Comedies, as a rule, do not age well. Good comedies are plagarized endlessly until nobody laughs at the gags because they’ve already seen them on The Simpsons, and if not, simply become dated as senses of humour shift. Bad comedies are just bad and remain bad. It takes a truly timeless comedy to remain funny decades later - A Night At The Opera, Some Like It Hot, A Shot In The Dark, Animal House - and they are few and far between.

However, comedies, over time, can transform. The Apartment, for example, hasn’t aged particularly well in terms of its humour, but its romantic aspect is strong enough that now it works better as a lighthearted, clever romance (as opposed to a laugher with a romantic plot). For most comedies, this is the eventual goal: redefinition into another genre or success on grounds other than the pure hilarity they can’t, for whatever reason, manage.

The Man In The White Suit, made in 1951, is an excellent example of a comedy redefining itself as time passes. Modern audiences, honestly, won’t find it particularly funny - but it’s smart, and engaging, and clever.

The story of the film is that of an inventor named Sidney Stratton, played by Alec Guiness (yes, that Alec Guiness - he started out as a comedic lead). Sidney is obsessed with a mysterious discovery, so much so that his demeanour at times becomes almost sinister as he pursues his goal. Eventually we learn that Sidney’s plan is to invent a superstrong fabric that never wears out and repels dirt. And one day, he finally does it - and promptly has a white suit (he can’t figure out how to make the fabric hold dye) made from the fabric. (Which he has to cut with a blowtorch.)

All of this would prove decent enough comic fodder, but the reason The Man In The White Suit works is because everybody in the movie except for Sidney has an admirable degree of common sense as regards their own livelihoods. The textile mill owners want Sidney’s invention suppressed because they can’t make enough money off suits that never wear out. The textile mill workers want Sidney’s invention suppressed because they realize once everybody has enough clothes made from the new fabric, they’ll all be out of work. (This actually leads to one of the best plot developments in the movie, as Sidney desperately manages to escape from the owners holding him hostage only to be caught by the workers, who think the owners are going to screw them - until everybody realizes what page everybody else is on.)

Guiness plays Sidney perfectly, a near-Aspergin’ level of obsession and lack of social experience without any hint of malice or bad manners; for most of the movie Sidney honestly hasn’t any idea why everybody is so panicked about his invention. He’s focused on the big picture: when everybody has indestructible clothes, Life Will Be Better. And in the long run he’s right, of course, but nobody is going to be comforted by the long run and he can’t understand that, and Guiness brilliantly makes it obvious that his lack of understanding has nothing to do with arrogance or stupidity but simple innocence.

So thus we have a movie, originally a comedy, but now far more of a low-tech sci-fi movie, or alternately a parable about progress and science; it works on both levels. The performances remain intelligent and nuanced, the story remains engaging. It’s just not as funny as people once found it, and the ending doesn’t quite match the tone a modern viewer will find in it (although it’s not completely off, either). But that doesn’t mean it’s not still relevant, in its way.

One thing movies tend to do for the most part really badly is portray realistic geniuses. I mean geniuses, not just smart people. The people whose brains run on different tracks. Almost uniformly these characters get slotted into two tracks: the comic relief nerd (Egon in Ghostbusters) or the crazy savant (for example, the horrifically bad A Beautiful Mind). Worst of all is the tortured genius genre, wherein the filmmakers take pains to make sure we all understand how tortured the genius in question is, merely because he’s a genius. How persecuted a genius must be!

Zero Effect is that rare accomplishment: a movie about a tortured genius that avoids cliche, easy answers, and mawkish sentimentalism. It’s also very entertaining on a quiet, subtle scale; the dialogue crackles and the plot is brilliant. It also manages to portray the fact of being a genius in an original, compelling way.

Darryl Zero (Bill Pullman) is the aforementioned genius - the “world’s greatest private detective,” but for real. He apes certain trappings of Sherlock Holmes (naming his cases with ostentatious names like The Case Of The Man With The Nonexistent Suitcases), but he’s also an emotional wreck - agoraphobic, obsessive-compulsive and with social skills that are poor. But - and this is wonderful - over the course of the movie it becomes apparent that he is these things not because he is a genius, but because like everyone else on the planet, he is fucked up in his own way.

