If you have a sense of humor like mine, and you should, then two movies you will just have to rent are Balls of Fury and Hot Rod.
Balls of Fury I rented a week ago via netflix and thought it was possibly the dumbest funny movie I'd seen in a while. A spoof of Enter the Dragon (a bruce lee movie for those who don't know, and thats sad if you don't), it pits our hero a washed up once olympic finalist in ping pong against a dastardly devious villian played by Christopher Walken. Now Walken makes the movie funny, frankly anyone else playing the villain would have been awful. That and the fat guy playing the hero is a pretty good new comer. A guy like Chris Farley would have been funnier but he sort of already made this movie when he made Beverly Hills Ninja... that and he's dead.
This movie is just funny if you just sit back and laugh at it. Its not high brow thats for sure, am I ever? And it has plenty of blind jokes, which can be distasteful at times. Is an old blind chinease man falling down an elevator shaft funny? I'll let you decide.
Now the funnier of the two was Hot Rod. I thought this movie was going to be lame, but it turned out to be one of the funniest movies I'd seen since Napoleon Dynmite. In fact it pretty much is a mix of Napoleon Dynamite and the Jerk. Rod is a perfect blend of the Jerk's obnoxiousness patheticness and Napoleon's in ability to realize the consequences of his social standing. The whole premise of this movie is pretty dang funny, Rod, a professional stunt man who does stunts on his pedal moped (right up josiah's alley) wants to raise 50,000 dollars (the premise of every Lorne Michaels produced movie) so he can pay for a heart transplant for his step-father. Then after the transplant is done he can go to work beating up his step dad. The whole point of everything he does is to get his step father healthy enough so that he can beat him up and prove to him that he's a man. Pretty funny stuff.
I don't know what it is about this movie, but I seriously was laughing for 15 minutes after the movie was over.
Posted by holtonian at February 3, 2008 03:15 PM