Word: shadyac
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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What's even sadder is the talent wasted. Director Tom Shadyac's other films (Ace Ventura: Pet Detective; The Nutty Professor; Liar Liar) are bright, off-kilter farces; scripter Steve Oedekerk wrote Professor. It is a crime against humority that they and Williams (who in a chair next to Letterman is still our most brilliant word surrealist) renounce the work they've practiced with such abandon and invention for Patch's bullying sentimentality. Comics who want to do Hamlet often end up, as here, serving big, sticky slices...
...directed by Tom Shadyac, there's enough surrealism in Liar Liar to content all but the most exigent Carrey fans. But there's something worrisome about the film's attempts to socialize and sentimentalize the '90s' designated anarchist. It's wrong to push characters like Carrey's toward mainstream lovability. Danger, with just the slightest touch of lonely-guy geekiness, is his business. Maybe The Cable Guy was miscalculated, but one would rather see Carrey heading for those dark woods than toward sun-splashed suburbia and the cheerfully romantic ending of this film...
...with that scenario is the original scenario. The Nutty Professor was never really a comedy. Directed and co-written by Lewis in his "total filmmaker" phase, it mostly projected the comic's disastrous desire to morph his gloriously geeky anarchist into a soulful clown. Murphy, abetted by director Tom Shadyac and a whole raft of writers, cannot entirely escape the curious blend of aspiration and sloppiness that marked the earlier film...
This review is not the cry of a prude. Frankly, we don't care if a joke's funny as long as it's dirty. But in switching writer-directors, from the first film's Tom Shadyac to Steve Oedekerk, Carrey lost a clever farceur and got what Ace would call a la-hoo-za-her (loser). The star plays more than ever to himself; the cast stands around starched and embarrassed, like white-tie judges at a wet-T shirt contest. Wearying, stupefying, dumber than dumb, When Nature Calls would be a career ender for Carrey--except that...
...lately to search for the Inner Jim. And so has anyone who has seen Carrey inhabit dozens of roles on Fox's prime-time skitcom In Living Color or commandeer the big screen in last winter's smash Ace Ventura Pet Detective. That rowdy farce, cagily directed by Tom Shadyac, earned $72 million at the domestic box office. Coupled with big expectations for Carrey's new fantasy-comedy The Mask, it kicked the actor's price from $750,000 to $7.5 million for headlining Dumb and Dumber, due early next year. He will also pocket $5 million as the Riddler...