More remake, less sequel scars Dumber To

In the closing credits of Dumber and Dumber To, the long-gestating sequel to the 1994 comedy smash, the film shows split screens of the two movies together, just in case the new one left you wanting more. And it will. 

The split-screens also highlight a glaring flaw in the sequel: everything that happens in Dumb and Dumber is given a do-over or update in the new entry. Looking at just the plot points, each film is mostly identical. Here’s a synopsis for both: after duping a blind kid with a bird, two Rhode Island idiots take a cross-country road trip in a ridiculous car with a murderous henchman to return a package to a woman who will likely be a romantic interest to one of them. Along the way they violently prank each other, abuse mustard, dress in absurd costumes, dream about ninjas and are saved by undercover cops. The details are changed, but the two films are largely identical. In many ways, this is more remake than sequel. 

It begins 20 years after the events of the original film, because that’s how long it’s actually been. Lloyd Christmas (Jim Carrey) is in a mental hospital and Harry Dunne (Jeff Daniels) makes occasional visits to change his diapers and empty his waterbed-sized urine bag. Lloyd eventually snaps out of it and the two IQ-deficient men head off to find Harry a kidney before he kicks the bucket.

Their search leads them back to their old apartment, the blind bird boy (played by the same kid, now grown up), and eventually to Harry’s Asian parents, where he receives a decade’s worth of mail — Lloyd: “Look, Harry, you were accepted to Arizona State!” They end up at the house of an old conquest, Fraida Felcher (Kathleen Turner), who reveals that she had given birth to Harry’s daughter 20 years earlier. The daughter is now in El Paso at a tech conference unveiling a billion-dollar idea, which brings out the worst in her stepmother (Laurie Holden), who looks so much like the original’s Mary Swanson (Lauren Holly) it kept ejecting me out of the movie. 

Now, could any movie live up to the original Dumb and Dumber? Not likely, which is why a lot of what happens here gets a pass. But I did expect the sequel to be original, and it rarely is. Much of what happens is call-and-response from the original film. The peppers-in-the-burger gag has been replaced with a fireworks-in-the-bedroom gag. Lloyd tearing a ninja’s heart from his chest and putting it in a doggy back has been swapped out with him snatching a man’s testicles off with a leather whip. In both films, the men comically abuse the package in their care — here they punt it in a game of football.

All of this would be more tolerable, if it were more organic and pure, like the original’s thunderous arrival. But it all feels forced and stretched. And poor Daniels, he was so genuinely earnest and dopey in the original. Here he seems out of his element and confused at Harry’s stupid tone. Some of the jokes just fall flat, including a long sequence that requires Lloyd to stick his hand in awful places on a deaf octogenarian or a bit with Mama June from TV’s Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. The TV mom, prone to dating child molesters, imploded on arrival — not a laugh in the entire audience. (In the film's defense, the scene was filmed before the mother's dating habits surfaced.)

The comedy does hit some home runs, though, including a bombshell that relates to an envelope’s return address and a Stephen Hawking-like scientist uttering a very unscientific sentence using his electronic voice assist. Carrey, so rubbery and goofy in the original, brings it all back here as Lloyd. It’s sometimes hard to remember Carrey’s physical comedy, but this will take you right back. He has a bit where he orders two hot dogs, sloppily eats the sausage and then uses the buns as napkins. It’s a very Jerry Lewis moment, but it’s silly and stupid in just the right amounts. Carrey also has one of the best context-free quotes of the movie: “That douchebag stole our hearse!” What he doesn’t know is where the hearse actually went. 

Dumb and Dumber To is not the sequel we deserved — and it reveals the continuous story failures of writer-director team Peter and Bobby Farrelly, two mummies from the ’90s — but it is a sequel that we should have expected. It’s not great, although there are moments of stupid brilliance.

 

Film can learn a lot from Too Many Cooks

As Too Many Cooks, Adult Swim’s 11-minute absurdist TV parody, climbs into the collective conscious of the Internet’s scattered dome, the kitschy farce has some lessons for the cinema in its wall-to-wall presentation — and debunking — of stale television tropes. 

The cinema might seem like a stretch for a TV-based short that lampoons outdated ’80s and ’90s programming like ALF, Battlestar Galactica, Law & Order, Full House and Family Matters, but Too Many Cooks’ wacky delivery and its viral hitmaking frenzy are signs that maybe feature films are ready for some new strategies. 

For starters, if you haven’t seen the short, it begins with a catchy little theme-song jingle that unspools a make-believe TV show’s cast. There’s a Flanders-like dad, several kids of varying ages, a mother and grandmother, and they all seem to be smiling a lot on the Married … With Children set. Just as the intro appears to be wrapping up, signalling the start of the actual show, the song adds verse after verse introducing even more characters as it skewers a variety of new shows, from G.I. Joe and Wonder Woman to The Cosby Show and Dynasty. Eventually, a serial killer plotline begins to get looped into the repetitive call-outs of actors, and slowly Too Many Cooks begins to unravel into madness as it is consumed by absurdity, doom and a surreal stupor, all with a gleefully oblivious smile on its twisted face. 

