THE ABSENT-MINDED PROFESSOR (1961)

Professor Fred MacMurray, who's so absent minded that he borders on being a danger to those around him (during the opening credits alone he blows out the windows to his upstairs classroom and rains broken glass down on the students walking below), fritters his days away tinkering in his laboratory working on Satan only knows what.

As the film opens, he once again misses his own wedding...for the third time!!!  (How this guy ever even got engaged to begin with is a mystery to me.)  Anyway, while he was suppose to be at his wedding, he was actually at home brewing up something so incorrectly that it blew up his shed and knocked him out.  When he awoke he found that he had invented a form of rubber that somehow creates it's own energy.  He names it "Flubber".  Naturally, the first thing he does with this new invention is make his car fly and then attach some Flubber to the bottoms of the college basketball teams shoes!  This causes the players to start flying all over the place and able to jump 20 feet in the air.  Soon after, all kinds of predators (including the government and a local hoodlum) want this amazing new invention for themselves.  Why they don't just take it from the basketball players, I don't know.  Instead, they chase MacMurray all over the place.

For a light-hearted, early 1960's Disney flick, I enjoyed THE ABSENT-MINDED PROFESSOR.  Silly as fook story, good special effects, cute dog, sinister undertones, a political jab about killing "every senator and congressman", maybe(?) a reference to TWENTIETH CENTURY that was probably just wishful thinking on my part, medium pace that could have been sped up a bit, great backlot locations, solid acting (especially by MacMurray) plus lots of great classic movie actors like Keenan Wynn (and his real life father Ed Wynn and his real life son Ned Wynn), Edward Andrews, Nancy Olson, James Westerfield and many others...even Leon Tyler from GHOST OF DRAGSTRIP HOLLOW!

Good lazy afternoon time-waster.

Interesting bit of trivia: THE ABSENT MINDED PROFESSOR was actually nominated for three Academy Awards (including Best Cinematography!), but lost all three.

Part 2 - Son of Flubber (1963)
Remake - Flubber (1997)

THE MECHANIC (1972)

Los Angeles.  An older, professional hitman (Charles Bronson) takes a younger man (Jan-Michael Vincent) under his wing as both a protege and assistant.  After that, things start to get a little gay, but not really since the studio chickened out on the original story and instead ended up with a garbled film that doesn't seem to know what it wants to be.

The assassination portions of THE MECHANIC are entertaining enough in a dated, early 1970's action movie sort of way, but the character development is weak.  According to Wikipedia, Lewis John Carlino's original script was suppose to be "...a commentary on the use of human relationships and sexual manipulation in the lives of two hired killers. It was supposed to be a chess game between the older assassin and his young apprentice."  That actually sounds interesting, but unfortunately, that's not what ended up on screen.  At all.  I wish, that, if the studio was gonna purge the gay stuff (and therefore the main subject of the script!), they would have just made another movie altogether.  Instead, the audience is left with a confused mess about two single men who, when not murdering people together, hang out together 24/7 and stare at each other longingly.

Confused pacing that alternates between slow and fast, zero nudity, mildly entertaining kills, one nice car-pushed-off-a-cliff wreck, okay acting, boring dialogue, goofy scenes of Bronson acting sophisticated while thinking really hard, a 16-minute section where there is zero dialogue, two men at the zoo touching fingers, awesome old movie posters.

THE MECHANIC is entertaining enough for a single viewing, but I have no desire to ever watch it again...or at least soon. Knowing me, I'll watch it again.

Remake - The Mechanic
Remake, Part 2 - Mechanic: Resurrection