A “before he got real famous and annoying”-era Ben Stiller plays Zero’s Archie Goodwin analogue, Steve Arlo. Steve hates his job, but remains loyal to his boss even as he realizes he has to quit, and assists Zero in handling the case. It’s a good dramatic performance by Stiller, who can actually act when he wants to do that. (Which, because he is rich thanks to mugging like a jackass, is not often. But frankly, if I were rich thanks to mugging like a jackass, I would do the same thing.)

Arlo, on behalf of Zero, is contacted by a rich man named Stark (Ryan O’Neal at his sleazy best). Stark is being blackmailed, and wants the blackmailer found. That’s the mystery, and it absolutely ruins the movie if I tell you how Zero solves it or how it plays out - but I assure you, the payoff is excellent and the process utterly engaging.

But this isn’t just a mystery; it’s also a story about a guy who is fucked up trying to unfuck himself a little. Zero begins this process when, in the course of his investigation, he meets Gloria (the superlative Kim Dickens, who went on to play the magnificent Joanie Stubbs in Deadwood and nowadays occasionally shows up as the mother of Sawyer’s kid in Lost), an enigmatic EMT with obvious smarts. It spoils nothing to say that Gloria ends up being involved in the mystery to an extent (I mean, come on), but how she is involved and the ramifications of her interactions with Zero are fascinating to watch.

This is a difficult post to write because the process of watching this movie is half the fun; it’s just well-written on a scale that’s amazing, every performance is just about perfect and the direction by Jake Kasdan is competent enough to know not to get in the way. As I write this, I want to explain how the follow-the-money sequence brilliantly shows, rather than tells, how great a genius Darryl Zero is (and does so with a narrative voiceover, normally the bane of evocative filmmaking). But if I did, that would ruin it.

So you’ll just have to trust me on this one.

Another film that got overlooked in theatres, and although most who have seen it sing its praises (and given the subject matter that is kind of a bad pun), it still hasn’t found the audience it rightly deserves on DVD as of yet. Right now it’s mostly a cult flick.

Saved is an excellent film about the troubling and fascinating power of faith, which takes very little for granted. As such, predictably, conservative Christian movie review sites hate it. The movie is a liberal one, but it is most certainly not an antireligious film; its conclusion lies firmly in the pro-faith side of the argument. I personally think this is part of the reason it fell under the radar - its target audience of tolerant faithful, while much larger than anybody gives it credit for, is not nearly so outspoken as the conservative religious and liberal non-religious camps.

It’s a movie with a number of nuanced performances, all uniformly excellent. Mandy Moore started off her penchant for playing hilarious psycho bitches with this movie. Her Hilary Faye is a terrific villain, but not unsympathetic - her nervousness and obvious lack of self-generated self-esteem turn what could have been a total cariacature into a compelling downward spiral. She might be bad, but she’s never one-note and she’s always understandable.

Jena “was Ellen Page before Ellen Page was Ellen Page” Malone plays the lead - a devout girl who becomes pregnant as a result of trying to “cure” her gay boyfriend’s homosexuality. She’s excellent - watching her faith shatter, then reform on her own terms is fascinating. When she hits bottom and stares at a church and just starts swearing, daring God to strike her down for blasphemy, it’s both sad and at the same time slightly funny. She’s not any good at blasphemy, so she just utters a few basic swear words like they’re the text of the Necronomicon, but Malone makes it work and then some. You can feel her devastation thoroughly.

The rest of the cast are uniformly terrific. Macaulay Culkin - of all people - contributes a gentle, understated and clever performance as Hilary Faye’s crippled brother. Patrick Fugit (who, I am informed by girls I have seen this movie with, has grown up all dreamy-like since Almost Famous) plays Malone’s love interest, a returning missionary who rides a moped. Heather Matarazzo (Welcome to the Dollhouse) contributes a brief turn as Hilary Faye’s lackey. Martin Donovan’s conflicted Father Ted is well done, and Mary-Louise Parker (whom I will watch in anything) is fantastic as Malone’s mother.

It’s a damned good movie, and a reclamation of religious faith for liberal values; the two are not incompatible and anyone who says different is simply wrong. And it’s funny. Especially when Mandy Moore runs Jesus over.

When 24 first debuted, everybody was making a huge deal about it being a story told in real time (well, except for Keifer Sutherland never having to go to the bathroom or anything like that), because it was, in fairness, something of a novelty.

