Blog O’ Leaps

BALLS OF FURY (2007)

YOU DON’T MESS WITH THE ZOHAN (2008)

I’m partial to the sub-genre of comedy that, around the heyday of the Chris Farley oeuvre, I termed the “Hitting in the Head comedy movies”. Lord knows, it doesn’t have to be smart to make me laugh. I was just watching some Three Stooges shorts recently, most notably, their only Academy Award-nominated * excursion into face-slapping, Men in Black and experienced the shortness of breath and episodes of dizziness which only coincide with extreme laughter, or becoming overwhelmed by all the helium during the propaganda-oriented commentary on Anthony Mundine fights.

Quite frankly, in the immortal words of cinema-phile Mr T, I “pity the foo’” who derides slapstick comedy, often without knowing what slapstick comedy is **, and sees it as being ‘beneath them’, and then turns around and praises bumph like Seinfeld and twaddly-dee like Frasier as the heights of sophistimicated comedy gold. It’s amazing how often you’ll find the same people doubled over with laughter during inspiration-proof televisual dingleberries such as Australia’s Funniest Home Videos. I put all this down to the spread of too much democracy in the industry, around the time Friends and its cardigan-comedy like began to proliferate, when it was decided that people bereft of a sense of humour needed comedy shows made for them as well. You know, the kind of people who if they ever had to lodge a personals ad, would definitely include the descriptive, “GSOH”. (Which as medical science has since proven beyond doubt, in laboratory test conditions, necessarily means “NSOH”.)

That said, the sub-genre of idiotic comedy movies continues to flourish in abundance, and arguably they’ve never been more insubstantial, nor stupider than they are right now.

The low end of the food chain are those generic titled ones, called Epic Movie or Superhero Movie or whatever, which should all cut their losses and just be called Wiener Movie, with a roman numeral in the title. Or Marketed-As-Comedy Movie, with the disclaimer “Caution – May Not Contain Actual Comedy”. These operate on about the level of a truly uninspired MAD Magazine parody. Sometimes they don’t quite make it to that level, but that appears to be more or less where they’re aiming.

Then there’s the hi-concept ones (which means kind of a fancy-dress party, set in 70s TV news-reading, or 70s pro basketball, or 70s anything, apparently) riddled with whiney, cringing, lead characters, and a supposedly ‘feel-good’ approach, which slowly but surely chokes any attempts at satire, parody, or indeed comedy to death. This is reserved almost exclusively for ex-Saturday Night Live performers, and in particular, Will Ferrell, who has turned them into some sort of bizarre personal cottage industry, rather than ever putting his considerable talents to some worthwhile use.

Also, there’s the gross-out bloke-comedy sub-genre which divide into three or so different strata – the ones with Rob Schneider, the ones about beer and snot from that comedy troupe which has that guy Chandrasekhar in it, and the ones featuring the clean-cut unfunny guys from Saturday Night Live who are all called Will, but not Ferrell. Oddly enough, in between sperm-related attempts at hilarity, these also go the ‘feel-good’ route, according to the Law of Diminishing Returns.

And, of course, there’s the other movie they keep making, where Seth Rogen gets stoned. This movie has one advantage over most of the others, in that Seth Rogen is inherently a funny man, which he had better be, considering they keep making the same movie with him in it over and over again.

What I need out of a stupid comedy movie, which most of these don’t do, is a consistent, funny, point-of-view, no matter how idiotic that is. In writing, directing and performance, it needs to be informed by some guiding intelligence, even if, in this case, the term ‘intelligence’ is used at the most giddy, ridiculous and knot-headed end of the spectrum.

This is why I respect Adam Sandler. While they knocked him for it, and despite the general excoriation of some true clunkers he was responsible for (the animated one about Chanukah comes insistently to mind), he just kept on making silly, inconsequential, hitting-in-the-head comedy movies which had no excuse for their existence other than the oddly idiosyncratic nature of their own light-headed foolishness. When he proved he could be a serious actor, and major box-office, he still went right back to making the stupid movies when he knew the high-minded general reaction would garner him a face-full of crap. Why? Because it’s a CALLING. The guy has a rare gift for doing dumb Adam Sandler movies. A dumb Adam Sandler movie is unlike anyone else’s idiot comedy movie. It’s nice to know the guy is essentially, for however else he’s developed and matured as a person and all that guff, the same happy-go-crackers grinning goofball who looked like he was having a whale of a time hooning around with his mates on Saturday Night Live being silly for a living. He’s the major auteur figure of stupid comedy.

