When did this sort of movie stop being funny? Parodies with so-called "saturation humor" used to be reliable - rarely memorable but typically good for 90 minutes of enjoyable, disposable cinema. At some point, however, the jokes lost their zing, and the writing team of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer were right in the middle. These two scripted Scary Movie (along with Shawn and Marlon Wayans), which was amusing, and Date Movie, which was anything but that. Epic Movie (with which these two make their directorial debut) is the third entry in the "trilogy" and it fails to reverse the downward spiral. If you thought it was impossible for a film to contain less effective comedy than Date Movie, here's evidence to the contrary.

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There was a parallel tradition of serials both in the United States and in Europe. In Europe, the motion picture serial was a close relative to today's TV series, with longer, self-contained episodes or segments. France, with pioneering auteur director Louis Feuillade, provided several magnificent chapter plays, including the five-part Fantomas (1913-France), the influential 10-part masterpiece Les Vampires (1915-France) with Musidora as villainous Irma Vep, the 12-episode Judex (1916-France), and Tih Minh (1918-France). Germany contributed the popular six-episode silent serial Homunculus (1916-Germany). Also, in the 1920s, Fritz Lang made the following two silent films in two-parts: the crime thriller Dr. Mabuse (1922-23), and Die Nibelungen (1924) (in two parts: Siegfried, and Kriemhilds Rache, aka Kriemhilde's Revenge)

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By the late 1920s and during the 1930s, more US serials featured male heroes, such as body-building strong man and stunt double Joe Bonomo, Jack Mulhall, Francis Ford, William Desmond, Franklyn Farnum, and Walter Miller. Four studios, including several independent ones, were responsible for producing most of the serials during the sound era: Mascot, Universal, Columbia, and Republic, while major studios (such as MGM, Fox, Warners, and Paramount) declined to produce sound serials. RKO-Radio's sole sound serial was The Last Frontier (1932).

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His Girl Friday (1940) is Howard Hawks' speedy and hysterically funny, modern-style screwball comedy, and one of the best examples of its kind in film history. Although it has an 92-minute running time, the breath-taking, fast-paced film has more than enough dialogue for a 3-hour movie. The film marked the beginning of a number of screwball comedies in the 1940s that emphasized the conflict for women in deciding between love/marriage and professional careers.

The original film version of His Girl Friday was director Lewis Milestone's big hit The Front Page (1931), produced by Howard Hughes and released by United Artists. [Milestone had won the Best Picture and Best Director Academy Awards for the previous year's All Quiet on the Western Front (1930).] This second screen version's screenplay, again by Charles Lederer, brilliantly transformed Ben Hecht's and Charles MacArthur's newspaper classic - the George S. Kaufman-directed 1928 Broadway smash-hit play The Front Page, with a major script change.

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Annie Hall (1977), from director-actor-co-writer Woody Allen, is a quintessential masterpiece of priceless, witty and quotable one-liners within a matured, focused and thoughtful film. It is a bittersweet romantic comedy of modern contemporary love and urban relationships (a great successor to classic Hollywood films such as The Awful Truth (1937) and The Philadelphia Story (1940)), that explores the interaction of past and present, and the rise and fall of Allen's own challenging, ambivalent New York romance with his opposite - an equally-insecure, shy, flighty Midwestern WASP female (who blossoms out in a Pygmalion-like story).

Annie Hall clearly has semi-autobiographical elements - it is the free-wheeling, stream-of-consciousness story of an inept, angst-ridden, pessimistic, Brooklyn-born and Jewish stand-up comedian - much like Allen himself (who started out as a joke writer for The Tonight Show) - who experiences crises related to his relationships and family. His unstable love affair with aspiring singer Annie Hall begins to disintegrate when she moves to Los Angeles and discovers herself - and a new life.

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Charlie Chaplin, a silent actor and pantomimist, was recruited to Keystone from an English variety act, and became Sennett's most important discovery. Chaplin made 35 short Keystone films for Mack Sennett in 1914. In Chaplin's second picture, the 11-minute Kid Auto Races in Venice (1914), he invented his immortal, trademark Little Tramp character as he attends a 'baby-cart' race in Venice, California. His first masterpiece, The Tramp (1915), produced by the Essanay Company in Chicago, showed the early development of the character, known for his baggy pants, bowler hat, walking cane, funny stride, and oversized shoes. Chaplin had appeared in Sennett's feature-length Tillie's Punctured Romance (1914) and produced two dozen two-reelers for Mutual, including such classics as The Rink (1916), The Floorwalker (1916), The Pawnshop (1916), The Cure (1917), The Immigrant (1917) and Easy Street (1917).

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Supernatural Films: These are films that have themes including gods or goddesses, ghosts, apparitions, spirits, miracles, and other similar ideas or depictions of extraordinary phenomena. They may be combined with other genres, including comedy, sci-fi, fantasy or horror. Interestingly however, until recently, supernatural films were usually presented in a comical, whimsical, or a romantic fashion, and were not designed to frighten the audience. There are also many hybrids that have combinations of fear, fantasy, horror, romance and comedy.

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Starring
Cameron Diaz
Justin Timberlake
Jason Segel

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Cast
James Cosmo as Laird
James Nesbitt as Cathal
Ian Whyte as The Beast
Niall Bruton as Fergal
Karen Gillan as Ally
Kate Dickie as Mary
Ciarán McMenamin as Liam
Christine Tremarco as Housing Officer
Christopher Downie as Police Officer #1
Therese Bradley as Jitta
Josh Whitelaw as Tomatsk
Hanna Stanbridge as Petronella
Claire Catterson as Susan
Daniel Porter as Paul
Andrew Martin as James
Sean McCarthy as Old Hands

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