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how's the whoring?
The Wedding
Planner is "The
best date movie of the year!"
Saving Silverman is "Hilarious!"
Shaft was "The best movie of the summer, 2000!"
Loser was "The best comedy of the
summer, 2000!"
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Raymond Carver - Snow
White
Johnny Cash - American
III: Solitary Man The
song "I See a Darkness" may be the saddest, prettiest
song ever
The
In-Laws, A screwball
comedy that's actually funny. Alan Arkin and Peter Falk are so
loose and wild as future in-laws meeting for the first time.
the story quickly goes from dentistry to trying to bring down
a loony South American dictator. It's smart and funny enough
to guarantee a few wet pants.
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©2000 by
Randy Shandis Enterprises. All rights fucking reserved.
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This week:
Down to Earth
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Filthy says:
"It fucking sucks." |
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What is worse: When Hollywood gives the reins to cocksuckers
like Dennis Dugan and Adam Sandler who don't even want to make
a good movie, or when they give them to someone like Chris Rock,
who aims high and misses by a mile? I'll take the second any
day because I would much rather pay to see someone try and fail
than endure another ass-reaming from Sandler and Dugan, the lazy,
arrogant fuckers. Rock has talent and he works hard.
Having said that, Down to Earth is a bad fucking movie,
man. It's not because of laziness or indifference, it's because
the people behind it didn't have a fucking clue. The acting sucks,
the writing sucks, the directing sucks.
In a remake of Heaven Can Wait, itself a remake of
Here Comes Mr. Jordan, Chris Rock plays Lance Barton,
a bad stand-up comic who gets hit by a truck after being distracted
by Regina King. But, angel Eugene Levy fucked up. Rock isn't
supposed to be dead, so Heaven decides to give him another body
to inhabit. Problem is, it's the body of a stodgy, cutthroat,
white billionaire (tee-hee). This leads to a long series of two
of the least funny types of jokes. "White people and black
people are different." Ha ha. "Rich capitalist fucks
are jerks and poor people are saints." Guffaw. Jesus Squatting
in the Woods Christ, you couldn't find more obvious premises
if you sat through an entire "Def Jam" Comedy Hour.
And I don't think anyone wants to do that.
Once he is Mr. Beef Wellington, Rock learns that his company
is about to close a hospital that King is fighting to keep open.
It's never said why she does, it appears she's just a fucking
busybody without a job. Rock saves the hospital and, as an old
white guy, romances King, winning her heart in about one night.
Along the way, he learns how to be truly funny because he can't
rely on his black body.
Chris Rock is a very funny man, but not here. He's funny when
he's prickly and sour, railing against injustice and making fun
of whiners and complainers, like in Nurse Betty. As a
romantic lead in a sappy, weak comedy, though, his performance
is the least believable I've seen since Mrs. Filthy claimed the
dogs ate my half-gallon of Rocky Road. Rock sucks the fur right
off a cat's ass. He's all teeth and screaming and unbelievably
dreadful double takes. I mean, he looks about as uncomfortable
as a dog in a wheelbarrow, all twitchy, googly-eyed and looking
for a way out.
Of course, his whole performance is based on us thinking he
is a fat old white guy. He appears almost entirely as himself
because nobody is going to pay to see Down to Earth starring
some white guy you've never heard of. The directors wrongly assume
we will imagine how funny a jive-talking white guy looks to other
people while only showing us for about a minute.
The rest of the cast is equally fucking awful. King is so
confused looking, somebody must have konked her on the head with
a klieg light. This is partially because the writers didn't even
bother to give her a character or a job. She's just a goddamn
prop created by a group of guys afraid of women. The fuckers
in charge even waste Eugene Levy. For fuck's sake, I think bad
moviemakers now think putting Levy in their flicks give it some
sort of hip cache. Never mind the guy is a fucking comic genius,
because these writers have him do nothing. Oh, but he does wear
a "funny" suit. (By the way, will somebody please make
The Bobby Bittmann Story because that's a movie I will
pay to see a million times.)
The script is pure, unstrained country-style shit. Country-style
means it's chunky. Rock and his three comedy buddies rewrote
Heaven Can Wait as a exposition-heavy, dull-paced vehicle
for stand-up comedy bits. The problem is, it's not all stand-up.
The comedy is stitched together by tedious, flat scene after
scene of stiff people talking and talking. The writers aren't
even sophisticated enough to have several people talk in a single
scene, or to actually have something happen besides people talking.
Down to Earth is a movie where the main character has
to keep asking what's going on, just so secondary characters
can lug around the plot like heavy boulders. I fucking hate movies
where characters keep asking questions to get the other characters
to explain what the audience already knows. Usually, though,
you only find writing this shitty in community college classes,
not major motion pictures.
The Weitz Brothers, Chris and Paul, direct with either incredible
disinterest or an inhuman lack of ability. These two fuckers
wrote American Pie, and in the incestuous, greedy land
of Hollywood, that movie's success gives them carte blanche to
be bad directors. The studios don't look at credentials, they
look at bottom lines. So, we get stuck with two jack-offs who
made their cast act stiffer than a week-old corpse, and who let
each joke drop like road apples from a horse's ass. Plop, plop,
plop. They never mix it up, never vary their formula of having
the people stand there while they talk. Oh, sure, there is one
exciting scene where Rock and King walk while they talk, but
otherwise, the only thing that changes from scene to scene is
the furniture in the background.
One Finger for Down to Earth, an appallingly
bad movie from a guy I thought knew better. Mr. Rock, stop listening
to your entourage because you're getting soft and fat.
Want
to tell Filthy something?
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