Satire Archives - Page 4 of 5 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (2006) + Why We Fight (2006)

January 20, 20062000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Denmark, Documentary, France, Satire, Theatrical, UK, War

LOOKING FOR COMEDY IN THE MUSLIM WORLD
*/****
starring Albert Brooks, John Carroll Lynch, Sheetal Sheth, Fred Dalton Thompson
written and directed by Albert Brooks

WHY WE FIGHT
**/****
directed by Eugene Jarecki

by Walter Chaw The most frustrating thing about Albert Brooks's crushingly boring, infuriatingly unfunny Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (hereafter Comedy) is the possibility that such was the intention all along. 'Lost in Arabia' (well, India and Pakistan–let's not get crazy, here) finds Brooks doing a high-wire act with post-modernism–the same one he's been doing his whole career, as it happens. At some point, though, it's fair to wonder how long you can push self-awareness before it finally flies apart in a storm of narcissistic deconstruction. Mull over, if you will, a moment where Brooks (as Brooks) recreates one of his classic gags–involving the world's most ironically-tragic ventriloquist–in the middle of an interminable stand-up routine staged in a New Delhi auditorium, closing his act with the dummy (the wooden one) drinking a glass of water. It's Brooks, and Brooks's film, in microcosm: a man who returns the term "mortification" to ritual and religion while being incapable of subsuming the belief that he's still the smartest guy in the room. The trick of Comedy is that in making a movie that isn't very funny about a man who isn't very funny in the middle of a gulf of cultural misunderstanding that's especially not very funny, Brooks hopes to draw a corollary between how the troubles of the world boil down to everybody's inability to communicate. As revelations go, it's not earth-shattering. Guess it goes without saying that it's also not worth the effort to get there.

National Lampoon’s Movie Madness (1983) – DVD

August 1, 20051980s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Comedy, DVD, Satire

National Lampoon Goes to the Movies
Movie Madness
*/**** Image C- Sound C+
starring Robby Benson, Richard Widmark, Diane Lane, Candy Clark
screenplay by Tod Carroll, Shary Flenniken, Pat Mephitis, Gerald Sussman and Ellis Weiner
directed by Bob Giraldi and Henry Jaglom

by Alex Jackson There is a Japanese restaurant in Beverly Hills called Ginza Sushi-Ko where some dishes are only in season for two days. The owner imports 90-95 percent of his fish from Japan and so his menu is contingent upon the current geographic conditions of the country. If the fishermen can't go out because of a typhoon, he'll close down his restaurant and cancel reservations. National Lampoon's Movie Madness is a film like that: it's as hyper-topical as a late-show monologue–every reference is isolated in 1981 and unable to expand itself onto a greater context. By the time the picture was actually released a mere two years later (direct-to-video in most territories), many of its jokes had already become dated. Just think of what an additional twenty-two years has done. Reviewing this thing isn't film criticism, it's archaeology.

Mac and Me (1988) – DVD

May 30, 20051980s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Family, Satire, Sci-Fi, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image D Sound D
starring Christine Ebersole, Jonathan Ward, Katrina Caspary, Lauren Stanley
screenplay by Stewart Raffill and Steve Feke
directed by Stewart Raffill

by Walter Chaw One of the most woeful and dispiriting films ever made, Stewart Raffill's Mac and Me qualifies as a hate crime. It's a feature-length commercial for McDonald's, Coca-Cola, Skittles, and Sears masquerading as a rip-off of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial ("MAC" = "Mysterious Alien Creature") that, what with Alan Silvestri's awful score, indicates that it's also ripping off Back to the Future during a key scene in which our wheelchair-bound hero, Eric (Jade Calegory), grabs the fender of a passing car and hitches his way to relative safety. Chips it might earn for casting an actual disabled kid in the role are cashed in when it's revealed that Eric's wrinkled-flesh puppet alien pal can only be sustained on this island earth by a combination of Coke and Skittles. It's enough to put you off not only junk food, but movies altogether. There's a place in Hell reserved for the clowns who peddle stuff like this (Ronald McDonald makes a cameo in the picture, and an even longer one in the trailer)–the movie is so venal and grasping in its conception, so astonishingly inept in its execution, that upon death, Raffill and writing partner Steve Feke should have this piece of crap projected onto their caskets to counter the pain of their passing. I'm serious. Mac and Me lowers the conversation for everyone, to the extent that it's almost a satire of greed and corporate malfeasance. Show it in a double-bill with Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room for an example of what corporations think they can get away with–and what they do.

