indefinite articles

Quick, what do you get when you cross the protagonist from any high-grossing movie from the past year, a pop culture celebrity, and a cliched comedic trope? If you’re one of the millions who have seen one of the many spoof movies penned by Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer over the past several years, you probably already know the answer to this one. The response of the millions of viewers who have seen Date Movie, Epic Movie or Scary Movie 3 has been nearly unanimous: “a steaming pile of crap.”

Friedberg and Seltzer have been walking a comedic tightrope since 2006’s Date Movie. While masters of the spoof genre like Mel Brooks or the Zucker Abrahams Zucker triad may take years between films to gather jokes and hone timing, the Movie duo had been cranking up the pace to produce a spoof yearly, ratcheting up the machine in 2008 to write and film both Meet the Spartans and the upcoming Disaster Movie.

Here, Friedberg and Seltzer make a bold move
and point out that Amy Winehouse likes to drink.

Not only have these rapid productions resulted in a kind of Whose Spoof Is It Anyway?” style of pop-culture-based assembly-line humor (”OK, now do Tila Tequila and Stephen Hawking on Dancing With the Stars!”), but production values have slipped as Friedberg and Seltzer have jumped into the speed round. Disaster Movie looks like it was filmed on a streetcorner in Kansas City on a June weekend [Shreveport. Seriously. -Ed], and the costumes have a distinctly Party City vibe about them. I’m surprised they didn’t film on Halloween so they could get free extras.

The Hancock parody America has been
eagerly awaiting for a whole month and a half.

But all isn’t lost. Even in a short attention span America, the pop-culture trough refreshes itself only so often, and if the Movie mavens keep up the pace, they’ll quickly run out of conventional spoof topics and will need to follow the long tail to get new ideas. While Action Movie, Kid Movie and Gangster Movie are foregone conclusions for 2009, I’m looking forward to 2010’s Mumblecore Movie, Meet the Coppolas, and Not Another Goddamn Surfing Documentary. By the end of 2011, I predict that they’ll have completely run out of subjects to lampoon, and will be forced into eating their own tail with Spoof Movie. And then they’ll be done.

The Simpsons Movie was technically a disaster movie.
Nonetheless, its poster didn’t exactly make history
as a towering triumph of graphic design.