Word: comical
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...child of a drug-addicted Vietnam-vet father and a hippie-ballerina mother with a bum knee. "My family's lineage is five generations of artists who never made it," LaBeouf says. His first name, which rhymes with hi-ya, was the name of his maternal grandfather, a Catskills comic. His last name, pronounced La-Buff, is a name shared with his paternal grandmother, a Beatnik poet...
...jokes hardly register on the shock-ometer these days; Evan Almighty, with its hundreds of comic crap-takings, has been marketed to Christian groups. The scatological jolt of Aachi & Ssipak fades pretty quickly, as viewers' jaws drop, along with their resistance, at the movie's brain-bursting visual density. Elaborate backgrounds flash by in a nanosecond. A million film references - Basic Instinct, Aliens, half of the Spielberg oeuvre and probably lots of Asian movies I don't know - collide and spawn a zillion more. Director Jo wants his picture to be hip to cultural references high and low (Diaper King...
...would be a stretch to call these two frantic studs characters, at least in the Pixar sense. Nor are Aachi and Ssipak standard comic figures like Archie and Jughead; they're more Itchy and Scratchy - excuses for sadistic, sumptuously choreographed mayhem. The best movies may create story and characters that involve, ennoble or devastate the viewer; but not every movie has to. This one is not humane; it may not even be human. After a while, its glamour and vigor can get wearying. But, s--t, is this movie great to look at, from a safe, sanitized distance...
...years ago, Los Angeles Time writer Patrick Goldstein made a joke about Rob Schneider's Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo, "a film that was sadly overlooked at Oscar time because apparently nobody had the foresight to invent a category for Best Running Penis Joke Delivered by a Third-Rate Comic." Schneider, in a response that ran as a trade paper ad, wrote: "Well, Mr. Goldstein, I decided to do some research to find out what awards you have won. I went online and found that you have won nothing. Absolutely nothing. No journalistic awards of any kind. . . . Maybe you didn...
...appalling. Are women somehow not funny, or do audiences not want to see them at the center of a comedy? Next year, Universal will try Baby Mama, with Tina Fey as a career woman who hires Amy Poehler to carry her child. Our blessings upon it. But until some comic actress has a big fat hit, Hollywood will keep thinking of comedy as Guytown--one more genre, like action movies, where women need not apply...