This spy decided to go back to the art of test screening infiltration motivated by the actions of this site. He/she/it didn't care for the movie. If you saw it, what did you think. Taking one person's opinion is not really the best thing to do. Make up your own minds. There are Spoilers in the review.
hey harry - love your site & spoilers... actually inspired me to attend my first test screening in years just to be able to contribute to your geek-cause. damn you anyway.
----->b cuz on monday night i was one of the underprivileged few who attended supposedly the first test screening for KRIPPENDORF'S TRIBE - "a wild, new comedy coming soon starring Academy Award-winner Richard Dreyfuss (Mr.Holland's Opus) [<---sucky film!]. Richard Dreyfuss stars as James Krippendorf, a scientist so desperate to maintain his research grant, that he fakes the discovery of a rare primitive tribe. Total havoc ensues as Krippendorf must produce documentary footage of his discovery, so he turns to the most primitive people he knows: his children! Always just one step ahead of his highly suspicious and competitive colleagues, Krippendorf and his kids improvise and film an entire culture from scratch in their backyard. Krippendorf's new 'tribe' soon becomes a national craze... but how long can the frantic family keep up the charade before the whole crazy hoax is exposed?"
Kind of a lame cartoony film with 3 funny scenes... the often brilliant Lily Tomlin stars unfortunately as Dreyfuss' anthropology rival who is so competent that you end up rooting for her instead of Dreyfuss' messy, dysfunctional, dishonest scientist. That is if you completely forget about her ill-conceived, vacant, uncomfortable & loooong tropical fruit sucking scene with a native. Jenna Elfman fresh from a failed sitcom (Townies) and a new sitcom (Dharma & Greg) and a new recognizable family name (she married the nephew to music czar Danny boy last year) stars as the love interest - a career climbing professor who flops back and forth between gamey adventerous heroine and abrupt calculating bitch. She is quite funny in key scenes, and in others she is terribly one-note and its a grater. However perhaps the funniest scene is when she commandeers a talk show program in which our goofy scientist is posing as a tribesman, and puts him through the ringer for the wrong he has done her (getting her drunk and dressing her like a tribeswoman to film her performing a 'mating fertility dance' for his documentary without her knowledge which she later discovers at an electronic superstore as the program airs on a nature-exploitative cable show - the film stretches credibilty to its predictably uninspired outer limits).. her comic timing tho as she stuffs Richie with a grub is fantastic. Her love scenes with a tubby grizzly Dreyfuss tho were quite unsettling and kind of made me quite queasy. There's a lot of wasted talent stuck in one-dimensional supporting characters - the oldest son however stands out as he has some raucuous scenes improvising a tribal circumsion on his younger brother for the camera, and presenting a fabricated menstruation ritual for his school science fair complete with a female classmate locked in a hut awaiting smothering by pig urine to be cleansed. This scene is the best choreographed with the action and farce building unexpectedly each moment, but when the pig pees on the principal at the climax you know you're knee-deep in the obligatory obvious. There is a lot of stupid sex and toilet and penis humor and insults. When the tribe is spawned by a panicking Krippendorf at a packed lecture hall he ends it by producing a microwave melted rocket toy that resembles a tribal fetish totem which he explains is the native dildo and hands it to rival Lily Tomlin suggesting she take it home and give it a try.Because these 2 leads are capable of some of the most intelligent comedy to emerge from Hollywood based on character depth & incongruities (TOMLIN: Search for Signs of Intelligent Life, DREYFUSS: What About Bob?) this type of broad adolescent humor just kind of hangs there limp and lifeless and never really fully takes off. While the subject of Anthropology is always ripe for satire, at its best a mirror of our own society and its absurdity - as in the mock documentation of the peculiar habits of the ACIREMA tribe and their far-out peculiar habits (at the end of the book you realize that the bizarre tribe you've read about is America spelled backwards) - this film squanders that inherent potential and like the film's protagonist exploits the subject matter solely for a suburbanized self-consuming consumption and in parts even self-therapy. The lowest and most painful moment to watch is the film's climax as Dreyfuss is exposed as a fake tribesman at a gala dinner party honoring him as the recipient of a new 100,000 dollar grant. After a few indignant exclamations from the trustees, Dreyfuss' youngest child speaks his first words to his father after 2 years of angry silence (a lame & barely mentioned subplot) to the effect of - "it was fun, daddy". The entire crowd falls silent as Dreyfuss has a heart to heart onstage with the child explaining the nature of fun and life and work and anthropology which is plain saccharine-laden ludicrous and purely the worst that Dreyfuss has to offer. You'd have thought that he'd had enough after that Hallmark card of a movie Mr. Holland's Opus, but i guess the man don't get enough sugar or something. o well, i'm done. sorry this report is so long and rambling, but let's just say its sloppy execution is an ode to the experience!
~ from psuedonym The LVX-Files
