31 January 2013
Directed by: Elizabeth Banks, Brett Ratner, Steven Brill, Steve Carr and James Gunn
Starring: Kate Winslet, Hugh Jackman, Dennis Quaid, Greg Kinnear, Naomi Watts, Halle Berry, Emma Stone, Chloe Moretz and Richard Gere.
What It’s About: A series of skits plays out as a man pitches a movie to a studio executive.
Rated R (for strong pervasive crude and sexual content including dialogue, graphic nudity, language, some violence and drug use)
Runtime: 90 minutes
By Aaron Sanders, Diversions Editor
The skit-comedy subgenre has seen a relapse over the years and has since been replaced by the horror anthology subgenre. Four years ago, a group of directors and writers set out to revive the cinematic skit-comedy form with Hollywood’s biggest and most recognizable stars and an enthusiasm to make good a movie. What they produced, while somehow able to retain the A-list actors, lacks the slightest semblance of wit, humor or effort; it instead spends its one-and-a-half-hour runtime telling stupidly crude jokes that, by 2013, really aren’t that shocking or entertaining.
Movie 43 (if you could even call it a “movie”) opens with Dennis Quaid pitching a movie idea to a studio exec played by Greg Kinnear, and that’s it as far as “plot” goes. The rest of the film is snippets from Quaid’s so-called film. The first short film follows Kate Winslet on her blind date with Hugh Jackman, but what’s the catch? Well, let’s just say Jackman has a not-so-subtle deformity on his chin. The next short, and admittedly the best, shows Liev Schreiber and Naomi Watts home-schooling their estranged son while ensuring he experiences the same humiliation and alienation one would typically endure in high school. In one of the only scenes in which I openly laughed, Naomi Watts attempts to seduce her disturbed son while he miserably stares into the distance. The next hour of the movie is a test of patience and really isn’t worth reciting, except for perhaps the semi-funny skit where Terrance Howard gives his all-black basketball team a pep talk before the big game.
The writers of Movie 43 use raunch for the sake of raunch. Poop jokes and gratuitous nudity run amok without any one to tell them where to go. They’re just there. As a result, nearly all the skits fall flat – think 70 minutes of bad Saturday Night Live sketches. Amongst all the garbage, the superhero sketch with Jason Sudeikis and Justin Long playing Batman and Robin stands out as the worst.
Despite some cringe-worthy skits and boring performance all around from the cast, I suspected Movie 43 might have some ambiguous agenda. On one hand the movie could in fact be one of the worst attempts at comedy in the history of film. But on the other hand, it could in fact be commenting on what our pop culture has been reduced to. Like the brilliant 2006 comedy Idiocracy, which depicted an intellectually retarded future society, Movie 43 could actually be showing America where the quality of “entertainment” is headed. Unfortunately, this film more so affirms the former’s premonition than it does perpetuate its message.
-1/10
Courtesy of www.filmofilia.com