Jimmy Stewart stars as the befuddled old coot trying to cope with his crazy family for a month on the Pacific coast. This mostly unfunny comedy mines all the expected areas of the whole “can’t stand my family, but I love them anyway” school of film with results that are generally less than tepid. Jimmy’s character, Roger Hobbs, endures his children’s various problems while coping with the run down house they’re staying at, but manages to solve all their marital, employment, and self esteem issues with remarkable ease by the time he has to pack everyone back up to St. Louis. Read More

If this movie let me down at all, it was that there simply weren’t enough misadventures detailed, though even the filmmakers would acknowledge this and immediately respond to American’s insatiable appetite for pointless experiments involving chimps and long-suffering girlfriends by serving up a sequel, The Monkey’s Uncle, only a year later. Read More

This is one of the gimpier offerings from William Powell and Myrna Loy, a pair known for their sophisticated brand of comedy that triumphed in such fare as The Thin Man and Libeled Lady. Double Wedding is one of those zany screwball comedies where a wacky guy and an uptight gal have to overcome their natural inclinations to be wacky and uptight before they can admit what we all knew going into things: that they’re really, truly, madly, deeply, in love. Read More

This a fun movie with four of Hollywood’s great talents firing on all cylinders. Spencer Tracy plays newspaper editor Walter Haggerty. He’s a fast talking, muckraking kind of guy who finds himself in a tight spot when he gets called in to work on his wedding day! His London correspondent has filed a story that socialite Connie Allenbury (Myrna Loy) was involved in some type of husband-stealing, home-wrecking, affair. The paper later figures out that this story is false and Haggerty immediately tells everyone that it was obvious their reporter was wasted when he phoned in the story! Read More

You can have Dr. Seuss’s If I Ran the Zoo with its totally made up monsters, exotic lands, and that praise-craving brat Gerald McGrew. If I ran a freaking zoo, I’d do it just like Mitch Collins (Hal Holbrook) did in Wacky Zoo of Morgan City with its run down and surely dangerous and inhumane cages, toothless lion that has low blood pressure and eats oatmeal, camel who can only eat a couple of carrots at a time due to digestive issues, and penguin who demands to swim in warm water. Read More

The first words on the screen were “Presented by R.I. Diculous.” A few more of these “wacky” credits followed confirming my suspicions that I was in for one of those most painful of movie going experiences: the bad movie that tries to be so bad that it’s funny. Read More

Cary Grant is coasting on the type of auto-pilot that only a guy who’s been in more classics than any other actor could, while Ingrid Bergman vainly attempts to get us to care about her co-dependent theater actress character whose startlingly lack of self-respect is equaled only by her stunningly bad taste in clothes. Read More

Time was, this country was one great big expansive opportunity to do whatever a person wanted to. There weren’t any rules and quotas set up by feminists, liberals, and activist judges because Big Government knew what was best for you. You needed to drive all over the upper Midwest during the summer to sell real estate and leave your kid at home by himself? Knock yourself out, bub! Just make sure you bring a big ass turkey home for Thanksgiving! Read More

Things begin a bit ominously with the appearance of a narrator whose chief distinguishing characteristic is his horrendously bad old-guy make up. Not to be outdone by his make-up, the “actor” wearing it, affects a putrid old-guy accent and begins telling us the story of the gardener at a girls’ school. Read More

Would it be a really lazy gimmick if I tried to be funny by appropriating the overbaked hipster slang the hot rodding kids used in this film and declared it to be “the ginchiest?” Sure, I’ve always been one to take my crate out and race for pink slips, but these hot chewers were the mostest! Lest, you think I’m exaggerating the lengths this movie went to get inside the head of modern (well, 1959 modern that is) kids who love to make poker runs in their tricked out muscle sleds, the movie finishes with these words on the screen: The Endest Man. Read More