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SCREEN: 'PEE-WEE'S BIG ADVENTURE,' A COMEDY
From The New York Times, 08.09.1985, Late City Final
Edition
There are two funny things in Pee-wee's Big Adventure,
which opens today at the National and other theaters. One is
a waitress who explains why her boyfriend doesn't want to go
to Paris. "He flunked French in high school and now thinks
everybody over there is out to make him look dumb." The
other is a pretty, unstoppably gushy young woman named Tina
(Jan Hooks) who acts as a tour guide at the Alamo in San Antonio.
I reveal this information as a consumer service, for
Pee-wee's Big Adventure is otherwise the most barren
comedy I've seen in years, maybe ever. It introduces motion
picture audiences to a popular California comic named Pee-wee
Herman, who seems to have put together his public personality
by ransacking the wardrobes of his betters.
Like Marcel Marceau, he appears to be physically slight and
he often wears lipstick, but, unfortunately, he won't stop talking
and--worse--laughing at his own gags. Like Jacques Tati, he
wears pants that are too short, and like Jerry Lewis, he behaves
as if he were a child trapped inside the body of a man. Like
them all, he desperately wants to be funny but, unlike them,
he isn't.
For the record, Pee-wee's Big Adventure is
the story of what happens when Pee-wee's bicycle is stolen and
he sets out to find it, a journey that takes him to San Antonio
and, finally, to the Warner Brothers studio in Burbank, Calif.
You have been warned. Pee-wee's Big Adventure,
which has been rated PG ("Parental Guidance Suggested"),
contains some extremely wan attempts at slightly vulgar humor.
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