Date Movie

saw Date Movie, a throwaway spoof along the lines of Scary Movie. I don’t mind such films. I actually found Scary Movie quite amusing. But this was just dull. I got pretty much all of the references and cameos, despite not having seen most of the films they refer to, so it wasn’t that I didn’t GET it…it was just that it simply wasn’t funny. It has the worst rating on rottentomatoes.com (a collection of film reviews) I’ve ever seen. Their biggest complaint is also mine: there are numerous references to other films, but they’re not actually parodies, they’re just references. There isn’t any joke beyond ‘This bit looks a bit like that other film, huh?’ There are some strong performances – the two leads are obviously good actors, and the extreme stereotypes of the parent figures are well-done, but the problem is with the writing. The only funny subversion of a real rom-com is the reworking of the mother’s-remains scene from Meet the Parents, with a different SORT of remains, but otherwise the only laughs come from totally random interjections from Lord of the Rings characters or Michael Jackson. All three of these laughs came within five minutes of one another. The rest of the film was a wasteland of the banal, the obvious and the downright nonsensical.