Stale Popcorn: The Hottie and The Nottie

This one's almost too easy. In case you've blocked it from your memory, here's a review of the Paris Hilton classic The Hottie and The Nottie (by James Berardinelli of ReelReviews.net)

Every February it seems there's something like The Hottie & the Nottie - a cinematic excursion so horrific that it's an insult to bad movies to call it a bad movie . . .

The first thing one notices upon watching this film is how shoddy the production looks. Compared to this, Cloverfield was slickly filmed. The director's shot selection is dull and static. The sound mix is awful. And the movie looks like it was filmed on someone's home video camera. Although the credits claim that Tom Putnam directed The Hottie & the Nottie and Heidi Ferrer wrote it, it wouldn't surprise me - based on the quality of the evidence - if Paris didn't have a hand in both of those areas as well. It's hard to imagine that professionals with a clue about what they are doing could arrive at such an abortion of a motion picture.

The plot is standard stuff but, as I have remarked before, that's okay for a romantic comedy if the intangibles are in place. Unfortunately, the people in this movie wouldn't know chemistry if someone gave them a Bunsen burner and a few test tubes. Plus there's an assumption that we're supposed to like and sympathize with the protagonists. Of the three individuals who fit into that category, we feel sorry for only one of them, and that's because she's forced to endure so much screen time with the other two. . .

Nate, as we learn after the obligatory grade-school flashbacks, is as big a jerk as they come. Now, well into his twenties and stuck somewhere in Maine, he has discovered the meaning of life: He will return to California to track down his first grade sweetheart, Christabelle, who has grown up to become "the hottest woman in Los Angeles." Would Paris Hilton play any other role? But there's a problem - in order to get a date with Christabelle, Nate has to find a boyfriend for her best friend, the butt-ugly June Phigg (Christine Lakin). Anyone who hasn't figured out within five minutes of the start of the movie where this is going deserves to be stuck watching this. For Nate, it helps that June gets progressively less ugly with every passing frame until she's drop dead gorgeous by the end of the film.

It goes without saying that this is a vanity project for Hilton. She is frequently filmed in soft focus and sometimes in slow motion. The scenes when she is scantily clad demand big reveals. And she gets to utter deep philosophical revelations worthy of Jack Handy. An example of her words to live by: "Life without orgasms is like a world without flowers." For the next few days, I'll be mulling over the facets of wisdom offered by that gem. Sadly, Hilton's acting is a little… off. Or, to put it another way, in a contest between her and a solid plank of oak, she would be more convincingly wooden. Where's all the passion and energy she displayed in One Night in Paris? Most shocking of all, perhaps, is the fact that she's not the worst actor in the primary cast. In fact, she's not even the second or third worst.

Unwatchable would be a good word to describe Joel David Moore, who resembles a Tom Green wannabe. This resulted in my having several flashbacks to Freddy Got Fingered, which is not a good thing . . . The only one who gives a decent performance is Christine Lakin, but it's hard to judge how good she is because anything that's not manure still stinks in a dungheap.

The Hottie & the Nottie contains several comedic sequences that are about as funny as the anal rape scene in The War Zone. It's as if the filmmakers scoured the worst of recent comedies and stole the most lackluster scenes. A pair of women sitting close to me laughed frequently during the movie, but it was immediately clear they were laughing at it not with it. Paris' philosophical ruminations got the loudest chuckles.

Eventually, the movie stumbles to its embarrassing and predictable conclusion with a stab at a Jerry Maguire-like line that we'll remember for about two seconds after the end credits have rolled. The problem is, as expected as the last scene is, the movie doesn't earn it. It has a confused trajectory, never bothers to develop anything between the two true lovers until it's too late, then has to rush everything through. It's a little amazing that a movie can mess up something so basic and automatic, but this one manages to do it.

This movie is funny. Not.

Kyle Smith's one-star review (New York Post) gives enough detail for readers to almost begin to appreciate how truly bad The Love Guru really is. Bonus: he also insults hockey fans.

