Movie 43

As excited the showing of “Movie 43,” a film I’d been very excited to see, I couldn’t seem to get past the biggest unresolved plotline of the film: how on earth did they get so many respected actors to be in such a god-awful movie?

The lineup is stacked. Halle Berry, Chloe Grace-Moretz, Dennis Quaid, Elizabeth Banks, Emma Stone, Hugh Jackman, Kate Winslet, Terrence Howard and Anna Farris are just a few of the top-billed names. But even that much talent can’t save a film this terrible.

The film is structured as a series of shorts that a crazy man, played by Dennis Quaid, is pitching to a studio exec he’s holding at gunpoint. Each time he starts to describe a movie idea, the film fades into portrayals of the pitches.

The pitched films are supposed to be terrible — that’s part of the gag. But things can be terrible in a funny way. These short skits are just terrible in a sad, strange way. You almost feel sorry for the actors in them.

The humor is almost completely based upon physical gags. Hugh Jackman having balls growing out of his throat is funny when you read it here, but it can’t carry an 8-minute skit. That’s the kind of thing you can expect to see in “Movie 43”: balls, poop, periods, boobs, mangled penises and other general gross-out gags. The line dividing stupid humor and pure stupidity is a thin one, and “Movie 43” has a lot of trouble treading it.

Even the high school boys seeing this in the row behind me barely laughed during the entire thing. I think that says it all.

Movies like “Movie 43” and “Valentine’s Day”  prove again and again that just lumping a bunch of famous people together in a film doesn’t make it good or funny. In fact, it often does the opposite.

Calling “Movie 43” the worst movie I’ve seen would be giving it too much credit.

I say this because calling it “the worst” might tempt people to actually see it. Truly bad movies, like Tommy Wiseau’s  “The Room,” are genius in how bad they are. “Movie 43” was just dull, with a few flashes of gross.

Please don’t waste your money.