Eurotrip (2004)

There’s something fundamentally odd about the teen-sex-comedy, if not for nothing simply because the phrase teen-sex-comedy describes an entire genre that was for a time staggeringly popular, and not a few weird movies that will only show up on bootleg VHS tapes from the 90s. But the teen-sex-comedy did indeed dominate the late 90s and early 00s, beginning with the seminal American Pie and spawning many many imitators, of which at the time Eurotrip was easily dismissed as just another example of the somewhat puerile genre.

I think it’s fairly obvious where this is going.

I like Eurotrip, and I think it’s better than a lot of the other imitators, and frankly I prefer it to American Pie, if for no other reason than that gross-out comedy was never that funny to me. There’s several things about this particular movie that I think elevate it, but at the most basic I think this movie displays some heart that just wasn’t present in many of the other teen sex comedies of the era. This combined with a fun plot and an approach to comedy more reminiscent of a movie like Airplane gives it an edge that still holds up today.

Let’s address the first part of the teen sex comedy. Teen. This movie features (supposed) teenagers, or at least characters who are teenagers. It’s a classic high school setup, where the teens in question are trying to respectively find true love (Scott, our protagonist), get laid (Cooper, best friend), enjoy Europe (Jamie, nerd), and motives uncertain until the end (Jenny, the girl). Unfortunately for Scott the object of his affections is in Germany and has blocked his e-mails due to a misunderstanding where he thought she was a man trying to do odd sex things to him (maybe a little iffy, but it’s actually not directly homophobic and is certainly a lot better than the other movies of the day.) Thus begins our European odyssey where the Americans culturally clash with just about everything they meet along the way. And the teens are good in this film. They actually do feel like teenagers and react as teenagers might. The idea of dropping everything to fly to Europe in order to pursue a potential true love is something that just doesn’t work as well with adults to my mind but teenagers can still have that naïve optimism and it feels natural and right. They also plan very badly and don’t do a great job of their continental trip, which also feels very in keeping.

Now onto the sex part. Eurotrip scores some points for me over other films by having a fun approach to sex, by which I mean it treats it as a fun thing, not the be all and end all of a teenager’s existence (looking at you American Pie.) Discussing sex scenes in movies can often end up feeling quite clinical but I think Eurotrip does a lot with the rating it has and makes the most of it to provide a collection of nudity and sex that manages to feel plot relevant without being completely gratuitous, or at least not more gratuitous than simply having a teen sex comedy at all. Sex in movies should always be in aid of the plot, not just thrown in for titillation, and I really think Eurotrip manages to keep it mostly relevant, and even has some naked guys in there, so kudos for some measure of equality at least.

And finally, comedy. The hardest and most subjective thing to write about. Eurotrip’s approach is as I mentioned earlier closer to my mind to the older style of comedies such as Airplane rather than other teen sex comedies of the 2000s. it relies on a lot of sight gags, quick humour passing by so fast that if you don’t find one joke funny the next one will hit in a minute so you don’t have to wait too long. The humour is denser and wackier than a lot of other teen sex comedies (tscs? I’m getting bored of typing it out fully every time) which are often more grounded in reality. Eurotrip gets a lot of mileage out of cultural stereotype humour, but it does so in a very lighthearted way that I can’t see anything malicious in. They make enough fun of everyone, including Americans, without it ever being mean spirited enough to come across as hateful. English football hooligans, snobby French people, hard-living Eastern Europeans, but all carried across with an attitude of gentle ribbing, not attack. The only joke for me that falls flat today is Cooper’s sexual assault halfway through the movie, which does have some quite unpleasant undertones in hindsight.

In the end the explosion of the teen sex comedy is obvious. VHS tapes gave movies an opportunity to make their budgets back through sales and rentals after the cinema release, and an easy way to guarantee sales and rentals is to appeal to a crowd that would love to get their hands on images of naked women with a veneer of acceptability in that you’re watching a movie with a plot rather than just getting a porno vid or a girly magazine. It was a unique phenomenon that could only have existed in that brief window between VHS rental becoming popular but before the internet truly took hold. We will likely never see anything like it again, although some Netflix films certainly seem to have a little of that old spirit of cheaper budgeted movies designed to do anything to get people to watch. In the end the majority of the films from that era will be consigned to the trash heap of history as churned out borderline softcore porn with the thinnest plot stretched between the nude scenes and a focus on cheap thrills. Eurotrip is not that, and whether you have enough nostalgia for the old days of the teen sex comedy, want a time capsule look into a curious moment in cinema, or just want to enjoy a well-balanced, neatly paced, well-acted film with good comedy and some funny sexy content then Eurotrip still holds up far better today than most of the rest of its ilk.

Enchanted (2007) – Review

God I’m a sucker for a happy ending.

