The Magic Hour (***)

This Japanese gangster comedy takes the premise of Bowfinger and reverses it. That is, instead of a film star not realizing he’s in a movie, the lead is a hammy bit-part player who thinks he’s gotten the role of his life. In a way he has; he’s impersonating a real hit man, and the “movie” is the ruse concocted by the “director” to save his own skin. (He’s been sleeping with the boss’s girl and can save himself only by arranging for a meeting.)

I didn’t care for Bowfinger in large part because I never really believed the scheme would have actually worked. I can’t really say I found this strictly believable either, but the scenes were crafted carefully and cleverly enough that for large stretches I was able to suspend my disbelief. The star’s mugging for the camera—not to mention his insistence on wearing makeup—translates into some behavior that’s pretty odd from the viewpoint of the very real gangsters, and pretty funny from the viewpoint of the audience. Overlaid on this is a gentle parody of old Hollywood, in particular the last scene of Casablanca. Even the setting, a town called “Sucago,” is an homage; it intentionally looks like a studio backlot. The intentional anachronisms and well-timed comic bits make strict believability beside the point. This is silly fun.

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viewed 3/28/09 at Prince Music Theater (Philadelphia Film Festival) and reviewed 3/29 and 4/16/09

Surf's Up (***)

Another animated movie about penguins, but actually something different. The story is told as a faux documentary, ostensibly being filmed set to air on the fictive sports SPEN network, about an underdog (underbird?), voiced by Shia LaBeouf, who heads for a big surfing championship, hoping to follow in the shoes of his idol, the late Big Z. Along the way he meets a hot female penguin (Zooey Deschanel) and her laid-back dad (Jeff Bridges, perhaps channeling his Big Lebowski character). The result is more often clever than funny, but it avoids most of the cloying sentimentality of family fare. However, the format, with its quick cuts and style reminiscent of actual surf movies like Riding Giants, means that younger kids won’t really follow it, and even older kids might miss some of the parody aspects of the story, which actually makes few jokes that have anything to do with penguins, and more to do with the clichés spouted by athletes being interviewed.

(Reviewed 6/15/07)
IMDB link

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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Date Movie (*1/4)

This Scary Movie-like pastiche (one hesitates to say “parody”) of romantic comedy plots is indeed the perfect date movie, assuming the evening will end with a murder-suicide pact.

The tag line for this is “from two of the six writers of Scary Movie.” This must be the reason it’s about a third as good. (Scary Movie 4 will turn up this spring.) Date Movie, starring Alyson Hannigan, follows the Scary Movie formula of cobbling together plots from other movies. Oddly, the movies it purports to spoof--primarily My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Hitch and Meet the Fockers--were comedies in the first place. A parody really should be funnier than its source material. Instead, the movie merely re-creates goofy scenes and makes them slightly goofier (but not funnier). If the cat in Fockers used the toilet, the one here makes loud bathroom noises, too. In case anyone forgot Meg Ryan’s most famous scene (the fake orgasm one) in When Harry Met Sally…—and yes, that did come out in 1989—the male lead re-creates it here. Oh, and there’s one scene parodying…I don’t know what (recent news stories, perhaps?), where he and Hannigan simply beat a homeless man. The first ten minutes are a very long fat joke. This was all in the first half; the second half was much less funny, the theater oh-so-quiet. In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll say that I chuckled in three places. One was when the lovelorn heroine takes a “Lonely Woman Dinner” out of the fridge. That’s about as good as it gets. Somewhere people are doing without running water. Somewhere schools can’t afford textbooks. It’s good to know there was still $20 million in the world to make this.

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