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Posts Tagged ‘Babaloo Mandel’

City Slickers II: The Legend of Curly’s Gold

Wednesday, June 12th, 2024

June 10, 1994

CITY SLICKERS II: THE LEGEND OF CURLY’S GOLD is the sequel to the Billy Crystal comedy adventure hit I reviewed in my summer of ’91 series. You may remember that Jack Palance won an Oscar for playing the surly trail boss Curly, who teaches Mitch (Billy Crystal, RUNNING SCARED) how to feel like less of a twerp, helps him deliver a baby calf, dies, and is bizarrely buried out in the middle of the desert. The sequel opens with Mitch riding out to visit Curly’s grave, only to have him reach and rise out of it, in a parody of the end of CARRIE. (A nightmare, of course.)

I thought it would be funny if they got Palance back just to do that scene, but this is actually a sequel that follows in the tradition of A BETTER TOMORROW 2, where the stand out character was killed in the first movie so they brought the actor back as his twin brother. Mitch keeps seeing Curly outside his window and shit, his friends think he’s losing it, but in fact Curly’s twin brother Duke is following him around trying to find a treasure map hidden in his brother’s hat, which Mitch has. (read the rest of this shit…)

A League of Their Own

Thursday, July 28th, 2022

A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN (which opened against BOOMERANG on July 1, 1992) is a very nice and pleasing mainstream period sports comedy-drama from director Penny Marshall (JUMPIN’ JACK FLASH). It’s a fictionalized version of one of those true life historical events you hear about and think “Yep, that’s a movie” because it reads so much like a high concept movie pitch: during WWII, when so many American men were sent to fight overseas, some enterprising baseball executives started the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League to keep the sport in the public eye. Though they endured all manner of sexist indignities (like being forced to wear skirts and pretend to fit various feminine stereotypes) they also were good at what they did and took their shot to show it off.

Geena Davis (FLETCH) and Lori Petty (CADILLAC MAN) star as Dottie Hinson and Kit Keller, small town Oregon sisters who run a dairy and play catcher and pitcher on a softball team. One day a scout named Ernie Capadino (Jon Lovitz*, THREE AMIGOS) attends a game and wants Dottie to try out for the A.A.G.P.B.L. She’s happy with her life and uninterested, but agrees to go if he’ll give Kit a shot too. (read the rest of this shit…)

City Slickers

Tuesday, June 8th, 2021

June 7, 1991. Despite the notable release of another odd Spike Lee movie, this week was won by more middle-of-the-road culture. It was the week that the original run of Twin Peaks ended. The #1 and #2 songs on the Billboard charts were “More Than Words” by Extreme and “I Wanna Sex U Up” by Color Me Badd. And the #1 movie was a nice normal comedy about wisecracking Billy Crystal birthing a cow to cope with the boredom of middle aged, middle class existence.

Like JUNGLE FEVER, CITY SLICKERS is about some lives upended and rearranged after a married man has an affair with a subordinate at his workplace. In this case the dude is Phil Berquist (Daniel Stern, C.H.U.D., FRANKENWEENIE), a wet blanket grocery store manager who is very unhappily married to a mean bully (Karla Tamburrelli, “Stewardess [Northeast Plane],” DIE HARD 2) until panicked young clerk Nancy (Yeardley Smith, then in her third season as the voice of Lisa Simpson) finds him outside of work to tell him she thinks she’s pregnant.

“Why is she telling you this?”

The scene goes down at the 39th birthday party of Mitch Robbins (43 year old Billy Crystal, ANIMALYMPICS) and inspires Phil to unleash twelve years of suppressed fury at his wife in front of the Robbins family and all their friends. If this was reality he’d for sure be the bad guy here, but we’ve already been primed to hate how this horrible wife talks to him and feel victory in him telling her off. (read the rest of this shit…)