Jason Friedberg Tagged Articles at Cinematical

As someone who watches most new releases, I wind up listening to critics on the margins. If the logline and advertising make a movie look brutal, and I'm not obligated to see it, I'll sometimes skip the screening (if there is one) and wait for the critics to weigh in. If the reviews are middling-to-decent, I'll bite the bullet and go. If they seem to confirm my initial impression, I might let that particular film pass.

Except sometimes that method fails me. As I've learned over the years, and as an experience last week proved for me beyond a shadow of a doubt, the mainstream critical establishment is not to be trusted when it comes to comedies; in particular, when it comes to the type of comedy that conceals intelligence under a sophomoric facade. Time and again, I've seen comedies panned, gone anyway, discovered a smart and funny gem, and wondered what the hell everyone's problem is.

An example. James Berardinelli introduces Fired Up! with this horrifying line: "Move over, Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer!" "No one in this movie has an idea in their bubbly little brains," moans Roger Ebert. The Detroit News' Tom Long calls it the latest in "a million-mile-long line of purposely dumb adolescent sex comedies" (though he does give the film a C+ for not being "painful"). On and on like that, to 30% on the tomatometer.

"What fresh hell is this?"
-Dorothy Parker, reportedly as she cast her first glance upon a poster for Disaster Movie

Let's get this out of the way: Disaster Movie is indeed a disaster first, and a movie barely, pure pop culture pablum for da masses (say it aloud, there you go) as can only be expected from the likes of Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg. It's another opus that, despite opening titles done in the style of Armageddon's and a feeble thru-line borrowed from Cloverfield (mixed with some of The Day After Tomorrow), is as much a send-up of disaster-related films as Epic Movie was a spoof of actual epic movies.

It takes two minutes for the first crotch shot, four minutes for the first belch gag, thirty for someone to get breast milk on their face, forty-five for someone to get feces on their face, and about sixty for a record scratch to tell us that something peculiar just happened. In between, the characters relentlessly name-check movies and celebrities and websites and any other manner of the vaguely familiar, the bulk of which I've taken to listing below (because if you're still going to see this willingly, I still doubt that you care much for reading at all).

(As for the rest of you: You're welcome.)

First there was Date Movie, and it was ... not good. And then came Epic Movie, and it was ... even worse. Most recently we received Meet the Spartans, and it was ... you get the point: By now we're well aware that sophomoric spoof-merchants Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer are not even remotely interested in making a good film. Their goal is simply to throw as many current* pop culture references onto the screen so that bored 14-year-olds with more allowance money than common sense will line up to chuckle (feebly) at the duo's desperate antics. (* And if the jokes are this bad when they're "current," what the hell will these flicks look like in ten years?)

But you know what? It's almost creepy how well these things do: For a production budget of about $20 million apiece, Date, Epic, and Spartans made about $84 million each. (That's worldwide box-office, and thanks to Mojo for the numerals.) So Fox essentially gave these guys $60 million and three shots, and they virtually quadrupled their budget each time out. (So why does the IMDb rate these films at 2.6, 2.3, and 2.4, respectively? I have no idea. How many times must a person get smacked on the skull before they start avoiding the hammer?)

Anwyay, Friedberg and Seltzer have moved their parody tent over to Lionsgate, and that's who'll be unleashing the aptly-titled Disaster Movie on August 29. (And people call Saw torture. Ha!) Click right here to enjoy the trailer, and by "enjoy" I actually mean "sit there and subject yourself to amazingly half-assed jokes about clumsy superheroes, pregnant teenagers, and tons of other horrific stuff that I can't believe passes for comedy." And yet I bet it will make about $84 million worldwide and we'll all be sitting here next year, bemoaning the impending arrival of Friedberg & Seltzer's Action Movie.

After the stunning cinematic achievement that was Meet the Spartans, I know you were all wondering, with bated breath, when we would get more. While this doesn't seem to be a sequel, Variety reports that Grosvenor Park is going to finance a new, untitled project from Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, otherwise known as the writer/director team behind Spartans.

