FF156 - Duck Soup

Intro by Adam Pranica

If you have noticed a growing tension in the Friendly Fire system, I don't think you are wrong. The longer we do the show, the more diverse our ideas have become about what makes a good war movie. That shows we are growing and maybe you are doing that along with us, and that is good. I think it is a reflection of a form of exposure bias. Our consumption of war films has changed our feelings about the genre, the way world-travel changes a person's view of the world and their place in it.

But it turns out: ”War movie” is a more elastic genre than I think any of us thought possible, and out of all of the hells of combinations, or: hell of combinationses, there are two kinds that challenge the delicate sensibilities of the modern moviegoer the most: The very old war movie, and the comedy war movie. Today's film is both: Duck Soup.

Most film viewers can leap that first hurdle, the one that involves getting used to a weird mid-Atlantic accent and ancient production values, and we have seen quite a few of those films on Friendly Fire. The hit rate is pretty strong, I would argue some of our highest-rated films come from there. Far higher is that second hurdle: Comedy. We have seen Good Morning Vietnam, In The Army Now, and Top Secret, and only one of those was any good, and you know which one I mean.

Will Duck Soup join their pantheon of great crossover films, or will our conversation be more like a duck hunt? ”There is a whole lot of irrelevance in the circus!” on today's Friendly Fire: Duck Soup.

Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License