People tend to cut comedies lots of slack as long as they make us laugh. They can be blasphemous, tasteless, lowbrow, highbrow, moronic, offensive, racist, subversive, disgusting, pretentious, pointless, shallow, blatantly left-wing, blatantly right-wing, vulgar, cruel, preachy, you name it -- if they make us laugh our butts off, we'll forgive them any and all of these sins. If they just aren't funny, like this turkey, that's when we start noticing all the bad stuff.
And there is plenty of bad stuff, believe me, starting with Steve Martin, who exhausted his tiny bag of comedic tricks more than twenty years ago and who has been coasting along ever since. I think this movie is where he finally coasts to a dead stop. Please, Hollywood, just leave him there.
And then there's the story. Bringing Down the House is a clash-of-cultures movie evidently written by people who don't have a clue about either of the cultures involved in the clash. The result is a bunch of crudely drawn caricatures of nonexistent social types. Nobody thinks white people or black people are anything like this, and it is insulting to have to sit through a movie made by people who think we do.
And there is plenty of bad stuff, believe me, starting with Steve Martin, who exhausted his tiny bag of comedic tricks more than twenty years ago and who has been coasting along ever since. I think this movie is where he finally coasts to a dead stop. Please, Hollywood, just leave him there.
And then there's the story. Bringing Down the House is a clash-of-cultures movie evidently written by people who don't have a clue about either of the cultures involved in the clash. The result is a bunch of crudely drawn caricatures of nonexistent social types. Nobody thinks white people or black people are anything like this, and it is insulting to have to sit through a movie made by people who think we do.