THE FADED SPOTLIGHT

A gleefully unsophisticated, lo-fi comedy fit for audiences who find brilliance in the absurd. It borrows Woody Allen’s early-career experiment What’s Up, Tiger Lily?, where he took a forgotten Japanese spy film and overdubbed ridiculous dialogue that incorporated a new plot (something about egg salad). J-Men Forever raids the vaults of 1940s adventure reels—those square-jawed relics of moral clarity—except here they lay a new track on top of it. A wild tale about a nefarious entity known as “Lightning Bug” and his plans to bring about societal collapse by broadcasting the sounds of rock ’n’ roll. (They weren’t ready for it yet, but their kids were going to love it.) It’s American decency undermined by music with a backbeat. Enter the J-Men—Hoover’s finest—who are tasked with saving the nation armed with little more than clipped dialogue, suspect logic, and exaggerated patriotism.

The premise is of course ridiculous. It plays like a dream someone might have who grew up on Commando Cody, passed out while listening to Cheech and Chong, and then came to in a radio booth manned by anarchist DJs. The humor throughout is broad and juvenile—often obsessed with gags about sex, drugs, and bodily functions. But the movie is also fast paced, committed to its concept, and weirdly quotable. There’s something compelling in the way it crashes Cold War sincerity into a kind of countercultural madness. Like Joe McCarthy trying to police the FM radio and then forgetting what decade it is. This film isn’t aiming for sharp satire—not in the way you might expect. It’s fueled mainly by volume and momentum.

The “performances” are mostly archival footage with new voice work, but the voice work is a lot of fun—frenzied, relentless, and clearly the product of people enjoying themselves. If you’ve ever taped Dr. Demento off the radio or quoted Firesign Theatre off a tape deck, you might just consider this film another holy text. Anyone else might just sit through it, baffled, maybe laugh once or twice, but overall wonder exactly what frequency they’ve stumbled onto.

Terry Gilliam’s directorial debut sends Michael Palin trudging through a world that looks like it was scraped off the underside of a trebuchet. He plays Dennis Cooper, the dim but hopeful son of an actual cooper (this being back when your last name might literally correlate with your profession). Dennis has a face made for expressing disappointment and a hopeless crush on an obese woman named Griselda Fishfinger (Annette Badland). Though you wonder why, since she chews with her mouth open and regards Dennis with the warmth of old broth. When Griselda’s father dies mid-insult, Dennis sets off for the city to make his fortune. And only then, perhaps, he’d have what it takes to win Griselda’s heart. But all he seems to find in the city is gatekeepers, the plague, and a population that seems to treat hygiene like an inconvenience.

Also, there’s a monster. It’s called a Jabberwock. A giant, twitching, almost machine-like looking contraption that resembles something like a bat, a lizard, and a coatrack that got caught in a windstorm. It goes about the city snatching villagers out of existence. The King (Max Wall) is doddering, distracted, and often facing the wrong direction. He organizes a tournament to try and find someone willing to battle the Jabberwock. The bravest might try their mightiest and fail spectacularly. But, it turns out, the beast is no match for Dennis just accidentally wandering into it.

This film operates like a medieval septic system. It’s noisy, foul, and prone to clogs. Characters speak in ellipses and dried phlegm. There’s a memorable scene with nobles whipping their peasants carrying them on their sedan chairs in a makeshift race. There’s another scene where a gleefully unemployed beggar beams at Dennis while he explains how amputating his own foot doubles as a business strategy—the sympathy points get him more coins. Adding to Dennis’ predicament, the princess (the stunning Deborah Fallender) falls desperately for him. But Dennis is just too loyal to Griselda that all he does back at her is stare blankly. There is certainly a story here, but it gets buried underneath all the mess—characters who seem more interested in chewing scenery with overblown dialogue, and many, many wacky side distractions. The satire boils down simply to a ne’er-do-well peasant stumbling into things and coming out of them with the outcomes opposite of what you’d expect. It’s nothing we haven’t seen before.

But I did enjoy the movie. It reeks, but there also seemed to be a real valiant attempt at making its filth-caked Medieval setting look authentic. This is Monty Python and the Holy Grail by way of infected hay. It’s not nearly as gut-busting, and—strangely—even less well-structured, but it’s all weird and dedicated enough to the joke that I can’t help but be drawn into it—at least a little bit.