The short, created by an enterprising young writer named Casper Kelly, has found fame — and infamy — because of its cheerful jingle (with lyrics about broth and stew), twisted plot developments with machetes and cannibalism, a teasing brand of parody that looks back on its targets with genuine fondness, and the wicked sense of humor it displays across its bleak, patience-stretching 11 minutes. 

Film can learn a lot from Too Many Cooks starting with its guerrilla-style marketing. The short aired at 4 a.m. in the middle of a nondescript block of programming called “Infomercials.” There were no teasers, no PR blitzes, not even a notation in the description in the programming guide. The only reason the show found an audience was because someone uploaded a rough copy, presumably from their DVR, onto YouTube, and then another person (or maybe the same person) posted it to Reddit, where it rose to prominence. 

Too Many Cooks is not the first of anything to drop itself into the world without warning: Beyoncé has done it with an album of music videos, and J.K. Rowling and other authors have done it with books written under pseudonyms. Movies, burdened under the weight of eight- and nine-figured marketing budgets, need to be nimble out the gate, and a covert release like Too Many Cooks isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It allows an audience to build organically and at its own pace. Due to the nature of film, and the large casts and crews involved, it’s unlikely we’ll ever see a secret movie just turn up in the theater, but the thought of that notion is intriguing. No Mt. Dew tie-ins, no teaser trailers, no Taco Bell combo items, no press junket tour, no social media campaign, not even known stars. One day the film just comes out and it forces audiences to be swayed by their own curiosity versus the media blitz that was rolled out months earlier. 

Films on the festival circuit, including at big names like Sundance and Cannes, arrive with audiences mostly unfamiliar with what they’re about to see. But how many people can afford, let alone gain access, to Cannes to watch a movie unvetted by the marketing honchos? Not many, which is why it would be so impressive to see a major motion picture just turn up in theaters across the country, because it would involve ground-level movie fans as opposed to festival regulars and critics. The risk involved with that would be great, but the rewards would be greater when considering that the audience will be the film’s ultimate champions. 

The Adult Swim show also hints that audiences might be ready for a new brand of storytelling. Something just southeast and down of center, something skewed into the bizarre. Airplane, Blazing Saddles and the original Police Squad! are appropriate examples, even if that genre of fourth-wall-breaking spoof comedy is worn and tired these days. Watching it again (and again and again), Too Many Cooks has a spontaneity that is so rarely seen in comedies, and I think its weird depravity and obsession with repetition would fit in well in the context of a larger comedy. 

I’m not suggesting a movie-length Too Many Cooks, just a comedy that invokes its gonzo-bonkers style. Besides, 11 minutes is plenty.

"Do not go gentle into that good night"

In the great cathedral of space, no one can hear you scream, but the cosmic organs are imbued with an acoustic majesty all their own. Their thundering choruses leap and swirl to an audience of stars, supernovas, nebulae and that little speck of shivering matter we call mankind.

Christopher Nolan’s bravely beautiful Interstellar establishes humanity’s insignificance, the universe’s vastness, and how human exploration will one day narrow the margins between them. The film obliquely dabbles with religion, philosophy, science, quantum physics, and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, all under the umbrella of an adventurous space opera, emphasis on the word opera — the music is exceptional.

In the near-future, the environment is scorched to the point of collapse. Water is scarce, dust chokes out anything living, and civilization is forced to take evolutionary steps backward to hack out a meager existence in devastated farmlands. We are plopped into the dusty haze of a farm run by former NASA test pilot Cooper (Matthew McConaughey). He’s a corn farmer, because everyone is — it’s the only crop that will grow in the planet’s temperamental weather. We catch a glimpse of the dinner table: corn on the cob, corn salad, cornbread, and creamed corn. We don’t see breakfast, but my bet is on cornflakes.

After a fluctuating gravity field is discovered in his plucky daughter Murphy’s bedroom, Cooper is sent bolting into the dust and desert for answers. He ends up finding a secret NASA base intent on launching a rescue mission into deep space to discover a new world, fresh water or the answer to a world-saving proof that has stumped a mathematician played by Michael Caine. As luck would have it, the mission is short a commander. Cooper’s truck disappears into his farm’s dust at the same time the film cuts to a similar shot of a rocket blasting white smoke as it breaks free from Earth’s atmosphere. Off we go!

The first stop is to Saturn, where a quantum anomaly might turn out to be a wormhole to an uncharted grid of the known universe. NASA knows the anomaly leads somewhere; a dozen astronauts in a dozen different ships were sent through years earlier and three are still relaying information back. Cooper and his fellow astronauts (including Wes Bentley and Anne Hathaway) buckle up and start spiraling toward the anomaly, which is itself a gateway to the rest of the film, a gateway I will peer into but not spoil further. 

