The Screengrab : chico marx

April Fools: The 35 Funniest Movie Characters Of All Time (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 21:00:00 GMT

WILL FERRELL AS RICKY BOBBY IN TALLADEGA NIGHTS: THE BALLAD OF RICKY BOBBY (2006)

Will Ferrell’s Anchorman may be more absurd, but Talladega Nights is still the SNL alum’s greatest big-screen achievement to date, a NASCAR-set bit of lunacy that mocks American culture while simultaneously exhibiting fondness for it. Via the character of Ricky Bobby, a nitwit car-racing star, Ferrell manages to send up our national gluttony and materialism, as well as Southern political and social conservatism, with a no-holds-barred goofiness that’s nonetheless underscored by affection for his redneck milieu and its inhabitants. To keep things evenhanded, Sacha Baron Cohen’s aggressively homosexual French F-1 champ Jean Girard provides a hilarious caricature of liberalism. It’s Ferrell’s titular clown, however, that truly embodies the film’s fair-minded attitude, his Ricky Bobby an egotistical good ol’ boy whose jingoism is as inane as his predilection for saying grace to the baby Jesus – an extended bit that gets funnier with every subsequent viewing – and yet whose me-first ridiculousness is laced with a childish kindness that makes him both an embarrassing and endearing personification of 21st century southern America. (NS)

CHEVY CHASE AS CLARK GRISWOLD IN CHRISTMAS VACATION (1989)

While the original remains the most popular, and European Vacation is probably the funniest, the Vacation series’ most heartwarming entry was 1989’s Yuletide saga, in large part because its holiday setting provided Chevy Chase with the best opportunities to convey not only Clark Griswold’s buffoonery, but to root that silliness in his deep, abiding love of family and tradition. In this second sequel, Clark’s homestead is invaded by parents, in-laws and the clan of Cousin Eddy (Randy Quaid), and this raft of supporting players – which also comes to include the Griswold’s prissy Yuppie neighbors (Nicholas Guest and Julia Louis-Dreyfus) – helps take some of the comedic burden off of Chase. Despite surrounding him with talented co-stars, however, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation’s spotlight nonetheless remains squarely on its headliner, whose pratfall skills are in fine form, and whose sympathetic embodiment of his well-intentioned doofus patriarch – aggravated by his kin, disappointed over not receiving the work bonus he was counting on, and tormented by a squirrel let loose in his abode – lends the manic, messy proceedings real warmth. (NS)

PAUL REUBENS AS PEE-WEE HERMAN IN PEE-WEE'S BIG ADVENTURE (1985)

Too much fun in a porn theater may have destroyed Paul Reubens' career – and, consequently, the life of his iconic Pee-Wee Herman character – but his 1985 big-screen debut, helmed by first-time director Tim Burton, stands up as a perfectly realized idiosyncratic original. In this fanciful, carnival-esque saga, Reubens' strange-talking man-child Pee-Wee embarks on a cross-country odyssey to recover his beloved red bike, which he believes was stolen by his rich, spoiled, nasty neighbor Francis (Mark Holton). Even on his first feature, Burton’s flair for crafting strange, wild, wondrous visions was in full effect, as was Danny Elfman’s aptitude for offbeat scores. Nonetheless, it’s Pee-Wee who cements his place in the film-comedy pantheon. From the colorful, gadgety confines of his home (where he chows down on some Mr. T breakfast cereal), to the Alamo (whose basement he foolishly hopes to investigate), to a roadside bar where he famously displays his dance moves while surrounded by a horde of nasty-looking bikers, Pee-Wee proves himself a one-of-a-kind weirdo whose irrepressible cheer is infectious, and whose childlike innocence is endearing. (NS)

ALBERT BROOKS AS ALBERT BROOKS IN REAL LIFE (1979)

