Full confession: I have not seen the original 1981 “Arthur”. “OH MY GOD, a movie Jason HASN’T SEEN?” Wait wait wait. I have seen the 2011 remake with Russell Brand and from what I can surmise the two movies follow the same formula: a belligerent and wealthy playboy has to learn to live without money if he wants to marry the woman of his dreams. The 2011 film oozed sentimentality and I think that had more to do with Brand’s personal struggles at the time (and his subsequent Producer credit on the remake) then it did a changing of the times: it doesn’t matter how much money either Arthur has, because eventually you will run out of things to do with it. No amount of modernization can change this, and sadly makes Arthur’s rich boy antics irrelevant; especially when there have been so many movies since about the 1% acting like idiots (The Hangover series; Blank Check; Wall Street 2; Fracture, to name a few). But where Brand’s characterization had a pathos when confronted with responsibility, Dudley Moore’s original really is only concerned with having a good time. The guy is a fucking useless drunk, and he’s an asshole! There could very well be more lurking beneath the surface of his interpretation, but Arthur 2 never gives us a chance to learn more about him: why he’s a drunk; how he feels about getting older and still not taking control of his life; his lack of confidence at middle age. Answering these wouldn’t make for a very funny movie, though (and there’s a good chance they were answered in the first one and I simply don’t know what I’m talking about. I have the sequel, not the original. I have to work with what I’ve got here).