Enchanted is an interesting movie to review because it manages to fall into two categories, both of which make me enjoy it. The first is that I find it a genuinely good movie. it’s fun and it lampoons a lot of tropes while never getting overly meanspirited about it and managing to still have a sweet and engaging love story between characters who have real chemistry and feel natural together. At the same time though it holds the same appeal as movies like Alien 3, in which I can see the other movie that it nearly was still shining through, which is almost more interesting for the road not taken.

Enchanted began life as a far more pointed and satirical strike against Disney movies, specifically the princess films. And while some of this more adult theming comes through in certain scenes, a lot of it has been rather dialled back and sanitised for a younger crowd, not necessarily to the movie’s detriment, but it might have been good to see how this darker fantasy would have played out. For example one scene that just barely managed to slip by the censors comes from the moment when Giselle first experiences anger, then very swiftly transitions into another emotion when faced with Robert wearing a bathrobe. It seems very obvious that in the original script this would have been the scene where they first slept together. And in the original movie this would have thrown up a lot of interesting questions. A princess like Giselle from a Disney movie might obviously have no understanding of sex, and indeed can seem childlike in a lot of ways. So what would sleeping with her at this point in the movie have led to? For one thing it would have made Robert far less sympathetic as he would have been actively cheating on his fiancé, but also would Giselle’s childish nature have been accommodated for? A dark question yes, but not entirely unreasonable.

There is of course no way to reconcile these two different movies completely. This is only one example, but there are more. Nancy getting upset about the ‘grown up girl bonding time’ and much of the Giselle’s introduction to Manhattan were obviously much darker in the original film, and given how early those scenes are in the film it is impossible to know how much they would have changed the eventual outcome. The more interesting question to ask might be whether the darker story would genuinely have been a better one. This movie was criticised at the time for not going far enough, and for skewering tropes that were either already old hat, or had never really existed in the first place. You can criticise it also for being hypocritical, trying to lampshade these tropes while at the same time serving up a fairly generic love story between a fish out of water girl and an only sane man type trying to deal with her.

But the issue with making this movie darker is that it runs the risk of becoming something very unpleasant. To take some examples already mentioned. Giselle in Manhattan could have been mugged and potentially assaulted. That crosses a line out of parody and satire and into something very dark. It removes any potential comedy from the moment. Robert could have slept with Giselle and her childlike nature would have made for some incredibly disturbing implications either rendering him into something of a predator or turning that moment of the movie into an abrupt loss of innocence narrative. And what exactly would the movie gain from this? There’s black comedy yes, but to try and jam it up against a Disney movie would probably end up ruining both, and not for nothing leave this movie with a very very small audience. I’m not saying that you can’t have a very dark take on Disney princesses, and that it could very well work by transplanting a Disney princess into the real world and seeing how she fares, but the simple fact is that the story that gets told that way has to be utterly divorced from the idea of doing a Disney movie. if you want to make a bleak hopeless tale about a Disney princess who came to the real world and got utterly crushed by it, destroyed by her lack of understanding and inability to connect with real people then by all means get to it, but I can’t imagine that movie being much fun.

I like the movie that Enchanted is. It knows when to poke fun and it knows when to laugh at some of the wilder aspects of Disney princesses but it also understands that you can occasionally just make a gentle parody rather than needing everything to be jammed so far up itself in deconstructing every little facet. Match that with some genuinely standout performances from all of the main cast and a really wonderful song in That’s How You Know’ and you have a really solid parody movie. one that doesn’t need to get nasty about the subject matter in order to still make fun of it. Which is why Enchanted will also be more likely to stand the test of time in the end. Any excessively dark movie runs the risk of falling deep into audience apathy or distaste, and while the zeitgeist for a time might be against a particular style of genre, sooner or later people always end up rediscovering at least some of the charms of a previous era, when it’s not being so endlessly pushed in front of them. And that’s why a gentle mocking tone paired with actual heart and divorced from nastiness will always win out in the end.

Dodgeball (2004) – Review

I love this movie. I love love love this movie. I want to marry this movie and have its children and live with it in a big house where all of our little mutant half human half movie babies can run around and enjoy themselves in the sun, making jokes about balls and being generally adorable.

Woops, kind of nailed my colours to the mast there on this review. Now what am I going to talk about for another seven hundred words?

Well I could start with how this movie has one of the most immaculate grasps of physical comedy that I’ve ever seen. I don’t care how many well delivered quips and funny puns and insightful witticisms you can come up with to populate your bigger more critically acclaimed movies, nothing to my mind will ever be so funny as the following sequence.

Patches O’Hoolihan: If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball.

Justin: What?

Patches O’Hoolian hurls a wrench at Justin who collapses writhing to the floor for the next minute.

