My friend Liz often says I'm the funniest person she knows. That's a bit of an exaggeration, or she doesn't know many people. And while I can usually change her mind about anything else, when I try to convince her otherwise, she just won't listen.
She's also been asking me lately why I never review comedies.
"It's because they are either terrible or funny. There is no in between," is my response. See, a horror movie can not be scary and still be good. "Cabin In The Woods" is not as scary as "The Ring" but it is incredibly entertaining. A Science Fiction movie can have a just a touch of Sci-Fi elements, like "Deja Vu" or "Primer" and also still work.
But a comedy is a comedy. It is saying "I will make you laugh." Horror movies have jokes, action films have one liners, and so on. But comedies are all about the jokes. The plots and characters are usually less fleshed out than a slasher film. It is all about the jokes. So when that one defining characteristic fails, the whole movie falls flat. And while I love watching bad movies, bad comedies are especially grating.
When I watch a movie like "Zombie Massacre," there is a quaintness to it. It's absolutely terrible and the fact the people involved thought it was action packed instead of the mess that it was IS the joke. But a bad comedy is just embarrassing. I understand it's hard to film a compelling zombie movie on a low budget in the middle of Romania. How hard is it to stand in a living room and tell jokes? It is a failure on another level: a relatable level. When I go to work, people don't have to act like people in bad zombie make up are actually a threat and not the director's cousins, but people do joke around. So watching a bad comedy is like being stuck at work for an hour and half with that guy who think he's so clever and entertaining when in reality he is neither.
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| If you find anything funny in this movie, you yourself are not funny. |
"And Now A Word From Our Sponsors" takes this "bad comedy" to another level by incorporating the least funny of all things: Quoting TV commercials. Some commercials themselves may be entertaining but quoting them out of context never is. So imagine an entire comedy written about a guy who says "Wassup!" and "Got Milk?" and you have just imagined the horror I have put myself through just so Liz could get her comedy review.
"And Now . . ." is about an ad executive named Adan who goes into a coma or has a seizure or something and can now only speak in ad slogans. He can't even rearrange the words, he has to repeat them exactly like the commercial. So when he wants to compliment someone he says "Maybe it's her, maybe it's Maybeline." When a guy asks how much he'll charge to come up with an ad campaign he says "What's in your wallet?"
Hi-larious!
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| "Wow! This movie looks zany and fun!" - Absolutely Nobody |
Anyways, Adan is this rich dude who ends up in some Podunk hospital ran by this angel of a woman named Karen. How do we know she's an angel? The very first thing she says in the movie is how they need more funding for a cancer ward. Wow, how original. The rich guy running into the poor but heartfelt woman who just wants to help people.
Karen also doesn't get along with her daughter Meghan. Oh no! I wonder if the newcomer in her life will help her with that too.
Here's a tip, scriptwriters: In the real world, weak parents equal bad kids. So please, stop writing movies where a "cool" mom needs to reconnect with her daughter when she's a teenager. If she was a "good" mom instead of a "cool" one, her kid would have respected her all this time. The fact that within a week they can go from screaming at each other to being best friends is less realistic than a man who gets bit by a radioactive spider and get superpowers instead of a flesh eating virus. And the fact that the it's the daughter who has to change and not the "cool" mom (she actually describes herself as this) shows how out of touch the scriptwriter is with real family dynamics.
See, that's part of the problem with these "comedies." They quickly become unfunny dramas. And when the script can't even tell a joke, how can someone expect it to be deep? Writing a saga of the human condition is far harder than writing a dick joke. When an action movie gets boring they don't throw in a subplot about gender inequality in the modern US household. They just blow something else up!
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| The reflection in his eyes either represents the obsession with consumer culture in the United States or foreshadowing Adan magically being sucked into a TV. |
OK, ok I'm getting frustrated here because "And Now . . ." is so bad and I want to put it behind me but I have barely scratched the surface.
Adan has a nervous break down and can only speak in ad slogans. He's also very rich. But oh no, the hospital can't have him stay there because they need the beds! I mean, whoever heard of a hospital allowing the rich person who can afford it stay as long as they need? And the only rest home/therapy center in the area won't have an opening for a week!!! What to do?
