Why Found-Again? In a way, I already had one found-again conversion moment with Oscar: I walked out on it in the theater back when I was a teenager on the grounds that it was too silly. Now I own it, but don’t watch it very often—maybe once for every 50 times I quote from it, in fact. So what’s the deal?
The Premise: Twofold:
1) Being a mobster who’s trying to go straight is one lasting administrative headache, not least when your idea of “going straight” is going into finance.
2) What audiences in the early 1990s were really missing was a chance to return to the era of screwball comedies.
For people who think the appearance of Sylvester Stallone always guarantees a crapstorm on the horizon, there’s probably no hope of convincing them to like Oscar. But I like Stallone here as “Snaps” Provolone, a successful mob boss trying to go straight as a promise to his dead father (Kirk Douglas).
The only things standing in his way are the cops, the rival gang, the snooty bankers who want his money, his lovesick but devious accountant, a desperate daughter trying to get freedom at any cost, and his exasperated wife: after all that, you’d have big, sad eyes too.
Oscar has one heck of a cast: in addition to Stallone, you have Marisa Tomei, Peter Riegert, Chazz Palminteri, and Tim Curry as a character I love so much I named one of my bettas after him, the elocution teacher Dr. Poole. That’s a lot of people who are fun to watch, even when the plot threatens to wear thin.
Getting back to point 2 above, though, this movie tends to be an acquired taste, a little too silly for people who want a witty comedy and not silly enough for fans of, say, the Naked Gun series. Watching the actual screwball comedies of the early twentieth century has given me a better grounding to appreciate Oscar, but there’s a case to be made that a movie shouldn’t always come with its own research project.
The Verdict: I don’t know why I don’t watch this more often, especially since I steal henchman Connie’s “I’m gettin’ good at this!” line almost weekly. I know I said above that it was an acquired taste, but you should acquire it already.
Might go well with: Tea, smoked salmon, Johnny Dangerously.
I don’t always post full movies, but as with so many of these features, the trailer is seriously lacking (lacking about 55% of the plot, for one thing, and being oddly misleading about the rest).
