My Childhood, Bastardized

I'm honestly not sure yet where I come down on this trailer. You see, my mom can vouch that I watched an unhealthy amount The Three Stooges when I was a kid. Not sure why I loved it so much, but I did and that's all that can be said. Didn't matter that it was in black-and-white, didn't matter that it was three grown men acting like the age of the kids watching them. It was three distinct personalities always getting themselves into hijinks without much hint on controversy. Great song, great physical comedy.



Well now in the continuation of Hollywood's creative malaise, someone decided to make a Stooges flick set in the present day. At first it was bad when they signed Sean Penn (Larry), Benicio Del Toro (Moe) and Jim Carrey (Curly) to play the parts, which I think would have been a nightmare. Once that failed, they downgraded to Sean Hayes, Chris Diamantopoulos and Will Sass. I really don't have a comment for this. My head won't stop shaking.



It looks both awful and decent at the same time. Awful because it honestly should never have been made in the first place. But decent in that, at least from the trailer, it eschews trying to reinvent the formula and instead delivers exactly what the Stooges did back in the day, only with modern-day actors and in color. These gags would look horrible if Eddie Murphy was trying to do them in a movie (oh, say, some horseshit like this), but if I don't focus on Larry being played by the guy who was the ultra-gay stereotype in Will & Grace, it looks and sounds like classic Stooges skits.

I probably still won't see it, because chances are the trailer is selling the only true Stooge-like parts of the movie (and the fact that there was a reason the original Stooges show was only 30 minutes long and not 90 minutes). So it still rings true as another piece of my childhood bastardized, but maybe only partially so.