Holy shit.

Is there any comedy subgenre that has produced as much failure and embarrassment as the caveman comedy? From Ringo Starr in the dopey Caveman, the lame live action Flintstones movie, e to the opening scenes of the generally-overrated Mel Brooks film History of the World – Part I, this admittedly very narrow subgenre hasn’t yielded much in the way of classic comedy. Even the genre’s highest profile example, Year One, was a surprisingly unfunny flick that nonetheless managed to snag some top-shelf talent. Of course, the reasons for the genre’s popularity are obvious: we don’t know much about the time period but the relatively rudimentary way of life of the period obviously involved lots of butt-fucking and shitting in the woods (in fact the best-known serious caveman movie, Quest for Fire, contains more butt-fucking and woods-shitting than all of the aforementioned combined), both of which are objectively hilarious. Read the rest of this entry »

Despite this forceful warning, Claire gets fucked with relentlessly.

Using actors of one ethnicity to portray another has pretty much always been de facto in Hollywood. While it can sometimes be abhorrent (see Memoirs of a Geisha as a recent example), I can’t say that it has personally affected me that much. As a Québecois, I can’t really say that we’ve been represented too much on the silver screen. Justin Timberlake’s turn as Jacques ‘Le Coq’ Grande in The Love Guru was one of the more tolerable things to happen in that shitfest and the only other example I can think of off the top of my head is Laurence Olivier as a plaid-wearing lumberjack in Powell & Pressburger’s 49th Parallel. The worst that could usually happen is that they’d pass off a French actor as Québecois in a movie shot in Montreal. That was the worst until I heard about a little movie called Picture Claire.
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Do not let the relatively competent composition of this shot fool you.

Few filmmakers have had as interesting a career as Ulli Lommel; fewer yet have made such a consistent amount of complete garbage. Although Uwe Boll seems to be everyone’s favourite scapegoat, he’s at least shown some capacity of improvement and desire to make something worthwhile. Lommel hasn’t. Lommel began his film career as an actor, working with mythical German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder in over twenty films. He moved to America in the late 70’s and hooked up with another rather mythical figure: Andy Warhol. Bumping around the Manhattan art world, he made a couple of movies that are admittedly more interesting from an archival point of view but do show that Lommel was around talented people at one point: the elusive Richard Hell vehicle Blank Generation and Cocaine Cowboys, an inexplicable crime film starring the unbelievable power-duo of Jack Palance and Andy Warhol. By 1980, he’d made his first horror flick (The Boogeyman, starring John Carradine) and never looked back. Read the rest of this entry »

Return of the living Snoops.

The old adage is that tragedy + time = comedy. While depictions of the Holocaust were once a very bad idea, it’s now perfectly acceptable (for example) to show Hitler getting a pineapple shoved up his ass or to let Uwe Boll make a movie about Auschwitz. I have to wonder, though, if there aren’t some missing variables in this equation. It’s tragedy + time, sure, but how much time? Is thirteen years long enough? What about tragedy + time + Emilio Estevez? I’m not sure what that equals but it certainly isn’t comedy. While it seems inevitable that most historical events will eventually be turned into a film, no matter how important or cinematic, my money for cinematic depictions of the ’92 LA riots was not on a cheap, ramshackle comedy starring Snoop Dogg, Emilio Estevez and a surprising hodgepodge of has-beens and character actors. Read the rest of this entry »