And the Oscar goes to… by Daiana Vasquez

[Warning: this film review contains spoilers]

Tomorrow night the cinema world and the movie fans will be anxiously holding their breaths to finally know which of the films nominated for the best motion picture of the year will receive the desired statue. The competing films are: Brokeback Mountain, Capote, Crash, Good Night, and Good Luck, and Munich. What do they all have in common? The quality of their story – at least in the opinion of the jury.

On the other hand, it is a pity that there is no Oscar for the worst motion picture of the year, because some films just deserve it as well as the fans definitely deserve knowing which films they should better not waste their time and money on. Maybe the Oscar organizers should have allowed the very Oscar living on Sesame Street to hand over this special award at the end of the ceremony.

The worst motion picture of my choice would be a production of Imagine Entertainment, directed by Dean Parisot and released on the 21^st of December last year. It is a remake of a 1977 film with George Segal and Jane Fonda and at that time directed by Ted Kotcheff. I am still asking myself why such a story could ever be considered to be remade…

Fun with Dick and Jane is definitely misnamed. I would rather vote for Embarrassment with Dick and Jane. The film is arguable with a flaw story, bad acting and even worst message, to say the least: Dick (Jim Carrey) and Jane Harper (Tia Leoni) are a “lovely” couple living the American dream of “success” when their life suddenly and without warning turns into a nightmare: unemployment. The film presents this issue as if millions of people in this world had never experienced that. And even more astonishing is the solution they “propose”.

Dick works at Globodyne, a leading group in the consolidation of media properties. Jane is a travel agent, who is definitely tired of being yelled at on the phone by unsatisfied clients. After being promoted to vice president of communications of his company, Dick encourages his wife to resign. This is what she does, certainly to spend more time with their child, a boy fluent in Spanish rather than English, because of his Latin-American nanny, Blanca (Gloria Garayua), who is practically assuming the post of his mother. But their idea of an “even more successful life” goes offroad when Globodyne becomes involved in a scandal and goes bankrupt, because of illegal activities of his big boss, Jack McCallister (Alec Baldwin): he lets the ship sink and bags 400 million dollars on profits. And Dick, who could not enjoy even a single day of being vice president, is now unemployed. So is his wife.

They try “hard” to find a job, taking rather bizarre approaches towards the problem that are neither realistic nor funny. Dick begins working as a greeter at a warehouse, but he simply “does not fit”, probably because such a job is not suitable for an ex-vice president, and neither does Jane who starts as an aerobics instructor, a job which the film tries to sell as pathetic.

After these and some other frustrated attempts to obtain a job, they cannot pay their bills and are reduced to penury. This unsuccessful job search is setting the stage for Dick ingenious master plan, coming out of pure desperation, and certainly because there was nothing else he could have done instead: robbery in order to pay the mortgage for their house and to regain the upper-class lifestyle of his family. But hey, they are decent people, it is not their fault if the system does not give them a chance! And Dick specifically provides us and his wife with this justification for pursuing a criminal “career”.

What comes next is far from hilarious. The couple has no scruples. For instance, in one scene, Dick makes fun of one of their victims, dancing and grimacing (the only thing Jim Carrey seems to be able to do – and this is called acting) in front of the tied up man, and even torturing him by making him wear a dog-collar that discharges an electric shock when he yells (inspired by Abu Ghraib?). This certainly happens when the poor man tries to call for help. Is this the moment when we are supposed to laugh?

The most important thing however, is that they finally regain their lives, their goals are achieved. They obtain with the robbery actually much more than what they had before and are again surrounded by “old friends”. Even their sexual life is back –this parallel of criminal and luxurious life with a good sex life is even more disgusting.

And the story is not over yet. They go for revenge helped by one of the men involved in the frauds in the company, a man who is now poor, unemployed and alcoholic. Using their newly-discovered talent, Dick and Jane, the new advocates of moral, cheat on Dick’s former boss at Globodyne: in what is for the innocent victims sitting in their cinema chairs supposed to look like a Robin Hood act they distribute his money among the ex-employees of the company. The whole thing is carried out to look like a donation from Jack. The good guys (Dick, Jane and the alcoholic) do their good deed of the day and do not even want to take the credit for that!

If the whole film was supposed to do a spoof of life during economic apathy, it has unfortunately miscarried. It cannot be a satire if in the end the criminals are rewarded as heroes, saving thousands of lives. The only irony we might smile at is in the end when thankful cheers go to Enron and likewise companies for the inspiration.

And the trash bin Oscar goes to: Fun with Dick and Jane!