bad movie night
Jul. 14th, 2003 09:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinYesterday was Bad Movie Night. This time around, it took particular intestinal fortitude, especially considering that all the movies were actual Hollywood releases.
The most baffling failure was the Eddie Murphy science-fiction mobster comedy The Adventures of Pluto Nash-- I was expecting a terrible movie, but it was actually worse than I expected, and in a different way. It seemed as if great effort had gone into making this potentially exciting movie as tedious as possible. Of course, since it's fascinating to try to figure out how something this big and expensive could go so wrong, we suffered through the whole thing.
The production design on Pluto Nash is fantastic, obviously the result of tremendous expense; it looks sort of like what Babylon 5 would have looked like at a hundred million dollars per episode. The cast is theoretically terrific-- lots of fine name actors even in small secondary roles, and Randy Quaid tries particularly hard to salvage his part as a wacky robot. But there's an amazing poverty of imagination.
Aside from the lovely sets and effects, the use of science fiction tropes and the futurism are really pretty minimal: a robot here, a clone there, occasional references to the fact that the whole story is supposed to be taking place on the moon in the late 21st century. But every time something unusual pops up, it's shunted aside as quickly as possible so they can get on with the lame club-owner-running-from-mobsters plot, which is played pretty much exactly as if it took place in LA and Vegas in the present day. It's pretty close to the "would you like space butter on your space toast?" school of science-fiction comedy, only without the word "space" in it.
Nor are there any notable attempts at comedy apart from Quaid's performance and the occasional chewed-up remains of a gag here and there. Usually movies like this go overbroad, but here, if anything, it's played too straight. Kibo suspected that the filmmakers thought the film would simply become funny if they put a funny cast in it. I got the impression that they were telling Eddie Murphy to play cool instead of funny. I suspect that they were trying to imitate a Quentin Tarantino movie without understanding what makes them interesting, much in the manner of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
samantha2074's complaint about Terminator 3's relationship to the first two Terminators.
After Pluto Nash we saw Kangaroo Jack, another famously lame gangster comedy, which was repurposed as a kid's movie halfway through production, resulting in some odd mismatches of tone. Shockingly, though, Kangaroo Jack was actually the better of the two: the jokes in it were stupid knucklehead comedy, but at least they were there.
The first movie of the evening had been Kibo's treasured videotape of The Garbage Pail Kids Movie, which defies description; even a synopsis would make you think I was hallucinating the whole thing. So I won't try.
The most baffling failure was the Eddie Murphy science-fiction mobster comedy The Adventures of Pluto Nash-- I was expecting a terrible movie, but it was actually worse than I expected, and in a different way. It seemed as if great effort had gone into making this potentially exciting movie as tedious as possible. Of course, since it's fascinating to try to figure out how something this big and expensive could go so wrong, we suffered through the whole thing.
The production design on Pluto Nash is fantastic, obviously the result of tremendous expense; it looks sort of like what Babylon 5 would have looked like at a hundred million dollars per episode. The cast is theoretically terrific-- lots of fine name actors even in small secondary roles, and Randy Quaid tries particularly hard to salvage his part as a wacky robot. But there's an amazing poverty of imagination.
Aside from the lovely sets and effects, the use of science fiction tropes and the futurism are really pretty minimal: a robot here, a clone there, occasional references to the fact that the whole story is supposed to be taking place on the moon in the late 21st century. But every time something unusual pops up, it's shunted aside as quickly as possible so they can get on with the lame club-owner-running-from-mobsters plot, which is played pretty much exactly as if it took place in LA and Vegas in the present day. It's pretty close to the "would you like space butter on your space toast?" school of science-fiction comedy, only without the word "space" in it.
Nor are there any notable attempts at comedy apart from Quaid's performance and the occasional chewed-up remains of a gag here and there. Usually movies like this go overbroad, but here, if anything, it's played too straight. Kibo suspected that the filmmakers thought the film would simply become funny if they put a funny cast in it. I got the impression that they were telling Eddie Murphy to play cool instead of funny. I suspect that they were trying to imitate a Quentin Tarantino movie without understanding what makes them interesting, much in the manner of
samantha2074's complaint about Terminator 3's relationship to the first two Terminators.After Pluto Nash we saw Kangaroo Jack, another famously lame gangster comedy, which was repurposed as a kid's movie halfway through production, resulting in some odd mismatches of tone. Shockingly, though, Kangaroo Jack was actually the better of the two: the jokes in it were stupid knucklehead comedy, but at least they were there.
The first movie of the evening had been Kibo's treasured videotape of The Garbage Pail Kids Movie, which defies description; even a synopsis would make you think I was hallucinating the whole thing. So I won't try.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2003-07-14 11:14 am (UTC)Oh well, at least there's plenty of fashion to appeal to chicks.
no subject
Date: 2003-07-14 01:46 pm (UTC)-Andrew Northrup
Don't make me remember that movie
Date: 2003-07-14 03:03 pm (UTC)And (as Sam just pointed out) a Lesser Wayans, doing an amazingly Steppin Fetchitized performance (much like that one guy in Kangaroo Jack, come to think of it).
I'll give Pluto Nash one thing: it has black characters who are NOT giving Steppin Fetchitized performances. In fact, this may have provided partial rationale for the movie's existence. But it's still no excuse.
no subject
Date: 2003-07-14 03:35 pm (UTC)Re: Don't make me remember that movie
Date: 2003-07-15 07:42 am (UTC)