Shrek the Third
Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie
Casino Royale
Little Miss Sunshine
Subway Sandwiches
Happy Feet
Taco Bell
Anna Nicole Smith
Nike
Brittany Spears
K-Fed
“American Idol”
Elton John
“Ugly Betty”
“Heroes”
Shaq
Dr. Phil
Tara Reid
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan
Oprah
Ain’t It Cool News
Toy Story
“America’s Next Top Model”
Gatorade ads
Paris Hilton (Nicole Richie)
Stomp the Yard
You Got Served
“Dancing With the Stars”
Budweiser ads
Wiis
“Deal or No Deal”
Yo Mama Contests
Star Wars
Dentyne Ice
The Coffee Bean
Spider-Man 3
Ghost Rider
Rocky Balboa
Botox
“Grand Theft Auto”
Transformers
The “Leave Britney Alone” Guy
Lindsey Lohan
Hooters
Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story
George W. Bush
“The Apprentice”
Ellen De Generes
Tom Cruise
Dane Cook
MySpace
“The Sopranos”
Las Vegas ads
Rambo
Your mission, should you be stoned enough to accept it: Given the aforementioned pop cultural touchstones (and an annotated encyclopedia to explain what over half that stuff is), fashion an insightful and coherent ZAZ-style parody film.
Oh, one further caveat: Your central parody is to be 300, a movie with 0% to do with the rest of that list, and wholly unable to sustain spoof tangents.
You can’t do it, can you?
Okay, instead let’s just limit things to 300 alone. When aiming to satirize it, what’s the first thing that jumps to mind? Well, perhaps how it was filmed – Actors blue-screened into a stylized comic book version of Ancient Greece that –
WRONG!
If you’re Aaron Seltzer and/or Jason Friedberg, first of all, I pity you tremendously, and secondly, you don’t care about 300 to begin with. You simply need something you can legally parody, without that niggling detail about creating “original” characters and all that. What better than a millennia old tale of warfare, a story of 300 (or 13) soldiers against 10,000 (or whatever) Persians, dating back to Herodotus? Herodo-who?! Careful, now, don’t confuse S&F – they likely aren’t even aware of the Frank Miller comic book they’re now piggybacking off of. Ignorant screwheads!
Meet the Spartans – which really ought to be called Epic Movie, just as Epic Movie ought to have been called Fantasy Movie (eh, that or something original)…Anyway, Meet the Spartans. Just where does that uninformative title come from?! Meet the Feebles. Meet the Browns. Meet the Robinsons. Meet the Deedles. “Meet the Press.” Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Meet the Parents. Meet the Fockers. Likely those last two, as S&F’s Date Movie burgled from them… It’s a common titling trope, like American _____ or _____ Movie, which allows for the greatest possible surfeit of creativity.
What we have here isn’t even a film narrative in the sense of S&F’s former debacles. This is the spoof genre well on its way to thorough abstraction. Even the vaguest plot recap of 300 (dudes fight other dudes) is overly generous if trying to summarize Meet the Spartans.
In regards to “satirizing” 300, S&F have pretty much but one observation to make…GAYS! Beyond even archaic Brokeback Mountain gags, there is absolutely nothing to this insight, as most people rightly giggled their way through 300 sustaining themselves on private, cleverer variations on this same joke anyway. Meet the Spartans’ sole attitude in this regard is basically “teh gayz iz teh lolz.” As Date Movie proved more shallow and image-obsessed than even the targeted romantic comedies, so does Meet the Spartans deliver the most grotesquely simplistic, terrified joke on homosexuality. In this, the Era of Adam Sandler, gay panic jokes are most common (among secretly schlong-hungry frat types [cough!] Dane Cook [cough!]), but Meet the Spartans…It ain’t cuttin’ it…
I mean, skipping hand-in-hand? Disco tunes? Overt references to buggery? It sounds funnier than it is (that is, still not funny at all), but that’s it?! (That the skipping is evidently the S&F variation on Holy Grail’s horseless horse riding does it no favors.) It’s an entirely useless comment upon Zack Snyder’s homoerotic epic, especially when man-on-man was a genuine thing in ancient Greece. I don’t mean to be gigglesome, but it’s a simple fact that other Greeks (the Athenians, mostly, who were as different from the Spartans as the Soviets from the Nazis) possessed some rather alien sexual viewpoints. Honestly, S&F, read some Plato some time! I mean, 300 acknowledged this in passing. What are you, unable to even make the same quality jokes as the non-comic movies from whom you pilfer?!...Wait…Wolverine giving the middle finger in that X-Men parody?...Same as he did in X-Men?...Up yours, Seltzer and Friedberg!
Gay panic bonmots that wouldn’t pass muster in the Victorian Age are not a sufficient means to populate a…whatever this sort of thing technically counts as (I doubt it’s actually a movie). (Un)luckily there’s that checklist of celebrities, advertisements and reality programs to fall back upon. The rancid, post-rape skeleton of 300 becomes naught but a delivery system for extended sketch routines on each and every one of those things.