Mostly because nobody had seen Nick of Time. It absolutely bombed in theatres and didn’t do much better on home video, which is a shame because it’s a really good little thriller which nowadays should be something that gets more notoriety, seeing as how it stars Johnny Depp at a point after Depp was a name but slightly before Depp became a bona fide leading man for action movies.

And it has Christopher Walken as the crazy-ass bad guy. This is good Walken, the sort of Walken role where in addition to being some variety of kooky there’s also weight to the role. All too frequently, Walken’s oft-stated tendency to take absolutely any script that comes his way in order for the paycheque comes to the fore: consider Balls of Fury, Domino, Click, or Man of the Year (and that’s just the lowlights of the last three years). However, every so often Walken gets to be in a decent movie where he can be heartwarmingly off-kilter (Hairspray, Catch Me If You Can) or freaky and otherworldly (The Prophecy, Sleepy Hollow), or, at best, terrifyingly and criminally strange (True Romance, Things To Do In Denver When You’re Dead).

In Nick of Time, Walken gets to be a completely amoral mercenary who likes to tell stories. I am sure your appetite is now whetted.

The plot of Nick of Time is quite simple, if contrived: Walken, representative of a shadowy conspiracy, selects Depp at the train station when he sees Depp with his young daughter to kill the Governor of California (a totally awesome Marsha Mason). Walken and his partner (played with equal badassedness by Roma Maffia) take the girl hostage. If, in ninety minutes, the Governor isn’t dead (with the gun they give him), they kill his daughter.

It’s a ridiculous premise, of course, but director John Badham (who these days, after having directed classics like Saturday Night Fever and WarGames, is apparently just directing episodes of second-tier television programs, sad to say) plays it absolutely straight and never lets the viewer lose suspension of disbelief - making sure that clocks are near-constantly in frame to remind the audience that time is ticking away (and the fact that the movie is in real time just reinforces the tension), regularly framing the action through video cameras (held by operatives of the shadowy conspiracy, who plan to use the tape of Depp running around looking frantic and nervous as proof that he was clearly a crazed assassin), and using the narrow halls of the hotel where practically the entire film takes place as befits the paranoid feeling of the film.

The dialogue between Depp and Walken crackles; Depp plays desperate straight man to Walken’s crazy rant master. And although the plot is ludicrous, the payoff at the end is tight with not an ounce of narrative flab. Plus, you get to cheer for Charles S. Dutton, and who wouldn’t want to cheer for Roc?

At one point, a long time ago, Dabney Coleman was the king shit.

You have to understand that at this time, Dabney Coleman was the definition of irascible authority figure. If you needed a tough bastard who deep down (often very very deep down) had a heart of gold, Dabney Coleman was your first and only choice. (Well, unless Howard Hesseman was available, but let’s face it, Howard Hesseman carries with him a streak of anti-authoritarianism that sometimes fails to work in establishment roles.)

But sometimes, you gotta stretch a bit.

Cloak and Dagger is perhaps one of the biggest stretches of all time in another sense, seeing as how it is loosely - very, very loosely - themed around the Atari arcade game of the same name. You might be thinking that making a movie after a popular game is no big deal, what with this being the era of Doom and Resident Evil and presumably other video game movies, possibly some of which don’t even have zombies in them. However, again, I feel the need to stress that this was an Atari video game, and it’s not like they made a movie out of Asteroids or Donkey Kong.

Wait, they made Super Mario Brothers, and that’s kind of like a Donkey Kong movie. I retract my previous statement.

Regardless. Considering that the Cloak and Dagger videogame did not, as such, have a plot, the screenwriters basically went apeshit and put the actual video game in the movie as a plot element, using it to smuggle important spy document sorts of things. Henry Thomas (Elliot in E.T.) stars as the kid hero who daydreams of being a super-spy, adventuring alongside his hero, super-spy (and star of both roleplaying game and video game) Jack Flack. And of course, his ludicrous adventures turn awry when he actually stumbles upon a real spy conspiracy - and of course nobody believes him.

And Coleman - Coleman plays a double role, and it’s a brilliant turn - as both the boy’s father and as his fantasy of Jack Flack. The two roles play off each other perfectly, the sober responsibility of the father contrasting in just about every way with Ideal Boyhood Companion (and pretty much insane) Flack; Coleman switches roles easily and smoothly, never letting Flack and Dad coincide, even for a moment - which works out perfectly when Flack turns out to be, unsurprisingly, pretty much useless for anything serious and Dad has to go full-on enraged papa bear to save his son from the actual real terrorists.