You Don’t Mess with the Zohan is, bless it’s pointy little head, yet another entry in the long-running series of Adam Sandler movies in which people get hit in the head and fall over in funny ways. Yeah, it’s got some well-intentioned stuff in there about Israelis and Palestinians forgetting their enmities and “just getting along, people”, but when their ultimate aim in teaming up is depicted as being the defeat of famed boxing ring-announcer Michael “Let’s Get Ready to Rummm-baaaaalllll” Buffer, it’s hard to take it too seriously, and you’re not meant to take it too seriously.

In fact the gift of the Sandler movies (the real ‘core’ Sandler pix, not the ones in which he’s playing a romantic lead for the big box-office pictures opposite Drew Barrymore or whoever) is that they use the feel-good template for structure, but there is patently no obligation on the part of the audience member to take that stuff remotely seriously either. In a late-breaking shock development in modern comedy movies, the Sandler Stupids are about making you laugh. I’m guessing it won’t catch on as a trend, but it’s nice to have them around.

In Zohan, the funny stuff is the running gag about the Israeli obsession about hoummos, anything else about foodstuffs, the gags about parents, Sandler’s wayward obsessions with toilet and groin-related humour, particularly anything to do with the rear-end, the running gag where he shags the Lainie Kazan character in front of her increasingly traumatised (fully-grown) son, (and Kazan is tremendous in this, as she has been in other comedy movies like My Favourite Year – you wonder why more comedy movies don’t sign her up), and the great stuff about the Israeli-run electronics stores in New York, which will produce gut-shaking bellows of laughter from anyone who’s ever run into recalcitrant, somewhat shady or less-than-helpful staff in this retail field. The basic premise is Sandler’s character is a brilliant Israeli commando who decides to retire and pursue his true ambition of being a hairdresser in New York City. You can see where you’re not meant to take this stuff seriously at all. John Turturro is also funny as his Palestinian counterpart, something vaguely in the eccentric line of his widely-enjoyed performance as the Hispanic bowler in The Big Lebowski. The gags about his fast-food franchise are a constant source of joy.

Don’t get the idea that this is great. It’s a dumb but enjoyable framework to support a lot of gags, a surprising amount of which are funny. Both its bizarreness and its sense of silliness are consistent, even if the quality of the writing isn’t, and that’s probably what makes it work. It kind of falls apart at the end, or, as is customary for movies these days, at its many endings. In the end, I thought it was feel-good, not because of the feel-good stuff at all, but because it made me laugh like a drain here and there.

Balls of Fury is a movie about a ping-pong playing FBI or CIA guy (I can’t remember, and I’ve just seen the movie, which tells you how vitally important the plot of stupid comedy movies is to me, and also how memorable THIS movie is) who due to some evil James Bond type villain’s nefarious schemes, has to defeat the latter at ping-pong, or something like that.

It looked ingratiatingly idiotic in the trailers. Well, once again we learn that with the vast majority of comedy movies, all the funny stuff is in the trailers, and it’s often funnier than when it turns up IN the movies. (Diverse as they may be, Spies Like Us and Muriel’s Wedding may hold the all-time achievement record in this field. In both cases, having seen the trailer, there is absolutely no point in proceeding to watch the movie. However Muriel’s Wedding is a rare case indeed – not only does the trailer hit all the major high points, but it’s actually a superior KIND of movie to the full-length version.)

There’s just nothing here at all, other than breathtaking cynicism. Once again it leans on the standard feel-good “We want the hero to succeed, get the girl, and defeat the creepy bad guy, but only when things get to their lowest ebb can he proceed to triumph” template, but can’t summon the consistency of tone to either milk it, Will Ferrell style, or pat it on the head fondly and generally place it carefully out of the way of the comedy, as in the Adam Sandler approach. It wants it both ways and gets neither.

