The Full Monty

Six unemployed men, inspired by a touring group of male strippers, decide they can make a small fortune by putting on a striptease show of their own-but with one small difference. They intend to go the "full monty" and strip completely naked! In this hilarious, heartfelt comedy, these six friends discover the inner strength to bare it all in front of the world. This "enchantingly funny crowd-pleasing" comedy (David Ansen, Newsweek) features the music of Donna Summer, Gary Glitter, Sister Sledge and Tom Jones.

The movie is about an aimless Scottish gardener and a middle-aged British widow with a green thumb. Grace (Brenda Blethyn of Secrets and Lies and Little Voice) has just discovered that her recently deceased husband has left her with an enormous debt when her gardener Matthew (Craig Ferguson, The Big Tease) asks her to help him tend to his small, personal-use marijuana crop. Grace soon realizes that they can turn her green house into a hydroponics laboratory and turn out a profitable crop--if only they can keep the local constables at bay and then find a dealer to actually sell the stuff. Saving Grace has well-developed characters, intelligent dialogue, a charming and capable cast, and clean, clear direction. But at heart it's still a marijuana comedy, with most of its funniest moments coming from the silly, stoned behavior of elderly ladies and other stuffy Brits. Nothing wrong with that, and Blethyn and Ferguson give the film a strong anchor. The ending goes a little over-the-top, but most of the movie is well-grounded in genuine human behavior. A subplot about Matthew's girlfriend's pregnancy is treated with respect and integrity. Sweet, silly, and sincere. --Bret Fetzer

The final novel of a trilogy about the working-class Rabbitte family of Dublin (following The Commitments and The Snapper ), shortlisted for last year's Booker Prize, demonstrates a brash originality and humor that are both uniquely Irish and shrewdly universal. Jimmy Rabbitte Sr. is without a job or a raison d'etre. Then his pal Bimbo gets sacked from his bakery job and the two use Bimbo's unemployment money to buy a ramshackle fish-and-chips van. In hilarious scenes that recall the hot-dog-wagon disaster in John Kennedy Toole's Confederacy of Dunces , Jimmy and Bimbo prove as determined as they are inept at making a go of their business (the vivid descriptions of unhygienically fried chips and grilled sausages could keep readers away from street food for quite a long time). In Jimmy, a likable fellow who tries to do right by his colorful and uncontrollable brood, Doyle has created an authentic hero of modern-day Ireland. That the author, a 33-year-old Dubliner, is also a vastly successful playwright will astonish no one who has read his superb dialogue. Tremendous good fun, devoid of pretension, this novel invites comparison with the best of 20th-century Irish literature. Readers who missed The Snapper first time around can find it in a forthcoming Penguin paperback. Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood," writes Frank McCourt in Angela's Ashes. "Worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood." Welcome, then, to the pinnacle of the miserable Irish Catholic childhood. Born in Brooklyn in 1930 to recent Irish immigrants Malachy and Angela McCourt, Frank grew up in Limerick after his parents returned to Ireland because of poor prospects in America. It turns out that prospects weren't so great back in the old country either--not with Malachy for a father. A chronically unemployed and nearly unemployable alcoholic, he appears to be the model on which many of our more insulting cliches about drunken Irish manhood are based. Mix in abject poverty and frequent death and illness and you have all the makings of a truly difficult early life. Fortunately, in McCourt's able hands it also has all the makings for a compelling memoir.

There was a time when reading Joseph Heller's classic satire on the murderous insanity of war was nothing less than a rite of passage. Echoes of Yossarian, the wise-ass bombardier who was too smart to die but not smart enough to find a way out of his predicament, could be heard throughout the counterculture. As a result, it's impossible not to consider Catch-22 to be something of a period piece. But 40 years on, the novel's undiminished strength is its looking-glass logic. Again and again, Heller's characters demonstrate that what is commonly held to be good, is bad; what is sensible, is nonsense.

Since his debut in 1951 as The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield has been synonymous with "cynical adolescent." Holden narrates the story of a couple of days in his sixteen-year-old life, just after he's been expelled from prep school, in a slang that sounds edgy even today and keeps this novel on banned book lists.

Before Elmore Leonard abandoned westerns to blaze across the pantheon of bestsellerdom with his hip, stylish thrillers, punctuated with dead-pan humor and dialogue worthy of a David Mamet play, he might have written The Hot Kid; it has some of the same crisp pacing and well-defined, if not especially complex, characters that marked his earlier novels.

