Unlikely Glossary Project
The Avengers
How Now, Brown Cow?
I saw this in the theaters, you know. And while I didn’t hate it as much as most did, it wasn’t until later, when I’d read the utterly brilliant, utterly surreal script (The best stage direction ever: “Mutual erotic, intellectual attraction.”), that I realized that this was truly one of the great loves of my life. Sophomore or Junior year I was lucky enough to come across a copy of the DVD (no special features, sadly) and was then able to inflict the movie, that distorted reflection of genius, upon lots of people. And of course my self. Over and over again.
The script is bizarre, baroque, funny, delightful. It is not known whether it was simply too intelligent for audiences or whether the director screwed up the execution, but the result was that when filming was done, the result was utterly impalatable to audiences. The studio’s solution: cut it so that the plot no longer made any sense and the whole thing just seemed like an unusually stylish dream. And I’m talking, like my dream with the decapitated Amish sort of dream.
h2. Quotes:
- Alice: A Gemini, definitely
- Sir August de Winter: A man with an umbrella is expecting rain.
John Steed: A man without one is a fool.
- Father: How real do you feel, Mrs. Peel?
- (During heavily sexualized shoe-on-putting scene): Peel: Too tight.
Steed: Push.
- Screenplay: (Of Mrs. Peel): “Sexual, invulnerable, cool. Very cool.”
- Mother: I often think of six impossible things before breakfast.
- De Winter: In India you can get a good ten inches overnight.