{48, C+/C, **} | DVD
• Suspicion confirmed: There's really little point in watching a Jackass movie alone in your apartment. In fact, I don't really understand how this concept found an audience on MTV—seems to me you need an entire roomful of people shrieking and recoiling en masse to get the full effect. (See also: Borat's nude wrestling scene.)
• The first film won me over immediately with its magnificent opening credits sequence, introducing the boys in slo-mo as they rode a giant shopping cart through a gauntlet of projectiles to the mock-pretentious strains of "Carmina Burana." This one lost me immediately by trotting out a near-identical variation, thereby demonstrating that inventiveness would be in short supply.
• Comedic peak arrives early with "The Valentine," which is downright classical in its construction and worthy of Bugs Bunny in his prime. Gross-out zenith is a tie between the fart mask and the leech attached to Steve-O's eyeball. In general, though, scrolling down the list of vignettes, I see very few I'd be eager to watch again, whereas I still crack up just thinking about the dude in Jackass the Movie who got a smiley-face tattoo while being driven around off-road by Henry Rollins. Putting Rollins behind the wheel doesn't really make the stunt any more harrowing, but it's a little conceptual soupçon that most of the episodes in the sequel lack.
• Sadism:masochism ratio feels considerably higher this time around, to the film's detriment. At times the distinction between Knoxville and Ashton Kutcher seems almost academic, merely a matter of scatology.
• Speaking of which, I realize that any halfway intelligent assessment of this movie has to address the boys' anal fixation, which is clearly well out of control. Some speak appreciatively of unabashed homoeroticism, but it seems clear to me that these guys simply regard the ass—not without reason—as humanity's ultimate common denominator. You can see the same basic impulse here*, and indeed the mooning phenomenon—sometimes expanded to shoving your bare butt into a sleeping person's face—knows neither gender nor sexual preference. It's a weird but always effective form of domination, a legacy from our apelike ancestors.
• At least the fishhooks in The Isle were make-believe. OWWWWWWWW.
* (please don't ask how I stumbled onto this)
1 comment:
This particular mooning was not your typical mooning. There is the backstory. What it was was Avril had done the live MuchMusic performance where this battery pack strapped to her belt was weighing down her pants and you could see her ass crack, and everybody had been talking about it. However I believe Avril has mooned reporters in the passing car which is more what you are talking about. thanks bud.
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