A Dumb, Lite Comedy That Makes Some Smart, Heavy Observations

Joe Somebody is a deceptive film, pretending to be one part romantic comedy and two parts office farce, but the secret to getting more out of the film than cheap laughs is to acknowledge what it really is: a smart social satire that takes a surprisingly frank, even disturbing, look at the state of modern American adult masculinity.

Considering that he has built much of his career out of poking fun at masculinity -- although rarely with as much cynical honesty as he does here -- Tim Allen is an apt choice to play the lead role. Allen stars as Joe Scheffer, an office drone with a remarkably unremarkable career and life. At the office, he has spent the last ten years exhibiting excellent work habits and positive results, but all to no avail; few of his co-workers know who he is, those who do view him with indifference, and a well-earned promotion that had been dangled in his face was given to another man a year ago. The only thing that ever really changes for Joe is that his wife has recently left him for a younger man, a pretty-boy actor more in tune with her own neuvo-hippy lifestyle.

In his whole pathetic life, Joe has only two things to be happy about: his relationship with his daughter, and his parking space. Joe doesn't have a private parking space, but he does take a small amount of pride in the fact that he has earned the right to park in the convenient "ten year parking lot," since employees with less than ten years have to trek all the way from the ridiculously inconvenient parking lot that is depicted as driving distance to the office.

Joe has never realized how much of his own happiness that he has invested into that parking lot until he loses his space to Mark McKinney, an arrogant brute played by a well-cast Patrick Warburton. When Joe rightly (but unwisely) challenges Mark's use of the Ten Year Parking Lot -- after all, Mark has been working at the office for less than seven years -- Mark brutally knocks Joe to the ground and threatens to beat him severely. Mark's cruelty is heightened by the fact that he is fully aware that coworkers, and even Joe's own daughter, are witnessing the event, adding an extra layer of humiliation to the beating.

This is the moment when Joe Somebody starts to reveal that it is less interested in cheap laughs than most Tim Allen movies are. Oh, there will be plenty of cheap laughs later, but for the moment, Joe Somebody is content to admit to the viewer that there is nothing comical about the beating that sets the story in motion, nor in the sequences that immediately follow: Joe is injured only very slightly, but his humiliation is so devastating that he cancels Bring Your Daughter to Work Day, and then refuses to return to the office for weeks. He's risking his job but doesn't care, he is too embarrassed to return to the location of his downfall.

The fact that Joe's beating causes a depression that lasts far longer than any of his injuries, and the movie's refusal to play Joe's depression for laughs, reveal the screenplay's brutal honesty about masculine self-image. A man may be intelligent, or meek, or white-collar, or possibly all three, such as the case of Joe, but these aspects of identity, while important on one level, are, on another, deeper level, nothing but sheets of paper armor that we use to clothe our insecurities, and all it takes is one slap to shred that armor to pieces and reveal that beneath the facade of civilization, we still judge our self-worth by our ability to, and willingness to, engage in violence if we are physically confronted. Put another way, mankind as a race may have emerged from the jungle millennia ago, but no singular man ever fully has.

In the movie, this harsh reality is confirmed by the office's reaction to the conflict between Joe and Mark. Despite the fact that Joe is a sweet man who did not deserve the humiliation and pain caused by Mark, Joe's co-workers have little sympathy for him, and even admit to thinking of him as a schmuck for allowing himself to be victimized; they view Joe with more pity than sympathy.

The driving plot point of the film is that Joe's self-image, and, just as notably, his image among other people, is brightened only by Joe's decision to challenge Mark to a re-match. As soon as Joe allows himself to sink to Mark's level, everything changes for the better: He feels better about himself, men suddenly want to be his friend, women suddenly want to be his lover, and even his office superiors decide to finally give him that promotion they had forgotten about.

The "voice of wisdom" -- all but drowned out by the multiple voices of reality -- is provided by Joe's daughter, played by Hayden Panettiere, and his love interest, played by Julie Bowen. Bowen's and Panettiere's characters are the only characters in the film who are dismayed by Joe's determination to fight Mark in a rematch, the only ones who see violence as folly. "But," the movie seems to argue, "of course they wouldn't understand, they're women."