This is a movie that would be made or broken on the strength of its physical comedy, and there is not a single actor who doesn’t commit 110% to the comedy, throwing themselves about with wild abandon in the dodgeball scenes, but equally committing to the rest of the film, such as Ben Stiller’s constant over the top arm motions all throughout, or Vince Vaughan’s utter unflappable nature. It’s a masterclass in how to use physicality to bring across character and simultaneously laughter. At no point does anyone need to do anything outside of character in order to get the laughs, the characters are the centre of that humour.

The writing is on point as well, propping up the physical laughs with some utterly hilarious jokes. They make a good wide range of comedy as well, never relying too much on any one style of humour or joke in order to be funny. They range from the simple innuendo laden quips (time to put your mouth where our balls are) to the wild surrealist statements (anything Pepper and Cotton say as commentary). It’s rare to find a movie that so perfectly blends physical pratfall style comedy with some pretty sharp witticisms but this movie does it very well. And then of course there’s the simple humour of unnecessary repetition (the American Dodgeball Association of America; Dodge, Duck, Dip, Dive and Dodge). It hits a lot of comedy bases all throughout.

And the last thing I’d highlight as a real positive of Dodgeball is that it has a good deal ore heart than a lot of other comedies of this style and era. To me that is always the thing that makes them stand the test of time and it’s why Dodgeball has a lot more staying power than other similar but lesser movies. There are small moments of positivity in here amongst all the ball gags an it really adds something. The Average Joes and Peter actually never particularly engage in physical appearance related bullying or negativity, and promote a generally healthy and positive attitude towards personal fitness, in contrast to the villain treating personal fitness as a measure of a person’s worth. We also see the head cheerleader being attracted to and liking the nerdy weakling with no hint of irony or playing it for a laugh, she just likes him and that’s ok. The final speech of the movie (before White Goodman’s ending comments) sums up any message Dodgeball might have quite nicely. It’s ok to be an average guy, as long as you like yourself and you’ve got heart.

Contrary to my opening statements Dodgeball is not my favourite comedy movie ever, nor do I honestly think it’s the best comedy film ever. But it has so much going for it that I would still highly recommend it today. Are there a few jokes that might rile some people up the wrong way? Almost certainly. Are there some jokes that won’t land as well today as they might have done? Of course, that’s just the nature of the progression of time. Is there at least one cameo appearance that has become either even funnier or really bad as time as passed? Ooh boy yes. But for a dumb movie about a group of grown men playing Dodgeball, there’s a surprising amount of genuine emotion and thought that was put into what could have just been another disposable pun machine.

Despicable Me (2010) – Review

Rewatching this film the first thing that strikes me is how little the minions are in it and how little they do. It’s honestly surprising because given how all encompassing the little yellow buggers have become you’d expect them to be all over this film, churning out unfunny gags that give beleaguered parents something that almost resembles the humour and comedy they used to enjoy before their life became an endless parade of cutesy CGI and cartoon characters chirping in high pitched voices every waking second of their lives driving them slowly into an unending spiral of madness and despair where they aren’t sure anymore of where the boundaries between reality and Fireman Sam lie.

I had a point with this…

Oh yeah. Despicable Me series is now known as ‘the minions movies’ and will deserve its place in hell for all eternity for introducing that pop cultural polyp to the world. But I’m actually here to stand in defence of this first movie. Because despite it introducing the minions it actually still stands up as a pretty good family movie, on par with a Disney or Pixar film in a lot of ways.

For starters, the story is pretty good. Decently plotted, well paced, nice climactic resolutions that tie into central themes and narratives of family that are non-traditional and all the stronger for it. I’m a sucker for anything that doesn’t over-stress blood relation as being the be all and end all of family, and this movie doesn’t hint even for a second that the lack of blood connection between Gru and the girls makes their relationship any less real. It’s a powerful and important narrative that many movies could stand to take to heart, even more supposedly grown up movies that seem to think that a woman’s vagina is a magical artefact that imbues a sense of connection between two otherwise unrelated people.

The characters are strong too. We don’t actually spend a whole lot of time developing the girls, the movie more in favour of Gru’s development, but we see enough of the children to know who they are, and that characterisation remains consistent throughout the film. The supporting cast are similarly strong, with Dr Nefario and Vector both sitting very comfortably in their roles and the minor characters of Gru’s mother and Mr Perkins filling out some nice if somewhat stereotypical roles. But it’s an important lesson for writers that tropes and even stereotypes are not always bad. They can in fact be very helpful for setting up another character’s relationship with that stereotype or trope. And sometimes they just act as nice simple shorthand so you don’t have to waste valuable screentime developing a character who doesn’t have such a plot critical role.

Gru is an interesting one. His arc is a little derivative yes, but it’s all played so well that you almost forget that. And most intriguingly he doesn’t actually abandon his scheme for the girls (although he might have wanted to) he does succeed in getting the moon as he intended. It’s a refreshing change of pace to show the moment of revelation that he isn’t satisfied coming after, rather than before, such a pivotal moment. Everything about him is just very sincere, and that carries the movie very well. Of course a lot of this is also on the animators for making Gru such a big and engaging presence and Steve Carrell for his excellent voice work.

