Hey folks, Harry here... Well.... dear lord... Spade has produced another.... thing on the um... movie rectangle. Joy. Bliss. Wonderment. The last time I saw one of his films it was LOST AND FOUND... which wsa just a near DOA... Spade is likable to a degree... but he hasn't really proven himself to be the LEADING MAN comedy guy. It's like watching 30FT BRIDE OF CANDY ROCK... there's Costello without his Abbott... Spade and Farley had a great chemistry... Without him... he feels like half of an act.... it's time to change. Look how George Burns changed when his wonderful Gracie departed... Sometimes change is wondrous. Now... remember.. this is a very early review... and comedies are most often the films most helped by the testing process in my experience of covering these things... Here ya go...
Hi Harry
Caught a test screening of David Spade's new comedy, The Adventures of Joe Dirt tonight in Thousand Oaks, CA. It's basically a standard entry in the alarmingly popular gross-out genre...now I'm no fan of that kind of movie, but I did quite enjoy Spade's last effort, Lost and Found, so I at least had moderate hopes for this. It was definitely a workprint, as there were wires visible in some scenes, and really bad blue screen fx in a scene where Spade is flying a hot air balloon. I also recognised some temp music from Edward Scissorhands!
Spade plays Joe Dirt, a redneck with a killer mullet who was abandoned by his parents at the Grand Canyon when he was eight. In a great opening scene, he drives the shittiest looking car you've ever seen down the Strip listening to "Sweet home Alabama" (the soundtrack is loaded with similar tunes!) He works as a janitor at an LA radio station, and for some unknown reason is invited to tell his life story to an obnoxious shock jock (Dennis Miller, basically playing himself).
The rest of the movie is a series of vignettes basically connected by Joe's search for his parents. He moves from town to town encountering the requisite zany characters, stereotypes and gross-out situations. Example : he finds a meteor and tries to sell it, only to find out that its actually a lump of frozen shit dropped from a plane. Then he meets a hot young thing called Brandy because...make sure you're not eating anything... her dog's balls are frozen to the porch and Joe is trying to help it out. The dog tries to stand up several times, and we get the pleasure of seeing its balls stretching to about two feet long. Get the tone of this movie yet?
Brandy's white trash father played by Joe Don Baker and Kid Rock(!) as a bullying redneck join in the, er, fun. Joe takes off on his quest, stumbling upon a firework-selling Indian, a serial killer called Buffalo Bob (played by that Schwarzenegger lookalike alien bounty hunter guy from the X-files) who imprisons him, in a parody of a certain serial killer flick, Rosanna Arquette as a gator farm owner, a girl who may or may not be his sister, but he sleeps with her anyway...etc etc. No white trash/ redneck stereotype is left unturned...
The bright spot of the movie is, yes, CHRISTOPHER WALKEN! The mighty Walken dominates his scenes in his all-too-brief appearance. These days, when you go to a Walken movie, there is diluted Walken, moody Walken or hammy Walken. This performance is PURE Walken. He plays a semi-psychotic school janitor who likes to tap dance while sweeping the corridors and rant at fire extinguishers. Why wasn't he in every scene, dammit!?
Anyhoo, is this movie going anywhere, you might ask? Not really...it briefly delves into Forrest Gump territory as Joe becomes a celebrity through the radio show, and eventually Joe does find his parents, living in a trailer park in Simi Valley (that one got a big laugh from the local crowd), played by Gary Busey and Roseanne, no less! And it turns out they abandoned him on purpose. Because they're just nuts, really. Then there's a nice happy ending where Spade is reunited with Brandy, with Walken and Arquette as his surrogate parents!!! (It turns out Walken was an ex-gangster in the witness protection program, his new identity is Gert B. Frobe...the name of the guy who played Goldfinger. I'm not sure what the point of calling him that was...)
So, if dumb humor and gross-out gags are your bag, this is for you. I didn't think it was as "good" as Lost and Found. For the rest of us, the God-like Walken is the brief bright spot. Don't get me wrong, I didn't despise the movie, it's just not for me. The crowd consisted mostly of high-schoolers, and they seemed to love it, so go figure. It'll probably fill the gap for the gross-out crowd between Sandler epics.
Max California
And here's MacGuyver...
Hey Harry, L.A. Spy MacGuyver here with a report from tonights screening of Joe Dirt, the new David Spade "comedy." The screening was in Thousand Oaks , CA, and both David Spade and Adam Sandler were in attendance - (In fact you might still catch them if you run over to the Janss theater, I just left and they had them hidden in a little room after the screening).
I'll keep it brief: I hope the movie was a VERY rough cut, because the story was quite choppy and the method used to keep the plot going from one gag to the next seemed very contrived. The story is moved along by David Spade's character Joe Dirt getting pulled into a live radio show hosted by Dennis Miller (doing his best Dennis Miller impression) because someone in the hallway thought his haircut was funny. Then he goes on to tell Dennis his life story leading up to him ended up being the Janitor at this radio station. This almost like an afterthought when they realized the movie they had didn't flow well enough, however I'm sure it was actually this ill-concieved from the start.
As Joe Dirt tells his life story over the next few days on this radio station, it is supposed to be so compelling that he develops a following among the listeners of the show, who are huddled around their radios laughing and crying and just dying to hear ever detail of Joe's pathetic white trash life. The problem is that we in the audience can't believe this because we are also hearing much of his interview, and there is no substance that would peak anyone's interest who might be listening.
The whole plot was basically formed as an excuse to see how many elements of white trash life you could make fun of - which would be fine with me is they were a little more clever and most importantly **Funny** with it - but there is no question that if anyone attempted to make a similar movie about some pour schmuck of different ethnic background they would be boycotted and picketted out of business.
Now I don't want this review to sound all bad, because there were some funny parts and I did laugh out loud a few times, and chuckle quietly a few more. Most notably, Christopher Walken is hillarious, and there's a Silence of the Lambs parody that is somewhat amusing. However I just wish they could have spent a little time making us care about this character instead of just assuming from the very beginning that we do, and will throughout. I also wish that they wouldn't have wasted time with ridiculous sight gags (semi-spoiler here... edit this out if you want to: A dog gets it's testicles stuck to a freezing cold porch, and they get severely stretched out while trying to unstick them) and try to be a little craftier... more clever... maybe have at least one moment of genius - But, they weren't.
Overall, I won't tell you not to see it because I guess they could improve it between now and the release, but they have their work cut out for them.
OK... so maybe I wasn't as brief as I promised.
MacGuyver
