Josef Krebs

You don’t watch Fast Times at Ridgemont High for any home theater glories. More likely, it’s a favorite movie to get stoned to — er, a series of memorable vignettes of high-school teenagers attempting to lose their virginity while surviving soul-destroying service-industry jobs.

The starting point of Hall Pass, the latest comedy from writer/directors Bobby and Peter Farrelly, is the same as that of most current TV sitcoms: Gone-to-pot, sex-mad, middle-aged suburban American husbands — who’ve been infantilized by their disappointed, slightly contemptuous, much more attractive wives — yearn for freedom (and more sex) via younger, even hotter women.

There’s a particularly wonderful scene in The Illusionist, the animated movie adapted and directed by Sylvain Chomet (The Triplets of Belleville) from a previously unfilmed script by Jacques Tati. When the Monsieur Hulot-like character familiar to fans of Tati goes into a movie theater, there’s Tati’s Mon Oncle up on the screen in live action.