And then you’ve got the minions. Clinging to this movie and demanding they be talked about. So let’s talk about the minions. In this first movie they are no worse than any Disney animal sidekick or the Ewoks or any other cutesy mascot added to a kid’s movie to hawk some toys. It’s actually hard to really analyse them in this film because there’s so little to them. They could be excised completely without much changing, or replaced with a single human assistant running around and nothing much would change. It’s obvious they were designed to be the toy-selling mascot, but in this first film they don’t completely overstay their welcome and they don’t take up so much time with their unfunny bit humour that they detract from the main plot or the other characters and their development. Simply put, the minions in the first film aren’t that bad. Much like a suspicious mole that later turned out to be a sign of metastasised lung cancer.

Despicable Me is a good, fun, family movie that doesn’t try and beat you over the head with their unfunny side characters and at its heart contains strong messages of family well supporting by a good script with genuine laughs and well rounded characters doing a good job at balancing between genuine heartfelt emotion and zany antics. And really, what more could you possibly ask from a movie?

Carry On Up the Khyber (1968) – Review

Uh, I watch it for the articles?

There’s something so painfully, awfully British about the Carry On films. They’re almost impossible to explain to anyone who didn’t grow up with that very particular brand of comedy. It’s so laced with a very particular British dryness and all out weirdness. This is truly an example of a movie that couldn’t be made today, and for a very good reason.

For me the Carry On films are the ultimate definition of a guilty pleasure. They’re utterly indefensible. If they’re not racist they’re sexist. If they’re not sexist they’re homophobic. The jokes which don’t rely on offensive stereotypes are puerile or cliché. Carry On Up the Khyber is by almost any objective measure probably one of the bottom five movies of my entire collection. But I can’t help but still smile at it.

It’s tempting to go the Blazing Saddles route here, to argue that the white characters are being made the butt of the jokes, which is true enough. But even if that were the case the brownface alone carries it past the point of tastelessness but maybe that’s actually why there’s still something intriguing about them? A movie which had these sorts of offensive jokes aimed at actual actors of colour would be horrifying, but when it’s Kenneth Williams with a heavy fake tan applied it somehow loops back round, maybe not out of being offensive but certainly towards something different? There is also the fact that the cultural stereotyping on display isn’t even really confined to a particular culture. They’re not making fun of Indians or black people or really any specific group, there’s just ‘foreign’ and ‘British.’ Is that any better? I want to say it isn’t, but this movie is so gleefully and fully down the rabbit hole of offensiveness that I have trouble even distinguishing right from wrong.

There are jokes which stand up without the need for bigotry in this movie. The sublime scene at the end of the movie where the British characters respond to an assault on their fort by sitting down to tea and not doing anything about it is by rights a classic British comedic scene. The general plot is also funny, of British soldiers being exposed as cowards specifically because they wear underwear underneath their kilts. It’s the sort of low brow ridiculousness that you can only carry by playing it straight. All throughout the movie the innuendo is almost non-stop. There’s barely a line out of anyone’s mouths that doesn’t reek of smut, yet stay entirely within PG-13 guidelines.

I actually first saw this movie when I was a child at boarding school. We used to have movies on the weekends and at some point this one got shown. I loved it then, and even as I get older I can’t help but still chuckle at it. It’s just so over the top that it bypasses the part of my brain that registers offensive things. Objectively I can look back at the movie I have just watched and be horrified at the outrageous accents and the brown face and the objectification of women, but it’s just so cheeky and light hearted. If it had been more vulgar, such as by having actual nudity or sex acts depicted, such as with the ‘confessions of a’ series of similar British Sex Comedies, then it would be too far. That would be offensive. But by toeing the line right up to the edge of PG it just about manages to somehow get away with it.

I can’t defend this movie, and I won’t. Don’t watch it, unless you’re trying to get a real sense of British film over the decades and want to see just how bad the Sex Comedies of the 60s and 70s could be. But for my personal money I will be keeping this one in the collection, even as other probably less offensive movies like Austin Powers get canned. Roger Ebert said ‘I may disapprove of a movie for going too far, and yet have a sneaky regard for a movie that goes much, much farther than merely too far.’ To me that sums up Carry On Up the Khyber about as well as anything can. If it hadn’t gone quite as bigotedly off the rails as it did then it would merely be consigned to the ash-heap of history as a relic of a bygone age, but it still just about manages to hold its own by plunging farther into the depths of bad taste than most other movies have ever gone.

Blazing Saddles (1974) – Review

‘Alright. What if Bugs Bunny was black, and a sheriff in the Old West?’