The tubby guy (Dan Fogler) who’s the hero is kind of ingratiating, and that’s about all she wrote. He’s kind of trying for something in between Seth Rogen and Jack Black, and doesn’t have the sarcastic edge and delivery of the former, or the energy of the latter. I can’t recall him being funny in the whole picture.

The guy who is funny is Christopher Walken as the kind of Fu Manchu type villain. Any super-villain type who makes a grand entrance in full cape and villainous headgear and then makes the opening statement to the assembled masses, “Okey-dokey, Artichokey” is funny, particularly when played by Christopher Walken. It’s also funny when he concludes the same speech with the memorable farewell, “Toodles”.

Apart from that, he looks funny and the delivery is great, but I think he gets about one other funny line in the picture.

Basically, there’s good-stupid and bad-stupid, and Balls of Fury is just stupid. Diedrich Bader is a funny comic actor who gets too few opportunities to show it in general, and manages to be funny working with nothing in a minor role in this. There’s a couple of very attractive female performers in there, one of whom should consider investing part of her salary in the odd can of soup in my opinion. That’s about it. It pretty much works on the level of those parody Wiener Movies mentioned earlier.

The Love Guru was panned by pretty much every straw vote on the planet, (and I think some folks dropped in from Mars to make up the weight), and Mike Myers was written off into some sort of Andrew McCarthy/Emilio Estevez forgotten star netherworld, never to darken the doorways of mass consciousness comedy stardom ever again.

Having seen it, I couldn’t begin to imagine why people had reacted that way, right up until the point where I realised they probably just didn’t get it. Mike Myers’s schtick, in the pictures he really has some control over, is a kind of amiable but extreme eccentricity of point-of-view, grounded by the odd knowing depth-charge of show-biz satire. You go with the flow or you don’t. He doesn’t always pointer all the gags for you like other comedies do. In the Austin Powers movies, people could hang their hats on the James Bond deal. The accessibility of the Wayne’s World movies was provided by a routine familiarity with suburban bogans who were into old-school rock (you either were one, or you knew one), and/or 70s and 80s rock itself.

Myers’ genial obsession with self-help gurus of dubious provenance and insight in The Love Guru doesn’t have the same easy touchstones for a lot of the audience. Also, unlike the main characters in those other movies, his Guru is a little off-putting. The viewers were left to fend for themselves with his idiosyncratic, head-bent comedic viewpoint. They probably just didn’t get it. ***

The Love Guru is actually a fairly funny picture. It meanders all over the joint, despite maintaining a nominal nodding acquaintanceship with the stock-standard feelgood comedy picture template, or “The Ferrell” as modern researchers could now term it. (The Guru has to motivate a failing star ice-hockey player, for reasons which elude me due to both poor memory and not caring at all.)

Along the way, he flirts with a few rather MTV-inflected comedy takes on Bollywood musicals, rather funnier and more pleasingly berserk than everyone else’s Bollywood imitations. He manifests a funny running gag about his obsession with outdoing his rival, the real-life self-help guru Deepak Chopra, and thus his obsession with appearing on Oprah. Ben Kingsley turns up as his instructor, under a very Carry On movie name, which is a funny use for Ben Kingsley in itself. Myers’ Indian accent comes and goes like the proverbial Karma Chameleon (this is also a built-in gag). Various other real-life celebs wander in and out. There’s a very funny gag early based around Myers’ mantra which he blesses his Hollywood devotees with, capped off with another funny celeb guest appearance.

That’s a classic piece of “You get it or you don’t” Mike Myers comedy perspective. Possibly the keynote one, which is kind of the whole picture’s humour in a nutshell in a way, (well that, and the peek-a-boo nature of the Guru’s ethnic origins) and I don’t think is ever “punched up” during the movie, is that the star ice-hockey player is a black guy.