Well of course, the only reasonable and logical answer is that Karen takes this strange man home!
Karen explains she met Adan before because Karen is an "ad junkie."
"Some people love comic books, I love the advertising industry," Karen says.
Ugh.
That makes it even odder that it seems to take her a few days to catch on that he is only speaking in ad slogans. If someone I knew only quoted GWAR lyrics it would probably take me sometime to figure that out, but if they were quoting Deep Space Nine I'd immediately recognize it.
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| Sometimes they make you watch "And Now A Word From Our Sponsors" first. |
So what are the chances of an ad-loving woman who needs millions to open a cancer center but has trouble with her teen daughter run into a millionaire who speaks in nothing but TV slogans and can help bring Karen and her daughter closer? Who cares, because it happened here and I was forced to watch it as a result. As the tepid plot slogs along, Meghan almost gets dated raped but Adan busts in and stops it. THAT'S the reason why Meghan started being nice to her mom. OK, that's weird. After the attempted rape the family goes on a music montage/shopping trip and play guitars together.
At this point you must be asking yourself why in the world am I still writing this review. Because trust me, as bad as this movie is the ending is insanely worse.
So towards the end, Adan and the "bad guy" who wants to take over his company are having a TV slogan-off. Yes, this movie is that bad. Why would the bad guy care if he could out-slogan a mentally disturbed man? Anyways. at this point a thought popped into my head.
"What if it turns out at the end lizard people are controlling the media and it's a whole Illuminati/"They Live" thing going on?"
I laughed at this suggestion, and continued to watch the movie. I only review movies I finish and since I was already an hour into, I figured it was worth another 30 minutes of my life to warn others of this film.
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| If only I could have warned myself . . . |
There is this long, dramatic scene done in one shot where Adan recites word for word a commercial of a Camaro convertible. Who cares. Who. Cares. The camera slowly zooms in on his face as he recites how great the car is. He moves around the car elegantly and goes into detail about the powerful engine and sleek design. So? He ends his monologue with the "fine print" part of the ad ("No apr, due at signing" nonsense.) The camera lingers on him for a moment before he walks off frame.
Why? What was the point of that scene? The fact that they did it in one camera take means they probably had to shoot it multiple times, for what? To hear a professional actor recite words from memory? Wow, that's unusual! I could tell from the way the scene was filmed that this was supposed to be a big moment but it was just word-for-word a shitty car commercial!
Then Adan gets sucked into a television.
Yes, after Adan stops a rape and brings Karen and Meghan together. After he loses his company to the bad guy, who actually wasn't bad but this movie needed an enemy. After he goes to the rest home he is watching TV then disappears. Then they show him in a BMW ad, which is odd considering he had such a boner for the Camaro, and he drives away.
The end!
Wait, no . . .come on.
During the credits they RE-SHOW the Camaro speech but this time he is singing it! All in one take. The scene ends with the sounds of the cast and crew clapping loudly. Who cares!? It was a stupid scene to begin with but the fact that director thought it was worth showing twice shows the level of bad judgment that ran throughout this film.
"And Now A Word From Our Sponsors" is a mess. The concept sounded intriguing but got old very, very fast. And here's the thing, I'm willing to believe in a man who can only speak in ad slogans. I can even suspend disbelief and accept the whole "sucked into the TV" thing. What I find hard to believe is a household of three that only has one TV.I live by myself and I have two TVs and a computer. But no, this movie wanted to have a scene where a teenage girl and a grown man fight over a remote so we can build tension and tell a "hilarious" joke about how men hate letting go of the remote. Genius!
The characters are cardboard cut-outs, the plot goes nowhere, and in the end we just don't care. Actually, more importantly in the end nothing really changes. Karen is the same and the bad guy is still a douche. Meghan is closer to her mom because she almost got raped, but does that mean if her boyfriend wasn't a total tool she would still hate her mom?
And Adan, well I guess he's off in a better world. The world of commercials. Because we all know nothing bad ever happens in commercials . . .
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