How shit are american films?

I went to see Ted on the weekend (pretty funny, thanks for asking). Before it started there were trailers for three American films that you’ll soon be able to experience in your local multiplex. All looked depressingly bad:

I’m not saying that every movie ever made has to be La Grande Illusion or Apocalypse Now but those three look so utterly awful that I want to cry.

Check out The 3 Stooges. Yes, it looks like the actors texted in their performances. Yes, the pratfalls look about as funny as soil. Yes, you’d rather kill yourself with a pair of rusty nail clippers than pay to see it, but all that is by the by. The really sad thing about this movie is that it was made by the Farrelly Brothers, the geniuses who gave us the sublime There’s Something About Mary. And they used to have balls. Remember the Matt Damon conjoined twin comedy Stuck On You? Well, that sentence should tell you all you need to know. This dismal skid mark makes you want to weep for the demise of such talent.

The Watch is also the product of some people who have seen much better days (There’s Something About Mary, Swingers, Moneyball, director of Submarine). What surprises me is that they ALL agreed to make that bucket of piss. Look, I know Vince, Ben and Jonah are sometimes not very choosy, actually, fuck that; has Ben Stiller made anything not shit since There’s Something About Mary? No. So I suppose this is only to be expected from him. But this seems so obviously dire that their agents, managers, wives, a passing janitor who accidentally caught sight of a single sentence of the script as he cleaned a desk… someone should have pointed out that the whole thing smelled like a tramp’s abscess had been smeared on the page. Surely?

Last and most depressing is the latest spray of diarrhoea from the master: Adam Sandler. People sometimes tell me that his early films are quite funny (I’ve never seen any of them), and I absolutely love Punch Drunk Love and the first half of Funny People, but shit my leg to the moon, this would be a new low for him were it not for the irrefutable fact that no one can ever make a worse film than Jack and Jill. How did humanity get to a stage where there is a genre of film costing millions of dollars called The Adam Sandler Movie and it is all that is wrong with Planet Earth? Witless, hopeless, pisspoor shite for people who have been in very bad car accidents that made their brains fail, it makes you want to ring up Amnesty International and suggest an exchange programme for tortured prisoners. We’d all vote Adam into a jail to have shards of glass rammed up his johnson for a few years, wouldn’t we?

I think I shall lie down in a dark room that isn’t a cinema until they all go away.