Farce of the Penguins

In 2005, "March of the Penguins", the award-winning documentary about the treacherous lives of emperor penguins in Antarctica, was released, and that was the year I saw it. It was definitely eye-opening for me, since I had no clue how rough those penguins had it! Since then, for quite some time, I've been aware of the title, "Farce of the Penguins", but didn't see it for a while. This is a direct-to-DVD send-up of the 2005 documentary, with real stock footage of penguins and sometimes other wildlife, put together to make a story, with dialogue added. This could have turned out to be a really good film if it was actually funny, which it unfortunately isn't.

Down in Antarctica, the male penguins are on their long journey to the breeding grounds, where the females are waiting for them. Two of these male penguins are Carl and Jimmy, best friends who talk a lot about relationships (including past ones), and other things, on their way to their destination. Meanwhile, as the females wait, there's also a lot of talk about sexual relationships back at the breeding grounds, especially between Melissa and Vicki. Carl and Melissa are both longing for a lover, and have yet to meet each other. Eventually, after the males finally make it to their destination and meet the females, Carl and Melissa soon fall in love. However, Carl and Jimmy's friendship gets awkward after Jimmy accidentally has sex with Melissa one night in the dark while she is asleep and he feels something soft!

Basically, "Farce of the Penguins" has the same problem as many other modern comedies. Two words that can be used to describe the humour in this spoof are crude and juvenile. Some of these comedies can be described as crude, juvenile, and FUNNY, while some can only be described as crude and juvenile. Sadly, this is one of the latter. The film is narrated by Samuel L. Jackson, and during the opening narration, he says some very unfunny, juvenile things about growing your pubic hairs if you want to come to Antarctica. There are definitely a lot of sex jokes in the film, which includes clips of various animals having sex put in for laughs, and these sex jokes don't tend to be funny. Another thing, you guessed it, there are some fart jokes, which are also lame. It seems the juvenile gags were just thrown in, and could have been a lot funnier if it actually took some comedic talent to come up with them. Not only is the humour severely lacking, the plot is also dull, it never improves along the way.

This is definitely NOT the worst spoof movie I've ever seen. The worst spoof movie I've ever seen is definitely "Epic Movie", made by the infamous Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer. I haven't seen any of Friedberg and Seltzer's other recent films, but they could easily be just as bad, so I'm not going to bother watching any of them, and if they were the ones who made "Farce of the Penguins", I'm sure it would have been worse (perhaps MUCH worse) than it turned out to be with Bob Saget as the writer and director. However, this spoof of the 2005 hit documentary on the lives of emperor penguins in their frigid habitat is still pretty lame, and it's probably a good thing it wasn't played in theatres, since that probably would have given it more undeserved attention. As a direct-to-DVD release, it seems to have been widely ignored, which is actually not a bad thing.

Bob Saget makes a foul mouthed send up of the March of the Penguins. Having enlisted dozens of actors and comedians to provide voices, Saget has cobbled together a spoof of the award winning documentary March of the Penguins. Its penguins going on about sex and food and relationship and sex and bodily functions and sex with the bluest of blue language (so keep the kiddies away).

How is it? More often than not this is very funny. The comedians provide lots of laughs in what are mostly asides to the man story of penguins going off to mate. Many of the jokes are the sort of one liners that can be used in other circumstances and there's a good chance that the film will end up being endlessly quoted.

The trouble comes when the movie doesn't end after twenty minutes. Lets face it, as funny as the movie is, after twenty minutes you're ready to turn it off and go on to something else. Don't get me wrong the one liners continue to be funny all the way through but with out any real "plot" other than the mating cycle of the penguins the film becomes just a series of unconnected jokes, which is fun for a while but ultimately just becomes boring. I'm not sure I'd watch it a second time.

Worth a rental with friends, but not worth buying.

STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning

A made for video spoof of March of the Penguins, with Samuel L Jackson taking over narrating duties with a much sharper tone, a much sassier attitude and a much fouler mouth!

Some recent spoofs that have hit the cinemas, including Epic Movie and Date Movie, have been rather below par, so I thought there might be some hope with this video spoof of 2005's renowned documentary March of the Penguins. It looked inspired enough, right down to Jackson doing the voice-over, his harsh, commanding voice in contrast to Morgan Freeman's soft, gentle delivery in the proper film. But, really, that's all that is funny, the concept of the film. Or rather, how ridiculous the idea of talking penguins is. Not just talking penguins, farting penguins, penguins that get into arguments with the narrator, penguins that swear and talk like they're from Da Getto, and penguins that, well, make idiots of themselves. The material is sadly just not funny enough to rise it above the absurdity of the story, but there are, to be fair, worser spoofs out there at the moment and considering how cheaply it's all been put together (one penguin even jokes about hating appearing in this "stock footage filled piece of crap!") that's actually quite an achievement. **

There were times we had some good laughs, but this really didn't need to be a film. The penguin footage had so little to do with what the comics were saying most of the time that it just got stupid after a while. It would have been just as good as an audio CD, maybe better.

If the comics had really LOOKED at the footage as they riffed, and if the editing were a little more creative, Farce of the Penguins would have been great. As it is, the comic timing of the voices got thrown off by what the penguins were doing, and vice versa.

The only reason I'm getting this for my video rental shop is that I think the advertising will make customers ask for it.

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.