The 1965 Mini-List

[therewillbeblus]

The humor in Help! is obviously not going to work for everybody but it lands for me to an extreme degree

I could’ve sworn I saw this as a kid, but it’s hard to say whether I actually did or just watched A Hard Day’s Night an endless amount of times.. Either way, I watched it today, and while not as good as the earlier film, it’s definitely a lot funnier than I anticipated, due to its surprisingly hard leanings into somewhat risky absurdist humor. While the narrative eccentricities are going to be the loudest pieces to highlight and gags to unpack, the bits that worked best for me merged subtle situational absurdism with deadpan humor- like Ringo’s early monotonous delivery of “I thought she was a sandwich”

[domino harvey]

King Rat will probably be a top ten for me.

Thanks for saying so in time for me to get this from my library before submissions. This may be the best wartime prison camp movie I've ever seen

Caught up with King Rat and enjoyed it on the whole, but didn't like it nearly as much as some of its defenders did. I think there's a lot of compelling moments and components, but Tom Courtenay's character and how the film posits him within this narrative is so much more interesting than anything else going on here, and his plotline functionally climaxes with a full third of the film left. Courtenay is predictably quite skillful as depicting this level of officiousness (it is amusing that he was nominated for an Oscar the same year this came out for a similar character), and the great joke of the film is that the narrative treats him as the villain when he is, of course, technically correct the entire time. George Segal's actions, entertaining though they may be, negatively impact the greater good of his fellow prisoners. But while Courtenay's "correctness" is right on paper, it is not necessarily correct in action, the film tells us. This is a great moral dilemma-- is is "right" to follow the rules even to the extent of adhering to those compelled onto your by your captors? Does our natural desire as viewers to root for the scrappy guys exploiting the holes in the system blind us to the actual damage of their actions? Unfortunately, the film doesn't really know how it feels about any of this. This is never clearer than in the exchange between Fox and Courtenay which ends the film-- this is a DEEPLY embarrassing miscalculation and misreading of literally the only thing here that even works, and to be honest it caused me to significantly downgrade my esteem for the film that preceded it, as I seemed to have been giving this production too much credit.

As a side note, I imagine the DoesTheDogDie.com entry for this film is just a couple of those Matt Drudge animated siren GIFs