Movie You Can't See Yet: World's Greatest Dad

Release Date: August 21, 2009 (so says IMDB, you can buy tickets in some locations now), Xbox Live and VOD supposedly starts July 24
Director: Bobcat Goldthwait
Starring: Robin Williams, Geoffrey Pierson, and a bunch of people you may not recognize
Cameos: Plenty! Mr. Show fans pay special attention.

It's not often a movie comes out at the perfect time, but every few years you get a Wag the Dog or something else that works. World's Greatest Dad comes into the world fresh on a number of celebrity deaths, including the often joked-about but rarely discussed auto-erotic asphyxiation, which (spoiler alert) comes up in this feature. (There's your warning if you can't laugh at that sort of thing.) And seriously, do not continue if you consider the premise of the movie to be a spoiler.

With a genuinely fantastic performance by Robin Williams, the film is largely populated by unknowns and hard-working comedians whose faces you will no doubt recognize as being key players in projects from Goldthwait's past-- old friends and co-workers give fantastic performances that really fit the material well. Some of the students are a little goofy, but really, who wasn't in high school?

The movie's premise is a twist on the classic "loser gets fame" model, with the key difference here being that Williams is Lance Clayton, a teacher and failed writer. The class he teaches is in danger of being cut due to poor enrollment, his teenage son is a nightmare, and to make matters worse, he's finally about to give up. And then, his son dies while jerking off, and being a good dad he covers for him by writing a suicide note and hanging the body in the closet. Soon thereafter, the note gets out and suddenly everybody is interested in knowing more about the son in his suicide note-- a thoughtful, deep boy rather than the porn-obsessed adolescent that truly died doing what he loved.

There are so many levels of comeuppance and schadenfreude that you wonder exactly which event constitutes a victory. Recurring themes of death, like Lance's love of zombie films, help to paint this pitch-black comedy. Without spoiling too much of the plot, he uses his son's newfound fame as a springboard into the life he's pursued and failed to achieve for so long.

To nitpick, there's one element that seemed to be less than fully creative in this otherwise astonishing piece of film, and that's music. While people frequently use music to add emotion to a sequence, or to make something funnier, here the lyrics of the songs used often had a direct correlation to the on-screen events. Robin Williams smokes pot, and there's a song about smoking pot. A ghost montage has a song about being a ghost. I'm sure this technique probably helped to push the story along, but it didn't seem to fit with the otherwise very crafty and well-assembled picture. You'll laugh, you probably won't cry, so go see it in a theater. You're going to want to pay attention to this one, there's so much going on that it demands your full attention.

Review: Borat (a movie I've never watched up until now, three years after its release)

In 2006, the movie Borat came out. I initially wanted to go see the movie, but after the first week of people everywhere saying "nice" in a foreign accent with a thumbs up I suddenly felt like I should never see the movie lest I catch whatever strange brain damage this movie caused.

Now with the recent release of Bruno by Sacha Baron Cohen, I thought maybe now would be a good time to go back and watch Borat for the first time as I wasn't being bombarded with idiots talking about "sexy time" over and over.

So, overall, this is a very funny movie with Sacha doing what he does best and fucks with people as an outrageous stereotype of a foreigner. I have to wonder, though, how many people in America who went to see this movie and then muttered "sexy time" really got the subtext of this movie. I know there was a lot of anger from the minister of Kazakhstan when this movie came out for how badly it portrayed Kazakhs, what with Borat being a man who has sex with relatives, defecates in public and thinks Jews are monsters that will poison him. However, Borat isn't real. The people he interacts with in the United States are real and make us look like xenophobic, racist, backwards people.

New Yorkers will threaten to beat up a guy trying to greet them by kissing, frat boys will declare that minorities have more rights than white people, a man who runs a gun store doesn't even bat an eye for a request for a gun to "shoot a Jew" and people in a Rodeo will cheer for support of the war on terror all the way up to suggestions of turning Iraq into a wasteland with George W. Bush drinking the blood of the enemies, but get irate when the national anthem is sung incorrectly.

It's frightening and hilarious because it simply focuses on real life which is often funnier than anything you can make up. I know that part of it flew over the heads of a lot of Americans who saw this, but for the rest of us it smacks us right on the head and makes us want to continue to weep into our liquor.

So yes, now that people are no longer annoyingly quote this movie, it's a good time to see it if you haven't. It's really funny and shows Americans for the retards we can be.

Cheap to buy almost anywhere on DVD for under $10 at the moment, it's a good recession entertainment buy, and I will recommend Amazon.com because I am their shameless whore.

Expect me to review Bruno in 2012.

An American Carol

I hate this movie. Then again, I'm a dirty liberal, so I'm guessing I'm supposed to hate this movie and get angry and blog about my hate, which is what I am doing. Question is, why would a conservative want to watch this movie either?

First of all, how could the director of Scary Movie 3 make such an unfunny movie? Wait, that's not quite right. There's more to him than that. How could David Zucker, director of Scary Movie 3 and 4 make such an unfunny, fucking stupid movie?

The plot of the movie is this - members of the Taliban in Afghanistan have a recruiting problem with the American military doing such a good job to free up the country. So, they decide to hire a Hollywood director, someone who really hates America to do their recruiting videos. Enter Michael Malone, played by the dead Chris Farley's brother, Kevin Farley. Michael Malone, who is obviously supposed to be Michael Moore, is a documentary filmmaker who falls down a lot and is constantly eating. Oh, he also is hosting a rally to protest July 4th because he hates America. The Taliban pick him to be their filmmaker, but somewhere along the line they decide that instead of having him make films for them he would be better used to get access to a public event to cause terror. Michael Malone gets visited by three spirits, the ghost of Patton, Washington, and the Angel of Death, oh, also JFK. In the process of --- it doesn't matter. This movie is not about comedy but preaching. Preaching, preaching preaching, with poor attempts at humor thrown in.

