Hi, Burl here, writing from home! I have a review for you –
a picture I just watched a few days ago for the first time! Ha ha, and it shows
how, if you know of the existence and the basic plot of a movie for years, you
can really form your own version of it, only to be mildly shocked when the real
version is so different! Ha ha, I’m talking about The Money Pit!
My imagined version of The
Money Pit wasn’t really so different materially, but tonally it certainly
was! I thought the movie would be more realistic, treating the states of
being broke and of dealing with contractors trying to shark you with at
least one foot planted in reality! But goofiness begins early in the picture,
and you realize it’s more of an expensive sitcom pilot than a genuine movie!
That may sound pretty harsh, and you may be thinking “Ha ha,
Burl, you’ve just got sour grapes because you were wrong!” Well, I think I watched
it with a pretty clear eye, and I’ve got to report that this picture is some
pretty thin soup! It’s really a series of physical gags that only occasionally
ring that sweet slapstick gong, and at every other moment in the movie there’s
not much else going on!
Ha ha, one might hope to achieve at least the level of
realism offered by The ‘burbs,
another Tom Hanks domestic comedy! But no, not really! When a movie opens with
your main characters getting the old heave-ho from none other than Yakov “Brewster’s Millions” Smirnoff, you get a
sausage-sniff of what you’re in for! From there, the picture flirts with
realism by presenting Hanks’s money problems and the contractor difficulties he
and his ladyfriend experience after purchasing a falling-apart house, but it
never comes close to reflecting or commenting on actual human experience!
No, it’s pretty cartoony! Weirdly, it was shot by Gordon
"The Parallax View" Willis, whose nickname “The Prince Of Darkness” you’d think would put him low
on the list of lensmen one might consider for a bright, goofy comedy! It was
directed by Richard Benjamin, whom I like as an actor more than as a director,
ha ha! He’s always great in pictures like Catch
22 or The Last Married Couple in
America!
Hanks is pretty good in the picture, though he’s no Harold
Lloyd! Shelly Long, known from television, plays his friend, and we also get
little appearances from many comic character actors, but none of these good
people are able to help The Money Pit
rise out of its own foul mire! After all, there is a scene in which a
contractor spells the picture’s theme out in blazingly on-the-nose allegorical
terms, ha ha!
Ha ha, there I am being overly harsh again! I promise it’s
not just because the movie defied my expectations, nor it is because I have
suffered excessive contractor troubles of my own and believe the subject should
be treated with deadly earnestness! It’s more because the movie is flat and not
too funny, and aims its comedy at moppet level while dealing with mortgage
payments and construction schedules! Moppets yawn at these things – I remember
from when I was a moppet!
I sort of enjoyed it when Hanks fell through the floor and
was trapped in a rug-bag for hours! It had a sort of Simpsons Rake Gag endurance quality to it! Otherwise it was a film
of squandered opportunities, cementing in my mind the conviction that Yakoff Smirnoff’s
best movie is and always will be The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension! I give The Money Pit one and a half fine old
cars!
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