Better Off Dead is a very minor comedy classic amongst 80s teen flicks. It’s not great, but it’s really funny, and it’s the kind of movie you can watch pretty much every time it comes on. Never gets old.
What becomes clearer to me every time I see it is that it’s a very poorly made film in a lot of ways. A lot of scenes are awkwardly shot, the movie meanders and has too many scenes that aren’t connected to the rest of the movie, and there are simple failures on the basic level of telling a story. For example, the whole movie is about John Cusack’s character dealing with getting dumped by his girlfriend, yet the dumping scene happens off-screen and all we get is a voice-over of what she said. Huh? I suspect that there was a real scene shot, and that they cut it out and added the voiceover to explain what happened.
Still, the material is really funny and the cast is good, so the movie works despite failing as a piece of cinema. Interesting.
4 comments:
While Better Off Dead is clearly sloppily made, I think you underestimate how far ahead of its time this movie was, especially in terms of irony and non-sequitors. Frankly, this line alone is enough to gloss over the bulk of the film's flaws, "Man, that's a real shame when folks be throwin' away a perfectly good white boy like that."
(Well-written stuff, by the way. Kudos. You can be sure I will be putting more than my two cents in...)
Thanks for the words, Paul.
I am the first to admit that my complaints about the sloppily-made nature of the film are hollow. The simple fact is that the movie works. As much as I appreciate a well-polished, visually mapped-out and technically proficient film, Better Off Dead makes me laugh, and that's really what's important. Warts and all, it's a damn fun movie.
i like this movie i think because i'm such a wet hot american summer fan- patrick and i were discussing once how wet hot american summer basically encapsulates the history of comedy, starting out as just pretty straightfoward, kind of tongue-in-cheek and slapstick-ey, goes through all these other transformations which i forget the exact nature of now because we talked about this last year, but by the end it ends up at the peak of wackyness and like...post-modern self-aware non-sensicalness, and that's sort of where better off dead fits in. into the best part. i see a lot of its influences there. i think that's why i'm so fond of it.
(wow, the majority of that long comment was one sentence)
I can see a bit of a connection in the randomness in the two movies, but I think Better Off Dead has more of a cartoon or Mad Magazine vibe with all the site gags and silliness, whereas WHAS is more down with being surreal or bizarre.
Still, there are some similarities. My guess is both are influenced or informed by similar sources, moreso than BOD influencing WHAS.
Post a Comment