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June 4 - June 10, 2009
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• Get lost, Ferrell
by Michael Phillips
• Hair of the dog
by Michael Phillips
 Get lost, Ferrell
by Michael Phillips
Like him or not (I like him), Will Ferrell remains at the mercy of his material. Is it sheer luck that Blades of Glory was so much funnier than Semi-Pro? No. Luck had nothing to do with it. Blades of Glory had jokes, pacing, dryly assured direction and the right comic attitude. Semi-Pro felt lazy and off-kilter and sour.
Ferrell may well shoulder the blame for Land of the Lost, even if he doesn’t deserve it. He did, however, willingly participate in this coarse, sloppy big-screen version of the old Saturday-morning time-warp adventure, the one with the stop-motion Silly Putty dinosaurs and the three moons, which ran from 1974 through 1977.
The series came from Sid and Marty Krofft, cheery schlockmeisters who delivered unto the airwaves the contact high known as H.R. Pufnstuf. It’s no surprise that Land of the Lost goes in for various trippy detours, including a scene in which “quantum paleontologist” Rick Marshall, played by Ferrell, gets good and stoned with his fellow space-time-continuum traveler Will (Danny McBride) and the ape-man known as Chaka (Jorma Taccone). It’s one of the few successful bits in a film that doesn’t mind making you wait for ’em.
The other one I liked involves Ferrell’s professor dumping a huge container of dinosaur urine over his head, as “protection” from a marauding T. rex. Then, to the disgust of his cohorts Will and Holly (Anna Friel), he does it again, to see if his eyes will stop stinging. Ferrell’s reliably funny when committing, with full and misguided belief, to an act of stupidity. Unfortunately, committing to this script constituted the same sort of act.
I missed the series entirely, so matters of fidelity to the original mean nothing to me. Which leaves us with matters of funny. The way Chris Henchy and Dennis McNicholas lay out their script, Land of the Lost is all happenstance and wandering around and random chaos. Ferrell’s obnoxious character, disgraced for his cockamamie theories, travels to a desert cave on a routine expedition, the one heralded in song, with that unsettling Deliverance banjo, in the TV show’s theme. A massive earthquake plunges him, his seedy tour guide and comely fellow researcher into an alternate universe where past, present, future are all mooshed together (though the director, Brad Silberling, does little with this notion). They encounter dinos and alien zombie lizard minions known as Sleestaks, plus some mumbo-jumbo involving crystals and a climax that goofs on both Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
The movie is 90 minutes of bickering and blasé under-reaction to outrageous events, interrupted by gross-out scraps such as Ferrell’s run-in with an enormous mosquito, which ends with a tremendous amount of blood and guts. Friel, a considerable talent, has little to do besides model her hiking shorts and perform slack-jawed nonverbal reactions to getting felt up by Chaka or slimed by McBride’s misfit tour guide. (Parents expecting an all-ages adventure may be in for a surprise.) The doughy, indistinct McBride strikes me as one of Hollywood’s clearest examples of someone being luckier than he is talented.
Matt Lauer of The Today Show appears in bookend scenes, wrangling with Ferrell. “You’re spending $50 million on time warps?” he asks. The natural, unasked follow-up: You spent $100 million on Land of the Lost?
—MCT
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 Hair of the dog
by Michael Phillips
The Hangover takes care of its target audience’s needs — the target audience being males who, after seeing director Todd Phillips’ earlier (and funnier) Old School, dreamed of joining the Old School fraternity.
But this film left a sour taste in my mouth. Only Daily Show alum Ed Helms, as a buttoned-down dentist along for the ride on a chaotic Las Vegas bachelor party, got me laughing, periodically, between the not-laughing parts.
There’s a sweetness to Helms that masks a sharp sense of timing, generally absent from the material. Screenwriters Jon Lucas and Scott Moore worked on Four Christmases, the one with Reese Witherspoon and Vince Vaughn. If that film appealed to you, by all means, have at The Hangover.
It belongs to the what-happened-last-night? genre typified by Dude, Where’s My Car? Groom-to-be Doug (Justin Bartha) is whisked to Vegas from L.A. by his pals, smarmy schoolteacher Phil (Bradley Cooper) and massively henpecked dentist Stu (Helms), with Doug’s eerie, borderline-pederast brother-in-law (Zach Galifianakis) in tow.
Next morning in their $4,200-a-night Caesars Palace villa (cue my raging class issues!) they wake up to a staggering mess. There’s a tiger in one room, a baby in another. Soon the lads realize they’ve ingested copious amounts of the date-rape drug; run afoul of Mike Tyson; and visited a wedding chapel, where Stu apparently tied the knot with a sunshiny Vegas escort (Heather Graham, in a role that could’ve been cast, quite literally, with any two breasts in Hollywood).
Typical set piece: Two cops encourage a classroom full of preteens to use a Taser on our alleged rooting interests. Bam! Right in the head. Zzzzzt! Right in the ’nads! The sequence isn’t good, rude slapstick; it’s just painful, and Phillips goes for grotty-looking realism throughout, jamming the camera too close to the action. When do you notice things like errant camera placement and ugly lighting?
When a comedy isn’t giving you enough to take your mind off errant camera placement and ugly lighting, that’s when.
The Hangover offers two female archetypes to speak of: miserable shrew and fantasy sex toy. The film’s also a little bit racist, plus a little bit homophobic; our white boy-men keep running into scary African-Americans, Latinos and Asian-Americans who want to hurt them. The end credits garner more laughs in two minutes than the previous 100 can muster. Always nice to leave ’em laughing. The movie smells like a hit, but honestly: Helms excepted, did it need to be quite so blandly cast, or quite so lamely raunchy?
—MCT
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