Wholly Moses!

source: Wholly Moses!

nineteen-eighty was a good year for movies. or it could be that i am just very nostalgic...i was six years old - before the fall. i don't know how old i was when i saw this movie for the first time, but it left an impression on me. i must have been pretty young. i have watched it again a few times over the ensuing decades and i always enjoy myself. not that i don't enjoy myself quite often anyways. =] a very nice "thinking man" comedy. in the vein of Mel Brooks, Jim Abrahams, and for lovers of comedic parodies (is there any other kind?), sarcasm, irony and wit in general. rest in piece guys. if you are resting. ;] much love, Brian

Another British comedian takes on the Bible with similarly funny results. If you enjoy satirical pseudo-biblically based films, then you can't go wrong with Wholly Moses! Dudley Moore plays Hershel, a Jewish boy who lives his whole life in the shadow of the biblical figure, and his own brother in law, Moses. Some very funny bits, and as i said before along the lines of Life of Brian and as others have said Mel Brooks' History of the World. Parodying several bible stories, this film is not as funny as LoB, but it's still a very enjoyable film. Stand out performances from Moore, Richard Pryor, Laraine Newman, Dom DeLuise, and including John Ritter as Satan.

So bad that it doesn't deserve a review so much as a warning. I mean, not one laugh. Okay, now if you are a mormon or something and think the Mr. Bean movie was funny because it was mainly inoffensive than this could be for you. There really is no other audience...except maybe precocious pre-adolescents. This MIGHT be worth their while. Dudley Moore - made me smile once. Richard Pryor - funniest thing in this, and still I did not laugh. Lorraine Newman - the less said, the better. James Coco - seems like a terribly nice guy...I'll leave it at that. John Ritter - no physical comedy for him to do so...basically wasted. The writer had a single previous writing credit. I hate to sound conspiratorial, but one does sort of imagine that someone said, "hey, let's capitalize on the popularity of Life of Brian and use this new (or was it old?) script". Life of Brian had 6 good writers and a cohesive comedic troupe. This movie, seems to have had nothing go right for it. Watch at your own peril. :-)

My husband and I communicate mostly by quoting memorable lines from movies. Along with "When Harry Met Sally", we often quote this comedy starring Dudley Moore. The bumbling Moses-wanna-be gets himself into one difficult situation after another. Like the time he is sold into slavery, and forced into heavy manual labor... such as, pulling huge boulders up a ramp, to help build an Egyptian pyramid. Moore's tiny stature set against this ridiculously heavy burden is funny enough. Then the muscle-bound task master approaches. Dudley inadvertently ends up causing the boulder to pin the bosses' foot. The burley man is double over in pain... face red... unable to speak... He spits out syllables such as... "rok-k-k" and "F-f-f-u-t-t." Dudley leans in closer, "What's that? My Arabic is rusty." I happen to find Dudley Moore's delivery of slap stick humor a laugh a minute... real belly laughs. Today, if I happen to inadvertently injure my husband one of us says, "rok-k-k..f-f-u-t-t" and that is all it takes for us to peal into laughter.

Moore plays a shepherd who's somehow two steps behind Moses when a famous incident occurs. The film is sporadically funny with Moore working in some mildly comic routines and there are fine cameos from Pryor, Kahn and Coco, but altogether, the film needs some side splitting laughs.

I don't understand how this movie got such a low score. I can appreciate that everyone has there own opinion but the score definitely does not fit the movie. I have seen this movie many times and each time it makes me laugh just as much as the first time I saw it. I love this movie. If you want to just sit back relax forget your troubles and have a good laugh then this movie is an excellent choice. It's absolutely worth watching and giving it a chance if you have not seen it before. In any case as I said above the low score surprised me so for anyone out there considering watching it don't let that score stop you because you will miss out on a really good movie. And if you're still in doubt just check out the cast.I think that says it all.

When "Life of Brian" come out in 1978 and succeeded in spite of (or due to) being so openly blasphemous (which the Pythons predictably denied), it opened the floodgates for (American & British) comedians to finally mock various aspects of religion in a more blatant, less subliminal manner. Or at least mini-floodgates; after all, it's still not considered too kosher or safe to make fun of The Great Book in any kind of very obvious way. But while for example "In God We Tru$t" worked quite well, WM turned out to be an abysmal, unfunny failure/flop. The writers even had the balls to steal the baby-mix-up gag from "Life of Brian", in which baby-Jesus has a sort of "double", except that this time around it's Moses. How absolutely lame. Lame is exactly how I'd describe 95% of the "gags". In particular the more drawn-out dialogs are close to unwatchable. I quit this movie several times, so bored was I with this "wholly" uninspired dud. It took me weeks to finish it (a few seconds per day, so I don't slip into a coma), and even that was just so I could trash it here. Dudley Moore and the rest of the cast look positively bored. They must have sensed the worthlessness of the project already half-way into reading the script, then had their suspicions and fears confirmed first-hand while they were shooting it: the material they parroted away so un-meticulously had zero potential, so why even try? Take your check and forget about it. The awfully cheap, ugly, and bland look of WM normally suggests a run-of-the-mill TV movie, but somehow, mysteriously, this was a big-screen offering. WM looks as if it'd been made for next-to-nothing, perhaps half the budget having been spent on Moore's probably sizable fee.

It's too bad that so many people who posted comments disliked the movie. I think it's a really good show. Some of the sexual humor is a little lame, but it's got some really funny scenes, and lots of subtle humor. For example, right before Herschel's first orgy is to commence, he gets his slave to douse him with some lemon scent and a bit of grapefruit behind his ears. Herschel says, "No one in Egypt will smell as good as me tonight." The slave smiles and when Herschel turns his head, the slave squirts some grapefruit on himself. I guess everyone's opinions are different, but I think this is a classic movie. I've read on other web sites that this movie attempts to copy The Life of Brian, but I don't see that at all. Perhaps it followed in the same vein in that it parodies a person from biblical times, but I certainly don't see any similarities other than they are both funny movies. This is a fun movie - it doesn't attempt to be something that it's not, or teach us any lessons. It just wants to make us laugh, which I think it succeeds at doing!

This film is for people with different tastes. I actually like this movie. In fact it's the only film I like of Dudley Moores. (RIP) It has a couple amusing moments, maybe not laugh out funny, but the comedy is restrained. Anyway I do recommend this movie for a Saturday afternoon, sort of along the lines of Abbott and Costello. 7 out of 10. I liked it.