Parkesy:
Just thought I'd give a quick review of "Road Trip".
I've wanted to see this movie for a while but since I'd heard bad things, I gave it a fairly wide berth. Caught it last night on TV and I must say it was a pretty good entry into the 'dumb comedy' genre. Not quite up there with Deuce Bigalow but on par with American Pie - and that's a pretty big wrap for me. If you dug either of those movies then switch the old brain off and have a good low-brow laugh.
Rating: RATE!
H.P.K.:
Awesome sarcastic review Parkesy. Really funny....oh hang on.
My review of Road Trip (aka Character. Or lack there of.)
Deuce Bigalow had character.
American Pie had character.
Road trip? No character at all. It spent too long trying to set up jokes that were just plain crap (the talking dog? If Eddie Murphy can't make it funny, grandpa extra has no chance.) ather than developing a few characters. Don't get me wrong, Im not some expert on character development. If I knew what exactly gives a movie character, I wouldn't be sitting here pompously typing out some lame-o review of a character-less movie. I'd be out there writing scripts with character and milking the character loving public for all it's worth. But Road trip and Character did not go together.
As for plot, surely they could've thrown in a few jokes around the plot rather than have a very small section of plot followed by large section of joke skits. The ending was almost like they'd run out of film or something it was so quickly tied up. My guess is they saw the ending as requiring plot (nasty fact of movie life that one), so just churned through it in order to get to the next joke. Bravo writers.
Also the direction was hackneyed and disjointed.....actually I have no idea if that was the case, this just makes me sound all intelectual.
Finally, it wasn't funny....and yes, I did find American Pie funny, so I'm not all anti-schlock humour. Oh and it had a very poor Wayne's World singing in the car rip off....probably a better bet to make it a famous song, unless you cant afford the rights to it....in which case well I dunno what you do then, find some other movie that's cheaper to rip off I guess.
All in all, no plot, no character, no good jokes. no good.
Rating: HATE!
Parkesy:
Is this our first Rate Or Hate controversy?
H.P.K.:
Not since A Simple Plan at least...though truth be told NS2k made less of a fuss than I expected.
Parkesy:
I think you need to take my first piece of advice (switch the brain off before viewing). Sure it wasn’t the pinnacle of filmmaking but I still rate it as dumb-comedy. I don’t agree with your ‘no character’ observation. It had Stiffler in it… playing… Stiffler… again. So there’s character for you.
H.P.K.:
You just proved my point exactly. Stealing an actor from another movie and making him the same character purely by association with a previous movie is pathetic....almost as pathetic as the logical structure of that sentence.
Parkesy:
I think that you are picking out non-gem moments to prove your point. I could see talking dog coming from a mile away (although I thought that they’d set him on fire somehow, too, to tie in with Tom Green doing it several years before) and rock-music-in-the-bus-scene was to show them as party animals and fill 30 seconds of celluloid. But I guess I just liked all the totally stupid little things like the guys obsession with feeding the python, the car jumping the bridge, and granddad’s boner (thought I’d end on a high note there). Just as in Gesalt theory, the whole was greater than the sum of its parts.
H.P.K.:
Gestalt was a dumb-@rse (do I still have to try to avoid your firewall?). I can't argue with the concept of whether it's funny or not, cause that's purely subjective, but even the bits that were funny (honestly I cant recall any of them), were just rip-offs of previous movies. It was like a greatest hits compilation, except one of those crappy Dino-records greatest hits without anything particularly great, nor indeed a hit.
Parkesy:
One strange thing is that I think the film is actually better now that Tom Green’s 15 minutes of fame is over. I think I would have liked it less if I’d have seen it when he was still the big man on campus (pardon the pun).
I’d like to see our dumb-comedy scale – like Scary Movie would be on the HATE! end and Deuce would be on the RATE! end. As new movies come along you could add them. Or even make it a two dimensional scale with axis-es (axi?) of crudeness and laughs.
H.P.K.:
This could be done in a jiffy. Give me a list of comedies and rate them on smart and funny scale, take the averages between the three of us and you can make a matrix pretty easy.
Parkesy:
I am sick of you resorting to emotive personal attacks to defend your viewpoint, H.P.K.
What’s more, you’re stinky-stinky-poo-poo and your bike is a girl’s bike!