'THE Love Guru" is even funnier than "Wayne's World" or "Austin Powers." Not. If this movie were a president, it would be Tedious Roosevelt.

Mike Myers' titular figure, a wannabe Deepak Chopra, is like one of those (98 percent of) "Saturday Night Live" characters not interesting enough to make a movie around. The pitch meeting must have been brief. "It's about this Eastern spiritual dude who writes self-help books with goofy titles." "OK . . . And?" "And, um, he gets various kinds of food stuck in his beard?" "OK . . . And?" "And we'll fill it out with lots of crotch jokes and people getting hit in the head with stuff." "You're a genius!"

Myers, who stars as Guru Pitka, a Hollywood sage, also co-wrote the script. It's a thrift-store hodgepodge of one-liners you last heard around the monkey bars in fourth grade ("I'd like an alligator soup and make it snappy"), goofs on Indian-sounding names (Ben Kingsley plays his teacher, Guru Tugginmypudha) and dull self-help acronyms (GURU: "Gee, You Are You").

Pitka is called in by the owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs (Jessica Alba, who is to acting what Dame Judi Dench is to sex) to help a star player (Romany Malco, the hilarious black guy from "The 40-Year-Old Virgin") who has lost his skills since his wife ran off with a French Canadian goalie (Justin Timberlake, with Gabe Kaplan grooming).

. . . there are jokes like, "What's the capital of Thailand?" "Bangkok!" followed by a crotch punch, a meal that looks like male mating equipment, and the guru saying of a corn dog, "Is this a dog's thingy?" Also there's a fight involving mops soaked in urine and a no-reason-for-this barroom brawl, which concludes with a pool cue up the guru's bottom. So he takes it out and sniffs it.

. . . As always in sports comedies, there are a couple of wacky announcers (Stephen Colbert, Jim Gaffigan), and as usual they try way too hard. Their routine is so brainless that it's hard to picture anyone enjoying it except those in the same IQ bracket as actual hockey fans, who would probably be equally entertained by an evening spent at home holding a Bic lighter up to their own bursts of flatulence.

Mini-Me, Verne Troyer, is on hand as the team's coach, but solely so Guru Pitka can reel off some midget jokes last heard in 1974 in the Copa Room of the Sands. This movie is so feeble that the gag reel at the end consists of one gag - which is better than almost all of the jokes in the film proper. At 88 minutes, "The Love Guru" would have benefited from a trim of roughly 80 minutes. Call it The Audience Cut.

Comparing the comedy in this film and that of "Get Smart" . . . is like asking whether Hamas or Hezbollah puts on a nicer Easter parade.

I'd like to thank Mike Myers, for providing the critics with such rich material, and inspiring them to such eloquence!

Place bets now!

Gawker predicts that The Love Guru Is Going to Be the Worst Movie of the Summer (although they haven't actually seen it yet):

The unfunny clips, the badmouthing about Myers, the sheer presence of Jessica Alba. All signs point to this thing being a catastrophe on an epic scale.

Though, I must confess, I find some of the little "Mini-Sutras" on the movie's YouTube page kinda funny. And "Mariska Hargitay" is funny, too! But the rest of it? Ugh. I mean, Mike Myers is a funny guy. And he's had years to put something together that could match, if not better, his Austin Powers success. And yet he chose... a comedy about his own spiritual enlightenment? After his father passed away in 1991, Myers became despondent. His depression eventually led him to the writing of spiritual salesman Deepak Chopra. The two became fast friends and Myers has been on a journey of awakening since, to hear him tell it. Which is fine. We're all entitled to a little happiness, obviously, but a whole tent-pole summer comedy based on a character and experience that is completely unrelatable to most audiences seems... a little misguided. It just seems wildly out of touch at best and self-indulgent and preachy at worst. One who wonders just who the hell greenlit this thing. Paramount must be awfully trusting of Myers. Or, they're scared.

