Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
I met this guy in NYC when I was there last time. I remember he seemed like a pretty even-tempered sort. Sounds like the comedy WITHOUT A PADDLE really rubbed him the wrong way, though, and you should probably read just how much it bothered him. Check it out:
Hey Drew-
Maybe you remember me from when you came to NYC to introduce Ray Manzarek's awful Love Her Madly and the great, underappreciated Interview With The Assassin, though more likely you don't. (You went out for drinks afterwards with a bunch of us Ain't It Cool fans.) Or maybe you remember my "spectacularly digressive" review of Rhinoceros Eyes, which finally came out a couple months ago in somewhat-altered form, something like a a year and a half after I saw it. (I'm sorry, it still sucks rotten, hemorrhoidal roadkill ass -- but the Tor Johnson mask will forever remain one of my favorite surreal-but-comic bits ever.)
Anyway, regardless of whether you or anyone else actually remembers me, and despite being incredibly busy with the 480-hours-a-day job of trying, trying, trying to break into the movie business myself (cough cough www.overconfident-wannabe.com cough) I'm back with another review (and possibly a good deal more soon), this time of Without A Paddle, currently scheduled for release on August 20th.
The guy who invited me to the screening pitched it as a spoof of Deliverance in the same way that Scary Movie was a spoof of Scream (and other movies). I love Deliverance -- it's a holy relic of the forgotten age when storytelling still seemed to really matter to Hollywood -- but the thought of people goofing on the dueling banjo scene with that evil little Okie homunculus, and on Ned Beatty's part in one of the most famous (or infamous) moment in all movie history (I don't want to spoil it for anyone who hasn't seen Deliverance, but if you haven't, what the fuck are you waiting for? it's on DVD!) was far too sublimely hilarious for me to get all huffy and stick-up-my-ass purist about the sacredness of the original, and even better yet, the guy told me Burt Reynolds was in it, which offered all kinds of extra self-mocking comic opportunities, so I was there.
And man, if Paramount plans to sell Without A Paddle as a Deliverance spoof, well, let's just say their marketing execs will share Ned Beatty's fate when angry movie-goers storm their offices with torches and machine guns and neatly-folded paper bags of old, rotting, fermented, bug-infested feces. See, for a movie to be a spoof, it has to have a lot of specific jokes and gags about what it's spoofing. And you have to have a pretty high density of jokes. But unless I'm suffering from early-onset Alzheimer's, there were no paper lunch bags full of shit in Deliverance, and hunting for DB Cooper's money (or any money, or any kind of treasure at all) wasn't in there either.
But OK, you can always add stuff to a spoof, so to prove just how mostly unrelated to Deliverance the movie was, here's a quick summary:
Paddle starts off with four kids, Tom, Dick, Harry and Gimpy (or something like that -- the characters weren't memorable enough for their white-bread names to stick) who spend all their time playing together, challenging each other to bike jumps, hanging out in their Hollywood-style tree house, and giving the sickly, weak member of their group - the one with the asthma inhaler, of course - shit by pulling the rope into the tree house up out of his reach so he can't join them.
Fast-forward to Matthew Lillard, Seth Green and some guy I've never heard of named Dax Shepard. (If Ryan Reynolds fucked Zach Braff and they had a kid, and then they force-aged the kid until he was a little older than his parents, that kid would be Dax Shepard - and I actually think his career could go places, but on the other hand the Reynolds/Braff resemblance might screw him over. Either way, he has a pretty good easy-going comic screen presence, and I wouldn't mind seeing him in something better.) Lillard, Green and Shepard learn that their childhood pal Frankie (or Tommy or Harry or Buddy or something like that) died while doing jumping jacks in Peru, or maybe while playing with a slinky in New Zealand or eating rice in Belgium or something. (All these details are basically from the "pick one from column A, one from column B and two from column C" school of screenwriting, so who the fuck can remember them?) So they meet up for the funeral and discover that poor dead Timmy (or Bobby or Barry) had figured out where DB Cooper landed and planned on assembling the foursome to go find the money. (There was an actual DB Cooper back in the 70s, and he stole a huge pile of money after hijacking a plane -- it's a pretty cool story, but look elsewhere for it.) Naturally, they decide to go look for the dough, you know, in memorium. There's nothing like toasting your dead friend with some stolen cash.