It’s an excellent family movie, and one of the few good family-appropriate thrillers extant period. (It’s not exactly a genre that gets a lot of play, after all.) It’s exciting on its own merits, frequently a little bit scary (and I am a firm believer that there is nothing wrong with family movies being a bit scary). And it has Dabney Coleman in it. What more could you ask?

Sherlock Holmes does not get enough movie love, these days.

I’m not sure when it happened, but at some point Sherlock Holmes, one of the most fantastically cinematic characters there is, got relegated to television. The lengthy Jeremy Brett series The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes likely had something to do with it, simply because it was such a good television show and so perfectly realized that it almost seemed to make further adaptations of the classic Holmes stories pointless. (After all, the series managed to neatly adapt practically all of the original Holmes stories.)

There’s also the continuing fear of making new Holmes stories, not least because the original Sherlock Holmes stories are so elegantly written; the mystery genre is, to this day, largely defined by the rules set out by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, even if he never actually intended to create rules for mystery writing in the first place. And if you’re going to write a mystery story, it becomes more intimidating to write one using Sherlock Holmes, because his fanbase, to this day, remains quite enthusiastic - and judgemental.

Even so, that’s no excuse. More Holmes movies are needed. But, in the meantime, there are two excellent and largely underrated flicks for Holmes fans to enjoy, both evading the “but I can’t imitate Conan Doyle” trap by twisting the concept as they saw fit to create a new type of story.

Without A Clue goes for a comedic take on the Holmes saga, with a very simple premise: Watson is the actual genius. The film actually mirrors a lot of real-life publisher’s intrigue surrounding Holmes: Conan Doyle based the Sherlock Holmes character on a police physician (Dr. Joseph Bell - there’s actually a very good BBC mystery series called Murder Rooms about Bell solving mysteries, with Conan Doyle in the Watson role). Further, Conan Doyle, like Watson in this movie, grew heartily sick of Sherlock Holmes and tried to get rid of him.Of course, Conan Doyle just tried to kill him off in a story. Watson (played by Ben Kingsley, who is awesome in just about everything he has ever been in) has a more difficult trick: due to originally wanting to solve the mysteries incognito (which he’s gotten past, not least because he’s realized how lucrative the private detecting business can be), he hired a drunken stage actor named Reginald Kincaid (Michael Caine, who is, as always, Michael fucking Caine) to play the Holmes role. Finally, Watson loses his temper and fires Kincaid, but - whoops - nobody wants to read about “John Watson - the Crime Doctor!” So he reluctantly rehires Kincaid for one last go-around, and of course this turns into a fantastic adventure.

It’s hilarious and exciting both, in equal measures (the final action sequence, in a burning theatre, is really fantastic considering it’s a couple of British guys in their 50s doing all the stunt work), and although the film suffers part way through for having Kingsley offscreen for an extended period (and it’s a shame, because when Caine and Kingsley are tossing lines at one another like exploding popcorn, it’s almost unparalleled great fun), when he storms back triumphantly it’s just all the better. And Caine is of course himself in full fetter, playing the type of role he plays best - a working-class lad trying to pretend he’s classier than he is. As a bonus, Jeffrey Jones plays Lestrade, and Jeffrey Jones is hilarious in everything.

Young Sherlock Holmes goes a wholly different way, one that was somewhat controversial among Holmes fans - it’s a swashbuckling adventure flick rather than a pure mystery, and Holmes’ detective skills, while evident, aren’t nearly so important to the story as his ability with a rapier. Answering the never-asked-but-why-not question of “what if Holmes and Watson met when they were in school” with “well, clearly they would investigate a murderous cult,” the film is nowadays frequently reduced to being the answer to a trivia question. (”What film had the first totally computer-generated character?”)

It deserves better. Young Sherlock Holmes is burdened unfairly in a number of ways, not least being the fact that the bad guys are a cult (one of those things that never really seems to click with audiences in movies). Alan Cox as Young Watson is, perhaps, somewhat overwhelmed by the role. And maybe a little more detectoring would have been in order, considering it’s a Sherlock Holmes movie in title if nothing else. (Admittedly, the film’s ending makes it clear that Holmes’ experiences over the course of the story teach him to value deductive logic and discipline above all else, so it’s not incorrectly used - but it still feels a bit incongruous.)

