Movie 43 (2013)

Though hardly a consistently funny film, “Movie 43” is, astonishingly, not a complete and utter miss. It is a hit-and-miss spectacle around the lines of 2013’s “The ABCs of Death,” with a comedy rather than horror theme. At it’s worst, it’s still a lot better than the worst “ABCs of Death” had to offer.

The plot is loosely and crudely constructed, with an emphasis on ‘crude.’ The jokes consistently base themselves on shock value and poor taste, with sometimes funny results. This is an anthology film, and the segments all base themselves around this premise- wimpy schmuck Griffin (Greg Kinnear) listens as obsessed screenwriter Charlie (Dennis Quaid) pitches a script to him- a tasteless opus that Griffin quickly dismisses. Undeterred, Charlie holds Griffin at gunpoint and tries to force him to sell the script. The following shenanigans are the contents of this screenplay.

The first segment, “The Catch,” is actually pretty funny as Kate Winslet tries to figure out why no one seems to notice the giant ballsack hanging from her date Hugh Jackman’s neck. Don’t judge me, I laughed. The second one was pretty funny in an ‘ashamed of yourself but laughing’ way, it actually plays on the stereotypes about homeschoolers, as a homeschooled young person I appreciated that.

The only other really funny short in this collection is the grossly inappropriate iBabe. The others range from pretty mediocre to pretty bad. The one with Chloe Grace Moretz, a talented young actress, is just embarrassing and awkward as a teenage girl is humiliated by her inopportunely timed first period and the incompetence of her male audience. The one with Anna Faris was gross and pointless, and is only funny if you like poop jokes and third rate sitcom humor.

Some of the shorts were mesmerizing in their strange tastelessness, “Beezel,” with it’s homosexual cat jacking off to pictures of his owner in swimtrunks, is a startling example. I didn’t find the short about the black basketball players particularly racist, but I didn’t find it funny either.

“Movie 43” doesn’t really utilize it’s all-star cast, but you could do worse for a late-rainy-day distraction. If you get to watch it free, and want to laugh a few times and think ‘hmm, that’s strange,’ then go for it. It’s not the abomination people have made it out to be, but it’s no classic comedy. Just remember to think for yourself!
                                

Four Rooms (1995)

For reasons I cannot fully explain, I thoroughly enjoyed this movie, and laughed throughout. Blame it on my crazy sense of humor. Blame it on my love of gratuitous film violence and insanity. But mostly, blame it on Tim Roth. Roth’s manic, inspired portrayal of swishy, spasticated, neurotic bellhop “Ted” resulted in one of the most entertaining characters I’ve seen in a while.

Here’s the deal- “Four Rooms” is a pseudo-anthology film featuring four segments written and directed by four filmmakers. Each segment follows Ted (Roth) through one insane New Year spent at a hotel and punctuated by violence, weird sexuality, and mutilation. Three of the segments are directed by filmmakers I’m not really familiar with, and the fourth is done by Tarantino.

I liked all of the stories in the film, but in different ways. I didn’t really know what to make of the first one. A coven of witches staying at the hotel, played by prominent ’90s icons such as Madonna and Lili Taylor, discover they need sperm to complete their witchy potion to bring the goddess Diana to life. And who else for the job but twitchy hotel bellboy Roth?

The second story involves an insane husband and wife who want to Ted to participate in their kinky sex games. The third and the funniest, “The Misbehavers,” follows Ted as he is bribed into caring for Antonio Banderas’s two whiny children. The kids, who exemplify the reason I hate small children, soon push Ted over the edge with their demands. But how will Ted react when there’s a real emergency on hand?

I actually thought Tarantino’s short, “The Man From Hollywood,” was the weakest, because it seemed self-indulgent, suffering from uninterrupted periods of Tarantino reading his dialogue. In this one, Ted comes across a Hollywood bigwig (Tarantino) with a shocking proposition.

I watched this movie free of the knowledge that it had been critically panned, with an abysmal 14% on Rotten Tomatoes. I think you have to have a certain kind of sense of humor to appreciate this kind of movie. For me, it was very funny, because it wasn’t the usual wishy-washy cliche type of comedy.

I derived the majority of the humor from Tim Roth’s absurdly physical performance. It reminded me a little of Charlie Chaplin for the ’90s, which was, obviously, a less innocent time for cinema than the Tramp’s heyday. Overall, “Four Rooms” is an interesting and overlooked black comedy for those who like their comedy absurd and bizarre.

V/H/S (2012)

Nothing to see here, ladies and gents. “V/H/S” is a appallingly bad and nauseatingly shot fright flick, marred by misogynist overtones and 0% (and I do mean %0) character development. The film is geared toward predominately male teenagers with short attention spans, sporting sickeningly schizoid cinematography and and gratuitous boobie shots (most of which are in sexually violent or exploitative context.)

In the core storyline, A group of miscreants break into a house after being hired to steal one videotape. We have no sympathy for these people- between their abusive treatment of women and their grating stupidity, we’re actually rooting against them. When they break in, they find a stack of V/H/S home movies… and a corpse. Unfazed by the body of an old man resting in an armchair, they begin to view the videotapes. Each one is a supposedly real horror short.

The first short in the anthology is by far the worst. A trio of horny and misogynistic friends set out to video tape one of the men’s sexual experience. The situation soon becomes rapey, as one girl is passed out drunk and another is an apparently addled femme fatale who is not what she seems. The acting in this short is pretty poor and the dialogue is worse.

Is it really necessary to drop the F bomb in every sentence? I mean, I love my expletives as much anybody else, but throwing it around willy-nilly makes you sound like a 13-year-old trying to be ‘edgy.’ The boys are disgusting pieces of work, but watching their well-deserved demise, satisfying as it might be, is not enough to save this terrible short.

The majority of these shorts are wretchedly bad to pretty mediocre, with the exception of one. Here’s a wonder- Ti West, who made one of the worst shorts in the similarly themed horror anthology “The ABC’s of Death”, also directs the segment that saves this movie from being a total disaster. “Second Honeymoon,” starring Joe Swanberg and Sopie Takal, is a surprising and competently acted short that kept me guessing throughout.

The short with the aliens had potential, but just left too many unanswered questions for my liking. The others were utter crap. The shaky cam gave me a headache and a stomachache. The dialogue was a string of childish obscenities. There was no depth to the characters. I have not seen a movie in a long time with a cast of characters I liked less. This movie is so, so bad. Avoid it like the plague.
Rating-
3.5/10