| Quirky Zany Frenzied |  |
If you enjoy madcap romps like It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way the Forum, Noises Off, Some Like It Hot, almost anything by Mel Brooks, the Road To... movies with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, Laurel and Hardy, and the Marx Brothers, you’ll probably get a kick out of this one.
The film starts in NYC in the 1930s with two out-of-work actors (Stanley Tucci, Oliver Platt) practicing for roles they’ll never get and trying to scam food. When they insult a pretentious Shakespearean actor Sir Jeremy Burtom (Alfred Molina), they find themselves running for their lives and hiding on board a ship. When they wake up in the morning, the ship – an ocean liner – is preparing to debark.
Of course they’re not going to get off the ship in time because they’ve got big work to do coming face to face again with the pompous actor plus a Nazi ship’s staff director (Scott Campbell), the compassionate and lovely social director (Lili Taylor), a Russian terrorist (Tony Shalhoub), the ship’s lovelorn captain (Richard Jenkins), a deposed queen (Isabella Rossellini), an endangered sheik (Teagle F. Bougere), an impoverished grande dame (Dana Ivey, who flat out startled me in her similarity to Maggie Smith), and her plain and shy daughter (Hope Davis), an egocentric gay athlete (Billy Connolly), a suicidal singer (Steve Buscemi), a neurotic casting agent (Woody Allen), and several others.
Whew! All that in under two hours!
Written, produced and directed by Stanley Tucci.
Rated R for some language.
My personal rating: B
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