What Does Mr. Market Know?

Tribune earnings are released tomorrow. And TRB has fallen through $29/share.

Anyone want to bet that the Trib announces some restructuring including sale of non-core assets?

After the Rental - Airplane!: Don’t Call Me Shirley Edition

Hard to believe that it’s been 25 years since this movie hit the screen. I first saw it at the Dundee Theater in Omaha, Nebraska on Dodge Street. My great-uncle Dave owned the theater. Not yet being of driving age, my mother drove my sister, my cousin Laura and me over to see it. The three of us sat down in front, not wanting to sit near the parental types.

Of course, the loudest howls of laughter in the theater came from mom. The three of us ducked down, not wanting to be associated with the lunatic that was in uncontrollable hysterics at the sight of Robert Hayes and his "drinking problem."

Afterwards, we asked he if she liked it. "Not really," was her reply.

To this day, she's never lived down that response.

So, Friday night I snatched up a copy and the Wife and I showed it to the Six Year Old. While the joke that the Hari Krishnas "gave at the office" (David Leisure in his pre-Joe Isuzu days) was beyond him, once the heart at the Mayo Clinic started bouncing around the doctor’s desk, he was all over it.

The movie still holds up after all these years. The bulk of the jokes still work as they were deliberately written to be timeless. The Wife and I were still laughing at "We have clearance, Clarence. Roger, Roger, what's your vector, Victor?" That Zucker-Abrams-Zucker chose to parody movies that are classics instead of what was then current (writers of Shrek, please take note) is also a big reason the flick still works.

This edition comes with a commentary track, a pop-up trivia track, and a “long haul” version that interrupts the movie every few minutes or so to show interviews with cast and crew. The interviewees include Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrams, David Zucker, Robert Hayes, Leslie Nielsen, Peter Graves, Lorna Patterson (Randi the stewardess), the little boy who spends all his time in the cockpit, his parents, and Al White and Norman Gibbs aka the two "Jive Dudes." Best anecdote: Graves explaining how a twelve-year-old boy kind of recognized him in a grocery store check-out line. Graves leaned over to him and said, "Have you ever seen a grown man naked?" which resulted in the boy's mother grabbing the boy's hand and yanking him out of the store. Conspicuously absent from the interviews was Julie Haggarty.

One downside to the interviews is that they can only be watched while playing the full movie. There's no way to just see the 30 minutes of interviews by themselves.

The commentary track was terrible. While many of these tracks are pretty bad to begin with, I haven't been that bored since the Anita Bryant concert. How three guys who wrote one of the funniest movies ever could be so dull and bored is beyond me. Maybe the rule for all commentary tracks should be to have a bottle of scotch and a 24-pack of beer in the room.

The only thing really interesting from the commentary was the sad news that "Autopilot" Otto is gone. It seems he rotted in one of the Zucker's garages. Vinyl only lasts so long, I guess.

Rating: Triple for the movie. Single for the special features.