Albert Brooks has built a career – and a pretty fine one, if you ask us – out of portraying himself as a complete jerkoff. Even when he’s not playing a fictional character who’s kind of a schmuck, he’s kind of a schmuck: the “Albert Brooks” he plays in his films is a rampaging egomaniac who’s completely oblivious to how he comes across to people. Nowhere is this better realized than in his first full-length feature as a writer and director, 1979’s Real Life. This criminally underseen comedy, which brilliantly anticipates the reality-TV craze of 20 years later, sees Brooks playing himself as a desperate-to-please filmmaker who decides to film a normal, average American family; the comedy lies in the fact that he quickly assesses that the moviegoing public will be bored stiff by normality and averageness, and immediately sets about interfering with their lives for entertainment value. Unsurprisingly, this ruins the experiment, and starts to ruin the family’s life as well – but right up until the very end (where he hits upon the brilliant idea of burning their house down in order to provide his disastrous movie with a suitably exciting ending), Brooks is completely blind to the fact that the only thing wrong with his movie is that he’s the one making it. “Albert Brooks”, as portrayed by Albert Brooks, is so fine a portrait of a self-absorbed Hollywood phony it must have made Robert Evans blush.

CHICO MARX AS BARAVELLI IN HORSE FEATHERS (1932)

Although we’ve chosen his role as Baravelli in the campus comedy Horse Feathers as representative, it’s really just a stand-in for any Chico Marx performance. In the Marx Brothers’ films, Groucho’s role was to be the anarchist, the fly in the ointment, the wild card who refused to play by society’s rules and hilariously wrecks the smooth running order of things; Chico’s role was to do the same thing – only to Groucho. Often stereotyped as the dimwitted punster, Chico’s roles went far deeper than that: he was a true comic foil to his younger brother, reminding him that he couldn’t always win, that there was always someone there who could outhustle even the great Groucho – even if it was by playing dumb. Groucho was the subversive riddle that brought down authority, and Harpo was the dynamite bomb thrown right in the middle of the room, but Chico was a Chinese finger puzzle: it looked so simple, but once you were caught in it, no matter how smart you were, you couldn’t get out. Nowhere is that more clear than in the famous “Tutti Frutti” scene in Horse Feathers, where a supremely confident Chico prevents a slow-burning Groucho from betting on the horse he wants to win. It’s one of the greatest examples of pure comic timing ever captured on film.

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

Contributors: Nick Schager, Leonard Pierce

Take Five: Bring On the Bad Guys

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 20:00:00 GMT

As you may have heard unless you've just gotten back from an alternate dimension with no public relations industry, The Dark Knight opens this weekend, and even our resident skeptic Scott Von Doviak is hailing Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker as one of the pinnacles of big-screen malevolance. Batman is the perfect illustration of the principle that a hero is only as good as his villains; the Clown Prince of Crime is the outstanding member of an unforgettable rogue's gallery that throws the lonely heroism of Bruce Wayne into sharp relief by illustrating the other facets of his personality and demonstrating how terrible he might have been had he not taken the path of righteousness. Indeed, there are any number of genres, from true crime to film noir to serial thrillers to even Shakespearean tragedy, that prove that a story is only as strong as its most detestable character. Crime, as the man once said, is only a left-handed form of human endeavor, and for every enigmatic nihilist like the Joker who simply wants to watch the world burn, there's a figure whose vileness and evil are the result of a good man gone just a little bit bad. If your showing of The Dark Knight is sold out, here's five movies featuring some of our favorite big-screen villains to tide you over until you get to hear Ledger's deadly cackle for yourself.

THE STEPFATHER (1987)

These days, Terry O'Quinn is best known for his portrayal of John Locke, the mysteriously healed castaway from Lost who can be both hero and villain as he attempts to forge a mystical connection with the island. But 20 years ago, when the veteran stage actor first came to the attention of the moviegoing public, it was in this smart little thriller about a man so obsessed with having the perfect family that he was willing to kill to get it. His face an affable blank, O'Quinn goes about his father-knows-best routine with barely a harsh word for anything, until something goes wrong. That's when the devil inside him comes up, and he moves quickly from tearing up his tool room to butchering his whole family. O'Quinn's tightly controlled performance here is what makes the movie, and his quiet intensity is what makes it so devastatingly effective when he temporarily forgets the careful fiction he's made of his life and asks, with genuine confusion, "Who am I here?" -- before remembering, and delivering the news to his new wife in an especially brutal way.

