Funny Movies
The following movies provide a perspective of looking at life through the eyes of humor. If it seems impossible to laugh about one's own unconscious behaviors, it is sometimes easier to laugh about the frailties of others. Next time life provides a similar opportunity, perhaps there is a chance to also laugh at yourself?!
You Kill Me
Black Humor
Frank Falenczyk (Ben Kingsley) is a hit man for his Polish mob family in Buffalo, New York. He has a drinking problem, and when he messes up a critical assignment that puts the family business in peril, his uncle Roman Krzeminski (Philip Baker Hall) sends him to San Francisco to clean up his act. He is forced to accept a job at a mortuary, and to go to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, where he confesses what job he has, and explains that he wants to get rid of his drinking problem because it affects his capability of properly killing people. He falls for Laurel Pearson (Téa Leoni), a quirky client he meets at the funeral home. Meanwhile, things aren't going well in Buffalo where an upstart Irish gang threatens the family business, and when violence erupts, Frank is forced to return home and with an unlikely assist from Laurel, faces old rivals on new terms.
You don't mess with the Zohan
The movie begins with Zohan Dvir (Adam Sandler), a Mossad agent, hanging around at the Tel Aviv beach, attracting several women and capturing the attention of every beach-goer with his Hacky Sack prowess including a clumsy Fizzy Bubelech drinker. Then the film goes to his vacation in Eilat where he cooks fish in the nude (using copious amounts of hummus) for himself, his friend and several women. His party favor, catching the fish between the cheeks of his butt. As he finishes cooking, an Israeli Defence Forces helicopter arrives, stealing him away from his presumed well-earned vacation...
Harold and Maude
Harold and Maude is a cult classic film directed by Hal Ashby in 1971. The film, featuring slapstick, dark humour, and existentialist drama, revolves around the exploits of a morbid young man – Harold (played by Bud Cort) – who drifts away from the life that his detached mother prescribes for him, as he develops a relationship with septuagenarian Maude (played by Ruth Gordon).
Monty Python’s Life of Brian
Brian Cohen is born in a stable a few doors from the one in which Jesus is born, a fact which initially confuses the three wise men who come to praise the future King of the Jews. They manage to put up with Brian's boorish mother Mandy until they realize their mistake. Brian grows up an idealistic young man who resents the continuing Roman occupation of Judea, even after learning his father was a Roman Centurion - Naughtius Maximus - who raped Brian's mother ("You mean; you were raped?", "Well, at first, yes"). While attending Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, he becomes infatuated with an attractive young female rebel, Judith. His desire for her and hatred for the Romans lead him to join the People's Front of Judea (PFJ), one of many factious and bickering separatist movements who spend more time fighting each other than the Romans. The group's cynical leader Reg gives Brian his first assignment: He must scrawl some graffiti on the wall of the governor's palace...
Die Girls von St. Trinian
St Trinian's is an anarchic school for uncontrollable girls. The film opens with meek and timid Annabelle Fritton, niece of the highly eccentric headmistress Miss Fritton, being admitted to the school. She meets Kelly, head girl, who shows her around the school and introduces the various cliques in the school - Posh Tottys (slang for gorgeous upper class girls), Chavs, Emos, Geeks and First Years. Annabelle has a rough first night in the school when her towel and dressing gown are taken from the shower and she is broadcast on the internet by the other girls while running naked from the shower to the dormitory. She phones her father and demands to be taken away from the school...
Step Brothers
Brennan Huff (Will Ferrell) is a sporadically employed thirty-nine-year-old loser who lives with his mother, Nancy (Mary Steenburgen). Dale Doback (John C.Reilly) is a terminally unemployed forty-year-old who lives with his father, Robert (Richard Jenkins). When Robert and Nancy get married and move in together, Brennan and Dale are forced to live with each other as step brothers. They immediately don't like each other. Dale warns Brennan not to touch his drum set. Later, Brennan plays on the drum set. Dale enters the room and notices a chip on one of his drumsticks and confronts Brennan about it. Brennan denies this and a fight breaks out between the two after Brennan vows and makes good on his promise to "rub my nutsack on your drumset"...