‘Well it’s a weird one Mel, but I guess if you think you’ve got a story…’

Blazing Saddles often gets cited (wrongly) as a movie that couldn’t get made nowadays because of the racial discussions it contains. Alternatively it is lauded (wrongly) by a certain demographic as a proper sort of ‘non-politically correct’ comedy. Apparently missing the part where all of the actual racists are simple farmers, people of the land, the common clay of the new West. Y’know. Morons.

The truth is that Blazing Saddles itself probably wouldn’t get made today, because thanks to Blazing Saddles and its effects on movies and movie making, it doesn’t need to be made today. It did its job. Well done Blazing Saddles, we all bask in the world that you lead to. In particular it led to two major changes that affected cinema for the better.

It led to the introduction of fart jokes into mainstream comedic movies. No, I’m not joking. Sure there had been perhaps one farting scene in a movie before, but this was a whole new deal. Blazing Saddles signature scene where a group of cowboys sit around a campfire and fart was as groundbreaking as it was wind breaking. Without the tireless work of those brave flatulent men we likely wouldn’t have such classics as American Pie, Austin Powers and I realise I’m starting to explain why it’s a bad thing that this scene made such changes, but trust me! We would all be in a diminished world of comedic movies had Blazing Saddles not included its farting cowboys. And yes it may seem quaint now, but doesn’t that speak to how well it achieved its goals? In that we now look back at it and think was there ever a time when a group of men cutting the cheese in such fashion was considered genuinely scandalous, but it was, and this movie finally opened the gates for a whole new wave of comedy.
It also kind of skewered the entire concept of white supremacy in 1974

It’s always hard with older films to truly explain and understand just how crazy they were at the time. As discussed in my Blade Runner review the originator of something can often become quaint due to its imitators in later films and Blazing Saddles is no different. We can look back from 2021 and see a film that has a bit of an issue with homophobia (not nearly so bad as some of the 90s fare I’ve already reviewed, but still) and has a few chuckle-worthy moments that to our fast paced comedy enjoying brains seem a little slow and spaced out today. But the fact is that Mel Brooks did a whole lot of that first, and he still did it in a way that raises a good few laughs from me.

If I had to highlight one particular genius of Mel Brooks’ comedy, it’s in the little moments. The small details that round out a scene that might pass you by in the first viewing. Small things like every town member in Rock Ridge having the surname ‘Johnson’ or the completely uncommented on medieval executioner in a Wild West city. I love an absurdist situation as much as the next guy, but it’s those little details that make it for me.

So now let’s address the gigantic white elephant taking up a supreme amount of this room. Is this movie racist? No. No it isn’t. Next question.

It takes the stereotypes of Western movies up to that point in time, that racism was something only practiced by the bad men of the west, and turns them on their head. Every white person in Blazing Saddles apart from the Waco Kid is racist. All racist all the time, no matter how ‘good’ or not they would be in a classic western. And that racism is run through the wringer in every direction. The white people are dumb, naïve, gullible morons so proudly convinced of their own supremacy even as they would willingly tear their own town apart simply to be saved from having a black sheriff. Cowards, thieves, murderers, all totally sure of their own wonderfulness.

Mel Brooks has a real talent for taking something out of the reach of those that practice it and making it and them so ridiculous that it becomes hard for them to argue against it. Neo-Nazis have managed to co-opt several classic anti-Nazi films, including American Gangster, Cabaret, Pink Floyd’s the Wall, yet none of them have ever even tried to co-opt the Producers. There’s just no way to make the Nazis in that film a good sell. Blazing Saddles isn’t quite as good at keeping itself out of the hands of racists, and for sure people are able to point at this film and try to claim it’s from a better, less PC time, but anyone who actually watches this ought to be coming away with the sure and certain knowledge that these racists are wrong about everything they believe. The jokes in this movie regarding race are firmly set against the white racists who make such comments and hold such assumptions, and that just plain wouldn’t work if they weren’t so horrendously racist to begin with. Toning down how awful their views and words are would make the hard hitting comedy hit a lot softer.

So if Blazing Saddles is actually not a racist movie, why wouldn’t it get made today? Well because a lot of the things that its skewering are not so commonplace in movies these days. The western was forced to evolve, in large part because of this movie, and begin to show a more nuanced view of the time period. You don’t need Blazing Saddles anymore because actual westerns are doing it right (or at least better) now.

Blazing Saddles is still well worth a watch, but it’s become a movie that’s a product of its time, and you’ll need a lot of knowledge of the movie and the era for it to still land quite as well. The Hedy Lamarr jokes (based on a once household name actress who has faded into obscurity) are a great example. Also the Native Americans being played by Jewish actors using Yiddish words, which seems offensive to modern tastes until you realise it’s riffing on the actual Hollywood tradition of having Jewish actors in blackface play Native Americans in westerns prior to Blazing Saddles. But the one thing that will never become less relevant is the all out attack on those who hold racist views, and consider themselves superior based on the colour of their skin.

Austin Powers: Goldmember (2002) – Review

I love Austin Powers: Goldmember! Best one of the trilogy!

