Movie Mon. - I'm Just Glad Meet the Parents Didn't Make the List . . .

My reviews will be up a bit later today. In the meantime, enjoy this blog meme on movie comedies.

John Scalzi has created a blog meme to discuss the proposed canonical list of film comedies from Bob McCabe's The Rough Guide to Comedy Movies.

The idea is to annotate the list as follows: Films in bold I have seen and I actually own those with an asterisk on DVD/Video. Below that is my commentary:

Airplane!
All About Eve
Amelie
Annie Hall
The Apartment
Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery
Blazing Saddles
Bringing Up Baby
Broadcast News
Caddyshack
Le diner de con
Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story
Duck Soup
Ferris Bueller's Day Off*
Four Weddings and a Funeral
The General
Ghostbusters
The Gold Rush
Good Morning Vietnam
The Graduate
Groundhog Day
A Hard Day's Night
His Girl Friday
Kind Hearts and Coronets
The Lady Killers
Local Hero
Manhattan
M*A*S*H
Monty Python's Life of Brian
National Lampoon's Animal House
The Odd Couple
The Producers
Raising Arizona*
Roxanne
Rushmore
Shaun of the Dead*
A Shot in the Dark
Some Like it Hot
Strictly Ballroom
Sullivan's Travels
There's Something About Mary
This is Spinal Tap*
To Be or Not to Be
Tootsie
Toy Story
Les vacances de M. Hulot
When Harry Met Sally...*
Withnail and I


Films Whose Presence in the Canon I'm Particularly Gratified to See (pick up to five):

1. Groundhog Day
2. Raising Arizona
3. Roxanne
4. Shaun of the Dead
5. This is Spinal Tap

Films in the Canon Whose Presence Should Not Be (pick up to five): I can only comment on those that I've actually seen.

1. All About Eve (Great movie, but not one I ever would have lumped in with comedy)
2. Austin Powers (while it grew on me, I've never understood the Austin Powers craze)
3. Bringing Up Baby (this movie drove me to murderous rages at times; people lying for no reason, people refusing to listen to one another, people automatically assuming the worst of somebody, contrived slapstick . . . it's like a Who's Who of my comedy pet peeves)
4. Dodgeball (enjoyable, but deserving of a spot here? Hardly)
5. Monty Python's Life of Brian (personally my least favorite of the Python films, probably because it's the most linear)

Films I'd Pick to Replace Them (pick up to five): I've tried to pick films that sort of correspond in genre, tone, and/or era to the five I disagreed with, although I didn't make it an obsessive compulsion to do so.

1. Arsenic and Old Lace (a classic comedy)
2. Young Frankenstein (My favorite Mel Brooks movie)
3. Philadelphia Story (A far superior screwball comedy to Bringing Up Baby, in my opinion. Yes, it has some of my pet peeves, but they are handled much better, and most of the characters actually seem to have a brain, which is nice)
4. The Jerk (Steve Martin's comic masterpiece)
5. Monty Python and the Holy Grail (I mean, seriously, how could this one have been omitted?)