw them out, threw them around or just threw them in the face of the cinema-going public. Theirs is a style so fresh and unique that the greatest compliment lies in the slew of ‘copy-cats’ and inferior rip-offs that have followed in their wake. Many, many recent comedies try to be like a Farrelly Brothers movie. Only a Farrelly Brothers movie seems to succeed.
Of late, the Brothers have admittedly gone the way of ‘the Landis’ and started to simmer and cool. Although early word on this year’s remake of The Heartbreak Kid with Ben Stiller, suggests it is a huge return to form after a tepid ‘hack’ job on The Perfect Catch and rushed production/story duties on a whole host of one-note, stupid failed comedies that carry the weight of their names (Say It Isn’t So, The Ringer etc.).
With that last point in mind, this sub-section of DVDs from my collection is very much concentrated on their directorial work. Not the stuff they just throw out with their names attached as producers. This is the work of great re-writers, superbly deft directors and excellent examples of a brotherly directing team that could equal the Coens!
Dumb and Dumber
Quite simply one of the greatest comedies ever made! There I said it. Flame me down, I don’t care. I have seen this film well over a hundred times (sad, I know!) and I STILL laugh every time I watch it. I honestly believe that the film doesn’t age. Not a single gag in it appears dated and we’re like ten to fifteen years after its original release. The film (and pretty much all of the Farrelly’s output to be honest), for me, plays like – to steal an old friend of mine’s description of the Coen Brother’s films – “a dumb-arse flick for smart people”. I sound pretentious when I say this but this is a comedic masterpiece whereby your enjoyment depends on you getting the surreal stupidity of the joke(s) and not just the ‘stupid joke(s)’. Never has a decapitated budgie with his head sellotaped back on and sold to a blind boy or the mispronunciation of the word “The” engulfed me with such a heavy fit of the giggles. At the heart of the film, when you take away the deft scriptwriting job from the Brothers that spins the tired ‘road movie’ genre down a new route, the excellent direction (one of the strongest and most forgotten debut directorial jobs!) and the star turn by Jim Carrey on full throttle, what you have is one of the greatest comedic performances in screen history by a performer that has never done out-and-out comedy before: stand up Mr Jeff Daniels.Kingpin
Often regarded as the Brothers’ “difficult second movie”, I remember rushing to the cinema to see this based off the love I had for their first film (see above). I was just on the brink of 17 or 18, I think, when this film came out and I recall being a huge Bill Murray fan even back then. I was so pumped for this that I remember coming away from it crushingly disappointed – I thought it went on a good half hour too long and there was about 80% of the jokes that just flew over my head. Within 18 months I was revisiting it again out of boredom whilst away from home. Suddenly everything just started falling into place – the things that I hated originally (Randy Quaid and Vanessa Angel) I came to like, the things that I liked I came to love (Woody Harrelson and that soundtrack!) and the things that I loved I came to adore (Bill Murray!). The thing with Murray is that he’s an exciting ‘watch’ because you know that the directors he’s working with on a given project are restraining him slightly and your excitement with the likes of Caddyshack, Stripes, Ghostbusters and Groundhog Day lies in the fact that you wonder when he’s going to shake off the restraints and burst free. He constantly teeters on the edge but never really does. He’s just this straight-jacketed devil of sardonic, comedic genius. Here, with Kingpin, the Farrelly Brothers have decided to just unlock Murray, smack him about and stir him up and let him loose with no boundaries. As a result this is probably easily up there in the top three of funniest Bill Murray performances ever and very much the greatest case of scene-stealing that cinema has seen in a long time. A very, very, very much recommended hugely under-rated slice of comedy gold. You have to see this if you haven’t already!
