November 24th, 1944 (four films remain)

Hoh boy... here we go again.  Well, it was World War II, and no one fought the Japanese harder than the Three Stooges, a close second to the Allied troops.  Time for one called No Dough Boys.

ACT ONE

We start with supermodels Moe, Lawrence and Curly at a photo shoot.  You can tell because they're posing, and because of a box that says "Commercial Photographer" on it.  Government regulations were much more crippling on photographers back then.  There's some high-jinks in between photos... it's all just too exhausting to relate.  Photographer John Tyrell has to intervene as the hitting stops and the shouting begins.  Tyrell gets a phone call, and the Stooges go over and watch.  Haven't they seen a phone before?  The boys make fun of Tyrell, and the dusty old phone gag is used once again.  "QUIET, YOU IDIOTS!... no sir, I don't mean you.  I mean, these other idiots!..."  Hopefully, I won't have to do much more thinking than that.
Then, the plot gets ugly.  Tyrell goes on break, and orders the Stooges to take a 15 minute lunch... phooey.  I gotta post everything on YouTube myself!  Apparently, the boys are portraying Japanese soldiers in this photo shoot, and Tyrell kindly asks them to leave their uniforms on.  What could go wrong?
Moe and Larry complain to themselves while Curly takes a lit cigarette out of his case.  Time for Moe to go to work.  Moe points to a sign, but to no avail.  Curly's been going to night school to get that law degree in case showbiz doesn't work out!  Moe resorts to removing the cigarette by force.  Curly resorts to his pre-lit cigar.  Moe resorts to force a second time.  Curly's got a third and fourth back-up plan.  I was going to say that this is the part that stretches out the film, but I'm starting to lose it.  I'd LOL but I'm in the computer lab and it'd be rude.  Then it just gets creepy, as we're all forced to observe about things today.  Personally, I think Stan Laurel did it better... but I don't remember where right now.  Let's see if the web remembers!  ...after about five minutes of looking, it seems to be Block-Heads.  Man, I'm exhausted!
Next scene: a WWII headline in the paper, being held by a café worker.  The café worker walks away, and the Stooges go to a table.  They're in their Japanese soldier outfits, and they start stuffing their mouths with bread... I see where they're going!  Clever!  See, they start talking with their mouths full of bread, and their grain-muffled speech makes them sound Japanese.  On top of being dressed like Japanese soldiers, the café worker springs into action, bashing them over the heads with a tray.  Larry gets the worst of it.  It's in his contract.  Curly and Moe chase the waiter into the kitchen.  Moe gets hit by the door.  Curly gets a faceful of mashed potatoes and ends up looking like... Santa Claus?  My P.C. detector isn't picking up any racial stereotypes on that one.  Curly throws the mashed potatoes back and hits the waiter.  The waiter wipes off his face and approaches Curly... dude, that dude's pissed.  Hmm!  Looks like Red Skelton.  Moe and Larry come to and join Curly in the kitchen, only to get punched in the face.  Curly saves the day with his stomach, bumping the waiter and sending him ass-first onto the hot stove.  This scares the Stooges and they flee through the back exit.  The guy cools his third-degree burnt ass in a big bucket of water, then he makes a phone call, remembering the threat to national security.  First things first.
Back to the Stooges in the alley.  The boys laugh and wonder what was "eating" that guy.  Moe realizes why.  Then, they laugh again.  Then they engage in possibly the weakest plot device ever used in any movie EVER.  But it's the Stooges, so we forgive them.  If this were an Andy Clyde short, it'd be the highlight.

ACT TWO

The boys fall through a door into the next room... a hotel lobby, perhaps?  They must've been very VERY short on sets that week.  The boys pretend to search for the outlines of the door they just fell through, and go back about their business of creating mayhem wherever they go.  Enter Nazi in chief Vernon Dent from Stage Right.  Vernon says "Heil Hitler!" to the three Japanese soldier Stooges, and shows them the paper we saw earlier.  Upon closer inspection, we see the smaller headline about three Japanese soldiers escaping from said submarine.  Moe says... well, one of them says "Quick!  Let's act like Japs."  Now the fun begins.
Vernon introduces the Stooges to the ladies, one of which is the always fetching Christine McIntyre.  As a character named Celia Zweiback, she's well-bred indeed!
Vernon says "Care for some refreshments?"  Ah, the elements that make up a Stooge film.  Most of them are in place here.  The three of them running over to a table full of food is perhaps the most common staple.  The two bipartite groups do some whispering.  We learn that Vernon is wise to what's going on: he's only half a dummy in this one.  All are waiting for the real Japanese soldiers to show up.  I'm betting they're the same guys from The Yoke's on Me.
Ever the instigator, McIntyre ups the ante by asking Curly "Remember Berlin and your acrobatic act?"  We get a nice big close-up of Curly's makeup.  They've gone all out on the makeup on this one!  That's what I get for watching this on YouTube.  Then the girls ask for a demonstration of jiujitsu.  The boys demure at first, but then launch into it.  Larry throws one of the girls across the room, and she lands ass-first into a comfy chair.  Larry's accent sounds more like a bad Arnold Schwarzenegger impression than Japanese, but why quibble about details?  Moe throws the tall chick towards a sofa with a sewing kit and prominently placed extra-large extra-sharp knitting needles on it.  This short's just chock-a-block full of subcontracted Stooges!
Now, seeing as how this is a Jules White short, McIntyre has to engage in some messy slapstick.  Curly tries to demonstrate some jiujitsu on her, but she's a bit more prepared than the other two.  She spins a Curly dummy around several times and throws it.  Kewl!  Just in time for the Olympics!  Curly ends up with his head in the wall.  As it turns out, Curly's super-strong saw-destroying head has made it outside, and there's a bird pecking at his head.  The audio doesn't seem to match what Curly's saying.  Moe and Larry go over to help.  The bird flies away.  Curly tries the ol' back-and-forth on Moe, but Moe ignores it this time!!  He points Stage Left, and Curly obliges.  Vernon comes back into the fold, asking "What is los here?"  Christine brings up the acrobatic act thing again, and Vernon wants to see it.  Larry the supplicant tries to say that they're out of practice.  "Forget routine!"  Vernon answers "Japanese never forget.  DO THE ROUTINE!"  Christine tells Curly to do the "foot-to-foot" routine, but Curly says he'd rather dance cheek to cheek, then does some dancing, topped off with a big vulgar hip thrust.  You might want to skip that part for the sake of the younger children in the audience.  Moe calls another conference.  "Yaki, Waki... come back-i."  I don't get it.  Moe tells the other two that they have to do something to stall the Nazis, and... why don't they just do the acrobatic act they were doing LAST NIGHT?  Damn you, time stretchers!!!!
The lame-ass "acrobatics" begin.  They throw napkins, and link arms and legs twice.  Larry tries a somersault but doesn't quite land it.  Curly goes into his chicken-with-no-head dance, and all three end up walking backwards on the floor... this has to be the saddest thing I've ever seen.  Their second act takes a slightly more confrontational tone.  At one point, Moe kicks Curly in the stomach, hopefully not too hard.  Curly hits Moe with his stomach in retaliation.  The kerchief throwing begins again.  Curly takes a cue from Harpo Marx and throws the kerchief to the floor, only to have it bounce back.  So that's where the budget went!  All involved dwell on this surprising moment for a few seconds, then Curly blows his nose, making a horn noise, and delighting all.
There's more!  Curly breaks Larry's arms, and a Larry stunt double enters the fray to do an actual flip.  A Curly stunt double does a flip, and ends up sitting on Moe's (stunt double's) face.  You might want to skip that part as well for the sake of the younger children in the audience.

ACT THREE

Might as well start Act Three here.  Completely under their own spell now, the Stooges think they're acrobats, and Moe starts pitching the big final number.  If it doesn't go right, several of them might die!  Curly and Moe fight over who's the top man.  Slowly they turn to Larry.  It's official.  Curly and Moe start.  The stunt doubles do the hard part first, but then we get a shot of Moe actually standing on Curly's shoulders!  Some credit is due for that one.  Then, Larry tries to complete the triple-deckering of the Stooges and brings the whole house of cards quickly down.  Cut to the "Nazis" who wince with disappointment.  They try a finale that's a little more modest, and they make a simple stack of Stooges on all fours instead.  They end up screwing that one up as well, but the Nazis fake being impressed.  Then, the phone rings, and Vernon exits.  At this point, rather than chatting up the babes, Moe heads for the refreshment table, where Curly puts his mouth on the seltzer bottle nozzle.  Such lack of manners.  Moe and Curly enjoy a brief awkward silence as Curly thinks what to do next. Ah!  He's got it!  He does the hand back and forth routine... and THIS time it works.  Moe looks up and leaves himself vulnerable to a spray from the seltzer bottle... they wouldn't be washing their makeup off, would they?  And when is it Larry's turn?
Next scene: Vernon is with the three actual Japanese soldiers.  After filming, they were promptly returned to the internment camp they came from, of course.  Anyway, the jig is up, and Vernon orders the three Japanese soldiers to grab the Stooges.  A mighty struggle ensues.  The big cake on the table will not go to waste, fortunately for us, and it ends up in Vernon's face.  Larry and Curly handle the three Japanese soldiers with two seltzer bottles.  Whew.  Typing "the three Japanese soldiers" over and over is a mouthful.  If only there were a shorter phrase I could use...
... and then, Curly cuts the lights.  That's actually a pretty smart technique, strategy-wise and film-making wise, but Cannery Row never cuts corners, and they film fresh black background for every film, no matter how low down on the totem pole it is.  The lights are out for about five seconds until Moe turns them on again.  The lights come on instantly, and one of the actual Japanese is hanging from the ceiling fan.  Larry's duking it out with Vernon Dent, and Curly has to fight the other two Japanese.  Moe turns off the lights this time.  The lights go out for about eleven seconds this time.  There's more scuffling, a gunshot or two, and then we hear Larry getting hit over and over.  Curly turns on the lights this time, and we see Moe slamming Larry against the hard floor over and over again.  Moe chastises Larry for being "in my hands" and the lights go out for a third time.  We hear Curly triumphantly saying "Hey!  Turn on the lights!  I got TWO of 'em!  I'm bashing their heads."  Gee, I wonder who Curly's got.  This time, one of the Japanese soldiers turns on the lights... as you would expect, of course.  Moe's tongue is hanging out.  The Japanese soldier who turned on the lights turns them back off again.  The lights come back on, and we see Curly filling a Japanese soldier's mouth with seltzer.  Seltzer's coming out of the Japanese soldier's ears.  It's too good for him, I tells ya!  Too good.  Vernon runs over and kicks Curly in the ass.  Moe's stunt double leaps up in the air and throttles Vernon.  Larry turns off the lights for the twentieth and final time... the lights come back on and we see Moe and Curly ripping Vernon's clothes off.  Good Lord.  This one's not for children of any age.  We see that Vernon's wearing swastika-laden underwear.  Vernon gets hit in the stomach, and over the head with a globe that's not filled with flour.  That would be too painful!

