BEFORE: OK, I think I've got a handle on the direction I want to go for, ideally, for the rest of 2019. I may not have anything lined up for Memorial Day or even Father's Day now, but I think I can get something to line up on July 4. And after filling in/extending my May and June chain as best as I can, I've now counted the days remaining, there's just a 72-day gap between "Spider-Man: Far From Home" and the start of October, and if I can plug that gap, that will just leave a 12 film shortfall at the beginning of November, so 12 steps to get from the end of October to "Star Wars: Episode 9" and/or a Christmas movie. Of course, the numbers are a little flexible, if I find a path from "Spider-Man" to "Toy Story 4", for example, that takes only 60 films, I can just add 12 more films to November or December, and that could easily work out, as long as this year's total adds up to 300 films and presents an unbroken chain, I'm good with it.
This looks like a bit of a strange film, it's a comedy anthology, a lot of short pieces stitched together, something that used to be an acceptable format back in the old days of "Kentucky Fried Movie" and "Amazon Women on the Moon", I guess somebody wanted to resurrect that type of thing. And I've had several movies this year with similarly big casts, like "Avengers: Endgame", "Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald" and "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse", films that make me feel like I can go in any of a dozen directions, but in some ways that's a double-edge sword. It gives me more possibilities, but it makes it more difficult to choose between all of my options. So tonight I'm really wasting a huge cast, I'm only using this film to link between two films with Hugh Jackman, who carries over from "Missing Link". But this does help extend my chain so I'll hit the July 4 benchmark.
I'm going to get back to the documentaries in just over a month - again, it's too bad that "Quincy", "I Am Big Bird" and "Being Elmo" could have connected to my other documentaries, but since the IMDB listings for all of those films were incomplete, I had no way of knowing that.
THE PLOT: A series of interconnected short films follows a washed-up producer as he pitches insane storylines featuring some of the biggest stars in Hollywood.
AFTER: In so many ways, I wish this had been a better movie - or at least a funnier one. I already felt like I was wasting it by not saving it to get me out of some future linking jam, but now I wish that I had saved it, or perhaps avoided it altogether. There's a reason why nobody makes these type of comedy anthology films any more, because they're so scattershot and the humor is so random that the whole film just tends to end up as completely incoherent. What most of the segments have in common, though, is really aiming low, like for the lowest comedy common denominator. So there are gags about balls, about piss, poop, and a teen girl getting her period for the first time, a teen making out with his mom, then his dad, and so on. If you find this sort of thing funny, more power to you, I guess, I just find it really very commonplace, like really bottom-of-the-barrel comedy.
Framing is all is a writer or producer, pitching ideas to a studio executive, and I guess the gag here is that all of his ideas are bad, which is a very lame way of admitting that all of the ideas in THIS movie are bad, as if the creators and the audience are all in on the joke - "But they're SUPPOSED to be bad ideas, that's the point of the story!" Umm, no, I'm guessing that's just a smokescreen. Somebody was trying to polish up a turd here, and came up with a framing device that set out to excuse all the bad comedy that needed to be connected somehow. One of the film's fourteen (yes) directors is Peter Farrelly, who used to do gross-out comedy in films like "Kingpin" and "There's Something About Mary", but now directs Oscar-winning films somehow, and at least two other directors have been accused of sexual harassment, and it's not hard to see why, if their segments showcase their attitudes toward women and sex.
Wikipedia is telling me that this film took over a decade to make, because studios kept rejecting it (gee, I wonder why...) and then shooting took a couple of years, probably because the producers had to stalk these actors for a long time to get enough material on their personal lives to blackmail them into participating. Richard Gere reportedly tried very hard to get out of his commitment to this film, but couldn't manage to do that - I wonder how many actors came on board for this "comedy" before reading the script, and then regretted that decision? Always get all the details before you sign something, kids...
I would put two segments into the "almost funny" category, and one of those would be the story about the teen being home-schooled, but his parents still want him to have the full public high-school experience, so they pretend to be a tough gym teacher, a bully who knocks his books out of his hands, a bully who makes fun of him in the shower, and so on. This is also the segment where his Mom gives him his first awkward high-school kiss and then his dad pretends to be a fellow male student who awkwardly admits to a gay attraction to him. Still, the whole premise doesn't really work, because if parents wanted their kid to have the public high-school experience, they would just simply send him to public school. The entire reason to home-school a teen is to avoid the horrors of high-school, not bring them home. This would be a bit like travelling by train to avoid the danger of an airplane crash, but then still setting yourself on fire while on the train.
The other one was the 'Superhero Speed-dating" segment, which featured Robin (of Batman and Robin) getting matched up with first Lois Lane and then Supergirl - this is an idea that has quite a bit of promise, but they managed to ruin it with Lois Lane talking about graphic sex stuff with her ex-boyfriend Superman, and then Batman hiding under the table and looking up Supergirl's skirt. Yeah, way to take the high road, guys. Then Wonder Woman shows up and accuses Batman of getting her pregnant and not going with her to get an abortion. And then it gets even worse from there. There are probably a dozen other ways this idea could have played out that would have been funnier.
