BEFORE: This wasn't part of the plan I just drew up a week ago - but it's been kicking around my list for quite some time, and I want to watch it, because I'm very curious about it. A quick spin through the cast list for tomorrow's movie showed me an interesting possibility, that I could work this one in here. Since this film probably spent a year or more on my DVR, and then a few more months on a DVD after I finally found something that would go with it on a disc, I'm anxious to get to it. This kind of messes up my July plan just a bit, because adding it changes which movie is going to be Big Movie 3,900 - but I found a way to move one film from July to September, just before the horror chain, since it's got Fred Willard in it. And wouldn't you know, the two movies on either side of THAT movie share an actor, so the chain's just going to close up around it. So Movie #3,900 stays the same, and I'm still on track to finish the year the way I want, with two Christmas movies at the end. OK, now NO MORE changes...umm, unless I want to add that "Last Blockbuster" documentary, but if I do, I can find something to drop from the November or December chain.
Two character actors carry over from "Cinema Verite" - Don McManus and Richard Fancy. I'll get back to Tim Robbins in a couple days - his sister is in today's film, though.
THE PLOT: Satirical interpretations of world events and curious human behavior are reflected in the news stories reported by a fictitious TV anchorman.
AFTER: I have great respect for the Onion, I miss the days when it wasn't just online, when you could go to the corner in NYC and get a fresh paper copy out of a bin on the corner. After the New York Press folded, it was the best source around here for movie listings as well as sardonic humor. Now I just have to remember to check their Twitter feed once a week and re-tweet all the best headlines - who even has time to follow the links and read the whole articles? The headlines are the best part, anyway.
Honestly, if this film had been 86 minutes of JUST the fake anchorman reading Onion news headlines, followed by some clips of the fake reporters in the field, I would have been FINE with that. But, I guess that's what we have "The Daily Show" for, and they haven't made a movie out of that show - yet. Damn, I probably just gave somebody the idea. But there's a back-plot here, with the anchorman being forced by his producers to work in promos for the new Steven Seagal film, "Cockpuncher", probably because the news channel is supposedly owned by the same giant media corporation (Global Tetrahedron) that produced that action film, and cross-promotion is king, after all. (Come on, do you really think that Disney PAYS for ads on ABC and ESPN to promote their films and theme parks? Of course not, they just move around some figures on paper and before you know it, your kids want to go see "Raya and the Last Something or Other" while you're watching SportsCenter.)
Then there are skits, or things resembling skits, that take place between the news stories, and those feel horribly out of place. I came here for Onion headlines, and essentially I was tricked into re-watching "Movie 43", or something close to it. Not cool. What's worse is that a lot of those jokes don't land, like the one about white teens acting black or men getting their penises stuck in mailboxes and library book slots. Umm, do the writers here even understand male erections and masturbation? Because it sure seems like they don't. There's also a fake film review segment where experts criticize the very film that they're appearing in, and this leads to a black man protesting the portrayal of the black characters in the film so far, which leads to a segment where a black man merely asks for directions to the library, so he can go get a book. Umm, OK, topical perhaps, but somebody forgot to make that segment funny.
The Steven Seagal action movie parody references run through the whole film, and I'm thinking that 2008 was probably the last year a comedy film could get away with that. Same goes for the songs and videos from "Melissa Cherry", a clear parody of Britney Spears, who claims that her songs "Down on My Knees", "Take Me From Behind" and "Shoot Your Love All Over Me" aren't meant to be sexual, not at all - and then we see the videos and realize that, come on, of course they are. But at that point, in 2008, Spears had already been a cultural punchline for close to a decade, so again it feels like this film came really late to that party. Also, 2008 was apparently a great year for making fun of Arab terrorists - that seems about right, but now, after the pandemic, aren't we all past that? But hey, Britney Spears is back in the news, and now that the U.S. is leaving Iraq and Afghanistan, maybe jokes about Muslim terrorists will be back in vogue again.
The good news, if you can call it that, is that for every joke that doesn't land, at least there are two or three others that might. The Bates computer 5000 that gets replaced by the Bates 6000 faster than you can upgrade from your Bates 4000 is a good gag, only it's clearly aimed at Bill Gates (the CEO of the fictitious company is Gil Bates...) only Gates's company, Microsoft, doesn't make computers, it only makes software. Right? Or I think they do now, but they didn't back in 2008. Similarly, the jokes about a teen demolishing his friends during a Dungeons & Dragons-style game goes nowhere, same goes for the fake ad for the gay cruise line and the press conference held by the old people with Alzheimer's. The skit about people playing a board game similar to "Clue", only the crime involved is rape, not murder, seems like it should be funny, only it just ends up being really icky. A joke shouldn't make me feel like I need a shower after it. Skits about landmines aren't funny either, it turns out.