Be Cool (2005)

March 4, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Music, Satire, Theatrical

**/****
starring John Travolta, Uma Thurman, Vince Vaughn, Cedric the Entertainer
screenplay by Peter Steinfeld, based on the novel by Elmore Leonard
directed by F. Gary Gray

by Walter Chaw At some point you decide that you're either going to play pool with Be Cool or you're not. You're going to have to decide whether Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's mincing caricature of a gay man is actually a self-parody of his own pumped-up, homoerotic image (see also Vin Diesel's simultaneously-opening Mr. Mom ape, The Pacifier), and whether this studied unkindness towards black people is actually only a satire of the bling-bling gangster culture that has all but defined rap music and young urban culture for the wider mainstream white audience. If you're resolved that Be Cool is meta-fiction that's more sociologically self-aware than other masturbatory cameo hustlers like Ocean's Twelve (and it might be), then it is indeed sort of liberating to give up and laugh along with the horde. (What could be funnier, really, than The Rock limping his wrist and doing a dialogue, solo, from cheerleading classic Bring It On?) But there's this lingering, disturbing thought I can't quite shake that Be Cool is only being a smartass part of the time–and maybe being a smug, insufferable prig all of the time.

Family Guy: The Freakin’ Sweet Collection – DVD

January 18, 20052000s, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Satire, Television

Image A+ Sound A Extras A
"When You Wish Upon a Weinstein," "Road to Rhode Island," "To Live and Die in Dixie," "I Am Peter, Hear Me Roar," "Lethal Weapons"

by Walter Chaw Possibly the most consistently appalling television show in the history of network television, Seth MacFarlane's "Family Guy" has a scary intelligence and a willingness to go places that most popular entertainment fears to tread. It's inspiring, is what I'm saying, and I put it on whenever I feel afraid to take my shots at the inexplicable sacred cow of the moment. I'm not sure how "Family Guy" survived for three seasons on Fox (actually, it sort of didn't: Bombarded with hate and diapers following the alleged series finale, the net allowed a selectively censored third season), but a precedent-setting fourth season, which will begin airing on Fox in May of this year, serves as a reminder that however many people have a conniption over Janet's tit, there are two million fewer of us who flinch at the moment of crisis, too, but in anticipation of the backlash instead of at the event itself. For what it's worth, "Family Guy" has picked up the baton from "The Simpsons" as the most relevant and daring adult entertainment. Take it with a healthy dose of "The Daily Show" and you're well on your way to developing pathos and irony.

Team America: World Police (2004)

October 19, 20042000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Esoterica, Germany, Satire, Theatrical

*½/****
screenplay by Trey Parker & Matt Stone & Pam Brady
directed by Trey Parker

by Walter Chaw The comedy bits that work in Matt Stone and Trey Parker's Team America: World Police are the most vile, the most puerile. The now-notorious puppet sex scene is uproarious–the consumption of Hans Blix by a catfish and the attempts at having marionettes fight one another in hand-to-hand combat are pretty funny, too, and though it's a little oblique, I appreciated our intrepid band's endeavour to disguise one of their own as a gentle-puppet of Middle Eastern decent. But we reach a point during this experiment in neo-"Thunderbirds" cinema where it becomes clear that the satirical sharpness that defines the duo's at-times incandescently brilliant "South Park" has been shunted aside in favour of vomit gags and screaming homophobia. It's faint praise to say that Team America is sometimes as funny as Steve Oedekerk's "thumb" movies, but more often it's just protracted and uninspired.

