It's only May, and already we have a strong candidate for worst movie of the year: Hot Pursuit, with Reese Witherspoon as a maladroit cop and Sofia Vergara as a flamboyant Latin mob wife on the run from killers and crooked cops.
Really, is there anything worse than a bad comedy?
Come to think of it, do they make good comedies anymore?
Anyway, it would be easy to go on and on about the films faults, but what I found most interesting was the inclusion of bloopers shown with the end credits. Havent seen that in a while. And they were certainly funnier than anything in the film.
If memory serves (which it does less and less these days), the first time I saw bloopers with end credits was with the 1978 film Hooper, a Burt Reynolds stuntman action-comedy directed by Hal Needham. Most of the bits shown during Hoopers closing credits are repeats or alternate takes of stunts in the film, though a few mistakes are included.
Then came the 1979 Peter Sellers movie Being There, which had an extended sequence of Sellers giggling as he flubbed a line over and over. Later, I saw the film again, and the bloopers were gone, with white noise and a snowy TV screen under the credits instead. (Both are on the Blu-ray release.)
The show-biz trade papers in 1979 reported that Sellers became furious when he watched Being There at the Cannes Film Festival and it had the outtakes at the end, which prompted laughter from the audience and, as he put it, broke the spell of the film, especially following the ambiguous mystical moment of the final shot.
Later, when Sellers received an Oscar nomination, many pundits felt he lost because of those end-credits bloopers although Kramer vs. Kramer winner Dustin Hoffman might dispute that.
After Hooper, outtakes under the credits became a staple of Hal Needhams movies, dominated by the actors flubbed lines in Smokey and the Bandit II, The Cannonball Run, etc.
There's no question that Needham started a trend. Even Jackie Chan, who is famous for showing stunts gone wrong under the end credits of his many Chinese comedies, was inspired by Needham. Chan had a small role in The Cannonball Run, and he was so impressed with the audience reaction to the bloopers that he began doing the same thing in his own movies.
Many others have followed suit over the years even animated films (starting with Pixars A Bugs Life), the bloopers of which are actually fake, of course, planned out and animated.
But the outtakes in Hot Pursuit reminded me specifically of my review of The Cannonball Run, which ran in the Deseret News on June 23, 1981, and began this way:
There is something very wrong with a movie when the end credits are better than anything that preceded them.
Hal Needham, director of The Cannonball Run, has elected to show outtakes as the end credits role that is, the fluffs and mistakes made by the cast during filming. He also did that with Smokey and the Bandit II, and the end credits were the funniest thing about that picture as well.
With a few more films, Needham will be able to string together a feature-length series of outtakes, and it will undoubtedly be his funniest comedy.
I remember noticing that when audience members filed out of the theaters at the end of both Smokey and the Bandit II and The Cannonball Run, they were smiling and chuckling, which may have given people in line for the next showing the impression that they thoroughly enjoyed the films.
So maybe what end-credits outtakes are meant to be is a marketing ploy.
Really, is there anything worse than a bad comedy?
Come to think of it, do they make good comedies anymore?
Anyway, it would be easy to go on and on about the films faults, but what I found most interesting was the inclusion of bloopers shown with the end credits. Havent seen that in a while. And they were certainly funnier than anything in the film.
If memory serves (which it does less and less these days), the first time I saw bloopers with end credits was with the 1978 film Hooper, a Burt Reynolds stuntman action-comedy directed by Hal Needham. Most of the bits shown during Hoopers closing credits are repeats or alternate takes of stunts in the film, though a few mistakes are included.
Then came the 1979 Peter Sellers movie Being There, which had an extended sequence of Sellers giggling as he flubbed a line over and over. Later, I saw the film again, and the bloopers were gone, with white noise and a snowy TV screen under the credits instead. (Both are on the Blu-ray release.)
The show-biz trade papers in 1979 reported that Sellers became furious when he watched Being There at the Cannes Film Festival and it had the outtakes at the end, which prompted laughter from the audience and, as he put it, broke the spell of the film, especially following the ambiguous mystical moment of the final shot.
Later, when Sellers received an Oscar nomination, many pundits felt he lost because of those end-credits bloopers although Kramer vs. Kramer winner Dustin Hoffman might dispute that.
After Hooper, outtakes under the credits became a staple of Hal Needhams movies, dominated by the actors flubbed lines in Smokey and the Bandit II, The Cannonball Run, etc.
There's no question that Needham started a trend. Even Jackie Chan, who is famous for showing stunts gone wrong under the end credits of his many Chinese comedies, was inspired by Needham. Chan had a small role in The Cannonball Run, and he was so impressed with the audience reaction to the bloopers that he began doing the same thing in his own movies.
Many others have followed suit over the years even animated films (starting with Pixars A Bugs Life), the bloopers of which are actually fake, of course, planned out and animated.
But the outtakes in Hot Pursuit reminded me specifically of my review of The Cannonball Run, which ran in the Deseret News on June 23, 1981, and began this way:
There is something very wrong with a movie when the end credits are better than anything that preceded them.
Hal Needham, director of The Cannonball Run, has elected to show outtakes as the end credits role that is, the fluffs and mistakes made by the cast during filming. He also did that with Smokey and the Bandit II, and the end credits were the funniest thing about that picture as well.
With a few more films, Needham will be able to string together a feature-length series of outtakes, and it will undoubtedly be his funniest comedy.
I remember noticing that when audience members filed out of the theaters at the end of both Smokey and the Bandit II and The Cannonball Run, they were smiling and chuckling, which may have given people in line for the next showing the impression that they thoroughly enjoyed the films.
So maybe what end-credits outtakes are meant to be is a marketing ploy.
