When it was announced only a couple of weeks ago, I was surprised to say the least that they were adapting a satirical talk show of the internet into a movie. I've always been a huge fan of the web show and always found the writing and humour to be really witty and funny. The same can not be said for the movie, which was just plain not funny and a complete waste of time unfortunately.
This movie followed every single cliche you could possibly imagine from a Hollywood movie. You know exactly where the film is going the entire time. The main driving force for the story is that they have to go cross country to get 10 between two ferns episodes shot so that Zach can get his own network talk show, so its a roadtrip movie... How fresh. The characters are bad, forgettable and unfunny. There is zero special about the filmmaking. One of the aspects of the movie is it's shot like they are making a documentary about the making of the web show, similar to something like the office, but unlike the office, it has zero value within this movie. It serves no purpose at all and was just another lazy excuse for a few gags. It also is completely inconsistent, the whole movie isnt shot in this documentary style, they make a point of Zach asking the make believe filmmakers to shoot everything, but then there are scenes presented like a normal movie. which begs the question why even bother in the first place?
At one point in this movie, Will Ferrell (Playing the manager of funny or die) says "people like to laugh at Zach, not with him" in reference to what made the show so popular. As if to suggest that is the driving force to what makes the web series so popular, is the fact that Zach is such a goofball. But that's not the appeal at all. The appeal is it's Zach making personal jokes about real stars careers and just plain being rude to them, having Zach shush the president of the United states, telling actors how terrible they are, in one episode he even asked hilary Clinton if email is the best way to reach her. Brilliant. It may be staged but undeniably it's still funny to see these things that you would never see happen in a more traditional interview, the show provided something unique and somewhat daring, and funny. So it's so bizzare to me that the writer and director of this movie (who is the same as the web show) didn't seem to understand the aspects that made the show so popular in the first place. I never saw Zach galifinakis as a character in the original series. More as a spokesperson for these jokes, jokes that people would make between there friends except Zach was directly speaking to them. not the Zach we see in this film, this bumbling goofy idiot type character who has a dream of making it big and becoming a real talk show host, Errm, who cares!!
The best part of this movie is of course the interviews themselves. But even they are not nearly as funny. They just feel more "polished" and some of them are less than a minute long. The movie was also not self aware in the slightest. I think it would have helped this movie along if they got alot more meta, you know have actors play up the way they are perceived by audiences, but they dont. Instead they just chose to go the absolute laziest route possible and have the actors just sit there quietly and take the abuse. The scenes between the interviews could have been filled with birdman like self awareness with actors mocking themselves. Such wasted potential here.
Overall this isn't a movie I can recommend, maybe for the ferns episodes within the film but you can probably just watch them online. In total they probably take up like 15 minutes of the film.Honestly this movie kind of ruins between two ferns going forward. When the show chastises actors for there bad choices on making bad projects from nownon. It's going to be really hard not to see the hypocrisy considering they were the same people who thought this was a good idea.
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