Farce of the Penguins

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!!!

Bob Saget makes a foul mouthed send up of the March of the Penguins. Having enlisted dozens of actors and comedians to provide voices, Saget has cobbled together a spoof of the award winning documentary March of the Penguins. Its penguins going on about sex and food and relationship and sex and bodily functions and sex with the bluest of blue language (so keep the kiddies away).

How is it? More often than not this is very funny. The comedians provide lots of laughs in what are mostly asides to the man story of penguins going off to mate. Many of the jokes are the sort of one liners that can be used in other circumstances and there's a good chance that the film will end up being endlessly quoted.

The trouble comes when the movie doesn't end after twenty minutes. Lets face it, as funny as the movie is, after twenty minutes you're ready to turn it off and go on to something else. Don't get me wrong the one liners continue to be funny all the way through but with out any real "plot" other than the mating cycle of the penguins the film becomes just a series of unconnected jokes, which is fun for a while but ultimately just becomes boring. I'm not sure I'd watch it a second time.

Worth a rental with friends, but not worth buying.

STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning

A made for video spoof of March of the Penguins, with Samuel L Jackson taking over narrating duties with a much sharper tone, a much sassier attitude and a much fouler mouth!

Some recent spoofs that have hit the cinemas, including Epic Movie and Date Movie, have been rather below par, so I thought there might be some hope with this video spoof of 2005's renowned documentary March of the Penguins. It looked inspired enough, right down to Jackson doing the voice-over, his harsh, commanding voice in contrast to Morgan Freeman's soft, gentle delivery in the proper film. But, really, that's all that is funny, the concept of the film. Or rather, how ridiculous the idea of talking penguins is. Not just talking penguins, farting penguins, penguins that get into arguments with the narrator, penguins that swear and talk like they're from Da Getto, and penguins that, well, make idiots of themselves. The material is sadly just not funny enough to rise it above the absurdity of the story, but there are, to be fair, worser spoofs out there at the moment and considering how cheaply it's all been put together (one penguin even jokes about hating appearing in this "stock footage filled piece of crap!") that's actually quite an achievement. **

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.

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.