Hollywood Needs a Dictionary

Film-makers these days seem to have forgotten what the meanings of words such as "satire" and "parody" mean. It's not hard to look up the definitions of these words and realise that the definitions do not in any way match what recent films have claimed to pass off as satires or parodies. (Although it is slightly harder to try and read through the Wikipedia definitions of satire and parody to do the same thing without getting bored.) In fact, you could argue that filmmakers have altogether forgotten what "comedy" means, but I think we're underestimating just how hard it is to make a comedy that works these days if we go that far.

Old satirical films lovingly hold a mirror up to the film, and then warp the mirror to create something slightly of kilter that makes us laugh. We recognise what the target is, and we agree with the films interpretation of how ludicrous certain aspects of the genre (or whatever) can be. Monty Python did it extremely well with Monty Python and the Holy Grail and The Life of Brian, for example, and Mel Brooks seemed to make an art form out of getting it right (for a while).

But recent films, such as the newer Shrek sequels (yes, I will be reviewing them), seem to get it wrong. So called "parody" films such as Meet the Spartans and the Scary Movie franchise (I'm including such abominations as Date Movie and Epic Movie in that franchise) get it so wrong that they seem to hold the mirror up to the original film only so that they can distract it just long enough to punch it in the face.

Newer parodies seem to all make the same key mistake: they confuse "parody" with "spot the pop culture reference". They think that audiences these days have such a short attention span that they don't bother to set up long jokes with satisfying punchlines, but rather just try and cram as many exaggerated pop culture references as they can into a single scene. Sorry, film-makers, but that's not how it works.

If you want to do it properly, you pick one story or genre and use that as the basis for all your smaller jokes. Then at the end you can deliver your final moral or the punchline you've used the whole movie to work towards. In fact, that's how half of comedy in general works if it's done well. Using pop-culture references as the smaller jokes is fine, but you can't use them as the whole basis for the film and hack a plot around it. There's no pay-off.

Of course, that's not the only reason that the Scary Movie franchise fell off the rails, but you all knew that already.