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Funny Farm / Spies Like Us Blu-ray offers decent video and solid audio in this enjoyable Blu-ray release
'Funny Farm' - George Roy Hill's 'Funny Farm' stars Chevy Chase as Andy Farmer, a big-city sportswriter.
Since he and his wife, Elizabeth (Madolyn Smith), are fed up with the tensions of urban life, they decide to
buy a house in the country where each of them will be able to work on their book projects in peace. Shortly
after they've moved to a spacious farmhouse in a small New England village, Andy begins to realize that his
dreams of bucolic nirvana are, in fact, delusions. First the birds sing too loudly, preventing him from
concentrating on his work. Then he learns that there's a corpse buried in their garden, not to mention snakes
in their lake. They have to make calls from the pay phone located in their kitchen, and the grasping
townspeople seem to have their meters running 24/7. To make matters worse for Andy, who can't get started
on his book, his wife has sold her children's book, with a squirrel protagonist named Andy, not long after
moving into the new house.
'Spies Like Us' - A pair of naive guys with aspirations to become government spies have their wish come true
only to find out that they're being used as decoys for a real spy team.
For more about Funny Farm / Spies Like Us and the Funny Farm / Spies Like Us Blu-ray release, see Funny Farm / Spies Like Us Blu-ray Review published by Jeffrey Kauffman on March 29, 2010 where this Blu-ray release scored 3.5 out of 5.
Chevy Chase has always been an interesting performer, sometimes as much for his failings as for his successes. Springing to fame in that first, great cast of Saturday Night Live, he brought the pratfall to new heights (lows?) with his bumbling portrayal of then President Gerald Ford. His smartass newscaster helped define Weekend Update as one of the generally funniest bits in Saturday Night Live's somewhat spotty history. When Chase graduated to film, his mugging and tic-filled work could work very well (Foul Play, Fletch), but frequently fell as flat as his short-lived talk show. These two 1980's films find Chase somewhere between those two extremes, at times very winning, but at others faltering with less than stellar writing.
Funny Farm
Just by chance Turner Classic Movies was running The Egg and I with Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray today, just as I was ruminating about Funny Farm. My mother had the book of The Egg and I as I was growing up, and I remember to this day staring at this strangely titled tome on my parents' bookshelf and wondering what in Heaven's name it could be about. On one of the local station's afternoon movies that ran weekdays when I was growing up, it was broadcast one afternoon and my Mom and I watched and I found it occasionally amusing, if never really laugh out loud hilarious. I fear I had much the same reaction to Funny Farm, the 1988 Chevy Chase film that posited Chase as retired sports writer Andy Farmer trying to craft the Great American Novel in his newly acquired farm in the rustic and scenic town of Red Bud, Vermont.
Sophisticated city types in bucolic settings have been the subject of various films from virtually the first moment celluloid flew by a flickering light, and continued of course on the small screen, especially on such country-friendly networks as CBS. Few people probably remember that Andy Griffith as Sheriff Andy Taylor got his television premiere as a guest star on the Danny Thomas sitcom Make Room for Daddy when Danny Williams literally blasted through Mayberry, running afoul of the law. Of course Griffith became a CBS mainstay, helping to kick off the 1960's staple of that network, the country-fied sitcom. When The Beverly Hillbillies hit ratings gold a couple of seasons later, it didn't take a genius to reverse that show's formula to come up with Green Acres, which is still probably the best small screen example of uptight city folk (at least in the person of Eddie Albert's Oliver Wendell Douglas, if not Eva Gabor's Lisa) colliding headlong into eccentric rural types.
Chevy Chase does 'Green Acres' in 'Funny Farm.'
That very same formula is followed pretty much to a tee in Funny Farm, though under George Roy Hill's rather understated direction (his final film, in fact), it never aspires to and indeed never reaches the lunatic insanity of Green Acres. This is in fact rather a kinder, gentler comedy (befitting its genesis in the George Herbert Walker Bush era), pleasant, often quite droll, but on only one or two occasions funny enough to elicit actual guffaws. Virtually every punchline, or at least setup, is telegraphed miles in advance, and the fun mostly comes in the execution. The best set gags are a very funny fishing contest into which Chase is lured (no pun intended), with complete mayhem ensuing, and the finale, when Chase and his wife (the very lovely and quite excellent Madolyn Smith), who have come to the brink of divorce, hire the town to act normal, indeed Norman Rockwell normal, so that they can sell the house and move on with their private lives. In Funny Farm, we literally get updated versions of The Egg and I's famous country crazies, Ma and Pa Kettle, though here they're types like a hell bent for leather mailman and a Sheriff who doesn't know how to drive a car.
