The Three Stooges began to come back, I believe, when Mel Gibson did a little Stooge routine at the start of a drug bust in Lethal Weapon. That was 25 years ago, and now, after relentless delays, the Farrelly brothers’ film version is opening in 4.13. 20th Century Fox publicists have been slow with the screening invites. They showed it yesterday afternoon at the Chinese to a family crowd. This morning I asked if I could please attend the Tuesday all-media, and they said okay.

From Dennis Lim‘s 4.6 N.Y. Times article: “The Farrellys agreed that it made commercial sense to modernize — no pie fights, for one thing — but Peter Farrelly said that to a large extent they strove for absolute fidelity to the original: “They had to look the same, sound the same, talk the same, dress the same.” Die-hards, they realized, would not tolerate deviation when it came to characters who had hardened into legend: Moe, the impotent leader with his mood swings and undercurrent of simmering rage; Larry, with his goggle eyes and frizzy mop of yankable hair; Curly with his trilling falsetto and subverbal yelps and nyuk-nyuks.

“The Farrellys also painstakingly preserved the famous sound effects: the boinks and thumps of all those head smacks and eye pokes and sledgehammers to the skull.”