Review of Date Movie
this entry brought to you by outkast, "the way you move"
When Michelle wanted to have a date night and wanted to go to the movies and we couldn't make the movies we actually wanted to see, Date Movie did not look like too bad an alternative. The commercials looked unfunny, but the marketing for Not Another Teen Movie never impressed me much, and my reasoning was that since I expected nothing out of Teen Movie, which ended up being hilarious and much smarter than all the movies it was making fun of, there was no particular reason to not give Date Movie a try. It probably would end up being something I'd rather rent, but heck, a movie night sounded like fun.
Let's just get the good stuff out of the way, because it's a short list: When the movie aspires to be a direct parody of specific movies, it gets laughs. There's a scene that parodies Kill Bill that will definitely get honest laughter out of you. The spot-on parody of Meet the Fockers would be worth downloading if you found it on the Internet somewhere without the context of the rest of the movie. And one of the best gags in the movie is that perennial parody-movie favorite Eddie Griffin (who, you'll notice, is black), plays Alyson Hannigan's Greek-Indian-Japanese-Jew father. Griffin is hilarious as always, but then, Eddie Griffin could have walked on set and cocked an eyebrow and still gotten laughs.
There are isolated, far apart gags that manage a chuckle, but the movie is far more interested in extended, embarassingly bad gross-out gags that just go on and on until the point where you're not offended from lack of taste, but offended that someone out there not only thought these gags were funny, but they'd be even funnier if they were three minutes long. I'm not completely against gross-out gags. The banana-in-the-butt gag in Teen Movie elicited a laugh, and the behind-the-curtains gags in Austin Powers were classic. But when the running joke in a movie is a farting, shitting cat that, at one point, humps a corpse, and you think that this joke is hilarious enough to warrant minutes dedicated to coming back to it, you know you've got a terrible movie. In fact, the movie's entire first 30 minutes, which were nothing but a long series of boring, painful, loathsome fat jokes, made me think that I wasn't going to giggle once over the next hour and a half.
There are long stretches of this movie that are just tortuous, and in this down time your mind starts coming up with new ways to say "awful". How about "shitterific"? Or maybe "paintacular"? Then you start to ponder what sort of human being would pay for a film degree only to wretch up vomitous poison like this? And then you realize that this movie has two credited directors, which means they had a team effort in making a movie, and still only came up with this. The only conclusion one can make with this knowledge is that they were trying to make an unwatchable movie, because if they weren't, at some point one of the two of them would have said "No, wait, this isn't funny at all," and stopped the whole thing. Even the frat guy with the backwards baseball hat and his cheerleader girlfriend sitting behind us must have thought something along the same lines, because they got up and left the theater-- and they were the audience this load was made for. Easily the worst movie I've ever paid to see. Check that-- one of the worst movies I've ever seen, period. Please, please, please, if there is a God, please make it so that Jason Friedburg and Aaron Seltzer, the directors of Date Movie never, ever come anywhere near another film again.
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with love from CRS @ 7:43 PM
Thursday, March 02, 2006
When Michelle wanted to have a date night and wanted to go to the movies and we couldn't make the movies we actually wanted to see, Date Movie did not look like too bad an alternative. The commercials looked unfunny, but the marketing for Not Another Teen Movie never impressed me much, and my reasoning was that since I expected nothing out of Teen Movie, which ended up being hilarious and much smarter than all the movies it was making fun of, there was no particular reason to not give Date Movie a try. It probably would end up being something I'd rather rent, but heck, a movie night sounded like fun.
Let's just get the good stuff out of the way, because it's a short list: When the movie aspires to be a direct parody of specific movies, it gets laughs. There's a scene that parodies Kill Bill that will definitely get honest laughter out of you. The spot-on parody of Meet the Fockers would be worth downloading if you found it on the Internet somewhere without the context of the rest of the movie. And one of the best gags in the movie is that perennial parody-movie favorite Eddie Griffin (who, you'll notice, is black), plays Alyson Hannigan's Greek-Indian-Japanese-Jew father. Griffin is hilarious as always, but then, Eddie Griffin could have walked on set and cocked an eyebrow and still gotten laughs.
There are isolated, far apart gags that manage a chuckle, but the movie is far more interested in extended, embarassingly bad gross-out gags that just go on and on until the point where you're not offended from lack of taste, but offended that someone out there not only thought these gags were funny, but they'd be even funnier if they were three minutes long. I'm not completely against gross-out gags. The banana-in-the-butt gag in Teen Movie elicited a laugh, and the behind-the-curtains gags in Austin Powers were classic. But when the running joke in a movie is a farting, shitting cat that, at one point, humps a corpse, and you think that this joke is hilarious enough to warrant minutes dedicated to coming back to it, you know you've got a terrible movie. In fact, the movie's entire first 30 minutes, which were nothing but a long series of boring, painful, loathsome fat jokes, made me think that I wasn't going to giggle once over the next hour and a half.
There are long stretches of this movie that are just tortuous, and in this down time your mind starts coming up with new ways to say "awful". How about "shitterific"? Or maybe "paintacular"? Then you start to ponder what sort of human being would pay for a film degree only to wretch up vomitous poison like this? And then you realize that this movie has two credited directors, which means they had a team effort in making a movie, and still only came up with this. The only conclusion one can make with this knowledge is that they were trying to make an unwatchable movie, because if they weren't, at some point one of the two of them would have said "No, wait, this isn't funny at all," and stopped the whole thing. Even the frat guy with the backwards baseball hat and his cheerleader girlfriend sitting behind us must have thought something along the same lines, because they got up and left the theater-- and they were the audience this load was made for. Easily the worst movie I've ever paid to see. Check that-- one of the worst movies I've ever seen, period. Please, please, please, if there is a God, please make it so that Jason Friedburg and Aaron Seltzer, the directors of Date Movie never, ever come anywhere near another film again.
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