There's no question that the movie uses exaggeration to depict the positive turns that come Joe's way due to his decision to announce an upcoming fight with Mark, but it would be a serious mistake to confuse such exaggeration with inaccuracy; the movie's denial of the conventional wisdom that "violence doesn't solve anything" may be grotesque, but it's also quite convincing. Why? Because, sadly, it's not just self-image that depends on a man's physicality, it's image in general. There's a reason why the observation that "nice guys finish last" has become a cliche.

movie review: Gamers

There are good movies, there are bad movies, and then there are movies that are so awful, so mind-numbingly bad, that you spend most of the movie wondering how much -- not "if," but "how much" -- the celebrities involved are humiliated by the fact that they've participated. It would not be hyperbole to describe director/writer Christopher Folino's studio film Gamers (not to be confused with Matt Vancil's similarly themed, hilarious indie film The Gamers) as such a movie. And when I say that this isn't hyperbole, I mean to emphasize that I'm not just trying to think of a clever, "writerly" way to insult Gamers. I mean I actually spent a good portion of the film feeling embarrassed on behalf of some of the actors.

"What were you thinking?" I thought to them on more than one occasion, the chastisement laced with sympathy more than anger. Because this movie's badness takes you beyond dissatisfaction, beyond anger. When serious movies fail on such an epic level, they can occasionally fall under the "so bad it's unintentionally funny" category. When comedies fail to the same degree, you don't even groan, for fear that you'd be insulting groans themselves.

The main characters are a group of friends who play a role-playing game called "Demons, Nymphs, & Dragons," or just "D.N.D." for short. (The exact parallels between D.N.D. and D&D -- the real-life Dungeons & Dragons -- are less satirical and more a mixture of lame joke and a clear ploy to avoid a copyright lawsuit.) The friends are excited because the game that they are scheduled to play in the upcoming weekend will officially break the world record of most hours devoted to playing DND.

Now, you don't have to be a D&D expert to understand either the movie or this review, but you should at least know that the concept behind D&D, DND, and most role-playing games in general is simple: In an event that is more or less cooperative story-telling, each player controls a single character, which represents an individual in a fictional setting, and results of the characters' choices and the overall storyline for the game are determined by the Dungeon Master (DM) according to the rules of the game and the DM's interpretation of those rules. In this movie, the Dungeon Master/DM is called a "Dungeon Lord," or "D.L." but it's obviously the same.

Anyway, as the big weekend approaches, we get to know each of the main characters: Gordon, who seems the most relatively normal person in the group; Paul, who ostensibly seems like a likable guy, but who secretly sabotaged the group's prom dates back in the 80s, just so they could devote more time to playing DND; Reese, a mentally unstable and pathetic loser; Fernando, a Mexican-American whose one joke seems to be his imperfect English (despite the fact that he's been an American citizen for 23 years when the movie takes place); and Kevin, the condescending singer-songwriter who serves as the group's Dungeon Lord, and who tries to balance his friendship with the other gamers, with his own belief that a DL shouldn't fraternize with the people in his group.

All of this is told, by the way, in a faux-documentary style that has become increasingly common since the continued success of Christopher Guest's faux-documentary comedies. One reason why Guest's movies succeed while this one fails is the film's attitude toward its characters. Guest encourages us to laugh at his characters, but also has a clear affection for them, and this feeling of good will affects the audience's reaction; as a result, even people who don't get Guest's humor usually don't outright dislike his films. Gamers director/writer Christopher Folino, on the other hand, has a clear contempt for his main characters, and it's hard to like a movie if the filmmaker himself so clearly dislikes the people who populate his own film.

The movie's most dominant joke by far -- the one factor that really drives the whole movie -- is the fact that each of the gamers is a truly pathetic loser. They are all adults who still live with their parents, are obsessed with DND to various degrees, and exhibit social ineptness both with each other and with the outside world of non-gamers. Considering the film's disdain for its gamer characters -- and by extension, real-life gamers -- it's no coincidence that the most central character is also the most pathetic of the bunch, Reese.

Reese is the newest member of the group and their exclusionary attitude towards him is reflected by the fact that they still refer to their group as "the Four Horsemen," even though Reese has been a fifth player for five years now. Dungeon Lord Kevin not only delights in killing off Reese's DND characters, but he openly admits it, and routinely mocks him for it (although Reese is also depicted as an idiotic player, whose character deaths are his own fault as often as they are Kevin's).

