My Favorite Year (1982)

This has been on my to-see list for more than a decade, so I've heard plenty about it -- mostly along the lines of "oh my word, so funny, love it," so I fully expected to agree. Well, that ain't what happened. Gary and I started watching this together and, it took us less than 20 minutes to figure out that neither of us were enjoying it at all, at which point we switched to The Blue Dahlia. I went back and finished it (of course) but I think it would've taken some serious bribery to get Gary to join me.

The basic story is that a fading, alcoholic movie star (Peter O'Toole) is booked on a live comedy show and a young writer is tasked with babysitting him so he 1) shows up and 2) shows up sober. That sounds promising and fun! But somehow it just isn't. I think the movie hurts itself in the first sequence when we're being introduced to wacky show people in general and the babysitter, Benjy Stone, in particular. There's so much mugging and Benjy is such an unlikable little pest that I had an immediate "oh brother" feeling about the whole shebang. I admit that when I returned to it, the movie got markedly better -- but it wasn't good enough to make me like it.

C-