I mentioned last night on Twitter that last night I saw for the first time A Fish Called Wanda, the 1988 comedy that won Kevin Kline his only Oscar and features John Cleese covering his genitals with a framed photograph, among many, many other wonderful things. It's kind of surprising that it took me so long to see the movie given how many of Kline's other films I've seen. My mom is a huge fan, and my childhood was spent seeing movies a little too mature for me, like Forget Paris and The Big Chill, and singing along to his made-up lyrics to "Hail to the Chief" as seen in Dave. In 1997 my entire family went together to see In & Out, strange not only because I was 13 years old and mortified to be seen anywhere with my parents, but in our small South Carolina town the movie about a gay man was still pretty risque.
Obviously, I adored A Fish Called Wanda and every single thing Kline does in the movie; I'm honestly jealous of the people who got to see him win his Oscar, since masterful comedic performances like that almost never get rewarded these days. The movie doesn't hold up quite as well as some of its genius contemporaries like Groundhog Day-- Charles Crichton's direction, though Oscar-nominated, is definitely a few years behind the curve-- but the writing from John Cleese is dynamite, full of callbacks and repetitions and a ton of well-placed vulgarity. It's a crime caper that goes some really dark places in the end, but also sails smoothly into its happy ending.
Below is a montage of some of Kline's choice moments in the film, but if you haven't seen the movie yourself, it's on Netflix Instant and well worth putting all this comedic genius in context.
