Word: stiller
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...back (along with the director-writers Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath) in Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, which is the surest money-getter this year short of an email to Obama supporters. The first film sent four denizens of New York City's Central Park Zoo - Alex the lion (Ben Stiller), Marty the zebra (Chris Rock), Gloria the hippo (Jada Pinkett Smith) and Melman the giraffe (David Schwimmer) - across several seas to an island off Africa. Madagascar was Oz with even more monkeys. It was smart, sitcommy and nicely congested. The sequel is more of the agreeable, strenuous same...
...meanwhile, has two very funny British imports. Sadly, only one is a comedy. CBS's adapted Britcom Worst Week (Mondays, 9:30 p.m. E.T.) has a much easier premise to sell to Yanks, mainly because it's pretty much lifted from a Ben Stiller movie: hapless Sam (Kyle Bornheimer), just engaged, tries to impress his future in-laws, but every attempt ends up disastrously. (In the first episode, he accidentally convinces his wife's family that her father is dead, a social faux pas in most cultures.) It's game if unambitious, with plenty of misunderstandings and physical comedy that...
Whereas most male stars in the Saturday Night Live era (a line that stretches from Bill Murray to Seth Rogen) sport a louche, slackerish affability, Stiller often plays the less-than-pleasant comic foil: the tightly wound unhero who either gets on everyone's nerves (Dodgeball, The Royal Tenenbaums) or is the hapless pawn of domestic fate (Meet the Fockers, The Heartbreak Kid). As actor, writer or director, he knows something most Hollywood people don't: certain characters needn't be lap-dog lovable--if they're funny enough, the movies they're in can still be hits...
...clearly not on African Americans; it's on the actor's belief that he can play anyone.) But Lazarus and the others out there in the jungle don't evolve or devolve; they are figures from an SNL skit or the director's own very smart Ben Stiller Show back...
...possible that to an old pro like Stiller, making an audience laugh is easy, too easy. The bigger challenge is not to underline the humor but to undermine it--to illustrate, within the form of a movie spoof, a thesis on the mechanics of comedy creation. Those opening trailers are hilarious and devastatingly acute, but the rest of Stiller's film could be more a deconstruction of comedy than a display of it. The brain gets the joke; the ribs are untickled...