Jul
30
Stupid Movie
Filed Under Movies
My, oh my, how far the parody movie genre has fallen. Remember “Airplane!” or “The Naked Gun” or even “Hot Shots?” Those movies were like feature-length “MAD” magazine parodies. Played totally straight, said movies were send-ups of a given genre — the airport disaster film, the police procedural, etc. — and breathtakingly funny, because for all their absurdity, they never overreached. Each film had a reverence for the source material and worked within those conventions. On top of all that, they told stories.
“Airplane!” is about an ex-fighter pilot named Ted Striker (Robert Hays). Having been shot down in Vietnam, Striker suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and is terrified of getting back on a plane. But his stewardess girlfriend Elaine (played by Julie Hagerty) has just walked out on him. He follows her to the airport to convince her to stay with him. She refuses, so in his desperation, he buys a ticket for the flight she’s on, hoping that maybe he can still win her back if he persists. Once in the air, the flight crew and a number of the passengers become deathly ill from food poisoning. Striker’s the only one on board who has experience flying an aircraft and isn’t sick. So it falls on him to safely land the plane in Chicago with the help of his estranged girlfriend in the co-pilot’s chair.
And it’s a comedy!
“Airplane!” has a fairly melodramatic plot, huh? It’s supposed to. The movies “Airplane!” is based on have melodramatic plots. What makes the movie funny is that every scene that advances the plot does so in humorous way, by playing with audience expectations. We’ve seen movies like this hundreds of times before. “Airplane!” has fun with that. See, the film uses what’s called “intertextual knowledge,” our understanding of certain character types, plot contrivances and current events, for comedic effect. As an example, take Striker’s “drinking problem.” We’ve all scene movies with a character who has a drinking problem, right? But Striker’s drinking problem is different. Each time he tries to have a drink, he ends up throwing the beverage in his face.
It’s funnier when you see it.
What isn’t funny when you see it is any one of these new “Movie” films. You know what I’m talking about: “Scary Movie,” “Date Movie,” “Epic Movie,” “Superhero Movie,” and now “Disaster Movie.” These monstrosities clearly want to be like “Airplane!” but they have no effing idea how to pull it off. Or they don’t care. These movies simply dress up a bunch of no-name actors like characters in recent hit movies and shoehorn them into a series of loosely-connected scenes that are like scenes in other recent hit movies. Then someone hits his head on something! That’s your cue to laugh. Hmm, maybe I told the joke wrong.
No, the joke is on you if you watch this crap. The jerkstores who write and direct this drivel — Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer — aren’t telling stories, they’re not playing with audience expectations. These “Movie[s]” of theirs are plotless, pointless and more than a little plagiarized. They’re not only unfunny; they’re unoriginal. They have to blatantly steal from others.
Their latest effort, “Disaster Movie,” has a character that looks strikingly like Ellen Page in “Juno.” Here’s a news flash: “Juno” is a comedy. “Disaster Movie” is making fun…of a comedy. And these movies do this sort of thing every time. I can’t tell them apart really, but I know one had a guy who looked like Borat and another had a guy who looked like Napoleon Dynamite. How is this funny? These quasi-filmmakers are just telling someone else’s jokes. This is comedy for fans of Dane Cook.
I simply don’t understand modern day film audiences. They crave distraction, but not in any form that remotely resembles quality. The war cry of “I just wanna be entertained!” rings false with me when it comes to people want to see these movies. “Airplane!” will entertain you. It’ll tell you a story and make you laugh and stay with you long after you’ve seen it. You and your friends will quote it endlessly. It’s something you’ll watch over and over and find new things every time. Can anyone say that about one of these “Movie” films?
If so, that’s not funny, not funny at all.
-Brad Lohan
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