Like most of my peers, I have fond memories of Airplane! and the Naked Gun movies, though unlike most of my peers I refuse to actually watch them again. Not quite true; I did, a couple of years ago, catch a few minutes of Airplane!, and found it to be remarkably unfunny. Further cementing this reluctance to revisit writer-director David Zucker’s oeuvre is news of — and a trailer from — his new movie, opening this October, An American Carol.
Something happens when certain entertainers we thought were hip and astute get older and richer and more out of touch with their audiences (and, frankly, reality) — they become aggressively unfunny. We can call it The Dennis Miller Syndrome. Entertainers on the fringes of both sides of the political spectrum tend to armor themselves with an inflated (and ill-considered) swagger when observing their opposites but nowhere is this more obvious than when The Right takes on The Left.
Consider Ben Stein, whose idiotic rants are so devoid of wit that they’ve made Ferris Beuler’s Day Off utterly unwatchable. And the aforementioned Dennis Miller. And, also mentioned above, David Zucker, whose new film, about a Michael Moore clone (played by Kevin “Brother of the Late Chris” Farley) seeking to repeal the Fourth of July but is dissuaded by three American ghosts (including Kelsey Grammer as Patton and noted antisocialist pundit Jon Voight as Washington), is… well, take a peek at the trailer, introduced by the most appropriate celebrity imaginable:
Gary Coleman slave-talkin’? Diminishing numbers of suicide bombers? Lesbians mistaken for men? Thigh-slappingly funny!
But the most hi.lar.i.ous moment isn’t in the clip above. Reason gives us a sneak preview:
Details about the movie were kept secret, on purpose, until this month. In February, it was reported that Kelsey Grammer would be Scrooge in the new movie. He’s actually playing the ghost of George Patton, and Jon Voight is playing George Washington. In a clip we saw, Washington takes [Moore clone] Malone to St. Paul’s Cathedral to lecture him on freedom of religion and “freedom of speech, which you abuse.” Malone is grossed out by dust in the priest’s box, so the doors open onto the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center. “This is the dust of 3000 innocent human beings!” bellows Washington. Malone whimpers that he’s just making movies. Washington won’t have it. “Is that what you plan to say on Judgment Day?”
“That scene,” said [writer-producer Myrna] Sokoloff, “is hard to put in a comedy. But we had to do it.”
They had to! They didn’t have a choice!
For those who think Ann Coulter “tells it like it is” only.
10 comments
With the string of flop movies we’ve had “telling it like it is” about Iraq, one more political bomb won’t hurt. At least it doesn’t have Kevin Costner. Considering the number of people who don’t know Al Gore was calling for Saddam to be over thrown because of his WMDs long before Bush ever set foot in the White House, I think the defining movie hasn’t beem made yet.
Rosie O’Donnel? Holy crap what did they pay her? Or did she read the script before hand?
The thing that makes the above scene unbelievable is I have a hard time buying the idea that any conservative would be THAT upset about 2,800 dead New Yorkers. I could see Patton (I can only imagine his reaction to Pearl Harbor), or Geo. Washington, but not the Fox News & Freedom Fries crowd.
I think a good deal of the seething rage you see from the Right these days is due the fact that they have come to the horrifying realization that they have to pretend to like NYC for the rest of their lives. Sure, they have Massachusetts and San Francisco to rag on, but *sniff* it just isn’t the same.
@ DeadRobot: Rosie O’Connell, not O’Donnell! (a.k.a. Vicki Browne — “Unique Trait: Rosie O’Donnell Lookalike”)
@Malle Babbe: You know someone’s sitting on some Fox News outtakes of some asswipe saying “good” on 11/09/2001.
@snotty: The defining movie about Iraq (thus far) has already been made, and it wasn’t a flop, quite the opposite: Fahrenheit 9/11. And Iraq for Sale wasn’t a flop, either. We’ll see how Erroll Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure fares, too.
Arrg! Damn the internet and it’s fast flash of information and my ADD. I stand corrected. While not a fan of her, my integrity gland still secretes for her.
I look forward to opening day, when this movie will make approximately $2.49 at the box office before vanishing to the bottom of the Blockbuster pile. Let freedom ring!
I was surprised to see how hard the “Kentucky Fried Movie” sucked and then I realized it was because I am no longer a pre-teen. What made Zucker great was that he had the sense of humor of an 11 year old, and the funds to make movies about that. What makes some people scary to me is that Zucker continues to appeal to them long after their balls have dropped and they should know better. But what’s really frightening is that the target audience for this film is children (and adults who won’t grow up), and if Zucker predicts that this shit is funny, then it likely is, to them.
I want movies marketed to that difficult-to-pin but I’m sure very lucrative “curmudgeon” audience. My inner old man could use a comedy.
Oh, I can still enjoy Airplane and Top Secret and Ferris Buehler’s Day Off for what they are. They still make me laugh and entertain me.
But I do think things have changed to where new versions of these movies aren’t so very funny anymore. The torch has evidently been passed to all those “Date Movie, Scary Movie, etc” franchises.
Damn. That’s, like, 12 crushing disillusionments in one post. Sniff.
PS … I hope you caught the third installment of The Genius of Darwin…it was my favorite!
[...] corrals the critics whose editors hate them enough to send them to see Jim Zucker’s predictably-unfunny An American Carol. The verdict? 14: Extreme Dislike or [...]