EPILOGUE

Moe points to Vernon's underwear... near the chest area... and says "Is zat not a swastika?"  Larry and Curly say "Ya, zat is a swastika!"  Moe asks "Is zat not a dirty rat?"  Larry and Curly say "Ya, zat IS a dirty rat!"  So THAT'S where that's from!  I guess the moral of the story is, sometimes you gotta stay undercover.  You know, like Bruce Willis at the beginning of Mercury Rising... am I the only one?  I thought so.

***
-so sayeth The Movie Hooligan

An Outbreak of Soderbergh Fever

"What's the greatest outbreak movie?" the question was posed.  Arguably, there's not that many.  How often anymore do we get to see a map with something in red spreading all over it?  Twelve Monkeys, to an extent.  Then of course there's Robert Wise's The Andromeda Strain, except that it's so old and, worse, antequated!  For some reason, Ivan Reitman's 2001 flick Evolution comes to mind, if only because David Duchovny's stunt double shows his ass.  And of course we do get a map with alien invaders spreading out all over the place, if memory serves.  Memory will just have to do, as I'm in no hurry to re-rent it.  And of course, there's the map in The Simpsons' Halloween episode from Season 14, first story: Send in the Clones featuring a map of multiplying Homer clones, even though there's only one origin point: (spoiler alert) that damn hammock. 
And so, we get Steven Soderbergh's 2011 film Contagion shot on digital video, I'm assuming.  It looked pretty streak free, actually.  Kudos, Peter Andrews!  Yes, it's the Ocean's Eleven of killer virus movies, but without George Clooney.  Their relationship with Christopher Nolan must've really stuck after Insomnia, because we've got two Batman people here: one future (Marion Cotillard) and one past (Lau, from The Dark Knight)
The plot.  We see various interconnecting stories of various people who are adversely affected by a global outbreak of a brand new virus.  Matt Damon plays the genetic Chosen One whose wife and son aren't as lucky.  Jude Law plays a Drudge-esque blogger... but without those politics.  Maybe he's more like Daily Kos or Huffington Post, except he's quasi-corporate.  He's got a lot of followers, apparently, and an inside track to defeating the virus the natural way.  For me, though, and probably for a lot of casting agents out there, Jennifer Ehle, daughter of Rosemary Harris, is the breakout star here, so to speak, as the dedicated scientist Dr. Ally Hextall.  She's got a nerdy sounding name, for God's sake!  How could she be anything but a dedicated scientist?  There's also Laurence Fishburne, far from the heroic Morpheus he once played so long ago.  Can't a brother get some respect here?  He plays a Colin Powell-esque politician who works for the CDC, or something... he's high up, that's all you need to know.  He has a debate with Jude Law with CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta.  Apparently, these things are taken seriously if they don't go well.
The virus spreads, and some moderately budgeted indie film hell breaks loose.  Kidnappings, houses broken into, a visual homage to Schindler's List where we see flashes of gunshot light in far-off windows.  And, SPOILER ALERT... Kate Winslet's character ends up dying from the virus!  My viewing companions felt sorry for her.  I cynically thought she was going for a second Oscar.  Guess it didn't work out, so now I feel sorry for her too, damn it.
I was afraid for a moment that Soderbergh was going to abandon his non-linear style here, but generally the story was much stronger with the linear style... until the end.  Thank God!  More spoilers: at the end of the film, we see the virus' hasty origins.  Was I the only one who nostalgically recalled the ending of Critters 1?  I thought so.  How about the beginning of Arachnophobia?  Similar hastiness there, if I recall correctly.  Speaking of hastiness, on to Soderbergh's next film............................................................

***
-so sayeth The Movie Hooligan

Auteur Watch - Frank and Irwin Yablans

Okay, okay... you got me.  Maybe they're not auteurs, but they're brothers!  What's the first name that comes up when you watch Silver Streak?  Yablans, bitches!  Silver Streak.  Now there's a movie that's remake proof... never mind.

Still 'Batman'

Once again, Christopher Nolan's latest superhero movie makes the box office its bitch.  Can he work similar wonders with Superman?  Of course, he's only producing it, but if it's PG-13 he must've seriously reigned in obnoxious director Zack Snyder.  Anyway, The Dark Knight Rises just recouped its production costs.  Filming in America ain't cheap!  Who dares challenge the Dark Knight's supremacy?  Ben Stiller's Men in Black with swears?  Puh-leeze... that got beat by Step Up: Revolution.  What else is new this week?  I still have to wait for IMDb to post the results.  According to Variety, the Olympics and the tragic Colorado shooting are dampening the box office, but it could still make a comeback.  It's the end of the trilogy, for God's sake!

The end of a mighty trilogy... for now

SPOILER ALERT: It's only every once in a while when a franchise like Christopher Nolan's "Batman" gets this kind of goodwill behind it.  These days, maybe every once every couple of years.  The last clearest example would have to be the Lord of the Rings trilogy.  2003 was an especially interesting year, given all the films seemingly piggybacking on LOTR's use of giant crowds.  Matrix 2 and 3, Terminator 3, Looney Tunes: Back in Action (...am I the only one?  I thought so) and Cold Mountain are just a few of the epics that seemed to be building up to Return of the King's release.  The Dark Knight Rises, for all intents and purposes, is all alone this summer.  After seeing the movie, I guess what I'm trying to say is... I'm a tad underwhelmed.  But my ears are still ringing after seeing it in IMAX.
But here's the one spoiler I want to give away: in all the publicity, we get that shot of a cityscape, where the buildings outline the shape of the Batman symbol, and another one where the Bat symbol is on fire.  At the beginning of the movie, the symbol is formed out of cracking ice!  GENIUS!!!!!  And I'm being completely serious.  If only similar attention to detail was paid to the rest of... ah, skip it.
---
Needless to say, my picky viewing companion was much more critical... or maybe not.  In a way, I kinda wish I didn't watch Batman Begins before going into this one.  I saw Liam Neeson wearing a mask and Boom!  It explained a lot of Bane.  In further comparing the Batman trilogy with the Lord of the Rings trilogy, I glibly think of The Two Towers, the middle installment of LOTR, as the weak one.  The Batman trilogy is the opposite, as its bookends are the weak ones.  I don't know why, but the Joker one is the best, maybe because we don't even see the bat cave in that one.  There seems to be The Curse of the Bat Cave at work.
I think I'm finally dulled to the effects of ultra-layered movies such as this, starting with The Sixth Sense.  I probably won't be watching The Dark Knight Rises again until it comes out on video, mostly because I'm broke and running out of time.  It would mostly be for the villain, ultimately.  Something about Bane doesn't quite work.  I read an article reminding us that Bane made his last appearance in Batman & Robin.  If I recall correctly, he was basically Poison Ivy's boytoy.  Arguably, he's got a larger role here.  Maybe he sounds too much like Sean Connery.  Sorry, SPOILER ALERT.
As the master of psychological horror, director Christopher Nolan somehow doesn't quite make it.  For example, I think Ebert's giving him too much credit.  Sure, the movie's downbeat, but not as much as everything else in the culture these days.  Somehow, even the big face-off with Alfred didn't seem genuine.  There also seem to be an homage to the falling clothes in Schindler's List specifically, and an ode to WWII Warsaw ghettos in general... but in America?  Well, I guess we're close, but it still doesn't work yet for me.
Batman is defeated early in the pic by Bane and is exiled to a far-off prison that Bane apparently started off life in.  The inmates are friendly enough, even though at times they start chanting like the chorus in The Shining as Shelley Duvall exasperatedly runs from room to room, finding horror after horror.  Bruce Wayne has two close inmates: the prison doctor (thank God), and the doctor's translator, which is as close to the Token Brit as we're going to get.  Bruce Wayne's injuries are so severe, they seem to rival Sing's before his rebirth in Hustle and Flow... I mean, Kung Fu Hustle.  Put another way, Batman is dealt such a beating, topped off with an injury similar to the one Steven Seagal dealt out in Marked for Death, and in that movie that Jean Claude Van Damme made with Ogre... Bloodsport, I believe it was.  In other words, credulity is stretched where it shouldn't be.  On top of the physical healing, Bruce has to find his motivation to escape the prison; when Patrick Stump's "This City" started playing, it kind of ruined the mood for me... oh, wait, it was just in my mind.  Well, I hear it a lot at the gym, at least once a day it seems.
That being said, the scenes of action are about as good as it gets.  Michael Bay, you could learn a thing or two from this.  It's not enough just to have cool-looking lens flares anymore.  The exploding bridges looked pretty good, as did the Bat (Plane).  The Bat Cycle deserves its own movie, I dare say.
I would like to point out a couple tiny scenes that stuck out.  First, a section of bridge is blown up by Gotham police, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt starts yelling.  I guess that stuck out because it seemed like a genuine moment.  Second, in the big final fist fight with Bane, Bane at one point starts WAILING on Batman's abdomen!  Dude!  Where'd THAT come from?  Even Bane loses his cool sometimes.  The way Bane is finally put down doesn't happen soon enough.
Not to mention that there's a slight homage to the family tree revelation in The Empire Strikes Back.  I'm a little more forgiving than my viewing buddy, but I can see the comparison.  I dare not spoil anymore than that.  As for Catwoman, well, I think I understand why people complained about her outfit.  She just suddenly gets an outfit in the middle of the movie without explaining where she got it.  Spoiler alert.
---
I've never heard anyone advance a theory yet, but it seems like once a director or producer gets their own prominently-displayed vanity logo, things start to go downhill.  Not everyone knows what to do when they get final cut.  But whatever lessons Nolan learned from 2008's The Dark Knight, stick with those lessons.  That one also had some problems, but it's still the best Batman of the trilogy.  It's been taken down since, but the IMDb had plans for another Batman reboot.  Just because Spider Man's doing it doesn't mean it's a good idea.

