Your Movie Sucks

Roger Ebert

• Verlag: Andrews McMeel Publishing, LLC
• Jahr: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780740792151
• Thema: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Thema: Film e video

A collection of some of the Pulitzer Prize–winning film critic's most scathing reviews, from Alex & Emma to the remake of Yours, Mine, and Ours. From Roger's review of Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo (0 stars): "The movie created a spot of controversy in February 2005. According to a story by Larry Carroll of MTV News, Rob Schneider took offense when Patrick Goldstein of the Los Angeles Times listed this year's Best Picture nominees and wrote that they were 'ignored, unloved, and turned down flat by most of the same studios that... bankroll hundreds of sequels, including a follow-up to Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo, a film that was sadly overlooked at Oscar time because apparently nobody had the foresight to invent a category for Best Running Penis Joke Delivered by a Third-Rate Comic.' Schneider retaliated by attacking Goldstein in full-page ads in Daily Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. In an open letter to Goldstein, Schneider wrote: "Well, Mr. Goldstein, I decided to do some research to find out what awards you have won. I went online and found that you have won nothing. Absolutely nothing. No journalistic awards of any kind.... Maybe you didn't win a Pulitzer Prize because they haven't invented a category for Best Third-Rate, Unfunny Pompous Reporter Who's Never Been Acknowledged by His Peers...." Schneider was nominated for a 2000 Razzie Award for Worst Supporting Actor but lost to Jar-Jar Binks. But Schneider is correct, and Patrick Goldstein has not yet won a Pulitzer Prize. Therefore, Goldstein is not qualified to complain that Columbia financed Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo while passing on the opportunity to participate in Million Dollar Baby, Ray, The Aviator, Sideways, and Finding Neverland. As chance would have it, I have won the Pulitzer Prize, and so I am qualified. Speaking in my official capacity as a Pulitzer Prize winner, Mr. Schneider, your movie sucks." Roger Ebert's I Hated Hated Hated This Movie, which gathered some of his most scathing reviews, was a bestseller. This collection continues the tradition, reviewing not only movies that were at the bottom of the barrel, but also movies that he found underneath the barrel.

S

Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic

(DIRECTED BY LIAM LYNCH; STARRING SARAH SILVERMAN, LA’VIN KIYANO; 2005)

Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic is a movie that filled me with an urgent desire to see Sarah Silverman in a different movie. I liked everything about it except the writing, the direction, the editing, and the lack of a parent or adult guardian. There should have been somebody to stand up sadly after the first screening and say: “Sarah, honey, this isn’t the movie you want people to see. Your material needs a lot of work; the musical scenes are deadly, except for the first one. And it looks like it was edited by someone fooling around with iMovie on a borrowed Mac.”

Apparently the only person capable of telling Sarah Silverman such things is Sarah Silverman, and she obviously did not. Maybe the scene of her kissing herself in the mirror provides a clue. The result is a film that is going to make it hard to get people to come to the second Sarah Silverman film. Too bad, because Silverman is smart and funny and blindsides you with unexpected U-turns. She could be the instrument for abrasive and transgressive humor that would slice through the comedy club crap. But here, she isn’t.

You have seen her before. She started on Saturday Night Live and has been in fifteen movies and a lot of TV shows. She’s tall, brunette, and good-looking, and she says shocking things with the precise enunciation and poise of a girl who was brought up knowing how to make a good impression. The disconnect between what she says and how she says it is part of the effect. If she were crass and vulgar, her material would be insupportable: If you’re going to use cancer, AIDS, and 9/11 as punch lines, you’d better know how to get the permission of the audience. She does it by seeming to be too well bred to realize what she’s saying. She’s always correcting herself. When she uses the word retards she immediately registers that it’s non-PC and elaborates: “When I say ‘retards,’ I mean they can do anything.”

So that’s one of her lines. It would be a cheap shot for me to quote a dozen more, and do her act here in the review. Better to stand back and see why she’s funny, but the movie doesn’t work. The first problem is with timing. None of her riffs go on long enough to build. She gets a laugh, and then another one, maybe a third, and then she starts in a different direction. We want her to keep on, piling one offense on top of another. We want to see her on a roll.

