Bad Grandpa

When it comes to the makeup category, you get some odd movies nominated for Oscars. Over the years, cinematic atrocities like Heartbeeps, Bicentennial Man, and Norbit have attached the phrase "Oscar nominated" to their names. Now we have a film that begins with Jackass Presents to the list, Bad Grandpa.

I've never before seen a Jackass film, just not my thing. But in the interest of fairness, and because it was nominated for an Oscar, I took a look at this film, in which head Jackass Johnny Knoxville is made up to look like an octogenarian and behaves inappropriately while a hidden camera captures the reaction of clueless people.

At first I was not impressed. I was ready to turn it off after ten minutes. The plot, such as it were, has Knoxville, as Irving Zisman, being saddled with his grandson after the boy's mother goes to jail. He has to drive him cross country to his scumbag father. This is after Knoxville's wife has passed away (the corpse is played, stoically, by Catherine Keener). The old man is a horndog, and the first gag has him getting his penis stuck in a vending machine. Then we get the funeral, in which, of course, the coffin falls over.

Candid camera humor, like this and Borat, makes me squirm. It can be very funny, but I feel bad for the people involved, who are being made to look like fools. At the end of the film, during the credits, we get a little bit of the reveal, which was always part of the Candid Camera show, but here the camera cuts away in the middle of the joke. For example, Knoxville and the kid are shoplifting in a store and are angrily confronted by the manager. I don't see this as funny, and I wonder if the manager really appreciated being the butt of a joke.

However. By the end of the film I was a little more accepting. Knoxville is upstaged by the kid, Jackson Nicoll, who is only ten but has the chops of a pro. He is called on to improvise with passers-by and he's a natural. The end of the film has the best sequence, in which Nicoll is in drag and entered in one of those little miss pageants. The sexualization of those girls gets a good send up, as Nicoll performs to "Cherry Pie" like a stripper. The horrified reaction of the audience (the mothers put their hands over their darlings' eyes) just further points out the hypocrisy of the whole enterprise. Yes, this was done in Little Miss Sunshine first, but it's done better here.

So I didn't like this film, but by the end I had raised it from one star to maybe two. I won't see any more Jackass films, unless it's nominated for an Oscar.