***
-so sayeth The Movie Hooligan

September 22, 1944 (five films remain)

Sometimes, the story behind the Stooge short is more interesting... okay, probably more often than not.  While we wait for VH1 to get around to Gents Without Cents, there's always Wikipedia, which informs us that this was based on a cameo that was cut from a film called Good Luck, Mr. Yates.  The cameo was trimmed from that film, and a new short was grafted onto it, to make the Frankenstein monster that is our next Stooge short...

ACT ONE

New opening music!  The opening credit title card informs us that it also stars "Lindsay," "LaVerne" and "Betty."  If only the historical record kept track of their last names... Apparently, these three had a Hollywood suicide pact or something.  Only one survived to enjoy the fruits of the tontine.
On to the short.  The boys are in their usual ratty apartment, but this time they're rehearsing the big "Niagara Falls" sketch.  It gets interrupted by a racket from upstairs.  Plaster dust falls from the ceiling, and a fixture hits Curly on his poor ol' bald head.  It takes 'em a while to get going, but the Stooges make their way upstairs to kill those guys making all that racquet.
Next scene: outside the upstairs apartment.  Loud jazz music can be heard coming from inside.  The Stooges drive home the point a little bit more, and then they just barge right in to that apartment to kill those guys making all the noise and ruining the Stooges' ceiling.  Clever camerawork helps to conceal the mystery, but the truth comes out: those "guys" are actually three dancing girls working on their risqué new jazzy Reveille dance number.  Hubba hubba!  Who likes short shorts?
One of the girls does a forward flip, then all three do forward flips, landing just in front of the Stooges.  The spell is broken, and they start to meet the Stooges.  As you can see, this is not your typical Stooge short.  Usually when they're showbiz types in a short, they're usually unsuccessful, and quickly on the run from the cops.  This is more of a meet and greet.  The girls are named Flo, Mary and Shirley, and a quick courtship inexplicably begins.  Time is stretched as the Stooges groom themselves, asymptotically approaching their handsome ideals.  Moe starts to explain about the act they're working on.  Can an Emmet Otter's Jug Band-esque fusion of their two acts be far behind?  Or is it more like a Reese's peanut butter show?
The Stooges demonstrate their act.  When they get to the "inch by inch" line, Curly rudely falls into the girls' tub full of water.  So it shouldn't be a total loss, Curly starts taking a bath.  Moe and Larry find a nugget of wisdom in this, and join Curly in the tub.  The girls apparently continue to look on in horror from the safety of the next room.

ACT TWO

Time is stretched out until just shy of the Act Two point.  Next scene: the office of Manny Weeks, Theatrical Agent.  We jump right into the opening act: the Stooges sing a song, probably titled "We Just Dropped In To Say Hello."  Marc Shaiman accompanies on piano.  Flo, Mary and Shirley are also in attendance.  The number finishes with Moe and Larry putting their hands over Curly's mouth.  Manny is unimpressed.  Moe promises that the next number will be better.  I, for one, disagree, political incorrectness aside.  Curly's part is probably the most offensive, but it is a rousing WWII number, even though the war was about half over by then.  The important thing is that Manny's impressed.  Moe says "Now comes the climax."  Curly begs for mercy at about 6:54, LMFAO.  Curly falls over and says "I faw dawn!!" in a manner that sounds a bit post-stroke, alas.  The boys start fighting.  Moe gives yet another "See that?" but he has to help his fist along for the full 360.  Another LMFAO.  Apparently Manny Weeks was staring at the three girls the whole time, because he looks over and tells the Stooges to break it up.
Unfortunately, fate intervenes and the Stooges get their big break, worming their way into Weeks' big "Shipyard" act.  The six of them leave in a conga line making train noises.  This is the kind of old school showmanship that hopefully had people rolling their eyes even back then.  Curly makes that weird wolf whistle noise at about 8:15, then has to subtract the price of one glass door from his meager pay.  I think it's time for me to hit the hay.

Act 2.5 - I'm back!  The show begins.  We get another hilarious placard... two souls and a heel.  Priceless!  Then, the acting begins proper.  If Moe Howard was to somehow ever get an honorary Oscar, surely it would be for his on-stage performance here.  I can see why Cannery Row wouldn't wanna just throw the footage away.  Way to screw it up, Lawrence!!
And you thought Curly couldn't get it right!  Then, the girls dance, with and without various jump ropes.  We'll just skip over that part.

ACT THREE

The boys do another hilarious foxhole sketch.  I dare not ruin it for you.  The show's a success, and Manny Weeks invites the boys to his New York office.  THEY'RE GOING TO BROADWAY!  They try to ditch Flo, Mary and Shirley, but they clobber 'em on the heads before they get the chance.  After they say so long, and before they can get away.  It's just damn near inbreeding, marrying such like minds to each other.

EPILOGUE

By way of California, the sextet is driving to New York.  They get to do the Niagara Falls bit one more time.  Someone dipped the audio track in pancake batter at this point.  I still can't decide if this one's better than average or not.  Even though Stooge shorts like this one helped us win WWII, it still kinda sucks.  I guess I refuse to believe the Stooges will grow up someday.

***
-so sayeth The Movie Hooligan

Bad double bill with: Good Luck, Mr. Yates.
Good double bill with: What's Up, Doc?

Auteur Watch - Cormac and Marianne Wibberley

Ah, the family business.  Is there anything nicer?  How they got involved with a decidedly un-family friendly turkey like Bad Boys II I'll never know.

Fuck the NRA

I try to run a nice clean family-friendly blog here at times, but if there was ever a time for profanity, this is it.  As with everyone else in America right now, my thoughts and prayers go out to the victims of that horrible shooting in Aurora, Colorado.  Needless to say, it's a new low for America.  We're used to violence in public places, but now at the movie theater?  Regrettable.  In a way, it's a tribute to the Batman movie that the heavily armed lunatic thought he was the Joker, but he thought he'd give the police a heads up about his booby-trapped apartment.  You know, a gesture of goodwill.  Apparently there's never been a really good documentary about the parents of one of these nutbags.  Will no one step up to the plate?  Michael Moore, is it time for Bowling for Columbine 2?

Jay O. Sanders, Alpha Male: Martin Campbell's "(the) Green Lantern"

