La farce de l'empereur

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.

For a documentary with no notoriety fueled by a very political filmmaker, March of the Penguins did very well for itself when it was released last year. It made quite a hefty bit of money, and went on to win the Academy Award for Best Documentary. But for all the quiet moments not featuring the voice of Morgan Freeman (who can narrate my life story anytime he wants to), I think most people would be hard-pressed not to be imagining what the penguins are actually thinking. So it should be no surprise to anyone that Bob Saget, everyone's favourite '90s TV personality, took this idea and ran with it. And what resulted was Farce of the Penguins.

Saget takes the basic premise from March of the Emperor penguins arduous journey to procreate, and created a whole storyline and dialogue to go along with it. The film, narrated this time by Samuel L. Jackson, follows the story of Carl (Saget) and Jimmy (Lewis Black), two friends making the journey with all the other male penguins to find love and make a baby. Jimmy is content with life the way it is, but Carl is going through somewhat of a mid-life crisis. He wants to find a woman he can stay with, but cannot face the inherent contradiction involved in the life cycle of penguins and their mating rites. It frequently pans off to the wait the female penguins are doing, and how nervous Melissa (Christina Applegate) is over the prospect of having a baby with someone she barely knows. Her friend Vicky (Mo'Nique) tries to console her, and attempts to stick by her side during the long wait.

It does not sound incredibly complicated, and in the end, it really is pretty straight-forward. Through digital manipulation and stock footage of various penguins (and all sorts of other wacky animals too), Saget has helped create something wildly irrelevant, but downright hilarious in many instances. Yes, it is incredibly vulgar, and yes, it is even more so ridiculously silly than anything. But does that make the movie any less fun? Slightly, but not by a whole lot. Granted you can take the stupid humour Saget is pitching, than you should be able to find quite a few moments of laughter throughout the proceedings. It gets a little repetitive in certain instances, but there are some really terrifically funny moments sprinkled throughout its way-too-short runtime to help make up for this.

The main voice talent is not amazing, but they get the job done. Saget and Black feed off of each other nicely for the majority of the film, playing jokes off of each other fast and furiously. At certain points however, they really do not seem like they work as well chemically as they did only minutes before. It makes for plenty of awkward transitions, and really unbalances the film. On the other hand, Applegate and Mo'Nique just sound terribly bored. They make a few funny jokes here and there, but sound stiff when they any sort of lengthy conversations. No one was holding them at gunpoint, so I do not understand why they could not have put at least a bit more enthusiasm into their voices.

What actually makes for most of the funny material in the film are the wildly outrageous cameo voices. There are far too many to name off, but making an attempt at trying to figure out whose voice belongs to who is a challenging activity all in itself. Once the end credits come up, you just may be a bit surprised at just who turns up (such as the pseudo Full House reunion). The movie parodies and random musical numbers featuring Saget belting out some pretty heart-warming tunes, is also pretty enjoyable. And of course, Jackson's brilliant narration is simply hysterical.

Unfortunately for this film, the main problem with the film is that it does not have enough steam to make it from beginning to end. Towards the opening, the whole digital manipulation and vulgar jokes are alright, and are pretty enjoyable to watch. But by the end, it just becomes an eyesore. I realize that the joke(s) can only go so far, but Saget had to anticipate this fact, and should have done more to try and resolve it. As a whole, it just feels way too weak to work as a full-length movie, and easily explains why the film is going straight-to-video this January. It could have easily done with a good polish, and a little bit more going for it. By the end, we are just waiting for the film to finish so we can turn it off, and that is not a good thing at all.

I do contest that I laughed pretty hard at more than a handful of scenes, and I would be lying if I did not say that I did enjoy Farce of the Penguins. It is not for everyone, and easily may be written off as being far too stupid to watch, but it definitely is worthwhile. If for anything, as a companion piece to March, just so more people have creative ideas as to what these penguins are thinking.

6/10.

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.

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.

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.