A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy
The plot revolves around a weekend party bringing together six people, loosely based on Ingmar Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night. This movie is notable for being the first of thirteen movies that Allen would make starring Mia Farrow. Farrow's role was originally written for another famous Allen lead actress, Diane Keaton, but she couldn't take the part because she was busy promoting her film Reds and preparing to begin production on the film Shoot the Moon. It also marks the first appearance of Woody Allen as an ensemble performer in his own film, as previously he had either been the lead character or did not appear in his films...
Happy-Go-Lucky
Poppy (Sally Hawkins) is a life-loving, irrepressibly cheerful, Pollyanna-type primary school teacher who is thirty years old, single, and infinitely optimistic and accepting. She lives with her best friend and flatmate Zoe (Alexis Zegerman) in London. She is tested by a repressed driving instructor with anger problems (Eddie Marsan), and tests him in turn. She has exciting flamenco lessons, an encounter with a homeless man, a row with her pregnant sister, and a love affair with the social worker guiding one of her students...
Shanghai Knights
The film opens in the Forbidden City in 1887, where Chon Lin (Fann Wong) is drinking tea with her father, the Keeper of the Imperial Seal of China. She tells him her brother, Chon Wang (Jackie Chan), is doing well as a sheriff in Carson City, Nevada, United States, but her father replies that he no longer has a son. At that moment, Lord Nelson Rathbone (Aidan Gillen), leads a band of Boxers into the city, who attack the Keeper. Lin defends her father, but is knocked unconscious. Rathbone kills him with a snake-handled dagger, and leaves with the seal. As he lies dying, he gives Chon Lin a puzzle box and a letter to Chon.
Back in the Wild West, Chon Wang is doing well as sheriff, having captured an impressive array of fugitives. His deputy is relaxing with a book called Roy O'Bannon Vs. The Mummy, a highly fictionalized account of the events of the first film that now portrays Wang's "Shanghai Kid" as a cowardly sidekick...
Along came Polly
Reuben Feffer (Stiller) is a friendly insurance actuary who, since his job involves analyzing risk for insurance purposes, likes living life in complete safety and free from any unnecessary risk. As the film opens, he is celebrating his wedding to Lisa Kramer (Messing), but promptly catches her making out on their honeymoon with a French scuba instructor (Azaria). When he returns he meets Polly Prince an extroverted former classmate (Aniston)at an art gallery he was asked to by best friend Sandy. Sandy appeared in a film when he was a teenager, and now thinks himself a big star. Sandy asks Reuben to leave because he "sharted", they say goodbye to Polly and the next day Reuben tells Sandy hes going to move on and ask Polly on a date. The two engage in a match against two other men in which Sandy tells Reuben that Polly would not be right for him because she has a tattoo and is nothing like when they were in 7th grade. At the end of the night he calls Polly but hangs up, she calls back and before he can stop it, his answering machine announces his name. Reuben then detours near Polly's apartment where he catches her coming home, and pretending he didn't see her, he then lies that his answering machine has been malfunctioning and calling people on its own...
Rabbit without ears
(Keinohrhasen )
Ludo Decker is a Berlin based yellow press reporter. With his photographer Moritz, his daily routine is to spy on celebrities for the tabloid Das Blatt. He also uses his work for frequent sexual contacts with his objects of interest.
When heavyweight boxer and celebrity Wladimir Klitschko is about to toast his fiancee Yvonne Catterfeld at their engagement party, Ludo and Moritz are on the scene to report about it. Ludo breaks through a glass dome of the party venue, falls into the cake and is subsequently sentenced to 300 hours of community service at a daycare center...
Green Card
The plot involves George Faure (Depardieu), a Frenchman who has been offered a job in the United States, and Brontë Parrish (MacDowell), a horticulturist. They initially form a marriage purely for convenience, because George needs to obtain a green card in order to start his job, while Bronte learns that only married couples are allowed to be tenants in the apartment complex she desires (it has a greenhouse).
George moves in with Bronte, and they begin to act like a married couple in order to fool the interviewers from Immigration who are investigating the legitimacy of their marriage. During the course of their trials, they end up falling in love...
