Hacks

I saw this film at the Orinda Film Festival and it did great with the inexperienced movie audience from Orinda. The film was not original, nearly a carbon-copy of previously released Christopher Guest Films. I mean the main character is a emulation of Corky St. Clair (Waiting for Guffman). The acting, however, was very impressive and the film itself is decent, but it isn't close to the creativity of a properly done film of this kind. Go see waiting for Guffman, Spinal Tap, Best in Show, or A Mighty Wind.

I don;t think making fun of retardid people is very funny but there's a lot of funny other stuf in this like a white guy playing a black rapper and a middleage lesbian who tells vagina jokes. I couldnt help but laugh a lot. My brother is in a wheelchair and he does fall down sometimes and sometimes it IS funny. I also like the music. The nudity is scary and funny - that something you dont see every day.

This is a funny movie with a serious point. Excellently written and directed. Good acting. If you like truthful, irreverent movies with outrageous humor, this movie will have you laughing so much there will be no time for popcorn. If you have a more restrained sense of humor, are offended by ethnic jokes, or don't care about using humor to get to the truth, you qualify for more popcorn. But you will also leave the theater with a full belly of entertainment and a few humorous moments where even the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse could not restrain the guffaws.

Hacks is about some incredibly lousy stand-up comics in New York City and the inept agency that manages them. See the movie to get the point.

Hacks is not tame by any stretch of the imagination, nor is it safe. It is sick, twisted, obscene, disturbing, and brilliantly funny. It manages to take the worst group of stand-up comedians (a group even worse then what you find on basic cable) as they `take their first step to showbiz mortality'. The movie is full of so many incredible lines that still continue to be funny months after having seen the film. In typical-lame-Hollywood-stereo-type-pitch terms, it is Waiting for Guffman raped by Spinal Tap while being exploited by Drop Dead Gorgeous. It is easily the funniest movie to hit the film festival market in years. It will survive in a Cineplex so pray that you can find a copy or it makes it into a film festival near you. If there was ever a movie that needed desperately to find an independent distributor to open up its market it is this.

Okay, first of all, Mr. Director, you are NOT Christopher Guest. I can see where you were going with this, but unfortunately the end product was lackluster at best.

Right off the bat: the packaging was incredibly misleading. There were no references to this being a "mockumentary," or fake in any way. We rented the DVD in the hopes we'd found an interesting and original documentary on the darker side of comedy. Boy were we surprised.

The acting was okay, I suppose, but being a comic myself I just found most of this film excruciating to sit through. Just because you put actors on screen with lines that a bad comic might say, doesn't mean those very lines are then funny. This was by far one of the worst films I've seen in a long time.

Now it did have some positives. A few of the lines / gags were funny, but by and large I found it impossible to sit through. I actually turned the film off before the end. I tried. I really did. But much like trying to slit my wrist with a spork, the going was slow and just too damned painful.

Stay away from this movie.