Silver City (2004)

September 22, 20042000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Mystery, Satire, Theatrical, Thriller

*½/****
starring Chris Cooper, Richard Dreyfuss, Billy Zane, Danny Huston
written and directed by John Sayles

by Walter Chaw The Summitville Mine Disaster in Colorado left over 20 miles of the Alamosa river "dead," so contaminated by waste materials (cyanide chief among them) that it very simply killed all the fish. A good thing, I guess, that there wasn't a sizable human population downstream. A superfund site now and fast becoming a sore election point in a Senate race between A.G. Ken Salazar and beer magnate Pete Coors as third-party interests begin a round of misleading, venomous attack ads, Summitville represents in a way a handy microcosm of the ugliness of the Kerry/Bush presidential election. There's a point when third-party interests and smear campaigns, on either side of the divide, start to demean all of us as a people, feeding on our worst instincts and treating us like dumb, mute animals. The political discourse in our country has devolved into a playground jibe match where it's easy to forget in the mud storm who's the rubber and who's the glue; no great surprise that the general death of conversation in our culture includes the whole spectrum of politics.

Saved! (2004) – DVD

September 20, 20042000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Satire

½*/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Jena Malone, Mandy Moore, Macaulay Culkin, Patrick Fugit
screenplay by Brian Dannelly & Michael Urban
directed by Brian Dannelly

Hot on the heels of Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen and Mean Girls, Saved! presents the same evil-girl-clique-victimizes-good-girl formula that is still defined by the wicked Machiavellian brilliance of Heathers, the last word on eloquence and intelligence in the bully sub-genre of teensploitation. In the wake of Columbine and the end-of-the-millennium spate of school mayhem, the greatest disappointment isn't the unabated gratification of the jock set, but the fact that school-based satires have yet to find the courage to address the absurdity of reaction post-atrocity while continuing to produce school-based satires at an unabated clip. If anything speaks to the ultimate triumph of the guilty bourgeoisie and the ineffectual leadership in charge of our nation's public schools, it's the glaring inadequacy of our cinema, that most agile and sensitive of our cultural barometers, in reproducing the voice of the oppressed. It's up to television's "Freaks and Geeks" (was, anyway) and NPR's stable of gifted monologists (Sarah Vowell, Dave Eggars, David Sedaris, and so on) to pick up the considerable slack.

The Stepford Wives (2004)

June 10, 20042000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Satire, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Nicole Kidman, Bette Midler, Matthew Broderick, Christopher Walken
screenplay by Paul Rudnick, based on the novel by Ira Levin
directed by Frank Oz

by Walter Chaw At one time Jim Henson's right hand, Frank Oz is the index finger that you close your book around when you get up to answer the door. An afterthought of a place-holder of a director, his cameo as the evidence officer in The Blues Brothers ("One prophylactic…one soiled") is as succinct a statement as any of the man's non-Muppet contributions to the films he directs. His visual style flat, his rapport with non-plush actors non-existent, Oz instinctively arranges everything as he would puppets on a soundstage: sightlines clear, movement in straight lines, and coverage that establishes the marvel of place but no sense that living things exist there. He's not a bad choice at first glance, then, for the second adaptation of Ira Levin's paranoia classic The Stepford Wives (already a mediocre camp classic 1975 movie starring Katharine Ross), the saga of a lovely young woman who discovers, Rosemary's Baby-like (another Levin source), that her husband is kind of a pig and her exclusive suburban neighbourhood is populated by vacuous femme-bots imagined as ideal wife-replacements by their pigs of husbands. Like the first film, an impossibly lovely woman is cast as the empowered lead to lend the premise a little more ironic horror, but Nicole Kidman, unlike Ross, is already an automaton and has been cast as such in films like To Die For and Eyes Wide Shut. The greatest special effect in Kidman's career is her sometime ability to simulate warmth–something that's not required in The Stepford Wives, and so again it would seem as though her involvement in this project makes a great deal of sense. Because of this, it's sort of amazing how genuinely bad are the results.

