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2/10
Nearly nonexistent humor ruins what could have been a fun parody
19 July 2008
When I first started this movie I had high hopes. The first five minutes seemed quite funny with Samuel L. Jackson's narration and the promising all-star cast. I assumed the reason few people liked this was because it had a sort of "stupid" sense of humor as seen in movies like Kung Pow that few people appreciated. Unfortunately, even with so many big names in this movie, it was difficult to find any humor at all in this.

The majority of the movie revolved around Bob Saget and Lewis Black's characters chatting back and forth about walking far and finding a mate. What made the movie bad wasn't its juvenile sense of humor, but rather the lack of overall jokes. What was shown was simply Bob Saget reenacting his job as host of America's Funniest Home Videos when he used to provide voiceovers to the five second clips in order to make them only slightly more amusing. But considering there isn't much amusing about penguins in the first place, Saget couldn't do much to make it funnier than the thoughts everyone with any sense of humor whatsoever was thinking while watching March of the Penguins.

I'll admit that the horrid editing didn't make me dislike the movie as much as the humor, but it is definitely worth mentioning that it had to have been done by someone with no real experience in the editing field. For example, when one penguin farts in the movie, a large transparent red circle appears near it. I don't know what the editor was trying to do to make the fart more visible by using a red circle. Had they added in something like a green colored gas effect, it would have been more appealing. Another example is how some of the clips blatantly reverse themselves to stay on screen while the actors talk. Very little effort was put into this movie, though considering how little the makers had to do (Nearly all the footage was cheap stock footage), they must have made a fortune by spending so little money on this.

The reason I didn't give this a score of 1 was because I'll admit that I did laugh a few times, and I appreciate that the movie recognized itself as a bad movie, like when penguins from the March of the Penguins scoff at how dumb the humor is, when the writers are depicted as a monkey banging on a typewriter, and when Samuel L. Jackson apologizes for not having the budget to make the penguins' mouths move. Still, I would not recommend this movie to anyone, regardless of their sense of humor.
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3/10
It seemed a bit pointless to me. I didn't get it.
17 May 2008
Warning: Spoilers
I remember watching this movie in my French class a while ago. The whole time I was watching it, I was waiting for a main conflict to arise and bring about a plot line, but this event didn't arrive until the very end of the movie. I thought something important might happen when the Nazis first capture the boys- I was expecting one of them to be sent to a concentration camp, but the Nazis simply drive them back to the school. It seemed a bit anti-climatic. I know it's not an action movie that needs a climax like that, but the entire movie seemed a bit boring and uneventful. It seemed more like a documentary filming the life of a student in France in the 1940s rather than a feature film about a boy's life during WWII.

This made the movie extremely realistic, which is a definite plus, but it seemed too realistic for its own good. Very little of the movie focused on the war itself compared to the main character's life at school. And when you have a movie set during WWII in Europe, with the actual climax of the film involving the Germans, you expect the movie to actually be about the war.

Other than the plot, I don't have many other complaints about this movie. The writing, acting, directing, etc. were fine. For a movie with a rating of 8.1, it should get some people to talk about it, but when my class finished the movie, we all felt sort of indifferent after watching it. No one talked about whether they liked it or not. So the reason I give this movie a rating of 3/10 is not necessarily that I hated the movie, but that I feel the movie is very overrated.
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1/10
Undoubtedly the worst movie I've ever seen.
5 May 2008
Warning: Spoilers
I created this account on IMDb solely for the purpose of reviewing this movie as well as Dan in Real Life, which were both horrible movies with outlandishly high scores. I first saw this movie after seeing a trailer online showing the scene with the shark that had Steve Zahn laughing like an idiot. I thought that was funny, and I saw that it had good reviews and that it was made by Happy Madison, which has never failed me before. Until now.

From the trailer I concluded it was a parody about a poorly made nature show and the humor was in how badly it was made, even though the announcer sounded intelligent. To my disappointment, the movie was actually about a group of stoners looking for Bigfoot, and that 90% of the scenes that actually involved the nature show were shown in the trailer. I figured this could still be funny regardless, but I was very wrong. I soon found out that the only funny scenes were the ones in the trailer, and that the jokes that were funny before were ruined by the fact that you're now used to these stoners saying stupid things and that the announcer is really not supposed to be intelligent.

