Friday, January 26, 2007

Epic Movie (*1/2)

                 
? The latest spoof from the people (Jason Friedberg, Aaron Seltzer) who brought you Spy Hard and Scary Movie and last year’s Date Movie. In this case, the meat of the story is provided by The Chronicles of Narnia, with appetizer portions of The Da Vinci Code, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, X-Men, Superman Returns, and Harry Potter, condiment-size portions of Snakes on a Plane, Nacho Libre, and Borat, which are not epics, and a fillip of Paris Hilton, who is neither an epic nor a movie.
+ I’ve tried to ascertain the appeal of these parody pastiches. It’s not like I sat there hearing gales of laughter in the theater, and, just like Date Movie, this will sink like a stone after the first weekend, lacking good word of mouth. However, the format supplies a certain feeling of familiarity, the sort that makes people watch reruns of crappy shows like The Brady Bunch. These movies are like instant reruns, and all the slapstick scenes make for grabby TV commercials. For the record, my tally was three smiles, and one mild laugh. (I’m too embarrassed to say which scene.) The real artists in this movie are the costume and set designers who re-create all those superior blockbusters on the cheap, plus the guy (Darrell Hammond) who pretends to be Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean. He’s pretty convincing. (Depp’s also spoofed in his Willy Wonka role, by Crispin Glover.) This is a tiny bit better than Date Movie for not being as mean-spirited, though it may be even less funny.
- A lengthy description of this movie’s flaws is unwarranted. They boil down to unimaginative, bad writing. You can have a bit of fun guessing how long it will be until someone gets randomly hit or falls, when the fart and vomit jokes will arrive, and where Friedberg and Seltzer will use up the one “fuck” allowed in a PG-13 movie. The basic approach is to take a scene from another movie and have everybody act silly. There are four main characters who are too fake to care about, one of whom is the same as Anna Faris’s Cindy in Scary Movie. Her shtick is to repeat everything said by the other female lead. Every so often the movie turns into a rap video featuring the sort of PG-13 smutty humor calculated to ferociously titillate eight-grade boys, just like the way Depp’s Pirates character is called “Jack Swallows.” Tee hee.
= *1/2 Don’t see this. Tell your friends not to see this. These people must be stopped.

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