I really like John C. Reilly

I do admire Will Ferrell

However, with the reviews and the external news reports I’m getting on “Holmes & Watson,” I don’t think I’ll waste my time on it.

When respected (by me) media site AV Club reports “Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly hit career lows in the abysmally unfunny Holmes & Watson,” this ought to be a wakeup call to someone.

Straight-industry-news website “Deadline” reported dismal audience response “… however audience gave the Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly PG-13 comedy a D+. which is lower than Ferrell’s Zoolander 2 (C+) and Land of the Lost (C+).” And last year — remember ” last holiday season’s comedy Father Figures, which tanked with a final gross of $17.5M.” ?

That can’t be enough for a profit.

“Deadline” reports: “We had heard for quite some time that test scores for Holmes & Watson were so bad that Sony tried unloading the movie to Netflix, but the streamer wouldn’t buy it.”

“Rotten Tomatoes” gave it a 9% favorable (critics) rating and a 27% favorable (audience) score.

“Rolling Stone’s” reviewer said, “It’s so painfully unfunny we’re not sure it can legally be called a comedy.”

“The Wrap” sums it up nicely: “Stan and Ollie (Reilly plays Oliver Hardy) is a movie about a comedy duo that has seen better days, while Holmes & Watson merely stars one.”

Where have the formerly-great gone wrong?

Well, perhaps Ferrel’s judgment isn’t the best. After all, he told “Altpress.com” (Headline): WILL FERRELL ADMITS HE THOUGHT ‘ELF’ WOULD RUIN HIS CAREER.

That was made 15 years ago and is now a Christmas perennial.

Even his “Funny Or Die”schtick is getting criticized. “The Daily Beast” sniped: ” ‘The Campaign’: Will Ferrell Phones It In . Will Ferrell’s new movie The Campaign is perfectly fine—but Richard Rushfield wishes the once inventive comedian would try harder.”

At least Reilly is getting some respect for his Extra-Ferrell work, like “Stan and Ollie” and “Ralph Wrecks The Internet.”

But we’ve seen the greats who seem to lose direction and wander off into their own little space/time continuum — sometimes never to return. Jerry Lewis, Jim Carrey, Adam Sandler … and the list could go on.

Let’s hope for a pleasant surprise — and the return of Will Ferrell’s funnybone someday.

Now listen up and listen good — I don’t like to repeat myself.

I like film-noir, see … I can get lost in the action when the tough guys start slinging the lead and the cars come squealing around corners.

There ain’t many to live up to the great Bogart or Cagney or that crazy Mitchum macho. But every once in a while, a new style update makes it worth going back to the movies to see what’s going to happen next.

Like that current movie, “Bad Times at the El Royale.” It’s really got the goods. A seedy motel outside of Reno, a shady travelling salesman, a daffy old guy who claims to be a priest — but we know better. The nightclub floozie and the runaway girl — they all get together at the motel, and you know it ain’t gonna be a happy ending.

The director lifted some good ideas from Tarrantino, and the pacing is as tight and tense as “The Maltese Falcon” 80 years ago. Bullets and fistfights? Present and accounted for. Lots of evil and maybe, just maybe, no good guys at all.

Jeff Bridges as the off-kilter priest and Cynthia Erivo as the nightclub singer carry the movie along. The big surprise is Lewis Pullman as the creepiest desk clerk since Dennis Weaver in “A Touch Of Evil.” And when Chris Hemsworth — Thor Himself — drops the hammer, he sure ain’t gonna save the day.

You haven’t seen it yet? There are other ways to waste your time. But if you haven’t had a tension headache and if your blood pressure isn’t abnormally high, this might be the ticket to buy.

A mouse is 1940s jive slang for a pretty girl. In the movie “Pal Joey,” Frank Sinatra flips his lid for Kim Novak when he sees her in the chorus line (skimpy dress, of course) and says with a leer, “Who’s the mouse with the built?”

The wolf is a frequent symbol of the predatory male. In Tex Avery cartoons of the 1940s, the wolf is dressed in a zoot suit and when he sees a mouse his eyes pop out, his tongue unrolls like a carpet, and he issues a sound like a flivver’s horn — “OOOOOooogah! Ooooogah!”

Now in that historical context, I will give you my recently completed updated lyrics for this fine song.

THE MOUSE: I simply must go

THE WOLF: Baby it’s cold outside

THE MOUSE: The answer is no

THE WOLF: Oh, in that case, I’ll call you an Uber. Good night.

(Total running time: 16 seconds)

COPYRIGHT 2018 WADE B WARD

It’s bad enough Joe didn’t get a reservation, the inns are all sold out, and we gotta sleep in the barn, but have you ever tried to get a baby to sleep in a manger?

I finally get him down — he’s gotta sleep in the manger, fer heaven’s sake! — and a bunch of shepherds drive their flock into the barn. Wake the baby, he’s crying! I shout “whattaya doin! can’t ‘cha see we got a baby sleepin’ here?”

They claim it’s a barn and what did I expect — camels? And the kid is sleepin’ on the sheep’s hay. I tell Joe to give them the Bum’s Rush but he just waves them away and says “have a heart!”

