Quote
Whore Hall of Fame Inductee Paul Wunder is dead, but here's what
he would have said about some of the current movies:
Hey Whore, how's
the whoring? According to this week's Quote Whore:
The Watcher is "Spine-tingling! The best
thriller of the decade!"
Bait is a "tasty piece of chum!
Jamie Foxx delivers a big hook full of laughs!"
Beautiful is "quite simply, beautiful!
A movie every woman who wants to be pretty should see!"
Urban Legends:
The Final Cut is
"A surprise! A very scary movie with an excellent cast...
oh, who the hell am I fooling? I'm a fucking loser!"
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©2000 by
Randy Shandis Enterprises. All rights fucking reserved.
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This week:
Meet The Parents
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Filthy says:
"Less scary than when Mrs. Filthy met my folks." |
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I got fired this week. Well, there are all sorts of ways to
say it that are supposed to make the worker feel better. A company
can say "laid-off" or "released" or "asked
to resign," and all of that bullshit is supposed to make
the canned worker feel a little better. But Family Dollar simply
said "fired." They fuckin' called me at home during
my shift, because I wasn't there because I was feeling a little
hung-over, and Manager Bob said "Fired. I'll call mall security
if you step foot in here again."
Why? Well, that's the part that gets me more steamed than
a freshly laid dogshit. They claim I stole. They claim I was
stealing their fucking lousy dollar merchandise but they can't
prove it!
Okay, so I was stealing, but I never got caught doing it.
And those fuckers shouldn't be rewarded for correctly guessing
that I was stealing. Hell, all I stole was Sprinkles the Shower
Clown (and some other shit) and that fucking thing was lame.
It's a shower head with a clown's face. We got boxes and boxes
of them and I fucking hated them. Every day, piling boxes of
that stupid plastic clown's face on the shelves. But, Sprinkles
was like an ugly girl you ride next to on the bus every day.
After a while, she doesn't seem so ugly and you wonder if her
tits are as flabby and pockmarked as her face. Then you don't
really care, you just want to see her tits.
So, I ended up wondering if Sprinkles was as fun as the box
says. Would I want to "jump in the shower with a clown every
morning?" Would that help me wake up before two in the afternoon,
or cut back on my drinking or scratching the paint on SUVs? I
snuck one home and found out the answer is no, it didn't make
me happy at all. And I feel like a fucking pervert washing while
that clown watches. I can't even jerk off in the shower anymore.
All of this business about my firing has nothing to do with
Meet The Parents, except that the movie is pretty fucking funny,
and it distracted me from wanting to go slash my old boss's tires.
There is a message here for Hollywood: good movies and cheap
beer do more than any government program can to keep the poor
and disenfranchised from rising up and eating the rich. Entertain
us and we'll leave you alone.
"Meet the Parents" is a remake of a classic from
way back in the golden age of movies, 1992. This version credits
the story to the original, but the writers and director are different.
Ben Stiller is Greg Focker, an unfortunately named (see, Focker
sounds like Fucker, get it?) male nurse who must get permission
to marry his girlfriend (Teri Polo) from her father. Polo's younger
sister is getting married and that presents an opportunity for
Stiller to "meet the parents" and get the father's
permission.
Polo's father, hard-ass Robert De Niro immediately distrusts
Stiller, and not just because he's not a very good actor. Stiller
thinks De Niro is a retired rare flower dealer, but soon learns
that he was a CIA operative, nicknamed The Human Lie Detector,
for 34 years. De Niro doesn't trust anyone, especially not a
nurse who wants to bone his first-born daughter.
De Niro makes a weak attempt at befriending Stiller, but he'd
rather torment him and prove him unworthy. He gives Stiller a
lie detector test in a dank hidden room, investigates Stiller's
claims of high scores on medical school entrance exams, and suspects
him of being a pot-head, high as a fucking kite. The deeper Stiller
gets in, the harder he works to win De Niro's trust, and the
worse it gets. He desecrates De Niro's mother's ashes, gives
the bride a black eye, burns down a hand-carved gazebo, and tries
to pass off a strange cat as De Niro's beloved pet, which he
lost.
The premise of Meet the Parents is pretty old. It's your basic
screwball comedy based on misunderstanding. But director Jay
Roach does a fine fucking job making the old dog fresh. He keeps
the predictable story loose, and the individual scenes funny.
While the pacing is a little slow, he draws laughs from some
good dialog and a few very good slapstick moments. That is, until
the last half-hour.
Writers James Herzfeld and John Hamburg are no comedy geniuses,
and they drop some jokes like loads of shit, such as a mistaken
suitcase filled with dildos and a misplaced pot pipe. But, they
also know their characters and the best laughs are reaction shots.
Stuff that could be real bad fucking news in the hands of a hack
like Peter Cohen (writer/director/motherfucker of Whipped) is
laugh-out loud good here, like Stiller supplying a cat with a
spray-painted tail and seting a hand-crafted gazebo on fire.
The cast is damn good, too, which is surprising because it
includes Ben Stiller. There's no Jim Carrey mugging, screaming,
or high-volume fart jokes. It stays consistently low-key and
underplayed, like the cast actually knew they were working with
funny shit and didn't feel desperate.
I usually would rather have my fat manic-depressive neighbor
Bert hold me down and put his hands down my pants than watch
Stiller mope his way through a movie. Here at least, Stiller's
given up on the annoying ham he perfected when he was trying
to be a serious actor. An added bonus is that there are no scenes
of him boning chicks doggy-style, which I was beginning to think
was his trademark.
De Niro gives the best performance, though, and it's because
he's relaxed. His previous attempts at humor have been about
as funny as finding a bleeding cyst in your armpit. His protective
and suspicious father plays off the slightly insane men he has
always played.
The women in the movie are treated like shit. Screenwriters
are mostly men who can't get dates, let alone find a woman to
fuck them for free, and they have no idea what ladies are like.
So, they write women based on what they learn in a grocery store
check-out line. In their world, good, smart women are the pretty-in-an-unthreatening-way
ones on the cover of Ladies Home Journal and hot, dumb bad women
look like those on the cover of Cosmopolitan. This movie is stock
full of the Ladies Home Journal type. Polo is a kindergartner
teacher, but that's all we know about her, and all she gets to
do is speak in exposition and then step aside to let the men
have the punchlines. Why can't Polo be angry, or a drunk, or
a thief, like the chicks on Low Rider? I can relate to them.
The mother is less interesting than a CBS sitcom. If she's lived
with a slightly insane CIA agent for 34 years, wouldn't she be
scared shitless of him, or be slightly insane and cruel herself?
Like so many comedies, Meet the Parents can't deliver on the
comedic setup and the ending is dull. When there's a half-hour
left, it stops being funny so that those grass-fuckers in Hollywood
can patch everyone up and deliver a bullshit happy ending. What
the fuck is wrong with keeping things a little messy? I mean,
my life is a fucking mess, but I'm still happy, so why can't
movies end the same way, especially if it means the movie ends
funny instead of sappy? Show some fucking balls, Hollywood.
Three fingers for Meet the Parents, an amusing comedy
only hampered by Hollywood's fear of women and unhappiness.
So, I'm looking for a job. I think I want to work in a video
store where I can make a positive impact on society by making
fun of the assholes who rent Adam Sandler movies and convince
confused people to get good shit. If anyone wants me to work
in their video store in the Denver area e-mail
me. I want to make $7 an hour (fuck it, I figure ask for
a lot and go down if they say no). And no Blockbusters or other
shitty stores that don't carry pornos and good movies.
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