Crazy People
Crazy People is a 1990 movie starring Dudley Moore as a burnt out advertising executive whose mental breakdown lands him in a psychiatric hospital. With time on his hands, the man quickly recovers his mental health and is inspired to make truthful advertisements, such as in an ad for Volvo, which proclaims "Buy Volvos. They're boxy but they're good." In the sanitarium he falls in love with Kathy (Daryl Hannah), a fellow patient, and transforms the place into a branch of the advertising industry, where other mental patients come up with wild, often funny advertising slogans, like "Forget Paris. Come to Greece. We're nicer," for a Greek travel agency and "Come... in the Bahamas" for the island nation's national tourism board, or for the movie The Freak, "It won't just scare you, it will fuck you up for life!"...
Monsieur Hulot's Holiday
Les Vacances follows the adventures of a lovable French dimwit, Monsieur Hulot (played by Tati himself) as he spends the mandatory August vacation at a beach resort. The film openly lampoons several hidebound elements of French political and economic classes, from chubby capitalists and rabid Marxists to petty proprietors and drab dilettantes, most of whom find it nearly impossible, even temporarily, to free themselves from their rigid social roles in order to relax and enjoy life. Les Vacances also gently mocks the confidence of postwar Western society in the primacy of work over leisure and the value of complex technology over simple pleasures, themes that would resurface in his later films.
Little Miss Sunshine
Sheryl Hoover (Toni Collette) is an overworked mother of two living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her brother, Frank (Steve Carell), is a scholar of French author Proust and a homosexual, temporarily living at home with the family after having attempted suicide. Sheryl's husband Richard (Greg Kinnear) is a Type A personality striving to build a career as a motivational speaker and life coach. Dwayne (Paul Dano), Sheryl's son from a previous marriage, is a Nietzsche-reading teenager who has taken a vow of silence until he can accomplish his dream of becoming a test pilot. Richard's foulmouthed father, Edwin (Alan Arkin), recently evicted from a retirement home for snorting heroin, lives with the family; he is close to his seven-year-old granddaughter Olive (Abigail Breslin).
The Birdcage
Val Goldman (Futterman) and Barbara Keeley (Flockhart) are engaged to be married, and have decided to have their families meet. Val's father, Armand Goldman (Williams), owns The Birdcage, a South Beach gay club. His lover is Albert (Lane), who appears regularly as "Starina," the show's star drag queen. Barbara's father, however, is ultraconservative Republican Ohio Senator Kevin Keeley (Hackman), co-founder of the right-wing "Coalition for Moral Order" and up for re-election this year.
Fearing their reaction if they learn the truth about Val's parents, Barbara tells her parents that Armand is a cultural attaché to Greece, that Albert is both a woman and a housewife, and that they divide their time between Greece and Florida; she also changes the family's last name from Goldman to Coleman to hide their Jewish background...
The Waterboy
Adam Sandler plays Bobby Boucher (pronounced "Boo-SHAY"), a socially inept (but also intelligent), stuttering, water boy with anger issues due to constant teasing and his mother's (Kathy Bates) excessive sheltering. He was the water boy for the fictitious University of Louisiana Cougars (a name and mascot bearing a strong resemblance to the Louisiana State University Tigers) for the past 18 years (he joined sometime around the 1980-81 season), but the players tormented him, and the team's head coach, Coach Red Beaulieu, (Jerry Reed) fired him for disrupting his team's practices. His attempt to become the new waterboy of his favorite wrestler, Captain Insano (Paul Wight, aka The Big Show), fails because he reveals that he is in fact 31 years old. As a result, Captain Insano and the TV presenter laugh and Bobby hangs up before they can answer...
The Wedding Crashers
Single bachelors and longtime friends, John Beckwith and Jeremy Grey are business partners in divorce mediation in Washington D.C.. The friends frequently "crash" wedding parties to meet women, working from a set of rules taught to them by a past ‘crasher,’ Chazz. The duo always have cover stories for inquisitive guests and inevitably become the hit of every reception, to charm their way into the hearts of ladies at the wedding for one night only.
The Golden Child
In an unknown location in Tibet, a young boy with mystical abilities, the Golden Child, receives badges of honor and demonstrates his power by reviving a dead bird, which is to become a constant companion. However, a band of villains led by a mysterious man (Sardo Numspa) breaks into the hidden temple, slaughters the monks and takes the boy away.