If there is a reader out there interested in trying Leonard for the first time, this is as good a place to start as any (from a numerous selection of good titles). Split Images is a great crime novel, and Elmore Leonard is so subtle in the way he writes, that I find myself reading along with what seems like a classic sort of hard boiled mystery only to realize slowly that I am reading something more than that. There have been a ton of hard school writers after him that adopted his nearly comic overtone, but none are as good. What would make this a good first entry into the world of Leonard is that this novel contains many elements that make it "Classic Leonard." --Mykal Banta

John Russell has been raised as an Apache. Now he's on his way to live as a white man. But when the stagecoach passengers learn who he is, they want nothing to do with him -- until outlaws ride down on them and they must rely on Russell's guns and his ability to lead them out of the desert. He can't ride with them, but they must walk with him or die.

A first-ever, triple-shot omnibus of the classic New York Times bestsellers featuring "THE WORLD'S MOST PERFECT PRIVATE EYE."-Los Angeles Times Book Review

In Pastime, the Boston PI revisits a crime from his past, and a young victim who wants answers. In Double Deuce, when Spenser is drawn into a war against a Boston street gang. And in Paper Doll, a perfect suburban wife and mother is found murdered. A random act? Spenser's isn't convinced.

A Greatest Hits package to die for, in which the inimitable, Pulitzer-packing humorist applies himself to taxes, toilets, airbags, baseball, beer commercials, and numerous other American artifacts. A typical bit, from a piece on legalized gambling: "Off-Track Betting parlors are the kinds of places where you never see signs that say, 'Thank You for Not Smoking.' The best you could hope for is, 'Thank You for Not Spitting Pieces of Your Cigar on My Neck.'" Happy? There's plenty more where that came from.

Readers can be excused for a little motion sickness when reading this collection of pieces from P.J. O'Rourke. To go from preaching "Armed Love" (whatever that is) to being anointed as the ultra-libertarian Cato Institute's favorite humorist in only 25 years is an astounding transformation.

No doubt about it: P. J. O'Rourke has a bizarre sense of fun. "What I've ... been," he writes in his introduction to Holidays in Hell "is a Trouble Tourist--going to see insurrections, stupidities, political crises, civil disturbances and other human folly because ... because it's fun." Forget Hawaii or the Poconos--O'Rourke gets his jollies in places like war-torn Lebanon where he is greeted at the border by a gun barrel in his face, or Seoul, just in time for election-day violence. Wherever he goes, however, O'Rourke takes his quirky sense of humor, laser eye for detail, and artful way with words: a Philippine army officer is "powerful-looking in a short, compressed way, like an attack hamster," and the Syrian army is described as having "dozens of silly hats, mostly berets in yellow, orange and shocking pink, but also tiny pillbox chapeaux.... The paratroopers wear shiny gold jumpsuits and crack commando units have skin-tight fatigues in a camouflage pattern of violet, peach, flesh tone and vermilion on a background of vivid purple. This must give excellent protective coloration in, say, a room full of Palm Beach divorcees in Lily Pulitzer dresses."

Barney Miller is the kind of cop we'd all like to run into. He is always sensible. He maintains order over a squad room of detectives who gamble for a hobby, get hit on by anything in skirts, go to renaissance philosophy conventions for fun, and would really prefer to be writing. Nearly all of the action takes place in the squad room where the citizens and criminals are brought in to complicate the mix.

Archie Bunker, was a working-class family man who held bigoted, conservative views of the world. His viewpoints clash with nearly everyone he comes into contact with especially his liberal son-in-law Mike Stivic (or, as Archie delights in calling him, "Meathead").

The 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital is stuck in the middle of the Korean war. With little help from the circumstances they find themselves in, they are forced to make their own fun. Fond of practical jokes and revenge, the doctors, nurses, administrators, and soldiers often find ways of making wartime life bearable. Nevertheless, the war goes on.

This classic comedy completes its tour of duty for the loyal MASH collector with this three-disc DVD Collector's Edition of the series finale, "Goodbye, Farewell & Amen".

A late-night comedy show featuring several short skits, parodies of television commercials, a live guest band, and a pop-cultural guest host each week. Many of the SNL players have spun off successful independent comedy and/or movie careers from here.