Movie 43

Movie 43 - Wholly baffling, Movie 43 poses the question: “What in the world were they thinking?” The film is a sequence of gross-out comedy sketches loosely connected by a frame story involving a madman (Dennis Quaid) with a gun who is pitching the film that we see to a reluctant studio executive. Individual sketches seem to be directed by different filmmakers although the whole thing is under the aegis of Peter Farrelly. The subjects of the sketches are variously coprophilia, incest, bestiality, child abuse, etc. Curiously, the film features major stars -- Haile Berry acts in one episode and there are a number of up-and-coming young actors recognizable to people who read People magazine and attend popular movies. Naomi Watts, Emma Stone and Richard Gere disgrace themselves in the picture. Jason Sudeikus and other luminaries from SNL appear, however masked as if ashamed of their contribution to the picture. Kate Winslett appears with Hugh Jackman in a skit about an eligible bachelor who happens to have testicles dangling from his throat. The guy who plays Andy Dwyer in Parks and Rec finds himself trapped (I wanted to write “interred”) in the coprophilia skit – his fiancée wants him to “poop on her” and so he takes the gastro-intestinal version of Viagra to insure a long and mutually satisfying encounter. This has predictably explosive consequences. Farrelly made the film over four years and it’s an embarrassing catastrophe. I’m surprised that it was released and didn’t go direct to DVD – but, of course, the film has more star-power than almost any other picture I have seen in the last year and so, I suppose, someone thought it had to be distributed. Movie comedy is in the same unfortunate position that mainstream films find themselves occupying in relationship to television violence. A film is supposed to up the ante and be more offensive, more violent, more disturbing, more obscene than television. But TV, particularly Cable, is experiencing an “anything goes” renaissance – and so movies can’t ratchet up the outrage without becoming so ridiculously offensive as to be unwatchable as is the case with Movie 43. On any given night on network TV, a sweet-tempered and mild show such as The Big Bang Theory will feature non-stop lewd sexual innuendos, much cursing, and lots of potty humor. Comedies with more edge, like Two and a Half Men, and anything by Seth McFarland, are much more savage and vulgar –Family Guy regularly features homicidal black comedy, overt jokes about sexual perversions, and much farting, vomiting, and defecating. So how is a movie supposed to compete? The answer is Movie 43 and it’s not a pretty picture. (The film’s title refers to the UK version which has a different frame story – in that version some teenagers are searching for the most offensive movie in the world; finally, they locate that film, called Movie 43, which is so vulgar and horrifying that it destroys the world.)