There are some good “vignette” movies, Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes (2003) and Night on Earth (1991) come to mind, but unfortunately this isn’t one of them. Not to say that it can’t be entertaining – sometimes you just feel like enjoying something so irreverent and crude without worrying about quality or sense. I’d like to compare it to things like John Waters’ works or John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus (2006) or Miranda July’s Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005), but alas, I can’t even do that, since that would be an insult to those filmmakers. Ultimately it comes closest to the Farrelly brothers’ other gross-out comedies like Dumb and Dumber (1994), Shallow Hall (2001), There’s something about Mary (1998), but even those were more cohesive and had a clear direction. If anything, this film’s greater merit is the fact that they got the ensemble cast to participate and the outrageous things they got them to do (Hugh Jackman with a hairy sack hanging from his neck or Halle Berry with huge prosthetics). In the end, I hope it was all in good fun for everyone involved. My personal favorite was the Middleschool Date part, with Chloe Grace Moretz’s moment and the way all the men around her deal with it by freaking out. It almost reminded me a little of Ginger Snaps (2002) if only for a few seconds. Overall I don’t know if this really warrants the title “the Citizen Kane of awful” as Richard Roeper put it, but it is certainly not good. But that’s OK.