Me, Myself and Irene
This is like the polar-opposite of Kingpin for me. I was out in Australia when this was released and I used to take great advantage of their being a 24-hour cinema in the Casino in Melbourne, by going to all the first showings of new movies at midnight. I had some great experiences (Pitch Black), some great experiences of some mediocre movies (Mission: Impossible 2) and some just out-right terrible experiences (Sandra Bullock in 28 Days anyone? Cuba Gooding Junior in Chill Factor? Come on now!). By this point, I was head over heels in love with the Farrelly Brothers work – Dumb and Dumber was a comedic masterpiece, Kingpin was a slice of slow-burning comedy genius and There’s Something About Mary was a masterclass in modern comedy story-telling. This time round they were telling the story of a Rhode Island police officer with split personality disorder who finds that each side of his personality falls in love with the same woman and a love triangle develops. Most exciting of all, they were reuniting with Jim Carrey. I was so looking forward to this film and when I saw it I laughed my arse off and rated it as the best comedy of the year. Then I counted down the days until its DVD release and recommended everybody I know pick up a copy. Watching it again disappointed me. I felt like the jokes didn’t stand up and the trio of ‘black sons’ were annoying and distracting rather then fresh and hilarious like I originally thought. Obviously the brilliant use of Chris Cooper, Richard Jenkins and Robert Forster still stands and Jim Carrey is very good in it (but raves about his “original” physical dexterity upon the film’s release should be placed in perspective alongside Steve Martin’s “original” performance some ten to fifteen years earlier in All of Me) but Renee Zellweger annoys and the film is unevenly stacked somewhat, with all the best jokes squashed into the first two acts and the third just seemingly on autopilot. I own it, like a lot of films on my shelf and in the director’s subsection specifically, out of a sense of completion. As is very much the case with…The Perfect Catch
It’s not that it’s a remake of a hit British rom-com. It’s not that it’s a film adaptation of a much loved British novel where they’ve taken the characters and settings and set them stateside, either. After all High Fidelity did that superbly well. It’s not that the script is unoriginal and paint-by-numbers in terms of its second act obligatory ‘break-up’ because we have to have the end of third act race-against-time-to-stop-the-one-they-love. It is all those things but at least there’s still some ‘sparkle’ there because this is Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel we’re talking about here! It’s not even the ‘hack’ direction from the Brothers either. They may well be on autopilot but they still manage to capture the infectious obsession with the Boston Red Soxs way better then the original director of the original source movie managed to capture the obsession with Arsenal. No, the problem is all in the leads. The film is watchable, relatively entertaining and – surprisingly (and maybe disappointingly) for a Farrelly Brothers film – inoffensive but it is also incredibly bland and totally uninvolving. That it is is all down to the lead performers; Drew Barrymore and Jimmy Fallon. I’m a big Saturday Night Live fan (prefer the early stuff to be frank!) and can see that Fallon has talent and has been responsible for a few guffaws from me here and there, but on screen he’s two for two, struck out, with me. With this and Taxi (another remake, funnily enough) he has proven hard to like and even harder to laugh with, which is as great a failing as you can get when you’re leading a comedy. Barrymore is whiny and annoying. I can usually by-pass her nasal speech pattern but here, every word grates. To know that the Brothers put their much-touted Three Stooges movie on hold for this makes you want to dislike this even more. It’s an easy viewing experience but an even easier film to be annoyed by!Shallow Hal
Classed as a flop due to it’s box office under-performance by Fox, much-maligned by the critical masses and often the second most forgotten out of the Brothers’ work, Shallow Hall is actually a really rather original, biting and very, very sweet comedy about something as simple as beauty being skin-deep. Like with Dumb and Dumber and Me, Myself and Irene, the Farrelly’s have taken a ‘concept’ script by another writer and delved into butchering and re-writing it… seemingly for the better! Having taken the comedy restraints off for Bill Murray in Kingpin, here they put them on tight with Jack Black and guide him into one of his most sweetly funny and heart-felt performances yet. This is the story of Hal (Black), a far-from-perfect guy who will only date physically perfect women. When a life-style guru hypnotises him into only seeing the inner beauty of women, Hal meets Rosemary (Gwyneth Paltrow – in a fat suit!), a morbidly obese woman who he only sees as a slim, beautiful blonde. Will true love prevail? Of course it will, even if the third act clunks under the weight (pardon the pun) of having to. Re-visit this on a bored Saturday night or a rainy Sunday afternoon. You’ll have a good time with it!Stuck on You
This film has appeared and disappeared from my collection more times then any other title. I buy it out of a sense of completion, get rid of it because I don’t like it and don’t find it funny. Then I miss not having it because I really dig the musical-Meryl-Streep-cameo at the end (sad, I know) so I’ll go out and buy the 99p copy from my local Choices UK store (plug! plug!) but then end up trading it when I’m putting a pile of DVDs together to shorten my collection. Now I’ve got it (again) and I’m keeping it because, despite the love-hate relationship that I have with Stuck on You, it’s starting to become more about love and less about hate. Kingpin was a slow-burner and Me, Myself and Irene was a slow-burner in reverse but this? God, its four years old and I’m only JUST starting to embrace it. Asides from Seymour Cassel’s hysterical cameo, I didn’t find much of this film funny. Don’t ask me why. Things that should have worked for me, didn’t and the things that did were in the minority and not enough to save the