Cynical Cinema

When I was younger, and single, I had a poster of an Olsen twins movie up on the wall of my apartment.  The movie was called The Challenge, and I had the DVD as well.  In fact, I had several Olsen twins DVDs, and an Olsen twins puzzle, that were laying around in strategic locations that ensured that everyone who walked into my apartment would instantly notice the paraphenalia and assume I had some kind of fetish for the Olsen twins.  And I would play that up, saying some very filthy things about what I did with those posters and movies.  And some people were incredibly uncomfortable, and others laughed extremely hard.  Those who laughed became my friends for life.  At the time, the Olsen twins were 16, and the wait-until-they’re-18 countdown was on.

Now, the Olsen twins are in their 20s.  And there is no longer anything creepy (and, by extension, funny) about Olsen twins fantasies.  So I have taken down the posters and given away the DVDs to friends who were genuinely creepy enough to enjoy them for real.  There’s just no humour in the Olsen twins any more, now that they are legal.  If only someone could have told the roasters at the Comedy Central roast of Bob Saget!  If only someone could have sat them all down and said “Olsen twins jokes are irritating and tired.  Stop it.”  Especially when the extent of the “clever” when it comes to these jokes is along the lines of “Mary-Kate Olsen is super skinny because she has an eating disorder because Bob Saget touched her on the set of Full House.”  That’s not funny.  Or even shocking.  It’s stupid.

But then, most of the comedians didn’t make me laugh much at all, as they got up on stage to roast Saget, who really ought to be one of the easiest targets in showbiz.  Not only that, but he’s a “comedian” himself, so he can take the really mean stuff.  And there is a lot of mean stuff.  But a lot of the roasters seem to think they are supposed to riff on the rest of the roasters, and eventually get around to Saget.  So we get “Cloris Leachman is old and gross” jokes, and “Susie Essman is terribly ugly” jokes (by the way - really?  I think she’s quite attractive.  Maybe this is comedy I don’t understand.  Or, perhaps, it’s just comedy that sucks.)

This is the way with Jim Norton, Greg Giraldo, Jeffrey Ross, Jon Lovitz and Jeff Garlin, who does a strange but not very good bit where he pretends to be the creator of Full House.  John Stamos is the host, the “roast-master” if you will, and he is no comedian.  Then again, he is better than some of the people who “are” comedians.  Susie Essman is decent, and so is Brian Posehn, but the truly great acts are few and far between.  Gilbert Gottfried’s bit is pretty good.  Cloris Leachman’s is a bit better, but part of that is the novelty that still exists with old women making jokes about dried-up body parts and using the f- word.  There are some funny sent-in-by-tape segments from Lewis Black, Sarah Silverman and Don Rickles. 

Speaking of Rickles, he clearly seems to have the oldest routine on the tape (because he is 100), and it almost feels like one of the Sammy Davis style roasts of old for a moment.  Until we get to Norm McDonald.  His bit was absolutely, terribly unfunny.  And I laughed very, very hard.  His jokes seemed to come from an era hundreds of years before Rickles ever picked up a mic for a zinger.  They were the kind three-year-olds make these days, and he had them written down on cue cards.  There is no way to convey how funny it was to watch McDonald saying “Bob Saget has a face that is beautiful like a flower…a CAULI-flower!” 

The audience had no idea what was going on.  Every other comedian got up there and dropped f-bombs and made child-molesting jokes, and now here’e Norm McDonald with “Susie Essman may be a vegetarian, but she’s still full of bologna in my book”.  Some of the comedians really get it, but even then a few of them look totally stunned and lost.  This is the best bit on the entire DVD, which comes out December 30th from Paramount Home Entertainment, and hopefully you can find it on youtube or something.  And skip the rest of the DVD.  The Olsen twins were no longer a source of comedic gold when they turned 18.

I tried. I really, truly tried to like Southland Tales. I liked The Rock in it. That’s right - The Rock, the wrestler, I liked him. I liked Seann William Scott - Stiffler from American Pie, the guy who has only ever played a drunken frat boy, I liked him. I liked Bai Ling -the Chinese actress who was recently busted for shoplifting. I also liked Jon Lovitz (Newsradio), Cheri O’Teri (irritating name), Christopher (there can be only one) Lambert, Justin (my music is obnoxious) Timberlake, Mandy (look how big my eyes are) Moore, Sarah Michelle (I have two first names) Gellar and John (remember me) Laroquette. I liked them all! I liked the camera work, I loved the layout of the scenes, I enjoyed seeing what was coming up next. I was desperate to like Southland Tales. The movie begged me to like it, and I said OK movie, I will try my very best to do so, just don’t let me down. And the movie did not let me down. But I can’t recommend it because it is awful.

Here is a plot synopsis, as best I can make out. Perhaps once you have read this you will understand. World War 3 has begun. There have been nuclear bombs set off in Texas, so the Americans have responded by bombing Iran, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Korea, Afghanistan, and possibly Belgium. The US army is running out of oil. It is the near future, but George Bush is still preisdent. (In fact, at one point they use actual file footage of Bush speaking.) As the oil runs out, a mad scientist invents a way to get energy directly from the ocean. He is either bent on world domination, or he’s crazy, or he’s just a nice old man with evil advisors. Still don’t know. The Rock shows up on a beach. He has amnesia. He is a famous actor, but he doesn’t know that, and he hooks up with Sarah Michelle Gellar, who is a porn star. He has a wife that he has forgotten, however, and she is Mandy Moore, who is the daughter of the man who is running for vice-president of the US in the elections on the Republican ticket. There are cameras everywhere, and one of the major election issues is bill 69, which would restrict the ability of the government to invade the privacy of people. Take a breath for a moment.

We continue: Seann William Scott is a cop who has a twin brother who is a left-wing extremist, and he has kidnapped his twin in order to pose as him in a large conspiracy that will see him, posing as his brother, commit a double murder with racist overtones, that will be filmed by The Rock before he finds out who he really is, and this will be released to the media to discredit both the cops and the Republicans all at once. There is musical montage, a music video, a song-and-dance number, a soap-opera going on in Mandy Moore’s family where some people are sleeping with some other people, there is a world domination theme, there is drug trafficking, somehow related to this machine in the ocean that produces energy and also perhaps some variation on Soylent Green. Everything in the country is sponsored by either Hustler or Budweiser, and the grand finale of the movie involves a giant Zeppelin, a riot, a fireworks display, a rift in the space-time continuum, and a flying ice cream truck.

So…yeah. Southland Tales is about all of this, and none of this. The movie is two and a half hours long, and to cram all this stuff in and make us care, or understand, it would have to be eleven hours plus. There is just way too much going on. And yet the movie seems to have a rather laguid pace, like it isn’t hurrying anywhere. It feels good to watch it. It is visually impressive. The writing is very good. There are some great lines, and great moments. The little old lady from Poltergeist is in the movie, and she has a great moment at the bottom of a staircase straight out of that movie. The little old smart guy from The Princess Bride is in it a lot too, and he throws it to that film with the word “preposterous”. Kiss Me Deadly, the classic 1955 film noir, is playing on the TV in the porn star’s room. The porn stars have their own TV shows and energy drinks. There are so many cool actors doing cool things. Justin Timberlake is awesome. And yet - there really is no movie here. You can sit there for two and a half hours. You might be entertained, you will be mildly stimulated, and you may even think you are enjoying yourself. But when the movie ends, you won’t know what it was about, you won’t care, and six minutes later you will have forgotten everything about the film. It’s heavy on style, but the substance is almost non-existent.