Meet the moppets

Years ago a movie buff pal said to me he couldn’t understand why I liked the theatre. ‘A great show is only great to the people who were there,’ he said. ‘A great film is for ever.’ Ha! Tell it to your humble critic after a month in which he’s reviewed the ‘new’ King Kong, the ‘new’ Producers and now the ‘new’ Fun with Dick and Jane, with a week off for Brokeback Mountain (or Fun with Dick). Like the old warhorses of the provincial rep, movies are now revived every few years with a new set and a younger cast.

And yet, even in as cannibalistic a village as Hollywood, who’d have thought they’d opt for a second bite at Fun with Dick and Jane? Thirty years ago, it was a modest hit for two Canadians, the director Ted Kotcheff and co-screenwriter (and sometime Spectator contributor) Mordecai Richler. Now another Canadian, star and producer Jim Carrey, has clamped the electrodes to the corpse and jumped it back into life. The original Fun belonged to that brief and not entirely explicable moment when George Segal was one of the hottest comedy stars in town, and viewed from today it reeks of period — not least the slightly self-conscious ethnic humour. But it has a great premise.

The title comes from a series of American children’s books — Dick and Jane are the equivalent, if memory serves, of the British ‘Janet and John’ books. I hadn’t thought about Janet and John in years, until I was motoring around the Sunni Triangle a couple of years back and began noticing that the triangular road signs warning of impending schools featured two highly non-Arabic pupils who looked like an English primary schoolboy and schoolgirl, circa 1954 — possibly a job lot of old Ministry of Transport signs HMG sold at a discount to King Faisal II.