Scribe & Green on the BIG screen

There are far too many people out there writing “reviews of movie-films & articles about them with absolutely no clue what the hell they’re talking about." Here are 2 more of them! (Well, one of us knows what the h___ we're talking about, but we'll leave it up to you to decide who that is...) Ultimately, can two people as opposite as Scribe and Green agree on anything?? That's where the fun begins. Won't you join us? (Every now and then we'll add a guest review, just for kicks.)

Thursday, November 15, 2007

Click

While Green is away stuffin' the love muffin- or whatever it is Biblical literalists do in the name of love- I thought I would post my own review to prove this blog still exists and is viable and maintains its undeniable sex appeal a la moi.

Following this review will cum a guest review from the undeniable lccb, my future conquest and present pants tightener, as we do "he said, she said" reviews of two films we dared each other to suffer through. For now, however, allow me to rip the following piece of shit into tiny flecks of brown flakes:

Readers of my Organized Chaos blog might have read my little treatise on the sad state of comedy. If not, shame on you and here is the link for you worthless putzes:
http://scribecn.blogspot.com/2007/11/sad-unfunny-state-of-comedy-id-like-to.html

That post was inspired by a conversation with my supervisor, with whom I often loan and borrow DVD's. I mentioned my growing dislike of Adam Sandler and she defended him by saying she did not think he was a punk-ass little sellout whore that only makes yuppie garbage with sit-com plots. Obviously you can tell what I said to her first. So, she gave me a copy of Click, his recent magical remote control comedy about a guy with...a...magical...remote...con...well, you get the idea!

This film reaffirmed two things I already knew about life: 1. There is no God in a world that unjustly pays hacks to write garbage that gets turned into big budget films, and 2. Adam Sandler was never as funny as he seemed on Saturday Night Live.

Warbling his way through yet another annoying character choice, Sandler stars as Michael Newman, a not-so-brilliant architect who constantly places unimportant things like food and heat above his kids' swimming matches and fucking recitals. Naturally, this makes him a good guy with a bad set of flaws and, in the convenient magical realism of the lazy and hackneyed "script" by my new sworn enemies Steven Koren and Mark O'Keefe, it places him on a collision course with destiny. In this case, destiny in the form of a universal remote control that gives Newman the ability to control how he views his life.

Thus we get worthless sight gag after unfunny punchline of Newman fast-forwarding through sex, his dog's procrastination during its shitting ritual and pausing his boss so he can bitch slap him. In the midst of all this wackiness, we get to watch the always sexy Kate Beckinsale parade around in shorts (the only bright spot in this wretched mess) and Christopher Walken sleep-walk through perhaps his first unfunny performance in memory.

And let us not forget the Hoff! How can you cast David Hasselhoff as a scumbag executive and never give him anything funny to do or say? Don't answer that, it was a trick question. The Hoff is only funny when he doesn't mean to be. He has no comic timing or on-screen presence for comedy. Was Alec Baldwin busy???

The writer in me is truly disgusted with this kind of comedy retread. A Jewish remake of It's a Wonderful Life with technology that makes no sense thrown in for no apparent reason. Walken's true identity is laughable and obvious from the beginning. Sandler tries way too hard to make us laugh in scenes that aren't meant to be funny and not hard enough in scenes that are. For example, his dancing scene when he thinks he's on a reality show is painful to watch because it doesn't match the mood of the moment, yet none of the scenes between he and Walken have a single spark of humor in them. He's obviously lost whatever comic ability he had.

Sandler has become a decent actor, however. This happens to most comedians. They spend so much time making movies, they forget how to be funny and wind up improving their acting skills. If he has a future in movies, it is probably as a dramatic actor like Bill Murray or Robin Williams, two guys who also haven't been funny in years.

The final third of Click takes the film from sit-com territory firmly into movie-of-the-week land. Here is where Sandler shows his acting chops but, again, the abrupt mood shift is almost dizzying and makes the entire exercise an enormous waste of time.

I threatened to bring my supervisor up on charges for making me watch this piece of shit. Sadly, I had a remote control next to me that could have turned it off at any time and instead watched all the way to end with my jaw dropped.

So who's really to blame?


* out of ***** (The one * is for the one time I laughed)


Labels: