Hacks

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.

There's some really funny stuff in this fake documentary about a bunch of misfit stand-up comics. I caught this at a festival in Park City, UT that was happening at the same time as Sundance. While some of the stuff in the film is hilarious, some of it is just in poor taste. The biggest problem with this movie is that it's about half an hour too long. You can cut all the boring slow stuff out of it and have a really funny hour long film. Worth catching if you can see it with some college freshmen while drunk.

Saw this movie at New York Film festival and was blown away. The crowd was packed - the laughs were out of control. I knew nothining about this flick going in and didn't know anyone associated with it. It was so smart and hilarious - this flick better come out in the theaters soon. The country needs this now.

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.

I saw this mockumentary at Sundance in mid January and was in love. When I was at Sundance, I saw a huge amount of self-important angst-ridden crap that's been done a million times (albeit in many different forms). I had no idea what to expect from this movie - it's a mockumentary about a group of horrendously bad stand-up comics. Sounds like it MIGHT work, right? Well, I was thrilled to see that it DID work in ways I've never seen done before. The movie has a really weird feel to it. It's definately not a typical mockumentary. In fact, it's not you typical anything. It's just insane. My friends and I were cracking up even after it ended. I won't give away the ending, but it was REALLY cool. You wouldn't expect this kind of movie to have any kind of real message, but there is one - and it's totally cool. You get the feeling the folks who made this really GET it. Very cool. If you catch this flick, remember to "cup the balls!" There should be more movies like this. Movies with balls. Peace