Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: The Three Stooges (2012)

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Posted by Sam Graham (Member # 2889) on 04-14-2012, 07:58 PM:

CINEMA: Regal Village Square, Las Vegas, NV
AUDITORIUM: 14
PRESENTATION: Sony Digital 4K
PRESENTATION PROBLEMS: Improper masking (scope for flat)
RATING: Two stars (out of four)

There's quite a line for tickets, and most of said tickets seem to be going to...John Carter? What???

THE PLOT: An orphanage is broke. Wackiness ensues.

Central States Theatre Corp ran Three Stooges shorts before the movies at their drive-ins right up to the end, and the management who took over the Council Bluffs drive-in kept this tradition up after Central States was sold to CEC and they walked away from the remaining drive-ins. So there should be some affection for this for the Midwestern drive-in fans, if anybody.

When I heard the Farrelly Brothers were behind this, I was actually excited to see what they'd do with the Stooges.

What they did was...make a long Stooges short disguised as three half-hour Stooges shorts.

The Stooges characters are dead-on perfect, save for being in color. And being in color actually distracted me, as did a lot of the rock soundtrack. Plus, I didn't really laugh a lot. I laughed mostly during the 'reality show' scenes (I won't spoil which one, but it's well-known, and the real cast is in attendance).

The audience for this showing included few families with small children, and the kids seemed to think this was far funnier than I did.

Posted by Michael Riley (Member # 5693) on 04-14-2012, 10:09 PM:

This was better than it had any real right to be. As someone who absolutely loves the Three Stooges in all their various incarnations (I even have a soft spot of the Joe Besser era), I was first in line to shout sacrilege when it was announced that this was going into production. That being said, I still don't think this is a film that needed to exist, but given the fact that it does, and there's nothing I can do about it, I feel they did about as good a job recreating the material as anyone could.

The film itself is mostly in the vain of the original Stooge shorts, they hit each other, do stupid things, and hilarity ensues. Some of the humor did border on being a little more crass than the Stooges ever were, but what are you gonna do? The actors themselves were easily the best part of the movie, they weren't just actors playing the Three Stooges, they were literally Larry, Curly, and Moe on screen, I would put Will Sasso's performance as Curly right up there with Jim Carrey as Andy Kaufman on the imitation scale.

The movie is what it is, if you like the Stooges, you'll probably like the movie. Kids will certainly like it, and the audience of the show I was in was consistently laughing out loud, so it seems to be well received. Even critical reviews of the film were a lot better than I expected, I thought critics would crap all over this, but there's a lot of big names giving this a good review, and even the bad reviews mostly say "I didn't find it funny, but if you like the Stooges you probably will", so hopefully this does well and leads people to seek out the fantastic Three Stooges collection DVDs Sony released a few years ago.

The only thing that bummed me out was no allusion or reference at all to Shemp, who is my personal favorite of them all, but otherwise I'd give the picture a solid B.

Posted by Mike Croaro (Member # 3123) on 04-30-2012, 02:36 PM:

Hi Folks:

Saw this a week ago. It was okay, but not great.

I can't beleive there was no pie fight at a high society party!

That would have really garnished laughs!

Mike

Posted by Claude S. Ayakawa (Member # 1401) on 04-30-2012, 06:11 PM:

I am inclined to agree with Michael after I also saw the movie a week ago at the Regal's Pearlhighland in Pearl City. I grew up with the original Three Stooges and the remake was not as good as the original but it came pretty close and I had a lot of laughs

-Claude