A glossy and well-intentioned but hopelessly overinflated spin on the childhood staple. The bones are still here. There’s a farm boy who trades away his horse (swapped in here, inexplicably, from the original cow) for a handful of magic beans. They get planted, a giant stalk grows out of the ground overnight, and he climbs it to face a towering giant. But this version can’t resist adding more to it. Much, much more. This isn’t so much a reimagined fairy tale as it is a full medieval pageant. We get some royal succession intrigue, a backstory about the beans being sacred relics, soldiers tagging along with Jack for reasons of their own. If that wasn’t bad enough, when Jack makes it up to the clouds, it isn’t one giant waiting for him but a whole race of them. For an action-fantasy, this movie is quite handsomely mounted. But it’s also so overstuffed that—call me a traditionalist—I’d have preferred a straight retelling.

But the bigger problem is Jack himself. Nicholas Hoult is fine in the role, but the character is written with roughly the personality of an ironing board. The monks are charged with protecting the beans, mainly from Roderick (Stanley Tucci in a wig), a scheming nobleman with ambitions for the throne. One monk, carrying the beans, panics when he sees Roderick closing in. He gets in a rush to ditch them and hastily trades the beans to Jack for his horse. Not because he wants the horse, really, but because Jack is a convenient means to be rid of them. Roderick’s plan is to reach the giants’ realm and seize a magical crown, an artifact said to grant dominion over the entire race. If he controls the giants, he assumes—probably rightfully—that he’ll have the muscle he needs to claim the kingdom for himself. But Jack never learns any of this. He plants the beans, the stalk grows, Roderick follows, and the very disaster the monks feared most comes to pass. Good going, monks.

To the film’s credit, the CGI is lavish. The medieval scenery and the giants’ realm look expensive, and it’s easy to get swept up in the spectacle. Tucci adds some welcome friction—breezily villainous, mildly theatrical, clearly enjoying himself. Eleanor Tomlinson plays Princess Isabelle as bold and independent, far more militant than the standard damsel, though the story keeps shoving her back into a tower. Ewan McGregor turns up as captain of the king’s guard in gleaming armor, his main function mostly to strike a pose and get captured.

All told, Jack the Giant Slayer is loud, glossy, and overstuffed. It feels twice as long as it should be and about half as necessary. As an action-fantasy, it has its surface-level thrills. However, they’re ultimately undone by thinly drawn characters and its overall needless urge to bloat a simple fairy tale. Call this serviceable, mildly entertaining, but instantly forgettable.

There’s at least one moment in Jackass: The Movie that made me laugh my proverbial ass off. And it takes a while to set up. Johnny Knoxville rents a perfectly good sedan, spray paints the number “3” on it, and enters it into a demolition derby. He then tries to return it with the windshield gone and the frame crumpled into modern art. How it’s still able to run is something like a modern miracle. But the real joke isn’t in the destruction—it’s Knoxville’s straight-faced insistence that the damage was “minor.” He even adds, as if it’s going to help his case, that he brought it back with a full tank of gas. This whole thing, of course, is filmed with hidden cameras, with the employees unaware it’s a prank. There’s a producer waiting off-screen with a checkbook to cover the damages, but they’re not aware of that. Their reactions are genuine bafflement.

Now, don’t let this mislead you into thinking the rest of the film is like that. This gag is almost clever. Otherwise, this is a smorgasbord of fearless people dreaming up and performing the most outrageous stunts they can think of. An extension of the namesake MTV series, though “extension” may be too polite a word. It’s really just more of the same, only a bit bigger and nastier thanks to the bigger budget and R-rating. The overall effect is like the show got drunk, fell through the roof of a frat house, and stumbled out the front door giggling and missing a tooth.

There’s no plot, naturally. It’s just a rotating cast of pain-proof man-children subjecting themselves to stunts, each one more deranged than the last. The quality varies. A man dressed as a mouse flings himself across a floor lined with hundreds of mousetraps—inspired. A running gag where a prankster scalps his friends with a razor—less so. Then there’s one of the filthiest pranks, which somehow misses its punchline. A man defecates in a display toilet at a hardware store. The owner is understandably livid, but the prankster just sheepishly zips up and walks out. What prevented him, in that moment, from turning to the owner and asking for toilet paper?

Overall, the film plays like a test of physical resilience. Not just for the actors, but for the audience. It’s an understatement to say Jackass is not made for everyone (to the extent it can even be considered “made”), but there’s an impish joy in watching people, as the saying goes, play stupid games and win stupid prizes. What makes it weirdly watchable isn’t just the gore or the groin shots, but the sheer audacity of the ideas themselves—and the commitment it takes to carry them out. Not in some grand cinematic sense, but the way a daredevil commits to climbing into a shopping cart and barreling down a concrete street without a care, or perhaps even a thought, for the inevitable crash.