So I get the baby asleep again and whattaya think?  It IS camels now! Three idiots from who-knows-where come trotting into the barn babbling in some kinda crazy tongue about following stars and traveling forever. Wakes the kid again, and now I gotta rock him and the camels smell like they ain’t been washed for ages — horrible stink fills the barn.

And what do you think else could happen?

Dis little runny-nose brat comes into the barn banging on a drum! He’s shouting, “I play my drum for him!” and he thinks he’s Gene Krupa or something! Baby starts crying all over again.

Ever have one of those nights?

To those who see politics in everything:

In the movie “The Matrix,” the hero is offered the choice of a red pill and a blue pill. The red pill gives you knowledge, freedom, uncertainty and the brutal truths of reality. The blue pill offers security, happiness, beauty, and the blissful ignorance of illusion.

In film “Total Recall,” the hero is offered a red pill which is described as ” a symbol, of your desire to return to reality.” There is no blue pill — but Schwartzenegger probably didn’t need the “little blue pill” (Viagra) anyway.

In “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” (which is a fantasy life) , Ben Stiller travels to Greenland and rents a car at the airport. He asks the rental agent “Do you have any cars available?” and is told “Yeah, we have a blue one and a red one,” and the hero (Stiller) takes the red one.

In 1969, the US initiated the lottery system to draft young men for the Vietnam War. The 366 days of the year (including February 29) were printed on slips of paper. These pieces of paper were then each placed in opaque blue plastic capsules and drawn from a jar. The first 195 birthdates drawn were basically given the blue pill.

For the more esoteric people (like, those who actually read as well as watch movies,) the fascinating non-fiction book “Gödel, Escher, Bach, and Eternal Golden Braid” by Douglas Hofstadter (1979) — described by the author as “in the spirit of Lewis Carroll” — has a section where the characters in Escher prints “pop out” of the two-dimensional world (and into our 3D world) by drinking from a blue phial (like a medicine bottle) and “push into” the 2D world by drinking from a red phial.

So which is the real world and which is the looking glass world? Red or Blue?

Our Theater date took us back to Stages in Fullerton. We enjoy small theaters, as they show wonderful creativity in overcoming their limitations. Our first foray to Stages was to see Urinetown which had a large cast in a small space. One result of this is that the cast acts very close to the audience. Another is that the sets must be modular (if scenery changes are required) and can be very 3-D (Urinetown was two-layered and used the upper level creatively.)

Last night we saw a “New Shakespeare Play” called “All The World’s A Grave.” In the modern era, one might expect such a title to mean a vampire or zombie play (Those are SOOOOO overdone!). But it was a classical Shakespearean tragedy — a mashup of half a dozen plays.

Hamlet, Prince of Bohemia, returns from a foreign war against Lear with a war bride — Lear’s daughter Juliet. He finds his father is dead and his mother has married the King, Macbeth (making her Lady Macbeth). Hamlet’s aide, Iago, is jealous because Romeo has been promoted to general, and Iago isn’t happy at all.

What could go wrong?

The play is gender-fluid. Lear is actually a Queen — Juliet’s mother — and Iago is also female. The troops are also co-ed and dressed in modern military garb.

MacBeth is African-American but race does not seem to be an aggravating factor. Hamlet wants to kill him after encountering his father’s ghost and learning that murder was the vehicle to the throne. Likewise, Rosencrantz is African-American and Guildenstern is female. In this world, the women are as deadly as the males and the ending has a body-count worthy of a Quentin Tarantino flick.

The story is basically a re-shuffling of all these tales, using the original lines with a few twists (Bohemia for Denmark, for example). Does it add anything to the Shakespeare canon? No, and it has pretty creaky contrivances, but then it only lasts about half as long as a full-text Hamlet.

Several of the players are standouts. Lear has a small part, but Rose London displays her mighty chops in the final scene. This is basically Iago’s story, and Christine Cummings carries a lot of weight with unexpected humor and nary a slip of the lip.

But Abel Garcia is a very American Hamlet — not like the British interpretations of a lad going quietly mad. Garcia transmogrifies the character from the initial scenes of a rather easy-going, humorous, and happily married war hero to a raging, ranting, screaming, haunted, and tormented demon. He slaps his poor and puzzled wife around, pulls a knife on his mother, terrorizes his troops — and this all of three feet away from our seats at front-row center. I was hoping that the daggers they all carried were really props.

At community theater prices, this was an evening chock-full of entertainment. The interpretations of well-known characters and tropes are interesting. But as someone once said — “The play’s the thing …” and this really adds nothing to the canon. It can be distracting at times as audience members try to remember which lines and situations came from which plays. For example, near the end, when Hamlet is stalking Romeo with murderous intent, he does a great Jack Nicholson impression (where Jack bursts through the door in “The Shining” and shouts “He-e-e-re’s JOHNNY!”) as he chases his prey across the stage and taunts him with “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?”

I am not a Hamlet fan-boy but I’ve seen most of the major portrayals on film (and some of the minor ones). This is an original take on Hamlet — and on the whole five-act Elizabethan drama oeuvre .

I would certainly recommend it to anyone who can sit through a traditional Shakespearean tragedy.

STAGEStheatre
400 E Commonwealth Ave #4
Fullerton, CA 92832