A Farsa dos Pingüins

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.

This extremely minimal production yarn might be an embarrassing excuse for a mockumentery, but is not the completely useless piece of celluloid trash that some are making it out to be. Keeping in the stoner-addled tradition of things in fact, one may even squeeze off a few scatological belly laughs in the otherwise depressingly low-brow, low budget affair. Apparently it boils down to this: Writer/Director Bob Saget has a lot of friends in Hollywood. They may not all be on top of their game, many even out of the limelight for some time, but a common friend indeed they have with their oft-ridiculed, former television dork dad.

What Saget gets to exploit out of this is a plethora of B-listers, which makes for an impressive cast on paper….but do not be fooled. On top of the disengaging sound quality which reeks of home studio, almost all of the frequent one line cameos done by celebrities are so apathetically subdued that one cannot help but think most of these people are phoning in a favor to an old Hollywood friend, with absolutely no intention on getting any attention in this project; who can blame them? Even at 80 minutes, relying on a low grade stash of penguin stock footage in order to manipulate a crude plot into this joke must have sounded drastically unappealing to most participants.

Thankfully a few of Saget's crew actually rise to the occasion, that is to say that they do not let their hubris get in the way of embracing the full-on stupidity of the project. It is in those low-fi moments of tasteless class that a few voice actors and the rancid production actually get to shine in it's context. Samuel L. Jackson, as the narrator was an excellent choice, although even his central dialog feels like his head is somewhere else (to the scripts credit, they actually throw in a joke to echo this sentiment). The only other voice actors that make an earnest contribution to this goof are Lewis Black (who thankfully had a large role) and Tracey Morgan, making all other voice actors seem completely indifferent. For the few genuinely hilarious moments that reached further then this trite March of the Penguins farce, I am unexpectedly happy for, but for a majority of screen time, viewers need either be indulging their chemical dependencies, or mocking aloud with friends in order to receive anything special out of this shell of a movie.

We tried watching this but could only handle about 20mins. We didn't laugh once, it simply was not funny. Could have been if it was animated but it was just poorly edited footage of penguins with celebrity voice overs that didn't fit. I give it a zero out of ten because it simply isn't a movie, it has no plot but that is not just it, it has nothing. I am usually pretty generous and have never before given a zero.

Save you time and let this one go by.

EDIT: I thought I summed it up as best I could but for some reason there is a requirement for ten lines of text. What to say that I haven't already said... I am really surprised that the celebrities would read the script and see the concept and still take part in this. I can't imagine this had any budget but considering it is just using stock footage of penguins, probably from the March of the Penguins movie, there was literally no production costs, so maybe there is where they had the money to pay the voice-overs.

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.

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.