At least 43 reasons why this movie is awful
So many stars, so few laughs in this painful collection
An attractive woman, played by Kate Winslet, gets ready for a blind date with a man who is rich, caring and handsome but has remained mysteriously single.
He turns out to be a charming bon vivant, played by Hugh Jackman, whose sole flaw — revealed when he removes his scarf — is that he has a pair of testicles hanging from his neck.
No one else seems to notice this, despite Winslet’s frantic mugging. Jackman will drip soup onto the scrotum, and later accidentally dip it into a dish of melted butter that came with the lobster dinner. At one stage, a pubic hair falls into his food.
And (speaking of dickheads) so unfolds the first of 12 punishing short films — short, but never short enough — in the astonishing spectacle called Movie 43. Featuring many famous actors and directors, it’s an eye-opening example of what happens when a bad idea goes worse.
The concept, credited to producers Charles B. Wessler and Peter Farrelly, was apparently, “Let’s be as crude and stupid as possible and see what happens.” The answer is that a pubic hair falls into your food.
There’s no point to the first short (which is directed by Farrelly), or indeed for any of them.
The idea of a neck scrotum is its own comic reward, just as it must remain in subsequent episodes where, for example, Anna Faris plays a young woman who asks her devoted boyfriend, Chris Pratt, that age-old question, “Will you poop on me?”
The rest of the time is taken up with scenes of the Pratt character eating Mexican food and suffering from wall-shaking flatulence awaiting the big moment.
Movie 43 — the unexplained title is the least of its enigmas — was loosely motivated by an irreverent 1977 film called The Kentucky Fried Movie, but with more references to vaginas, one of the film’s chief obsessions.
“It’s obscene. It’s offensive,” says a movie executive (Greg Kinnear) in the framing story, in which desperate screenwriter Dennis Quaid is supposed to be pitching this very film, a conceit that is at once cheap, ridiculous, tiresome and, yes, obscene and offensive.
The worse crime, though, is that it’s not funny. I like to think I enjoy a good poop-on-me joke as much as the next man, but the creators have to do something with it. Not that one can expect such a premise to illuminate the human condition, but all Movie 43 does is cover it in feces and call it hilarity.
And so on it goes: Emma Stone and Kieran Culkin as ex-lovers screaming insults at one another (“Do you still like fingers in your butt-hole?”); Halle Berry responding to a truthor-dare challenge by stirring guacamole with her breast (relax: it’s a prosthetic); Richard Gere struggling to understand the problem with the “iBabe,” an MP-3 player shaped like a naked woman, but with a dangerous fan spinning in its vagina.
There is one promising episode here, with Justin Long as Robin, the superhero sidekick, at a speed dating club and Jason Sudeikis as an interfering Batman. But it’s too little, too lame. Movie 43 is the year’s first utter disaster.