4 | / 10 |
Users | 3.7 | |
Reviewer | 1.0 | |
Overall | 2.9 |
The Farrelly brothers are among the creators of this compendium-style comedy filmed in the style of 1970s sketch films such as 'Kentucky Fried Movie' and 'Groove Tube'. The film comprises over 20 comedy shorts, loosely held together by an over-arching storyline and featuring a star-studded ensemble cast that includes Hugh Jackman, Kate Winslet, Richard Gere, Chloë Moretz, Gerard Butler, Emma Stone, Kristen Bell and Elizabeth Banks.
Starring: Dennis Quaid, Greg Kinnear, Common, Charlie Saxton (III), Will SassoComedy | 100% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
English SDH, Spanish
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Two-disc set (1 BD, 1 DVD)
Digital copy
DVD copy
Slipcover in original pressing
Region A (C untested)
Movie | 0.5 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 2.5 | |
Overall | 1.0 |
What does the "43" stand for? I don't know. Maybe it's the number of times you'll want to stab yourself in the eyes with that pair of rusty scissors
from Antichrist after watching what might just be the most audience-insulting, talent-wasting movie to have ever been shat out of Hollywood.
How bad is it? So bad that Halle Berry now has a worse movie than Catwoman on her resume. And she's only one out of more than two dozen
A and B-listers who humiliate themselves here in a series of career-low sketch "comedy" vignettes that try desperately to shock, offend, and disgust,
but really only manage to bore.
Two questions naturally emerge from any viewing of Movie 43: How, and why, God, why? The blame should fall on the
producer/director team of Charles B. Wessler and Peter Farrelly, who've been working together since Dumb and Dumber, and who conceived of
this project as "a Kentucky Fried Movie for the modern age." Presumably calling in every favor stored up between them, the two somehow
attracted a cast that includes industry titans Richard Gere, Naomi Watts, Hugh Jackman, Kate Winslet, and Terrence Howard—among many others—
and recruited directors like Brett Ratner (X-Men: The Last Stand), James Gunn (Slither), and Steve Carr (Paul Blart: Mall Cop)
to oversee the individual segments. The end result is a tasteless and loud procession of R-rated middle school humor that's inexplicably targeted at
adults. Movie 53 isn't just bad, it's aggressively bad, and the most offensive thing about it is that it treats you, the viewer, like an
idiot.
Movie 43 was shot over a few years—in order to accommodate the schedules of its stars—but the project maintains a mostly consistent appearance, picture quality-wise, shot almost entirely with Red One digital cameras. (There are one or two shorter shorts that look to have been shot on what was probably less expensive gear.) The film's 1080p/AVC-encoded presentation seems true to source—no blatant DNR or edge enhancement, no obvious compression issues—but Movie 43 isn't exactly a stunner, mostly because of the cheap-looking "comedy movie" lighting, which tends to be flat and often overly bright. The sense of clarity is usually quite strong, though, with visible fine detail almost always visible in the actors' faces, hair, and clothing. (The soft shots that are here seem to be the result of less-than-precise focus-pulling.) Aside from some blown-out highlights here and there, there are no major color problems; adjusting for the variances in color grading between each vignette, contrast is stable, saturation is good, and skin tones balanced. Overall, a great Blu-ray presentation of a visually uninteresting movie.
Likewise, the audio here is solid but strictly functional, with bare-bones sound design that does what it needs to do and not much more. The disc's lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track is mostly sharp and clear—aside from a few moments when the normally clean dialogue seems oddly thick, for the lack of a better word—but there's little in the way of immersion or engagement from the rear channels beyond some light ambience and a few occasional effects. And that's fine. This is a hokey sketch comedy, not some whiz-bang action movie. No real problems here. The disc includes optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles, which appear in easy-to-read white lettering.
Movie 43 is already being hailed as one of the worst Hollywood movies ever—and you'll hear no objection from me—but keep in mind that it's bad bad, not so-bad-it's-good bad. Bad as in increasingly hard to sit through bad. Bad as in I need to watch something else as a cinematic palette cleanser after that bad. Worse, the next time you see Kate Winslet, Naomi Watts, Halle Berry, or Richard Gere in some prestige drama, you're gonna think of them in Movie 43, utterly humiliating themselves. Don't give in to the urge to see just how awful it is; let's all just collectively forget that Movie 43 ever happened.
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