The news that the Farrelly Brothers are going ahead with their proposed Three Stooges movie, with a dream cast that includes Sean Penn, (probably) Jim Carrey, and (keep your fingers crossed) Benecio del Toro), is the latest sign that even the people who make movies think they don't make them like they used to. Especially since the official invention of "pop culture" at some point around 1967, moviemakers have found it harder and harder to leave well enough alone and resist the temptation to bring back their old favorites. This is the dark, deranged side of the comebacks that directors like Quentin Tarantino and Darren Aronofsky have deliberately engineered for actors they like, such as John Travolta, Pam Grier, and Mickey Rourke, who have slipped from the A-list or, as in the case of Grier, never really had the chance at a role worthy of them when they were cult favorites. It may also be the next stage of decadence after movies like Peter Bogdanovich's 1975 At Long Last Love, a nostalgic attempt to create a 1930s musical comedy with Cole Porter score, as if it had just been found in a time capsule where it had lain slumbering for forty years, even though it inexplicably starred Burt Reynolds and Cybil Shepard. In 1995, Robert Zemeckis, a director who never met a technological gimmick he didn't like, used what then seemed like exciting new computer wizardry to make an episode of the HBO TV series Tales from the Crypt "starring" Humphrey Bogart; Bogart had to play a corpse, though, because the computers that snipped clips of him our of his old movies and inserted him into Zemeckis's new footage couldn't get his frozen face to move. Voiceover narration was supplied by Robert Saachi, an actor whose whole career is based on his physical and vocal resemblance to Bogart: he starred in a 1980 period detective movie called The Man with Bogart's Face, whose plot and supporting cast of characters were derived from assorted Bogart classics. More recently, the movie Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, a period fantasy that wore its computer-generated artificiality on its sleeve, used some old footage to have Laurence Olivier "play" its villain, though once again the dead star was unable to interact with the rest of the cast while unknowingly and involuntarily having one more bad movie added his IMDB page.

Of all dead stars, it makes sense that comedians would lead the league when it comes to inspiring people to want to bring them back. Many a kid has taken the first baby steps towards full-blown geekdom by working up imitations of some performer who's made him or her laugh. And laughter can make you feel so close to a performer that it's only natural to want more from them than we can ever get, especially in the case of those who were in an advanced state of rigor before some of their current fans were even born. In his comic book series Cerebus, which ran for 300 issues from 1977 to 2004, the writer-cartoonist Dave Sim paid affectionate, parodic tribute to a vast array of pop culture figures, ranging from Rodney Dangerfield and Mick Jagger and Keith Richards to Oscar Wilde and assorted Looney Tunes characters, by basing supporting players on their physical appearances and capturing their speech patterns, mating the perfect pitch of a perfect mimic to a true satirist's gift for being funny in character. The first real sign that Sim might be possessed of genius came when he introduced "Lord Julius", a major Cerebus character based on Groucho Marx, and proceeded to demonstrate that writing convincingly Grouchoesque dialogue was well within his range. Much later, the roped the Three Stooges into Cerebus, too. But Sim--like Paul Gulacy, another comics artist, who attracted some notoriety in the '70s and '80s for his habit of drawing movie performers (including Bogart and Woody Allen) into his strips--Sim didn't have to worry about whether his collaborators could hold up their end, or about making his resurrected stars believable in the flesh. Others who have tried to pull off what the Farrellys are shooting for have been...not so lucky.

BRAIN DONORS (1992)



Jerry (Rat Race) Zucker and his brother David (An American Carol) Zucker were the big wheels behind this movie, back around the time when they were still regarded, as well, the way the Farrellys are apparently regarded in the industry today. The idea was to revive Marx Brothers-style comedy using the script for A Night at the Opera as a base. Among other things, this resulted in a script credited as having been written by Pat Proft, the scribe of Police Academy and Bachelor Party, and suggested by George S, Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind. (One of these things is not like the other, one of these things just doesn't belong...) The film stars John Turturro in the Groucho role, called Roland T. Flakfizer, because although Proft, in his rsearch, failed to grasp anything about how the Marx Brothers' comedy worked or how their characters were shaped, he did pick up on the funny name motif. The English comedian Mel Smith is supposed to be Chico, and someone named Bob Nelson, who was either encouraged to mug his ass off or suffered from a galvanic facial tic, is a surprisingly talkative Harpo figure. (There's also Nancy Marchand, who was unable to seem out of it convincingly enough to remind anyone of Margaret Dumont.) Directed by Dennis Dugan, a man who has reason to be very grateful for the career of Adam Sandler, Brain Donors shows little interest in aiming for the level of surreal verbal with that made Groucho and Chico living legends; instead, it concentrates on sloppy, mistimed slapstick, making it one of the few films that make you think, "Leslie Nielson did this a lot better--in Wrongfully Accused!" Because Proft read somewhere that the Marx Brothers were anarchic and subversive, whenever Turturro and company execute some sloppy, mistimed slapstick, some guy who looks as if he's played a lot of bankers in his time stands up, gets red in the face, and says something like, "I'm gonna get those guys, Ngggghhhh-ghhh!" Maybe Proft and Dugan were confused and thought that the Marx Brothers were three of the Little Rascals.