But hey, they say that you miss 100% of the shots you don't take - even if you only hit 40 or 50% of the shots that you DO take, it's still worth swinging, I guess. (Ah, the Trivia section on the IMDB tells me that this whole movie was filmed in 2003 and shelved for five years before release, that perhaps explains why so many of the jokes were stale. Britney Spears, Arab terrorists, Steven Seagal, that does feel a lot more turn-of-the-millennium. And it explains how Rodney Dangerfield made a cameo four years after he died. He deserved a lot better than THIS film for his last appearance.)
Also starring Len Cariou (last seen in "The Greatest Game Ever Played"), Larissa Laskin (last seen in "The Scarlet Letter"), Scott Klace (last seen in "The Pursuit of Happyness"), Steven Seagal, Erik Stolhanske (last seen in "Super Troopers 2"), Orlando Seale (last seen in "The Old Guard"), Sarah McElligott, Brendan Fletcher (last seen in "The Revenant"), Murphy Dunne (last seen in "The Main Event"), Alex Solowitz (last seen in "Alpha Dog"), Paul Scheer (last seen in "Clear History"), Alonzo Bodden, Nick Chinlund (last seen in "The Kid"), Jim Rash (last seen in "Captain America: Civil War"), Jed Rees (last seen in "American Made"), Jim Gleason (ditto), Kirk Ward, Greg Pitts, Greg Cipes (last heard in "Teen Titans GO! to the Movies"), Evgeniy Lazarev (last seen in "Lord of War"), Adam Gregor, Ahmed Ahmed (last seen in "You Don't Mess with the Zohan"), Amir Talai (last seen in "The Circle"), Robert Hoffman, Jen Cohn, Chrissy Metz, Sal Lopez, Jay Montalvo, Kate Fuglei, Abigail Mavity, Reid Weaver, Brian Powell, Adele Robbins, Barbara Pilavin, Sandy Kenyon, Kwame Boateng, Randy Ogelsby (last seen in "We Were Soldiers"), Murray Gershenz, Paul "Mousie" Garner (last seen in "Cheech and Chong's Next Movie"), Helen Geller, Savannah Haske, Griffin M. Creech, Stefan Sacks, Rebecca Lowman, Amy Davies, Ben Braat, Bashar Rahal, Russell Steinberg (last seen in "Adventureland"), Todd Bosley, Michael Brainard, Dane Farwell, Mary Boucher, Chris Karwowski, Michael Harte, Charles Howerton, James Kayten, Sean Conroy, Christopher Boyer, S.E. Perry, Michael Harney (last seen in "Widows"), Gill Gayle, Robert Shampain, Tom Wright (last seen in "Murder at 1600"), Troy L. Collins, Marc Antonio Pritchett, Jerry Giles, John Viener, Mike Loew, David Chisum, Martin Morales, Micah Sauers, Clint Culp, Dustin Seavey, Bill Dearth, James M. Connor (last heard in "Kong; Skull Island"), Michael Delaney (last seen in "Sleeping with Other People"), Angel Cassidy, Mia Crowe, Eric Siegel, Charley Bell, Daniel Benson, Adam Crosby, Terrence Flack, Mo McRae (last seen in "Thirteen"), Michelle Buffone, Jim Ortleib (last seen in "Flatliners" (1990)), Kenneth C. Rosier, Bo Barrett, Jackson Bolt, Chris Cashman, Said Faraj, Bill Frenzer, Glen Hambly, Susanna Harter, Paula Price, Helen Slayton-Hughes, Ken Takemoto,
with cameos from Meredith Baxter (last seen in "All the President's Men"), Michael Bolton (also last heard in "Teen Titans GO! to the Movies"), Rodney Dangerfield (last seen in "Natural Born Killers"), Kevin Federline, Daniel Dae Kim (last seen in "Always Be my Maybe"), Joel McHale (last seen in "What's Your Number?"), Gedde Watanabe (last seen in "The Last Word")
RATING: 4 out of 10 obscure racial stereotypes
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