3rd tale rife with hackneyed humor
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| Devilish Prince Charming (Rupert Everett) gathers all the evil characters so he can create his own happily ever after. |
When David Letterman told Regis Philbin, “It’s the third one and you’re in it. How good could it be?” everyone thought he was kidding.
Like most other things about “Shrek the Third” it’s not so funny when you see the movie.
“Shrek the Third” shows some initial promise as Prince Charming (voiced by Rupert Everett), pretender to the throne of Far Far Away, toils in dinner-theater, acting out fairy tales for unappreciative audiences. Running into some disgruntled fairy tale villains (Captain Hook, Sleeping Beauty’s Evil Queen, etc.) in a bar, Prince Charming hatches a revolution.
Shrek (Mike Myers) doesn’t want to be king. So Shrek and his sidekicks, Donkey (Eddie Murphy) and Puss in Boots (Antonio Banderas), go after the only other heir to the throne, Fiona’s cousin Arthur (Justin Timberlake), who would rather be called Artie.
Princess Fiona (Cameron Diaz), by the way, is pregnant.
Throwing an all-star voice cast at a bad script doesn’t help. The animation is up to par, although the animators appear to have discovered fire this time and work it to death.
While the comic scenes aren’t very funny a surprising number of scenes don’t even try to be funny. When you’re not laughing, you don’t care why. The filmmakers must have related to Merlin (Eric Idle) when he says, “I don’t have it in me anymore.”
With all the toilet humor including the projectile baby vomit and gingerbread poop you’ve probably seen in the trailer “Shrek the Turd” would have been a more fitting title.
Steve Warren
Grade: C
Opens May 18 in wide release.
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HOLD YOUR HORSES
What the hell is going on?
Have y’all seen Out’s newest cover with muscleboy Chad White astride a stallion and gorgeous photos by Francious Rosseau? The images are enough to make you whinny. But was the idea for this Equus-inspired shoot playing off the new documentary “Zoo?”
“Zoo” is about a “family man” from Seattle, who died from a perforated colon after he was mounted by a horse that was hung like a horse. I haven’t seen the film yet which played at Sundance and has already opened in New York and Los Angeles. But I did stumble across some disturbing footage on the Internet.
“Zoo” is about Kenneth Pinyan, the 45-year-old Boeing engineer who died in July 2005 after an Arabian stallion fucked him in the ass. Apparently, Pinyan had sex with horses frequently. And the cohorts who helped him achieve his kinky dreams had filmed many of the incidents. If you google Pinyan’s nickname, “Mr. Hands,” you too can track down the barf-worthy footage, which may or may not have been the incident that killed Pinyan.
Weird fact: “Zoo” is earning glowing reviews. The film is being lauded for it’s “unexpected beauty” and sensitivity to zoophiles.
Say what?
I don’t know how they achieved their aesthetic, but critics say the film does not contain the footage that’s on the Internet. How the filmmakers arrived at making an “expressionistic tone poem” out of the shadowy world of sex with super-huge animals remains a mystery. But is Out now eroticizing sex with horses?
Daniel A. Kusner
This article appeared in the Dallas Voice print edition May 18, 2007