I'm on a roll now!  Well, I'm not going to take the blame for this one, damn it.  I didn't TiVo it.  But it does raise some interesting psychological questions.  What is a bad movie?  And what are the ingredients that make up a bad movie?  Are they always the same?  Or is each bad movie as unique as a snowflake?
I guess I'll take a page from Donald Rumsfeld and answer my own rhetorical questions.  I'll leave the destabilization of Iraq for the more politically connected types.  Green Lantern is a bad movie.  Many ingredients make up Green Lantern, but the principal components analysis points to Ryan Reynolds as being the chief bad ingredient.  That's right, Van Wilder himself.  Conan O'Brien knows what I'm talking about!... damn.  YouTube doesn't have everything!
Full disclosure: I didn't actually see the whole movie.  Our viewing was aborted after the hybrid helicopter and green race car, for full disclosure.  But on to the third question, about the ingredients that go into making a bad movie.  I can tell you for a fact that they are indeed not always the same.  Sure, there's some fabulous special effects in this movie.  The $200 million is up there on the screen, if only in the stars.  The opening scene on the desolate planet was crystal clear in HD and looked ethereal enough.  And then, there's the scene where Ryan Reynolds gets fired from his job... here's my question.  Why exactly was that scene shot in the MoCap Studio?  Did you notice no one sat in a chair or picked up anything off the desk?  Not only is the Great Age of Cinematography in our rear view mirror, so is the Great Age of Production Design and Set Dressing!
I don't know why I'm being so fair.  I guess director Martin Campbell was playing it too safe or something, but he can't be accused of slowing down the narrative structure.  The plot, such as it is, moves along at a fine clip.  I guess it's just how all the pieces don't quite fit together.  Frankly, DC Comics has taken itself down a notch with this entry.  I said it about Ridley Scott, so I might as well say it about Martin Campbell.  The dude's almost 70!  He just finished up working with tarnished Mel Gibson in Edge of Darkness, and pumped this out a year later.  He's just thankful for every day he wakes up and his adult diapers aren't... well, you get the idea.  I try to run a classy blog here.  Tougher on some days.
Back to the plot.  So these space guys land on a distant planet for some reason, and stumble upon the grave of the bad dude called "Parallax."  Parallax sucks out their skeletons and heads out into space, like the skeleton head at the beginning of The Fifth Element.  (spoiler alert: The fifth element is sexy Milla Jovovich)  Parallax's first stop on its End of the Universe Tour: Abin Sur, the dude who locked Parallax up the first time.  They say it's Temuera Morrison, but I still think he looks vaguely like Daniel Craig, in an homage to Campbell's Casino Royale, no doubt.  Abin Sur is devastated by a sneak attack from Parallax, and crash lands on Earth.  Abin Sur's life is in danger, and so is the green ring he wears.  Time for the ring to pick a replacement for Abin Sur.  Cut to Ryan Reynolds, a Top Gun-esque test pilot for the Air Force, or for Tim Robbins, one of the two.  Tim Robbins?  His Bob Roberts days are either behind him, or they've just lost the satirical edge.
Then there's Robbins' "son," Peter Sarsgaard, channeling the spirit of Michael Jeter, no doubt.  Since I've been obsessed with peoples' ages lately, let me just report that according to the IMDb, they're apart by 13 years... (insert Southern joke here)  Sarsgaard gets to perform an alien autopsy without Fox Channel cameras present, but with an animatronic Angela Bassett... oh, wait!  It's really her!  I guess I hate to admit it, but she's still pretty hot!  Anyway, Sarsgaard gets a touch of the yellow from the alien, and becomes the bad guy the movie so desperately needs.
And speaking of hot, I suppose I should mention Blake Lively, the girl.  There's a scene where she and Ryan Reynolds dance to their favorite song... no, it's not Kid Rock's "Sweet Home Alabama."  It's something from the 50s; I can't remember what right now, and the IMDb sountrack page is no help.  I asked my viewing companion about this, and we both agreed: it's more of a reflection on the old filmmakers than the young protagonists.
I don't know how seriously the film takes itself.  I've never been a good judge of that.  But it's stitched together out of too many parts from other movies.  In GalaxyQuest style (but without the GalaxyQuest panache), Van Wilder travels through space for some Green Lantern Boot Camp, fires a giant, green, phallic machine gun, then flies back to Earth for a birthday party. You know how it is.  Then, the big confrontation involving a helicopter that turns into a race car.  You know a movie's in trouble when it's taking its cues from Son of the Mask.  Even bitter, bitter Jamie Kennedy (of the Jamie Kennedy Experiment) would agree with that logic.

*1/2
-so sayeth The Movie Hooligan

Bad Movie Day: McConaughey's "Michael Clayton"

As they say at my alma mater, wow.  This is usually said before tackling an offensive comment.  Anyway, where to begin with The Lincoln Lawyer.  Spoiler alert: to my shame, I couldn't help but think of Lebowski.  Seriously.  For a few reasons.  First of all, McC takes on a case that already has legally capable hands to handle it in the first place, and second, because that biker at the end sounded an awful lot like The Stranger.  He should've said "You take 'er easy there, Dude."  For several reasons.
Movies like this tend to make one's mind wander and think about what other movies it's too much like.  Criminal Law also comes to mind... which may be unfair to Criminal Law.  McConaughey himself seemed to be channeling his character from A Time to Kill, if only in terms of accent.  To be fair, the courtroom scenes held my interest.
The plot.  We get the obligatory introductory episode... I can't remember what it was now.  Oh, right.  McC goes to court and says he wants a delay in a certain trial to wait for a "Mr. Green" as a witness.  Now I get it!  Tee hee hee...  There's a couple moments like that in the film, but they quickly pass.  Then, we get the big case.  A rich playboy is in trouble.  And what American film these days wouldn't be complete without a member of the Job Creators present?  Why are they always portrayed so poorly?  In this case, it's Ryan Phillippe, and he's accused of beating a woman nearly to death.  I hate to say it, but the victim's wounds didn't match the enormity of the sentence he was looking at.  Let's leave aside his financial status for now.  The film tries to deal with it a little, actually!  Kewl!
Needless to say, in keeping with the current state of film plots these days, the plot's a little more complicated than it might first appear, come to find out.  It just zig-zags all over the place, but McC and his black driver try to keep the storm as calm as possible.
There's other characters as well.  William H. Macy plays a private investigator who works for McConaughey, but he can't hide his haggard face behind his long blond locks.  Josh Lucas plays the anti-McConaughey and the prosecuting attorney, but frankly Lucas looks like he's a couple years away from looking like McConaughey if he can't handle the pressure of his gig.  Marisa Tomei is the rather agreeable ex-wife, and she and Matthew continually race to the bottom of the glass throughout the movie.  Don't they see that they deserve each other?  Phillippe seems to be channeling pre-rehab Robert Downey Jr.
But for me, and I'm sure Maxim Magazine will agree with me on this, the tone of the movie is set by that one douchebag witness who's a little too proud of himself for having used the services of a prostitute.  If you see his performance, I'm sure we can all agree that we should act as well on the stand as that guy.  What The Shawshank Redemption was to idealizing prison life, this guy is to being on the witness stand.  I can't seem to pick him out of the IMDb cast list, and frankly, I think I've spent too much time trying.
As for why McC's called "The Lincoln Lawyer" beyond the surface reasons, well... you'll just have to wait for the TV series!  I think McC's probably too proud to do a TV series at this stage of his career, but you never know.

**
-so sayeth The Movie Hooligan

The Fall of the British Middle Class

Apparently, it's every actor's dream to play a loser.  William H. Macy knows this, and did so in Fargo.  George Clooney also knows it, and hence his roles in The Perfect Storm, Michael Clayton, and to a lesser extent, Batman & Robin.  So too with actor/director Sir Richard Attenborough, who became his generation's David Lean... sort of.  Here he teams up with director Bryan Forbes, another name fraught with British tradition and heraldry.  Forbes in turn teams up with composer John Barry, and actress/wife Nanette Newman in this tale of kidnapping.  I hate to give it away by saying it goes awry...
Kim Stanley is the main one here as Myra Savage, the domineering and pseudo-psychic wife of long suffering, bent-nosed Billy, played by Attenborough.  We see them prepping a spare bedroom in their two-story post-War house of Usher.  The wrinkle is: they're prepping it for a kidnapping.  Having a Coen-centric cinema brain, I couldn't help but think of Raising Arizona, but with less comedy, of course.  Perhaps the spirit of The King of Comedy is more apt.  Stanley says that the plan is all to appease a dead relative, but with some modest fame and riches as well.  Sometimes having a gift such as psychic powers isn't enough for a satisfying life, especially with the tightwad crowd that come to their house for weekly seances.  And so, with Seance on a Wet Afternoon, perhaps it's better in a way to be a monarch for a couple days instead of a wanker for a lifetime... something like that.

Good double bill with: what else?  The Dock Brief (aka Trial and Error).

***1/2
-so sayeth The Movie Hooligan

July 15, 1944 (six films remain)

Despite my lack of better judgment, I'm going to forego a review of 1945's feature length pic Rockin' In The Rockies, mostly because YouTube doesn't have it.  My To-Do List is too lengthy as it is.  So let's go to their next short, Idle Roomers.

ACT ONE

Scene: the Hotel Snazzy-Plaza, where Mrs. Leander is checking in to her room.  The desk clerk is Eddie Laughton, a lifetime member of the Stooges Stock Company Players.  The Stooges are bellhops, and they're all asleep on the same bench together, in a very butch way.  Fortunately for Eddie, recent technological advancements in the hotel industry allow him to remotely wake the Stooges up, utilizing our friend called "electricity"!!  It's currently helping us win the war against Hitler and Mussolini... sorry, I forgot where I was for a second there.  Kinda like Owen Wilson in that 2011 Woody Allen movie!  Anyway, Ed pushes a button, and the Stooges fall on their butts.  They've slept through a bucket of water getting dumped on them, they can sleep through this, by God... except Moe, who wakes up and finds his legs at the bottom of a Stooge leg sandwich.  He tries lifting his legs twice!  I only mention it because it's rare to see Moe suffer in silence like this.  He hits Curly and Larry in the head.  FINALLY!  Some familiar Stooge behaviour.
The Stooges stand at attention, and they each say "FRONT!"  They then see the fetching Christina McIntyre and stand at attention some more.  Like Gordon Sumner once said, love is stronger than justice, so surely it's stronger than a mere bellhop job, as we're about to find out.  The boys follow Laughton's orders, but they're second to Moe's call for a coin flip.  As Colbert would say, the boys engage in a freaky coin flip three way.  Larry and Curly both gets tails.  Moe says "Heads," takes their coins, and rushes to McIntyre's side.  Larry and Curly do a double take.  They're not happy with this outcome, and Curly slams his hand down on the front desk.  He accidentally hits a wet sponge and sprays Laughton in the face.  Like a fool, Laughton licks an envelope.  Why waste the water on his face?  Isn't what that sponge is for?  Wetting envelopes so your tongue doesn't have to?  What was he thinking?
Anyway, Christine's in a Del Lord pic, so she's spared the indignity of physical comedy, unlike Laughton.  If it were Jules White, it'd be nothing but pies in the face for 16 minutes.  On to the next scene.  Next scene: the elevator, where Moe's escorting Christine to it, telling her that he's the head man of the hotel.  Meanwhile, Lawrence is in the elevator, and sneakily closes the elevator door before Moe can get in.  Furious, Moe furiously runs up to the 8th floor.  I forgot to mention: Christine's going to Room 810.  Crucial plot point.  Anyway, through the pure power of his fury, Moe gets to the eighth floor and stands next to the elevator doors BEFORE they open!  He's Superman with a sugar bowl haircut!  The elevator doors open and we hear Larry being all cocky and thinking he has a shot with Christine.  She must be used to this kind of attention from hotel bellhops.  Moe's a gentleman at heart, and he waits until Christine has passed to really stick it to Larry, specifically and especially Larry's head with some help from the elevator doors.  Larry says "Oh Captain, Oh Captain.."  Obviously a reference to another Columbia pic shooting that week.
Now you might be asking yourself, where's Curly while all this is going on?  Your prayers are about to be answered: Christine McIntyre enters her hotel room, sees a man covered with a newspaper on the couch and says "Oh, darling!  I didn't know you were here already!"  It gets better.  Christine goes to get her husband's slippers, while Moe offers to help.  It's such a swanky, full-service hotel, that Moe takes the guy's shoes off.  He eventually discovers that it's CURLY!!!!!
As "busteddolls91" rightly points out, Curly laughs at 2:48.  Curly has the courage to betray his ruse, but Moe is of course unappreciative, and proceeds to herniate Curly's leg.  Talk about the Passion of the Curly!  This is one of those parts that stretches out the length of the film, but it disguises itself well.  He then grabs Curly by the scruff of the top of his bald head... and it works this time!  Dude!  Moe's pissed off...
Let me just take this opportunity for yet another sidetracking non-sequitur, and marvel that the million dollar invention that the aforementioned "busteddolls91" has graciously shared with the world.  Let's see if I can partake of it here... Curly laughs at about 2:48... curses!  Not working.  You have to be on the page and click their link to jump right to 2:48.  Must be some privacy issues or something.

