No Laughing Matter

Okay... I'll admit it. I'm a Jim Carrey fan. I had seen him on "In Living Color" a number of times, and thought Fire Marshal Bill was pretty funny, but it wasn't until my first viewing of "Ace Ventura" that I discovered just how hard he could make me laugh. Just the first five minutes of that movie made me laugh hard enough that my wife had to pause the movie for ten minutes to give me time to catch my breath. No joke.

He's tried to move away from the "zany" comedy and do more subtle stuff will mixed results. Well, perhaps "mixed" is being too kind. Frankly, Carrey should go back and wipe the lame sequels to "Dumb and Dumber" and "The Mask" off the planet and remake them in his own image. He is this generation's Jerry Lewis or Danny Kaye. As far as physical comedy goes, the guy's a genius. He should stick with what works.

Now on to the topic that prompted all this rambling on. I've been browsing new movie trailers on Apple.com. There's a new movie coming out called "Strangers With Candy". It's apparently a"prequel" of a Comedy Central series by the same name. Never watching that channel, I can't say I've heard of it, so I'm seeing this without any sense for the larger context of the show. I've never seen or heard of the lead actress, but the supporting actors are fairly big names (Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ian Holm, Matthew Broderick, Sarah Jessica Parker) so I guess someone's trying to keep this off the "B-movie" list.

Judging from the trailer I think they failed in that attempt...miserably. Frankly the movie looks lousy. For that the writers are most likely to blame since that's who usually is at fault for a bad movie. Having read a little about the show, it sounds like the writers didn't even do much work for the movie. Instead they borrowed heavily from the three seasons of the cable series - recycling the best jokes. I'd wager they picked the jokes first and built the screenplay around them (that must break a screenwriting rule somewhere). But that's not why I'll be avoiding the movie - more on that in a moment.

The real shame is that judging from the few clips the trailer offers, the lead actress appears to have the comedic potential to be the yin to Jim Carrey's yang. My favorite bit is towards the end of the trailer when someone accuses her of talking with food in her mouth. There are some other moments sprinkled throughout that make me think of Carrey's "Ace Ventura" shtick. Aside from those little jems in the trailer, the rest of it is just plain stupid (which coming from me is saying a lot.)

Of course, all films coming out of Hollywood have to play by the Agenda Playbook, and so we have a token sub-plot evident in the trailer of a gay romance between a teacher and one of his students. Given the media uproar in recent months of the heterosexual affairs between female teachers and their male students, how anyone is supposed to find comedy in a gay affair between a teacher and a high-school student is beyond me, but I guess I'm not the target audience.

But the film caters to the Agenda perfectly: make homosexuality sanitary, lighthearted, fun, funny, palatable, attractive, pleasing, acceptable. Once everyone has been convinced of this, then the people will be less resistive to the laws which give this tiny minority group what they want: the erosion and ultimate decimation of the very building-blocks of society - marriage and family life. Strange that I can go from finding an actress funny to saying that her movie is leading our culture to implosion, but there it is.

So cross this one off your list, and we'll keep our fingers crossed that she will be in an upcoming film with Jim Carrey. Something like "Dumb and Dumbette" would suffice.