Land of the Lost

Welcome to the cosmic trash heap.

(Universal) Will Ferrell, Danny McBride, Anna Friel, Jorma Taccone, Matt Lauer, John Boylan, Brian Huskey, Leonard Nimoy (voice), Dennis McNicholas. Directed by Brad Silberling

The existence of parallel dimensions is a theory many well-known scientists are beginning to take seriously. As of yet, however, the theory is largely unproven, but what if there was a way to actually travel to a parallel universe?

Rick Marshall (Ferrell) is a scientist who thinks he has proven just that. His quantum…er, tachyon…oh hell, just call it a thingamajig and leave it at that…needs a little more financing to get properly tested and Marshall appears on the Today show with Matt Lauer (himself) to explain why the $500 million is so necessary. After Lauer reminds him that most credible scientists think he’s a lunatic, the two wind up getting into a wrestling match. Personally, I think Lauer could school Ferrell. He may be smaller, but you know he’d fight dirty.

The fallout from the Today show appearance is disastrous for Marshall. Already a laughingstock, the Today show footage is a YouTube sensation, and Marshall loses what little credibility he has left. He’s reduced to lecturing elementary school students on the wonders of science until he meets up with Holly Cantrell (Friel), a former Cambridge physics student who dared to find Marshall’s theories worthwhile. For this sin, she was cast out of Cambridge.

When she finds a fossil that appears to be hundreds of millions of years old – of a lighter imprint, she knows that Marshall’s theories are true. Marshall is further blown away when he discovers it’s his own lighter that she found.

Holly takes Rick to the area where she found the fossil, as well as several crystals that seem to be irradiated with tachyons or some such gobbledygook; the main thing is that the location is a cave that has been turned into a tourist trap by redneck fireworks salesman Will Stanton (McBride) who agrees to take the two on a tour of the cave on a yellow inflatable raft. As the tour passes one cheesy tableaux after another, the tachyon detector/ectoplasm reader/tricorder thingy begins to go nuts. Rick turns on his thingamajig, the earth begins to shake, the little stream turns into a raging torrent and the three of them are sucked into a whirlpool o’ doom.

Except that it turns out they aren’t so doomed after all. They wind up in a strange world with several moons, deserts and swamps co-existing side by side, and the detritus of our world in a sort of cosmic trash heap, with cruise ships, ice cream trucks, drive-in movie screens and hotel pools all left to rot away in the garbage dump of the universe.

Unfortunately, there are other things in this place – grumpy tyrannosaurs (who are sensitive about their walnut-sized brains), larcenous pteranodons, lizard people in tunics (whom, as Will sagely notes, you can never trust), and proto-humans with plenty of hair, one of whom named Chaka (Taccone) befriends them. They have also lost their trusty thingamajig so they are stranded there. Can they find their thingamajig so that they can activate the whosis and use its gobbledygook to get them home?

Sid and Marty Krofft, who produced the original television show on which this is based, act as producers so you have to assume that they signed off on all of the changes and updates to their somewhat campy creation (so we can’t make any grave-rolling jokes either). When this came out in the summer of 2009, Da Queen and I originally made plans to see it but the reviews were so uniformly bad that we decided not to.

That’ll teach us for listening to those damned humorless critics. There is actually a sense of whimsy to the movie that I found rather refreshing. There is a running joke about the thingamajig also playing songs from A Chorus Line throughout the movie, which seems to exasperate Will and Holly no end. The look of the movie is deliberately kitschy, not only in a nod to the original series but I think for the laugh factor as well. While some of the CGI creatures are effective, they don’t need to be quite so much here – that’s part of the movie’s charm.

Ferrell has made a career out of playing dumber-than-rocks characters – Ricky Bobby, Ron Burgundy and George W. Bush, among others – and he’s added another one to the list. Marshall spews out factoids on subjects he knows nothing about and it almost always comes back to bite him in the derriere. Ferrell is one of those guys that people either love or they hate. Those who get him swear by him and those who don’t avoid him like the plague.

Anna Friel is in my humble opinion one of the more underrated comic actresses working today, as her work on “Pushing Daisies” and this film show. While ladies like Katherine Heigl get a lot of the higher profile comic roles, Friel is at least as good. It’s a shame she hasn’t really had a big successful movie to bolster her career the way Heigl has had.

The humor is a little scattershot and true to a movie about a place that has a little bit of everything, so too does the script and in situations like that, some things will work and others won’t. However, when the humor works the movie is as funny as anything Ferrell has done in his career (except for maybe his Celebrity Jeopardy skits on SNL – “Your answer is Threeve. I’m sorry, that’s not a number and your wager is…Texas.”) and that’s saying something.

WHY RENT THIS: The art direction is marvelous and there are some pretty nice laughs here. Friel is a much underrated comic actress.

