Cynical Cinema

There is almost nothing I can think of to recommend The Heartbreak Kid, which comes out on Blu-Ray December 16th from Paramount Home Entertainment.  This movie is garbage, through and through.  I like Michelle Monaghan, but she is merely a charming pretty face in this movie, and that isn’t enough.  I was excited to see Ben Stiller acting with his father, Jerry (they play father and son - neat, eh?), but Jerry Stiller’s role is reduced to that of the old man who says filthy things about women and sex, and we’re supposed to laugh just because he’s old and filthy.  I didn’t.

The basic premise is the same one used in the original Heartbreak Kid, which was released in 1972 and was much, much better than this one.  Ben Stiller plays a guy who rushes into marriage, only to discover that his new bride (Malin Akerman) is a maniac, and awful, and he wants nothing to do with her.  On his honeymoon, he falls in love with another girl (Michelle Monaghan), and hilarity supposedly ensues.  It doesn’t.  Crazy women aren’t funny just because they’re crazy.  Ben Stiller isn’t funny just because he’s Ben Stiller.  And old men aren’t funny just because they swear and say dirty things.  And The Heartbreak Kid just isn’t funny.  On Blu-Ray or otherwise.

Paramount Home Entertainment is releasing another Carlos Mencia DVD today. A couple of weeks ago, they released a DVD of his stand-up, Carlos Mencia: Performance Enhanced. At the time, I said that it sucked. And that Carlos Mencia sucks. Now, a few weeks later, with the release of Mind of Mencia, Season Four, I can put an exclamation point on my earlier statements. Carlos Mencia is terrible. He is probably not the worst comic working today, but he is certainly the worst comic with his own TV show. He makes Dane Cook look like Jerry Seinfeld. How bad is he? Let’s examine the fourth season of his show to find out.

Who is the comic most people mock, more often than any other, the world over? I am going to go out on a very short limb in saying that it is Carrot-Top. Carrot-Top has become the standard punch-line in every non-comic’s jokes about bad comics. There is a moment, in the fourth episode of Season Four of Mind Of Mencia, where Carlos Mencia does a bit involving a briefcase that looks like a muffler, and other props, that really made me think I would rather be watching Carrot-Top. It’s one thing to do a “crazy John McCain” bit that smacks of lazy and terrible Jon Stewart. Or a “who has it worse” bit that is like a crappy, unclever, lazy Bill Maher. The stupid alien-ass-probe bit that was done way better by South Park, the unfunny Indiana Jones bit that was done far better by The Simpsons, and dozens of others. It is quite another thing to do a bit that makes CARROT-TOP look good. That is unfortunate.

What I think this show needs, more than anything else, is some co-stars. Every stand-up bit, every skit, every spoof, stars Carlos Mencia. Since Carlos Mencia is not funny, this is way too much Carlos Mencia. And maybe, just maybe, Mencia could find a co-star who is actually funny, and that would improve this show immeasurably. However, I think the problem may be that Carlos Mencia has no friends. During the stand-up portions of his sketch comedy show, he is constantly mentioning other people. Like, he’ll say “people are always coming up to me and saying ‘Carlos, my life is rough’”. Or some such thing. Now, this seems suspect to me. No one has ever come up to me and said anything like that. Not strangers, not acquaintances, and certainly not friends. I’m not a stand-up comic, so perhaps people approach me with different questions or statements than they do Carlos Mencia. But I find this unlikely.

And he will then, on stage, have a conversation with himself in the guise of “other people”. He will respond to this anonymous “other person”, as Carlos Mencia, and then respond again as the “other person”. This creates a bizarre, schizophrenic-style dialogue that really appears as though it never took place. And when he finishes his bit, very often he laughs way too hard at his own jokes. Which makes me feel like I’m watching an unfunny and vaguely creepy wannabe comic rehearsing his own routine in front of his bathroom mirror while he is off his meds. At the end of an episode, he says “that’s the show, and if you don’t like it, you can choose not to watch”. This is about the most insightful thing he has ever said on his program. But what he really means is “if you are offended, change the channel”. I am not offended, I am bored. I don’t like his show. And I choose not to watch.

Carlos Mencia is just not that funny. I tried to like him through his entire stand-up performance Carlos Mencia: Performance Enhanced, out October 28th from Paramount Home Entertainment. I really tried. But this man does not make me laugh. At all. I believe I laughed once through his entire performance. And I know that he tries to make people either laugh or cringe, but I didn’t cringe either. I just sat there, bored out of my mind, for sixty-six minutes. Mencia’s style of comedy is the kind that pushes boundaries, makes people squirm, and offends people. He makes fun of every race, and people laugh, and he says the N-word, and people laugh, and that’s about it.

