Wow I hate it
Something fierce—
Except the astrophysicist David Hyde Pierce.
He lives in a
Cottage nearby
And boy can he make Jeanane Garofolo sigh.
She’s the director
Of Camp Firewood,
Which turns before our eyes into Camp Feelgood.
She is funny
As she’s hurrying
Through the camper’s names, including David Ben Gurion.
She dreams of bunking
David Hyde Pierce,
Who fears a falling Skylab will crush them first.
(Chorus)
Let me leave,
Oh mudduh faddah—
From this comic romp in Mother Nature …
Don’t make me stay,
Oh mudduh faddah—
In this idiotic motion picture.
Every camper
And each counselor
Is horny, especially Michael Showalter.
He lusts after
Marguerite Moreau’s bod,
But she prefers the lifeguard played by Paul Rudd.
The camp cook,
Chris Meloni,
Goes berserk because he feels attacked by phonies.
He talks to bean cans
And screams and moans
Periodically because of Post-Traumatic Anxiety Syndrome.
(Chorus)
I want to escape,
Oh mudduh faddah—
Life’s too short for cinematic torture.
Comedies like this,
Oh mudduh faddah—
Inspire in me the critic as a vulture.
Ben and McKinley
Achieve their fame
As campers whose love dare not speak its name.
Ken Marino
Doesn’t go rafting
Prefering Marisa Ryan, who is zaftig.
Watch David Wain’s
Direction falter,
Despite the help of cowriter Showalter.
They did The State,
On MTV,
And of the two that is the one you should see.
Thoughts of Meatballs
Cruelly hamper
Attempts by us to watch as happy campers.
Allan Sherman
Sang on the telly.
I stole from him, and he from Ponchielli.
Whatever It Takes
(DIRECTED BY DAVID HUBBARD; STARRING SHANE WEST, JODI LYN O’KEEFE; 2000)
Whatever It Takes is still another movie arguing that the American teenager’s IQ level hovers in the low nineties. It involves teenagers who have never existed, doing things no teenager has ever done, for reasons no teenager would understand. Of course, it’s aimed at the teenage market. Maybe it’s intended as escapism.
The screenplay is “loosely based on Cyrano de Bergerac,” according to the credits. My guess is, it’s based on the Cliff’s Notes for Cyrano, studied only long enough to rip off the scene where Cyrano hides in the bushes and whispers lines for his friend to repeat to the beautiful Roxanne.
Cyrano in this version is the wonderfully named Ryan Woodman (Shane West), whose house is next door to Maggie (Marla Sokoloff). So close, indeed, that the balconies of their bedrooms almost touch, and they are in constant communication, although “only good friends.” Ryan has a crush on Ashley (Jodi Lyn O’Keefe), the school sexpot. His best pal Chris (James Franco) warns him Ashley is beyond his grasp, but Ryan can dream.
If you know Cyrano, or have seen such splendid adaptations as Fred Schepisi’s Roxanne (1987) with Steve Martin and Daryl Hannah, you can guess the key scene. Ryan talks Chris into going out with Maggie and then hides behind the scenery of a school play while prompting him with lines he knows Maggie will fall for. With Maggie neutralized, Ryan goes out with Ashley—who is a conceited, arrogant snob, of course, and will get her comeuppance in one of those cruel scenes reserved for stuck-up high school sexpots.
The film contains a funny scene, but it doesn’t involve any of the leads. It’s by Ryan’s mom (Julia Sweeney), also the school nurse, who lectures the student body on safe sex, using a six-foot male reproductive organ as a visual aid. She is not Mrs. Woodman for nothing. As a responsible reporter I will also note that the film contains a nude shower scene, which observes all of the rules about nudity almost but not quite being shown.
And, let’s see, there is a scene where Ashley gets drunk and throws up on her date, and a scene set in an old folks’ home that makes use of enough flatulence to score a brief concerto. And a scene ripped off from It’s a Wonderful Life, as the high school gym floor opens up during a dance to dunk the students in the swimming pool beneath. Forget about the situation inspired by Cyrano: Is there anything in this movie that isn’t borrowed?
What Planet Are You From?
(DIRECTED BY MIKE NICHOLS; STARRING GARRY SHANDLING, ANNETTE BENING; 2000)
Here is the most uncomfortable movie of the new year, an exercise in feel-good smut. What Planet Are You From? starts out as a dirty comedy, but then abandons the comedy, followed by the dirt, and by the end is actually trying to be poignant. For that to work, we’d have to like the hero, and Garry Shandling makes that difficult. He begrudges every emotion, as if there’s no more where that came from. That worked on TV’s Larry Sanders Show—it’s why his character was funny—but here he can’t make the movie’s U-turn into sentimentality.
He plays an alien from a distant planet, where the inhabitants have no emotions and no genitals. Possibly this goes hand in hand. He is outfitted with human reproductive equipment, given the name Harold Anderson, and sent to Earth to impregnate a human woman so that his race can conquer our planet. When Harold becomes aroused, a loud whirling noise emanates from his pants.
If I were a comedy writer I would deal with that alarming noise. I would assume that the other characters in the movie would find it extremely disturbing. I put it to my female readers: If you were on a date with a guy and every time he looked dreamy-eyed it sounded like an operating garbage disposal was secreted somewhere on his person, wouldn’t you be thinking of ways to say you just wanted to be friends?
The lame joke in What Planet Are You From? is that women hear the noise, find it curious, and ask about it, and Harold makes feeble attempts to explain it away, and of course the more aroused he becomes the louder it hums, and when his ardor cools the volume drops. You understand. If you find this even slightly funny, you’d better see this movie, since the device is never likely to be employed again.
On Earth, Harold gets a job in a bank with the lecherous Perry (Greg Kinnear), and soon he is romancing a woman named Susan (Annette Bening) and contemplating the possibility of sex with Perry’s wife, Helen (Linda Fiorentino). Fiorentino, of course, starred in the most unforgettable sexual put-down in recent movie history (in The Last Seduction, where she calls the bluff of a barroom braggart). There is a scene here with the same setup: She’s sitting next to Harold in a bar, there is a humming from the nether regions of his wardrobe, etc., and I was wondering, is it too much to ask that the movie provide a hilarious homage? It was. Think of the lost possibilities.
Harold and Susan fly off to Vegas, get married, and have a honeymoon that consists of days of uninterrupted sex (“I had so many orgasms,” she says, “that some are still stacked up and waiting to land”). Then she discovers Harold’s only interest in her is as a breeder. She is crushed and angry, and the movie turns to cheap emotion during her pregnancy and inevitable live childbirth scene, after which Harold finds to his amazement that he may have emotions after all.