Movies everyone but me have seen: The Burbs

I *finally* saw The Burbs for the very first time a couple days ago. I came home from the last day at the Arizona Film Festival to discover my girlfriend was about to watch it and wanted me to as well. At first mention of the idea I sorta got bitchy with her; "Holy shit! I have just sat through 6 hours or so of movies!" is what I felt like saying, but, I just sorta mumbled "sure" and sat on the couch. Now, in the past I would deliberately not see movies that everyone else felt like I needed to because they thought it was "amazing" or "the best movie ever" (Rocky Horror being the main one, still have not seen it). The main reason for this being most people I talked to have utterly piss poor taste in film but it could also have to do with the fact that I am sort of a prick.

Anyways, The Burbs is one of those movies that I never saw growing up and decided to give it a whirl for two reasons: (1) when one has watched three movies in an older movie theater seat the fourth one is more inviting at home on a nice couch and (2) in the most private sector of my mind, I consider Tom Hanks a great actor. After an onslaught of underground movies over the previous three days the Burbs ended up being a really good "comedown" movie. I laughed quite a bit, nearly all the roles were perfectly played in this film and I really wanted to hang out in the neighborhood they all live in. It does not even have to try to be that good and it just ends up being good.

I fell asleep about an hour into this but watched it again the next day and loved it. I got all nostalgic and felt like going on an 80's-early 90's comedy binge but decided against it, I have better things to do, like watch other movies, though I am pretty sure that most of those cheesey comedies from the Pryor-Martin-Murphy-Murray-Chase-Candy etc.. era are still funnier then most modern ones. The more modern emo-comedy genre has some good ones but that did not really exist back then. The brotherly love of three neighbors coming together to protect the neighborhood while maybe learning some life lessons along the way is emotional as it gets in the comedies of the late 80's and that's fine with me, keep all the heavier emotional bullshit out of this, lets just laugh and keep it simple.

The only real bad part about this movie is Corey Feldman.... I think that last part is self explanatory.