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Sunday, January 27, 2008

Meet the Morons

I know how and why movies like this keep getting made, and I have an unfortunate jones for Carmen Electra at times, but shit, each one of these stupid pop-culture parody movies looks more unwatchable than the last. I guess if I was a dippy teenager trying to get laid I could sit through maybe half of one of these things, but unless Law & Order is lying to me, you can get a blowjob pretty much any time you go to the mall.

Update: God, it sounds even more dismal, if that's possible, than I had assumed:

As Bryan Curtis has pointed out in Slate, the spoofs of Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker—the team behind Airplane! and The Naked Gun—are characterized by their facility with the tone and detail work of genre films and their genius combination of straight-faced B-movie actors with lowbrow punch lines and sight gags. Friedberg and Seltzer, rather than tweak the clichés of the movies they parody, take a NOW: That's What I Call Movies! approach, using farts and leather underwear to not-critique a collection of pre-chewed moments from recent blockbusters. In Meet the Spartans, the mere act of referring to Transformers, Happy Feet, Spider-Man 3, Ghost Rider, Rocky Balboa, Stomp the Yard, Shrek, Lindsay Lohan, Kevin Federline, or Deal or No Deal is presumed to be hilarious. (If you'll indulge me for a second, I will pause to crack up Friedberg and Seltzer: "Paris Hilton.")


That's pretty much what it appears to be from the incessant commercials, but it's additionally lame that not only is this cheap pastiche nearly as short (64 minutes) as the shelf-life of its pop-culture references, but one of the commercial's big sight-gags (Spider-Man yanking Donald Trump's toupée) is actually part of the closing credits. That's fucking weak. Not that anyone was figuring it to be a crucial part of the narrative, but shit, why not just do a skit-driven compilation, à la Kentucky Fried Movie? The capital of Nebraska is still Lincoln.

Spoof movies can still be inventive and genuinely funny, as shown by Hot Fuzz and Walk Hard. But this sort of shit is just a pissant toss-off, like Pee Diddly fucking up Kashmir by remixing the drums and going "yeeeaah, yo, come on now" throughout. Motherfuckers get their hands chopped off in Saudi Arabia for that kinda shit. They sure as hell shouldn't make money from it.

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