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Tag Archives: Comedy
Trading Places Exemplifies the Eighties Class Comedy, for Better and for Worse
There’s something about class conflicts that lend themselves well to comedy. The snobs vs. slobs dynamic has been a venerable strain of humor on the silver screen, especially in the eighties, and Trading Places aims to take advantage of that. It presents Dan Aykroyd as a snooty stuffed shirt named Louis Winthorpe and Eddie Murphy as a street-wise hustler named Billy Ray Valentine. As I discussed on the Serial Fanaticist Podcast, Having the otherwise disparate worlds of these two men collide is a sound, time-tested recipe to wring some laughs out of the contrast between the well-heeled and the worn-heeled.
Posted in Classic Films, Movies
Tagged 1980s Movies, Comedy, Dan Aykroyd, Eddie Murphy, Movie Reviews
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Black Monday Styles, Snorts, and Saunters Its Way Onto Television
It’s 1986, and Mo Monroe (Don Cheadle) is the coke-snorting, name-dropping, robo-butler-boasting head of his own rough-and-tumble Wall Street firm. Alongside his equally profane but effective lieutenants, Dawn (Regina Hall) and Keith (Paul Scheer), Mo is literally kicking in the doors of the New York financial scene, trying to use his ostentatious, unorthodox style to help his upstart firm keep up with the big boys. A chance encounter brings him face-to-face with Blair Pfaff (Andrew Rannells), a newly minted, squeaky-clean business school grad with an algorithm that could revolutionize the trading floor. What none of them know is that one year later, they’ll all be a part of the worst stock market crash in Wall Street history. That day of financial disaster, dubbed Black Monday, lends the title to this comedy series, which offers rapid-fire humor, an impeccable cast, and boundless style.
Posted in Other Sitcoms, Television
Tagged Comedy, Don Cheadle, TV Reviews, Wall Street
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Groundhog Day at 25: Bill Murray Finds Freedom While Trapped in a Nightmare
It’s easy to think of science fiction and fantasy films in terms of their trappings, whether that be spaceships and lasers or swords and sorcery. But at their best, works in that genre aren’t about light speed or magic powers; they’re about thought experiments made whole, meant to probe the real world through a fictional one and to examine the human condition by stripping away the bounds of the impossible and seeing how much humanity is left.
That’s a lofty way to introduce an uproariously funny, Bill Murray-fronted comedy. But seen from that vantage point, Groundhog Day may be the sci-fi/fantasy film of the decade (with all due respect to The Matrix), despite its small-town setting and distinct lack of spells or space flights, because it uses its fantastical conceit to reveal what could, and what does, make us good.
Posted in Classic Films, Movies
Tagged Bill Murray, Comedy, Existentialism, Groundhog Day, Harold Ramis, Movie Reviews
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