That’s in the concert documentary parts of the movie. She stands on a stage and does the material and there are cuts to the audience, but curiously not much of a connection; it doesn’t seem to be this audience at this performance, but a generic audience. Then she cuts away from the doc stuff to little sketches. The first one, in which her sister (Laura Silverman) and her friend (Brian Posehn) brag about their recent accomplishments, is funny because she perfectly plays someone who has never accomplished anything and never will, and lies about it. Then we see her in a car, singing a song about getting a job and doing a show, and then she does a show. Fair enough.

But what’s with the scene where she entertains the old folks at her grandma’s rest home by singing a song telling them they will all die, soon? She is rescued by the apparent oblivion of the old folks, who seem so disconnected she could be working in blue screen. Then there’s the scene where she angrily shakes the corpse of her grandmother in its casket. Here is a bulletin from the real world: Something like that is not intrinsically funny. Yes, you can probably find a way to set it up and write it to make it funny, but to simply do it, just plain do it, is pathetic. The audience, which has been laughing, grows watchful and sad.

To discuss the film’s editing rhythm is to suggest it has one. There are artless and abrupt cuts between different kinds of material. She’s on the stage, and then she’s at the nursing home. There is a way to make that transition, but it doesn’t involve a cut that feels like she was interrupted in the middle of something. And the ending comes abruptly, without any kind of acceleration and triumph in the material. Her act feels cut off at the knees. The running time, seventy minutes including end credits, is interesting, since if you subtract the offstage scenes that means we see less of her than a live audience would.

Now if Silverman had been ungifted or her material had lacked all humor, I would maybe not have bothered with a review. Why kick a movie when it’s down? But she has a real talent, and she is sometimes very funny in a way that is particularly her own. Now she needs to work with a writer (not to provide the material but to shape and pace it), and a director who can build a scene, and an editor who can get her out of it, and a producer who can provide wise counsel.

On the basis of this movie, it will be her first exposure as a filmmaker to anyone like that.

Saving Silverman

(DIRECTED BY DENNIS DUGAN; STARRING JASON BIGGS, STEVE ZAHN; 2001)

Saving Silverman is so bad in so many different ways that perhaps you should see it as an example of the lowest slopes of the bell-shaped curve. This is the kind of movie that gives even its defenders fits of desperation.

Consider my friend James Berardinelli, the best of the Web-based critics. No doubt ten days of oxygen deprivation at the Sundance Film Festival helped inspire his three-star review, in which he reports optimistically, “Saving Silverman has its share of pratfalls and slapstick moments, but there’s almost no flatulence.” Here’s a critical rule of thumb: You know you’re in trouble when you’re reduced to praising a movie for its absence of fart jokes, and have to add almost.

The movie is a male-bonding comedy in which three friends since grade school, now allegedly in their early twenties but looking in two cases suspiciously weathered for anyone under a hard-living thirty-two, are threatened by a romance. Darren Silverman (Jason Biggs), Wayne Le Fessier (Steve Zahn), and J. D. McNugent (Jack Black) grew up together sharing a common passion for the works of Neil Diamond; their sidewalk band, the Diamonds, performs his songs and then passes the hat.

The band is broken up, alas, when Darren is captured by Judith Snodgrass-Fessbeggler (Amanda Peet), a blond man-eater who immediately bans his friends and starts transforming him into a broken and tamed possession. “He’s my puppet and I’m his puppet master!” she declares, proving that she is unfamiliar with the word mistress, which does not come as a surprise. In a movie so desperately in need of laughs, it’s a mystery why the filmmakers didn’t drag Ms. Snodgrass-Fessbeggler’s parents onstage long enough to explain their decision to go with the hyphenated last name.

Wayne and J. D. concoct a desperate scheme to save Darren from marriage. They kidnap Judith, convince Darren she is dead, and arrange for him to meet the original love of his life, Sandy Perkus (Amanda Detmer), who is now studying to be a nun. She hasn’t yet taken her vows, especially the one of chastity, and is a major babe in her form-fitting novice’s habit.

I was going to write that the funniest character in the movie is the boys’ former high school coach (R. Lee Ermey, a former marine drill sergeant). It would be more accurate to say the same character would be funny in another movie, but is stopped cold by this one, even though the screenplay tries. (When the boys ask Coach what to do with the kidnapped Judith, he replies, “Kill her.”)

The lads don’t idolize Neil Diamond merely in theory, but in the flesh, as well. Yes, Diamond himself appears in the film, kids himself, and sings a couple of songs. As a career decision, this ranks somewhere between being a good sport and professional suicide. Perhaps he should have reflected that the director, Dennis Dugan, has directed two Adam Sandler movies (both, it must be said, better than this).

