BEFORE: OK, now the end of Movie Year 10 is really coming up very fast. Just four film slots left after tonight. And already I've got a list of films that I meant to get to this fall that I couldn't squeeze in, like "Venom" and "Ralph Breaks the Internet" and "Bohemian Rhapsody". Oh, and "Mary Poppins Returns" and "Won't You Be My Neighbor", I won't be able to get to those during 2018. But the Academy screeners are still coming in, so maybe in late December or early January I'll have a chance to go through them and start thinking of ways to work them into the chain, possibly starting in March.
For now, it's the penultimate Jack Black film, I'll watch the last one on the day after Thanksgiving - or I guess that will be "Jack Black Friday" for me.
THE PLOT: A pair of buddies conspire to save their best friend from marrying the wrong woman.
AFTER: I wasn't expecting something completely hysterically funny here, but I thought maybe this one would be good for a few laughs, but most of the comedy comes from such a weird place, it just all feels too obvious or something. And being obvious in humor is sometimes worse than not being funny at all. The director, Dennis Dugan, is best known for a string of Adam Sandler films, and of course all of that humor is either slapsticky or super obvious, but I guess Sandler is a little better at pulling off unsubtle humor, if that makes any sense.
It's like the new "Murphy Brown" episodes, which are all filled with very obvious humor, like some writing team somewhere is just not trying, they're just going for the easiest Trump jokes, the lowest hanging fruit, and there's no artistry or subtlety involved. Yeah, I'm watching the "Murphy Brown" revival, and one level it's great that the stories aren't pulling any punches and going straight at our Cheeto-colored Commander in Chief, but it all just feels too easy somehow. And then it pisses me off that it feels like nobody's doing a lick of research to see if this is really how a cable morning news show functions (umm, I'm guessing no) or how election night coverage works, or whether Murphy's son would get such a high-profile job on a competing network in the SAME time-slot as hers - the odds are astronomically against such an occurence, but they're not letting that get in the way of telling a story, because some writer mistakenly thinks that just making random stuff happen is an efficient way to tell a story.
And that's how I feel about "Saving Silverman", all the humor comes from putting the comedy cart before the horse, like some of the early Farrelly Brothers films - take your pick from "Kingpin", "Me, Myself and Irene" or "There's Something About Mary". They all seem to me like someone wrote a collection of random jokes and slapstick that end up driving the story, rather than writing the story as a framework and then adding the jokes on, like decorations on a Christmas tree. Do you know what I mean? Like Jim Carrey's character in "Me, Myself and Irene" had three black sons - why? Because somebody thought that would be a funny gag, and then the story ends up being based on the gag, rather than the other way around. The "hair-gel" gag in "There's Something About Mary" drove the story, it became a plot point instead of just a sight gag, and to me that's backwards.
So "Saving Silverman" ends up being one lame gag after another - from the very fake raccoon attacking exterminator Wayne, to Judith being somehow flipped out of a recliner and getting covered in salsa, to the guy in the bar doing terrible magic tricks to try to break the ice with women. These things just don't happen in real life, not to this degree at least, so it's a little sad that a writer couldn't pay enough attention to the real world to make up gags that at least have one foot in reality. And if you do that too many times in one film, you end up with a film that's so far removed from real that absolutely none of it can be taken seriously.
There are dozens more examples here - the high-school mascot costume, the logistics of being in a Neil Diamond cover band, the lack of security at a Neil Diamond concert, the way that a tranquilizer gun works - I've got minor issues with all of these things. The way that someone takes vows to become a nun - did anyone do any research into this, or did they just go with the "Hollywood" version of how people think this works? My money is obviously on the latter. The way that the Coach breaks people out of prison - come on, that wouldn't work in a million years.
I think the worst offense, however, comes from the depiction of a woman who happens to be a psychologist, and the dumber characters in the film (which is basically all of them) are helpless against her "mind tricks" that take advantage of things like Stockholm syndrome, and also she's extremely dominating in her relationship with Darren. I'm sure there are some good psychologists out there who are not always looking for ways to psych out their romantic partners, right? But here the only person with a college degree is not only lording it over everyone else at every opportunity, but she's also a complete bitch. Which I think ends up selling a lot of people short. And then later she gives therapy sessions to J.D. and either helps him determine that he's gay, or tricks him into thinking that he's gay. I think both of those trivialize the self-awareness that lead to coming out, and honestly I'm not sure which one is worse. Probably if she tricked him, right? But it's yet another sensitive subject that wasn't handled with any subtlety at all - he's either gay or he's not, there's no in-between here, and I think in reality there are more subtle levels to this topic.
The love triangle is also incredibly over-simplified - Darren's either in love with Judith, or he's not. Where in reality love and hate are not opposites, and there are many degrees in-between. He's either in love with Judith, or he's in love with Sandy. Well, why can't he be in love with both? In real life there could be times where a person could have feelings for two people at once. But again, why let the real world have any bearing at all in creating this non-sensical story?
Honestly, it feels like whoever wrote this was an alien from another planet who knew nothing at all about what it means to be in a relationship. Sometimes you see writing this bad in comic books, when you can tell that a writer is a nerd who's been single his whole life, and doesn't know how to write about an adult relationship. This usually then leads to killing off the wife character, or sending her on a long business trip so the hero character can be single again for a while, because that's what the writer knows about.
It's not all terrible, there were a couple funny moments, like when the coach was quoting inspirational messages like "If you can dream it, you can do it" only he was talking about things like kidnapping and murder. I can't hear the Disney song "When You Wish Upon a Star" without thinking that its lyrics are hopelessly out of date. The lyrics "no request is too extreme" and "anything your heart desires will come to you" are overly simplistic and misleading, because there are a LOT of people out there in the world with some very sick requests and desires, and they shouldn't be led to believe that those will come true.
(At least they didn't pull a wedding switcheroo at the end, where they change the bride or groom, and two people get married on the spot who didn't have a marriage license. Movies pull that crap all the time, and they forget that such a ceremony would not be legally valid.)
Also starring Jason Biggs (last seen in "Anything Else"), Steve Zahn (last heard in "War for the Planet of the Apes"), Amanda Peet (last seen in "Sleeping with Other People"), Amanda Detmer (last seen in "The Majestic"), R. Lee Ermey (last seen in "Body Snatchers"), Neil Diamond (last seen in "The Jazz Singer"), Kyle Gass (last seen in "Jacob's Ladder"), Lillian Carlson, Mark Aaron Wagner, Steven McMichael, Norman Armour, with cameos from Dennis Dugan (last seen in "You Don't Mess with the Zohan") and the voice of Richard Kline (last seen in "Don't Think Twice").
RATING: 3 out of 10 faked photos
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