Some time afterwards, a young woman named Kee Nang watches a Los Angeles TV show in which Chandler Jarrell, a social worker who engages in finding missing children, appears and tries to present his latest case (a missing girl named Cheryll Mosley) over the host's prattling. She seeks him out the next day and openly informs him of the kidnapping of the Golden Child and that he is the 'Chosen One' who would recover it from the hands of evil. Jovial and worldly as he considers himself, Chandler does not take this seriously, even after the appearance of the astral form of the Child and his bird familiar following Chandler everywhere he goes, but he is instantly taken with Kee Nang and constantly tries to flirt with her...
Drop Dead Fred
Elizabeth "Lizzie" Cronin (Phoebe Cates) is a repressed young woman (with "wallflower" tendencies) who lets others walk all over her. One day she loses her money, her car, her job, and her husband within the same lunch hour. Following this turn of events, Lizzie's domineering mother Polly (Marsha Mason) forces her to return and live in her childhood home.
Returning to her old bedroom, Lizzie finds a taped-up jack-in-the-box in the cupboard. She opens it and releases Drop Dead Fred (Rik Mayall): her imaginary friend from childhood, whom only Lizzie can see. Through a series of flashbacks it is revealed that as a child, Lizzie was tormented by the overbearing Polly, who drove away Lizzie's father Nigel. It was Fred alone who made Lizzie happy and gave her an outlet for her frustrations, though Fred was a troublemaker who wreaked havoc wherever he went, always shifting the blame to Lizzie for his tricks. Fred was eventually sealed in the jack-in-the-box by Polly. Upon being released by an adult Lizzie, he is disappointed that she has grown up and lost her zest for life...
Failure to Launch
The movie opens with Tripp (Matthew McConaughey) and Melissa (Katheryn Winnick) on a dinner date. Things seem to be going well, until Melissa sees an elderly couple sharing dinner and it prompts her to ask Tripp, "Where is our relationship going?" Tripp says that he sees it going back to his place that night. His place is a lovely two-story home. While they're in the heat of passion in Tripp's bedroom, Tripp's dad Al (Terry Bradshaw) walks in without knocking. Melissa, as well as being embarrassed by Al introducing himself and shaking hands with her while she's holding the covers up over herself, is angry that Tripp still hasn't moved out from his parents' house, and storms out. Tripp doesn't seem too upset about it. Al, and Tripp's mom Sue (Kathy Bates), are shown listening to her leave as if it's a common occurrence...
40 Days and 40 Nights
Matt is obsessed with his ex-girlfriend, Nicole (Vinessa Shaw), though it's been six months since she broke up with him. His obsession makes it impossible for him to have relationships with other women. Matt confides to his brother John (Adam Trese), a priest-in-training, that he has sexual problems because of his obsession. Realizing that Lent is about to start, Matt tells John that he's going to do without sex for 40 days and 40 nights. This, he concludes, will force him to get over Nicole and cure his problem. John warns Matt that celibacy is not easy...
Clockwise
The film centres on Brian Stimpson (played by Cleese), the successful but obsessive headmaster of Thomas Tompion comprehensive school. Having been habitually late and disorganised as a young man, he has grown up to become famously punctual, and his school runs 'like clockwork'. On the way to a Headmasters' Conference (to which he has been elected, for his school is a state school and the HMC is a trade association for fee-paying public schools) at which he is a speaker many misfortunes befall him and his ordered world begins to unwind in a way reminiscent of Greek tragedy. A Morris 1100 car, similar to the Austin 1300 beaten with a stick by Cleese in Fawlty Towers episode 'Gourmet Night', plays a key role in the plot of this film...
Bean: The Ultimate Disaster Movie
Mr. Bean, a hopeless caretaker at the "Royal National Gallery", London, is sent by his employers, who wish to get rid of him, to America under the pseudonym of "Dr. Bean" to oversee the transfer of Whistler's Mother to a Los Angeles art gallery. Once at the airport, he is surprised to see policemen with guns and pretends he himself has one. He ends up being arrested by Lieutenant Brutus.
