Word: dumbness
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Axel quickly falls for a wealthy widow named Elaine (Faye Dunaway). Like Daedalus escaping from Crete, Axel builds endless air machines at her insistence. The numerous crash scenes range from dumb to dumber. Though there's hardly a wrinkle on Dunaway's face and her figure is curvaceous, her Elaine clutches beauty like an iron mask, with quickly spoken words and twitchy mannerisms...
Just like a "Brady Bunch" episode, the film's plot neatly proceeds from dumb to dumber. Next door neighbor Mr. Ditmeyer (played annoyingly by Michael McKean) tries to get the Bradys to sell their house so he can turn the neighborhood into a minimall. The Bradys refuse, of course, because, as Mr. Brady (Gary Cole) says, "I love the house, my wife loves the house, the kids love the house, Alice loves the house..." They love the house...
This scenario, which sounds a bit like science fiction to most Americans, is already accepted as fact by the motor moguls in Detroit, where a remarkable technological transformation is occurring. Gone are the days when that city's machines were regarded as handsome and powerful but basically dumb brutes. Today the buzz words in the Motor City are "smart cars," vehicles that literally think for themselves, diagnose their own problems and compensate for their drivers' frailties and failures, while ensuring a safer, more comfortable ride. A few smart-car features are already available on higher-priced vehicles, and Detroit intends...
...Brock Yates, the curmudgeonly columnist for Car and Driver, questions the demand for this technological gimcrackery by suggesting that consumers can be dumb about smart devices. "For a nation that can't program its vcrs," he says, "I wouldn't want to imagine a future where people will be expected to operate a 4,000-lb. smart car propelling them down the highway at 65 m.p.h." Besides, says Yates, "the auto is the last bastion of personal freedom in the U.S. It promises enormous flexibility. This smacks of Big Brotherism. I don't want 'HAL' inside my dashboard telling...
...said that fastidious filmmakers retreat in dismay muttering, ``Does he mean, like, bathroom jokes?'' Ignoring the advice, they end up dying out there with cute, cautious comedies like Speechless and I.Q. (not to mention spineless farces like Mixed Nuts). Meanwhile, Dumb and Dumber becomes the most popular movie in America. ``Gross-out grosses,'' its rivals may sniff, and they would not be wrong. But so what? The fact is that D and D--in comparison with which Jim Carrey's other pictures look as if they were scripted by Oscar Wilde--makes you laugh out loud for almost its entire...