That leaves three characters who are funny a lot of the time: Jo’s parents, Valdine and Walter Wingfield (Sally Field and Richard Jenkins), and Dig McCaffey (Orlando Jones), the legless pilot. Valdine is a scheming, money-grubbing con woman who conceals from Gilly the fact that she is not his mother, so that Jo can marry the millionaire. And Walter is her terminally ill husband, communicating through an electronic voice amplifier, who bears a grudge against almost everyone he can see. These characters have the necessary meanness of spirit, and Dig McCaffey is so improbable, as a Jimi Hendrix look-alike, that he gets laughs by sheer incongruity.
On the TV clips, they show the scene where Jo gets so excited while cutting Gilly’s hair that she takes a slice out of his ear. Since you have seen this scene, I will use it as an example of comic miscalculation. We see her scissors cutting through the flesh as they amputate an upper slope of his earlobe. This is not funny. It is cringe-inducing. Better to choose an angle where you can’t see the actual cut at all, and then have his entire ear spring loose. Go for the laugh with the idea, not the sight, of grievous injury. And instead of giving Gilly an operation to reattach the missing flesh, have him go through the entire movie without an ear (make a subtle joke by having him always present his good ear to the camera). There are sound comic principles at work here, which Say It Isn’t So doesn’t seem to understand.
Note: The end credits include the usual obligatory outtakes from the movie. These are unique in that they are clearly real and authentic, not scripted. They demonstrate what we have suspected: that real outtakes are rarely funny.
Scary Movie 3
(DIRECTED BY DAVID ZUCKER; STARRING ANNA FARIS, CHARLIE SHEEN; 2003)
Scary Movie 3 understands the concept of a spoof but not the concept of a satire. It clicks off several popular movies (Signs, The Sixth Sense, The Matrix, 8 Mile, The Ring) and recycles scenes from them through a spoofalator, but it’s feeding off these movies, not skewering them. The average issue of Mad magazine contains significantly smarter movie satire, because Mad goes for the vulnerable elements, and Scary Movie 3 just wants to quote and kid.
Consider the material about 8 Mile. Eminem is talented and I liked his movie, but he provides a target that Scary Movie 3 misses by a mile. The Eminem clone is played by Simon Rex, whose material essentially consists of repeating what Eminem did in the original movie, at a lower level. He throws up in the john (on somebody else, ho, ho), he duels onstage with a black rapper, he preempts criticism by attacking himself as white, he pulls up the hood on his sweatshirt and it’s shaped like a Ku Klux Klan hood, and so on. This is parody, not satire, and no points against Eminem are scored.
Same with the crop circles from Signs, where farmer Tom Logan (Charlie Sheen) finds a big crop circle with an arrow pointing to his house and the legend “Attack here.” That’s level one. Why not something about the way the movie extended silence as far as it could go? His parting scene with his wife (Denise Richards), who is being kept alive by the truck that has her pinned to a tree, is agonizingly labored.
The Ring material is barely different from The Ring itself; pop in the cassette, answer the phone, be doomed to die. The Sixth Sense stuff is funnier, as a psychic little kid walks through the movie relentlessly predicting everyone’s secrets. Funny, but it doesn’t build. Then there’s an unpleasant scene at the home of newsreader Cindy Campbell (Anna Faris), involving a salivating priest who arrives to be a babysitter for her young son (ho, ho).
The movie is filled with famous and semifamous faces, although only two of them work for their laughs and get them. That would be in the pre-opening credits, where Jenny McCarthy and Pamela Anderson take the dumb blonde shtick about as far as it can possibly go, while their push-up bras do the same thing in another department.
Other cameos: Queen Latifah, Eddie Griffin, William Forsythe, Peter Boyle, Macy Gray, George Carlin, Ja Rule, Master P, and Leslie Nielsen, the Olivier of spoofs, playing the president. But to what avail? The movie has been directed by David Zucker, who with his brother Jerry and Jim Abrahams more or less invented the genre with the brilliant Airplane! (1980). Maybe the problem isn’t with him. Maybe the problem is that the genre is over and done with and dead. Scream seemed to point in a new and funnier direction—the smart satire—but Scary Movie 3 points right back again. It’s like it has its own crop circle, with its own arrow pointing right at itself.
Scooby-Doo
(DIRECTED BY RAJA GOSNELL; STARRING MATTHEW LILLARD, FREDDIE PRINZE JR.; 2002)
I am not the person to review this movie. I have never seen the Scooby-Doo television program, and on the basis of the film I have no desire to start now. I feel no sympathy with any of the characters, I am unable to judge whether the live-action movie is a better idea than the all-cartoon TV approach, I am unable to generate the slightest interest in the plot, and I laughed not a single time, although I smiled more than once at the animated Scooby-Doo himself, an island of amusement in a wasteland of fecklessness.
What I can say, I think, is that a movie like this should in some sense be accessible to a nonfan like myself. I realize that every TV cartoon show has a cadre of fans that grew up with it, have seen every episode many times, and are alert to the nuances of the movie adaptation. But those people, however numerous they are, might perhaps find themselves going to a movie with people like myself—people who found, even at a very young age, that the world was filled with entertainment choices more stimulating than Scooby-Doo. If these people can’t walk into the movie cold and understand it and get something out of it, then the movie has failed except as an in-joke.
As for myself, scrutinizing the screen helplessly for an angle of approach, one thing above caught my attention: the director, Raja Gosnell, has a thing about big boobs. I say this not only because of the revealing low-cut costumes of such principals as Sarah Michelle Gellar, but also because of the number of busty extras and background players, who drift by in crowd scenes with what Russ Meyer used to call “cleavage cantilevered on the same principle that made the Sydney Opera House possible.” Just as Woody Allen’s Hollywood Ending is a comedy about a movie director who forges ahead even though he is blind, Scooby-Doo could have been a comedy about how a Russ Meyer clone copes with being assigned a live-action adaptation of a kiddie cartoon show.
I did like the dog. Scooby-Doo so thoroughly upstages the live actors that I cannot understand why Warner Bros. didn’t just go ahead and make the whole movie animated. While Matthew Lillard, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Linda Cardellini show pluck in trying to outlast the material, Freddie Prinze Jr. seems completely at a loss to account for his presence in the movie, and the squinchy-faced Rowan (Mr. Bean) Atkinson plays the villain as a private joke.
I pray, dear readers, that you not send me mail explaining the genius of Scooby-Doo and attacking me for being ill-prepared to write this review. I have already turned myself in. Not only am I ill-prepared to review the movie, but I venture to guess that anyone who is not literally a member of a Scooby-Doo fan club would be equally incapable. This movie exists in a closed universe, and the rest of us are aliens. The Internet was invented so that you can find someone else’s review of Scooby-Doo. Start surfing.