Okay, back to the movie.  Moe's about to throw Curly out of the hotel room.  For once Moe says "Here's a tip" and doesn't poke someone in the eyes.  Now, screenwriters take note of this next plot development: as Curly's going out, Vernon Dent's trying to go in.  There's a huge collision.  Curly starts to get mad but gets scared when he realizes it's Vernon Dent he's talking to.  No one talks to Vernon Dent like that!  No one.  It gets worse.  Moe confuses Vernon with Curly and gives 'em the ol' flower-water-through-the-transom bit.  Some wise stand-up comedian's got to use this to reevaluate the phrase "You only hurt the ones you love."  Moe then opens the door and tells who he thinks is Curly to "get outta here and stay outta here!"  Moe screams at 3:56.  Vernon lunges for him, but Moe dodges out of the way, and ends up crawling away on his hands and knees about as fast as is Stoogely possible without speeding up the film to 12fps!  Lol.
Next scene: Builder Moe is constructing the world's largest stack of suitcases... well, second largest.  His one mistake: getting Wreck-It Curly to carry the load.  Well, one of several.  For example, I don't know how long it took to construct that stack on Curly's back, but it gets un-constructed in record time!  Tis easier to destroy than to create, dear Brutus.  Moe ends up in a pile of suitcases with a "This End Up" sticker over his mouth, but at least he's not in the gutter.
Next scene: the 8th floor, where Curly arrives with the one trunk on his back.  Short term memory loss is a horrible thing, but Curly spins it into comedy gold.  Meanwhile, Lord knows what Larry's up to.  It looks like he's trying to barricade himself in a closet, but screenwriters take note: it's all for the setup of a gag, baby!  To make a comedy omelette, you gotta break a few eggs of plot inconsistency.  Curly's trek to room 810 gets a little bit longer because of the genius of Lawrence.  Now, the pickier among you will notice that Larry can't do anything right, and he gets the carpet stuck in the door as Curly begins the last longest part of his journey.  This gets rectified and the comedy treadmill gets going in full.  Curly's legs don't hold out, partly because of his twisted ankle, partly because they were an expensive prop and they wanted to get the most bang for their buck out of them, but mostly Curly's legs turn into cowboy legs because of the trunk's crushing heaviness.  They start to buckle at about... well, just click here and all will be revealed!  So cool.  Sounds like an elephant in heat.  Anyway, Curly finally makes it to the door and sets the trunk down on the last bit of the carpet.  There's a great reason for this, and it gets used.  McIntyre comes to the door and Curly says he has a trunk for her.  McIntyre looks around and sees no trunk.  As in cartoons, if something's not in the frame, it doesn't exist, so McIntyre goes to stand where the trunk once was, while Curly prepares to lift up the trunk.  McIntyre sticks out her arms to aid in the ruse.  Curly lifts up Christine and carries her across the threshold.. I mean, into the hotel room.  Christine lightly screams, and Curly finally realizes what's going on.  Dapper-looking Dent is in the hotel room and reacts as any married knife thrower would: he starts throwing knives.  The first one lands near Curly's face.  More concurrence, as Moe runs up and puts his ear next to the hotel room door.  Here comes the second knife, which pierces the door proper.  Whoopsy-daisy!  Now it's good 'n broke!  The knife ends up near Moe's face, and Moe lets out a Curly-esque scream at about 6:16.  Vernon's not finished yet, and he grabs a bunch of knives that look like ones they used to use in bullfighting.  Curly ends up running out of the hotel room with an ass-full of knives.  In empathy, Moe takes off after Curly, also nyaah-nyaahing.  Vertical-wipe to next Act.

ACT TWO

Time to introduce a new character/twist.  In this case, the showbiz Delanders... Leanders... introduce a new wrinkle to the plot when they open the trunk.  Inside this trunk is one Lupe the Wolf Man.  When I first saw this despicable creature, was I the only one who thought of Claude in Fearless Frank?  I thought so.  Just checking.  Well, it made an impression on me, I must confess.  And I just did!  No, it's just the Duke of York, who made an earlier appearance throwing spears at the boys in Three Little Twirps.  Christine at first thinks that they'll get arrested for fraud.  Then she gets an eyeful of the beast and just flat out doesn't want anything to do with it.  Vernon tries to calm her down by saying that Lupe is harmless unless he hears music!  The opposite of Frankenstein.  Another confession: good line reading by Dent when he says "Then he goes insane!"  Oh, this is going to increase my hit count for sure.
The Stooges knock on the door.  They've got janitorial equipment and are dressed in white.  Let the comedy soiling of clothing begin!  Vernon closes up the trunk and steps out into the hall with Christine.  He's calmed down a little since.  Well, he doesn't have any knives on him, anyway.  He says to the Stooges "The apartment's a disgrace!"  I thought they were in a hotel.  Vernon issues the order, saying "It better be clean by the time we get back, or else!"  Curly angrily asks "Or else what?"  Moe, realizing the gravity of the situation, brings Curly back into line by using a hammer on his nose.  You know, pretending his nose is a nail that needs to be pried up.  The boys go into the "apartment."  Moe gives Curly some instructions, and specifically tells him "No dirt under the carpets!"  They must've gotten too many complaints: apparently, real janitors across the country started to emulate the Stooges in their own lines of work.
Anyway, Curly's left alone again, and he gets to work, but he's clearly not in the right frame of mind... especially when he sees that much hated trunk again.  He gives it a good knock for good measure and gets to work.  But then... we hear another knock!  Scientist Curly has to investigate with another knock.  Then, a light rap with three fingers.  I dare say they repeated the audio at about 7:50 or so.  One last test: Shave and a Haircut.  Curly laughs like a moron, then he hears the last two knocks and gets scared.
Moe emerges like a spectre from the other room.  Again with the hammer.  Moe seems to be following the following script a lot in this one.  Earlier he handed Curly a broom and said "Here.... GO ON, GET BUSY!!"  Terribly fed up with Curly.  The point is, normally this would be the scene where Curly tries demonstrating for Moe by hitting the trunk and waiting for it to hit back.  In this case, we've become Curly, but who's our Moe to appeal to?  To whom do we say "I swear!  I thought it was going to happen!"
Moe goes back into the other room, and Curly goes back to work.  The trunk opens.  Curly has his back to Lupe, and Lupe starts... hoh boy... Lupe starts trying to grab Curly's ass.  Parents might want to get young children out of the room at this point.  Curly starts singing, but Lupe doesn't go crazy!  He's about to, though.  The plot thickens.  Curly approaches a radio, and calls it a... well, better just see for yourself (Curly 0:16).  Curly turns on the radio and music starts playing.  Curly exits Stage Right.  Somehow, Curly misses all of what happens next, but we don't.  Lupe starts freaking out, then he bends the bars of the trunk, goes over to the radio and yanks it out of the wall.  Lupe throws the radio.  Curly bends over just as the radio goes sailing over his head.  The radio hits Moe and Moe hits the bed he's standing in front of.  The bed breaks.  So much for cleaning up the "disgrace."  Never send the Stooges to do a professional's job.
Moe handles the situation, though.  He doesn't accuse Curly directly, but merely asks him if he likes the radio.  Managers of employees, take note.  This is how you handle the delicate situations that invariably come up in your place of work.  You might not want to handle conflict resolution the way Moe does, however.  It's not quite as drastic as Aykroyd's final mortal blow in Grosse Pointe Blanke, but the result is similar, as Curly ends up with a radio on his head.  Moe goes back into the bedroom, and we find out where Lupe's been hiding.  Another homage to Stan Laurel's fall with a big stack of dishes in Our Wife, but once again the Stooges have no comedic deus ex machina at work in their film.  Back to Curly who's still struggling with the radio on his head.  He stops struggling and decides to fiddle with the radio knobs.  It's at this point he becomes... CURLO, the Beast from Mars.  Curlo has much to learn about our planet.  Equipped with only his sense of touch and incredible strength, he wanders out into this strange new land and stops just short of running into Lupe.  Thinking it's Moe, Curly... I mean, Curlo says "Hey!  Get this thing off my head!"  Apparently handling the situation like Moe would, Lupe gives Curly a good old-fashioned bonk on the head.  Curly falls down and his radio hat breaks.  It's at this point when Curlo becomes that lion in that Disney cartoon who thought he was a sheep.  The very fabric of the Stooge universe seems to be ripping apart to reform itself in the shape of a new paradigm.  Some of you can see what I'm getting at, but I'll make it explicit: did this not inform the work of Thomas Kuhn?
Lupe continues his new-found tradition of appearing to be a figment of Curly's fertile lack of imagination by climbing out the hotel window.  Curly says "You better get outta here!  It's a lucky thing you went through that winda..."  I spelled 'window' to reflect the New York accent.  It's from here that the Stooges use the word "window" more than they've ever had in their entire careers.  I'm surprised Larry didn't come in and say "Will you two stop saying 'window' so much?!!"  Curly finally realizes that what he's been talking to that just went out the window was actually here the whole time, standing right behind him.  Normally he'd "nyaah nyaah" and run away if not for the plot constraints.  Moe eventually says "I didn't go out any winda!"  Curly says "Well, SOMEBODY did!!"  Love the emphasis on the "did" (Curly 2:10).  The three of them collectively "nyaah nyaah" and push their way through the bedroom door as hard and as fast as possible.
Meanwhile, we follow Lupe and his ledge adventures.  This is the boring part that Irving Thalberg put into the movie to sell more tickets.  First up: a room with two chicks sharing a bed.  The first chick in a shiny robe wakes up, looks over and sees Lupe, and puts her fist in her mouth.  She runs off to the bathroom to hide.  Doesn't wake her friend up!  It's all for the comedy, folks.  As it turns out, this second chick's got much more work to do.  She eventually looks up, sees Lupe, and her hair stands up on end around 3:32 or so, even though it's in curls.  She throws a gewgaw at Lupe but hits the mirror instead.  Yup, you guessed it........................................................................