Said no one ever.

Couldn’t resist, after saying I knew I wouldn’t like this one as much in my previous review.

It feels like I’m starting to beat a dead horse here but reviewing movies from the 90s and 00s really does come with an inherent problem of race and homophobia. And in this movie’s case it feels so needless. The first two movies got by just fine without leaning heavily into these sorts of offensive jokes, so why did this one have to get so deep into it? I’m hardly going to claim the first two were forward looking bastions of tolerance, but good god this one feels at least a decade out of date. It’s no surprise Mike Myers went on to the make the blatantly racist Love Guru after this, the signs were all there!

I’m going to get the positives for this movie out of the way fast, because it still does have some actually funny stuff in here. It’s just that getting to it through the sludge and slurry of the negative makes it not really worthwhile. Watch a ‘funniest moments’ compilation on YouTube if you really want to see them.

The ‘English English’ scene is hilarious. In fact a lot of what Nigel Powers says is funny. He’s a stand out bit of fun in this whole movie. The flash backs to Austin and Dr Evil’s school days are also pretty funny and well done, and could have been much better utilised. There are still a few laughs to be had from some of Dr Evil’s antics in general. It’s also funny in hindsight that Daniel Craig said his Bond had to more serious because the Austin Powers series had ruined the credibility of Bond, only for the most recent Bond film to use a plot point seriously that had been used as a joke in this film over 15 years earlier.

That’s about it. Now for the bad

They’ve basically given up on plot at this point. Travelling back in time is done largely for the sake of formula. The overly long gags now take up about half the film and they also seem to have abandoned the concept of starting out with something funny at all. These long gags are supposed to be funny purely because it’s a section that stops the plot and drags on for ages. The musical number returns from the second movie only even more pointless and this time with a side helping of offensive stereotyping. The characters are even more ridiculous and out there with nothing grounding them to reality and actual heart and soul. Even the attempts at the deeper moments of the previous movies with the father-son conflicts fall utterly flat given that no one feels like a real human being anymore. And this movie is definitely racist.

Yeah it’s hard not to address this particular elephant. Goldmember’s attitudes towards Japanese people just make me deeply uncomfortable. And while I get that Foxxy Cleopatra is supposed to be a reference to the 70s Blaxploitation movies, there’s something very uncomfortable about such a character having been so clearly written by white writers who might have got the structure and form of what those characters were, but they seem to have missed the memo on the underlying themes and social commentary those characters represented. And not for nothing the entire joke of the character Goldmember himself basically seems to be ‘he’s Dutch, isn’t that funny?’ Even his golden penis thing is less of a joke than his nationality.

Don’t watch Goldmember. It’s not worth it and it doesn’t hold up. If you’re going to rewatch Austin Powers for the nostalgia value, or because you’re interested in the history of some of the comedy tropes it helped to formalise, then just stick to the first two and you’ll have a much better time. There’s been talk for years of a fourth movie and frankly I’m opposed to that, especially after rewatching all three. The cracks were showing as early as Austin Powers 2, and then this movie came along to solidify the fact that ironically enough, Austin Powers should probably have stayed in the 90s.

Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999) – Review

Or: Why getting denser and wackier leads to your movie not holding up nearly so much.

The Spy Who Shagged Me definitely has some stand out moments and while watching it I will happily confess to laughing out loud at a couple of the jokes, but this is where the Austin Powers formula was already showing the strain. It wouldn’t reach the absolute depths until the third movie, but looking back this sequel makes it very clear as to why this wasn’t going to be a long running franchise.

The first major downside is the reliance on overly long gags. There were a couple of these in the first movie, but the second movie has several sequences which long overstay their welcome. This was actually a very common style of comedy in the late 90s and early 00s, of which Austin Powers was a genuine pioneer. The problem is that in retrospect this sort of cringe comedy, or making a joke out of how unfunny dragging a joke out can be, just wasn’t particularly funny. You can make a lot of people laugh simply out of awkwardness because they don’t quite know how to respond to an awkward situation, but it’s a far cry from a directly targeted joke that actually makes you laugh.

Another major downside is the increase in direct reference humour which can only become more and more dated as the years drag on. Dr Evil trying to make himself look ‘hip’ by doing a weird macarena in the first movie still holds up even without knowing how uncool the macarena became because a fumbling dad doing a cringey dance to try and be cool will always have an element of humour to it. Dr Evil going on an extended ‘show me the money’ reference binge, or singing a 3 minute song that breaks the pacing of the movie in half, just isn’t as funny.

Which leads neatly into another downside. The pacing has taken a major downturn. The first movie could hardly be accused of being heavy on plot, but in the grand tradition of Airplane, Ace Ventura 1 and many others, it had enough of a plot to hang the jokes onto, so that there was more going on than simply unconnected humour. This movie becomes a lot flimsier, and the characters becoming even less deep doesn’t help matters in the slightest.