Once released, he meets David Langley, an employee of the Grierson art gallery, and David's family, with whom Bean is to stay for his visit. Despite winning the affection of David's son (played by Andrew Lawrence), David's wife is hostile about having to look after him, while David's rebellious teenage daughter finds Bean "ugly as Meat Loaf's butt". His wife later leaves after Bean breaks a family heirloom while fiddling with a CD player...
As Good as It Gets
Melvin Udall is a successful novelist with a brash and abrasive personality who suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder. He insists on sitting at the same table at the same restaurant each day, much to the chagrin of Carol (Helen Hunt), the main waitress who waits on him.
Melvin works from home, and often uses anti-gay remarks to berate his neighbor Simon Bishop, a painter who is often seen with his little dog Verdell, which Melvin dislikes.
Simon is robbed and severely beaten in his apartment. He survives, but has no health insurance for his medical bills. Suddenly broke, he is forced to lay off his housekeeper and also faces the loss of his apartment. His agent Frank (Cuba Gooding, Jr.) pressures Melvin to look after Verdell. Melvin grows fond of the dog...
What About Bob?
When Dr. Leo Marvin, (Richard Dreyfuss) a trained psychiatrist, goes on vacation in New Hampshire, he leaves his new patient, Bob Wiley (Bill Murray), on his own with a copy of Marvin's latest book, "Baby Steps." Bob is a very nice man, but he's nearly paralyzed by multiple phobias and his last psychiatrist, Dr. Carswell Fendsterwald (driven to the brink of a nervous breakdown) is quitting his practice and leaving town to get away from Bob. This, combined with the audience's knowledge that a number of therapists have dropped Bob, foreshadow future events, though not in the way one would expect...
Liar Liar
Fletcher Reede (Carrey) is a particularly career-focused lawyer and divorced father. He has a habit of giving precedence to his job, breaking promises to his young son Max, and then lying to both Max and his ex-wife Audrey about the real reason for having done so. Ultimately, Fletcher misses his son's birthday party, whereupon Max wishes while blowing out his cake candles that his father be unable to lie for an entire day; a wish that immediately becomes true...
The Ex
In Manhattan, Sofia (Amanda Peet) is an attorney, and Tom (Zach Braff) is a cook who has a hard time holding a job. When their first child is born, they agree that she'll be a full-time mom and he'll get a promotion. When he gets fired, he takes a job in Ohio working at the ad agency where her father is assistant director. Tom's assigned to report to Chip, a competitive, hard-driving guy who's in a wheelchair and who's Sofia's ex-boyfriend - from high school. Chip still carries a torch for her, so he connives to make Tom's work life miserable. As Tom's frustrations mount, it may be that Sofia will take Chip's side. Is Tom doomed to fail yet again, and lose his wife to Chip?
Idiocracy
A narrator explains that natural selection is indifferent to intelligence, so that in a society in which intelligence is systematically debased, stupid people easily out-breed the intelligent, creating, over the course of five centuries, an irremediably dysfunctional society. Demographic superiority favours those least likely to advance society.[1] Consequently, the children of the educated élites are drowned in a sea of sexually promiscuous, illiterate, alcoholic, proletarian peers...
The Pacifier
U.S. Navy SEAL Lieutenant Shane Wolfe (Vin Diesel) is assigned to rescue Howard Plummer, a man working on a top-secret government project, from a group of Serbian rebels. Wolfe and his team manage to get Plummer off an enemy boat; moments later, Wolfe and Plummer are shot while boarding the escape helicopter. Plummer is killed in the attack. Wolfe spends two months in the hospital. Wolfe's commanding officer, Captain Bill Fawcett (Chris Potter), is assigned to escort Plummer's widow Julie (Faith Ford) to Zurich, where a safety-deposit box belonging to the Plummers has been discovered. Wolfe is assigned to stay at the Plummer residence to search for the secret project called GHOST, hidden somewhere in the house, and to look after the family's five children: Zoe (Brittany Snow), Seth (Max Thieriot), Lulu (Morgan York), Peter (Logan and Keegan Hoover), and Baby Tyler (Bo and Luke Vink)...
Latest
Read about the transforming power of man's sexuality when experienced with an attitude of surrender...
Breathe in, breathe out, but let it be love coming in, going out...