Last-in, first-out (LIFO) appears to be my film watching philosophy, gentle reader, but that’s partly because the results of my most recent trips to book sales or antique malls end up jumbled atop the cabinets beside my entertainment equipment, so of course I watch them first. This is not holding true for the Marvel movies I have been accumulating for some time now–perhaps I’m going to put them together and watch them in order sometime. But it took me only a couple of days from purchase to watch this film.
I watched Not Another Teen Movie relatively recently, but perhaps before I started doing movie reports, and it was silly but not odious. So I expected something similar from this film, even though apparently it was not from the same people–this is from the people who wrote Scary Movie. Perhaps that was an early 2000s trend, to just give a generic Movie name for a parody. I’ll have to think on whether other unrelated examples exist. With or without National Lampoon Presents above the title.
At any rate, Alyson Hannigan in a fat suit starts out deciding she will not give up and will find a man. So she consults Hitch who gives gets guys a la Pimp My Ride to give her a makeover, and like Nia Vardalos in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, she becomes pretty. Well, she becomes Alyson Hannigan, which is several steps above pretty. She meets the man of her dreams, who has quirky parents (played by Fred Willard, who made every movie he was in better, and Jennifer Coolidge). When they are engaged and planning their wedding, she discovers he wants Andy to be his best man–and Andy is an attractive woman who wants him back. Hijinks ensue.
Amusing in spots, although I am pretty sure I would have written something similar in high school. There are spot hits/gags based on Michael Jackson trying to prey upon a child, a brief spot from the frame of Mr. and Mrs. Smith which I would not have gotten two months ago, a not-necessary-to-the-plot Napoleon Dynamite gag, and just a bunch of other things machine-gunned in. It’s similar to the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker films, but the characters in the film do not play it as though they were in a serious film.
And since Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker have been out of the game for a while now, if anyone is going to make a Samurai Cat movie, it’s these guys. Wait a minute. This movie is almost 20 years old now. Perhaps they, too, are out, and we will never get the Samurai Cat movie we deserve. Because we have been very, very bad.