Anyway, here at last was a reference to Deliverance: in order to reach the spot on the treasure map where Freddy (or Sally or Jackie) said the money was, they go canoeing down a river. And here's another: when they drive way upstate to the back-country area in which they have go canoeing, they find a bunch of country-bumpkin hicks with bad teeth and some kids riding a giant pig. Now, I'm no expert, but while giant pig-riding sounds pretty right for the world of Deliverance, it doesn't seem even remotely appropriate for this movie, which is set in the Pacific Northwest. I know there are lots of ultra-right-wing reactionary freakazoids up around there, but are any of their kids dressed up like Okies and riding pigs the size of Winnebagoes? I don't think so.
Regardless, their river trip naturally turns into a series of hilarious disasters -- except they forgot the hilarious part. I mean, who the hell had the bright idea that moving a flashlight in a figure-eight pattern to get salmon to jump out of the river is either remotely plausible or even vaguely amusing? That person should be killed on general principle just to safeguard the comedy-writing gene pool! And aren't jokes about women going au naturale and sporting thick matts of leg hair kind of old too? At least find some kind of surprising new spin on the idea, if that's even possible! Jeez!
Which brings me to the folded-over paper bags of shit. See, our three heroes are on the run from some psycho back-woods pot farmers they ran afoul of. (Forget about the fact that you might expect pot farmers to be kind of mellow...) They find a couple hot-chick eco-activists (played by the rode-hard-and-put-away-wet-looking Rachel Blanchard and someone else whose name I didn't catch and who wasn't, I'm sorry to say, especially pretty anyway) living in a tree (don't ask me, it's some kind of protest) so they hang out for awhile until the gun-totin ATV-drivin salmon-beheadin pot farmers find them and start shooting, and in order to drive the farmers off, they (drum roll please) drop bags of shit on their heads.
Yes, you read right: they drop neatly-folded little paper sandwich bags of shit on their heads.
Where did they get such creative, unusual and sidesplittingly hilarious ammunition? Well, remember how the chicks living in the tree are supposed to be some kind of environmental activists? Naturally enough, it turns out that whenever one of them had to take a dump, instead of climbing down the tree and going off a ways into the woods or even just hanging her ass out over the edge of their little treehouse platform and letting it all fall out, they'd climb higher up the tree and shit into a paper bag. And then they'd saved the bag. You know, to conserve, paper bags being so environmentally friendly and all.
So of COURSE they'd have bags of shit just lying around ready to pelt the pot farmers with!
And that, my friends, is the level of comedy you'll find in Without A Paddle.
Now, just to be clear, I have nothing against stupid comedy. I love stupid comedy when it's done right, often the grosser the better. Kingpin is one of my favorite movies of all time, and I think Adam Sandler can sometimes be really cool (The Wedding Singer and 50 First Dates being his best Adam Sandler-type movies). South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut... well, that's just about as good as it gets. And if you want to see the Germans give us a run for our money in the genre, try Maybe, Maybe Not. Some really funny stuff. But for stupid, gross-out humor to work, it's got to start with some kind of twist on the same old gag, and then it's got to build on that twist. In Without A Paddle, the shit gag starts off old and boring and then just sits there getting repeated a couple times until you just groan and roll your eyes.
The director, Stephen Brill, has a rather uninspired career so far (Little Nicky and Mr. Deeds being his most recent films), but nothing he's done comes close to the sheer, mediocre, average pointlessness of this movie. It's not even that there aren't any laughs -- there are a couple. It's just that there's no energy, no genuine sense of humor, and what laughs there are are pretty widely separated. I guess the movie is well-meaning enough, but I was stone-cold bored for long periods of time. So overall, this one gets a C- on the movie meter.
Oh, and Burt Reynolds? He plays DB Cooper's unknown partner. No Deliverance references to be found there at all. What a huge fucking waste.
Brother Isaac
Thanks, man. Nice work, and sorry you disliked it so much. Sounds sort of painful. Dax Shepard, who you mentioned not having seen before, was actually the one consistently funny thing about the first season of Ashton Kutcher’s PUNK’D, and pretty much took all the funny with him when he left.
"Moriarty" out.
