Strangers With Candy
So much for moving the "Friday Movie" feature to Monday. On Monday, I took a bus down Second Avenue to see The Great New Wonderful, but I was told that the air-conditioning wasn't working, so that was out. I walked a few blocks over to the theatre next to our storage unit, but none of its seven theatres was showing anything that I either hadn't seen or had no intention of seeing. A complete bust.
Because Kathleen really really wants to me to see The Devil Wears Prada for the first time with her, and because there was an eleven o'clock showing at the Sunshine Theatre, on Houston Street, I popped left the house at ten yesterday morning and went downtown to see Strangers With Candy. I had a bag to drop off at a thrift shop nearby, and I wanted to give myself plenty of time. But the trains were brilliant and I turned onto Houston Street from Lafayette at 10:30. The weather was sunny but gusty - an unusual combination that always heralds a storm. (It's amazing how long Ms NOLA, with whom I met up after the movie, and I would be able to stay dry.) There was no sign of rain, however, when I walked into the Sunshine and tried to buy a ticket. The place was just opening up, and I was asked to take a seat on a bench. In the end, I got into the theatre after the previews had started.
Strangers With Candy - ! That's about the best I can do. The only film with which it can be remotely compared is National Lampoon's Animal House, but Amy Sedaris is in far more of Strangers than Belushi was in the earlier gross-out. And she is every bit as gross. Gross, gross, gross! Did I mention her toenails? Did I mention what happens when, chided for talking with food in her mouth, she replies that there is no food in her mouth? Did I mention her Balinese dancing? No, of course I didn't!
Strangers With Candy is loaded with parts - great parts - but it refuses to add up to a sum. It does this so deliberately, so competently, that you forgive it. You just roll with the gags, which are constant. The casting alone is a riot: Ian Holm, Deborah Rush, Dan Hedaya, Sarah Jessica Parker, Allison Janney, and Philip Seymour Hoffman all have terrific bit parts in this high school romp. Matthew Broderick, no less, is the "bad guy," and he finds startling new things to do. Greg Hollimon, a new face to me but someone who I gather has been busy on Comedy Central, was in every way the more established stars' equal. Maria Thayer managed to put enough intelligence into her part to suggest that she's capable of doing quite well in less fluffy surroundings, but she stuck out for me principally because she reminded me so forcibly of the pale girl standing behind the young fop in George de la Tour's La Sorcière. I could go on and on, so I won't. Strangers With Candy isn't for everybody, but anybody with a taste for parody will enjoy this quick-witted send-up that knows no shame.
