Review of The Pink Panther (1963) by Tim H — 06 May 2008

I don't know. I just wasn't all that impressed.

The one thing that I will give this movie is Peter Sellers. Peter Sellers is an amazing comedian whose physical comedy is just spot on. This is some of the best slapstick in ages. But the movie itself? Not all that funny. The real draw and drawback of this movie is te fact that it is a "super-sixties" movie. There's a certain genre of film that rose out of this era that I've dubbed "The Super-Sixties." It's such a product of the era that there is little substance as opposed to the just ridiculous nature of the movie. Honestly, the other "super-sixties" movie also starred Peter Sellers and David Niven. I refer to Casino Royale with Woody Allen. These movies are just stretches of the imagination and are slightly alienating. The humor is very forced and I believe the movies aren't as timeless as people make them out to be. They have these absolutely confusing plots that just boggle the imagination and fluster viewers into the point of simply accepting the plot and circumstances.

But I kind of like the vibe of these movies. I saw this also in The Fearless Vampire Killers. It's a really bizarre style of filmmaking that has asides and unrelated moments intertwined with a losely strung together plot. Really, this is the perfect kind of movie to shut your mind off. While I don't take drugs and don't advocate their usage, I imagine that half the people watching this movie were stoned as it was so why bother make the movie intelligable. No matter what the makers of the film did, no one was going to catch on to where they were going.

There's a few really funny bits in this movie, but few of them involved characters outside of Sellers's Clouseau. Honestly, his bits by far were the funniest. I did laugh out loud in the movie, but the only times I did were from Clouseau moments. (Okay, and the cars going down the street with the two bears talking in different cars.) These are really rudimentary jokes, but I loved them. Some of my favorite moments were even off-camera moments, having foley for the broken bottle of sleeping pills that Clouseau is clearly crushing.

Yeah, there's a few good moments, but the very nature of the movie hinders it from being truly great. I'm going to give a few of the sequels a try some day (probably not all because I hear that they get horrendous), but as of right now, I'll refuse to think pink.