Synopsis
It takes two to skidoo.
Ex-gangster Tony Banks is called out of retirement by mob kingpin God to carry out a hit on fellow mobster "Blue Chips" Packard. When Banks demurs, God kidnaps his daughter Darlene on his luxury yacht.
Ex-gangster Tony Banks is called out of retirement by mob kingpin God to carry out a hit on fellow mobster "Blue Chips" Packard. When Banks demurs, God kidnaps his daughter Darlene on his luxury yacht.
Jackie Gleason Carol Channing Frankie Avalon Fred Clark Michael Constantine Frank Gorshin Peter Lawford Burgess Meredith George Raft Cesar Romero Mickey Rooney Groucho Marx Arnold Stang Doro Merande Phil Arnold Slim Pickens Robert Donner Richard Kiel Thomas Law Jaik Rosenstein Stacy King Renny Roker Roman Gabriel Harry Nilsson Austin Pendleton Alexandra Hay John Phillip Law Donyale Luna
Skidoo se faz a dois, Смывайся!, Skidoo Se Faz a Dois, 新潮男女志
I used to watch this movie so much in my early 20's. I was familiar with it's reputation for the Jackie Gleason acid trip scene and got a copy from 5 Minutes To Live (If you remember that website, I bet you miss it as much as I do). There were a lot of things I loved, and looking back I realize that it was my introduction to a bunch of seminal favorite things/actors/music, most notably the score by Harry Nilsson. I was familiar with him in a vague lime-in-the-coconut kind of way but this is when I REALLY started paying attention to him. "The Cast and Crew" track still remains one of my most sung Nilsson songs (although admittedly…
Otto's Erotic Acid-fixation
How Do You Do, Fellow Kids?, The Movie
Believe it or not, I've seen this infamous flop, long ago. However, this-via TCM Underground late last night-was the first trip in widescreen. What a motion picture this is, something that satirizes such things as hippies while at the same time trying to be “hip” in order to appeal to “the youths” at the time. Believe it or not, a bunch of old Hollywood farts who did not really understand hippies and the counterculture did not succeed at making something for them. As nice a cast as this features and Otto Preminger is a legendary director, practically all the famous faces are old people so of course they will seem woefully out…
Preminger somehow managed to do the impossible (turn the Batman TV series straight)
Tripping towards God. Can one loves a comedy that is almost devoid of actual laughs? That's the question people have face while dealing with Skidoo for some 50+ years. It is wonderfully imagined, formally always very interesting, full of amusing touches while at same the generation gap jokes are flat and the attempts at screwball more endearing weird than funny. Yet it has the Garbage Can Ballet, it remains concepotually tight, its paranoid corporate satire better than its reputation and Preminger cast of vets and youngsters inspired. "It's a great, big, beautiful blob of nothing. It wants me. It wants me. It loves me." goes the film better known line and the paradox of Skidoo is that is the opposite…
Skidoo ist einer dieser Filme wo sich eine Gruppe alter Männer vor hatte, einen Film für junge Leute zu machen. In 90% der Fälle geht das ganz ganz schief und es kommen ziemlich unangenehme Filme dabei rum. Skidoo soll auch so einer sein. Ich kann das wenig beurteilen, hab mit den Hippies der 60er damals nie viel zutun gehabt. Aber Spaß bei Seite, Skidoo kann man aus heutiger Sicht schonmal gucken, ohne dass man ziemliche fremdschämende Momente hat.
Was bei Skidoo eher problematisch ist, dass der Film halt überhaupt nicht lustig ist. Die Dialoge sind mehr schlecht als recht und die Charaktere teils zum Augenverdrehen dämlich, teils nur so akzeptabel geschrieben.
Auch die Handlung ist in meinen Augen nicht sehr…
Skidon't.
I figured my opinion of this would plummet on a second viewing and it'd seem like a mere psychedelic trainwreck mostly worth only gawking at (ala candy, myra breckinridge, et al). Quite the opposite, to my surprise
if you too have wondered what it'd be like if the sopranos was produced in the style of batman '66...tune in, turn on, and drop out with due haste
Great Directors’ Misfires (1/27)
Among Classical Hollywood's vanguard of filmmakers trying to push the limits imposed by the Hays Code, Otto Preminger stands out for his excelling in making films that skeptically observed conflicting characters and taboo themes while always remaining frank and objective with how he handled where the camera would roam. Preminger never stuck with any immediate style to connect the vast array of genres and topics he covered (seriously, the man went from a Gershwin musical to a courtroom drama about rape to a Zionist epic in a row), but instead used his craft in order to make films that studied characters with ambiguous human psychology governing them, all with very subtle and discreet camera movements and…
Watched this high out of my mind as God intended and was absolutely riveted by the end credits.
What’s not to like?
Impossible to dismiss something so magnificently fearless, even when it's this obvious that a healthy dose of fear would have been more than warranted. I would like to say that absolutely nothing works, but that would be untrue: Carol Channing, of all people, is on exactly the right wavelength, though even she is unable to completely overcome the script's tendency to ride "comic" scenes until they die and fall apart and the bones are ground into dust. One of the very worst of these is right at the beginning, a fight between Channing and Jackie Gleason over the channel clicker that lasts for approximately six hours in a movie with a 99 minute runtime. And you can tell based on…