New York Times Thing Two: on Screwball Comedies and Shoe Phones

Reading the Times article mentioned in the previous post, I started to feel a little overwhelmed. So many comedies coming out, how would I handle it? For any normal person, it will be a very full summer of new releases. But I, inexplicably, almost never see movies in the theater, so I'll be impressed with myself if I manage to do one a month. It isn't that I dislike seeing movies in the theater, it's just that it rarely occurs to me as a thing to do. And seeing as I've already promised my heart to one movie during the spring-summer season, I really will have to make an effort. But there are several movies that I think will be worth putting on my calendar.

One is the season kickoff movie (pun very much intended) "Leatherheads," directed by your friend and mine George Clooney. It is described in the New York Times article as "a screwball comedy about the early days of professional football." Ah, there's nothing that makes my heart sing like the term "screwball." Except perhaps the term "madcap." Clooney plays Dodge Connolly, a football star (a football player named "Dodge?" this is so promising) whose team loses their sponsor as the league faces collapse. Connolly brings college football star Carter Rutherford (John Krasinski, praise the lord) onto the team, who also happens to be America's Favorite Hero after single-handedly forcing many German soldiers to surrender in WWI. He seems too good to be true, and reporter Lexie Littleton (Renee Zellwegger) starts poking around. In the meantime, she manages to get both Connolly and Rutherford to fall in love with her, and madcap antics ensue, I'm sure. Clooney is always such a joy to watch, I can't imagine "Leatherheads" being any less than clever and entertaining.

The other comedy I'm excited for this summer is "Get Smart." Not just because Steve Carell and Anne Hathaway are awesome, or because the poster is subtly funny (and subtle is not the usual kind of funny you see on posters), but because "Get Smart" is one of the first non-contemporary shows I can remember watching as a kid. Nick at Nite (with FX, back in that summer before 8th grade when all they played were old superhero shows) is largely responsible for my embarrassingly expansive knowledge of sitcoms from the Kennedy to the Carter administrations, and I'm always excited when it becomes obvious that other people in the world love the things I love. Which reminds me...won't one of my friends please start loving the new "Doctor Who" as much as I do?

Anyway, I loved the show "Bewitched," and subsequently did not love the movie "Bewitched." But I am an eternal optimist, and after all, "Get Smart" will lend itself much better to a film format than "Bewitched." TV's "Bewitched" worked in the same way "I Dream of Jeannie" did. The wacky magical blondes would discover or accidentally create a problem, do their best to fix it, inevitably bungle it, and - whew! - somehow put everything back together before Gladys Kravitz or Dr. Bellows could figure out what happened...packaged perfectly in serial format. Of course, "Get Smart" featured Maxwell getting into and out of scrapes in less than 30 minutes, too. But a secret spy agency (CONTROL) versus an ambiguously evil group (KAOS)*, with bumbling agents on each side? That practically begs to be feature-length.**

I should also mention that I'm also looking forward to Tina Fey's "Baby Mama," but because I trust that she and Amy Poehler will make something very funny, not because the previews have bowled me over. I thought "Mean Girls" was great, and those previews weren't great either. So I have a lot of hope. All in all, it's shaping up to be a fun summer.

*Those don't stand for anything, as far as I know. It's just Mel Brooks and his friends being funny.
**To be fair, in 1989 (19 years after the series ended), the creatively titled movie "Get Smart, Again!" came out, with the original stars Don Adams and Barbara Feldon. But I haven't seen it, and probably won't.