Bean

 Year of Release:  1997

Director:  Mel Smith

Screenplay:  Richard Curtis and Robin Driscoll, based on the television series Mr. Bean created by Richard Curtis and Rowan Atkinson

Starring:  Rowan Atkinson, Peter MacNicol, Pamela Reed, Harris Yulin, Sandra Oh, Burt Reynolds

Running Time:  90 minutes

Genre:  Comedy

Mr. Bean (Atkinson) is a well-meaning but clumsy and accident prone security guard at the National Gallery in London.  Unable to fire him, the gallery's board of directors select Bean as their representative to oversee the transfer and unveiling of the painting of Whistler's Mother by James McNeill Whistler to the Grierson Gallery in Los Angeles.  The Grierson's curator, David Langley (MacNicol) his impressed by Bean's false profile and offers to accommodate him at his family home, much to the displeasure of his wife, Alison (Reed), and his two children.  However, Bean's inadvertent ability to create absolute chaos threatens to ruin everything for David.

Mr. Bean started out as a British television sitcom which ran for 15 episodes between 1990 and 1995.  The series was hugely popular bit in Britain and around the world, due in no small part to the fact that the series was almost entirely free of dialogue.  The comedy was entirely physical, and the almost non-existent dialogue really had nothing to do with the episode's plot.  In the film there is dialogue and also a plot.  Mr. Bean would speak in strange, strangulated voice and, true to the series, he does have very little dialogue, and the humour is also mostly slapstick, physical comedy.  It's not a bad film, but it's not a good one either.  It's a fine enough film to pass the time, and it is funny, but it's not really something that will stick in the memory.  Rowan Atkinson is a very talented physical comedian, the problem is that the character of Mr. Bean is great for a half hour TV show, but spread out over an hour and a half it's just too much.  Peter MacNicol provides a good counterpoint to Mr. Bean's clowning as the harried, put upon curator.  

  Rowan Atkinson in Bean

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask)

Year of Release:  1972
Director:  Woody Allen
Screenplay:  Woody Allen, based on the book Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask) by Dr. David Ruebens
Starring:  Woody Allen, Louise Lasser, John Carradine, Tony Randall, Burt Reynolds, Gene Wilder, Lynn Redgrave
Running Time:  84 minutes
Genre:  Comedy

This film is a selection of seven sketches inspired by questions relating to sex and sexual behaviour:  In medieval England a court jester (Allen) attempts to seduce the Queen (Redgrave); A respectable doctor (Wilder) falls in love with a sheep; An Italian man (Allen again) discovers that his wife (Lasser) can only reach orgasm in public places; A middle-aged married man (Lou Jacobi) takes to wearing women's clothing; A cheery 1950s game show attempts to teach America about sexual fetishes; A mad scientist (Carradine) unleashes a giant, monstrous breast on the world; A nervous sperm (Allen) prepares to leap into the great unknown.

The original book, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, was a serious sex manual, which became a huge bestseller and was one of the most popular and influential non-fiction books of it's time.  Allen, here, takes chapter headings from the book, and spins them off into the comedy sketches.  The kind of sketch comedy format, while it has often been popular on TV (maybe not in the past few years, but it certainly used to be), never really works in movies, partly because because sketches tend to be hit or miss,  and also because they tend to be very lightweight, they are really either too short to get into, or they are too long to sustain the joke.  By and large this is funny, with each segment having at least one good laugh in it.  It belongs to the early part of Allen's career, when he really was trying to make straightforward comedies, without the dramatic or philosophical concerns that would later come to dominate. The film pokes fun at Shakespeare, Italian cinema, and science-fiction and horror movies.  The best segment is the last one; which takes place in the hi-tech control centre of a man's brain while he's on a date, with Allen as a nervous, white-uniformed sperm.  That last segment is inventive and very funny.
It's certainly worth watching, but I would point out that this is a product of the early 1970s and has not dated well in terms of it's attitudes and some of it's humor, so proceed with caution.

Woody Allen is going to tell you Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex*  (*But Were Afraid to Ask)