Too much parody vs. too little parody

Fulfilling a promise I made to a recently deceased Leslie Nielsen, I finally watched my copy of Dracula: Dead and Loving It on Sunday afternoon.

You know, it wasn't that bad. I understand the impulse to rake Mel Brooks and Nielsen over the coals for this movie, but to be honest, Nielsen made a dozen movies that were worse than this. (You have no idea how many movies he made in the late 1990s and early 2000s that you've never heard of.) Brooks may not have made that many that were worse, but he certainly made one or two.

However, I freely admit that my limited affection for Dracula: Dead and Loving It may just be relative, when you compare it to what passes for parody in these here modern times of ours.

Yes, I am going to shit on Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer yet again on my blog.

Friedberg and Seltzer, the writer-directors of such landfill as Date Movie, Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans and Vampires Suck, are irritating because of their many sins of commission. A movie like Dracula: Dead and Loving It is notable for its omissions, not its commissions.

Put differently: Epic Movie tries way too hard, while Dracula doesn't try hard enough. And in this case, I vastly prefer the latter sin.

When you think of Mel Brooks, you may think of a guy who is terminally goofy, willing to try anything for a laugh. But he's really quite restrained compared to Friedberg and Seltzer. Brooks at least confines his jokes, relatively speaking, to the context of his plot. There may be the occasional anachronism in his movies, sure, but it's nothing compared to Alice in Wonderland showing up in the middle of a vampire movie. (Which happens in Vampires Suck. Friedberg and Seltzer have done far worse, but that one is fresh in my memory from an unfortunate recent viewing.)

You might say that anachronisms are the raison d'etre for Seltzer and Friedberg, the more off-the-wall, the better. This gets old, fast. But it's what they have to do, since they're determined to end every single shot on a joke. (Note: calling it "what they have to do" is not, for a moment, endorsing anything about their method.)

And that's what I really noticed as I was watching Dracula: Dead and Loving It: Some scenes just ended, without what appeared to be a joke. To some people, that's the very definition of why it isn't a good movie. To me, it brought relief -- relief that the movie takes itself seriously enough not to strain for humor when it just isn't there.

I guess the fact that I noticed it means that they were doing something wrong. And I'm not going to try to tell you that Dracula is in the same league as The Naked Gun (if we're looking at Nielsen movies) or Blazing Saddles (if we're looking at Brooks movies). But it is in the same league as Naked Gun 33 1/3 (Nielsen) or High Anxiety (Brooks) -- which is to say, not great, but worth a watch.

What I like most about Brooks' approach relative to the approach of the Two-Headed Monster (I will refer to them as such from here on out) is that Brooks' approach doesn't date itself. If the Two-Headed Monster had been making Dracula: Dead and Loving It, it would have come across less as a parody of Bram Stoker's famous novel, and more as a parody of the pop culture landscape circa 1995. Which would make it really fun to watch in 2011.

But since the humor in Dracula was almost entirely driven by the scenario, I was able to laugh at it, from time to time, in 2011. Sure, it's not high comedy when Lucy (Lysette Anthony) closes her balcony door, and a bat with Nielsen's head slams face first into a pane of glass. But at least the humor flows organically from the situation.

I did not laugh at the bat-into-the-glass gag, but I did laugh at the following jokes:

1) When Dracula (Nielsen) removes his goofy heart-shaped hairdo, revealing it to be just a "hair hat";

2) When Harker (Steven Weber) gets repeatedly doused by sprays of blood from Lucy's corpse, as he drives a stake through her chest. The sprays of blood alone are funny, but Weber's line deliveries during this scene are priceless;

3) When Renfield (Peter MacNicol) eats all manner of bugs while at a dinner with Dr. Seward (Harvey Korman). I think Peter MacNicol may have been born to play Renfield;

4) When Van Helsing (Brooks) and Dracula have a battle to see who can get in the last word, each prolonging the conversation by throwing down one last Yiddish word as an exclamation point. This bit has a funny payoff in the film's final shot;

5) When the sun melts Dracula at the end, leaving only a bat-shaped pile of ashes on the floor. Renfield gathers the ashes into a neat little pile and draws a smiley face in it. "There, master, you're starting to look like your old self again."

And those are just the times I can remember.

When you legitimately laugh (or "LOL") during a movie at least five times, that means it was worth watching.

I haven't legitimately laughed five times in all the movies I've seen by the Two-Headed Monster -- combined.

