Year One

Even a shitty movie like Year One can be instructive when it comes to tracing the history of comedy. This film hearkens to a kind of spoof that is probably best associated with Mel Brooks--a story set in remote history but with characters who speak in contemporary idioms. Brooks made several movies like this, but the germ of this probably goes back to Sid Caesar's TV show (for which Brooks wrote).

The film also has the old standard of the mismatched comedy pair. Jack Black is the bombastic, fat one; Michael Cera is the deadpan, skinny one. This trope goes back to the Greeks, but Black's brash coward has seen several incarnations, most significantly Bob Hope, and then in turn by Woody Allen in films like Love and Death.

Of course, all of these precursors make Year One look like a steaming pile of turds. Directed and co-written by Harold Ramis, it is an embarrassment, and I have to wonder what Ramis was thinking. Well, I'm sure he was thinking about making a spoof of Biblical pictures, but he ended up making one that is absent any humor. In looking over Ramis' career, I see that he's had as many flops (Club Paradise, Stuart Saves His Family, Multiplicity) as he had bona fide comedy classics (Animal House, Groundhog Day, Ghostbusters), so he can be termed inconsistent. But Year One may be his most repellent picture.

Black and Cera are the misfits of a village of hunter-gatherers. Black eats a piece of forbidden fruit, which gets him banished. Cera tags along, and the two have a symbiotic and antagonistic relationship (reminiscent of Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Hope and Crosby et. al.). As they traverse the countryside they discover societies that are more advanced, and also characters from the Bible such as Cain and Abel and Abraham and Isaac (the only smile I got was with Hank Azaria's portrayal of Abraham, obsessed with chopping off foreskins and describing Hebrews as a "righteous people, but not too good at sports").

Eventually they are enslaved by Romans, and endeavor to rescue themselves and the women they pine after. There is some nice eye candy with Olivia Wilde (hubba hubba) as a princess, but this does not mitigate the overall slovenliness of the script, which relies mostly on fart/poop and gay jokes. The film would seem to have been written by thirteen-year-old boys.

I liked Michael Cera, who got the jist of what he was supposed to do, even if his lines weren't funny, but I've never really warned to Black's shtick. Watching him unemcumbered by any restrictions is not pleasant.