The Love Guru also rated a measly 14% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer and the concensus:

The Love Guru features far too many gross-out gags, and too few earned laughs, ranking as one of Mike Myers' poorest outings.

And finally, the Village Voice weighs in with the following:

Mike Myers likes ice hockey. He also likes Deepak Chopra, a little bit too much. So he pulled together a bit of hockey and a whole lot of Chopra and called it a plot. Building a movie around the efforts of an also-ran celebrity guru to sort out the internal politics of the Toronto Maple Leafs was Myers's first mistake. His second was to seek Chopra's blessing and throw him a cameo, thus fluffing a golden opportunity to take a good, strong whack at the guru industry. Kitted out in an orange shirt, Dali mustache, brown-cow eyes brimming with faux-sympathy and lechery, and a fluid libido, Myers's Guru Pitka, a shaman cursed with lagging behind Chopra on the pop-psych charts, is too like his source to be really funny or really cutting. Indeed, he’s a bit of a dear, and completely upstaged by the charm of a bunch of mega-stars ready and waiting to spoof themselves. Team manager Jessica Alba romps adorably through a goofy Bollywood dance sequence. Goalie Justin Timberlake gives his all to a sing-off with a Céline Dion impersonator. And Ben Kingsley, as a cross-eyed Zen master, hasn’t been this funny since he swanned around in that outsized diaper in Gandhi. The rest is disposable. Now and again some pungent writing (the script is by Myers with Graham Gordy) leaks through to poke fun at the excruciating banality of guru wisdom. But mostly it’s dreary dick jokes and elephant poop, slack directing by Marco Schnabel (a second unit on the Austin Powers movies), and, of all fatal errors, Mike Myers, shooting for cuddly.

UPDATE: The New York Times weighs in:

. . . by the time Guru Pitka (Mr. Myers) says “Mariska Hargitay” to Ms. Hargitay herself, it’s somehow less amusing than it should be.

Which might sum up “The Love Guru” in its entirety but only at the risk of grievously understating the movie’s awfulness. A whole new vocabulary seems to be required. To say that the movie is not funny is merely to affirm the obvious. The word “unfunny” surely applies to Mr. Myers’s obnoxious attempts to find mirth in physical and cultural differences but does not quite capture the strenuous unpleasantness of his performance. No, “The Love Guru” is downright antifunny, an experience that makes you wonder if you will ever laugh again.

And this is, come to think of it, something of an achievement. What is the opposite of a belly laugh? An interesting question, in a way, and to hear lines like “I think I just made a happy wee-wee” or “I’m making diarrhea noises in my cup” or to watch apprentice gurus attack one another with urine-soaked mops is to grasp the answer. Please don’t misunderstand: I’m not opposed to infantile, regressive, scatological humor. Indeed, I consider myself something of a connoisseur. Or maybe a glutton. So it’s not that I object to the idea of, say, witnessing elephants copulate on the ice in the middle of a Stanley Cup hockey match, or seeing a dwarf sent flying over the same ice by the shock of defibrillator paddles. But it will never be enough simply to do such things. They must be done well.

. . . He is supported by a cast that includes Justin Timberlake (as a well-endowed Québécois goalie), Romany Malco (as a hockey star with love trouble) and Jessica Alba, as the owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs. A further list — Stephen Colbert! John Oliver of “The Daily Show”! Ben Kingsley! — would only create the misleading impression that there is something worth seeing here. If there is — Did I miss it? Darn! — I’m sure it will show up on YouTube before long. In the meantime talk amongst yourselves.

