What do swimming lessons, shoveling snow off a roof, and general tardiness have to do with today's review? They all prevented me from watching this movie with my daughter this week! But the weekend has come, and I have run out of excuses to put off this classic comedy further. I almost put it aside in favour of a movie that Erini had selected, and it wasn't a Disney movie. I almost relented, but decided to stick it out. In the end, I'm not sure if it would have mattered because most of the movie she spent running around with my friend's son. Needless to say, Erini will be living up to her name tonight.
Released to theaters in 1966, this Tony Award winning Broadway show was adapted for the screen with a number of the original cast. Right from the start, it's portrayed as quite the zany and funny film with the song "Comedy Tonight." I had forgotten just how bawdy it was, although I did remember a large part of the film deals with a courtesan house, and there were a few moments that I wondered if this was a good idea after all.
Then came the ever important running plot element, the mare sweat sleeping draught. What's funny about mare sweat? Aside from raw sewage, it's one of the more disgusting things that came from the Roman Era, so you would think it wouldn't be all that funny. Yet Hero, the master of the main character, Pseudolous, continues around Rome looking for a sweating horse. How the writers thought of putting a horse in a sweat lodge, I'll never know. Quite frankly, I think I'm better off. Yet those horses kept my daughter's wavering attention through the course of the movie, up to her favourite part, the chariot chase.
A memorable, albeit brief, chase scene that I'm sure she'll still think is funny when we watch with Bronwyn some years down the road.
Some staunchly conservative folk probably stopped reading this when they saw the DVD cover I have posted. I'm sure their thoughts are something along these lines: "How could this father fathom the thought of showing his impressionable daughter, who is not even four years old, a film featuring Romans, slaves, courtesans, and men posing as courtesans?" "This is lewd, crude, and anyone who thinking this is funny will most certainly be spending the course of eternity burning in the fire of their own condemnation."
Humour is one of the most difficult things to teach, since it involves a very broad spectrum of dramatic elements and requires a vast array of knowledge. Even with those two key characteristics in place, it requires the viewer to be in the proper mindset be receptive to the comedy presented. High brow, low brow, intelligent, slapstick, dark, practical, and the list goes on with the number of different types of comedy, all of which are weighted by personal taste. Some people can't get enough of Dane Cook and Larry the Cable Guy, while others will not stray from Reader's Digest.
Is this something I would put on for her to watch by herself? No. In a perfect world, my daughter and I would watch everything together. The world is not perfect and I am even further from it, so I do my best to allow my daughter to view a variety of comic situations as to allow her to develop her own sense of humour and appreciation for film.
Also, I'm not going to be around all the time to make her laugh.
Next up: Abbott and Costello - Jack and the Beanstalk
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