The rest of the jokes were just painfully juvenile. Who over the age of six honestly still finds jokes involving the word 'Dick' (in this case being someone's name) funny? And who could stand listening to the same joke about someone's name being Dick being told for five straight minutes? This is basically the kind of humor this movie has. I also noticed some jokes from the movie being recycled throughout it later on. Why would anyone in the right mind do that? It kills the joke and whatever humor it originally had. Not only this, but some scenes were just pointless in the way that they didn't even try to put humor in it at all. The humor was just awful and the movie was a disaster.
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Dan in Real Life (I) (2007)
1/10
Boring, unrealistic, stereotypical, unoriginal, one of the worst movies I've ever seen.
4 May 2008
Warning: Spoilers
I'll start from the beginning. My first impression is that it's going to be a comedy, which ends up not being the case. I think I laughed maybe once or twice at parts that were supposed to be funny and at least ten more times at the parts that weren't.

We first see that Steve Carrell's daughter is your stereotypical whining teenager who is constantly screaming about love, which few teens speak of in real life. To top it off, her boyfriend seems to chase after the car as her father drives away, as if all people do that.

They then go to a family reunion where we meet some more lame stereotypes- a caring, loving, constantly smiling family that's painful to think of as realistic. When Steve finds out the girl he likes is his brother's girlfriend, he seems to throw a temper tantrum after finding out, making it blatantly obvious that he likes her in cases like when his brother sings her a love song and he finishes it for her, and yet his family can't figure out why. To punish him for throwing a fit, his parents make him do the dishes while they play a board game, as if he's a child. This could have been a funny joke if it was done correctly, but apparently it was a serious scene.

Steve talks with her in a bathroom about getting over it, but hides in the shower when Steve's daughter walks in to talk to her. Steve's love says she was just about to take a shower and while she talks with the daughter, gets naked and jumps in the shower while Steve is already in there. WHO ON EARTH WOULD DO THAT? WHY DIDN'T SHE JUST TALK WITH HER OUTSIDE? WHO FINDS THIS ORIGINAL, FUNNY OR REALISTIC IN ANY WAY?

Hoping to find out why Steve is acting strange, his parents ask him about his love life in the laundry room as a private conversation, when suddenly nearly the entire family walks in, apparently having to all do their laundry at the exact same time. Coincidence, or just bad writing? The stereotypical loving family set him up with a girl they invite and describe as pig-faced, and constantly make fun of her, singing songs about pigs knowing full well she could walk in at any moment, and whadayaknow, she walks in as soon as they finish singing, only to be, whadayaknow, a beautiful model, like in every movie, and Steve is, whadayaknow, interested in her now.

They go to a bar and start laughing and joking until she suddenly tells them her boyfriend was killed in an accident and starts crying into a handkerchief (which I haven't seen in years in real life) for five seconds until she decides to turn on a juke box and start slow dancing all sexily like a stereotypical hot girl. Cue a pointless dance sequence that lasts nearly five minutes. The brother's girlfriend for some reason gets jealous about this even though she's taken and never really seemed interested in Steve from the start, taking it out on Steve, but breaks up with the brother soon after.

In the middle of all this, Steve catches his daughter kissing her boyfriend and tells him to go home. Before he goes he tells Steve something in Spanish, then translates that it means something along the lines of "You can't stop true love" or something unbelievably cheesy like that. Why he told him in Spanish first, I have no freakin' clue. He drives away and his daughter chases after him uselessly and collapses in tears, screaming "I hate you" to her father, which makes the rest of the family angry at Steve for some reason. Who actually thinks this is original? Why doesn't anyone realize she's just a spoiled brat and Steve is the one who's really right?

Steve meets his love at a bowling alley and kisses her when suddenly the entire family walks in to go bowling, after doing aerobics, crosswords, lame talent shows, football, etc. together previously. Honestly, how many families do that much at family reunions? Not to mention this bowling alley was implied to have been abandoned when Steve took his daughter and two kids he seemingly kidnapped there earlier. His brother punches him even though he already broke up with her. Regardless, they get married in the end seemingly immediately after the reunion. What the hell...

This is a terrible movie, and I don't believe the score is really 7.1 out of 10. Do you honestly call this realistic? Who the hell made this awful movie?
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