La farce de l'empereur

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.

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.

I just finished watching Farce and overall it was decent. Don't be sucked in by all of the celebrity voices because most of them only have one-liners. Bob Saget is Carl and Lewis Black is Jimmy. The movie follows these two on their long journey to mate. Along the way they interact with their penguin pals as Carl talks about his past girlfriends. Overall the movie wasn't as funny as I was expecting, but still made me laugh. Many fart and crude humor jokes are used, but in a funny way. Tracy Morgan was by far the funniest part of the movie. I was surprised by the R rating and was hoping for some adult humor. That is exactly what I got. Oh almost forgot, Samuel L. Jackson as the narrator was also extremely good. Go see The Farce of the Penguins when it comes out so Bob Saget can be reincarnated!!!

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.

I love Bob Saget, and many of the other comedians that starred in this thing. But I can't for the life of me understand why any of them agreed to do it. I've seen Saget's standup, and I think he's very talented. But it does NOT translate well to a movie.

When the dialogue wasn't raunchy, it was incredibly trite, which offended me even more than the lewd humor.

For starters, Samuel L. Jackson belongs in something either a) intelligent or b) badass. This film was neither. And furthermore, I've actually lost some respect for Lewis Black due to his involvement in "Farce." What a stupid title, too. Way too obvious.

And why would you make fun of "March of the Penguins?" It's completely uncontroversial and didn't make a big enough splash in pop culture to be a worthy target of parody, so I guess they figured they had no choice but to make the penguins use the F-word.

Of course, the crappy paste-up job with the footage didn't help this film, either.

I'm not easily offended by off-color humor, but I am offended by respectable comedians reading VERY un-funny dialogue. What a shame.