Matt and Jay’s Excellent Adventure

You know, it is pretty rare to have a critically acclaimed comedy movie coming out of Canada – other than Bon Cop, Bad Cop (as well as its sequel), Starbuck, and perhaps a few others (and that might be a stretch)... somehow, despite all the funny people to come out of the country north of the United States, it just doesn’t happen – perhaps because so much of the talent relocates to either New York or Los Angeles. Well, another rare funny film has to be added to the short list: co-star, co-writer, and director Matt Johnson’s Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (2025). Not at all related to the 90s grunge band Nirvana, the concept is actually based upon a web series that ran between 2007-2009, its tv adaptation which spawned in 2017-2018, only for it now to evolve into its current film form.

Originally meant to be a satire... though of a film very few have ever seen nowadays, the Norman Z. McLeod western comedy The Paleface (1948), written by Frank Tashlin about 1929's Virginian, infuriated the man in how it was directed (as a more generic spoof of the western)... but funnily enough, despite the screenwriter’s opinion, until Blazing Saddles (1974) came out, it was the highest grossing western parody of all-time and spawned a sequel in Son of Paleface (1952), while it was also remade as the Don Knotts vehicle The Shakiest Gun in the West (1968). After government agents tasked with tracking down an illegal gun smuggling ring turn up dead, the infamous Calamity Jane (Jane Russell) is secretly broken out of jail by Gov. Johnson (Charles Trowbridge) with the hope that she will take a pardon for going undercover to get to the bottom of this rebel-rousing (similar to rabble-rousing) gang in the frontier land.

elebrating its 85th anniversary this year, Arthur Lubin’s Buck Privates started Bud Abbott and Lou Costello on their path to superstardom. Though they had already gained some fame on the vaudeville and burlesque comedy circuits, as well as gathering some traction on the radio (and lest we forget their small roles in their first film, One Night in the Tropics, the year before), things would be wholly different soon after. Combining their very different talents as the perfect straight and funny men (their longtime writer and ideas man John Grant came along for the ride – and would be involved on most of their future movies), it also didn’t hurt that cinema goers found plenty of comedic fun in its topical premise as tensions grew around the fears of the lengthening World War II – making Universal the most money it had ever earned up until that point (four million dollars – a lot of cash when tickets were between ten cents and a quarter depending on the location).

Ah, Death, sometimes known as the Grim Reaper, has been depicted in so very many unique ways, with the most traditional being of the lineage of Victor Sjöström – who made the silent horror film The Phantom Carriage (1921)... which then inspired his protégée Ingmar Bergman (who watched the feature every year – usually on New Year’s Eve) with making his classic Black Death plague set film The Seventh Seal (1957). Having a laugh at that always winning Reaper, the 2011 horror comedy short The Coldest Caller, written and directed by Joe Tucker, is a four minute humour-filled foray into one such harrowing scenario. Exhuming some fun in a Monty Python-like sketch (specifically Monty Python’s Meaning of Life), when the ominous list-carrying Grim Reaper (Noel Byrne) – your typically towering, hidden gaunt figure dressed in all black, arrives on the cozey doorstep of one Mrs. Evans (Sheila Reid), the punctual old lady almost seems like she has already been waiting for him all day.

In 1928, after falling under some financial pressure, Buster Keaton moved away from his own independent productions and merged things with MGM... a most profitable decision, yet a choice that he later called the, “ worst mistake of his career”. Going from the creative genius behind his own projects to a cog in the studio system with limited creative control over his projects, it went well enough on their first feature, The Cameraman (reviewed here on Filmizon), but with their next effort, Spite Marriage (1929), sadly that freedom was mostly gone. Directed by Edward Sedgwick, with a star like Keaton there is still some magic here, though that feeling of spontaneity, charm, and warmth feels confined within the structured, more efficient MGM production.