The SmarK DVD Rant – Anti-Comedy!
As I’ve noted before, comedy is tough to pull off at the best of times. It can be even harder if you’re an independent filmmaker struggling to find an audience that gets your work. It’s probably most difficult if you’re a pair of humorless hacks who inexplicably keep getting movie deals despite no understanding of what’s funny. And thus we discuss two new releases on DVD that could only be united by one of my patented segues…
Cyrus
I will warn you now, the DVD case for this one is SERIOUSLY misleading. Here’s the setup: John C. Reilly is a rather sad, divorced man who falls for a hot MILF (played by the very-gracefully-aging Marisa Tomei), but she’s very close with her manipulative son, Cyrus (Jonah Hill), and the kid is intent on blocking John’s every attempt to get closer to his beloved mother. Now, you’re probably thinking “wacky Judd Apatow comedy” here, and the packaging and advertising do absolutely nothing to dispel that thinking. The DVD case features a smart-ass tagline (“Seriously, get off his mom!”) with everyone looking very jolly, and the blurbs proclaim how hilarious it is. But here’s the dirty secret of this movie: It’s part of an indy scene called “mumblecore”, which casts aside things like gags and punchlines in favor of a more naturalistic acting and directing style. Basically, nothing happens in this movie. The three leads essentially comprise the entire cast, and developments occur at a pace that can only be described as glacial if you’re used to watching movies from this decade. Yeah, the acting is good, but the most glaring problem is that a movie being sold as a comedy isn’t funny. I guess that a blurb describing it as a low-key character study with slow-simmering conflicts between damaged souls wouldn’t be as effective, but it would have been a hell of a lot more honest. This was a major disappointment.
However, one movie that couldn’t have expectations high enough to disappoint and yet still managed to…
Vampires Suck
Who the hell keeps giving Friedberg and Seltzer money to make movies? You may remember their particular brand of “comedy” from the [Noun] Movie series of alleged spoofs where the punchlines have little to do with the subjects at hand, and this one deviates little from that pattern. Here’s what really made me sad and annoyed about this movie: The vampire craze has been asking for a good parody for months now. Yeah, Twilight is practically self-parody as it is, but there’s also the superior vampire cousins True Blood and The Vampire Diaries, not to mention 100 years of Dracula and Blade movies to draw from. Wesley Snipes hunting Edward Cullen? This stuff writes itself, and yet they totally missed the boat. See, in Movie Movie world, doing an exact copy of another movie is “parody”, and inserting the latest pop culture reference is a punchline. And when you’re attacking a series of movies so self-important and angsty, why do you need the Kardashians as a punchline? How is it even funny? The people behind this movie are so humorless that they not only have Edward (Matt Lanter, a frequent resident of these crapfests) spell out the original theme of the movies, then note that he read it off of Stephanie Meyer’s Twitter page, THEN actually show the page on a laptop in case we really hadn’t gotten the joke the first two times it was hammered into our heads. You know what the saddest thing is, though? The people who love the original movies also are 100 times smarter and more venomous about their hatred toward what doesn’t work about them. For example, the laughable CGI of the originals is readily admitted and mocked by the Twilight fans, but instead the Movie Movie doofuses make their big punchline that Jacob takes his shirt off a lot. Wow, that’s cutting satire there, guys. They can’t even come up with their own PLOT, instead condensing the first two movies down into 80 excruciating minutes and faithfully following the story beats of the movies that they’re supposed to be making fun of. Which means that the original flaws are all still there, except with more fart and gay jokes now. Like, does anyone but the 14-year-old girls who have seen the movies 20 times each REALLY need to have every major scene recreated faithfully? There’s definitely still opportunity for someone to skewer the vampire fad once and for all, but these guys aren’t the ones to pull it off.
The winner this week: No one. Better luck next time for me, I guess.
