Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Man of the Year

This is topic Man of the Year in forum Film Handlers' Movie Reviews at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

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Posted by Chris Hipp (Member # 1788) on 10-14-2006, 12:51 AM:

Starts out great, but turns into a semi serious drama about half way. I would have liked more scenes like when Dobbs dressed up in the colonial outfit. Overall, not bad but I was expecting a few more laughs.

Posted by Steve Scott (Member # 630) on 10-14-2006, 11:19 PM:

Ugh... A bunch of jokes too dull to be funny and too obviously topical to make you think. A lot of acting in which the players look as unconvinced as the audience. And then a forced drama that's so lumberingly awkward it summoned my bladder to cue me away from the tackiness.

Universal clearly didn't step out to make this. Political humor should be sharp & constantly redefining the spin on current topics, but this film just kind of sat on big government's Summer generalities & threw out reminders of the state of things. All of the media in the movie was straight out of Universal's NBC catalog, a great nod to how much the film is willing to spend on looking authentic, which I don't think ever managed to convince the audience I was sitting in with on Saturday night to follow the dreadfully-forced story. Not too many laughs either. Were there any jokes coming out of Robin Williams that one couldn't have had sent to their cell phone via text message? His charming vulgarity never got used. Louis Black appeared to have the studio's leash tied directly to the back of his throat. And, once again, Walken seemed to have been advised to avoid the slightest funny improv under penalty of a sequel.

A lot of what gets said in the debate scene got muffled out of context when they manically switched over to monitoring it on TV. Too much music in the surrounds, too.