But its strengths greatly outweigh the minuses. The action sequences are excellent, the plot well-thought-out (it was written by Chris Columbus, of all people). The villains are excellent and genuinely freakish when they need to be, and the hallucinogenic sequences are scary in all the right ways. The comedic bits don’t detract from the story in the slightest (and in a movie like this one, where the desire to break the fourth wall is almost palpable, that’s a great thing). Best of all, the central romantic relationship between Nicholas Rowe’s Holmes and Sophie Ward as Elizabeth is excellent; both young actors are very talented and play their roles near-perfectly.

Both films are great, but they can’t give us what we truly crave, which is more original Holmes flicks in the classic mold. But, until such time as somebody makes a new one, they do quite nicely.

Beautiful Girls is something of a rarity, because it is a guy movie.

By this, I do not mean it is an action movie, which for some reason has become the accepted definition of “guy movie,” despite the fact that women can enjoy a good action movie just as well as men can. (Men, to be fair, are probably better at enjoying shitty action movies. Eighteen million opening gross for Rambo, baby!) It doesn’t mean “stupid gross-out comedy” either - thankfully, society’s notions of gender have evolved to the point where a boy fucking a pie is considered hilarious entertainment for both sexes, and honestly, aren’t we all slightly better for that?

No, Beautiful Girls (the best film in the fine and too-short career of the late Ted Demme) is a guy movie in that it is the equivalent of a “bonding”-style chick flick, except instead of being about women, it is about men. This is a dreadfully rare commodity in Hollywood; Diner and About A Boy are probably the only other two major entrants in the field, and the latter is also about single parenting and the definition of family, so let’s say it only counts as half. The simple truth is that, at some point, Hollywood decided - and probably not entirely without justification - that movies about men confronting their fears and anxieties, men bullshitting, and men being, well, guys, were not box office mojo in the working. So this is a rare example of it.

And it’s a good example, of men supposedly in their prime, their early thirties - and societally, we’re all conditioned to accept that men in their early thirties to mid-forties are expected to take the lead in any problematic situations, there has been science done on this and everything, trust me - and, like most men in their early thirties, not really happy about it. In your early thirties, you’re not definitively not a kid any more, you’re an adult - but oftentimes, you still don’t know what you’re doing with your life, where you’re going; and if you’re very, very lucky, maybe you understand women a bit.

Willie (Timothy Hutton), a piano player, comes home early to his small hometown for his high school reunion, his girlfriend (Annabeth Gish) due to arrive a couple of days later. His brother Mo (Noah Emmerich) is (mostly) happily married. His best friend Tommy (Matt Dillon) plows snow and landscapes for a living, and relives his high school football glory days by cheating on his girlfriend (Mira Sorvino) with his former head cheerleader (Lauren Holly). Paul (Michael Rapaport) is trying to fix his relationship with Jan (Martha Plimpton).

Floating around these guys are Max Perlich as “the sidekick,” Pruitt Taylor Vince as “the other friend done good,” Uma Thurman as “the unattainable dream girl,” and Rosie O’Donnell as, well, mostly herself really, but this was long before she got annoying, back when she still did excellent standup. All of these performances are excellent; Emmerich allows his calm, placid demeanour to occasionally reflect the anxiety every dad who doesn’t understand why he’s a dad already, Holly’s brittle exterior lets us see her need to not just become another suburban wife, and Hutton’s everyman character is universal without being generic.

And then, on a whole other level, there is Natalie Portman, playing an intelligent, nigh-luminous thirteen-year-old girl named Marty, who immediately develops a deep (but, do not worry, PG-rated) relationship with Willie. The script and Portman’s performance play this absolutely right; Willie laments (and you can understand why) that he’s actually jealous of some punk 13-year-old kid because that kid gets to be thirteen at the same time as Marty - and it’s obvious that Marty is equally jealous of Willie’s girlfriend for exactly the same reason in reverse. Every time Portman is on screen, the sense that there’s this amazing life ahead of Marty is strong without ever being forced or obvious. This could have been a plotline that wrecked this movie, simply because the temptation to eroticize it for shock value would be obvious, but it’s played respectfully and intelligently throughout - although Willie and Marty both wish things were different, they just aren’t. And they have to deal with that.

