BEFORE: I feel a wee bit guilty referring to this as a "Ewan McGregor film", because it's not - but he does have a cameo as a cowboy at a fair, so I feel justified. This is one of those films with such a giant cast that I probably could have linked to it from just about anything - so it seems a little wasteful to use a quick cameo to justify its inclusion here, even though it gets me to the start of a Charlize Theron chain.
But there were tons of promos for this at the New York Comic-Con in October 2013, (or were they promoting the DVD release in October 2014? After a while it's tough to remember...) so in my mind there's a bit of a link to Comic-Con - plus tomorrow morning I'm headed out West myself. There won't be gunslingers or Indians out there, but San Diego can still be a dangerous place. I just did a podcast describing some of my best (and worst) Comic-Con experiences, which you can listen to here:
http://wrongreel.com/podcast/wr062-san-diego-comic-con-survival-guide-predictions/
I mean, when you think about it, there could be problems with the plane flying out there. I have to take a taxi, so traffic accidents are a concern, plus the Convention Center is on the far side of a highway, a trolley line AND a freight train track. While accidents there are not commonplace, they have occurred. Not to mention food poisoning, terrorist attack, over-exhaustion, dehydration, and if the weather's absolutely perfect, and everything goes my way, there's the chance that I'll find myself happy for a few minutes, and not know what to do with that feeling.
I kid, of course, but my point is that traveling often sucks, and even if it doesn't, I have to be on my toes. The fact that I've made this trip 12 or 13 times before is no reason to be lulled into a false sense of security.
THE PLOT: As a cowardly farmer begins to fall for the mysterious new woman in town, he must put his new-found courage to the test when her husband, a notorious gun-slinger, announces his arrival.
AFTER: If you watched the commercials or the trailer for this film before it was released, you might come to the conclusion that it's a one-joke film. The ads and trailer only featured people dying in quick and gruesome ways, and MacFarlane's character talking about other ways people could bite it back in the typical American Old West town.
What's really strange is that I set this chain up merely because there were three films that featured Ewan McGregor. But "Moulin Rouge!", "Down With Love" and tonight's film - what do they all have in common? Anachronism. In "Moulin Rouge!" we had people in 1899 who somehow knew songs that were written 60, 70 or 80 years later, and in "Down With Love" we had people in 1962 who were somehow keenly aware what the future of sexual politics in the workplace would be. And tonight we've got a sheep farmer in 1882 who somehow knows that life's going to be much better in the future, which means that right then and there, it pretty much sucks.
Another thing that they have in common is the fact that they're all sort of cobbled-together pieces of other plots, it's just that today's film referenced bits of other Westerns - barfights, gunfights, etc. - in the name of comedy.
I'll admit that this is not really a one-joke film. There are other jokes, besides watching people die - but unfortunately they're pee jokes, poop jokes and references to sex acts, so they really were stressing low comedy over high ideals.
Once again, there's a man in love with a prostitute - that's weird, this topic has popped up for the third time in recent memory. But here it's taken to a vulgar extreme in the name of comedy - unlike in "Moulin Rouge!" where they wrung every little bit of drama out of that situation, and "Irma La Douce", which sort of handled the situation with kid gloves and turned it into a dress-up bedroom farce. Here the hooker in question has loud, graphic (off-camera) sex with a variety of men, while her beloved boyfriend waits downstairs holding a bouquet, waiting for his platonic date with her. The irony is that he can't have sex with her, because she's "saving herself" for marriage.
It's fun for a few laughs here, but it brings up an odd point based on discrepancies in a relationship. Every joke has some basis in real situations, after all. Any time one part of a couple is more sexually active than the other, an imbalance is created - and it's a very real situation for some people, like those who work in the adult entertainment industry, some of whom go home to spouses and try to keep their two worlds separate. They find a way to deal with this particular conflict between their home life and their jobs, and their partners either find a way to deal with their spouses' job, or else they separate, or perhaps go a little berserk in the process.
It's perhaps a little personal for me because of my first marriage (see my review of "Chasing Amy" for all the details there...) but the crux of the situation was that she wanted to broaden her horizons, so to speak, take a walk on the wild side, and I preferred that she not do so. She expressed a desire, and I made a choice to not be OK with that. But my choice had ramifications, because once that desire is expressed, and not acted on, then I became the barrier standing in her way of being who she wanted to be. (She had friends in Ohio who were living a more bohemian "swinging" lifestyle, and my guess is that hearing about that made her long for new experiences.) Perhaps the relationship was doomed from this point on, or perhaps if I could have wrapped my head around a different definition of marriage, something could have been worked out - we'll never know.
I watched part of a documentary on Billie Jean King the other day, and I never knew she was married before coming out - and she was having an affair with a woman, her secretary/hairdresser/traveling companion, while remaining married. Now, this was back in the early 1970's and it was a different time, but I saw obvious similarities to my first marriage (1991-1996), and the way her husband accepted her affairs seemed a little like my "road not taken", but they still divorced anyway in 1987. So I don't think there are any easy answers when there's a discrepancy in sexual activity between two people - there seem to be just two main paths, acceptance/ignorance or the termination of the relationship.
Back to the film - we also find out why no one ever smiled in old-time photos, how hard it was to train for a gunfight, and why a proper man needed a proper mustache. At least there weren't as many cutaways as you might find in the average episode of "Family Guy", but unfortunately that just ended up making more room for potty humor.
Also starring Seth MacFarlane (last heard in "Ted"), Charlize Theron (last seen in "Head in the Clouds"), Liam Neeson (last seen in "Taken 2"), Giovanni Ribisi (last seen in "Gone in 60 Seconds"), Sarah Silverman (last heard in "Wreck-It Ralph"), Amanda Seyfried (last seen in "The Big Wedding"), Neil Patrick Harris (last seen in "A Very Harold & Kumar 3-D Christmas"), Wes Studi (last seen in "The New World"), Evan Jones (last seen in "Jarhead"), John Aylward (also carrying over from "Down With Love"), with cameos from Rex Linn (last seen in "The Odd Couple II"), Alex Borstein, Matt Clark (last seen in "42"), Jamie Foxx (last seen in "Django Unchained"), Ralph Garman, Christopher Lloyd (last seen in "Goin' South"), Gilbert Gottfried, John Michael Higgins (last seen in "Rapture-Palooza"), Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting, Bill Maher, Ryan Reynolds (last seen in "R.I.P.D."), Mae Whitman (last seen in "Hope Floats") and the voice of Patrick Stewart (last seen in "X-Men: Days of Future Past").
RATING: 4 out of 10 bottles of snake oil
No comments:
Post a Comment