Nolan has made some of the most important blockbusters of the 21st century, and he outdoes himself here with rocketships, time travel, black holes, desolate planets, twirling space stations, monolithic AI sentries and enough big ideas to stroke the edges of Stanley Kubrick’s all-but-untouchable 2001: A Space Odyssey. Like that picture, Interstellar is only half interested in its human characters, instead committing itself to the grander mission of human achievement, a cerebral journey into the nature of space travel and the galaxy’s dreadful expanse. It’s a theme repeated over and over again as Cooper’s tiny-by-comparison ship glides past Milky Ways, dwarf stars and rocky planetoids. In one exceptional shot — made exponentially better when rendered on IMAX’s huge screens — the ship is represented as a single pixel as it cuts across the face of Saturn. That kind of scale is not only accurate, it’s terrifying. 

Nolan is an astoundingly perceptive director, but an awful cinematographer and editor. (Hoyte Van Hoytema and Lee Smith are his actual cinematographer and editor, respectively.) The editing cuts too frequently to unwanted angles or confusing perspectives; it is frustrating to see a film of this caliber struggle with the basics, and yet it does repeatedly. The cinematography is also noticeably sub-par in random chunks. It’s as if they didn’t get enough coverage during initial photography, and then winged it all later when the film was being edited. The rocket launch isn’t even shown until the rocket is in orbit, the spaceship is only photographed from one annoying down-the-nose GoPro-like angle, and dialogue is shot using a stale set of alternating medium shots, like this is some kind of flat Lifetime movie. I will give Nolan credit for using lots of in-camera tricks (as opposed to green screen and CGI), but the nuts and bolts of the film’s mechanical bits are wobbly and unstable. It’s a complaint that is still echoing with resounding strength from his Dark Knight days.

And one more gripe before switching gears: the science is little wonky. Well, a lot wonky. It renders the Theory of Relativity into a plot device with about as much nuance as an episode of Scooby Doo. The film’s big revelation — Caine’s mystical proof — is never explained enough to take it seriously. And then the plot holes: How would a planet with 2 feet of water pooled on its surface be able to sustain waves as tall as the Rocky Mountains? Doesn’t time-bending only work on things traveling the speed of light or near the speed of light? What’s the point of that Indian drone that crash lands near the cornfield? Why wouldn’t Anne Hathaway’s character have aged more after another character tinkers with a black hole? What does the proof even solve? Remember when Neil deGrasse Tyson picked apart Gravity? With Interstellar he might have to nuke it from orbit, just to be safe. 

Now that I’ve sniped at the science, let me reiterate something: Interstellar is a phenomenal movie about adventure, love, family and the reaches of the human spirit. It doesn’t portray science or space accurately because it doesn’t have to. It’s real quest is to take us into the emotional cosmos of a father separated by space and time from his daughter. (There is  a similar theme in Robert Zemeckis' equally perceptive Contact, another McConaughey film about space-time travel through the galaxy.) Interstellar's story came about after Jonathan Nolan, the director's brother and collaborator, grew interested in time travel, but not the theory as much as the scenario in which the theory is discussed. In science books, the Theory of Relativity is often framed in a diagram of a person on a train platform watching as a train, traveling the speed of light, carries another person away into the great beyond. Interstellar has two people (Murphy and Cooper), a platform (earth) and a convincing train (a rocket), and it uses that model to weave a compelling space drama that will suck you into its eternal void of deep space.

Interstellar has its Spielbergian moments, and its Kubrickian moments, and some very quintessential Nolan moments, including a scene of Cooper, gone for hours on a strange planet, asking how much real time — relatively speaking — has elapsed while he was away. “23 years,” a now-graying astronaut says. There’s also a brilliantly choreographed scene of a spaceship docking with another ship under the most extreme circumstances. The music is pumping, the camera is whirling around the ship and Cooper is fighting as hard as he can to save himself and the human race — this is Interstellar firing on all cylinders. 

Scores are rarely noteworthy enough to get detailed mentions in reviews, but Hans Zimmer’s score is the rare exception. Zimmer’s electric organs, booming bass and hypnotic swells are just perfect. The music is comparable to the 1982 Philip Glass soundtrack in Godfrey Reggio’s art picture Koyaanisqatsi, itself a film about the limits of man and the unbalancing of the earth. Zimmer’s music, occasionally full of bombast and broad salvos of sound, can also quietly punctuate the dialogue, including Caine’s great recital of Dylan Thomas’ line, “Do not go gentle into that good night,” or when Cooper paws through the dry soil and ponders, “We once looked up and wondered at our place in the stars, now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.”

Interstellar is not without its scientific failings, but looking at what it accomplishes and what it invokes within us, it is likely to go down as one of the great science fiction movies of this generation. It has scope, it has grand ideas and it has a story large enough that it can be seen from Jupiter, which was probably the point all along.