This is a movie about guys being guys. About guys playing video games (and cheating when their friend’s back is turned), about guys getting drunk and having a singalong, about guys stupidly not understanding that they have a good thing going with a given girl, about guys not understanding when they’ve fucked up a thing with a given girl for good, about guys swearing at each other, about guys having a tendency to want to fight things out to solve them even when they know it’s stupid and won’t help, about guys thinking with their dick and about guys managing to not think with their dick, about guys wanting to live the dream and about guys learning to settle for a pretty good thing instead. And you should see it. Because it’s pretty damn good.

The Frighteners. Six years or so ago, it was slightly more obscure, but those movies with the hobbits in them mean that Peter Jackson’s earlier movies have received more attention. Of course, most of that attention went to Heavenly Creatures, which is excellent and deserves it and that’s all right, but The Frighteners is a pretty goddamned solid movie in its own right, and just right for Halloween viewing (hence this post, you see).

In its way, The Frighteners is delightful. Yes, it’s a bit uneven, starting out as an off-kilter supernatural comedy then shifting to a horror flick and finally culminating in balls-out sci-fantasy action. But it’s good comedy followed by good horror followed by good action, so if it’s uneven in tone it never really varies in quality, and the special effects are just choice to boot, the entire way through.

This is one of Michael J. Fox’s last onscreen film roles before he permanently migrated to television and the occasional voice-acting job, and it’s worth noting just how fucking good an actor Fox is, not just as a comedian (and during the funny parts of this movie, his timing remains as choice as ever), but as a dramatic actor too and even as a believable action star in the “normal guy forced to crank it up” ouevre of action. Fox just has chops a mile deep. It’s uncanny how talented he was in his prime, and a further reminder of how much Parkinson’s Disease really goddamn sucks ass.

Fox of course completely commits to the role of Frank Bannister, a man with deep emotional scars who can see the dead (and uses it for personal gain in the least satisfying of ways). But he’s matched by a cast that commits to their roles in turn. Trini Alvarado, whose career never really took off - and that’s a shame, because she pairs up Andie McDowell-esque looks with the actual acting talent Andie McDowell never had - works the love-interest/co-hero mode excellently, and her contributions to the final fight scene are wholly exciting. Chi McBride shows up (really, once I type the words “Chi McBride” you know at least part of whatever I’m talking about will be good) along with John Astin as an elderly ghost, and I am not quite sure how that works particularly. (Along with a lot of the other elements in this movie - The Frighteners is a movie that requires wholesale commitment from the viewer and a willingness to think things like “well, ghosts, that’s why” a lot.) Jake Busey’s crazy-ass baddie is just fantastic - utterly psychotic and well worthy of his eventual ghostly asskicking - and yes, he really is the spitting image of his dad, and all the moreso in this flick. And Jeffrey Combs’ crazy-ass FBI agent (there is a lot of crazy in this movie, but it mostly works because a movie that is about people who deal with ghosts should be weird as all get out) is hilarious.

And, again, it’s Peter Jackson, and that means one thing: inventive visual genius married to an action sense that equals top-notch entertainment for all concerned. Well, not all, maybe, because this is a movie where a guy’s head explodes and rotting things fall apart at times. But if you like that, or at least can get past it, then by all means, catch this.

P.S. Go with the director’s cut, which adds both fifteen extra minutes and 150 percent better flow in the action sequences. Trust me on this one: Peter Jackson films are always more coherent in the director’s edits.

I have taken, in my time, a lot of grief for unapologetically loving Posse. I am not sure as to why.

It certainly can’t be because the movie isn’t entertaining. With a wealth of excellent performances from Mario Van Peebles, Big Daddy Kane, Tiny Lister, Billy Zane (as the crazy evil white dude) and Stephen Baldwin (as the crazy good white dude) and many others - including the usual Peebles brigade of former blaxploitation stars, this time around casting Pam Grier, Isaac Hayes and Peebles’ father Melvin - the acting in this Western is definitely up to snuff. (Amusing: current Black Panther writer Reginald Hudlin shows up as an extra.) The action sequences are excellent (as can be expected from Peebles’s direction), and the plot is perfectly decent. Okay, maybe the bits with the golden bullets are a touch melodramatic, but they also add a pleasant larger-than-life, mythic aspect to the movie.

