(no subject)

[noahgibbs]

This week The Onion's AV Club has a movie review of "I Spy" that I have to mostly agree with. They thought it was a basically bad movie that was saved by Owen Wilson, who in turn got Eddie Murphy kickstarted. I hadn't realized that one of the random commenter guys was Sugar Ray Leonard until I checked the movie out on IMDB. Good to know.

Comments

[bellacrow.livejournal.com]

agreed ;-)

[stephtoth.livejournal.com]

you all's a bunch of whiney-snoots :) I figured I'd skip commenting the first time you mentioned the movie, and everybody agreed that it was bad, but since you find it facinating enough to warrent two LJ posts, I'll throw in my 2 cents.

For goodness sakes, that movie was FUNNY!
Even if it was owen wilson who saved it, doing his usual type-cast character that he always does, it was laugh out loud funny. And Eddie Murphy, who I typically don't enjoy at all, was really good too. I watch a lot of movies, and hardly ever even giggle at most comedies, you can tell this was a good movie because I was laughing almost the whole way through it. It's making fun of the cliche'd spy movie, thus, there are cliche's in it. That doesn' t make it cliche'd. (though I will agree with your AV Club reviewer that kicks in the balls are a little innane, but even that was done in such a way that it wasn't just stupid for the sake of being stupid.)
Maybe it's all what you go in there expecting. It's not an action/adventure spy movie, it's a comedy, they are judged entirely differently in my opinion. I enjoyed I Spy a lot, and will put it on my non-existant list of top comedies of the year. ;)

if you want to see the best example of owen wilsons character, see Bottle Rocket. Very good movie! I'm thinking it's made by the guy who made Rushmore, which was also very good :)

[angelbob.livejournal.com]

I don't know. There were things in it I thought were pretty funny. The schtick at the very end with the aerogel was amusing. There were several other things that were up there in the "as amusing as a lot of the stuff that friends say" category (note: my friends don't charge me nine bucks to spend time around them).

Then there was stuff like the whole attempted-seduction scene with the split-screen camera stuff going on, and him stiffly speaking lyrics as Eddie Murphy sang them. That was... Um... Less painful to watch than some forms of surgery, I guess.

Overall, I thought it was split. For every scene like the one where he talks on the phone in Hungarian to make the room reservation (which were stuff-friends-would-say funny) there were scenes like the one where he gets back to base after the disastrous mission, answers the phone and claims everything's going well -- scenes that aren't meant to be especially funny, but still manage to really subtract from the movie overall.

That's considered mandatory in American comedy, for reasons I've never figured out. Sure, you spend some time doing stuff that's funny, or at least supposed to be funny, but you alternate with scenes that are supposed to look kind of soulful and character-building where the characters do entirely out-of-character stuff that messes up the story, or is irrelevant to it, or just really shows up the enormous gaping holes in the plot. Who decided that was a good idea?

Earlier I said that it couldn't be much better and still be that genre. So you've got main characters that pretty much work (Wilson, Murphy) and tolerable acting, you've just also got these constant scenes that aren't funny and make the whole thing seem pretty stupid. Those scenes are the mandatory bit to keep it in-genre.

Alternately, it could have been a comedy with some character, some story and some subtlety -- like "Roxanne", for instance, which had a much smaller number of painfully stupid scenes, better characters, a better story, yet it was much funnier. But that would have been a different genre.