There's something about that squint

One unassailable truth about the 2012 movie season, shared by almost everyone I've talked to, seems to be that The Three Stooges will be an utter abomination.

Me, I don't know. I'm taking a wait and see approach. In fact, I'm not even going to look at its Metascore until after I've finished writing this.

Part of that has to do with the Farrelly Brothers. The veteran comedy writer-director duo made one of my favorite comedies of last year, Hall Pass. In the process, they at least temporarily reversed a decade of decline, which had culminated in their simply awful remake of The Heartbreak Kid a couple years ago.

The rest of it? Something about that squint.

That's right, the squint of Sean Hayes as Larry Fine is fascinating to me for reasons I can't entirely explain.

Well, here's one explanation: I've been looking at it every day for the past six weeks on my drive in to work. A massive Three Stooges poster has been plastered to the outside of a building I pass on my commute. As seen here:


About a week into its tenure on the side of this building -- a week spent mostly rolling my eyes, if I remember correctly -- I became sort of entranced by Sean Hayes' squint. And I can't really explain why, because I have no personal history whatsoever with the Three Stooges, and Hayes in particular is no great favorite of mine. In fact, he was one of the reasons I never truly became a Will & Grace fan.

But there's something about the look of befuddlement he captures here that intrigues me. I have to look at his squinting face every time I pass it, until I can no longer see it. It makes me chuckle.

I guess I am also feeling somewhat favorably inclined toward Will Sasso, who plays Curly, these days. I never watched him on Mad TV -- in fact, I felt that show was a pale imitator of Saturday Night Live and sort of disdained it. But he was on last season's short-lived sitcom Shit My Dad Says, and my wife and I, against our better nature, sort of dug that show. (What can I say, I love William Shatner.)

Of course, none of this translates to me actually seeing The Three Stooges in the theater. There's another movie coming out today, The Cabin in the Woods, that is probably my next target. In fact, I might have written about that today except that I've done a very good job avoiding most of the information about it. I understand that's as it should be with this film.

I do have what I think is a plan for seeing The Three Stooges, though -- despite the seeming ineptitude on display in the trailers, and the fact that they contain a cameo from Snooki. I said before that I was generally unfamiliar with the work of the real Three Stooges, right? Well, this seems to set itself up perfectly for my Getting Acquainted series, maybe for August or September, once the Farrellys' comedy has reached DVD. I'll watch three movies by the Three Stooges (one for each Stooge, you might say), then I'll finish up the month with The Three Stooges.

I suppose this movie could look a lot worse to me if I've just seen three of the Stooges' "classics." Then again, I don't know that I really will find them classic. This seems like a situation where I may just judge the new film based on how well the actors (the third of whom I've never heard of) impersonate the people they're impersonating.

And maybe I'll actually enjoy it. I mean, if Larry David's in it, it might be good, right?

Um ... right?