{"id":19142,"date":"2012-03-06T21:33:51","date_gmt":"2012-03-07T02:33:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/?p=19142"},"modified":"2012-03-06T21:33:51","modified_gmt":"2012-03-07T02:33:51","slug":"review-tim-and-erics-billion-dollar-movie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/2012\/03\/06\/review-tim-and-erics-billion-dollar-movie\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: TIM AND ERIC’S BILLION DOLLAR MOVIE"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tim And Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie<\/strong> premiered at Sundance this past January and had a short run on video on-demand before it’s limited release in theaters this past weekend.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Before sitting to watch Tim And Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie<\/strong> I was aware of, but had never watched Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim’s Adult Swim sketch series Awesome Show, Good Job!<\/em> but hadn’t had a chance to see it yet. But after watching the comedy duo’s debut film, I find that I won’t be wasting my mind time in tracking down the series, as Billion Dollar Movie is the most aggressively unfunny, alleged comedy I have seen since I stopped subjecting myself to those Movie<\/strong> movies from Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer.<\/p>\n

Irritatingly, the film does have a premise that suggests plenty of comedic potential. Two nitwits, the titular Tim and Eric, have just spent a billion dollars to make a movie and all they have to show for it is a three-minute short starring a Johnny Depp look-a-like. Their backers, lead by a scenery chewing Robert Loggia, exercise a clause in their contract that will require the pair to repay the billion dollars out of their own pocket. The two on the run from Loggia’s gun-totting thugs and find themselves as managers of a rundown shopping mall as a way to earn the money they need to repay. Now I am sure that there are plenty of hysterical set pieces one could devise from such a scenario with crazy business owners and shoppers that the two could encounter. But that never materializes.<\/p>\n

Now I know that humor is subjective, but during the film’s one hour and thirty-three minute runtime I did not laugh once. Not a chuckle. Not a chortle or even a guffaw. This film is the antithesis of comedy, a seemingly endless string of incidents that land with all the comedic grace of the Hindenberg<\/em>‘s arrival in Lakehurst, New Jersey. Can anyone really find funny a scene where a man is defecated on by a number of ten-year-old boys as a way of detoxing from an overdose of spanish fly intercut with an awkward sex scene between his hoped-for girlfriend and his best friend? This isn’t a comedy, it’s borderline illegal fetish porn. While this might represent the most extreme the movie gets, it is indicative of the overall desperation for laughs that permeates the whole film.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Perplexingly, there are a number of well-known actors who appear in this movie like Jeff Goldblum, Will Ferrell, Will Forte, Zach Galifianakis, John C. Reilly, Ray Wise and William Atherton and none of them give a performance that doesn’t leave you wondering why they are in the movie to begin with. Is it possible that Heidecker and Wareheim have compromising pictures of all these actors?<\/p>\n

I very rarely say after a bad movie “Well there’s an hour and a half of my life that I’ll never get back,” as I feel you can never really appreciated good films without having a yardstick of bad films to measure them against. But Billion Dollar Movie<\/strong> just goes off the rails so disasterously that I can’t even recommend it as an object lesson in what not to do when making a movie. At most, I can only hope that you only took a few minutes reading this review and have decided to save yourself an hour and a half of your life with which you can do something more constructive than watch this film.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You could not pay me a billion dollars to watch this again.<\/div>\n

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