Plus - and this cannot be underrated - the movie addresses a major complaint I have with Westerns, which is to say their whiteness. There were a lot of black people headed west during the post-Civil-War period, but in just about every Western movie you find a dearth of black people - short of Morgan Freeman’s turn in Unforgiven I’m hard-pressed to think of any offhand. This sort of thing is forgivable in earlier westerns like High Noon, but it’s something that continued way longer than it should have; even when movies like Silverado and Tombstone had token Mexicans (mostly because sloppy-looking banditos in sombreros with guns are a staple of the Western, for good or ill), there was always a conspicuous lack of black people. And that is lame.

Some have criticized Posse for being an overreaction to this, in the “oh so you’re not going to have black people in your Westerns well I’ll make a Western with all black people, how do you like them apples” variety. They have a tiny bit of a point, but given the cinematic situation with westerns and blacks, it’s not a very big point, and moreover it’s just plain harping considering that Posse isn’t just cinematic affirmative action but a damned entertaining movie in its own right. When Stephen Baldwin’s crazy white boy points out, quite reasonably, that “I ain’t ever personally enslaved nobody,” Peebles gives him ups that the argument doesn’t necessarily even deserve. That’s because Peebles, in addition to writing a damn fine oater, also wants to be fairminded.

But so what if he is? This is a movie with black cowboys quoting poetry and Scripture while they shoot the bad guys, with Stephen Baldwin throwing knives at people (this long predates Stephen Baldwin’s born-again phase, for those wondering), and Billy Zane wearing an eyepatch because he is EEEEEEVIL. It is good goddamned fun. I can understand not liking Westerns as a genre, because not everybody likes cowboys. But if you do like Westerns, why you would not like Posse is beyond me.

Brain Donors is one of those movies that I routinely inflict upon my friends. Unlike other overlooked movies I have previously mentioned, Brain Donors is not necessarily a movie everybody will love. Because Brain Donors can be explained in one simple sentence: it is a remake of a Marx Brothers movie with a young John Turturro in the Groucho Marx role.

“No?” Flakfizer doesn’t know the MEANING of the word “No!” We’re also a little fuzzy on “panaglutin” and “viscosity.” Actually, come to think, everybody should love Brain Donors precisely because it is a remake of a Marx Brothers movie (specifically A Night At The Opera, their finest, except with ballet instead of opera) with John Turturro in the Groucho role. And let me assure you that Turturro is full-on manic in what I consider to be his finest pure comedic performance ever. Yes, better than any Coen brothers film he’s ever been in. Yes, better than his freak turn in Transformers, where he was the best thing about a pretty marginal movie. As Roland T. Flakfizer (Brain Donors enthusiastically embraces the silly-name traditions of the Marxes), Turturro chews up the scenery then regurgitates it as cud to digest later. “Charity work. I gather these for those less fortunate than myself who can’t afford pornography.” Still, the Groucho role is only one of three in a Marx flick, and luckily Turturro has compatriots as game as he is: Bob Nelson, a more-or-less unknown standup comedian, takes on the Harpo role with exceptional gameness (and turns out to be a splendid physical comedian), and Mel Smith turns the Chico role from Italian-American to illegal-British-immigrant, matching Turturro word-for-word in often-dizzying dialogue. “I could make love to you right here.”
“Roland, let’s keep this professional!”
“Fine, I’ll charge you fifty bucks a pop.” Brain Donors is old-school, a finely-tuned romp with an enthusiastic love of silliness for silliness’ sake. Every single element of this movie is dialed up to eleven (except for Turturro’s performance, which I would estimate to be dialed up to around thirty-six). And the best thing is that it builds, and builds, and builds, starting with Turturro chasing an ambulance (literally) and slapping an inflatable rotator cuff on an opportunistic little kid while encouraging said kid to sue his parents (”I sued mine!”), and ending with one of the funniest extended sequences in film comedy ever, a twenty-minute sequence with the three numbskull-heroes deliberately sabotaging a performance of Swan Lake so that the evil ballet dancer (yes, there’s an evil ballet dancer) and the evil rich guy get their horrible comeuppances. “And that spells cash with a capital…”
“K!”
“You should go back to school.”
“I hated teaching.” I won’t pretend that Brain Donors is going to be everybody’s cup of tea; even a modernized take on the Marx Brothers isn’t going to appeal to everybody no matter how much I think it should. But it has John Turturro shooting at a large man in a duck costume onstage in the middle of a ballet, and if loving that is wrong then I don’t want to be right.