Hollywood's Great Chickenshit

Another great review by Robert Wilonsky of the Village Voice:

Patrick Dempsey plays a conveniently rich and willfully single serial "fornicator" slowly but surely domesticated by his unspoken love for longtime BFF Hannah (Michelle Monaghan), who's on her way to Scotland to marry Mr. Right Now since Mr. Right's too chickenshit to say boo before her "I do." Which, come to think of it, not only sums up this movie, but more or less half the films in which Dempsey starred between 1987 and 2003, when he was scheduled to headline a Fox TV series based on the film About a Boy, with Dempsey in the Hugh Grant role of the conveniently rich and willfully single serial "fornicator" slowly but surely domesticated by his blah, blah, blah. And then, of course, there's the My Best Friend's Wedding connection. Only the filmmakers and McDreamy have been so up-front about the resemblance between their offering and 1997's threesome that to acknowledge any further similarities would be playing right into their grubby paws. Director Paul Weiland and the three (!) screenwriters it took to boil down thousands of bad movies into 101 minutes haven't provided this one with a single original thought; it should only entertain those still getting adjusted to the idea of talkies.

From The Village Voice.

What A Bunch of Nonsense

Robert Wilonsky of the Village Voice takes aim at The Happening:



What a bunch of nonsense—effective nonsense, chilling nonsense, occasionally wrenching nonsense, but nonsense nonetheless. This is what happens when M. Night Shyamalan tries to play both John Carpenter (bloody) and Stanley Kubrick (cold-blooded) while writing and directing what the literalist will either dismiss or embrace as the horror-film extension of An Inconvenient Truth, depending upon who the literalist thinks is responsible for, ya know, killing the planet. No spoilers here, because there’s nothing to give away—not even the alleged cause of the toxin that causes folks in the Northeast to go loopy before killing themselves with whatever’s handy (a cop’s gun, a shard of glass, a sidewalk 40 stories down … a rotor tiller, ick). One minute folks are enjoying themselves in Central Park, the next they’re stabbing and shooting themselves for the following, oh, 90 minutes give or take.

Full article here.

Stale Popcorn: Wicker Man

It's an old one, but worth revisiting. Jim Slotek of the Toronto Sun wrote the following (one star):

It really is a shame that Nicolas Cage is becoming synonymous with bad movies. He asserts his talent on occasion. But too often his "performance" is just a bunch of phoned-in self-parodying mannerisms.

In the case of The Wicker Man, a moronic and muddled Hollywood remake of one of the best British thrillers ever, Cage seems to be acting in a whole other movie -- with, as they say in the TV capsules, hilarious results.

Hilarious? Wait until you see him taking part in a pagan ritual, dressed as a bear. . .

Hey, but don't worry. Our hero Nic gets to punch some of these bad women in the face before we're done. As they say on South Park "dude, this is pretty f---ed up right here." . . .

And where the original gave up details a bit at a time, LaBute's script is so expository it insults the stupid. Characters pick up books and read aloud extensively about Druid traditions and sacrifice rituals. Burstyn and her right-hand pagan Sister Rose (Molly Parker) practically admit in the first act that they perform human sacrifices. It's LaBute's first thriller, and it's so hamhanded you want to douse it in mustard. . .

BOTTOM LINE: A great thriller has been remade into one of the most laughable. Nicolas Cage seems to be acting in another movie, waving his arms around, shouting, pulling guns and even punching smiling pagan women. And Neil LaBute -- who never met a story he couldn't turn into a paranoid castration fantasy -- dumbs things down enough to insult the stupid.

Read the full review here.

Hulk also go rarrr!

The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw gives The Incredible Hulk only one star in his hilarious Hulk-dialogue-inspired review.

"Hulk. Smash!" Yes. Hulk. Smash. Yes. Smash. Big Hulk smash. Smash cars. Buildings. Army tanks. Hulk not just smash. Hulk also go rarrr! Then smash again. Smash important, obviously. Smash Hulk's USP. What Hulk smash most? Hulk smash all hope of interesting time in cinema. Hulk take all effort of cinema, effort getting babysitter, effort finding parking, and Hulk put great green fist right through it. Hulk crush all hopes of entertainment. Hulk in boring film. Film co-written by star. Edward Norton. Norton in it. Norton write it. Norton not need gamma-radiation poisoning to get big head. Thing is: Hulk head weirdly small. Compared with rest of big green body.

There are 6 more paragraphs of this for your reading pleasure here.