ACT THREE

The Stooges emerge from the elevator, brandishing brooms.  For our edification, Moe tells the other two "The boss says there's a burglar in the building and we gotta find 'em!"  We hear a scream.  You gotta hand it to these Stooge films: they keep it short and sweet.  Larry runs back into the elevator, having gotten over his trauma from before.  Moe and Curly make the same gesture too late and smash into the closed elevator doors.  They "ricochet" backwards into the room where the scream came from.  They see the scared woman, but she's under bedsheets so naturally they assume it's the "burglar" and start beating the sh... out of the thing under the bedsheets with their brooms.  The lady screams and takes the bedsheets off.  Moe says "Sorry, lady, but we thought you were a burglar!"  Curly's a little more tongue-tied, mumbling "Yes, we are that, yes..."  The lady sees Lupe behind Curly and points, screaming "Wolf!  Wolf!! AAAAHHH..." and ducks back under the sheets.  Curly is indignant.  Moe says "I always said your face scares people.  Why don't you throw it away?"  In this age of Facebook, people are apparently doing just that, and not just Brazilians, either!
Moe FINALLY gets an eyeful of Lupe.  He makes scared noises like Curly and exits Stage Left.  Curly does an impression of him at about 4:19.  Soon after... the Max Linder/Duck Soup mirror bit begins.  Another part to stretch out the length of the pic to 16 minutes.  Curly eventually gets scared by his hairier, snagglier-toothed expression and runs off, finding Moe standing next to a door.  Moe asks "Did you lock the other door?"  Curly says "Yeah!  Twice!  Once this way, and once that way."  It's more of a visual joke...
Back to Larry, who's apparently manned up for his earlier act of cowardice, and comes creeping down the hall towards the other boys' door.  Lupe creeps up behind Larry.  Lupe touches Larry's hair, then puts his claw on top of Larry's head.  Larry quietly shrieks in fear and runs off.  Very next scene: Moe says "It's Larry!"  Curly responds "What are you waiting for?  Let 'im in!!"  They open the door and look away as Lupe enters the room.  Moe says to Curly, "Gimme a hand.  We'll barricade the door."  Lupe helps them do it.  Lol.  They eventually realize Lupe's in the room with them, but the plot forbids them from leaving the room just yet, so they back up into a corner.  Moe sees a trombone on the desk behind them, gives it to Curly and orders Curly to play it.  "Maybe music will tame him!"  Curly starts "playing the trombone."  We hear a full orchestra playing the song Curly played before in Dutiful but Dumb.  Lupe starts getting angry, but Curly keeps playing anyway.  Lupe grabs the trombone and throws it at Curly.  We see Curly wearing a trombone-shaped broach.  Moe runs off, Curly removes his mangled trombone yoke, and runs off too.  Curly shuts the door behind him, and Lupe throws a chair.
The action gets packed.  Moe and Curly open a door.  Larry's behind it.  All three get scared.  Larry says it again: "Open the door!  It's me!"  Curly goes "Oh no you don't!  We tried that before!"  Moe and Curly back up in front of a small dog.  The dog barks.  Moe and Curly get scared and leave the room, taking Larry with them as they enter the hallway.  They get to the elevator and eventually get in.  Lupe narrowly misses getting into the elevator with them.

EPILOGUE

I thought we'd never get to this part!  Lupe just missed catching the Stooges, but he's got an idea.  Above the elevator is an old-fashioned "analog" dial showing what floor the elevator is on.  It's pointing at about three.  Lupe grabs it and pushes it back to eight.  We hear the squeaking sounds of the wagon trap door in Oily to Bed, Oily to Rise.  The Stooges get out of the elevator, and Lupe gets in.  Moe says "Well, we made it!  We're in the lobby."  Lupe grunts, and the Stooges get back into the elevator.  Lupe starts running the elevator, as the boys find out too late.  They're scared, but have trouble sustaining it.  Larry starts clutching his chest, while Curly starts doing a Russian dance.  We see the analog elevator dial going from Basement to the top floor, then back again, in record time.  Cut to stock footage of an elevator in the shaft, then a loud crashing sound, then back to the elevator dial, spinning as though the Devil himself had spun it.  Did this not inspire Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory to an extent?  It's an ending similar to the Stooges' earlier pic, Boobs in Arms, but at least they have company this time as they go flying through the air.
So!  What's my final analysis?  This is one of the greats.  I'm surprised I haven't seen it more often.  I should check to see if it's on one of my DVDs.  It'll be a while before I get the rest, anyway.  I think the best way to conclude this review is to pay homage to that AWFUL new Adele song, and close by saying Roomers has it, Roomers has it, Roomers has it, Roomers has it, Roomers has it.............................................

****
-so sayeth The Movie Hooligan

Auteur Watch - Joss, Jed, Zack, Tom and John Whedon

Geez!  They're worse than the Wayans!  Go figure.  Joss looks like Brad Bird after a fiery car crash, and they've both suckled at Pixar's ever expanding teat.  Don't worry, Pixar's still got their feet firmly planted in PG territory.  Joss, however, scored big with The Avengers.  It's made 611 million in the US, and 1.5 billion worldwide.  Well, it'll probably recoup its cost sooner than Nothing but Trouble, for example.  Or Pluto Nash.  Yeah, that's more like it.  They should do a Pluto Nash sequel where Eddie wears his Nutty Professor fat suit!  Awesome.  Anyway, Joss can write his own ticket some more.  He's always been successful, really.  I'll see one of his projects someday, I promise.

No, Batman's next week...

Well, the season premiere of Breaking Bad's 5th Season's almost upon us!  There really is a Christmas in July!  Meanwhile, the latest installment of Ice Age is out.  I've lost count... I think it's the fifth one.  Why don't they just make a TV series out of it and call it a day?  Well, some film's got to be known as the one that opened the week before Batman.  Meanwhile, Wes Anderson's film is having the best run of, really, ANY Wes Anderson film ever!  It's hanging in there at 8 or 9 for the fifth... eighth week in a row.  Viva Coppola!  Oh, it's definitely time for a Best Original Writing Oscar for Wes, even though he'll really be getting it for Rushmore.  Woody Allen got one last year for less.  The only other thing worth noting is Katy Perry's documentary / promo film, hanging in there at #8.  It'll be a while before the sequel, looks like.

May 26, 1944 (seven films remain)

Has it been a week already?  Time for the next Stooge short called The Yoke's on Me.  Sheesh!  Good thing these weren't in 3D.  Good thing for the audience they got out of Vaudeville; out with the Stooges, in with Gallagher.  Ain't it always the way?

