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EVIL DEEDS:
Don't even shoplift it
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| The Worst |
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Posted Sunday, Dec. 30, 2002; 2.02 p.m.
GMT
Nothing Funny About It
Comedy was Hollywood's smartest gift to the movies. The silent-screen clowns and screwball farceurs united the world in laughter. But that's long gone, replaced by a reign of stupidity and laziness. Adam Sandler, whose specialty is the goofy sociopath, remakes the Frank Capra classic Mr. Deeds (Goes to Town) and turns the hometown hero into a violence-prone rube who manages to shoplift the heart of Winona Ryder. That's stupid. Other filmmakers are too lazy to remake someone else's movie, so they redo their own. Men in Black II was virtually all recycled jokes from the first movie. It is made for people who say, "Instead of renting the original movie, I'll pay more to see the same thing, but worse, in a theater."
It's a truism that, of all movie forms, comedy is the most local — it doesn't travel. But Deeds and MIB II should never have been allowed in the airport. They and dozens of other "comedies" were manufactured simply to pay the bills. Unfortunately, bad comedy drives out good, at a time when the whole world could use a few honest laughs
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