WHY RENT SOMETHING ELSE: The humor misfires more often than it hits home. You get the impression Ferrell is trying too hard to be funny.

FAMILY VALUES: There’s some scatological humor, some raunchy sexual humor and some drug references; might be a little too much for smaller children, particularly when it comes to the monsters but otherwise okay for most audiences.

TRIVIAL PURSUIT: This is the third version of the Sid and Marty Krofft kids show to be made; in addition to the original TV series and this, there was a second version of the TV show made in 1991 with Timothy Bottoms in the Ferrell role (although he was called “Tom Porter” in that version).

NOTABLE DVD EXTRAS: There is a “day in the life of” feature regarding co-star Danny McBride.

FINAL RATING: 6/10

TOMORROW: The Karate Kid (2010)

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Morgan Freeman discovers that people will do all sorts of things when told to over a loudspeaker.

(First Look) Morgan Freeman, Paz Vega, Anne Dudek, Jonah Hill, Alexandra Berardi, Bobby Cannavale, Kumar Pallana, Jim Parsons, Danny de Vito, Rhea Perlman. Directed by Brad Silberling

As we move through life, our lives intersect briefly with other lives, and then we move on. Sometimes even the briefest of interactions can affect us profoundly, having an impact on the remainder of our lifetime.

An actor – nay, a movie star – known here only as Him (Freeman), is considering a new project (not a film – things aren’t to that stage yet). He hasn’t committed to it yet, which is somewhat surprising, since he (or is it He?) hasn’t done a movie for four years and is coming dangerously close to being “Say, weren’t you that guy who…”

Because the role is as a grocery store manager, the production company sets up an opportunity for Him to research the role at an actual grocery store in the godforsaken wasteland that is Carson, California. He is driven there by an overeager Kid (Hill) who is not so much starstruck as he is hyperactive. The Kid promises to be back in an hour, but we never see him again, which isn’t very surprising to anybody, not even Him.

He finds himself drawn to Scarlet (Vega), an acerbic check-out clerk in the Express Checkout Lane – the one where you can have no more than ten items or less in your cart. She foils customers who would skirt the rules, terrifies an assistant manager (Pallana) who is deaf as a post and slower than that molasses spill on aisle four, and has a running war with the only other checkout clerk (Dudek) in the market who despite the dearth of help seems content to sit on her behind while Scarlet does most of the work.

Scarlet, who emigrated to America from Spain, has found life incredibly hard in the Land of Milk and Honey. She’d gotten married to a man in what turned out to be a major mistake, has had most of her hopes and dreams crushed by the realities of Los Angeles and has been burned so often that she doesn’t distinguish between friend and foe – often they are one and the same in her experience. Despite all this, she finds a common bond with Him.

In turn, he is fascinated by her and her ethics. When he discovers she is going on a job interview later that day, he is keen to go with her, but insists on taking her shopping at Target for new clothes. As an actor, he understands that first impressions are everything during an audition, and when playing a role, one must look the part. The two couldn’t be any more worlds apart than they are, but still they develop a surprisingly intense friendship.

Silberling, director of such blockbusters as Lemony Snicket and City of Angels, picked this indie project for the challenge of completing shooting in 15 days.  It’s a quiet little movie, offering no great emotional resolution nor any particular insight that you can’t find elsewhere. Still, it is refreshing to watch a movie content to remain within its own framework.

Freeman does a bang-up job of essentially playing himself. Although there are some differences between Freeman and Him, there are enough similarities that it becomes eerie at times. For me, however, the opportunity to watch Vega (previously incendiary in Spanglish) is well worth it. Not only is she one of the most beautiful women in the world, she is a tremendous actress who truly wears her heart on her sleeve. I was riveted every time she made an appearance.

This is a shamelessly independent movie; the production values are next to nothing and at times, it seemed like the pace of the movie was hurried a bit, as if they had some sort of deadline to meet even after the movie had been shot. I liked it and found it charming at times (enough to give it a recommendation), but I can see where that charm would wear thin on people. Think of it as “Seinfeld” without the laughs.

WHY RENT THIS: Paz Vega. Charming without being overbearing. Paz Vega.

WHY RENT SOMETHING ELSE: No new ground broken here.

FAMILY VALUES: The language is a bit too coarse for young ‘uns.

TRIVIAL PURSUITS: This was the first movie to be available legally on the Internet while it was still playing in theaters.

NOTABLE DVD FEATURES: This has one of the most light-hearted set of features that aren’t out-and-out parodies. A Q&A session with the two main stars and director Silberling in the middle of a Target store, as well as a making-of feature that is notable in that it is longer than the actual film.

FINAL RATING: 6/10

TOMORROW: Leap Year