BEFORE: It's Will Ferrell week, more or less. Actually it's only four films, so that's not a week, but at least he'll see me out of May and into June. Will carries over from "Winter Passing", which was an odd film - and I think tonight's another odd one, at least it's one I've been avoiding for a very long time. I needed to fill up a DVD that had "Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping" on it, and it made sense to include another film starring people from SNL that was on the topic of stardom.
Speaking of superstars, my Summer Rock Concert chain is really coming together, I went through all the cast lists and found a way to link all of the films together, starting with films about the Beatles and ending with 2 documentaries about Rush. (Yeah, it would have been great to go alphabetical, like Abba to ZZ Top, but that's not the way I tend to do things.) Thankfully so many musicians from one film were also interviewed or made appearances in other films, so once I got things arranged, I only had to add a few more films as mortar between the bricks.
The problem then became, if I add THIS documentary about rock music, then I probably should add THAT one, since it's on a similar topic, and then where do I stop? What started as 13 or 14 films that I dubbed to DVD quickly turned into 33 once I added what's available on Netflix for free, then the bridging material films I can rent from Amazon or iTunes has brought the total up to 44 or 45. Do I really want to spend a month and a half on this topic? I mean, yes, if I want to cover everyone from the Stones to the Dead, from Bowie to Zappa, and from Amy Winehouse to Lady Gaga. But now I have to think, are there some films that I can or should cut? Do I need to watch that documentary about Lemmy if I'm not into Motorhead at all? Maybe there are 4 or 5 that I can cut, even if I have to sacrifice the linking.
Maybe I have to look at where I'll be in mid-August, because the last doc in the chain links back pretty easily to "Ant-Man and the Wasp", coming out this summer, and I think I see way to get to my back-to-school films from there. But if I can figure out how many slots I'll need for the rest of the year's business, that could be very helpful in motivating me to trim down the Summer Rockfest chain. Because I think I'd rather watch a lame comedy over a music documentary focused on an act I don't care about.
AFTER: Correction, I think I'd prefer to watch a documentary on any musician over a lame comedy - especially one centered on an SNL character that I never cared about in the first place. See also: "A Night at the Roxbury", "MacGruber" or "It's Pat". I just don't think there's enough here to hang your hat on, like what was up with those head-bobbing club characters played by Will Ferrell and Chris Kattan. So, they bob their heads to club music - can you really make an entire feature film about that? Well, they did and it sucked.
Same problem here, Mary Katherine Gallagher has her sights set on being a star, without any knowledge of how to get there - or any talent, either. Is that enough for a film? I don't think so. All the physical comedy that appeared in the SNL skits is here, from M.K. dancing very weirdly to M.K. knocking over chairs, to M.K. sticking her fingers in her own armpits and smelling them (and then talking about that, which honestly is the worst part.).
Whatever they were going for here, whether it was a spoof of high-school comedies, or just something weird and quirky, it just didn't land. And then "Napoleon Dynamite" came along five years later and succeeded where this one failed, like casting 30-year old actors as high-school kids, and pretending like nobody's going to notice. (Jon Heder was 27, and that blond bully guy in "Napoleon Dynamite" had to be at least 30, if not 35. That's always bothered me, like was he held back 12 or 13 times?) Molly Shannon was 35 when this film came out, and Will Ferrell was 32 - it's just weird.
At least when they put a character in an "SNL" skit, you know it's only going to last for four minutes, tops. Asking me to watch 80 minutes of Mary Katherine Gallagher is just too much. The best moments here belong to Will Ferrell, but really only the ones where he's playing Jesus in her imagined visions. I would watch an entire movie of Ferrell as Jesus, if someone ever wanted to make something similar to "Life of Brian", one that really portrayed the New Testament as the bunch of silly stories that it is. I remember Dudley Moore tried that with "Wholly Moses!" and it didn't really work that well, but I think Ferrell could pull it off.
I've got a whole list of NITPICK POINTS, starting with the fact that you can't change the speed on a record player just by bumping into it (which happens not once but TWICE in this story) and even if you could do that, it wouldn't affect the people dancing to that music in that way, and what happened to Mary Katherine's parents in the flashback story is twice as impossible. Even the way that M.K. jumps into bed is physically impossible - she couldn't land that way on the mattress after rolling forward from the kneeling position. Also, nobody I know would lick a tree like that and end up enjoying it - I realize this is played for comedy, but even comedy has to make some sense.
Beyond that, nothing about this comedy struck me as remotely funny, except for Ferrell as Jesus, as stated above.
Also starring Molly Shannon (last heard in "Hotel Transylvania 2"), Harland Williams (last seen in "My Life in Ruins"), Elaine Hendrix (last seen in "Romy and Michele's High School Reunion"), Mark McKinney (last seen in "The Out-of-Towners"), Glynis Johns (last seen in "Around the World in 80 Days"), Jason Blicker, Gerry Bamman (last seen in "The Long Kiss Goodnight"), Emmy Laybourne (last seen in "Nancy Drew"), Jennifer Irwin, Rob Stefaniuk, Natalie Radford, Karyn Dwyer, Tom Green (last seen in "Stealing Harvard"), Chuck Campbell, Donna Hanover (last seen in "Someone Like You..."), Aidan Kelly, Jane Moffat, Tracy Wright, Robert Clark.
RATING: 3 out of 10 Volkswagen Beetles
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