On the “ehh” side of the ledger, Mini-Me Verne Troyer is back, along with all the nut-punching gags, and midget-related humour, a minority of the latter being quite funny and some of it also broad and naggingly insistent enough to be verging on uncomfortable. The guy from The Colbert Report does a routine as an “inappropriate” ice-hockey commentator which should have been a lot funnier than it was, and maybe would have been if Fred Willard, whose role in Best in Show this was fairly obviously based on, had been hired instead.

In the centre-column, Jessica Alba is certainly decorative as the nominal female lead, and that appears to be about as much thought as went into the enterprise.

However, on the upside, the grindingly-unpleasant bodily functions material which “flowered” so insistently in the second and third Austin Powers pictures has, happily, largely gone missing here. It’s strange – with Sandler, that’s an integral part of his weird little comedy worldview and, kept to a dull roar, it works. With Myers, the gross-out stuff almost always seems extraneous, forced and laughter-challenged, and sometimes even in relatively small doses.

Anyway, The Love Guru, much to my surprise is as silly as a wheel in a good way, amiably loopy rather than a bucketing laugh-fest, but has just about enough gags to get you through. But if you just don’t like Myers at all, forget about it.

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On the industry-acknowledged, international smash-hit MPHOAH scale:

The Love Guru………………………………..6.5 out of 11 MPHOAH

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* (Yes, that’s true, and it was THOSE Academy Awards. It was the first of their “Dr Howard, Dr Fine, Dr Howard” epics. It also has a notably more anarchic approach than their more typical later “these guys are just screw-ups” short pictures.)

** (If all someone has to say about Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton is “I don’t like slapstick comedy” they’ve got nothing to say to me or anyone else about comedy movies or television. It’s like saying you quite like architecture, but you’ve never enjoyed design, concrete, glass, foundations, or buildings in general. Anyone who can’t see a difference between Laurel & Hardy (the virtual foundation for all character-tension based TV sitcoms) and, say, Abbott & Costello, and who pulls the “Eurgh - slapstick!” card to ward all of them away equally, has nothing to say about comedy at all, end of story. Everyone knows the saying about those who don’t know history being condemned to repeat it, but in this case if you dismiss the history, you don’t repeat anything - you pretty much wind up in an empty corridor, which you get to stand in for life. You might as well take out that personals ad where you talk about your “GSOH” and make it official.

*** (A classic example of the value of a touchstone in this kind of context - and/or some viewers flailing hopelessly without one - is in the Guest/Levy ensemble series of semi-improv comedy pictures. On a mass-market level, the most popular of these is, inevitably, Best in Show. Why? Well, probably because it was centred around cute dogs. Just about everyone gets cute dogs. To me, it’s not the best-balanced, paced, or, arguably, funniest of these movies. The stuff with Parker Posey and the guy playing her husband is tedious domestic squabbling, and not remotely funny. Although the movie is enjoyable, (hilarious when Fred Willard/Jim Piddock and Jennifer Coolidge are on), one of the central flaws is that Chris Guest’s role in it is meticulously observed and thoroughly portrayed, but it’s just not funny. He’s hilarious in Waiting for Guffman and For Your Consideration, and slyly funny in a ’straight’ role as a humourless pedant in A Mighty Wind, particularly when teamed with Michael McKean in the latter. A Mighty Wind gets a lot closer to the blend of comedic and dramatic elements, with a growing tide of irresistible underpunched humour, that they are shooting for than Best in Show does. It’s a better-constructed, funnier movie for mine. And For Your Consideration, they drop the boot into, and go openly for comedy more, with a torch’n'burn approach to show-biz satire which has both gusto and an evil eye for accuracy going for it. But people don’t ‘get’ the naff end of the 60s folk-scene, or the tragicomedy of small-town theatre, or the inherent cheese of fringe Hollywoodiana, like they do cute dogs and “Isnt it funny how dogs resemble their masters?” stuff. The other subjects, they have to be gently led to, flattered and pampered with a lot of developmental information, and then have the gags pumped to arena size before they come around. The Guest/Levy pictures don’t play that game, they lay the stuff out there, don’t punch the gags, and you take what you can get from the smorgasbord. Which is precisely why the cute dogs picture went over bigger than any of the others did.)

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