I'm glad I got a laugh or two (or five) from Dracula: Dead and Loving It, if only because it's nice to come across a Nielsen movie I hadn't seen that's better than Wrongfully Accused or 2001: A Space Travesty. (I saved you the trouble and saw both, thank you very much.) Seeing his smiling face in the "In Memoriam" section at the Oscars just whetted my appetite for this unique funnyman, all of whose best work I thought I'd already seen.

No, Dracula is not among his best -- but it didn't make me cringe either, and that's a small victory worth applauding.

Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer still suck

As I learned from a movie by Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer earlier this week, vampires suck.

But they don't suck as much as Friedberg and Seltzer do.

I watched Vampires Suck on my last day before the end of ranking my 2010 movies because it was short and I had a block of time to fill after getting home from work. Plus, as stated here, I had the masochistic desire to flesh out the bottom of my rankings.

However, if I had consciously known it was "a Friedberg-Seltzer joint" (Spike Lee, forgive me), I would have definitely avoided it.

But if it walks like a Friedberg-Seltzer movie, and it talks like a Friedberg-Seltzer movie, then it's probably a Friedberg-Seltzer movie.

If I'm losing you with these names, let me tell you about these two guys, who I loosely consider to be two of the worst people in Hollywood. But first, let's take a look at who we're dealing with.

Here are Jason and Aaron:


And oh look! Some kind soul on the internet has already done the work for me. Jason and Aaron do, in fact, suck.

And I'm glad they find themselves so funny, because no one else does. Or no one else should -- but apparently, some people do, which is why Friedberg-Seltzer movies still make money, which is why they get to keep on making them.

After being not-totally-terrible in Scary Movie, where they shared the writing credit with four others, here's what they've gone on to unleash on the world:

Date Movie (2006)
Epic Movie (2007)
Meet the Spartans (2008)
Disaster Movie (2008)

Each of these films has been given one star by the website I write for. And even that might be too generous, except that the website refuses to cut a single star in half. One is as low as they go. That's got to be the lowest number of stars for any four movies in the careers of any writer, director, writer-director or team of writer-directors.

Vampires Suck was given one-and-a-half stars, although no review exists -- in fact, I may be the one who reviews it. Vampires Suck, in fact, is one half start better than the two other Friedberg-Seltzer movies I've seen, Date Movie and Epic Movie. It's nice to know that over the course of almost exactly four years since I last checked in with them (I went to Epic Movie in January 2007, in the theater, because I was desperate to start my new yearly rankings), they've managed to raise their overall aesthetic from an F grade to an F+.

So they still suck -- they still suck big time. They just suck marginally less than they did before.

Why is Vampires Suck "better" than the other Friedberg-Seltzer parodies? For one, at least it manages to stick pretty much to a central plot. The first two Twilight movies are the unambiguous target of this film. Fuckwad #1 and Fuckwad #2 use that architecture to keep the plot, even the jokes, relatively streamlined. Whereas in their other two movies I saw, Date Movie blended the plots of Hitch, Meet the Fockers, My Big Fat Greek Wedding and others, and Epic Movie was so confused, I don't even remember what its plot was (but did you know that Snakes on a Plane and Nacho Libre count as an "epic movies"?).

And that's really the "big secret" about these two -- no matter what goes in the ______ of _____ Movie, all they really want is an excuse to lampoon up-to-the-moment cultural trends. And that's what was my true tip-off that Friedberg and Seltzer were the ones who shat out Vampires Suck. It wasn't the fact that it was a parody -- others have dabbled in parodies during Friedberg and Seltzer's dubious reign, including the Wayans brothers and the Abrahams-Zucker team. It was the moment when a character throws a cell phone and it hits Alice in Wonderland in the head. It was when there was an inexplicable riff on Dear John that lasts about 15 seconds. It was when Lady Gaga makes an appearance. It couldn't have been a Seltzer-Friedberg movie released in 2010 without the requisite cameo by Lady Gaga. (Not the actual Lady Gaga, of course, but a person playing her.)

I've said it before, I'm saying it now, and I'll probably still be saying it in 2017, after they've inevitably made five more movies:

Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer suck.

Unfortunately, I'm not done with them yet. I'll be seeing Meet the Spartans sometime soon. I've already been approved to review it.

I suck.

Comparative brilliance

I am not -- repeat, not -- going to see Dance Flick.