ACT ONE

The sweet old lady from Oily to Bed, Oily to Rise has been downgraded to the Stooges' mother.  She and her no-account husband are sitting in their sitting room.  Mother's knitting a small patch with three stars on it.  She says they've been gone for two days and "not a word from them."  Well, that was a big deal back then.  She mentions Curly and the Cavalry in the same sentence.  You don't hear a whole heck of a lot about WWII Cavalry these days!  That's why War Horse was about WWI, I guess.  I only mention the Cavalry because it's kinda crucial to the Stooges' eventual entrance, as the three of them come "galloping" round the couch.  This is going to get ugly...
Where's the rapid fire gags we've come to expect?  What's with this snail's pace?  Frankly, I'm insulted.  But Curly does get in a nice sight gag when he mentions he has "water on the knee."  Pop's shocked, and Mom says "I told you not to let him wear pumps when he was a child!"  Another shout out to OtB,OtR.  Then, Moe brings the pain when he stabs the other two with Mom's knitting needle.  I know he had a good reason to do it, but for me it still recalls those awful videos of modern recruit hazings.  There's a reason the magazines started with Sponge & Vacuum and stopped with Glass Eater on that one Simpsons episode where Marge becomes a cop.  Moe arguably gets the worst of it, but he asked for it.  He asked Pa to kick him in the ass, and Pa really winds up to do it.  Pa has to waste the flower water to revive the three of them.
Even the Stooges would've gotten drafted in WWII, but here they didn't make the cut.  And after they inform Pa of their future plans, Pa lets loose with a triple-header slap.  They all seemed to be in position for that to happen.  Then he yells out some practical advice: "Everybody's got to do something!"  Pa gets more specific and tells them to work on a farm.  Time to break into song.  "Oh, the farmer in the dell... ONIONS!... the farmer in the dell... POTATOES!"  Curly makes the mistake of ending with "TOMATOES!" and the boys get tomatoes thrown in their faces.
Next scene: the boys drive up to a house in a Mel Blanc-voiced car.  This may seem like an old-fashioned Realtor transaction, but at least they didn't have credit swaps or credit derivatives back then.  They knew better than to mix real estate and calculus, the Greatest Generation, they did.  A nerdy guy takes the Stooges' wad of cash, loads his bags into the Stooges' car and eventually drives off.  The Stooges talk afterwards of what an "egg beater" the car was, even though it drove off at about 8 fps.  The boys solemnly enter the yard of the house.  Curly closes the fence, and the fence breaks down as though it were made of dominoes.  Curly picks up one of the pickets and treats it like a rifle, hitting Moe in the head on that "right face."  Curly doubles down when Moe gets hit with a loose board on the porch.  The needless violence continues.  Larry tries to break it up and move things along.  Moe has to hit him, of course.  The three of them start knocking on the front door.  Curly tries to help Moe pull on the doorknob by putting his hands around Moe's waist, but Moe doesn't seem to appreciate it.  Moe breaks the doorknob and hits Curly in the chin with his elbow.  Curly cries out in pain, more so than usual!  In a rare emphatic gesture, Moe drops the doorknob on his foot, but I still think Curly got the worst of it.  Moe gives up on opening the door and decides to "crash" it.  This with his own house, no less!  Curly, for what may be the first and last time, looks for a "crash helmet."  He puts a bucket on his head and, uh... goes in through the window, so to speak.  So far, this is hands down the funniest part of the whole pic.  Moe rains on Curly's parade, of course, and orders him to open the door, after hurting his hand with a second "See that?" fist routine on Curly's be-bucketed head.  Curly summons all his available dignity (with Harpo Marx's lower lip) and does just that.  The other two enter, and Curly goes through the window the other way and knocks on the door.  Moe answers... I assume it's Moe.  Curly asks "Pardon me, but is the lady of the house in?"  Whoever answered the door grabs Curly by the nose and drags him inside.  Must've been Moe, yeah.

ACT TWO

We catch up with the nerd in the car who approaches a roadblock.  The sheriff informs the nerd that three... three Japanese citizens escaped from an internment camp.  I expected them to be called "Japs," of course, but "relocation center"?  "RELOCATION CENTER"??!!!!!  Somehow, that's much worse.  They're also looking for truant circus performers... oh, I see what they're trying to do.  They may be circus performers, but at least they ain't no dirty Jap!  See, it's okay for me to say it because some of my relatives went to a "relocation center" in Rohwer, Arkansas.  Gotta get something out of the deal!  The car the Stooges gave away isn't as bad as they thought.  It needed a little shove, but it's still running!  If the car were in a Laurel and Hardy pic, it'd be a pile of component parts by now.  The sheriff and his helper give the car a shove and get a faceful of soot, turning them into... Next scene: the Stooges approach the barn.  What?  No horizontal wipe between scenes?  I feel cheated. 
Curly always gets to do his own little scenes.  This time, he hears the chirping of young birds.  They sounded like baby chickens to me, but they turned out to be ducks.  Which is good, because he fills up a hole with water, and we see the ducks slowly rising to the surface as the rising tide lifts all ducks.  I'm sorry... ONE duckling.  And then... Yes!  THAT's what I'm talkin' 'bout!  (about 6:49)  Horizontal wipe.
Next scene: the Stooges eagerly enter their barn.  See, they thought they were getting livestock with the deal.  What chumps.  They look around, and Curly runs into a giant block and tackle.  Larry smugly says "I don't see a single cow!"  Curly adds "I don't even see a married one!"  God bless you, Ben Hecht... he was ghost writing on this one, surely.  Curly gets another moment to himself when he talks to a chicken in a box, thinking it's a waiter.  Which came first, indeed?  The knucklehead, in this case.  The boys regroup just before Curly completely succumbs to cabin fever or Dr. Doolittle Syndrome.  A duck runs up.  Curly says "Look!  A pelican!"  Moe says "That's a gander."  Curly asks "Mahatma Gander?"  Well, they gotta get in some world events every now and again.  Professor Moe takes over: "A gander!  A gander!  A goose's husband!"  Curly looks confused.  Professor Larry tries to take over, while Moe covers his face with his hand.  I think this is the first time Moe gets to refer to his hand as "five delicious flavors."  Larry and Moe exeunt Stage Right while Curly gladly takes up an adze in the service of hunger.
Let me just take this rare opportunity to say that I grow weary of this latest Flash player upgrade!  They seem to have overstepped the bounds of what a "redraw region" is.  Time to start minimizing then maximizing whole windows again.  Anyway, Curly finds an ax and starts going after the gander with it.  The gander, however, seems to have some divine help from a deus ex machina of some sort, if you will.  Curly ends up face first in the mud, and we hold and wait for the laugh.  Curly, on the other hand, is rather nonplussed with his new-fangled makeup.  He looks over, and we see the goose's head disappear behind a bale of hay.  Humane Association be damned.  Second funniest laugh of the film.  Curly starts to emerge from the side of the hay bale when a goose puppet grabs hold of his nose like it's a piece of a slice of bread!  Take that, Jim Henson.  The gander ends up on top of the hay bale stack, then lands deftly on Curly's back.  Curly grabs the ax and prepares to use it.  Then the gander lands deftly on top of Curly's head.  Third biggest laugh.  Curly prepares to give the gander a good chopping... guess what happens?  Curly looks at the mangled ax.  Usually it's Moe that does the looking!  How does Curly's head do that?  Saws and axes don't stand a chance against Curly's corundum-coated cranium.  The impacts, however, tend to defy all known laws of physics.  I guess Curly didn't spend his childhood hitting himself in the head with stuff, then inspecting the wreckage.  "Where's that goose?" asks Curly, pitifully.
Next scene: Farmer Moe's hard at work, tilling the land.  I guess he's holding the plow right, but he's got a leather strap around HIS head!  Go figure.  We see Lawrence AND Curlington with harnesses, pulling the plow.  Moe's really getting into this whole farmer gig.  He's already picked up a dialect of Amish or something as he orders his oxen forward.  After about ten seconds, however, the plow hits a giant rock, and everything else also grinds to a halt.  Time to blast.  Moe orders Curly to get blasting powder.  Curly, in a rare moment of lucidity and honesty, says "What do I know about blasting powder?  I'm a horse!"  Moe gets pissed off, of course.  Back to the barn they go.
The boys go inside and... oh!  Okay, the guy said "ostrich."  There's an ostrich wolfing down blasting powder.  "Explo" brand, no less!  Curly is ordered to "get rid" of the ostrich.  Curly salutes and hits Larry with his hand.  "Oof!" says Larry.  Better get the ASPCA back, or at least a professional ostrich trainer, just in case Curly gets kicked in the stomach by the ostrich and suffers a mortal wound.  So far, so good.  The ostrich plays along and goes where Curly directs it to go.  Back to Larry and Moe, who turn their thoughts towards a bunch of pumpkins.  They'll make more money selling 'em as Jack O'Lanterns!  Ain't it always the way?  Just like the meat industry makes more money off Lady Gaga's dresses.  Meanwhile, Curly puts the ostrich away using the worst fencing ever: one board about four feet off the ground.  I guess the ostrich's not desperate yet.  Curly gets inspired and plucks some feathers off of the ostrich... shyeah, right.  We hear about three pin prick sounds, and Curly emerges with two big handfuls of ostrich feathers.  Time to dance!  Right, Ellen D.?  Belladonna4577's right.  Curly IS the Man... although we haven't gotten to 3:37 yet.  He's still the man... especially at 3:17, am I right?  Moe and Larry start to notice what Curly's doing, however.  "Hey, Pin-up Boy!" yells Moe.  Curly hands back the feathers to someone, and starts frügging over to the others.  He runs into the block and tackle an unprecedented third time, and this one's the charm.  I guess it's time for the act break.  As good a time as any.

