Completely Hollywood (abridged)
Completely Hollywood (abridged)
By Reed Martin, Austin Tichenor and Dominic Conti
Directed by J Michael Roddy
With Mark Baratelli, Matt Horohoe and Joshua Siniscalco
Winter Park Playhouse, Winter Park Fl</strong>
Given a choice, I’d rather have a great cast and weak material than a weak cast and great material. That’s what happened in this pop culture flyover – three seriously funny guys merged bits and pieces of 186 films into a fire hose of jokes. If one failed they were on to the next before you noticed. The first act focused in the Twelve Rules of Film making. These include “All successful films are a combination of two other successful films” to “there are only two plots – The Jesus Story and Coming of Age.” Another rule “Everyone has a screen play” set up the second act, but first we worked through such mergers as “Darcy’s Angles” and “Snow White and The Seven Samurai.” Given that “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” is in preproduction, there was nothing here that couldn’t happen in real life, or what Hollywood pretends is real life. So in the second act, THREE movies were combined into one, but it’s all a blur now – I think Hobbits attacked a spaceship with meatballs, but don’t hold me to that.
This is gag oriented humor, and if not done quickly it were best not done at all. Fortunately, these three comics were at the top of their form, and it’s the sight gags that stick with you – Baratelli as the MGM lion, the obligatory Austin Power scene, and Horohoe as the maniacal director with his mini megaphone. It helps if you watch a lot of popular movies; you’ll need the background to get the jokes. The running slowly skit is funny because of “Chariots of Fire” but the fast running gag relates to either “Forrest Gump, “Marathon Man,” “Running Man” or a cop drama I missed. If there’s a gag gap here, they skipped “Plastics” and “A fella’ could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff.” And we know you can’t have everything – otherwise, what would they put in the sequel?
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