Tuesday, February 17, 2009

WHAT I HATE TODAY: Your daily dose of negative energy

Today I hate The Onion Movie. The CNN/C-SPAN/Good Morning America parody videos on The Onion’s website are first-rate -- I love the one featuring a U.S. Representative reading into the congressional record an account of beating a homeless man to death for purposes of recreation -- so how did America’s Finest (Fake) News Source issue this bit of dreck?

The Onion Movie is a series of parody TV news items. This would have worked if the items had been funny, and if the filmmakers had stuck with it -- they could have had a morning show, a sports show, a financial segment, a disaster report, and so forth, plus commercials. But the jokes seemed like rejects from The Onion’s main publication, and the writers tacked on a dopey framing device about the anchorman that culminated in a painfully unfunny cameo by Steven Seagal. The whole thing seemed to have been outsourced to the lowest bidder in Sri Lanka.

Fair warning: The Onion Movie is not so bad it’s good. It’s just bad. Don’t watch it.

1 comment:

  1. Yeah, I know, right? I was SO stoked when I saw the first preview, but I was SO let down when we finally watched it. (Most of the news items, by the way, are actually video remakes of Onion print articles.)

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