Let me put it this way, would you like to see a movie telling you the following:

College students are stupid and will repeat anything in a protest.
College professors are 1960's throwbacks who want to indoctrinate kids into hating America.
The war against terror is the same as the war against the Nazis.
Pacifism means surrender.
If Liberals were in charge, the Union would have lost the Civil War because they are against any war.
People in Hollywood rich hypocritical iditots.
The Left wing is full of crazy extremists.
The members of the ACLU are zombies who fight only to destroy America. They fight for the fourth amendment which leads to terrorists bombing America.
Bill O'Reilly is a decent human being.

If your answer is yes, then you probably already believe all this anyway, so the question is, why would you go to a movie that tells you what you want to hear that isn't entertaining?

There's very little comedy in this, and when there are attempts at comedy there are weird jumps that go from, talking solemnly of the death of thousands of innocent people, and the people who tried to save them, in the ruins of the World Trade Center, to Michael Malone stumbling around in a graveyard, bumping repeatedly into bells.

I think the message of this film is that "conservatives are right, liberals are wrong" and it plays that message for an hour and a half, which makes this movie an inverse of Team America. That movie was funny, had some hilarious scenes, and some music you could really sing to and maybe 2% message. If you were liberal, conservative, who cares? It was funny. An American Carol is about 99% message and 1% entertainment.

It's also just really angry with it's message. It's almost like they wanted to make a movie that just had an hour and a half of liberals being beaten to death, but instead made it veer towards "comedy" so it could be labeled "satire."

So, if you're that type of person who just hates the liberals, and wants to see a movie about hating liberals, and hate hate hate, liberal liberal liberal, then go ahead and see this movie.

It should be noted that I, being a dirty horrible liberal, saw this film in a movie theater in Phoenix, the home of John McCain. They, like me, did not laugh through most of the film, but at the end of the film, they stood up and applauded. Some cheered.

This isn't satire, this isn't entertainment. This is like a fourteen year-old kid being angry that he has to go be cooped up at High School all day, so he throws his own shit at the Principal's office. Seriously.

The Wrong Guy

The Wrong Guy
Buena Vista Home Video
Released: September 2002
Director: David Steinberg
90:00 minutes



Dave Foley, known for his roles as Dave Nelson on Newsradio and as the most feminine looking of the Kids in the Hall, stars in The Wrong Guy, a terrifically funny movie that you are likely to have never seen and probably never heard of.

One reason you have never heard of this movie is that it was released in 1997 in Canada, then in July of 1998 in Poland. It was only in September of 2002 was this movie released directly to video in the United States.

The story follows Nelson Hibbert, a company executive who goes in to have it out with his boss only to find out his boss has been murdered. He then panics, makes some horrific blunders that would make anyone believe that he did it, and goes on the run, thinking all the while that the police are hot on his trail.

Thing is, a security camera catches the actual murderer on tape, and the police know Nelson Hibbert didn't do it.

Thus begins a tale in which Nelson, as the bumbling idiot, stumbles his way from one town to the next in an attempt to escape the authorities he believes are on his tail. On the way he meets up with a narcoleptic love interest (Played by Meg Tilly) and runs into the real killer (Colm Feore, whom you've seen in thousands of films but probably don't realize it) as well as a some minor appearances by Kevin McDonald as a hotel clerk and Joe Flaherty as a simple country banker.

To reveal any more about this movie would ruin some of the jokes, which come frequent and are filled with a lot of originality, it strays away from doing a simply parody of The Fugitive, which was done in 1998's Wrongfully Accused, and instead delivers a madcap romp that has the same kind of tone and pacing as a good Simpsons episode (remember those?)

The directing was done by David Steinberg, a veteran of directing television series such as Seinfeld, It's Garry Shandling's Show and, post-movie, Curb Your Enthusiasm. The experience in directing comedy shines here, where sight gags and timing isn't ruined by inappropriate framing or clunky shot progression. There's one really good gag at the end, at a miniature golf course that requires a lot on the skill of the director, and Steinberg pulls it off well.

Also of note is that Steinberg doesn't make the mistake that most film directors make in a transition to film directing, and that is a tendency to use a lot of static shots with heavy cutting. The camera moves and, when it moves, its appropriate and elegant. Mind you, it isn't the cinema beauty of Run, Lola Run, but it's a few steps above from the clunkiness of Dogma.

Of note is that David Foley wanted to direct this himself, but his shooting schedule for Newsradio didn't allow him to do it.

Also of note is that this movie is the main reason that Dave Foley does not have a writing credit on the Kids in the Hall movie Brain Candy. This movie, along with his shooting schedule for Newsradio, did not give him time to help write the final draft of Brain Candy. This makes one wonder if Brain Candy would have been slightly better had Mr. Foley gotten one last crack at it.

Disappointingly, this DVD is one of those where all you get is a movie, surround sound, and subtitles for other languages. It's too bad there really isn't anything extra of value, because a commentary by Dave Foley or David Steinberg would have been really a plus on a movie like this.

At the very least you get The Wrong Guy, which is a hilarious movie and a fine addition to any DVD comedy library.