The pair have just started directing from their script in Shreveport, LA, and while there's no word on what this latest comedy will be about, it's got a cast that includes Matt Lanter, Vanessa Minnillo, Carmen Electra, Kim Kardashian, G-Thang, Nicole Parker, Crista Flanagan, and Ike Barinholtz. Sounds excellent, eh? We won't even have to wait long for it. The film is scheduled to be released this August.

Sure, there was only one "fresh" review on Rotten Tomatoes (from Kam Williams at News Blaze), IMDb voters rated it 2.3/10, giving it the #88 spot on the Bottom 100 list, and 63.8% of those who voted at Box Office Mojo gave it an F, but it still managed to gross $77,758,391 worldwide. I wonder how many bad films this team can make before people stop going to see them?

Well, we knew it wouldn't be too long before writer/director's Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer tortured us with yet another one of their awful "spoof" movies. And I put the word 'spoof' in quotations because I don't believe they're making spoof films; they're making sh*tty films. It's a whole new genre. Moviehole tells us the two dudes behind such instant microwave classics as Meet the Spartans and Epic Movie will next give us Goodie Two Shoes. Apparently, the "film" will follow "a group of friends who go on a life-changing adventure."

MH tells us the main movie being "spoofed" here is Superbad, which means the "group of friends" in the description will probably resemble Jonah Hill, McLovin,' etc ... I wouldn't even be surprised if they threw in a few cracks at some other Apatow films like Knocked Up and Forgetting Sarah Marshall. What was that? The latter film hasn't even come out yet? Oh, I know -- but that won't stop these boys from spoofing it. In fact, MH says they'll also be going after Will Smith's Hancock, Sex and the City and The Love Guru. WTF? So now we're writing jokes about films that haven't even hit theaters, and won't for a couple months? I can't. I won't. Where's the gun?

As Scott pointed out in his review, you need not fear that this week's Superhero Movie is another brainchild of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, whose satanic perversions of the parody genre -- Date Movie, Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans -- have been terrorizing unsuspecting audiences every year since 2006. Superhero Movie was actually directed by Craig Mazin, a protégé of the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker dream team responsible for Airplane! and The Naked Gun, and produced by David Zucker himself. But it, too, is plagued -- albeit to a much lesser degree -- by what's turning out to be the problem with the entire modern generation of spoofs going back to Scary Movie: relentless pop culture specificity.

The basest incarnations of this, of course, are the Friedberg-Seltzer monstrosities, which may be worthless as comedies but which could prove valuable to historians because they indicate precisely what dominated the American zeitgeist in the few months before their release. It's too generous to call these films' vulgar spasms "jokes," but to the extent that's what they are, they depend entirely on either audience members' awareness of US Weekly-type factoids such as Britney Spears' shaving her head or their recall of particular scenes and characters in recent box-office hits. That's not to say that these kinds of jokes can't be funny -- the problem with Friedberg and Seltzer, as others have pointed out, is that they think throwing something current on the screen ("Look, Paris Hilton!") constitutes humor. But they do limit comedies' universal appeal and staying power.

I'm always relieved when I don't have to review a film like Meet the Spartans, because it's such a writing challenge. What do you say about a movie that's intentionally bad? Thankfully, Slate's Josh Levin is up to the challenge, skewering the film riotously in a new piece. The first part of his reportage is focused on the length of the film, which he declares is less than what other reviews are telling you -- he clocked it with his watch and says that it's no more than a hour and three minutes from opening to closing credits, well below feature length, and asks "Isn't it massive consumer fraud to charge $10.50 for a barely hour-long movie?" Levin then goes on to declare that the co-directors of the film, Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, are not even worthy of being compared to The Wayans Brothers, Uwe Boll, or "a bear who turns on a video camera by accident while trying to eat it." Friedberg and Seltzer are "evildoers, charlatans, symbols of Western civilization's decline under the weight of too many pop culture references."

What seems to irk Levin most are the directors' basic misunderstanding of what constitutes humor, since they more or less have impersonators walk on screen and just stand there. Again, I haven't seen this film, but I think I have a general understanding of what he's getting at, since movies of this stripe seem lately to rely more and more on the reference itself to be funny rather than to do anything funny with it. "If you'll indulge me for a second," Levin writes, "I will pause to crack up Friedberg and Seltzer: 'Paris Hilton.'" He also fumes at the movie for having the actors call out the names of the people its impersonators are supposed to be impersonating, in case we don't get it. "The filmmakers betray their lead actor by having him shout 'Paris Hilton!' or 'Dane Cook!' every time one of the film's copious celeb impersonators makes an appearance," Levin writes. "Meet the Spartans dares to presume that it's smarter than the people watching." I don't think he liked it, do you?