Funny Farm has, rather oddly in my humble opinion, a rather vociferous and ferociously loyal fan base. The film is good, simple fun, but it certainly is no masterpiece and is too trite to ever really fully engage the more jaded viewer. There are wonderful bits sprinkled throughout the proceedings, but they play in fact like those individually brilliant skits on Chase's alma mater, Saturday Night Live, with, like that series itself, long stretches of less compelling material in between. There's no real momentum here, with a cascading domino effect of mayhem building to a knockout ending. Instead, it's like a pleasant walk down an admittedly gorgeous and bucolic country lane, with the occasional hilarious slip on a discarded banana peel.
Spies Like Us
A good deal sillier, and therefore more successful in my opinion, is the daffy, somewhat Dr. Strangelove-esque Spies Like Us, featuring Chase and Dan Aykroyd in a sort of mid-80's update of the old Bob Hope and Bing Crosby Road pictures. In this case, however, the two play bumbling low level intelligence operatives who are deemed expendable and sent into a high risk mission in order to deflect attention from the real operatives conducting a super secret mission in Russia. This could have easily been named Road to Ruin or Road to Thermonuclear War, as Chase as pencil pusher Emmitt Fitz-Hume and Aykroyd as brainier analyst Austin Millbarge stumble their way through mishap after mishap, a la Hope and Crosby, while of course managing not to get killed, ultimately "helping" the lone surviving real agent, Boyer (Donna Dixon), somehow not wearing a sarong a la Dorothy Lamour, to start the missiles rolling toward a nuclear meltdown.
Spies Like Us lacks Dr. Strangelove's mordant wit even as it explores the same dark areas of humanity's penchant to destroy itself. The homage to Strangelove is rather explicit at times, especially in the casting of Steve Forrest as a sort of B-movie version of lookalike Sterling Hayden's General Jack Ripper. Directed by John Landis, who is not exactly a model of Kubrick-like restraint and understatement, Spies instead plays like a slightly out of control Saturday Night Live extended skit, with several hilarious one-liners dotting the landscape, along with more outré elements that seemed to have wandered in from a parody of Ishtar (as if that film weren't parody enough).
Chase and Aykroyd make very appealing leads, with Chase's sometimes annoying shtick is kept to a minimum and is at least partially balanced by Aykroyd's more laid back persona. The film is also helped by the wisecracking know how of co-scenarists Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, who bring their sharp knack for comedy zingers tied to character traits (Chase's Fitz-hume, ever the smart aleck, tends to wax philosophical, literally bringing up Jean-Paul Sartre, when he's grilled by a Russian spy). However, there's also a surfeit of just plain stupid, but usually funny, body part and function jokes ("What's a dickfer?"—I'll let you guess the punchline), which has probably helped to make the film so popular with adolescents.
Spies Like Us, like Funny Farm, is far from being a masterpiece, but somehow the juvenile lunacy of this "second feature" seems much more comedically efficacious when propped up next to Funny Farm's decidedly more plebeian charms. If you're immune to silliness, the film will probably leave you largely cold, despite occasional laugh out loud moments. If, however, you're not averse to the occasional potty based humor, Spies Like Us may prove to be at least passably engaging.
I frankly have never owned either of these films in any of their previous home video iterations, so I can't responsibly compare this Blu-ray to either VHS or SD-DVD. My hunch is that fans of these films will probably love these transfers, despite their flaws, if only by dint of their anamorphically enhanced transfers. For those coming to this Blu "cold," as it were, my hunch is the response will be decidedly more tepid. Arriving on Blu via the VC-1 codec, with a 1080p 1.78:1 image, both of these films look pretty soft, as you can easily see in the screen captures included with this review. The sharpness quotient is upped at least partially in some nice close-up shots in both films, but overall there's a haziness that almost resembles soft focus at times running rampant through both of these efforts. On the plus side, colors are often very vibrant, with flesh tones very lifelike, and a nice array of colors filling out the palette, especially in Funny Farm, which exploits the luscious foliage of Vermont. Contrast is acceptable, but seems pretty anemic in Funny Farm especially, with some of the indoor scenes seemingly lit "verité" style. Black levels are consistent, with no egregious crushing, though there's nothing that screams high definition in either of these transfers. I'm sure this Blu is heads and shoulders above the VHS releases (how could it not be?), but I have to wonder how much of an improvement over the SD-DVD (putting aside a widescreen presentation) these are.
There's not a lot of exciting aural action in either of these films (despite a couple of bombastic moments in Spies Like Us), but we're at least offered a respectable sounding lossless DTS-HD MA 2.0 mix on both films. These tracks are pretty standard fare, with no overt directionality, but with exceptional clarity and really good dynamic range. LFE occasionally gets a workout on both films, though it tends to be in quickly passing moments. Dialogue is crisp and clear throughout both films, and the scores are well mixed. For mid- to late-80's comedies, these are decent enough stereo mixes, but there's really nothing here that is going to reach out and touch an audiophile in anything resembling a remarkably hi-def experience.
Fans of either or both of these films are probably going to be overjoyed that they've finally made it to Blu and will want them in their home collections. Other, more jaded, eyes will probably see these as good for a laugh or two, and opt to rent.
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