Post by colly on Jul 10, 2008 9:24:17 GMT -5
Get Smart
Paul Byrnes, reviewer
June 25, 2008
LET'S see, which words come close to describing Get Smart, the new movie version of one of the funniest television shows ever made? Terrific, fabulous and wonderful do not. Terrible, puerile and a travesty are closer, but not angry enough. How about this: a nauseating insult to the original and a lesson in all that's wrong with Hollywood's current ideas about comedy? Not to mention tasteless, colourless and deadly, like carbon monoxide. I would have said odourless, but the movie stinks.
Steve Carell plays Maxwell Smart, as well as being credited as one of six (six!) executive producers, so he deserves part of the blame. The publicity notes say the film doesn't try to recreate the original but update it with a contemporary feel. Contemporary as in unfunny, I must assume.
Carell has the square, wary face of a classic nerd. He came through stand-up, featured on Saturday Night Live and hit it big in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, which he co-wrote. Some people think he's hilarious, but I haven't seen enough to join them. I can tell you he isn't funny as Maxwell Smart, but then, I've seen the original. Warner Bros and the director, Peter Segal (who made some of Adam Sandler's alleged comedies), are counting on the fact that millions of American kids have not. This is a remake banking on ignorance. To paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen's comment to Dan Quayle, anyone over about 40 knows Don Adams, and you, Steve Carell, are not Don Adams.
Maybe that's unfair. Carell has some charm in the role; he is just not really capable of delivering the sense of bumbling innocence that made Max so lovable and sweet. Adams's Max was dumb, but he thought he was smart, as well as Smart. Part of the fun was that he operated in a secret world where that was OK. Real spies are often incompetent fools - that was the real story Mel Brooks and Buck Henry were telling when they created him in 1965. Sure, he was a spoof of the ultra-competent James Bond; he was also a spoof of the CIA that produced the debacle at the Bay of Pigs four years earlier.
It was satire, a word that is never popular with Hollywood, where it is thought to be a sure way to lose money. What that really means is that they think the American public is too stupid and straight to get satire - even though Get Smart was a successful series that ran for 138 episodes, from '65 to '70. What this movie offers instead of satire is moronic humour of the poo-and-wee sort, peppered with vastly more violence and long sequences of dull action. I mean, how much dumber could the filmmakers be? Sweet satire out, vulgarity and violence in. What an indictment of how they see us.
Carell's Max is a stitched-up analyst with CONTROL, an organisation thought to have been disbanded after the Cold War. Instead, it is holed up in a high-tech Washington bunker beneath a museum of spying in which the other Max's shoephone and red Sunbeam Tiger are on display. The new Max is a nervy swot, who listens to Russian electronic intel then presents reports of bum-numbing detail to his colleagues. The Chief (Alan Arkin) won't promote him to field agent because he's aware that Max is a boob, if also a good analyst.
That all changes when KAOS, run by Siegfried (Terence Stamp), hacks into their computer and learns the identity of every CONTROL agent. The only faces they don't know are those of Max and the top female agent 99 (Anne Hathaway), who has just had hers reconstructed. She explains why at some point, but it almost put me to sleep. Where is Basil Exposition when we need him? Max and 99 are soon parachuting into Russia pursued by an enormous assassin called Dalip (the Indian wrestler Dalip Singh). There's something about stolen yellowcake, Chechnya and a huge ransom - the usual plot to spread badness and woe among peace-loving folk everywhere.
Anne Hathaway is probably the best thing in the movie: sassy, sexy and funny - albeit nothing like 99. Barbara Feldon's character was always the better agent but she let Max think he was the boss, out of concern for his ego. Hathaway's 99 is a ballbuster alienated from her "feminine side". She thinks Max is a loser (although she secretly fancies him). Their exchanges generate what little electricity the film has. Almost everyone else is badly used, some inexplicably. If Stamp has given a worse performance, I've yet to see it.
The worst thing about this lowballing of the concept is that it's deliberate. Segal has made the movie he wanted, in which the freewheeling, anarchic, inventive and childlike humour of Brooks and Henry becomes duller, dirtier and much more derivative. Remember the dance under the laser beams that Catherine Zeta-Jones did in Entrapment? Hathaway does an almost identical thing here. Remember the endless pissing joke in the second Austin Powers movie? Carell offers a variation, in between nods and winks towards Borat, Bond and Mission: Impossible. These are not homages so much as evidence that the movie never had any ideas to begin with. The credits list Brooks and Henry as consultants, but that's a laugh. They've been brought aboard to keep them silent about how bad the movie is: shame on them for agreeing. It won't work, because the public are not as dumb as the cynics who made this mockery of a classic think they are.