THE NEW ADVENTURES OF LAUREL AND HARDY: FOR LOVE OR MUMMY (1999)



Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy have always been one of the most fervently beloved slapstick comedy teams among real afficionados of comedy, though their profile among the public at large has shrunk a bit in recent years, maybe because their style and presence were so graceful and elegant that their work strikes modern audiences as slow and lacking in the energy that comes from real comic aggression. For the people who made this attempt to revive "Laurel and Hardy" as a trademark-- treating the performers as characters who could be incarnated by new actors, Gailard Sartain and Bronson Pinchot---that translates into family-fun innocuousness. What's missing, aside from the falling-domino intricacy of the real Laurel and Hardy's complicated routines and the ease with which they had learned to execute them after years of practice, is the real affection viewers come feel the two shared for each other: Sartain and Pinchot are just two talented guys who couldn't get a better gig and, between them, seem to have at least three eyes on the clock. As for what F. Murray Abraham is doing here, I'm not even sure I want to know. (I remember a time, back around his Oscar win for Amadeus, when you used to hear people snicker that Abraham was pompous and took himself too seriously. Maybe we should all go over to his house and apologize for that before he starts begging his agent to get him a job as a contestant on the next series of I Love New York.

STOOGEMANIA (1986)



This meager-budgeted comedy, starring the gifted Josh Mostel (who had one of his first high-profile roles standing in for John Belushi in Delta House, the "official" TV sitcom-rip-off of National Lampoon's Animal House), isn't actually an attempt to revive the Stooges but a "tribute" to them that doubles as the screen's major repository of Stooges imitations. Mostel plays a schlub named Howard F. Howard who seeks medical help for the Stooges fixation that is threatening to upend his life. Half-assed as the whole thing is, the movie has a few conceits--such as its visit to Los Angeles's dreaded "Stooge Row", populated with Stooge-imitating Stooges freaks who are on their last legs after having worn out their welcome in polite society--that might have been amusing if the thing weren't so underfunded and Mostel had had a little help to get it off the ground. It all plays out like a padded promotional video for Jump 'N The Saddle Band's 1983 novelty hit, "The Curly Shuffle."

The Stooges--comprised, in their glory years, of Moe Howard, Larry Fine, and Moe's brother, the protean Curly--knew something themselves about the joys and sorrows of repackaging. They had started out in vaudeville supporting the tall, abrasive comedian Ted Healy, who in both his dress and demeanor suggested Bill O'Reilly playing Popeye Doyle in The French Connection. Originally, the third Stooge was Moe and Curly's brother Shemp Howard, but Shemp found getting yelled at and batted about the face by Ted Healy--a practice that Healy reportedly expected his employees to put up with whether they were on stage or off--such a joyless experience that he departed before the Stooges went to Hollywood. (Shemp and Moe both made their movie debuts in the 1919 Spring Fever, a short film in which they supported the baseball legend Honus Wagner.) The Stooges made Soup to Nuts, their first movie as a unit, complete with Healy and Curly, in 1930, four years before splitting off on their own.

The Stooges' golden era, the time they were making shorts for Columbia with Curly on board, lasted a little less than a dozen years. In 1945, Curly began slowing down, showing signs of the effects of his drinking and Christ knows how many hits to the head, and in 1946 he retired from the team after suffering a debilitating stroke. He was replaced by Shemp, who after his death in 1955 was in turn replaced by Joe Besser, who destablized the universe by brazenly violating the accepted terms of Stooge Law: Besser, when hit by Moe, insisted on hitting back. Columbia let their contract lapse in 1957, and that should have been the end of it. But when the Stooges were rediscovered by a new generation that saw their classic shorts on TV, they were given the opportunity to cash in, and the boys, who had never received princely wages in all their time at Columbia, needed the money. Now augmented by Joe DeRita--christened "Curly Joe" for Stooge purposes--instead of the retaliatory Besser, Moe and Larry would appear in a string of feature films, such as Have Rocket, Will Travel, The Three Stooges Meet Hercules and The Three Stooges Go Around the World in a Daze. Compared to the shorts that made the Stooges beloved, they serve as cautionary examples for the Farrellys and their new Stooges, because they established certain new rules about just how long you can stand to watch people doing this stuff to each other. Not to mention just how long it's healthy for people to, you know, do this stuff to each other.