Envy (2004)

May 4, 20042000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Satire, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Rachel Weisz, Amy Poehler
screenplay by Steve Adams
directed by Barry Levinson

by Walter Chaw Reminding a great deal of the masticated wonderlands of Joe Dante's The 'burbs and his own Toys, Barry Levinson's Envy operates within a carefully constructed artifice. It's a fantasy of suburbia filthy with arrested men-children and the dolls who love them, helplessly acting out music-box morality plays against a backdrop of outsized slapstick. At it's best, the film evokes the diorama lollapalooza of Tim Burton's Edward Scissorhands (indicated by its affection for the image of a snow globe), floating along on the undercurrent of meanness that defines Burton's Pee-Wee's Big Adventure like a twisted form beneath a multi-coloured blanket. Disturbingly unmoored monologues about the joy of running a pretzel stand and an invitation to catharsis as "let it tumble out like circus freaks" are made all the more peculiar by the delivery of Christopher Walken, playing a character named obliquely–after Kafka or Christ–J-Man. Redemption and oppression in one Camus parcel, Envy is the story of an everyman toiling under the yoke of the peculiarly American sickness of being completely average while nursing a sense of outrageous entitlement.

Wild Things (1998) [Unrated Edition] – DVD

March 30, 20041990s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Satire, Thriller

**/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Kevin Bacon, Matt Dillon, Neve Campbell, Denise Richards
screenplay by Stephen Peters
directed by John McNaughton

by Bill Chambers I shepherded myself through puberty on a steady diet of Cinemax, and I’ve apologized for worse than this movie’s sins on behalf of director John McNaughton, whose Mad Dog and Glory almost sires a new genre: misogyny uplift. So I’ve always considered my indifference towards Wild Things to be something of an anomaly. A continuation of a theme that ran subtly through McNaughton’s powerful Normal Life, i.e., some inextricable link between carnal desire and pecuniary greed, Wild Things (originally titled Sex Crimes) opens with an aerial view of the ‘Glades that cleverly juxtaposes alligator-infested swampland with the grounds of a nearby high school. The implication is clear, but then again it’s too clear, and you can shut the movie off then and there without missing a beat.

Looney Tunes: Reality Check (2003) + Looney Tunes: Stranger Than Fiction (2003) – DVDs

December 5, 20032000s, Animation, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Looney Tunes, Satire

LOONEY TUNES: REALITY CHECK
½*/**** Image A Sound B Extras B-

LOONEY TUNES: STRANGER THAN FICTION
½*/**** Image A Sound B Extras B-

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover So it's come to this: after decades of revelling in the hair-trigger-timed, artfully-drawn, beautifully lush fruits of the old Warner Brothers animation stable, we are now reduced to badly animated web broadcasts slapped haphazardly onto DVD. This cynical cash-grab has nothing to do with the craft of classic-Hollywood Looney Tunes and everything with trying to muscle in on an animation market largely dominated by Disney. But the iron that forged the greatness of the old shorts has largely run cold, replaced by the pathetic brandishing of the only other big cartoon trademarks in town–making for something from which only the very young or the very easily amused could derive any pleasure.

Scary Movie 3 (2003)

October 24, 20032000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Satire, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Anna Faris, Charlie Sheen, Regina Hall, Denise Richards
screenplay by Craig Mazin and Kevin Smith and David Zucker
directed by David Zucker

by Walter Chaw Even without the Wayans Brothers, the latest Scary Movie sequel is unspeakably bad. A disjointed series of set-piece recreations from popular films (Signs, The Matrix Reloaded, The Ring, 8 Mile) populated by idiots and scripted with a flat collection of obvious fall-down gags and scatology, the picture doesn't even respect the movies it mocks enough to understand what it is about them that fails. More, with the absence of the Wayans (who are replaced by David Zucker, one-third of the braintrust behind successful spoofs like Airplane! and The Naked Gun), the repeated shout-outs to heroes of hip-hop (an entire record label shows up in cameo bits) and attendant disrespect of the culture land with disturbing racial undertones. The film is aimed specifically at an African-American demographic: That's one thing when the filmmakers are African-American, another thing altogether when they're not.

