Unsought Input

Spider-Man 3 seems like a shoo-in to join Spider-Man 1 and 2 in the top ten highest-grossing films of all time, but reviews have been mixed. Right now it’s running about 60% positive at Metacritic and 61% positive at Rotten Tomatoes.

So is it any good? I thought so, but this isn’t a movie review. As an internationally-recognized expert in Spidey Studies, I thought it would be important to point out where Spider-Man 3 gets it right, and where it get things wrong. I’ll start with the bad news first, with the good news to follow in the next day or two.

Please note: this is not a series of gripes over deviations from the “cannon” of the original Amazing Spider-Man comic books or anything like that. Spider-Man, like many of his his comic book and other literary brethren, has been written by many different people over the years in many different media. Instead, I hope to point out where Sam Raimi deviated from the crux of the characters or missed opportunities that presented themselves.

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Perhaps you shouldn’t go right now, since I’m writing this at midnight on a weekday, but go at your earliest convenience. Hot Fuzz is the latest film by Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright, the guys who made Shaun of the Dead. If you haven’t yet seen Shaun of the Dead, go out and get it – it’s one of the funniest, most clever movies I’ve seen in a long time.

You may not have heard of Hot Fuzz, it doesn’t seem to be getting much advertising and didn’t open in a large number of theaters. If you’ve seen a review, you might have heard that it’s a buddy cop action movie spoof. Really, it isn’t a spoof so much as an homage wrapped up in a bunch of postmodern cleverness. It’s also a damn good film in it’s own right.

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If you take a look at the CIA World Fact book, you’ll see that Turkey’s top exports include apparel, foodstuffs, textiles, metal manufactures, and transport equipment. What the United States government doesn’t know, or doesn’t want you to know, is that Turkey tops the world in a commodity not listed here: comedies.

In our ongoing quest to discover the greatest comedies of all time, I decided to take a look at what IMDB had to say. IMDB does have an official list of the top 50 comedies, but I wanted more. Many lists include 100 movies, so I went to the Advanced Search and searched for all movies in the genre “comedy”, with at least 1000 votes, excluding TV movies, TV shows, and direct-to-video releases.

The first thing I noticed is that IMDB’s search is broken, apparently “ignore TV series” really means “litter the results with lots of TV series.” The next thing I noticed is something even the CIA couldn’t discover: Turkish dominance of the top 3 comedies of all time.

At number 1, with a rating of 9.2, is Babam Ve Oglum (2005), also known as My Father and My Son. At number 2, with an 8.9 rating, is Tosun Pasa (1976), with Hababam sinifi (1975) just a notch below at 8.8. The Turkish dominance is finally interrupted by Dr. Strangelove (1964) at the number 4 spot.

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A few weeks ago JessB mentioned she had seen a list of the 100 greatest comedies (I think it was Bravo’s list) and that it was pretty lacking. The full list can be seen here, in Manroom Magazine, and no, I didn’t just make up Manroom Magazine, it actually exists.

At the time a few of us remarked that although constructing a definitive list would be difficult, we could come up with 100 that were, on average, much better than the Bravo list and even the fancy important AFI list.

So I am issuing two challenges:

1. To all Unsought Input writers: I am seeking your input to a list of the greatest comedies. Write a follow-up post with some of your picks.
2. To all UnsoughtInput readers: give us suggestions and critique our choices in the comments section.

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