Author: Brian J. Noggle

This is one of my beautiful wife’s favorite movies, and now that the youngest is fourteen, we thought he was old enough. He’s good with swearing, but boobs in movies weird him out. He is definitely not a child of the 1980s, when many if not most films that a young man watched (comedies and action films) featured at least one set of breasts, no matter how briefly. So the youngest only made it a little way into the movie before heading off to his YouTube videos to learn how to be cool.

Aside: In the video from “American Ride” by Toby Keith, in 2009, a caricature of Trump appears. But we were talking about Eddie Murphy’s movie about a rich prince who comes to America to find his bride.

That’s basically the plot: An African prince, not happy with the arranged marriage planned for him, convinces his father to postpone the wedding so that he, Akeem, the prince played by Eddie Murphy, can go to America. The father, played by James Earl Jones, thinks it so that his son can “sow his royal oats,” but Akeem wants to find a woman who has not been trained from birth to serve him.

So Akeem and his friend/servant Semmi, played by Arsenio Hall, travel to America, New York specifically, and they end up in Queens (naturally). They get jobs at a local restaurant patterned after McDonalds, owned by Mr. McDowell played by John Amos, and Akeem falls for Lisa, Mr. McDowell’s daughter, so he and Semmi take a job there. Antics ensue, and when Semmi contacts the royal family of Zamunda, the whole entourage arrives just as Akeem is winning Lisa’s heart–but he wants her to love him for himself, not his royal riches.

The film was noted at the time for the number of roles Murphy and Hall played, from barbers and their patrons to women in the clubs where the prince and Semmi go to look for women. It’s a bit of an in-game to look for the characters played by each the first time you see it, I suppose. For me, that was a long time ago. The movie also tips the cap to Trading Places, the 1983 film where Ralph Bellamy and Don Ameche are reduced to poverty at the end–in this film, five years later, Akeem tucks a wad of cash into their hands, and they announce they’re back. Which would have made sense if you were an Eddie Murphy fan and had seen this film five years prior. I’m pretty sure I saw it long after.

The other actors in the film are noteworthy as well. Comedian Louis Anderson plays an employee of McDowell’s. Samuel L. Jackson tries to rob McDowell’s. Vondie Curtis-Hall has a bit role; in a couple of years, he would be a bad guy along with John Amos in Die Hard II. And so on.

So the film is quite up there in the Nogglestead pantheon. Not only is it one of my wife’s favorite comedies, but it also has several lines that we use as common allusions in fairly regular talk. Including:

• Inclining head: Whatever you like.
  Said when one of us asks the other’s preference in places to eat or similar aesthetic decisions.
• The first thing we have to do is get you out of these wet clothes.
  I won’t go on about when that’s said.

Also, I bought the girl a Sexual Chocolate t-shirt, but she is a proper woman of the community and does not wear it out of the house. I think it must be at the bottom of the drawer, as she does not wear it.

I guess the oldest thought it funny enough, but as I mentioned, the youngest did not watch it. Yet.

Now, I know you like to see pretty girls tucked under the fold here, gentle reader, but I looked through the IMDB listings of most of the players in the film, and this was the peak of many of their oeuvres. Except for Garcelle Beauvais, who was a rose petal bearer in the film early in her career, and she has been very active ever since.

Continue reading “On Coming to America (1988)” →

The trailer for this film appears before one of the movies I watch fairly frequently–perhaps The Man Who Knew Too Little on DVD, or perhaps Dodgeball. So I have seen the trailer enough so that when I found the video at the antique mall when I had a gift certificate to spend, I picked it up.

If you’re of a certain age and think Taxi, you hear Bob James’s “Angela” in your head.

But this is not that show.

This is a Queen Latifah movie with Jimmy Fallon in it judging by the titles; it also features a young Henry Simmons (Mac from Agents of SHIELD) as Queen Latifah’s boyfriend and an unrecognizeable Ann-Margret as Jimmy Fallon’s mother. In it, Fallon’s character, detective Washburn doesn’t drive a car well, and in the intro, his antics lead to destruction and a license suspension. When he hears of a bank robbery, he jumps into a cab driven by Belle Williams (Queen Latifah) and orders her to follow the robbers. It’s no ordinary cab–a former bicycle messenger, Williams has modified the car serving as her cab to be a racecar, and she’s a NASCAR hopeful. So they drive really fast on the trail of the bank robbers, who are apparently also models for some reason (well, they can’t all be surfers like in Point Break, I guess). Which means the leader of the band is Mrs. Tom Brady. I tried to lure my boys to watch the film, but that trivium was not enough.. And as they work together, they meet each other’s families and whatnot for some humorous set pieces.

So it has a bit of a bad reputation and rating, but it’s just a piece of early century popcorn action comedy. No worse than most, and honestly better than the Internet would have you believe.

So, about that band of bank robbers.

Continue reading “On Taxi (2004)” →

My oldest re-watched Fletch earlier this year, and I told him to look for Fletch Lives in the watched section of the video library. The video library is only marginally better organized than the book library, which is basically because we own fewer DVDs and videocassettes to randomly array on the too-packed shelves allotted them. He did not find it then, but when I went looking for another previously watched (Coming to America, which my beautiful wife and I had seen, but not the boys had not). The oldest made a run through the stacks looking for that film and could not find it, either. So I took a try and found this film on the first pass through (and Coming to America on DVD on the second pass, but early, as it was like the third film on the upper left shelf’s second rank).