Fahrenheit 451 (1966) + The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) (Anchor Bay) – DVDs

May 18, 2003****/****, 1960s, 1970s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, Satire, Sci-Fi, UK

FAHRENHEIT 451
****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A
starring Julie Christie, Oskar Werner, Cyril Cusack, Anton Diffring
screenplay by Francois Truffaut and Jean-Louis Richard, based on the novel by Ray Bradbury
directed by Francois Truffaut

THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH
****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A
starring David Bowie, Rip Torn, Candy Clark, Buck Henry
screenplay by Paul Mayersberg, based on the novel by Walter Tevis
directed by Nicolas Roeg

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The second film of Francois Truffaut’s “Hitchcock Period” (and the Nouvelle Vague legend’s first English-language feature), Fahrenheit 451 is swathed in dread and melancholy–a sense belying cinematographer Nicolas Roeg’s bright, elemental colour scheme and simply blocked mise-en-scéne, though a sense completely in line with Roeg’s subsequent work as auteur. The weight of Roeg’s compositions–and arguably the genius of them–is the way in which he uses the weak side of the screen to introduce an element of disquiet into otherwise innocuous situations. The brilliance of the man’s eye in locating the menace and ineffable sadness in the midst of the bright and the mundane.

Femme Fatale (2002) – DVD

April 10, 20032000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: Brian De Palma, DVD, Romance, Satire, Thriller

*½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C
starring Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, Antonio Banderas, Peter Coyote, Eriq Ebouaney
written and directed by Brian De Palma

by Walter Chaw The first script written solely by Brian De Palma since his 1992 film Raising Cain, Femme Fatale, like that film, rips off the famous murderer-reveal of Dario Argento’s Tenebre. Come to think of it, the picture is essentially a rehash in one way or another of every film De Palma’s ever written (the voyeurism and body switch of Body Double, the phallic film equipment of Blow Out, the steamy stall-sex of Dressed to Kill, the evil twin thing and split-screen of Sisters, the voyeurism again of Hi, Mom!, and so on)–and because De Palma’s best films and screenplays were iterations of Hitchcock (and sometimes Argento, the Italian Hitchcock), Femme Fatale is as stale and detached as the third-generation copy that it is.

Head of State (2003)

March 28, 20032000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Satire, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Chris Rock, Bernie Mac, Tamala Jones, Lynn Whitfield
screenplay by Chris Rock & Ali LeRoi
directed by Chris Rock

by Walter Chaw Chris Rock’s directorial debut Head of State is a little like Weird Al Yankovic’s UHF or Dana Carvey’s Opportunity Knocks: a vehicle meant to showcase a sketch comedian’s strengths but functioning more as an exposé on said comedian’s weaknesses. It vacillates between a potentially interesting central plot and a couple of misogynistic and boring subplots, managing by the end to come off as shrill, cynical, and disjointed as well as overly cutesy and infatuated with its own cult of bling. Its one saving grace is that it seems to occasionally know what satire is, conceiving of a “white folks can’t dance” sequence that actually scores a couple of points in letting the poor Man dance well instead of mockingly (see Bringing Down the House), and in the identification of “God Bless America” as the hypocritical exclusionary bullshit that it is.

