There's Something Wrong

The really idiotic comedy has taken a new direction in the last few years. The best of the idiotic comedies of the 1980's (not including idiotic comedies which were vehicles for one specific idiotic comic) was undoubtedly "Airplane!" and the second-best was, almost as surely, "The Naked Gun." These films relied on the saturation-gag method; i.e., put 1000 jokes in the movie and hope 1/3 of them work on any given audience member. An enormous proportion of the jokes in "Airplane!" and "The Naked Gun" worked, with the results best summarized in the hoary old cliche "busted a gut laughing." "Wrongfully Accused" is an inheritor of this tradition, written and directed by a cowriter on "The Naked Gun," starring the same lead actor and generally exuding the same spirit of basically stupid yet amusing jokes piled up like lunch meat on a thin weak rye bread of a plot.

The new direction is the Farrelly/South Park-type ethos, where the main idea is to gross out everyone who is watching the movie and show things that are so shocking you just have to laugh. "There's Something About Mary" is probably this genre's best example and exponent, featuring several jokes which I will talk about only in carefully couched euphemism because they still embarrass me or, in the case of Ben Stiller's zipper attacking his manliness, because they inspire vast rafts of sympathetic pain of the type that all men experience when watching balance-beam disasters. (The cackling Schadenfreude-inspired laughter of the females I saw this movie with during this scene actually disturbs me much more than the actual scene, but oh well.)

On the one level you probably want to know whether these movies succeed at the level they are operating on. Well, "Wrongfully Accused" is the best film of this kind since "The Naked Gun" series ended, mainly because Leslie Nielsen is so extraordinarily talented at the double-take, the idiotic malapropism, and getting clobbered over the head or otherwise put in pain by other characters or machines that aren't really necessary to the plot. Nielsen almost saved the total dog "Dracula: Dead and Loving It," and brings this film up to a high level indeed. What actor working today would you rather watch get attacked by a model plane in a "North by Northwest" parody? It's competenly directed and everyone else is OK, but the thing here is converting the jokes. In this arena, Nielsen proves time and time again he is the Michael Jordan of falling around cluelessly. One only hopes he has no desire to retire, because frankly most of these movies have seemed tired because the actors in them have also seemed tired and the jokes therefore follow suit. (These are very specialized talents; Samuel L. Jackson, a total badass in anyone's lights, couldn't save "National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon 1.")

And the Farrelly brothers certainly succeed in their program of grossing you out of existence. They continue in their highly successful program of presenting total scummy losers engaged in the pursuit of romance and making asses of themselves (cf. "Dumb and Dumber," where having Jim Carrey involved was sort of unnecessary but fun because no one could have done it better. The point is it was not a Jim Carrey film per se). Some of their machinations are genuinely hilarious, and the movie does not seem to hate its pathetic people like so many others do, which makes it easier to laugh, somehow (although Ben Stiller is undoubtedly the good pathetic guy, because he befriends Cameron Diaz's mentally impaired brother, whereas Matt Dillon refers to his (invented) favorite pastime, when he is trying to impress Miss Diaz, as "working with retards"). Diaz is good-, but not incredible-, looking, but her character is certainly possessed of incredible patience and generosity. I suppose this is a necessary precondition for losers to think they could get close to her. There are some genuinely funny moments in here, and some others where you laugh because you're probably supposed to, and further moments where you will cringe at the sheer tastelessness of proceedings (and laugh, if you're me).

So both these films are effective. The relevant issue here is, "Where are we going, and does it make any sense?" Because there is a limit to how much people can be shocked. I mean, certain of "The Naked Gun"'s jokes are fairly odious, but nothing compared to those contained in the Farrelly films, and there is a limit to how low you can drop that bar. Once we reach that limit, where do we go? It's kind of like relying on oil instead of investigating alternative fuels; your engine will definitely go for a while, but if there's not something different to do in 50 years you'll be up a creek. Perhaps this is the problem I have to worry about. In any case, I recommend both these films, with appropriate caveats, and encourage you not to think about the larger cultural issue I seem to have unwittingly raised. In fact, try not to think at all. You want to think during a comedy, go watch "Emma."

There's Something About Mary

Attractive Man Count: 1, barrreeeely for Matt Dillon.

Attractive Woman Count: 1 for Miss Diaz.

Overall Grade: B+.

Wrongfully Accused

Attractive Man Count: 0.

Attractive Woman Count: 2.

Overall Grade: B-. That's an A for Nielsen, and a "What?" for the rest of the film. Nielsen admirers will want to rush right out and see this like I did.

"There's Something About Mary" should really probably be an A. I was upset at the time I saw the film, and haven't seen it since, but in retrospect I think it should be an A.

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