ACT THREE

I didn't talk about it before, but Curly has hit his head against this giant hook hanging in the middle of the barn now three times.  Third time's a spanking in this case, as Curly has now made it his life's mission to defeat this thing once and for all.  So let's begin the play by play.  Curly grabs the block and tackle hook and throws it with all his might.  He must've been in a lot of pain already, or thinking about an unrelated thing really really hard, because even though HE'S STARING RIGHT AT IT AS IT FLIES BACK TOWARDS HIS HEAD, he gets hit by it a fourth time.  I guess the block and tackle's got more brains.  Curly yanks downward on the block and tackle, pulling it from its mooring high up in the ceiling.  Curly has finally triumphed... at least until he gets hit in the head with a giant burlap sack that's at the other end of the block and tackle's rope.  Moe intervenes.  Moe points towards Larry, and Curly follows the length of Moe's arm with his nose.  But there will be no Curly and Moe tangoing off screen hand in hand this time.  Instead, Curly gets Moe's foot in his ass.  A kick so powerful that Curly ends up knocking Larry over.  WHAT'D HE DO?!  Moe's micromanaging continues.  Curly gets hit at 4:08 and makes a sound never heard before or since.  Moe hands Curly a very light Jack O'Lantern.  I hope it's made of plastic.
Enter the Japanese people.  Hmm!  Three of them, three of Stooges... maybe they're three Japanese comedians in their own right!  Or three presidents of the Tokyo branch of the Stooge fan club.  What does the IMDb say?  Wikipedia's no help.... alas, they don't get credit on the IMDb page.  Needless to say, they're three Japanese Dudley Dickersons in the final analysis.  But they prove they're Stooges at heart, as the Moe and Larry of the bunch go off to the right, while the Japanese Curly ducks down in front of the open door, just as Curly puts a Jack O'Lantern on his head.  Time for some light fun.  The Jack O'Lantern moves to the left on the ledge.  Stranger yet, Curly notices this, and asks the Jack O'Lantern why it didn't stay put.  The Jack O'Lantern moves back.  Curly notices this, and practically thank the Jack O'Lantern for going back into place.  Then, Curly slowly gets concerned.  Moe's no help, of course... at least, until Moe sees the same phenomenon at work.  Moe calms everyone down by saying "Aw, it must've rolled over there."  Moe and Larry add their Jack O'Lanterns to the ledge, so now there are three total.  They get back to work "polishing" the next three.  The other two Japanese rejoin their friend by the ledge.  They each take a Jack O'Lantern and duck down.  Once again, my complements to the sound department at Columbia who saw fit to repeat Curly's song between 5:25 and 5:33... three times, no less!
Now, here's the part where they blatantly pad out the film.  They march their next batch of Jack O'Lanterns over to the ledge as slowly as possible to delay the shock of finding an empty ledge.  The Stooges turn around, and Moe says "There's nothing to be afraid of... is there?"  They turn around and see that the Jack O'Lanterns have returned... whew!  I'm going to cut and paste that from here on out.  The Jack O'Lanterns have returned, and the Stooges duck down.  The Jack O'Lanterns duck down as well.  The Stooges slowly creep back up, as do the three Japanese.  The three Japanese punch the Stooges in the face.  The Stooges duck down again, but in pain this time.  The three Japanese duck back up, then take off running.  Moe screams "Hey!  Pumpkin thieves!  C'mon!"  Whew.  He didn't figure out their ethnicity yet.
Next scene: the barn door, where Moe and Larry are walking slowly along... you know, to try and catch up to the pumpkin thieves.  Curly turns around and looks.  Just then, two of the... I'm going to call them 'fugitives' from here on out, I think.  Two of the fugitives emerge from around the corner, brandishing large sticks.  Moe and Larry chicken out and run into the barn.  Curly turns around.  Make a note of that, future screenwriters.  Curly turns around, and the two fugitives hide their sticks behind their backs.  Curly puts his arms around them and starts talking like it's Moe and Larry.  Then he gets scared.  The two fugitives take their sticks and start to aim for Curly's head.  They hit each other instead.  Curly goes in the barn.
Next scene: Now the real idiocy begins.  Moe hatches a premature disguise plot.  He and Larry decide to put Jack O'Lanterns on their OWN heads!  Meanwhile, Curly approaches with a big board in his hands.  Moe and Larry slowly rise up with the O'Lanterns on their heads.  Curly lets 'em have it, and the pumpkin masks crumble into a few large pieces.  I guess even balsa wood can do that.  And of course, Curly lets loose with the word at about 6:50 or so.  He goes on: "MacArthur will decorate me for this!  I practically won the war alone!"  We get a nice shot of Moe and Larry looking on in pissed-off-itude.  Moe starts choking Curly.  Curly gets him to stop.  At first, I thought it was so that Curly could continue his flight of fancy, but the plot pudding thickens a bit.  More fugitives of a similar ethnicity show up.  I wonder how often that actually happened.  I thought those camps were guarded pretty well.  THAT we could afford.
Anyway, the Stooges head over to the ostrich.  I forgot about that!  Moe looks for something to throw.  Apparently, the ostrich has laid some eggs... three, to be more precise.  Spoiler alert: I guess Moe remembered that the ostrich was really going to town on that blasting powder, so he thought the ostrich eggs would be like contact grenades, or land mines or something.  Six Japanese people are standing inside the barn.  Moe throws his egg and there's a giant explosion.  Note the way the bodies are laid out this time.  Not quite so comical, is it?  The sheriff arrives.  He congratulates the boys on the "nice work", then of course wants to know how they did it.  Curly says they have an ostrich that lays "hand gren-eggs."  He slips on a cylindrical piece of wood and throws his egg up into the air.  The egg hits him on the head, but it's a dud.  Curly ends the film with perhaps the strangest monologue to ever end a Stooge film.

EPILOGUE

Was that Japanese subplot really necessary?  I mean, 1945 was really when the war with Japan became central.  As for me, the story I heard was that someone asked one of our relatives if their last name was Japanese.  They made the mistake of saying yes.  A few days later, off to the internment camp.  We never did figure out who got all their stuff.  Must've been a Zorba the Greek-kind of Everything Must Go free-for-all.  God bless America.

***
-so sayeth The Movie Hooligan

Auteur Watch - Ken and Jim Wheat

Ted again? ...oh, right! Spider Man!

As some of you may know, I'm totally against this Spider Man remake... then again, it is in 3D, and Spider Man's a classy Brit now, so what's not to like?  Still, what does it tell you about Hollywood culture that they're remaking a $140 million film?  I guess Marvel doesn't respect themselves that much.  Same with 2003's Hulk.  Also quite expensive.  Well, it gives a chance for the computer geeks to do something.  They went to all that trouble to make a CGI Hulk.  Might as well give it something to do!  In Spider Man's case, they've finally got the outfit the way they want it.  Look for the new and improved version in the sequel.
Of course, DC's not immune to reboot fever, either.  Another Batman reboot?  How many times do we have to sit through the scene where young Bruce Wayne's parents are slaughtered in the alley by the Joker?  It looked quite handsome in Batman Forever, incidentally.
What else?  Apparently, people were flocking to the theaters this weekend for the air conditioning.  Oliver Stone's latest, Savages, partially benefitted from this, as did the Katy Perry docudrama Katy Perry: Part of Me.  Makes me wonder what is that part of her that we'll never ever take away from her.  Probably the skeletons in her father's closet that he's trying harder than ever to cover up.  Thanks a lot, Katy!
Meanwhile, in the world of Konigsberg, looks like Woody Allen's on his way to a Best Actor Oscar now that his 2012 film's out, Nero Fiddled... I mean, The Bop Decameron...  I mean, To Rome With Love.  Ah, but how I love a sweet title like that.  Ellen Page can perhaps finally put Juno behind her now.  Come back to Facebook soon, Ellen.  She's gotta compete with Penelope Cruz in this one, but I think she can hold her own.  Let me just end with one last swipe, as people don't seem to like People Like Us.  Oh, snap!  It's okay, though, because director Alex Kurtzman's already hard at work on that Spider Man sequel.  You'll get to that train wreck in the coal mine art house movie soon enough!  Hook up with Jon Jost if you really must for advice.

Wink wink!!!

Personally, I don't understand it yet, but I just found out that The Night of the Hunter is one of the greatest American movies ever made.  I'll probably have to watch it a couple more times or something, preferably on DVD or Blu-Ray or TCM HD if they ever come up with it.  They're close!  Real close.  Regular TCM, that is.
Directed by Charles Laughton... yes, the Charles Laughton... ooh!  And a couple others, apparently... it seems like a first-time director's film.  It features an odd mix of real locations and bad sets.  However, there was one sequence where we see a house and a barn and a river in front of it.  I guess it was fake, but they spared no water for the river.  Gotta give 'em credit for that.
The plot.  Always with the plot.  Seeing as how it's highly rated and all, I kinda hate to spoil it.  Richard Widmark... I mean, a young Peter Graves... comes home with a big wad of cash.  The cops are hot on the trail, so he has to hide the money.  He gives the money to his son, and makes him swear to never reveal where it's hid.  Meanwhile, con man Robert Mitchum, posing as a man of the cloth, gets arrested for stealing a car, the tip of his crime-berg.  Graves and Mitchum end up being bunkmates in the same prison cell... okay, busted.  I missed the beginning of the movie, but apparently Graves killed one or more people in a bank robbery, something like that.  Graves gets hung by the neck until dead... but before he does, he tells Mitchum about the money.  Mitchum, In Cold Blood-style, takes up with Graves' wife and tries to get that money.  The story meanders quite a bit after that..............
That's all of the plot I'll reveal.  I sure wasn't prepared for this film, I'll tell you that, but now that I know how goofy it is, I'm sure I'll grow to appreciate it as the years pass.  And I'm sure that ol' Joel and Ethan have seen this one plenty of times, seeing as how they refer to Ruggles of Red Gap in Barton Fink and all.  There's more, of course.  The IMDb's got the whole list, but not all the details.  Raising Arizona: "Sometimes it's a hard world for little things."  Hi says that as the sun rises on his first day of fugitive fatherhood.  At the end, Lillian Gish looks in the camera and says that children abide... Abide?!!  LEBOWSKI!!!  Then there's the car at the bottom of the lake, used in The Man Who Wasn't There.  Mitchum keeps singing the song sung at the end of the Coens' True Grit, and of course barns a la O Brother, Where Art Thou?  I think that's all of them.  Of course, Hunter's IMDb 'connections' page leaves out the most crucial homage of all... uh, The Blues Brothers?  And to a lesser extent, probably Blues Brothers 2000?  Mitchum's hands, for God's sake!  I thought he had a similar tattoo in Cape Fear.  Apparently, De Niro in the Cape Fear remake had other tattoos.
Anyway, that's all I can think of at the moment.  Oh, and I think John Landis drew some inspiration from this movie in his opening shots of Joliet Prison in The Blues Brothers.  Li'l bit.  Other critics will laud Laughton's film more thoroughly.  I'm not there yet.

***1/2
-so sayeth The Movie Hooligan