Farce of the Penguins

I love Bob Saget, and many of the other comedians that starred in this thing. But I can't for the life of me understand why any of them agreed to do it. I've seen Saget's standup, and I think he's very talented. But it does NOT translate well to a movie.

When the dialogue wasn't raunchy, it was incredibly trite, which offended me even more than the lewd humor.

For starters, Samuel L. Jackson belongs in something either a) intelligent or b) badass. This film was neither. And furthermore, I've actually lost some respect for Lewis Black due to his involvement in "Farce." What a stupid title, too. Way too obvious.

And why would you make fun of "March of the Penguins?" It's completely uncontroversial and didn't make a big enough splash in pop culture to be a worthy target of parody, so I guess they figured they had no choice but to make the penguins use the F-word.

Of course, the crappy paste-up job with the footage didn't help this film, either.

I'm not easily offended by off-color humor, but I am offended by respectable comedians reading VERY un-funny dialogue. What a shame.

In 2005, "March of the Penguins", the award-winning documentary about the treacherous lives of emperor penguins in Antarctica, was released, and that was the year I saw it. It was definitely eye-opening for me, since I had no clue how rough those penguins had it! Since then, for quite some time, I've been aware of the title, "Farce of the Penguins", but didn't see it for a while. This is a direct-to-DVD send-up of the 2005 documentary, with real stock footage of penguins and sometimes other wildlife, put together to make a story, with dialogue added. This could have turned out to be a really good film if it was actually funny, which it unfortunately isn't.

Down in Antarctica, the male penguins are on their long journey to the breeding grounds, where the females are waiting for them. Two of these male penguins are Carl and Jimmy, best friends who talk a lot about relationships (including past ones), and other things, on their way to their destination. Meanwhile, as the females wait, there's also a lot of talk about sexual relationships back at the breeding grounds, especially between Melissa and Vicki. Carl and Melissa are both longing for a lover, and have yet to meet each other. Eventually, after the males finally make it to their destination and meet the females, Carl and Melissa soon fall in love. However, Carl and Jimmy's friendship gets awkward after Jimmy accidentally has sex with Melissa one night in the dark while she is asleep and he feels something soft!

Basically, "Farce of the Penguins" has the same problem as many other modern comedies. Two words that can be used to describe the humour in this spoof are crude and juvenile. Some of these comedies can be described as crude, juvenile, and FUNNY, while some can only be described as crude and juvenile. Sadly, this is one of the latter. The film is narrated by Samuel L. Jackson, and during the opening narration, he says some very unfunny, juvenile things about growing your pubic hairs if you want to come to Antarctica. There are definitely a lot of sex jokes in the film, which includes clips of various animals having sex put in for laughs, and these sex jokes don't tend to be funny. Another thing, you guessed it, there are some fart jokes, which are also lame. It seems the juvenile gags were just thrown in, and could have been a lot funnier if it actually took some comedic talent to come up with them. Not only is the humour severely lacking, the plot is also dull, it never improves along the way.

This is definitely NOT the worst spoof movie I've ever seen. The worst spoof movie I've ever seen is definitely "Epic Movie", made by the infamous Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer. I haven't seen any of Friedberg and Seltzer's other recent films, but they could easily be just as bad, so I'm not going to bother watching any of them, and if they were the ones who made "Farce of the Penguins", I'm sure it would have been worse (perhaps MUCH worse) than it turned out to be with Bob Saget as the writer and director. However, this spoof of the 2005 hit documentary on the lives of emperor penguins in their frigid habitat is still pretty lame, and it's probably a good thing it wasn't played in theatres, since that probably would have given it more undeserved attention. As a direct-to-DVD release, it seems to have been widely ignored, which is actually not a bad thing.

This extremely minimal production yarn might be an embarrassing excuse for a mockumentery, but is not the completely useless piece of celluloid trash that some are making it out to be. Keeping in the stoner-addled tradition of things in fact, one may even squeeze off a few scatological belly laughs in the otherwise depressingly low-brow, low budget affair. Apparently it boils down to this: Writer/Director Bob Saget has a lot of friends in Hollywood. They may not all be on top of their game, many even out of the limelight for some time, but a common friend indeed they have with their oft-ridiculed, former television dork dad.

What Saget gets to exploit out of this is a plethora of B-listers, which makes for an impressive cast on paper….but do not be fooled. On top of the disengaging sound quality which reeks of home studio, almost all of the frequent one line cameos done by celebrities are so apathetically subdued that one cannot help but think most of these people are phoning in a favor to an old Hollywood friend, with absolutely no intention on getting any attention in this project; who can blame them? Even at 80 minutes, relying on a low grade stash of penguin stock footage in order to manipulate a crude plot into this joke must have sounded drastically unappealing to most participants.

Thankfully a few of Saget's crew actually rise to the occasion, that is to say that they do not let their hubris get in the way of embracing the full-on stupidity of the project. It is in those low-fi moments of tasteless class that a few voice actors and the rancid production actually get to shine in it's context. Samuel L. Jackson, as the narrator was an excellent choice, although even his central dialog feels like his head is somewhere else (to the scripts credit, they actually throw in a joke to echo this sentiment). The only other voice actors that make an earnest contribution to this goof are Lewis Black (who thankfully had a large role) and Tracey Morgan, making all other voice actors seem completely indifferent. For the few genuinely hilarious moments that reached further then this trite March of the Penguins farce, I am unexpectedly happy for, but for a majority of screen time, viewers need either be indulging their chemical dependencies, or mocking aloud with friends in order to receive anything special out of this shell of a movie.

There were times we had some good laughs, but this really didn't need to be a film. The penguin footage had so little to do with what the comics were saying most of the time that it just got stupid after a while. It would have been just as good as an audio CD, maybe better.

If the comics had really LOOKED at the footage as they riffed, and if the editing were a little more creative, Farce of the Penguins would have been great. As it is, the comic timing of the voices got thrown off by what the penguins were doing, and vice versa.

The only reason I'm getting this for my video rental shop is that I think the advertising will make customers ask for it.

I just finished watching Farce and overall it was decent. Don't be sucked in by all of the celebrity voices because most of them only have one-liners. Bob Saget is Carl and Lewis Black is Jimmy. The movie follows these two on their long journey to mate. Along the way they interact with their penguin pals as Carl talks about his past girlfriends. Overall the movie wasn't as funny as I was expecting, but still made me laugh. Many fart and crude humor jokes are used, but in a funny way. Tracy Morgan was by far the funniest part of the movie. I was surprised by the R rating and was hoping for some adult humor. That is exactly what I got. Oh almost forgot, Samuel L. Jackson as the narrator was also extremely good. Go see The Farce of the Penguins when it comes out so Bob Saget can be reincarnated!!!