209) Land of the Lost (2009)

209) Land of the Lost (2009) Dir: Brad Silberling Date Released: June 2009 Date Seen: July 6th, 2009 Rating: 2.25/5

In Brad Silberling's revival of Sid and Marty Krofft's campy Edgar Rice Burroughs' spinoff Land of the Lost, the mediator between head and heart is the groin. So much of the film's time is spent taking the piss out and onto Dr. Rick Marshall (Will Ferrell), mad scientist and babbling egotist, that it rarely remembers that it's set in a world of Sleestaks and T-rexes. Screenwriters Chris Henchy and Dennis McNicholas are so fixated on showing that Marshall, the brainiac that discovers "tachyon" rays and the portal to an other dimension, is just as ineffectual as Will Stanton, Danny McBride's simian-like yokel, that they suck all the fun out of the preposterous world they stumble through for 101 painfully drawn-out minutes.

 The weirdly endearing prehistoric other dimension they visit is reduced to jokes about the size of a dino's brain--big enough to outsmart Marshall at every turn, apparently, da-hoyk!--and neutered, "family-friendly" jokes about reptile dicks, poop and pee. What made the original TV show so wonderful was how eager it was to show off its gemstone-powered technology and lizard people. It was cobbled together from flimsy styrofoam, cheap rubber and lots of by-now hideously outdated greenscreen technology but it was earnestly off-the-wall. This film reshapes that silly world to make fun of the show's childishly overzealous, self-assured protag. That's not pop progress, that's just needlessly cruel.

Note: I liked Ferrell for the most part because I still think his brand of blustery posturing is pretty good even though the material he's given is pretty lousy. In other words, I laughed but then stopped short after I processed what Ferrell was saying.

103) 10 Items or Less (2006)

103) 10 Items or Less (2006) Dir: Brad Silberling Date Released: December 2006 Date Seen: April 14^th, 2009 Rating: 1/5

Writer/director Brad Silberling’s 10 Items or Less (2006) is a perfect test for anyone who ever said that they could watch Morgan Freeman read the phone book and be sated. It’s a feel-good comedy about enduring life on the bluecollar margins by the director of Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004) and the upcoming revamp of Sid and Marty Krofft’s Land of the Lost (2009). That’s right, before Siberling made Will Ferrell fight the Sleestaks he made a warm-hearted, low-budget trip into the faux-indie heartland and dragged down there Morgan Freeman with him.

Here Freeman, billed only as “Him,” isn’t playing the “magical negro” type that he normally does—he forfeits his race card when he picks at a cassette tape of Paul Simon and cooes at images from The Yearling (1946) playing on a TV at a Latino carwash. In Silberling’s real-world fantasy, Freeman is a “magical movie star” that swoops down from his ivory tower after four years of inaction to help Scarlet (Paz Vega), a dumpy(?!) supermarket employee in desperate need of a change of pace. Freeman’s an angel whose ability to enrich Scarlet’s life comes from his superhuman distance from the common people—he gawks at the low prices at Target, amazed that such a wondrous smorgasbord of savings exists. If you can’t tell by now, “Him”’s an idiot.

He’s also a major dick. As always, Freeman’s earnestness in the film is reflected by his tendency to shoot from the hip. In this case, however, he talks, and hence thinks, in Hollywood jargon: when he sees Scarlet’s ripped blouse, he fails to comfort her by stammering: “This? That’s nothing! That’s just a wardrobe change! Don’t worry about it.” The man, not so much kooky as he is insipid, has no regard for the plebeians whose toes he’s stepping on while he traipses through their lives like a Hollywood moonman confused by our quaint Earth customs—upon seeing the sign outside Scarlet’s trailer park community he smirks to no one in particular, “Star Mobile…ha! God, I feel at home already! This your neighborhood? Nice. Real…texture.”

Because Freeman’s our guide to the world of dead-end, working-class, immigrant America, the world according to 10 Items or Less looks as true-to-life as Disneyland’s "It’s a Small World" ride. As if it wasn’t enough that Scarlet lives in a trailer while being dicked over by her cheating future ex-husband (Bobby Cannavale), the fact that she drives a lemon-yellow Gremlin, the car that makes the Pinto look regal, tips us off to how stuck in place she's supposed to be. At this point, I’m laughing but not with Freeman or the film. These clichéd and absurd details are so piercingly obnoxious that it’s impossible to think that at some point, this character was intended to represent reality according to an outsider. Thank goodness Silberling isn’t making this kind of project his regular thing because man, this shit makes Lemony Snicket look genuwine.