film. Then, and this is why I love this website so much, I got into an argument once about the Farrelly Brothers here in the ATBs. I love them. Someone else thought I was over-selling their schtick. Someone else joined the argument in my defence but, in the process, pushed the ‘hard word’ on me regarding this film. Originally planned as a “high concept” comedy for Jim Carrey and Woody Allen to star in (now how funny would THAT film have been?), I was told to look at the performances of Greg Kinnear and Matt Damon. Especially Damon. I was told that everything that was “great” about this film was all in their performances and how they were the “best” of the year. Well, that person was right. You watch this film and you concentrate on Kinnear and Damon and it is very much all about them. The film isn’t “great” and their performances weren’t the “best” of the year but the film DID deserve way more respect from me then I was giving it and I’ve come to really like it. The original problem is that because we like to pigeon-hole directors as being the one who does “twists” (M. Night Shymalan) or the one who does “crap” (Paul W. Anderson) that when the one’s we think do “outrageous and gross-comedy” decide to stack their film with more heart and less “outrageousness” or “grossness” we feel disappointed. I’m saying, in the case of this film, it’s wrong to feel short-changed.There’s Something About Mary
Probably the most well know of all of the Farrelly Brothers output and the style and tone of which they are alleged to be returning to with this year’s remake of Neil Simon’s The Heartbreak Kid with Ben Stiller. Yeah, it’s more famous for it’s dick-in-a-zipper and sperm-in-the-hair moments but, bypass all of that, and you’ve got a film, as outrageous as it is (and all the more original for it), that is both warm and funny and one of the most original romantic comedies of it’s genre. Working from a hugely re-written ‘base’ script from Ed Decter and John J. Strauss, the brothers have formed the multi-stranded story of an angst-ridden man called Ted (Ben Stiller) who hires a sleazy private-investigator (Matt Dillon) to hunt down Mary (Cameron Diaz), his high school crush, after thirteen years. As we’re all aware now, any male who sets his sights on Mary falls head-over-heels in love with her so what begins as a simple lie from the investigator to his client becomes a battle amongst a queue of men (including famous footballers, famous British comedians making it big stateside and famous character comedians doing their schtick) for the fair-hand of the lovely Mary. Like in Dumb and Dumber, the Farrelly Brothers have taken note that the real delight was in seeing someone not necessarily seen for his comedic abilities but front-and-centre in a broad comedy. It worked to a huge effect with Jeff Daniels in that film and the Brothers repeat the process here, placing Matt Dillon as the second male lead to comedian Ben Stiller and he all but walks away with the film. As highlighted in William Goldman’s Which Lie Did I Tell, There’s Something About Mary is not just a brilliant comedy at a performance level, the script is a masterclass in visual and verbal joke-telling. We’re coming up to the tenth anniversary of this film and it still plays like it was released yesterday. Like their first film, the Farrelly’s There’s Something About Mary doesn’t age. Not a single gag in it appears dated and we’re nearly ten after its original release. This is one of the greatest romantic comedies of the last thirty years – and best of all, it’s probably the best romantic comedy for people who hate romantic comedies. Every single film fan should own this film!Osmosis Jones
Probably the most forgotten of all of the Farrelly Brothers movies, having tanked in the US this was dumped straight to DVD here in the UK where the “cult” following hasn’t kicked off as well as the likes of Empire Magazine and myself had hoped for. Probably one of the most original and high-concept of film’s since, well, since Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the very film that it is easiest to compare to, Osmosis Jones is a mixture of live action and animation with the Farrelly’s handling the live action and Piet Kroon and Tom Sito handling the animation. The story is two-fold; Live action deals with Frank (Bill Murray), an unhygienic zoo keeper struggling to raise his daughter. When Frank gets into a ‘fight’ with a caged chimp over a pickled egg, he is infected with a virus known only as Thrax. From there we enter into the animation side (intermittently dropping back to the live action every now and again), where Thrax is voiced by Laurence Fisbourne and is hell-bent on spreading an epidemic of evil through the “City of” Frank and eventually shutting the whole “place” down. Here is where the true genius of the film lies and it has to be said that it has nothing to do with the Farrelly’s and everything to do with Marc Hyman’s superb screenplay, probably one of the smartest and most clever when it comes to punnery and visual gags. Hyman’s screenplay takes the animated side and turns it into a play on 80s buddy/cop movies – only within the human body! So we have a maverick, plays by his own rules, white blood cell cop called Osmosis Jones (voiced by Chris Rock) who is reluctantly partnered with a by-the-book cold-capsule ‘visitor’ called Drix (voiced by David Hyde Pierce) to take on Thrax and save Frank. I’ve got a huge soft spot for this film and just love its shear inventiveness. I have a whale of a time everytime I watch it but wholly acknowledge that the Farrelly’s input is probably the weakest thing about the movie. This is probably one of the most enormously under-rated family movies ever made. Definitely worth checking out!
And that’s my two-pennies worth on the DVDs off my shelf for this week! What’s your thoughts?
Questions, queries and quibbles can be directed to me over the multitude of issues of OFF THE SHELF in a variety of formats! You can e-mail me at:
undiscovered_genius@hotmail.comorgazz@stalepopcorn.co.uk
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www.myspace.com/gazzfromfilmrot(which will obviously be getting a slight name change over the coming weeks!)Or finally, you could just leave a comment below! 
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