Oh look, my next downside coming thick and fast. Austin Powers in the first movie had surprising depth. It wasn’t going to win any dramatic awards, but it still took the time to showcase how Austin’s fish out of temporal water status actually did have an effect on his mental health. Vanessa Kensington had layers as an uptight woman learning to have a little fun. Small things yes, but enough to give a movie just that little more heart. This movie has none of that. Any character conflicts are resolved in a second with no growth needed on any side. Felicity Shagwell is a far flatter character and Austin has become more cartoony as well. There’s also just a sense of everything being a bit more meanspirited as well, what with Vanessa Kensington’s being a fembot and then dying being glossed over so quickly. I get that it’s a comedy but frankly the first movie wouldn’t have had nastiness like that.

At this point reading this probably comes across like I don’t like this movie but I think it still just holds up. It’s not in retrospect as good as the first one, and probably there are now several jokes in the reference humour genre that will fall utterly flat to a more modern audience, and the overly long gag thing has become a relic of the past as well. But there are still genuine laugh out loud moments to be had, and the basic joke of the character and the premise hasn’t quite worn out its welcome yet.

In the long run, the most interesting thing I’ll take from rewatching Austin Powers is how my tastes have changed over the years, and how in general the tastes of the public can change such that a movie that was once considered a worthy sequel and perhaps even greater than the original can become lesser as the years wear on and cultural trends and tastes change. We have this general view that once something has been deemed ‘good’ or ‘bad’ it will by and large stay that way, especially if the judgement has been made by comparing it to another movie, often a sequel. While some movies will obviously eventually be dismissed due to certain attitudes being utterly unforgiveable a lot of movies are still largely held in the same sort of regard as they once were. While the Godfather might no longer be considered the greatest movie ever made, no one could sensibly argue it isn’t a fantastic film which broke ground in lots of ways. But rewatching Austin Powers, of all things, has taught me that sometimes my automatic assumptions as to whether I will enjoy something or not might just be brought into question.

Right, now onto a movie I know I won’t enjoy nearly so much as either of the previous two.

Anchorman (2004) – Review

A movie was seduced by the Dark Side of the Internet. It ceased to be Anchorman and became a meme. When that happened, the good man who was this movie was destroyed. Anchorman was a good friend. When I first knew him, the movie was already a great movie. But I was amazed how strongly the comedy was with him. He’s more meme now than movie. Twisted and evil.

In my previous review of Ace Ventura I said that there were three types of media. Those that were bad for their time, those that are of their time or fair for their time, and those that are ahead of their time. Anchorman is solidly a movie that is of its time. Already its former glory has begun to fade, and people of a new generation will no longer be able to watch it and know it as it was for people my age when it came out. It seems a bit odd looking back to think how much of a revelation Anchorman was at the time, just how much every single line would be quoted at some point during the school day. That strange halcyon time of the 00s where the comedic blockbuster reigned supreme. The days of Hangover, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, 40 Year Old Virgin, Dodgeball. A time when the raunchy explicit sex comedy of the 90s gave way to something that was almost as innuendo laden, but somehow felt just a little bit more mature and less toilet humour.

The 00s definitely launched several comedians into the stratosphere as A list celebrities. Many of the are in Anchorman in some form, as cameos or side characters, but no one can ever deny that this movie is Well Ferrell in perhaps his most iconic role. This movie oozes Will Ferrell from its every second of runtime and Will Ferrell milks it for all its worth. And is that really a bad thing? He’s a marmite comedian and actor really. If you like him, then you like this movie for it being nothing but him on full blast all the time, if you don’t like him, then you hate this movie as much as every other movie he’s ever appeared in. He’s definitely one to mug to camera and play it loud but he’s more restrained than a Carey, and even when he starts to get more blue everything stays comfortably within ‘a family with children over 13 could probably all watch this and not feel desperately uncomfortable’ which is more than can be said for the American Pies of the world.

So let’s talk about something else that cannot be understated when discussing Anchorman, it’s influence on the internet. Because it might not be too hyperbolic to say that Anchorman was for a time one of the single most quoted and memed movies on the entire internet, which is quite an impressive achievement. Even today you’ll still see the ‘that escalated quickly’ crop up from time to time, along with ‘I immediately regret this decision.’ And many of the memes became themselves memetic, which is perhaps even more impressive. You’ll often see quotes from the movie show up without the attached images, sending Anchorman right into the realms of a Seinfeld or a Lord of the Rings. So emulated and endlessly copied that when someone finally sees the real thing they might not even laugh, because what’s so funny about a movie that’s nothing but memes? They might never even realise that this is what started it all.