He seems to think he’s redeeming himself when he breaks out of the stand-up routine to say something nice and intense about the soldiers in Iraq. But he isn’t. It comes off as platitudes that he spouts because the nice stuff then gives him license to offend everyone on the planet. But it isn’t nice stuff. It’s bland, obvious stuff. And the offensive stuff isn’t offensive either. Just saying racial stuff isn’t in itself naughty or crude, it’s boring. And sadly, so is Carlos Mencia.

Until the advent of Sarah Palin, with her striking resemblance to Tina Fey and her amazing inability to answer easy questions coherently, the easiest public figure to lampoon was George W. Bush. After all, the man has not only been dangerously inept, historically unpopular, and frighteningly zealous, he has also been incredibly bad at using words to create sentences, which makes him come off as hilariously stupid. Mixed metaphors, mispronounced words, questionable grammar, and a rather poor handle on facts have made the current American President an easy target for comedians and satirists alike. Now Paramount Home Entertainment is releasing an anthology of these humourous looks at a dangerously unqualified man. Comedy Central Salutes George W. Bush hits DVD on October 21st. It’s a collection of George W. Bush related moments from Comedy Central over the past eight years. The past eight long, painful years.

And as it turns out, even with this incredibly easy-to-mock subject matter, the DVD itself manages to be long and painful! It begins well, with an episode of South Park where Cartman blames Kyle for 9/11. Eventually, the boys meet up with Bush and some intriguing yet bonkers conspiracy theories are revealed. A funny episode from a funny show, featuring some genuinely creepy moments involving the Hardy Boys, for some reason. What follows is a sub-par episode from a sub-par show. Lil’ Bush is just not that good. Obviously this disc was going to contain an episode, and in fact it contains two. But there are some episodes of this show that are better than others, and they have chosen two of the worst. For example, why not pick an episode that genuinely lampoons Bush, like the one involving Lil’ Karl Rove? Instead they have chosen an episode that centres around Lil’ Cheney having sex with Barbara Bush and ending up stuck in her womb. Which is just disgusting, not funny at all, and really has little to do with George W.

After sitting through two episodes of Lil’ Bush, one boring and one unpleasant, we get to a truly bizarre show I never knew existed. That’s My Bush is a really strange show lampooning the Bush family in a sit-com style. It’s basically a scenario that asks “what if George W. Bush starred in a sit-com?” It doesn’t really satirize the president, because it doesn’t touch on his policies at all, or his views or his outlook as president. It goes through the motions of a sit-com. Only it stars George Bush and Laura Bush. Get it? I don’t. It’s a satire of sit-coms, not of Bush. In this particular episode, Bush is trying to hold a meeting to unite the leaders of the pro-life movement with the leaders of the anti-abortion movement, all the while attending a nice, sit-down, romantic dinner that he has promised Laura. So he constantly runs back and forth from the dinner to the meeting, and hijinks ensue. Not once do we get any satire on his own personal views on Roe vs. Wade, we just get the sit-com spoof of him switching dinner jackets a bunch of times.

Then there is some respite from the terrible, with an episode of Lewis Black’s Root of All Evil, one that pits Paris Hilton against Dick Cheney. A very funny episode, but one that deals only tangentially with Bush himself. Then The Last Laugh Squad, a cartoon featuring Black again, along with some other comics, as they shrink themselves, get into a spaceship, and fly up Bush’s ass. Considering the talent in the episode, this is a pretty poor comedic vehicle. Finally, we get to some stand-up clips from Greg Giraldo, Patton Oswalt, Lewis Black again, and Frank Caliendo doing his Bush impression. Some of this is quite funny, but it’s all too brief, and Carlos Mencia’s bit about Bush being the president of Iraq in 2026 is absolutely awful, and not funny at all. Considering all the fodder Bush has provided Comedy Central over the past eight years, I am sad that this DVD is the best they could manage. They would have done much, much better cobbling together a couple of hours of moments from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, and ignoring most of this stuff altogether.

