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Stuart Saves His Family
: :Though it seems like a one-joke premise, this spinoff of Al Franken's Saturday Night Live character, self-help nerd Stuart Smalley, actually has some substance. And, in fact, it offers a message that wouldn't be out of place at an Al-Anon meeting (although with the laughs). Stuart, fired from his cable TV self-help show, goes home to resolve a family crisis. Dad (Harris Yulin) is an abusive drunk, Mom (Shirley Knight) is an enabler, Sis is an over-eater, and Brother has ...
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Best of Saturday Night Live Celebrity Spots: Jerry Seinfeld
: :Though it seems like a one-joke premise, this spinoff of Al Franken's Saturday Night Live character, self-help nerd Stuart Smalley, actually has some substance. And, in fact, it offers a message that wouldn't be out of place at an Al-Anon meeting (although with the laughs). Stuart, fired from his cable TV self-help show, goes home to resolve a family crisis. Dad (Harris Yulin) is an abusive drunk, Mom (Shirley Knight) is an enabler, Sis is an over-eater, and Brother has ...
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Zorro the Gay Blade
: :After having a surprise hit playing Dracula in Love at First Bite, George Hamilton seized the moment and spoofed another movie hero: Zorro. In fact, he plays two characters: the heroic Don Diego, who fights Spanish tyranny in Old California in his secret identity as Zorro, and Diego's long-absent brother, Bunny Wigglesworth, a man totally comfortable with his sexual identity and unafraid of accessorizing the Zorro outfit by rendering it in purple. When the swashbuckler is injured, he turns his ...
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Cold Turkey (1971)
: :After having a surprise hit playing Dracula in Love at First Bite, George Hamilton seized the moment and spoofed another movie hero: Zorro. In fact, he plays two characters: the heroic Don Diego, who fights Spanish tyranny in Old California in his secret identity as Zorro, and Diego's long-absent brother, Bunny Wigglesworth, a man totally comfortable with his sexual identity and unafraid of accessorizing the Zorro outfit by rendering it in purple. When the swashbuckler is injured, he turns his ...
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Young Frankenstein - Special Edition
: essential video:If you were to argue that Mel Brooks's Young Frankenstein ranks among the top-ten funniest movies of all time, nobody could reasonably dispute the claim. Spoofing classic horror in the way that Brooks's previous film Blazing Saddles sent up classic Westerns, the movie is both a loving tribute and a raucous, irreverent parody of Universal's classic horror films Frankenstein (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935). Filming in glorious black and white, Brooks re-created the Frankenstein laboratory using the ...
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Airplane
: essential video:The quintessential movie spoof that spawned an entire genre of parody films, the original Airplane! still holds up as one of the brightest comedic gems of the '80s, not to mention of cinema itself (it ranked in the top 5 of Entertainment Weekly's list of the 100 funniest movies ever made). The humor may be low and obvious at times, but the jokes keep coming at a rapid-fire clip and its targets--primarily the lesser lights of '70s cinema, ...
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Blazing Saddles
: essential video:Mel Brooks scored his first commercial hit with this raucous Western spoof starring the late Cleavon Little as the newly hired (and conspicuously black) sheriff of Rock Ridge. Sheriff Bart teams up with deputy Jim (Gene Wilder) to foil the railroad-building scheme of the nefarious Hedley Lamarr (Harvey Korman). The simple plot is just an excuse for a steady stream of gags, many of them unabashedly tasteless, that Brooks and his wacky cast pull off with side-splitting success. ...
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Bugsy Malone
: :Writer-director Alan Parker's feature debut Bugsy Malone is a pastiche of American movies, a musical gangster comedy set in 1929, featuring prohibition, showgirls, and gang warfare, with references to everything from Some Like It Hot to The Godfather. Uniquely, though, all the parts are played by children, including an excellent if underused Jodie Foster as platinum-blonde singer Tallulah, Scott Baio in the title role and a nine-year-old Dexter Fletcher wielding a baseball bat. Cream-firing 'spluge guns' sidestep any real violence ...
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Denise Austin - Power Yoga Plus
: :If you're one-stop shopping for the hottest exercises, Denise Austin: Power Plus Yoga is the trendiest video around, containing a 20-minute yoga workout and a 20-minute Pilates workout. Designed to be done separately, each workout is a self-contained program. 'Power Yoga' is a beginners workout, using familiar poses such as sun salutations and downward-facing dog. The movements are fluid, although Austin doesn't always provide enough information on proper body alignment and modifications. This workout is not meant as meditative--while the ...
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Stewardess School
: :If you're one-stop shopping for the hottest exercises, Denise Austin: Power Plus Yoga is the trendiest video around, containing a 20-minute yoga workout and a 20-minute Pilates workout. Designed to be done separately, each workout is a self-contained program. 'Power Yoga' is a beginners workout, using familiar poses such as sun salutations and downward-facing dog. The movements are fluid, although Austin doesn't always provide enough information on proper body alignment and modifications. This workout is not meant as meditative--while the ...
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