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Disaster Movie. And since Dennis Miller isn’t available, I’ll just have to do.
So let’s go through that trailer again, and I’m going to point out places where you did things that, frankly, I can’t believe. Moments when you made such poor choices that my gut response was to shout “Liar! You LIE!” at my computer screen. Which, by the way, totally ruined my cred at the library.
All right, here goes:
1.
Comedy is all about subtlety. Maybe you’re still amped up from Rove’s reign of blatant attack ads, or maybe you totally missed the point of my Wednesday post, but no one’s going to laugh at a guy pointing to a stupid guy and saying “this guy’s stupid” in a deep voice. Or, I mean, maybe they would, but not for two hours. I hope.
Didn’t any of your English teachers hammer “Show, Don’t Tell” into your heads? If you want to show the audience that Michael Moore is totally clueless, rather than calling him totally clueless, how about depicting him standing in front of a movie poster for the movie
Clueless? Or perhaps misplacing his game of Clue? Or going to the Pope's funeral and taking a massive shit all over the floor? Believe it or not, all of those things are still technically more subtle and crafty than some of the lines in this trailer.
And in case you want to say it’s just a by-product of the trailer’s distilled format, I’d like to point you in the direction of
this clip, where a liberal poll taker laundry lists a series of Republican talking points so panderingly that I was waiting for her to turn to camera and say “I’m such a dick!”
You want people to see the Republicans in the movie as voices of reason, not condescending, ham-fisted cynics rolling their eyes at our stupidity while they spoon feed us catchphrases from Hannity’s dream journal.
2.
Gary Coleman. Funny in
Diff’rent Strokes, kind of funny ten years later, no longer funny. Not only has his cachet as a public figure been used up; using him just seems like you’re a creepy old guy trying to “get in with the kids.”
In fact, now that I think about it…David Zucker, Leslie Neilson, David Allen Grier…this would have been an all star cast in 1987! So you’re doing something right, just two decades late. If you want to get in with today’s kids, you’re going to need to update some of the cast and references.
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