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A Fish Called Wanda
(1988)
Beautiful intro, elegant heist, clever denouement. This superb comedy of manners with a delightful hint of absurdity was the culmination of the collaboration between veteran British movie director Charles Crichton, who was 77 at the time and hadn’t directed a feature film since the 1960s, and Monty Python co-founder John Cleese, who wrote the script and starred as Archie Leach. The film is a brilliant observer of and commenter on the cultural differences between American gung-ho attitude and British stiffness, with a playful Jamie Lee Curtis and a peaking (comedy-wise) Kevin Kline as proponents for the former, and Cleese and Michael Palin as representatives for the latter. Not many comedies manage to be both silly and brainy at the same time, but A Fish Called Wanda does just that – as well as a few other things that might surprise you. Kevin Kline won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his work, one of only a handful of times that has happened for a purely comedic performance.
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