This story was found at: www.smh.com.au/articles/2008/06/25/1214073341862.html
Paul Byrnes, reviewer
June 25, 2008
LET'S see, which words come close to describing Get Smart, the new movie version of one of the funniest television shows ever made? Terrific, fabulous and wonderful do not. Terrible, puerile and a travesty are closer, but not angry enough. How about this: a nauseating insult to the original and a lesson in all that's wrong with Hollywood's current ideas about comedy? Not to mention tasteless, colourless and deadly, like carbon monoxide. I would have said odourless, but the movie stinks.
Steve Carell plays Maxwell Smart, as well as being credited as one of six (six!) executive producers, so he deserves part of the blame. The publicity notes say the film doesn't try to recreate the original but update it with a contemporary feel. Contemporary as in unfunny, I must assume.
Carell has the square, wary face of a classic nerd. He came through stand-up, featured on Saturday Night Live and hit it big in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, which he co-wrote. Some people think he's hilarious, but I haven't seen enough to join them. I can tell you he isn't funny as Maxwell Smart, but then, I've seen the original. Warner Bros and the director, Peter Segal (who made some of Adam Sandler's alleged comedies), are counting on the fact that millions of American kids have not. This is a remake banking on ignorance. To paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen's comment to Dan Quayle, anyone over about 40 knows Don Adams, and you, Steve Carell, are not Don Adams.
Maybe that's unfair. Carell has some charm in the role; he is just not really capable of delivering the sense of bumbling innocence that made Max so lovable and sweet. Adams's Max was dumb, but he thought he was smart, as well as Smart. Part of the fun was that he operated in a secret world where that was OK. Real spies are often incompetent fools - that was the real story Mel Brooks and Buck Henry were telling when they created him in 1965. Sure, he was a spoof of the ultra-competent James Bond; he was also a spoof of the CIA that produced the debacle at the Bay of Pigs four years earlier.
It was satire, a word that is never popular with Hollywood, where it is thought to be a sure way to lose money. What that really means is that they think the American public is too stupid and straight to get satire - even though Get Smart was a successful series that ran for 138 episodes, from '65 to '70. What this movie offers instead of satire is moronic humour of the poo-and-wee sort, peppered with vastly more violence and long sequences of dull action. I mean, how much dumber could the filmmakers be? Sweet satire out, vulgarity and violence in. What an indictment of how they see us.
Carell's Max is a stitched-up analyst with CONTROL, an organisation thought to have been disbanded after the Cold War. Instead, it is holed up in a high-tech Washington bunker beneath a museum of spying in which the other Max's shoephone and red Sunbeam Tiger are on display. The new Max is a nervy swot, who listens to Russian electronic intel then presents reports of bum-numbing detail to his colleagues. The Chief (Alan Arkin) won't promote him to field agent because he's aware that Max is a boob, if also a good analyst.
That all changes when KAOS, run by Siegfried (Terence Stamp), hacks into their computer and learns the identity of every CONTROL agent. The only faces they don't know are those of Max and the top female agent 99 (Anne Hathaway), who has just had hers reconstructed. She explains why at some point, but it almost put me to sleep. Where is Basil Exposition when we need him? Max and 99 are soon parachuting into Russia pursued by an enormous assassin called Dalip (the Indian wrestler Dalip Singh). There's something about stolen yellowcake, Chechnya and a huge ransom - the usual plot to spread badness and woe among peace-loving folk everywhere.
Anne Hathaway is probably the best thing in the movie: sassy, sexy and funny - albeit nothing like 99. Barbara Feldon's character was always the better agent but she let Max think he was the boss, out of concern for his ego. Hathaway's 99 is a ballbuster alienated from her "feminine side". She thinks Max is a loser (although she secretly fancies him). Their exchanges generate what little electricity the film has. Almost everyone else is badly used, some inexplicably. If Stamp has given a worse performance, I've yet to see it.
The worst thing about this lowballing of the concept is that it's deliberate. Segal has made the movie he wanted, in which the freewheeling, anarchic, inventive and childlike humour of Brooks and Henry becomes duller, dirtier and much more derivative. Remember the dance under the laser beams that Catherine Zeta-Jones did in Entrapment? Hathaway does an almost identical thing here. Remember the endless pissing joke in the second Austin Powers movie? Carell offers a variation, in between nods and winks towards Borat, Bond and Mission: Impossible. These are not homages so much as evidence that the movie never had any ideas to begin with. The credits list Brooks and Henry as consultants, but that's a laugh. They've been brought aboard to keep them silent about how bad the movie is: shame on them for agreeing. It won't work, because the public are not as dumb as the cynics who made this mockery of a classic think they are.
This story was found at: www.smh.com.au/articles/2008/06/25/1214073341862.html
not very positive are they?