Thursday, September 14, 2006

Date Movie (2006)

I know that, by now, taking this film to task is a total barrel-fish situation... but goddamn, if there were any fish begging to get a bullet in the brain, it's the two flounders who (dis)graced the world with this woebegone waste of celluloid. The situation is dire before we've even gotten past the credits, with a whole raft of awful fat jokes leading into a lengthy parody of some viral video that was spoofed better in twenty seconds at the end of Dodgeball, but it only take about seven minutes to descend into cinematic Hell, when it tries to satirize a comedy (My Big Fat Greek Wedding) that was terrible to begin with and in the effort manages to come out even worse. The successful parodies that have emerged in the wake of Airplane! were funny because they were poking fun at the ridiculousness of the cliches in serious genres; here, we have an unfunny movie making mockery of other unfunny movies. Seriously, how the fuck do you parody something like Meet the Fockers, a movie so desperately inane that it damn near turns into a parody of itself? Apparently, all you do is replace Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand with Fred Willard and Jennifer Coolidge. And if there's anything more unbearable than Barbra Streisand in Meet the Fockers, it's Jennifer Coolidge channeling Barbra Streisand in Meet the Fockers. Eventually, the filmmakers get so hard up for laughs that they attempt to parody films that the target audience likely hasn't seen (Rize? What the fuck?) and bust out with things that aren't even jokes in concept (i.e. the scene where Alysson Hannigan and that boring British guy, apropos of nothing, beat up a bum). So over all, this is a crass, lazy and depressing film that wastes the fetching Ms. Hannigan in ways that shouldn't be possible, not that you're surprised. I think the final word on this film's utter incompetence stems from, believe it or not, the soundtrack listing: I sat through the credits because I swore during an early scene that I was hearing the distinctive nasal flow of Mr. Lif, and I wasn't mistaken -- the songs listed at the end include "Party Hard" by Lif and Akrobatik's group The Perceptionists. Which is misspelled as 'Percetionists.'

Grade: F

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