Saving Silverman is Jason Biggs’s fourth appearance in a row in a dumb sex comedy (in descending order of quality, they are American Pie, Boys and Girls, and Loser). It is time for him to strike out in a new direction; the announcement that he will appear in American Pie II does not seem to promise that.

Steve Zahn and Jack Black are, in the right movies, splendid comedy actors; Zahn was wonderful in Happy, Texas, and Jack Black stole his scenes in High Fidelity and Jesus’ Son. Here they have approximately the charm of Wilson, the soccer ball. Amanda Peet and Amanda Detmer do no harm, although Peet is too nice to play a woman this mean. Lee Ermey is on a planet of his own. As for Neil Diamond, Saving Silverman is his first appearance in a fiction film since The Jazz Singer (1980), and one can only marvel that he waited twenty years to appear in a second film, and found one even worse than his first one.

Say It Isn’t So

(DIRECTED BY JAMES B. ROGERS; STARRING CHRIS KLEIN, HEATHER GRAHAM; 2001)

Comedy characters can’t be successfully embarrassed for more than a few seconds at a time. Even then, it’s best if they don’t know what they’ve done wrong—if the joke’s on them, and they don’t get it. The “hair gel” scenes in There’s Something About Mary are a classic example of embarrassment done right. Say It Isn’t So, on the other hand, keeps a character embarrassed in scene after scene, until he becomes an … embarrassment. The movie doesn’t understand that embarrassment comes in a sudden painful flush of realization; drag it out, and it’s not embarrassment anymore, but public humiliation, which is a different condition, and not funny.

The movie stars Heather Graham and Chris Klein as Jo and Gilly, a hairdresser and a dogcatcher who fall deeply in love and then discover they are brother and sister. Jo flees town to marry a millionaire jerk. Gilly lingers behind in public disgrace until he discovers they are not related after all. But since Jo’s family wants her to marry the rich guy, everybody conspires to keep Gilly away. The movie tries for a long-running gag based on the fact that everybody in town mocks Gilly because he slept with his alleged sister. They even write rude remarks in the dust on his truck. This is not funny but merely repetitive.

The movie was produced by the Farrelly brothers, who in There’s Something About Mary and Kingpin showed a finer understanding of the mechanics of comedy than they do here. Say It Isn’t So was directed by James B. Rogers from a screenplay by Peter Gaulke and Gerry Swallow, who show they are students of Farrellyism but not yet graduates. They include obligatory elements like physical handicaps, sexual miscalculations, intestinal difficulties, and weird things done to animals, but few of the gags really work. They know the words but not the music.

Consider a scene in which Chris Klein, as Gilly, punches a cow and his arm becomes lodged in just that portion of the cow’s anatomy where both Gilly and the cow would least hope to find it. I can understand intellectually that this could be funny. But to be funny, the character would have to have a great deal invested in not appearing like the kind of doofus who would pull such a stunt. Gilly has been established as such a simpleton he has nothing to lose. The cow scene is simply one more cross for him to bear. There is in the movie a legless pilot (Orlando Jones) who prides himself on his heroic aerial abilities. If he had gotten stuck in the cow and been pulled legless down the street—now that would have been funny. Tasteless, yes, and cruel. But not tiresome.

That leads us to another of the movie’s miscalculations. Its characters are not smart enough to be properly embarrassed. To be Jo or Gilly is already to be beyond embarrassment, since they wake up already clueless. The genius of There’s Something About Mary and Kingpin was that the characters played by Ben Stiller and Woody Harrelson were smart, clever, played the angles—and still got disgraced. To pick on Gilly and Jo is like shooting fish in a barrel.

Chris Klein’s character seems like someone who never gets the joke, who keeps smiling bravely as if everyone can’t be laughing at him. We feel sorry for him, which is fatal for a comedy. Better a sharp, edgy character who deserves his comeuppance. Heather Graham’s Jo, whose principal character trait is a push-up bra, isn’t really engaged by the plot at all, but is pushed hither and yon by the winds of fate.

That leaves three characters who are funny a lot of the time: Jo’s parents, Valdine and Walter Wingfield (Sally Field and Richard Jenkins), and Dig McCaffey (Orlando Jones), the legless pilot. Valdine is a scheming, money-grubbing con woman who conceals from Gilly the fact that she is not his mother, so that Jo can marry the millionaire. And Walter is her terminally ill husband, communicating through ...