I just received a DVD called The Best Of Comedy Central Presents. It’s eight comedians, each doing a half hour stand-up show on Comedy Central Presents, and brought directly to DVD as a collection courtesy of Paramount. It is hit and miss, much like most comedians. It’s presented in a three-hour, uninterrupted show, broken up by the outros to comercials and the intros back from commercials. You would think Comedy Central could take this stuff out, just like they have taken out the commercials themselves. It’s just distracting and breaks up some fine performances. And some lousy ones. I would recommend the disc, But I would recommend selecting just the individual performances of the good comics, and leaving out the other ones. These are the eight comics:

Lewis Black. Unfortunately, the DVD starts with his show, and it is the best one on here. I am just an enormous fan of Lewis Black, his delivery is superb, his material is smart, and no one delivers a punch line quite like Black with his pointed finger and his growly, focussed anger. Hilarious stuff, but I would have liked to see this one close it out. It starts off the DVD at it’s highest point, and it’s tough to get better from here. This is one of the classic Black bits, the one about seeing a Starbucks in the same building, only across the street, from another Starbucks, and how that clearly signals the end of the world. Amen.

Dane Cook. The DVD goes from the high point to the low point. I still don’t get Dane Cook. I think maybe the appeal of Cook is that…he is kind of attractive? For a comic? Most of them are fairly ugly. Cook is muscular and good-looking enough to be cast as Jessica Simpson’s love interest. And Jessica Alba’s. And, one can only assume, soon enough Jessica Biel’s and Jessica Rabbit’s and maybe Sarah Jessica Parker’s. In this one he imitates an alien from Alien, a snake…none of it is funny, it goes on too long, and I just don’t get it!

Jeff Dunham. If there is anything that smacks of “dated”, it’s vaudeville routines. Second only to vaudeville is ventriloquism. Jeff Dunham is a ventriloquist. He is a fairly good one, although he tries to go too fast and slips up every now and then. His material might seem clever and racy, and he can get away with it because it comes out of a puppet and not him, and he just has to look shocked at what the puppet says, but after watching the rest of the guys on this DVD, there isn’t anything that shocking about what his puppets say. For his act to work, he should be far more offensive, and I just don’t think he has it in him. Pretty boring.

Jim Gaffigan. A pleasant surprise for me. Jim Gaffigan is very funny. I had not seen him before, and his material is very clever, very well-worded, and delivered in a great, almost-incredulous manner. The biggest surprise on the disc, I have seen Gaffigan in small roles in a movie or two, but never doing stand-up, and he is a welcome inclusion here.

Mitch Hedberg. I have always liked Mitch Hedberg. His delivery is stoner-slow, not Steven Wright slow, but laid back and solid. His material is very good, and just about every line he says is funny. The best bit in this set is about his neighbour who would bang on the wall when he played his music too loud. And Hedberg yells back “go around!” Every line is great, and his delivery may just be the best of the bunch. But I still prefer Lewis Black. Because I love him.

Demetri Martin. Again, a guy I have never seen before doing stand-up. In fact, I had never seen Martin before, anywhere. And he’s pretty good. He uses props, but not Carrot-Top type obnoxious props, just a big paper pad like the kind your boss brings to your board meetings, and a few well-placed surprise “guests” toward the end of his set. Not classic material, but worth watching once. Also a very laid-back kind of comic, real smooth delivery and some good material.

Carlos Mencia. Again, a guy I just don’t understand. What is the appeal of this man? I guess it’s the fact that he will cross all lines, insult every race, say terribly shocking, politically incorrect things? But…if he is constantly telling you how controversial he is, if he hits you over the head with the fact that he insults everybody…no, really. Everybody. Ummm…we get it. Get on with the funny stuff. But he doesn’t seem to have much funny stuff to say. He appears to have no original material at all, so he just insults people and stereotypes groups. Frankly, I don’t mind this kind of humour if it is done with wit and inciciveness, a la Sarah Silverman, but Mencia isn’t even close to that level. Skip him.

Brian Regan. It seems sad to me that the Comedy Central people chose to end this DVD with the most bland and blase of all the comedians. Better than Dane Cook, better than Carlos Mencia, but nowhere near as good as Hedberg or Black. Very run-of-the-mill routine, mostly about food, and with a few very good jokes here and there. Sort of a let-down. I would watch him, but I would watch him first.

In fact, here is the order in which the comics should have been presented:
Brian Regan
Jim Gaffigan
Demetri Martin
Mitch Hedberg
Lewis Black
No Cook or Dunham or Mencia. Just those five, and that way you start slow, move up, come down a little again, then hit the big ones to close. That is how I recommend setting up your DVD player for this one. In this order, well worth it!