PARKER POSEY AS DARLA IN DAZED AND CONFUSED (1993)



The first time I ever saw Parker Posey on screen, a camera was swooping down on her ‘70s mean girl, Darla, as the dominatrix in bellbottoms screamed, “All right, you little freshman bit-ches!” in the midst of a bizarre Texas hazing ritual in Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused...and for me, it was love at first sight, both for the character and the actress portraying her. Darla was the epitome of the smart, formidable high school queen bee nerds like me pretended to hate but secretly wished we were cool (or hot) enough to hang with...the sort of girl that fuels class reunion fantasies of all varieties. And Posey zaps every precious second of the character’s too-brief screen time with megawatt voltage, whether helping Matthew McConaughey’s Wooderson keep L-I-V-I-N by grabbing a meaty handful of his aging stoner ass or advising some hapless underclassman to “wipe that face off your head, bitch!”  Despite later good roles in the likes of Party Girl, Noah Baumbach’s Kicking and Screaming and the Christopher Guest oeuvre, Posey was never quite this incandescent again...not unlike the real-life Darlas of the world, who eventually graduate and somehow never recapture that brilliant spark of absolute adolescent power. (AO)

SEAN PENN AS JEFF SPICOLI IN FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH (1982)



There have been a lot of stoner comedy routines in movies, but nobody has ever acted being toasted with the Method intensity of Penn as Spicoli, while making it funny. Penn is the kind of actor who aims to convince you he's morphed into whoever he's playing, but as Spicoli, who's "been stoned since the third grade", he doesn't just transform himself physically and spiritually, he declares his emancipation from gravity. Sweetly pledging that all he needs in life are tasty waves and a cool buzz, he blurs the line between being out of it and being in a state of grace. (PN)

WALTER MATTHAU AS COACH BUTTERMAKER IN THE BAD NEWS BEARS (1976)



Few things are funnier in the movies (though not real life) than adults being mean to children. And, with the possible exception of Billy Bob Thornton’s bad Santa, no adult character has ever gotten more mileage out of behaving unsuitably around kids than Walter Matthau’s Coach Morris Buttermaker in Michael Ritchie’s The Bad News Bears. An ex-minor league ballplayer who takes a job as the coach of a lousy little league squad, Buttermaker is the exact opposite of a role model, showing up to work hungover, endlessly smoking and drinking beer in front of his young charges, and putting them down with droll callousness. Of course, Buttermaker and the Bears’ story is an ultimately redemptive one, a narrative arc which presumably goes some way toward excusing the coach’s early, improper conduct. But people learning and growing isn’t why Ritchie’s film endures as a comedy classic; the sight of the peerlessly cranky Matthau passed out next to the pitching mound, empty beer cans lying nearby, is. (NS)

REX HARRISON AS SIR ALFRED DE CARTER IN UNFAITHFULLY YOURS (1948)



Who doesn't love a movie where the fool is the pompous highbrow? As pointed out in the excellent commentary in the attached clip (the only clip of this movie on youtube, sadly), Preston Sturges directs this one fairly close to the heart. Rex Harrison plays Sir Alfred de Carter (the "de" in the middle is an exquisite joke all on its own), a conductor who suspects his younger wife of infidelity. The movie proceeds with a fantastic comic plot: De Carter conducts three orchestral pieces, and in each imagines a different way of murdering his wife. In the final part of the movie, he heads home to put his nefarious plans into action, which is where the movie tips into some first-rate slapstick. That's what you call black comedy! Harrison plays an excellent upper-crust twit, being believably competent in his privileged artistic role but an inept bungler at the fairly simple crime of murder. There's hilariously great screwball dialogue throughout and a kneeslapper of an overwritten slice of purple cheese to cap off the movie. Skip the remake and go straight to the source for the good stuff. (HC)

MICHAEL SIMON AS BOUDU IN BOUDU SAVED FROM DROWNING (1932)



Boudu is the holiest of holy fools, a vagrant who is unexpectedly drawn into a comfortable middle-class existence where he destroys every social rule he faces. It is a testament to the skill of Michel Simon, who played Boudu, that he remains a comic, and mostly sympathetic, force of nature even as his behavior ranges from merely obnoxious to outright felonious. Jean Renoir was a master of ripping asunder the veil of the French class system with the deftest of touches. Consider the scene above, in which Boudu eats sardines with his bare hands. The French public apparently rioted at this. And at the scene where he wiped shoe polish all over a fine bedroom. But the scene where he seduces/rapes his benefactor's wife? That left them unfazed. The movie ends with Boudu finding a way to yet again subvert his benefactor's attempts to give him the Eliza Doolittle treatment in a way that suggests that he never needed to be saved from drowning in the first place. Don't subject yourself to the awful remake Down And Out In Beverly Hills; stick to the original for the real comic masterpiece. (HC)

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Five, Six, Seven & Eight

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Nick Schager, Hayden Childs