It looks stupid. It looks infantile. It looks obvious.

But it also made me breathe a sigh of relief when I first saw the trailer.

Why? Because at least it wasn't another ______ Movie, written by Hollywood's laziest rich hacks, Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer.

It's hard to believe I've had a film blog for this long without ranting about Friedberg and Seltzer. But let's go back to the beginning of the story.

In the last decade of the 19th century, there were a pair of siblings known as the Lumiere Brothers ... okay wait, that's too far.

You could say this story begins with the early parody classics, such as Airplane!, The Naked Gun and Top Secret! It was a time when everything was fresh and new, and making fun of things in even the dumbest of ways was funny. The early era of parodies produced its share of duds, sure. Loaded Weapon 1? Wrongfully Accused? Mafia!, originally known as Jane Austen's Mafia? But since we were, as a filmgoing public, still sort of getting to know this form, we took the bad with the good.

The Zucker brothers, Jerry and David, along with their friend Jim Abrahams, were synonymous with these films. So, for that matter, was Leslie Nielsen. But this act began to get pretty long in the tooth by the mid-1990s, and the parody movie crept to the brink of extinction.

That's when, in 2000, Keenen Ivory Wayans came along and took the reins. Wayans was a veteran of parodic films like I'm Gonna Git You Sucka!, but it was the first Scary Movie that delivered him his biggest hit of all time, and made him relevant again after a bunch of ill-conceived action vehicles. He followed that up with the less-well-received Scary Movie 2 before he was summarily ejected from the parody racket and replaced by David Zucker, who directed Scary Movie 3 and 4.

Lest you think this is the story of the power struggle between the Zuckers and the Wayanses, hold on there -- we haven't even met our villains yet. Two of the six writers credited on Scary Movie were Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, who were also both veterans of one of the lesser Leslie Nielsen spoofs, Spy Hard (1996). As the Zuckers and Wayanses fought over the legacy of Scary Movie, Friedberg and Seltzer spun off and were given control of their own movie: Date Movie (2006).

It was vile. It was repulsive. It was cheap. To excerpt my own review: "There's something just plain wrong with this movie, such that viewers will find the words 'torturous' and 'excruciating' entering their mental vocabulary as they watch."

But Date Movie raked in millions. $48 million, to be exact, or two-and-a-half times its budget. Meaning it had a high profitability factor.

And thus spewed forth a string of movies each less clever than the one before it, though only the first one -- Epic Movie (2007) -- was I willing to personally vet. Again excerpting my own review: "The jokes are so brainlessly simple, only by aiming them at the most recent Hollywood releases is there any chance they'd seem fresh -- and even that is quite optimistic. Simply put, this is lowest common denominator filmmaking, produced on a shoestring using actors whose hunger for a paycheck is downright embarrassing." I like to imagine that Meet the Spartans and Disaster Movie (both 2008) are even worse, though I am unwilling to find out. I'd prefer just to ball my fists each time I see another pathetic trailer hit the screen, filled with variations on this pathetic joke: Some popular current icon (Britney Spears, the cast of Juno, Iron Man) gets kicked, punched, or crushed by something heavy. So inescapable were Friedberg and Seltzer that their idol, David Zucker, even impersonated them (though it's getting a bit hazy at this point) with Superhero Movie, also in 2008.

It seems strange to say this, but there's something comforting about Dance Flick being back in the hands of a Wayans. Damien Dante, to be exact, with four other Wayanses (including Keenen Ivory) serving as producers, screenwriters and/or performers.

Now, the Wayanses have their own kind of terrible. These are the guys who brought us both White Chicks and Little Man, two of the worst comedies I have seen in the last five years. But at least those movies give you the sense that they're trying something. The jokes may fail, but at least they're failing with soul.

What I hate so much about Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg is that they are utterly content with mailing it in, and the contempt they show their audience feels intentional to the point of spiteful. How can a movie be funny when greed and hateful indifference are informing it? Either that or they really are that unfunny, in which case, it might be worse: a failure of every standard available to Hollywood to measure talent. Literally the only reason for the existence of their films is to make fun of a popular movie that was released at some point in the previous seven months, no matter how little it relates to the parody genre du jour. (Good example: Borat, Snakes on a Plane and Nacho Libre all qualified as "epic movies" simply because they came out while Seltzer and Friedberg were shitting out the script.)

Dance Flick? Well, at least it seems content primarily to spoof dance movies.