They were repeat running a commercial for Without a Trace (I think) last night during the two-hour premiere of the new Amazing Race. The crawl read something like “A tiny victim…and a cop on drugs…is a combination for disaster.”
Is that correct? A “combination for disaster”? I mean, a recipe for disaster makes sense, but I don’t think a “combination for disaster” is even proper English. They pay professionals umpteen millions of dollars to make these commercials, and they can’t even proofread them?
And hey, what’s the deal with Date Movie? From the commercials, it looks like all the gags involved visual references to not just other movies, but other comedies: Napoleon Dynamite, Shallow Hal, Hitch, Wedding Crashers, etc. I mean, when you make a reference to a dramatic movie in a comedy setting (as they do with Kill Bill!, as tired as such a jape already is), I can see from where you expect to have humor derive. However, what’s funny about just seeing somebody who looks like Owen Wilson from Wedding Crashers? Ha, it’s a reference to another movie! Is that inherently funny, for some reason? Don’t you need more than that?
The Scary Movie series does the same, of course, but then again, at least they are taking scenes and characters from (mostly) horror movies and playing them comically. Still, they too often descend into a sort of, “ha, ha, I saw that”–or even, “ha, ha, I didn’t see that, but I still get the reference”–as when they cut in a long parody scene of the rap battle from Eight Miles.
These films are still compared to Airplane!, but while that film had such references, too, as in the Saturday Night Fever dance scene, it had many other sorts of gags in it too. These films just seem lazy, somehow, both on the part of the people who make them and, frankly, the audience, too. Are we really willing to settle for this sort of thing?
From the “Really?!” Department: In the March 3rd issue of Entertainment Weekly, the DVD release of The Ice Harvest is given an A-, while that of Kind Hearts and Coronets, a truly classic comedy, is given a B+. And it’s not because of the extras, from what I can tell. The Ice Harvest boasts one outtake, and apparently a roundtable chat of some sort by the filmmakers. Kind Hearts, meanwhile, is a Criterion release, includes an old BBC interview with Alec Guinness (who legendarily played eight parts in the movie), and an “informative” 1986 TV documentary on the film. So extras are at best a draw, meaning that the magazine is assigning a higher grade for Ice Harvest as a movie.
I don’t think so. Which isn’t a knock on Ice Harvest, but please.
