This weekend I went out a caught a matinee of KNOCKED UP. Funny little comedy from the makers of last year’s THE FORTY YEAR OLD VIRGIN. That movie, you’ll recall, starred Steve Carel, who was at the helm of another movie that opened this week, EVAN ALMIGHTY. This is also a funny little comedy, if you’re not hung up on that whole definition of words thing. EVAN ALMIGHTY will ultimately pull in more money than KNOCKED UP, but it won’t matter because KNOCKED UP reportedly cost $30 million dollars to make and EVAN ALMIGHTY cost somewhere between $175 to $250 million, depending on which lies you believe.

BRUCE ALMIGHTY with Jim Carrey brought in about $60 million in it’s opening weekend. EVAN bought in about thirty, and based on its 22% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes it’s not going to catch up. So where did they go wrong?

You could say that they should have bit the bullet and shelled out whatever Jim Carrey wanted to bring him back, but that’s a sucker game. Carrey was demanding a percentage of the gross. No matter how much the movie made, Jim Carrey would have eaten into the profits. The studio was guaranteed to lose money under Jim Carrey terms.

The thing that Carrey is best at though is being funny around special effects. As someone pointed out when THE MASK opened, Jim Carrey IS a cartoon. He knows how to work with a green screen and his problem is working around people. Carrey’s best chemistry is with himself.

Which brings us back to EVAN ALMIGHTY. It is the rare comedy that is funny AND hugely expensive. Money kills laughs. Perhaps it’s because there is so much at stake. The studio keeps sending notes back - can’t say this, we’ll lose the red states, can’t do that, the PETA people will be on our backs. A comedy that costs more than any comedy ever has will only be under more pressure. An American comedy poking fun at the old testement - well, why be careful around that?

People are most funny when they are relaxed, and probably at their least funny when everything they say and do has to be filtered through the idea that it might ruin their careers. Maybe Jim Carrey makes the big bucks because ultimately he doesn’t care about his career - he’s only amusing himself. I don’t know.

If people are laughing, they don’t care how crappy the effects are, or if the editing is bad, or… well, if they’re laughing, all the other aesthetic standards are up for grabs. Attention studios - spend less on comedies. Seriously. I need a good laugh.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 26th, 2007 at 1:34 am and is filed under General, Motion Pictures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.