Year One
Directed by Harold Ramis
Runtime: 100 min.
Judd Apatow’s raunchiness may go too far but it never goes deep. That’s the problem with Year One, which starts out spoofing prehistory but quickly veers into ridiculing religion. Its prehistoric and Biblical jokes don’t necessarily go together, but the mash-up assumes a derisive attitude toward religious historical belief no different than Apatow’s childish, self-serving, unprincipled approach to sex.
Year One’s cavemen-era protagonists, Zed and Oh (played by the unbearable Jack Black and the nauseatingly ephebic Michael Cera), get kicked out of their tribe for being doofuses, then stumble into predicaments from the Book of Genesis. This wobbly comedic concept—lurching from Evolution to Intelligent Design in one pratfall—could be dismissed as simply misguided. But there’s a suspicious—almost MSNBC, snarky-Liberal undertone. Without overtly addressing the debate over evolution, producer Apatow and director-writer Harold Ramis take for granted that there is a general agnostic point of view among movies audiences. This isn’t sophistication, it’s arrogance and its brazenness is only matched by the filmmakers’ intellectual laziness.
There’s no revelation of the roots of human folly like Mel Brooks’ History of the World, Part I or challenge to cultural tenets like Buñuel’s seriously sacrilegious L'Age D'or. Behind the facade of harmless crazy-comedy is tired gags: Hitting a woman with a stick as a mating ritual, spearing a fur-clad man instead of a woolly mammoth. These jokes don’t spoof the birth of slapstick as in the 1981 film Caveman; they’re just crude. And the sarcastically retold Bible stories are similarly Apatowian; they’re just smart-ass
Year One is insipid, yet something truly fascinating happens when Ramis and Apatow try replaying the story of Cain and Abel as knock-about farce. It’s the one time I was grateful that a Hollywood studio forced critics to attend a nighttime screening with civilians because I was able to witness average viewers blanch at the misguided humor. No one laughed when Cain (David Cross) slew Abel (Paul Rudd). This archetypal moment of human sin--murder--simply wasn’t funny. Not even when Ramis forced it with repeated bludgeonings.
Something in the history of human culture demands that this quintessential, brother-against-brother story (whether considered myth or faith) be respected for its instructive depiction of inhumanity. To scoff at this is where secular liberal sarcasm hit’s the wall. Ramis’ direction hadn’t become any clumsier than before. At this humorless point, Year One wasn’t merely transgressive, it was stupid.
Apatow’s habit of offending cultural tenets is too easy. Zed and Oh are forefathers/descendants of the slob-nerds in Knocked Up and Superbad, who have become avatars of contemporary bad manners—cultural devolution. Through this pandering, Year One defies the old Production Code that prohibited the ridicule of religion yet this roguishness also embarrasses the anti-Christian, freedom-from-religion zealots it’s meant to appeals to. Year One’s weak amusement doesn’t justify the artistic freedom that was supposed to come when the Production Code was replaced by the more permissive ratings system—a change that came about when the culture was honestly grappling with fundamental moral and philosophical issues. Year One is an artifact of the Daily Show-MSNBC culture that assumes irreverence itself is an ideology.
Year One’s single good sequence re-tells the Abraham-Isaac sacrifice—mostly because Hank Azaria wittily channels George C. Scott’s magnificent Abraham performance in John Huston’s The Bible. (Azaria parodies Scott’s zealotry, gruffly barking “God!” at the end of every sentence.) Year One denies the power of our cultural legacy to instruct and unify—a fact that Huston, Brooks, even Bob Dylan (who, since retrofitting the Abraham-Isaac tale in Highway 61 Revisited, built a career on respecting Western religious heritage) all understood. But Year One was made by philistines. It uses dirt-bag humor as a missile in the culture wars.
Directed by Harold Ramis
Runtime: 100 min.
Judd Apatow’s raunchiness may go too far but it never goes deep. That’s the problem with Year One, which starts out spoofing prehistory but quickly veers into ridiculing religion. Its prehistoric and Biblical jokes don’t necessarily go together, but the mash-up assumes a derisive attitude toward religious historical belief no different than Apatow’s childish, self-serving, unprincipled approach to sex.
Year One’s cavemen-era protagonists, Zed and Oh (played by the unbearable Jack Black and the nauseatingly ephebic Michael Cera), get kicked out of their tribe for being doofuses, then stumble into predicaments from the Book of Genesis. This wobbly comedic concept—lurching from Evolution to Intelligent Design in one pratfall—could be dismissed as simply misguided. But there’s a suspicious—almost MSNBC, snarky-Liberal undertone. Without overtly addressing the debate over evolution, producer Apatow and director-writer Harold Ramis take for granted that there is a general agnostic point of view among movies audiences. This isn’t sophistication, it’s arrogance and its brazenness is only matched by the filmmakers’ intellectual laziness.
There’s no revelation of the roots of human folly like Mel Brooks’ History of the World, Part I or challenge to cultural tenets like Buñuel’s seriously sacrilegious L'Age D'or. Behind the facade of harmless crazy-comedy is tired gags: Hitting a woman with a stick as a mating ritual, spearing a fur-clad man instead of a woolly mammoth. These jokes don’t spoof the birth of slapstick as in the 1981 film Caveman; they’re just crude. And the sarcastically retold Bible stories are similarly Apatowian; they’re just smart-ass
Year One is insipid, yet something truly fascinating happens when Ramis and Apatow try replaying the story of Cain and Abel as knock-about farce. It’s the one time I was grateful that a Hollywood studio forced critics to attend a nighttime screening with civilians because I was able to witness average viewers blanch at the misguided humor. No one laughed when Cain (David Cross) slew Abel (Paul Rudd). This archetypal moment of human sin--murder--simply wasn’t funny. Not even when Ramis forced it with repeated bludgeonings.
Something in the history of human culture demands that this quintessential, brother-against-brother story (whether considered myth or faith) be respected for its instructive depiction of inhumanity. To scoff at this is where secular liberal sarcasm hit’s the wall. Ramis’ direction hadn’t become any clumsier than before. At this humorless point, Year One wasn’t merely transgressive, it was stupid.
Apatow’s habit of offending cultural tenets is too easy. Zed and Oh are forefathers/descendants of the slob-nerds in Knocked Up and Superbad, who have become avatars of contemporary bad manners—cultural devolution. Through this pandering, Year One defies the old Production Code that prohibited the ridicule of religion yet this roguishness also embarrasses the anti-Christian, freedom-from-religion zealots it’s meant to appeals to. Year One’s weak amusement doesn’t justify the artistic freedom that was supposed to come when the Production Code was replaced by the more permissive ratings system—a change that came about when the culture was honestly grappling with fundamental moral and philosophical issues. Year One is an artifact of the Daily Show-MSNBC culture that assumes irreverence itself is an ideology.
Year One’s single good sequence re-tells the Abraham-Isaac sacrifice—mostly because Hank Azaria wittily channels George C. Scott’s magnificent Abraham performance in John Huston’s The Bible. (Azaria parodies Scott’s zealotry, gruffly barking “God!” at the end of every sentence.) Year One denies the power of our cultural legacy to instruct and unify—a fact that Huston, Brooks, even Bob Dylan (who, since retrofitting the Abraham-Isaac tale in Highway 61 Revisited, built a career on respecting Western religious heritage) all understood. But Year One was made by philistines. It uses dirt-bag humor as a missile in the culture wars.
anonymous
