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Dumb and Dumberer

By Adam Lippe

dumb_and_dumberer_018Now that I have just forsaken 82 minutes by a viewing of Dumb and Dumberer, I can say that not only was I wrong about sequels, I want them to make more. Please have movies that while they begin promisingly (in the first shot, the camera is moving out of Mimi Rogers’ vagina while she gives birth) have jokes like the second one in this movie, where the doctor has to deal with a difficult baby, who bites him. No one thought to mention that newborns don’t have teeth? Please Hollywood, make more movies like this, where despite being set in 1986, you have characters dancing to Ice, Ice, Baby during the credits.

Dumb and Dumberer doesn’t even get being dumb right. The first film was at least consistent, every single thing that either Harry or Lloyd did or said was completely inane and idiotic. In the sequel the characters are stupid when it suits the joke and then suddenly have a witty turn of phrase. They’re not actually funny, but they know an awful lot of words that morons wouldn’t know how to spell, let alone use properly. There’s 1 funny line in the whole movie, said by Mr. Show alum Jill Talley, and I’m not sure it was on purpose. Harry and Lloyd steal a stuffed polar bear from the museum and the next day, Talley is at the museum with her daughter, who asks of mom, “Where did the daddy polar bear go?” Talley responds with, “He was killed by a hunter, just like your father.”

The ending makes no sense on so many levels, and not just because the movie is stupid. The plot has to do with Eugene Levy as the principal of Harry and Lloyd’s school, learning of a way to swindle a lot of money out of a group that supports Special Needs Classes. So Levy creates this small class to pretend to have facilities for the less than bright. But at the end it turns out that the group he was trying to steal from, was actually fake, and was just made up of undercover police officers pretending to be retarded. So are we supposed to think that they created this group with the hopes that a principal somewhere would find their brochure, devise a plan and try to take advantage, so they could find a reason to bust him? I realized I just thought about this movie more than the screenwriters did.

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Roadracers

By Adam Lippe

Whenever there’s a genre parody or ode to a specific era of films, such as Black Dynamite’s mocking of Blaxploitation films or Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, the second half of Grindhouse, the danger is that the film might fall into the trap of either being condescending without any particular insight, or so faithful that it becomes the very flawed thing it is emulating.

Black Dynamite has nothing new to say about Blaxploitation films, it just does a decent job of copying what an inept [...]


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Featured Quote (written by me)

On Cold Fish:

Though the 16 year old me described the 1994 weepie Angie, starring Geena Davis as a Brooklyn mother raising her new baby alone, as “maudlin and melodramatic,” Roger Ebert, during his TV review, referring to the multitude of soap-operaish problems piling up on the titular character, suggested that it was only in Hollywood where Angie would get a happy ending. “If they made this movie in France, Angie would have shot herself.”

Well Cold Fish was made in Japan, where Angie would have shot herself and that would have been the happy ending.