For more, check out Scott Weinberg's take on the film.

All of a sudden I'm in a really crappy mood. Is a comedy supposed to have that effect on a person?

Maybe it's because I just spent a week at the Sundance Film Festival watching movies created by people who really TRY to make good films that I'm reacting this way to Meet the Spartans. Or maybe it's because, after sitting through the rancid garbage that are Date Movie and Epic Movie, I simply don't have any more patience for the worthless cinematic exploits of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer. These guys are to comedy what Uwe Boll is to action, sci-fi, and horror. And seeing how Boll's films are almost aggressively (albeit unintentionally) funny, while SeltzerBerg's annual crap-fests are completely and totally bereft of humor ... I'm pretty sure a Seltzer / Boll / Friedberg collaboration might make for the world's ultimate rotten movie.

Bottom line: My college professors taught me a lot about film ... but they simply never prepared me for something like Meet the Spartans. This is a "movie" the same way some drunk idiot screeching "Oooh, behave!," "Dat's a-nice!," or "This ... is ... Sparta!" at the top of his lungs is "the life of the party." And yet, every year Aaron and Jason sit down to smoke waste a lot of weed and crib a bunch of really terrible jokes from other folks' popular movies. The duo's "films" are little more than mirth-leeching barnacles fastened to the lowest end of the comedy food chain -- but by shamelessly pandering to the lowest of the lowest common denominator, these fools have built a cottage industry out of being the worst of the worst filmmakers out there. And, of course, they love their work. (Ultimately I blame the audiences, because if nobody bought a ticket to this junk, Fox would tell Aaron and Jason to hit the freakin' road already.)

The writing team of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer got their big break on the 1996 spoof Spy Hard, and then hit it extra-big when their Scary Movie made so much cash. Since then the team has given us Date Movie and Epic Movie -- comedies so bad it makes me wonder if Aaron and Jason are trying to become the Uwe Boll of the comedy genre. Well, they're back. And get this: They're spoofing 300. By mixing it with You Got Served. Already I can feel the groans forming.

Originally called Hunting and Fishing, the duo's latest glued-together project is now known as Meet the Spartans. And if you brace yourself for something truly painful, you can check out the trailer for the movie right here. And people say the Saw flicks are torture. Trying watching Date Movie and Epic Movie back-to-back and then try doing some tough algebra problems. Or forming a sentence. Starring in this inevitably woeful display* are Kevin Sorbo, Carmen Electra, Sean Maguire, Diedrich Bader and Method Man. Fox seems to have wedged this thing into a November 30 release slot, but I have another suggestion: Never.

(* Generally I hate being THIS negative when we're talking about a flick I haven't seen yet -- but seriously. Go watch Date and Epic and then tell me I'm wrong.)

This could be the most bizarre casting idea I have ever heard: Nicolas Cage is said to be producing a Liberace biopic, in which he will star as the flamboyant pianist. Is it just that everyone wants to play gay these days or could this really be a dream of Cage's? After his hilarious retro cameo in Good Night, and Good Luck, Liberace is ripe for more spotlight, but Cage? Nicolas Cage as Liberace? I'm dumbfounded. There is no way that this movie could be taken seriously, right? Right. And it seems that Cage must not really be intending for it to be. Hired to write the screenplay are Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg, the guys who gave us Date Movie, and who partially gave us Scary Movie. Since they're so good with titles, let me be the first to guess this one will be called Liberace Movie.

Of course, there is just too much about Liberace that requires a serious portrayal of his life. Can Seltzer and Friedberg handle the AIDS aspect with respect? According to the report on this project, the writers are approaching the idea with more care than their other scripts, so it is possible. But I am hoping that they can find a happy medium and include a good amount of silliness, too. There is a very slight chance that a combination between camp and drama could work, though Cage is going to have a tough time finding that perfect director to make it happen.