THE MINUS MAN (1999)

Though a flawed movie, The Minus Man -- directed by Hampton Fancher, best known for penning the screenplay to Blade Runner -- is also a compelling one, thanks to the strong performance by Owen Wilson as the main character, Vann Siegert. Turning the usual serial killer narrative on its head, The Minus Man presents Siegert as a kind, handome, likable young man who wants to put down roots, to fit in, to be somebody -- but most of all, to help people. The problem is, he thinks that most people are so miserable that the best way to help them is to kill them (gently, of course, with a fast, painless poison). So decent is this mass murderer that his own conscience has to step in occasionally and remind him that what he's doing is wrong, in the person of two imaginary FBI agents who torment him. And so convincing is Wilson in making Vann a likable figure that more than once, the viewer finds himself wishing they would just go away and leave the poor boy alone.

THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI ACROSS THE 8TH DIMENSION (1984)

Great villains don't always have to be grim, sinister, humorless killing machines. Sometimes, as in this delightful neo-pulp sci-fi musical comedy, they can be goofy, pompous, overblown killing machines with the worst fake Italian accents since Chico Marx. Dr. Emilio Lizardo, the nefarious Red Lectroid living in the body of a long-dead rocket scientist, is played in the film by John Lithgow, who hams it up like there's no tomorrow. He sticks electrodes on his toungue, he tortures helpless women with honey, he gives plagiarized inspirational speeches to his handful of followers, and he deliberately mispronounces the names of his underlings -- and he has a hell of a time doing it. Dressed up in cobbled-together bits and pieces of a dozen pulp archetypes, Lithgow gets support from a colossal cast of veteran character actors, including Dan Hedeya, Christopher Lloyd and Vincent Schiavelli, but he outshines them all, investing each one of his often hilarious lines with hooty gravitas.

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (2007)

Some critics found the character of Anton Chigurh in the Coen Brothers' masterful adaptation of a Cormac McCarthy novel to be so over-the-top as to read like a cartoonish supervillain. Others, though, found the understated psychopath, played by a preternaturaly detached Javier Bardem in one of the big screen's most memorable haircuts, to carry surprising depth for someone described by another character in the film as "the ultimate bad-ass". The most compelling thing about Chigurh is that, while everyone else perceives him as totally insane, his madness has the impenetrable integrity of the lunatic. To himself, his actions make perfect sense, and the more time we spend around his insanity, the more we begin to understand it: in the chilling scene near the movie's end where he pays a visit to the tragedy-stricken Carla Jean, we know that he's playing his own deranged interpretation of fair with her, and the terror we feel as the tension mounts comes from the fact that we know and she doesn't.

ROCKY III (1982)

Made at the exact moment in time that the Rocky franchise was becoming a laughable self-parody, but Mr. T had yet to do the same, Rocky III, while more or less a disaster in its second half and filled with hokey, ridiculous moments, does manage to give us some of the most thrilling scenes in the series. Why? Because it also gives us the greatest villain in the series: the brutal, granite-hard, contemptous Clubber Lang, a street-fighting brawler who has nothing but loathing for the soft celebrity smooth-talker that Stallone's Rocky Balboa has become. Patterned partly after the young George Foreman, Clubber Lang is a monster in the ring who lives to destroy his opponents and has developed a line of trash-talk so electrifying that it sends the gregarious Rocky into a rage while providing the most quotable dialogue in the whole Rocky series. And though he never showed himself capable of doing more than he does here, Mr. T is stunning: his hostile, spitting hatred of everyone but himself is so exciting to watch that for the film's first hour, it's hard to take your eyes off him.