Movie 43

 

We will probably never see a film like Movie 43 ever again.  And yes, that is a very good thing.  It's not so much that it's bad at the acting or even the filmmaking level.  Its failure goes much deeper than that, right to the concept.  The film is a collection of skits, and so many of them are just so fundamentally not funny, that it doesn't matter if talented people are involved.  It doesn't matter what the actors do, because they're trapped in an awful idea to begin with.

Movie 43 is a comedic anthology film, along the lines of The Kentucky Fried Movie or Amazon Women on the Moon.  It's made up of 14 short films, roughly 5 or 7 minutes long.  It has 12 different directors, 9 writers, and a literal cast of thousands, including the likes of Hugh Jackman, Kate Winslet, Dennis Quaid, Naomi Watts, and Richard Gere, just to name but a small few.  Seriously, a good chunk of Hollywood must have been involved with this project at one point or another.  I won't bother asking why any of these actors signed up to appear in something like this.  I'm sure many favors were handed out.  Instead, I'll focus on the core problem of this movie - It mistakes being gross for being funny.  Now, my sense of humor can be just as juvenile as anyone else.  If you need proof, I actually laughed a few times at the film's opening sketch, which concerns Hugh Jackman and Kate Winslet on a dinner date.  The skit's sole gag is that Jackman has a small scrotum hanging from his neck, and nobody seems to notice.  I laughed at Winslet's attempts to appear proper and poised in the face of this, and to try to work the conversation toward the fact.  I laughed less so when Jackman started dipping his neck abnormality in the butter, or rubbing it on a baby's head.

Believe it or not, this is one of the more subtle films in the collection we get.  The sketch that follows is an example of a potentially funny idea done wrong, so that the laughs never come.  Liev Schreiber and Naomi Watts play a suburban couple who homeschool their teenage son, but go out of their way to give their kid the "full high school experience".  In other words, they humiliate him, taunt him, publicly ridicule him, and make sure he has all the emotional scars that most outcast teenagers have during that time.  The sketch goes overboard in its cruelty, and just becomes pathetic instead of funny.  Another sketch idea that never lives up to the promise it holds is the one titled "Superhero Speed Dating", in which we find the Boy Wonder Robin (Justin Long) trying to date various women, only to have his efforts constantly foiled by a very nosy Batman (Jason Sudeikis), who keeps on embarrassing him.  Other comic book figures appear, such as Lois Lane (Uma Thurman), Supergirl (Kristen Bell), and Wonder Woman (Leslie Bibb), but the skit misses ample opportunities for satire.

These two films show potential, but are just so badly handled, they deliver no laughs whatsoever.  Other sketches are just simply bad ideas that never could have worked, no matter who was behind them.  Such examples include a romantic story involving a young couple (Anna Farris and Chris Pratt) who are put to the test when the woman asks her boyfriend that she wants him to poop on her after they have sex.  In another, Kieran Culkin and Emma Stone have a very explicit argument about their sex life in front of a bunch of elderly people at a grocery store.  In yet another, two best friends (Seann William Scott and Johnny Knoxville) manage to capture a leprechaun (Gerard Butler), and try to force it to give them its pot of gold, only to have the little wee man turn out to be a foul-mouthed psychopath.  For those of you who have long wished for the two lead stars of The Dukes of Hazzard movie to appear in a remake of the 1993 camp horror film, Leprechaun, I have good news - your deranged desire has been granted.

Believe it or not, the movie does pretend there's a connection between all of these films.  That comes from the movie's main repeating segment, which revolves around a deranged wannabe screenwriter (Dennis Quaid) holding a Hollywood agent (Greg Kinnear) hostage, and forcing him to listen to his various movie pitches.  Just like everything else about this movie, it doesn't generate any laughs, and it doesn't go anywhere.  And when the skit tries to go even further over the top, by having the agent start gunning after the head of the studio (Common) for the disrespect he's been shown all these years, it somehow generates even less laughs.  That kind of describes this movie's whole problem.  The further it goes, the less funny it becomes.  It seems to think that the idea of Halle Berry doing disgusting things while involved in a game of Truth or Dare that goes way too far alone is funny enough.  Comedy needs to build, and it needs a starting point to begin with.  We need to build to the humiliation.  Movie 43 is all humiliation all the time.

 

So, I'm not going to ask what Richard Gere is doing in this movie, playing the CEO of a company that makes iPod players that are modeled like naked women.  I won't even ask if Elizabeth Banks was thinking straight when she signed on to play a woman whose relationship to the man she loves is threatened by the guy's pet cartoon cat, who has a sick sexual relationship with its owner, and sees Banks as being in the way.  Everybody who agreed to do this movie most likely did it as a lark, anyway.  I hope they had fun making it.  I just wish they would have taken the audience into consideration. After all, we're the ones who end up paying in the end.

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