Then later there's a segment that riffs on "Truth or Dare", where a couple on a blind date plays this game, and dares each other to do more and more dangerous and outrageous things, like getting a tattoo or having cosmetic surgery, pretending to be a stripper at a bachelorette party, etc. The gags don't work because the whole game of "Truth or Dare" doesn't really work - unlike the game "Tag", which has specific rules and got turned into an OK comedy, this doesn't work here, because - well, how do you KNOW when someone playing the game is telling the truth? They could just be better at lying than you. And then if you took a dare and didn't like doing it, but couldn't turn it down, well then you probably wouldn't say "Dare" ever again when playing the game with that person. Really, this was just an excuse to get Halle Berry to wear a set of large fake naked breasts, so it's just some male director's juvenile fantasy projected on to the screen.
There are fake commercials strung between the segments, but most of those don't work either - one suggests that there are small kids who live inside vending machines, ATMs and copy machines, who somehow dispense the food items and cash and make the copies (although they don't say how) so the PSA is meant to inform people that they shouldn't yell at the machines or bang on them, because they'll injure or hurt the feelings of the small children that live inside? Yeah, this seems very ill-advised, and I can't even tell where the joke is coming from here. Like, who even thinks this way?
There's a spoof of an inspiring sports story, where a black basketball coach in 1959 is trying to inspire his all-black team to go out and beat a team of white players, and it also heads right into the gutter when the coach says that the team's probably going to win, because they're black, and also their penises are larger. Great, that's racist and sexist and also not funny. And then there's some corporate meeting about an iPod-like device that's shaped like a life-sized naked woman, and really, that's just an excuse to get some more nudity in the film, right? Again, this comes close to comedy because the clueless company CEO can't understand why teen boys are trying to have sex with the device, and getting injured in the process.
Reviews for this film ranged from "a masterpiece of tastelessness" to "the Citizen Kane of awful". OK, so this film doesn't even deserve to serve as an important link in my chain. I'm going to try to forget it and just move on.
Also starring Dennis Quaid (last seen in "Smart People"), Greg Kinnear (last seen in "You've Got Mail"), Kate Winslet (last seen in "Wonder Wheel"), Liev Schreiber (last heard in "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse"), Naomi Watts (last seen in "Eastern Promises"), Chris Pratt (last seen in "Avengers: Endgame"), Anna Faris (last seen in "I Give It a Year"), J.B. Smoove (last seen in "The Polka King"), Emma Stone (last seen in "Ghosts of Girlfriends Past"), Kieran Culkin (last seen in "Music of the Heart"), Richard Gere (last seen in "Nights in Rodanthe"), Kate Bosworth (last seen in "Wonderland"), Jack McBrayer (last seen in "They Came Together"), Aasif Mandvi (last seen in "Premium Rush"), Common (last seen in "Suicide Squad"), Seth McFarlane (last heard in "Sing"), Jason Sudeikis (last seen in "Drinking Buddies"), Justin Long (last seen in "Yoga Hosers"), Uma Thurman (last seen in "Burnt"), Bobby Cannavale (last seen in "Adult Beginners"), Kristen Bell (last seen in "The Disaster Artist"), John Hodgman (last seen in "Pitch Perfect 2"), Leslie Bibb (last seen in "Tag"), Christopher Mintz-Plasse (last heard in "Trolls"), Chloe Grace Moretz (last seen in "Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising"), Patrick Warburton (last heard in "Mr. Peabody & Sherman"), Matt Walsh (last seen in "A Futile and Stupid Gesture"), Gerard Butler (last seen in "P.S. I Love You"), Johnny Knoxville (last seen in "Bad Grandpa"), Seann William Scott (last seen in "Super Troopers 2"), Will Sasso (ditto), Halle Berry (last seen in "Kingsman: The Golden Circle"), Stephen Merchant (last heard in "Sherlock Gnomes"), Terrence Howard (last seen in "On the Road"), Elizabeth Banks (last seen in "Swept Away"), Josh Duhamel, Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi, Katrina Bowden (last seen in "Tucker and Dale vs. Evil"), Charlie Saxton, Odessa Rae, Roy Jenkins, Rocky Russo, Anna Madigan, Julie Claire, Katie Finneran (last seen in "You've Got Mail"), Jeremy Allen White, Alex Cranmer, Julie Ann Emery, Jarrad Paul, Aaron LaPlante, Arthur French (2 Days in New York"), Marc Ambrose, Will Carlough, Jimmy Bennett (last seen in "Poseidon"), Esti Ginzburg, Ricki Noel Lander, Zen Gesner, Corey Brewer, Jared Dudley, Larry Sanders, Aaron Jennings, Jay Ellis, Emily Alyn Lind.
RATING: 2 out of 10 scarfed-down burritos
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