And in that way I do think that Anchorman deserves at least some praise for having such an impact on popular culture. Classic comedies really do cement a place in culture quite unlike anything else. Bugs Bunny single-handedly changed the meaning of the word Nimrod simply through sarcastic usage. Chandler Bing gave an entire generation of Gen X and Millenial television viewers a speech impediment. And Neil Patrick Harris’ contributions to a television culture will surely always be remembered as being legen…

Wait for it.

Does any of this make Anchorman a good film? I think it still stands up on its own as funny, but it probably has become a little bit too memetic to be properly enjoyed on its own merits these days. The temptations to point and laugh at a classic internet image will probably now detract from the actual humour of those moments. It’s an interesting problem to have. So impactful as to be remembered and repeated decades later, but no longer able to stand alone from the reputation surrounding it. A poignant commentary on the endlessly shifting nature of comedy and of life, as things shift and change, evolving into something new, much like the journey through which Ron and his associates must go, entering perhaps a better world, but leaving behind forever the comfortable and familiar surroundings of their youth.

-dary.

Airplane (1980) – Review

The greatest comedy film of all time.

Right, review done, next?

Surely you can’t be serious?

Alright alright I guess I can say a little more.

There are three genius parts to Airplane which make it stand head and shoulders above all other comedy movies.

The jokes very rarely or even never rely on punching down, making the movie stand the test of time in terms of changing social values and mores. Where other films (hi again Ace Ventura!) rely on easy-hitting for the time transphobic and homophobic jokes, Airplane never really stoops to that level. Sure there are a couple of jokes that might skirt damn close to the line (the jive talking black men spring immediately to the fore) but even there the joke isn’t a negative down punch on them for being jive talking black men. It’s a very subtle line, and a hard one to walk, and individual opinions will of course be divided as to whether certain jokes cross it or not, but I believe that the essence of a bigoted joke is that the joke is made at the expense of the person being joked about, whereas non-bigoted jokes are at the expense of the situation. The black men speaking jive isn’t funny because they are speaking jive, it’s funny because the subtitles render two friends having a conversation as rather antiquated ‘proper’ English. It isn’t funny that they speak jive, it’s that the stewardess doesn’t understand them, and the woman who does is a much older white lady, exactly the last person you’d expect to speak jive as well. I am happy to admit to being wrong about this one, and as I say opinions will differ, but I see a clear difference between this sort of joke and the Ace Ventura style of joke.
The jokes don’t rely on reference humour to be funny. Sure, there are references, and some of them are now hopelessly outdated, but with the exception of one or two very specific jokes (which we’ll get to later) the humour in them isn’t based on the reference. Did you know that the guy who gets into Ted Stryker’s taxi and waits the whole movie with the metre running was at the time a famous anti-taxation activist, renowned for being frugal, and thus an additional layer of comedy comes from a man who would be so unlikely to run up a meter doing just that? I bet most of your didn’t, but the joke still works because it’s funny when a guy waits hours in a taxi with the meter running. Did you know the soldier who thinks he’s Ethel Murmon was actually played by Ethel Murman? Well he was, but it’s funny even if he wasn’t. A lot of reference humour movies/shows of the last few decades base the entire joke around knowing the original reference, which is fine when the reference is fresh and new, but as they get older and fall out of public consciousness those jokes will fall flatter and flatter. Twenty years from now no kid will laugh at Princess Fiona doing a Matrix bullet-time kick in Shrek because they get the Matrix reference, but 20 years from now when Airplane is 60 years old ‘Don’t call me Shirley’ will still be as funny as it was in 1980.
Don’t like the last joke? There’s another one coming. Airplane was one of the first movies to properly embrace the incredibly fast paced style of humour in which there’s always something vaguely funny happening on scene at every second, even if the thing that’s funny is that everyone’s being completely serious. There isn’t a moment in Airplane that isn’t ridiculous, whether it’s an outright joke like the drinking problem, or a serious line being delivered with all the gravitas that a venerable Hollywood movie star can give it. Is it funny when Rex Kramer is trying to talk Ted Stryker down to land? His dialogue isn’t, but then we cut to Ted Stryker fighting with the balloon-man autopilot while his entire body is drenched in so much sweat it looks like he’s having a shower in the pilot seat and we’re roaring with laughter at how stupid it is to juxtapose that serious dialogue with this ridiculous visual. This is why the few jokes that either don’t land at all, or have drifted out of public consciousness (the wife whose husband never drinks two coffees at home, a reference to an old advert) don’t detract from the experience. In modern comedy the jokes are focused on, in Airplane you can miss two or three because you’re still laughing so hard from the previous one.

Airplane is incredible because it adheres to these three tenets, and never lets up the whole movie. There is no halfway through attempt at seriousness that could work, but also might fail because of the inherent ridiculousness of the movie. There is only the relentless unending comedy of the situation, whether that be visual gags, juxtaposed serious lines against a ridiculous situation, or just straight up basic punchline jokes.

Sublimely flawless from beginning to end. I’m completely serious and don’t call me Shirley.