You need to be particularly hard up for gentle, mindless entertainment to find refuge in these Blondie movies. In a certain way, they and their radioshow brethren set the stage for nearly all situation comedies on TeeVee.
I cannot recommend any of them, except for those that have a good joke or two in them.
This one does. Oh, the story: the couple go back to college while baby is in military school. They pretend to be single and each get entangled in affairs. Ho hum.
The joke worth seeing has them in class. Etymology. The professor must be a vaudevillian who does what we see for a living.
He mixes stodgy phrases that we can just barely make out and some of these are erudite with incomprehensible blather. In a way, its similar to what Chris Cooper does with W. Bush in "Silver City." But here it is snappy and much funnier.
The pacing of when he comes in and out of the glossolalia is the funny thing. He knows just how to catch us with a portion of a phrase and when to leave us hanging. Its amazing comedy, skilled stuff that I think owes a lot to similar rhythms that Shakespeare uses when he moves from reality to metaphor.
Dagwood and Blondie look at each other in reaction. Its perfect. So much of humor, especially in movies, is of people too dumb to understand the language. Black characters were prime targets in that era for being dumped on. Here, the target is us.
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.
I cannot recommend any of them, except for those that have a good joke or two in them.
This one does. Oh, the story: the couple go back to college while baby is in military school. They pretend to be single and each get entangled in affairs. Ho hum.
The joke worth seeing has them in class. Etymology. The professor must be a vaudevillian who does what we see for a living.
He mixes stodgy phrases that we can just barely make out and some of these are erudite with incomprehensible blather. In a way, its similar to what Chris Cooper does with W. Bush in "Silver City." But here it is snappy and much funnier.
The pacing of when he comes in and out of the glossolalia is the funny thing. He knows just how to catch us with a portion of a phrase and when to leave us hanging. Its amazing comedy, skilled stuff that I think owes a lot to similar rhythms that Shakespeare uses when he moves from reality to metaphor.
Dagwood and Blondie look at each other in reaction. Its perfect. So much of humor, especially in movies, is of people too dumb to understand the language. Black characters were prime targets in that era for being dumped on. Here, the target is us.
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.