As the movie opens, Kevin has recently killed Reese's character Farrah, whom Reese has been playing in other people's DND games for 20 years. This devastates Reese, who risks his job by devoting hours of office time to leaving nasty messages on Kevin's answering machine. A friend of mine says that "frustration is comedy, anger isn't." I don't know if I agree with this formula, but Gamers makes a good argument in favor of that theory, as Reese's repeated tantrums and angry phone calls invariably motivate the viewer to cringe rather than laugh. Reese's heartbreak over the non-existent Farrah's death develops into an ongoing joke, as he repeatedly calls in to a request radio station to devote countless love songs to Farrah's memory. When the DJ finally tires of devoting so many songs to one person, Reese attempts to bribe him by mailing in beef jerky. This is funny?

Incidentally, I'm 100% positive that there are real-life equivalents to the character of Reese, but this film is an outright insult to everyone who enjoys role-playing games, by unironically presenting Reese and his fellow losers as representational of the group.


But that's not why I disliked the film. In the end, this is simply a comedy that is astoundingly unfunny. How unfunny? I'll give you three examples of the film's humor, and you can judge for yourself whether they make you want to see the film.

Example #1 -- Fernando works for Gordon's father, who is a farmer. This fact is introduced for no other reason except as a set-up to a joke that the farm's speciality is selling horse sperm, for the purposes of thoroughbred breeding, and the joke's punchline is when Fernando shows up covered in horse ejaculate.

Example #2 -- Reese brings beef jerky to a gaming session to share with the other players, but because of his anger over Farrah's death, he first rubs the jerky on his bare crotch in an act of petty revenge. The punchline to this joke is that this is the jerky he accidentally sends to the DJ mentioned earlier.

Example #3 -- Kevin's African-American girlfriend sews together a "wizard's cloak" for him, and the running gag is that neither she nor any of the gamers are aware that the cloak looks exactly like a Ku Klux Klan outfit. There is also a running gag involving a radio trivia question which callers keep getting wrong. The answer to the question is "David Lynch," a joke that exists only for the sake of the punchline that ties these two jokes together, as a frustrated Kevin, in his KKK outfit, keeps crying out "Lynch, Lynch, Lynch" as the furious black neighbor looks on.

If any of these jokes strike you as hilarious, then Gamers might be the movie for you. But I warn you that the movie's jokes aren't just bad in their own right, they're also presented badly, with no sense of comedic delivery or timing.

So is there anything about this movie that I did like? Yes. For one thing, Kevin Sherwood, the actor who plays the musician Kevin, is actually a pretty good singer and guitarist, and his condescending songs are pleasant enough to listen to, even if the lyrics aren't nearly as funny as they're intended to be. And actors John Heard and William Katt both provide good performances in their small roles. Katt's cameo as Reese's boss, a former DND fanatic who now must warn Reese that Reese's fanaticism has become a job risk, includes a terribly written but well-delivered monologue about the virtues of football-themed video games.

Heard's supporting role as Gordon's father includes the movie's only relatively good scene (meaning it's still a pretty bad scene, but there is at least an element of inspiration here that is lacking in the rest of the movie): Gordon's parents are both disillusioned that their son has devoted more time to a fantasy-themed game than to living life and making something of himself, but when they are invited to a party that turns out to be a tribute to one of Gordon's DND characters, it's almost touching how Gordon's father temporarily puts aside his animosity and tries to smile and get into the spirit of things. (Any potential humor or good will that might have been generated by the scene, however, is ruined by the palpable bitterness displayed by Gordon's mother, played by Beverly D'Angelo -- another good argument in favor of my friend's "anger isn't comedy" theory.)

What else did I like about the movie? I'm not trying to be a smart-ass when I observe that the DVD menu itself is funny, as Reese's answering machine messages segue into a rant about people who spend too much time listening to the audio on a DVD menu. And the opening credits sequence illustrate how the combination of exciting visuals and a fun rock tune can create enthusiasm for the movie about to follow. (In an extreme case of misdirection, this exuberant opening strongly implies an earnest zeal for fantasy role-playing games.) But it's all downhill from there. When the best things about a movie are the DVD menu and opening credits sequence, it's time to make another viewing selection.