Reviewed by: Dusty Carr
Review Date: September 28, 2001
Director: Ben Stiller
Producers: Scott Rudin, Ben Stiller
Genre: Comedy
Starring:
PLOT:
Derek Zoolander, a really, really stupid male model superstar, is brainwashed to kill the president of Malaysia.
THE REVIEW:
Okay, I’m going to list some movies for you, and you’re going to tell me what they have in common: ‘Coneheads’, It’s Pat!’, ‘Stuart Saves His Family’, ‘Blues Brothers 2000’, ‘A Night at the Roxbury’, ‘Superstar’, ‘The Ladies Man’.
“Oh Dusty,” you say, “that’s easy. All those films originated from comedy sketches performed on the long-running NBC television variety program ‘Saturday Night Live’.” “Yes Mr. Ebert,” I reply, “that’s frickin’ obvious. My real point is that they’re all crap, that they all stink more than Iggy Pop’s washroom.”
Alright, another question: if basing a movie on a TV skit guarantees instantaneous-direct-to-video suicide, then why do they keep doing it? Answer: because Hollywood studio executives are - without exception - VERY stupid people, so they follow ‘formulas’. They think, ‘Hey, it was a funny five minute skit. So all we have to do is stretch it to ninety minutes and we’ve got a hit!!”
And how do they ‘stretch’ it? Well, they add a few more characters and what passes in a toddler’s book as ‘a plot’. Simple, isn’t it kiddies!
It’s this kind of brainiac thinking that produced ‘Zoolander’, a film based on a skit that Ben Stiller did for the 1996 VH1 Vogue Fashion Awards (the what?).
Okay, let’s be fair. Stiller is a talented guy, and the character he created for Zoolander - the dumb-as-a-stick male model - is, well, funny, but not for ninety minutes! I mean, ‘Satisfaction’ is a great song, but not for half an hour. You get my drift?
If you ask someone, “So, how was so-and-so film?” and they say, “It has its moments,” that means the film’s promotional trailer is the best thing going. Because that’s what a trailer is, a kind of a Greatest Hits package. So if you strung all of Zoolander’s ‘moments’ together, you might have twenty minutes of entertainment - and that’s a pretty good trailer.
Maybe I’m unkind labelling all studio executives as stupid. I mean, most people are stupid. That’s just the way the world works. You know, right now I’m thinking about John Belushi and ‘The Blues Brothers’, one of the rare exceptions when a TV skit (albeit musical) made a decent movie. This is what Belushi told me, a few weeks before he croaked in March, 1982. “Dusty,” he said, “nobody in this rotten business knows anything. It’s a fool’s game played by idiots.” And Big John was right. It’s a gamble, and the guys that made ‘Zoolander’ have pulled a Low Pair, not a Royal Flush. Sometimes you gotta read ‘em and weep.
THE BOTTOM LINE:
See ‘Zoolander’, but walk, don’t run.
© 2001 IMC Communications Inc.
Be sure to visit Dusty at www.filmcan.ca