Saturday Night Live: The Best Of Commercial Parodies

One of the things Saturday Night Live has done and done well since the show started is commercial parodies.  I found SNL’s Best of Commercial Parodies at Big Lots recently for $3.  I decided to pop it in and check it out.  The show originally aired as a special apparently and was hosted by Will Ferrell.  The Ferrell bits were used to intro and outro the real commercial breaks from the way it looks.  They aren’t the sharpest bits of humor SNL has ever seen, but they aren’t as bad as some of the sketches they tend to throw in after the last musical performance and before the good nights.

Of course the real reason to watch this disc is to see the commercial parodies.  When SNL started back in 1975, Lorne used to constantly have affiliates cutting out during the commercial parodies because they thought it was an actual commercial break.  Unfortunately only about 3 of the parodies from the classic first 5 years are included on this disc.  You get the Bass-O-Matic, Little Chocolate Donuts, and Hey You.  Most of the parodies are from the late 90s and early 2000s.  There are plenty of bits with Will Ferrell and Amy Poehler.  I don’t remember much of anything from seasons 6 through 11 making the cut.  I keep hoping SNL Season 6 will get the complete season release treatment this year just because I’m so anxious to see just how bad that year truly was.  It was also one of the three shortest seasons in SNL history.

So keeping in mind that most of the content of this disc is more recent, how did it fair?  Well, the parodies they chose were for the most part funny.  Many of them I remembered seeing when they first aired and enjoyed revisiting them.  Others were brand new to me and managed to make me smile.  A few suffered from not wrapping up the gag quick enough.  For example did “Oops, I Crapped My Pants” adult diapers really get funnier as the two seniors kept repeating the line, and did we really need that final shot of them walking off the tennis court carrying an obvious full load in their adult diapers?  Guess that depends on your taste in scatological humor.

The Best of Commercial Parodies is a decent collection and the DVD even provides several bonus commercials to make it an even better value.  At $3 I’m very happy with the DVD.  If I had paid full price, I’m not sure I would have been so thrilled.  I give Best of Commercial Parodies 2 1/2 stars.

The Foot Fist Way

A lot of small independent films come out that I read reviews for and think they would be fun to see.  Wet Hot American Summer was one of those films.  The Foot Fist Way was another.  The problem is that these films seldom make it to WV, so I’m left waiting for the DVD.  Of course I won’t buy the DVD until the price drops or I find it used, and that doesn’t always happen either.  Recently I did manage to run across a copy of The Foot Fist Way at Wills, so I picked it up.

The Foot Fist Way is the story of Fred Simmons (Danny McBride), a Tae Kwan Do instructor with a huge ego and a poor sense of reality.  The film shows us Simmons’ life in much the way a documentary filmmaker would show it.  It’s like watching The Office without the interview segments.  When Simmons finds out his wife has cheated on him (she gave her boss a hand job at a party), he begins a downward spiral.  He tries hitting on one of his female students to no avail and begins discussing his marital problems with his grade school age students in graphic detail.  The only bright spot for Simmons is his trip to Las Vegas to meet his idol Chuck “The Truck” Wallace (Ben Best).

Fred Simmons plays like a Will Ferrell character which is not surprising since Ferrell and Adam McKay were “presenters” on this film.  The director is Jody Hill, who also plays Simmons best friend Mike McAlister.  Hill was the writer/director of Observe and Report and has also worked with McBride on his television series Eastbound & Down. 

The Foot Fist Way has some funny sequences, and it has its share of cringe inducing moments as well.  The scene where Simmons sits in his van with one of his students whose parents failed to pick him up and starts talking about his wife while drinking beers has a very creepy feeling.  When he asks the kid if he knows what a hand job is and then proceeds to explain the act in technical detail, there is almost a predatory pedophiliac overtone to it, but that’s not the case.  The scene is just more of Simmons self-absorbed personality and bad judgement.  This is not your garden variety comedy.  It does have a fairly uplifting ending, but it’s not a case of everyone lived happily ever after either.

The DVD contains a behind the scenes featurette, but it is the worst example of this that I have ever seen.  There is no dialogue.  It is lots of home movie style footage spliced together with some music over top of it.  There are a couple of bloopers and some deleted scenes such as an alternate ending.  These are more enjoyable, but still nothing amazing. 

As I said The Foot Fist Way isn’t for everyone, but if you want something different, give it a shot.  For my money, Foot Fist Way gets 2 1/2 stars.

The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard

I love the movie Used Cars.  It is one of the funniest movies from start to finish that I have ever seen.  Once I realized that The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard was also about used car salesmen, I knew it had a huge measuring stick to go up against.  The Goods focuses on one particular type of used car salesman; the ones that car lots bring in when they really need to make a lot of sales.  John Landis did a fantastic documentary on one of these used car warriors called Slasher.  It was a very entertaining film and it showed some of the tricks of the trade.  The Goods didn’t use all the tricks that Slasher used like the $50 car that is for the most part a piece of junk the dealer should be paying to have hauled away, but they created some that were funny and yet plausible like the salesman that buys the customer’s car as a trade-in and then sells it back to him at a mark-up 40 minutes later.

