BEFORE: I got this one to fill up a DVD that had "Dirty Grandpa" on it, the two just seemed to go together - now, normally I don't watch the "Jackass" movies, but now that I put this one in the collection, I have to watch it. The saving grace here is that it gets me one step closer to the end of the year (I still can't believe a new "Star Wars" film is just 78 movies away...) but before that, I've got to plan and work New York Comic-Con and then go on vacation. But before THAT, I've got to finish the August and September movies - and the back-to-school films start tomorrow, believe it or not.
Catherine Keener carries over from "Into the Wild", and she'll be here tomorrow as well.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Dirty Grandpa" (Movie #2,529)
THE PLOT: 86-year-old Irving Zysman takes a trip from Nebraska to North Carolina to deliver his grandson, Billy, back to his real father.
AFTER: Hoh, boy, where do I start with this one? Remember all those hidden-camera prank shows that were popular after one of those writers' strikes in the year 2000? (Sorry, I guess it was an actors' strike...) Remember "Jackass" and "Punk'd"? They had their day, that's for sure. But then I guess it got to a point where head Jackass Johnny Knoxville had to become an actor for real, because when he walked into a public place, people started looking for hidden cameras, or ducking for cover because they figured he was going to put too much detergent in the washer or spray ketchup all over the restaurant. So somebody got the crazy idea to dress him up like a senior citizen and make everyone think he was taking care of his grandson, and now he could hit on women at will, or crash his car into things, and everyone would just write him off as senile.
So they made this hidden camera movie, where the old man and kid disrupt a funeral, a wedding reception, cause a scene in a restaurant AND a biker bar, and that's just for starters. The kid (who's obviously been fed some lines, or told what to do) mistakes a woman working in a store for a stripper. The old man dances with male strippers at a bachelor party, and so on. All to get the reactions from the unsuspecting public on camera. Problem is, almost all of it isn't funny, or if it is, it comes at the expense of older people. Ha ha, old people can't drive well. Ha ha, old men are horny because they haven't gotten laid in a while. Ha ha, old people fall down and their bones are brittle. Ha ha, old man got his wee-wee stuck in a vending machine. (Umm, that last one just doesn't happen. Not at all.)
Maybe it's because I'm staring down another birthday right now, which will be the last one in my 40's, but humor at the expense of any group, whether based on color, gender, religion or age, just doesn't land. It shouldn't even be allowed to take off, let alone land. Find another way. And just because you HAVE the make-up technology (borrowed from "Undercover Boss", probably) doesn't mean you should use it in this way.
The other problem is, the hidden-camera pranks are worked into the narrative of this film, as if they're part of the story. As if that's NOT Johnny Knoxville in old-person make-up, and we're just supposed to take this as a story about a grandfather and grandson on a road trip, causing havoc. That's not just ill-advised, it's stupid and dangerous. Passing off set-up pranks as a form of "reality" is one thing, but doing it for the sake of a story, well, now they're dragging fiction down into the mud-hole where we usually find Reality TV. Look, I know that the show "Storage Wars" would be boring as dirt if it were JUST about people bidding on abandoned lockers, so they have to add a little bit about the bidders and their personal lives, just to make it interesting. But there's no "story" that justifies making a funeral home full of people think that the body just fell out of the coffin, or asking furniture movers to help load a dead body into a trunk. This is real bottom-of-the-barrel type of stuff.
The question then becomes, how "set up" are these pranks? Do the people not wonder why there are THREE cameras following this old guy around, even to his doctor's office? Why doesn't anyone call the police when he exposes himself, or asks someone to help him move his dead wife's body? They must have let everyone in the scene know immediately afterwards that they were filming a movie, right? I mean, they had to get personal releases from everyone in the scene, and the fact that some faces were blurred out means that they weren't always successful. And did they use a person who was playing dead, or a lifelike mannequin - and aren't those both really bad choices?
Maybe they were playing off that appalling ABC show "What Would YOU Do?" (which I think resulted from another writers' strike, the one in 2008) where normal people are made to witness a person in public cutting in line, or abusing a child, or drinking too much at a bar and then heading off to drive home - and then they interview the people to learn WHY they interfered in the situation when, let's face it, we already know the answer, either they cared enough to act, or they didn't. But that still doesn't justify the humor here. Shock comedy (as seen in "The Hangover" and "Vacation") has just come way too far - and we know that in a fiction film, what we're seeing happen probably isn't really happening, and the people in these "reality" scenes just don't know that.
And where the hell was Catherine Keener? Ah, Wikipedia tells me that she played the dead grandmother, or she would have if those scenes hadn't been cut. They filmed flashbacks of her interacting with old Irving, but those scenes just didn't fit with the tone of the film - apparently cutting to a flashback would have disrupted the "reality" of these scenes, but somehow cutting between different three angles inside Irving's car doesn't, which is ridiculous. A real old man with a real grandson wouldn't even have ONE camera inside his car, but we're all so used to the language of film editing that we just take the actors being filmed for granted and don't even think about what that means. But Keener was also used as the model for the dead grandma mannequin, they took a molding of her to make it look lifelike.
(As a point of order, I should probably disqualify this movie, but since Catherine Keener is still listed as being in this film, according to the IMDB she is in this, so I'm going to proceed. She appears more in "Bad Grandpa .5", apparently, where they used the flashback scenes, but I feel no need to watch that.)
The only reason I'm not giving this film a "1" is that I did laugh during the scene where Irving dresses Billy up as a little girl and enters him a beauty pageant for little girls - and his Shirley Temple-like dance routine turns into a full-on stripper pole dance to the song "Cherry Pie", and the audience is completely shocked. From everything I've seen of these child beauty pagents (on "Toddlers & Tiaras", among other shows) these people, more than anyone else, needed to be taken down a peg. But when confronted with something that compares these pageants to a striptease, they can't handle it, which means they're a bunch of damn hypocrites. We all know most of those girls are going to end up working a pole, anyway, right? I mean, is Honey Boo Boo going to hold down a real job someday?
NITPICK POINTS: There are so many tonight, it just makes sense to combine them all into one. Strangers don't attend people's funerals - just doesn't happen. Social services doesn't let women go to jail without making sure someone takes care of their kid. Similarly, if a counselor saw a father doing drugs on a Skype, she probably would NOT let the kid be delivered to him. And if a body needed to be moved to another state for burial, a funeral home would probably have a way to send it there, they would NOT release a body back to the family. And it's impossible for someone to spray fecal matter on a wall without removing their pants - why do I even have to point this last one out?
In exchange for making this disaster of a film, I decree that to right the karmic balance, when Johnny Knoxville becomes as old as the character he portrays here, he will be forced to walk around and NOT be recognized, and no one alive at that point in the future will still find any of his pranks funny, because humanity will have evolved past crude humor. That seems only fair.
Also starring Johnny Knoxville (last seen in "Fun Size"), Jackson Nicoll (ditto), Greg Harris (last seen in "Mr. Woodcock"), Georgina Cates, Grasie Mercedes, Jill Killington.
RATING: 2 out of 10 cans of beer
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