Other Titles • Man of the Century • Johnny Twennies (1998)
Synopses for Man of the Century (1999)
1.
This one-joke movie would have made a classic two-reel short. At 77 minutes it overstays its welcome, yet its goofy preposterousness is so sweet-natured that you'll probably develop a grudging fondness for it. Gibson Frazier, with his crackerjack musical-comedy moves and long, sharp-edged, comic-strip face, plays an aggressively chipper newspaperman named Johnny Twennies--a cross between the go-getters Harold Lloyd played in silent comedies and the motor-mouth hipsters perfected by Lee Tracy and Jimmy Cagney in the early talkies. Johnny wears '20s duds, writes on a vintage typewriter, sends telegrams instead of e-mail--yet he's living in modern-day New York City. He doesn't register anything that wouldn't have fit into the world of those movies from which he appears to have sprung: for instance, that his girlfriend (Susan Egan) is horny as a bedbug, or that his photographer sidekick (Anthony Rapp) is gay. None of these comic ideas comes to much, but Frazier (who cowrote with director Adam Abraham) can really dish out the snappy patter, and the black-and-white camerawork is the bee's knees. --Richard T. Jameson
2.
Johnny Twenties is a modern New Yorker, but only in the physical sense. Everything about him is leftover from an era long gone, and he himself is convinced that he is living in the 1920s. This screwball fantasy follows the confrontations he has with his modern neighbors as he attempts to cope with the ethics and attitude of the late 1990s.
3.
Meet yesterday's answer to today's world.
Take a sharp dressing, fast talking 1920s newspaperman, plant him in gritty, modern day Manhattan and what do you get? An "audacious, hilarious comedy!" (Mike Kerrigan, Boxoffice
The sidewalks of New York will never be the same, thanks to sharp-dressing, fast-talking newspaperman Johnny Twennies (Gibson Frazier), an ace reporter stuck in the 1920's who's blissfully unaware that he sticks out like a sore thumb in modern Manhattan. His girlfriend is fed up because he hasn't even kissed her, his boss wants him canned, and the local mob wants to bump him off because he's hot on their trail. Can Johnny blow the lid off an important crime scoop, get the girl, and keep himself from getting killed?
Winner of the Audience Award at the Slamdance Festival and a feast for the eyes in glorious black and white, Man of the Century is an "unforgettable movie experience!" (Sarah Hepola, Austin Chronicle).
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