Q&A (1990) + I’ll Do Anything (1994) – DVDs

February 1, 20031990s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Directors: Sidney Lumet, Drama, DVD, Satire, Thriller

Q&A
***/**** Image A- Sound B
starring Nick Nolte, Timothy Hutton, Armand Assante, Luis Guzman
written and directed by Sidney Lumet, based on the novel by Edwin Torres

I’LL DO ANYTHING
***/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Nick Nolte, Albert Brooks, Julie Kavner, Joely Richardson
written and directed by James L. Brooks

by Bill Chambers When news of Nick Nolte’s arrest for driving under the influence of the date-rape drug hit the Toronto International Film Festival last year, just days after he’d made a strong showing there with Neil Jordan’s The Good Thief, I immediately flashed back to the time I met Nolte–“met,” alas, a figure of speech in this case: We crossed paths in the lobby of the Park Hyatt Hotel. His beanstalk frame sheathed in an emasculating banana-yellow housecoat, Nolte wore a pair of bookish specs that offset his craggy mug, and his snow-coloured hair stood unnaturally on end, as though he’d just seen a ghost. On his way to record interviews for Breakfast of Champions (and looking a lot more like that film’s Kilgore Trout than like the erstwhile Tom Wingo), Nolte growled this to a gawping me in passing:

S1m0ne (2002) – DVD

January 24, 20032000s, Al Pacino, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Satire, Sci-Fi

***½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras C+
starring Al Pacino, Catherine Keener, Jason Schwartzman, Winona Ryder
written and directed by Andrew Niccol

“Pygmalion saw so much to blame in women that he came at last to abhor the sex, and resolved to live unmarried. He was a sculptor, and had made with wonderful skill a statue of ivory, so beautiful that no living woman came anywhere near it… His art was so perfect that it concealed itself and its product looked like the workmanship of nature.” – Bulfinch’s Mythology

Andrew Niccol’s brilliant S1m0ne is an updating of the Pygmalion myth substituting a sculptor of clay for a sculptor of film and his disdain for women for disdain towards the peccadilloes of actors. The ending, however, stays the same.

Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy (1996) – DVD

August 10, 20021990s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Comedy, DVD, Satire

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring David Foley, Bruce McCulloch, Kevin McDonald, Mark McKinney, Scott Thompson
screenplay by Norm Hiscock & David Foley & Bruce McCulloch & Kevin McDonald & Mark McKinney & Scott Thompson
directed by Kelly Makin

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The mad Scotsman John Grierson, documentary king and architect of Canada's National Film Board, often made the naïve assertion that those who wanted to make Canadian fiction films should go to Hollywood and make them there. He would have been pleased to learn that in 1996, the Kids in the Hall did just that: left without any pop-film infrastructure on their home turf, they made a bid for Yankee stardom with Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy, shooting a Hollywood film that's Canadian to the core–for good and for ill.

Kung Pow: Enter the Fist (2002) [The Chosen Edition] + Contract Killer (1998) – DVDs

July 23, 20021990s, 2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Hong Kong, Martial Arts, Satire, Thriller

KUNG POW: ENTER THE FIST
**½ Image B+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Steve Oedekerk
written and directed by Steve Oedekerk

CONTRACT KILLER
*/**** Image B Sound B
starring Jet Li, Eric Tsang, Simon Yam, Gigi Leung
screenplay by Chan Heng Ka, Vincent Kok, Cheng Kam Fa
directed by Tung Wai

by Bill Chambers In addition to putting the fear of God in us about CGI, Kung Pow: Enter the Fist (henceforth Kung Pow) makes us wish the technology it employed to seamlessly superimpose writer-director-star Steve Oedekerk into the 1977 kung fu movie Tiger and Crane Fists had been around circa Bruce Lee’s demise. Back then, the producers of Game of Death struggled to complete a half-finished star vehicle minus one star using cardboard cut-outs and a variety of unconvincing doubles. (Lee’s character, the hero, spends most of the picture with his back to the camera.) Oedekerk, playing the archetypal grown-up orphan seeking vengeance against “Master Pain” for his parents’ murder, spends most of Kung Pow looking into the lens with his tongue sticking out, the tongue itself adorned with a face that has its own tongue. Technological advances have always been either too dawdling or too hasty in serving the cinema, alas.