One of the reasons I felt The Goods worked so well was its top-notch cast.  Jeremy Piven, Ving Rhames, David Koechner, and Kathryn Hahn are the sales crew brought in to bring up the sales.  The local crew they are brought in to assist includes Tony Hale, Ken Jeong, and Charles Napier.  We also meet the family that owns the lot led by patriarch Ben Selleck, played by James Brolin.  The rest of the family includes Wendie Malick, Rob Riggle, and Jordana Spiro.  Spiro plays daughter Ivy Selleck who is engaged to Paxton Harding (Ed Helms) the son of a competing used car dealer played by Alan Thicke.  Helping to further raise the comedy talent quotient is Craig Robinson as DJ Request (a DJ that refuses to take requests) and an unbilled Will Ferrell as McDermott, the sales team’s former DJ who dies in a horrible sky diving accident that had me laughing out loud sitting by myself in the living room.

The plot is pretty simple.  The mercenary sales force comes in and motivates the local crew.  They buy lots of TV and radio spots to promote the event and bring in a minor celebrity to help sell the event.  The rival dealer makes a play for the lot and they end up making a wager that they will sell every car on the lot by the end of the weekend.  It is the whacked out characters and their interactions that make the film.  Helms for example is also part of a boy band, or as he calls it, a man band since all the members are grown men.  Brolin has a crush on one of Piven’s sales crew but it isn’t the busty red-head, it’s Koechner.  Piven has his eyes on Spiro’s Ivy despite her engagement to Helms.  And Hahn has the hots for Brolin’s son Peter (Riggle) who although he is in a huge man size body is actually only 10 years old and suffers from a glandular disorder that makes him large.

The Goods is not as laugh packed as Used Cars, but it is still pure good old raunchy fun done extremely well.  I didn’t see the film when it was in theaters, and it appears that I was not alone in that.  The trailer and the marketing didn’t do a good enough job of telling the potential audience what they were in for.  That is terrible for audience attendance, but it makes the film that much more enjoyable when you can walk in and no practically nothing about the film.

I give The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard 4 stars.  Any flaws it has I can overlook by the virtue of two incredibly funny scenes that had me laughing.  I mentioned that one was the skydiving scene.  The other one also involves Ferrell, but this time with a pair of singing black angels with dirty mouths.  Definitely check this movie out, and if you see Used Cars available, make it a double feature.

Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy

I remember watching the trailer for Anchorman back in a theater in 2004.  I don’t recall which film it was on, but I thought it looked mildly amusing.  The one thing I didn’t know when I saw the trailer was how much of the footage in the trailer was not in the movie.  There were apparently huge sub plots that were cut out of the movie before it was released.  There was so much extra footage shot that when the DVD was released, there was actually a second movie released with it made up entirely of scenes that were cut from Anchorman.  I wish I had picked up one of those two pack deals, but I just never found a copy at my price.  I did eventually pick up a copy of Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy the uncut unrated edition at a yard sale for a buck or two, but I never have bought a copy of the second movie.

I have heard a lot of my friends say they enjoyed this movie and a lot of them have said they hated it.  I bought the DVD almost 5 years ago and had never sat down to watch it.  Tonight I dropped it into the DVD player and hit play.  Anchorman is set in the 1970s when women are just starting to become on air news personalities.  The boys club of Will Ferrell, Paul Rudd, Steve Carell and David Koechner aren’t happy to have a woman, Christina Applegate, invading their territory.  Fortunately for them these were pre-sexual harassment days or they would have all been fired.  It also helps that their boss, played by Fred Willard, keeps sending her out on puff pieces like kitten fashion shows.  However when Ron fails to show up to do the news one evening, she strong arms her way into the anchor’s chair and delivers a perfect newscast.  She and Ron are now co-anchors.

Anchorman has a lot of talent packed into its runtime.  The producer is Judd Apatow who has been involved with some very funny films and some brilliant TV.  In addition to the comedy talent in the major roles, there are dozens of cameos as well including Jack Black, Tim Robbins, Luke Wilson, Vince Vaughn, and Ben Stiller.  Some of Ferrell’s SNL buddies are around as well with Fred Armisen and Chris Parnell being the most prominent.  The question is does all this talent equal huge laughs.  Well, yes and no.  There are some very funny scenes in the movie.  There are some very quotable lines in the films as well.  The problem is the whole package isn’t as funny as it should be.  There are some scenes that you can tell the actors thought were funny, that just don’t play funny to me.  One scene where the guys are all raising their voices and shouting to protest the station adding a woman to their news team could have been funnier if it was toned down and done a little more realistically. 

One area the disc gets huge marks on is bonus features.  There is a commentary.  You get bloopers.  You get deleted scenes, and not just 2 or 3.  You get a ton of deleted scenes.  You get a behind the scenes/making of featurette.  You get promotional stunts done for the film like Ron Burgundy at the MTV Movie Awards or auditioning for ESPN.  The only think you don’t get, unless I overlooked it, is the original theatrical trailer.

So while Anchorman is not the laugh riot some people led me to expect, it is not the horrible experience others warned me it would be.  I give it a solid 2 1/2 stars and I actually think it will be one of those films that is more enjoyable upon a second viewing.