So the boys and I watched it.

In this film, Fletch receives a call from Louisiana that his aunt has died and has left him her plantation, home and 80 acres. He quits his job and travels to the bayou, only to discover that the house is in poor repair. However, a cash offer is immediately made on the place, and after he signs the papers to take over the estate and makes whoopie with the attorney (Patricia Kalember), she dies in bed with him, and he is picked up on suspicion of murder. After his release, a real estate agent (Julianne Philips) approaches him with a better offer, which makes him suspicious. He investigates, with the help of his aunt’s caretaker (Cleavon Little), and encounters a nearby religious-themed amusement park that has been acquiring land to expand. So is it the televangelist, played by R. Lee Ermey, or something more sinister?

Well, the ultimate plot is a little more elaborate than that, something a bit Chandlerian in complexity, but it does give Chevy Chase the chance to chew the scenery and put on some silly disguises. The film does hit some common 80s tropes (televangelists as venal hucksters, toxic waste), so it’s not especially inventive, but it has gotten rapped in reviews for being not as good as the original. Maybe not, but it was not that far off if you watch them one after the other. So never mind the reviewers from its day: Know that my oldest son was disappointed that there is not a third Fletch movie (and before Hollywood gets it into its head to make one thirty-three years later, it’s too late).

So I enjoyed it, and it’s something I have re-watched in the last couple of years (well, maybe seven or eight). So let that be an endorsement as well. For the books as well–perhaps now the boy will read the Fletch books.

But did someone mention Patricia Kalember and Julianne Philips?

Continue reading “On Fletch Lives (1989)” →

C’mon, man, you know this is the 1954 film starring Humphrey Bogart in one of his later roles and not the 1989 De Niro and Penn film. I mean, I guess I could watch that, too, since it is an oldie now–characterized not so much by black and white or bright Technicolor, but the lack of CGI and the presence of a plot.

The plot centers on three convicts who escape, in 1895, from a prison on an island off of French Guiana and arrive at a seaport where a bunch of other recently freed convicts or prisoners on work release work, so they kind of blend in. They offer to “fix” the leaking roof of a local shop–in reality, they just want to hide out until they can stow away on an outbound vessel. But they come to feel some affection for the family running the store as the store’s owner comes from France to check in on the operation–the store is struggling, as it is the only one in town offering credit, and townspeople are taking advantage of it and of the shopkeeper. So they help sell, help cook the books, and help take care of the shop’s normally in absentia owner.

The heroes of the story are actually convicted felons and murderers who sometimes joke about it–so they’re anti-heroes in 1954, which I am assured by popular culture is impossible. Also, it’s a a movie based on a stage play, which you can kind of tell by the limited number of sets, the wordplay, and the talk of going to other locations but not actually going there (the governor’s garden, unseen, is a source for flowers, for example). It’s not badly paced, as the wordplay and humorous situations come with frequency, but it is paced for the middle of the 20th century, so probably a bit slow for the TikTok generation.

It featured Joan Bennett as the shopkeeper’s wife.

Continue reading “On We’re No Angels (1954)” →

As you might know, gentle reader, my boys and I a couple of years ago went through the main line of James Bond movies in order, starting with Dr. No and culminating in the end of the Pierce Brosnan years. Actually, I started them with the first appearance of James Bond in an American television episode of Climax! that introduced Jimmy Bond. We also watched Never Say Never Again, another studio’s rendition of Thunderball! that brought Sean Connery back after Roger Moore had taken over. We did not, however, watch this fillm, which is a late 1960s spoof starring David Niven, Ursula Andress, and Woody Allen.

I invited the boys to watch it, but they demurred, as they’d already seen it; the episode of Climax is entitled Casino Royale and is based upon the book, loosely, as is this film, much more loosely.

The 1960s were rife with these spy-movie romps. Kids today, and by “kids,” I mean people of a certain age who think they’re still young but are not, think Mike Myers invented the spy spoof when he did Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (actual kids these days don’t watch old movies like Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery). But you’ve got the Flynn movies and the Dean Martin Matt Helm movies, so they existed, although they were lost in the 1970s pop culture dark age.

So: In this film, the original James Bond has retired. But SMERSH is killing the MI6’s and other agencies’ agents, so they try to lure him out of retirement to help tackle the terror organization. He refuses but changes his mind after his mansion is destroyed–at the orders of M, who is killed in the attack. So Bond takes over MI6, renames all of the other agents James Bond 007 to confuse SMERSH, and takes M’s remains to his estate in Scotland, which has been infiltrated by SMERSH. Women agents try to seduce Bond to knock the shine off of his celibate gentleman reputation, but cannot. He learns that the other agents have been seduced and led to their deaths, so he strives to find an agent impervious to female charms to beat a gambling-debt-ridden SMERSH agent at baccarat.

So that’s the basic outline that leads to the Casino Royale of the title. The film is full of silly scenes and escapades, lots of attractive women, and ends on a note that presages the grimness of 1970s cinema.

So I thought it was interesting to watch as a cultural artifact and in the name of Bond cinema completeness. I was amused in spots, but I don’t think my boys would have liked it–again, they’re a bit young to understand what’s being spoofed.

But it did include beautiful women.

Continue reading “On Casino Royale (1967)” →