Hey folks, Harry here. Well it seems Mr Iguana has quite an interesting perspective on Mike Nichols' latest film... WHAT PLANET ARE YOU FROM. You see... he was at the first screening of the film, months ago... and now he's seen the latest print... The 'enhanced' version you may say. The film is now just about a month and a half from release and seems like it still has it's fair share of problems... the type it's hard to fix. But of course... that's just the opinion of Mr Iguana... take care and here he is. Oh... Mr Iguana... were you once Stacy Keach?
Hey Harry. Mr. Iguana here. This is my review of a screening that I've taken part in twice now. It's called "What Planet Are You From?" directed by Mike Nichols, and they have screened it three times here in New Jersey. Three times in the same theater. I went the first time just because it sounded like it could be great. They assured us that we were the first audience to see. That was about two or three months ago. I didn't go the second time because it was too soon and as you'll read in my review: It's not good. Basically I went again last night just to see what was happening to it. You never know how a movie will change, right? For example, a long time ago I wrote a review of the first screening of "Bowfinger's Big Thing" later titled "Bowfinger". I hated "Bowfinger", it was crap. It was released and now I love it! They edited so much of the junk and bad jokes and they managed to find a movie under all that. Not the case with "What Planet Are You From?" staring Garry Shandling and Annette Bening.
I'm a little dumbfounded by this movie. I don't think I'll ever know how a director like Mike Nichols could go from "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf", to "The Graduate", to "Biloxi Blues", to "Regarding Henry", to "Wolf", to "The Birdcage", to "Primary Colors", and now to "What Planet Are You From?". Why? Garry Shandling wrote the screenplay to this with Peter Tolan ("Analyze This") and based on the story by Michael Leeson ("War of the Roses"). Yet it is a type of comedy that I don't think can win. In a way I hope it does. I hope it makes money for them all. It might. The people in front of me gave it a perfect score on their opinion card. I don't think they get to laugh much.
Anyway, I'm a pretty shy person so this was wasted on me, but these nights have been pretty star-studded. The first night Mike Nichols was there, I said nothing to him. Last night I think I lost my mind. I was smoking outside five minutes before the movie was going start, I finished and walked very fast into the theater. I noticed that the theater lobby was pretty empty I had to hurry. I showed the ticket to the ticket guy and I realized that my friend was not moving as fast as me. I turned to see where he was and right in my face is Garry Shandling. He's waiting for me to move. I turned to stone. My brain told me to snap out of it and I did. I turned around to my friend and BOOM like a punch in the face, there was Annette Bening looking right at me while she shoved popcorn into her mouth. I turned to stone. My brain didn't tell me to snap out of it instead it said "American Beauty, American Beauty, American Beauty, Kevin Spacy, In Dreams, In Dreams, In Dreams, Neil Jordan, The Crying Game, End of the Affair, Warren Beatty, Warren Beatty, having sex with. . .". I didn't know what to do. I heard Garry say, "Who are we going to sit next to.". That snapped me out of it and I laughed. I laughed hard. I laughed right in her face, I turned and laughed at Garry. My friend came by and started laughing to. I looked at him and screamed, "That is totally Garry Shandling and Annette Bening!!" and we ran off into the theater. I'm an idiot, but it was funny.
Anyway, this is a review so I should do that. The plot is this: A race of aliens just outside our universe are on the brink of extinction because as they evolved their reproductive organs dried up and fell off. An unmaned probe from Earth is at Jupiter, three years from discovering their planet. All the aliens are men or they just look like men and their leader is Ben Kingsley. They must send one man to Earth equipped with a robot penis to impregnate a woman. They need a baby and I don't know why. So Garry Shandling is sent to earth and the only way to get him there is to crash him into a airplane sending all passengers airborne for a few seconds. Anytime Garry wants to speak with the leader he must board a plane. Now the first time I saw this they used this effect about 4 or 5 times. This is a cool effect. It's the best thing about this movie and they cut it down to 2 for time reasons. Bad move.
So Garry is on earth and he has a job at a bank and starts to hang out with Greg Kinnear who knows how to pick up woman. Garry meets Annette and she's the one Meanwhile John Goodman, an airport cop is investigating the weird crash on the plane that brought Garry to earth. He must find the truth. Now I don't want to go into too much plot detail so I'll just pick apart one thing. The robot penis. Why oh why a robot penis. Here's the joke: When Garry is horny or basically when he just talks to a woman, any woman his penis makes a buzzing noise. Over and over again. It is described as buzzing, humming and vibrating. There are 10 or more times that they try to make a joke out of the buzzing and not many of them are funny. Some are a smile, not much more than that. But the real problem here is that no women really seem to mind and some don't even know where the noise is coming from, during sex! One of the funniest jokes in the movie is from Linda Fiorentino who hears the humming and says maybe it doesn't know the words. Ha-ha!! It's only funny because she says it in a sexy way. I laughed but I'm an idiot.
This movie will be rated R for lots of sex and language. And maybe if you can lower yourself to a 13 year old's mentality you’ll laugh on a line for line basis. This movie is like Deuce Bigalow, afterwards I laughed but the movie is bad. Everybody knows it. It's a bad movie but look how much money it made. Maybe if they market it as a dumb movie like Deuce it will make money and that's all they could be out to do. The only difference between the two is that "What Planet Are You From?" is packed full of lame morals and points to make. It's not going to change the world.
Mr. Iguana
