Comments on: Mind Blowing Movies: Funny Bones, by Bill Barol

By: blufive

blufive — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 20:05:00 +0000

“never understood why Lee Evans didn’t go on to stardom”

Depends on your definition of stardom; he’s done standup tours to huge audiences, sold millions of copies of DVDs of said shows, stage work (like lead in The Producers opposite Nathan Lane). Not international stardom, but not exactly chopped liver, either

By: Neil Krupnick

Neil Krupnick — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 16:58:00 +0000

My wife and I loved this movie so much that we named our first dog Toast.

By: Crumble Needy

Crumble Needy — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 13:55:00 +0000

take it to the edge …

one of my alltime favorite movies. never understood why lee evans didn’t go on to stardom, but he and oliver platt (and the rest) are brilliant. some of the best physical comedy ever filmed – at least in color.

toast!

By: Mat Ricardo

Mat Ricardo — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 08:14:00 +0000

One of my happiest career memories is having been in this movie. 99% of my scenes got cut (although you can still see me at the back of a couple of shots), but I had a very fun few days shooting.

I wrote about it here: http://matricardo.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/long-time-ago-i-was-in-jerry-lewis-film.html

By: devophill

devophill — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 05:53:00 +0000

Funny Bones also feature the incomparable George Carl. The man was a genius if there ever was one.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=029szjgA-8g

By: penguinchris

penguinchris — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 01:53:00 +0000

I’ve always thought it was a travesty how awful movie boxes typically are; I mean I know it’s hard to boil a movie down to box size in a way that will sell but in most cases I think it’d be better if they just put the movie poster on the cover (they still don’t do this, instead putting a photoshop hack job that took five minutes on instead) and called it a day. Maybe a few lines suggesting what it’s about on the back, but none of the vapid hyperbole and misrepresentation.

They make it so much worse by doing it the way they do, and it must result in fewer sales and rentals for harder-to-sell films like this. I watched hundreds of films from the local library when I was younger that all had this stupid zero-cost marketing, and every time I was surprised at the quality of the movie (even the bad ones) – the stupid stuff they write vastly lowers your expectations. Huh… maybe that’s their strategy after all :)

By: greenberger

greenberger — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 22:01:00 +0000

FUNNYBONES is a great, great film. I don’t find it quite as indescribable as you do, but I agree that it is a unique little creature sandwiched between mid-90′s hits such as CLERKS and PULP FICTION on the video store shelves. It’s basically a drama about a person having to accept he’s not good at something he spent his whole life pursuing- but the narrative doesn’t follow a conventional route, and it’s those quirky moments that make it so wonderful. And, like you said, the acting. Saying Jerry Lewis is better here than he is in KING OF COMEDY is a little bit of over-hype- after all, he’s a minor character in this film and a major one in Scorcese’s- but he is great here as well. I’d just hate for anyone to watch this now expecting something as epic as the performance Mr. Lewis gave there.

The video packaging can be blamed on fucking Disney, who applied the same generic template formula design on everything they controlled- which includes Miramax. I worked at a video store back in the day and had to witness the same hackwork on a weekly basis from those idiots. Many a great movie got buried and ignored because it looked like a bag of shit shoved into a VHS case!