Bottom Feeders: Bucky Larson – Born to be a Star

Today I’m going to get a little bit artsy talking about a movie that’s pretty fartsy, so excuse me if I end up sounding like some kind of Timothy Sexton douche hole.  Examining what exactly makes something unfunny is pretty difficult and the only way you can really go about it to use lots of words that belong in a LiveJournal.  I’m reviewing a particularly unfunny movie starring someone I think can do better, so this edition is going to get just a little more condescending and smarmy than usual.

About this much more.

This is partly because I’m going to talk about where art comes from and you are going to love it when I basically tell you it’s suffering.  The fact is that almost all artists are basically trying to tell you how shitty they feel.  Even if they’re trying to make you happy, it’s pretty much always because they feel sad.  And the more shitty they feel and the less able they are to express that through normal means, the better their art will usually be.  The reason great novelists used to die poor and alone is that being poor and lonely your whole life makes you want to write really good books.  Lots of successful, well-adjusted people wrote books too but we don’t remember theirs because they aren’t as good.

It also helps a bunch to be Russian.

But like a vagina, the holes in our hearts can be filled by many things and very few were actually designed to go there.  If you feel sad because you can’t connect with people but have access to ski-do’s and cocaine the need to create isn’t necessarily all that strong.  Being famous and rich and successful usually trump being awkward and withdrawn.  But those watercraft and drugs still aren’t going to pay for themselves and that’s how you end up with the Adam Sandlers and Nick Swardsons of the world.  To me, they’re people creating art because it’s their day job.  They put nothing of themselves into what they do and have no real reason to succeed because they already have.

The face of success.

That’s how you get something like Bucky Larson.  You end up with gags like a condom made out of a straw or non-jokes like Kevin Nealon’s asshole roommate being passed off as humor in a piece of shit being passed off as a movie.  And it’s not going to change any time soon.  Movies cost a lot of money to make and Happy Madison movies usually make that money back because they’re safe – they’re juvenile and dirty enough to draw in teenagers whose sense of humor hasn’t developed yet but just clean enough for families.  Bucky Larson strayed from that format with its R rating and it suffered for it.  It’s now the lowest grossing Happy Madison movie of all time.

It made 2.5 million. This is what 2.5 million looks like in Hollywood

It will take five more flops before Hollywood even thinks twice about it because they want to go with the safe bet.  And there’s another problem with art – nobody is great at what they do all the time.  You hear about studios ruining movies all the time but they save them just as often.  Actors, directors and writers can all get to a certain point where they get to do whatever they want and that point comes when they make a lot of money, not when they get a certain amount of good.  Swardson is a hilarious guy and Sandler can be ok too but neither of them are good writers or producers.  They can’t even set tone so you end up with a shitty plot squeezed around hacky jokes and nobody’s going to mess with them because The Animal made 85 million dollars.

A respectable amount, in Hollywood dollars.

And when you measure success in money there’s nothing to keep you in line once you have tons of it.  Thus, only a very few people can truly edit themselves when no one else will and the way they deal with criticism has a lot to do with that.  So when I see this –

“A lot of reviewers aren’t going into that movie to like it. They don’t want to like it. None of those reviewers was psyched to see Bucky Larson and laugh. They go in with the mentality, ‘Fuck these guys for making another movie.’ They go in there to kind of headhunt. It makes me laugh because it’s just so embarrassing. It makes them look like such morons.”

– I get disheartened because it means Nick Swardson is going to write off his critics.  When they say his movie sucks he’s going to tell himself they’re out to get him and not that it actually did and he needs to better this time.

Much, much better.

As bad as it is, Bucky Larson isn’t even the worst Happy Madison movie this year.  The takeaway from this one is that everyone’s career has an arc and some end earlier than you’d want them to, while others drag on too long.  A younger, dumber me would talk about how much I hate Sandler and Swardson but I’ve grown up a lot in the two months since I reviewed Jack & Jill.  I don’t hate the guys but it’ll take a lot of convincing to get me to watch something of theirs for personal enjoyment.  And that’s fine.  Every single other person in Hollywood is a genius, and they’ve got this covered.

I might even be out of a job, soon.

Am I right or am I right?  Email all opinions, in the form of a yes or no answer, to [email protected] and explain yourself before you cause pain to yourself.  Or, follow me on Twitter @Dan_Tompkins.  You can shout at me there and as a bonus, I will amuse you.