A momentary review:

Barbershop

It's good. It's a rare movie that's funny because it's funny, not because it's trying to be funny.

The best comedies are the ones where the characters don't know they have to be funny. The situations aren't contrived and the comedy comes out of honest reaction to the event. Mugging is a big no no, Robin Williams, Martins Lawrence and Short and (for the past five years) Eddie Murphy.

I point to the movie Major League, which has become something of a topic of discussion around Casa de Big Stupid Tommy. It's one of my favorite movies, and I was watching the DVD of it the other day. Bill is watching, too, and he's laughing giddily at nearly everything that's happening on screen.

Major League is something of a clever (and increasingly rare) movie in that it relies on the writing rather than the actor to be funny. Everybody in Major League has a feasibly established character. Some are a bit cartoony and stereotypical (Cerrano and Harris), but nobody is outlandish or contrived. Furthermore, nobody has to stretch or do something slightly (or ridiculously) out of character just to be funny.

Major League relies on the story and the interactions between actor/characters to be funny. When Cerrano (a follower of the voodoo doctrine(s) needs more power for the final playoff game, he requests a live chicken to sacrifice. The panic of Wesley Snipes' Willie "Mays" Hayes at the alien (and to him disgusting) act of sacrificing an animal is funny, and conceivable. Tom Berenger's Jake Taylor comes up with the novel and funny solution: he brings Cerrano a bucket of KFC. A passable compromise, at least in the terms of the light-hearted comedy.

Back to my original mission--

Barbershop, which stars (among others) Ice Cube, Eve and Cedric the Entertainer, is a lot like Major League. The Actors seem to have been given strong guidelines for how their characters act, and those characters were strongly defined by the writers. Never once do any of them stray or act outlandishly out of character. There are zany characters. Cedric's Eddie is an old barber with a few unique ideas about how the world runs. But that's his character, so it's believable. He's not zany for the sake of it.

Is Barbershop groundbreaking? I don't think so. Neither was Major League. But Barbershop is legitimately entertaining.

Boy I sure do like Major League.

When Harry Doyle cries out "The Indians win it! The Indians Win It! Oh My God! the Indians Win It!" it gives me goosebumps.