Each S&F motion picture so far has been defined by a single, overriding flaw, unique to that film – on top of the duo’s innumerable innate flaws which permeate their whole douchey existence. We’ve had confusion about gender, age, and now anachronism. It’s a decent sign you shouldn’t be making a period pastiche when every (and I paid attention, so I do mean every) ostensible joke is founded upon anachronism. Damn it all, but Meet the Spartans wouldn’t have a single understandable joke in even the year 1999! It badmouths the ancient Spartans for possessing the temerity, the audacity not to love, say, Tila Tequila with the same fervor as the culturally disabled among us today. This is worship of the modern historical superiority of the worst sort, that the new is the best by dint of that fact alone.
These things are getting measurably worse…and we’re talking about a directing career that started (with Date Movie) comprised wholly of gags that Scary Movie would’ve rejected (and that movie “enjoys” the same status in regards to Airplane!).
Let us take the defining moment of Meet the Spartans: the Pit of Death, one of the three permutations their apartment-sized single studio set is capable of. In 300, King Leonidas kicks a Persian emissary down a chasm as a precursor to war. In Meet the Spartans, Leonidas (Sean Maguire, who hasn’t bothered doing another film since) does likewise, and the movie is so far beyond contempt that they cannot even be arsed to squeeze in a legible gag. It’s as though repetition of the movie you’ve opted to repeat, only cheaper, counts as a joke.
Ah hah, but then…IT happens! For reasons no logical entity can parse out, Brittany Spears is seated by the Pit, shaving herself (not there) and breathing disgustingly upon an evidently false baby. For possibly a mere minute, though it feels like 20, we’re subject to Brittany’s buffoonish monologues. Then Leonidas kicks her in the Pit. Rim shot!
Then…okay, I’m not even sure who this next guy is supposed to be, but he sings poorly and looks like a cock (a rooster, that is). Leonidas kicks him in the pit (then in the Pit).
(The Pit is evidently S&F’s metaphorical way of saying “recent tabloid celebrity, we consider you pwned.” It’s as though they simply saw 300 – or its trailers – and decided this moment could sustain their bitchy 2007 recap.)
Leonidas walks away, when…the “American Idol” judges sit there right before the Pit, deposited by some freak cosmic rending of the space-time continuum. Cue another minute and change of impersonations – What? You thought the actual celebrities show up in this? Hell, Chris Crocker turned S&F down! Rather, just about every single damn female guest role is played by Nicole Parker, of “MADtv.” That’s what Meet the Spartans is, a rejected outtake reel from “MADtv,” the sketch komedy show comprised of rejected “SNL” performers. This is telling.
It’s taken a genuine five minutes of nothingness so far, this Pit of Death. To go by the post-film “deleted scenes” (which still make up the flick’s scant 86 minute running time, populating an end credits that is seriously 17 minutes long – the movie is but 69 – uh huh huh – otherwise), S&F intended another eight minutes of Pit o’ Death gnarliness. Look to those celebrity names at the post’s top. There’s a 90% chance that celebrity (impersonator, really) appears before the Pit.
It’s the pits.
Oh boy, the end credits are a debacle, slowed down to the minimum legal speed because that’s the only way Meet the Spartans could get up to feature length. It’s a remarkable scam upon the mouth-breathing moviegoers who’d patronize such filth. You’d think if you worked in an S&F movie, you’d want your name legible for less time!
The whole movie, from studio logos to post-flick MPAA title card, is one long stalling tactic. When it’s not lame-o-zoid celeb roasts, we’re pausing for wholehearted recreations of reality shows. And I don’t just mean that “Deal or No Deal” gets spoofed for two minutes. Nope! It’s just redone for the same amount of time, without comment. As though the sheer lunacy of wedging it into a B.C. context is enough – if it were, repetition of the form for the fourth reality show surely undercuts whatever value remains.
The nadir of this particular approach comes in a dance competition, which substitutes for the Spartans’ first battle – a clear sign that maybe, just maybe these filmmakers oughtn’t to have selected a warfare movie to lampoon. For three minutes (which feels longer than it sounds) they just dance, dance, dance. No jokes, not that they’re wanted, but rather the death of the spoof format right here. I thank Zeus we have smaller movies like Black Dynamite keeping the genre afloat.
Then there are the ads. It’s a rule that once per parody film you’re liable to find a joke on product placement, usually done as an overly-obvious brand name shout out. If that’s S&F’s intent (for Red Bull, Taco Bell, Budweiser, Gatorade, Dentyne Ice, etc. ad infinitum), repetition doesn’t help. Nor does the sincerity or length with which the products are shilled. It’s almost as though, yeah, this is genuine product placement, and our writer/directors are so shameless that they take no pains to hide that fact. I’m reminded of a recent “30 Rock,” where Jack engineered a movie so tied up in synergy that it was successful before theatrical release, simply through sponsorship and so forth.
I’m also reminded of “Family Guy,” and the manatees who write that show by moving balls around in a tank. They could do better at creating wholly arbitrary pop culture mash-ups than Seltzer and Friedberg are. I mean, how does one take so long uniting Spider-Man with Donald Trump (Spidey in his symbiote outfit, to claim specific Spider-Man 3 relation, despite a total lack of pertinence towards that movie)? And all that for a belabored toupee gag? As though no one’s ever said so much about the Donald before! I – I – I just – AAAAAARHGHRHGH!
…I have nothing more to say.
RELATED POSTS
• No. 1 Date Movie (2006)
• No. 2 Epic Movie (2007)
• No. 4 Disaster Movie (2008)
• No. 5 Vampires Suck (2010)
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