Posted on 08/12/2005 8:10:01 AM PDT by Borges
"Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo" makes a living cleaning fish tanks and occasionally prostituting himself. How much he charges I'm not sure, but the price is worth it if it keeps him off the streets and out of another movie. "Deuce Bigalow" is aggressively bad, as if it wants to cause suffering to the audience. The best thing about it is that it runs for only 75 minutes.
Rob Schneider is back, playing a male prostitute (or, as the movie reminds us dozens of times, a "man whore"). He is not a gay hustler, but specializes in pleasuring women, although the movie's closest thing to a sex scene is when he wears diapers on orders from a giantess. Oh, and he goes to dinner with a woman with a laryngectomy, who sprays wine on him through her neck vent.
The plot: Deuce visits his friend T.J. Hicks (Eddie Griffin) in Amsterdam, where T.J. is a pimp specializing in man-whores. Business is bad, because a serial killer is murdering male prostitutes, and so Deuce acts as a decoy to entrap the killer. In his investigation he encounters a woman with a penis for a nose. You don't want to know what happens when she sneezes.
Does this sound like a movie you want to see? It sounds to me like a movie that Columbia Pictures and the film's producers (Glenn S. Gainor, Jack Giarraputo, Tom McNulty, Nathan Talbert Reimann, Adam Sandler and John Schneider) should be discussing in long, sad conversations with their inner child.
The movie created a spot of controversy last February. According to a story by Larry Carroll of MTV News, Rob Schneider took offense when Patrick Goldstein of the Los Angeles Times listed this year's Best Picture Nominees and wrote that they were "ignored, unloved and turned down flat by most of the same studios that ... bankroll hundreds of sequels, including a follow-up to 'Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo,' a film that was sadly overlooked at Oscar time because apparently nobody had the foresight to invent a category for Best Running Penis Joke Delivered by a Third-Rate Comic."
Schneider retaliated by attacking Goldstein in full-page ads in Daily Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. In an open letter to Goldstein, Schneider wrote: "Well, Mr. Goldstein, I decided to do some research to find out what awards you have won. I went online and found that you have won nothing. Absolutely nothing. No journalistic awards of any kind ... Maybe you didn't win a Pulitzer Prize because they haven't invented a category for Best Third-Rate, Unfunny Pompous Reporter Who's Never Been Acknowledged by His Peers."
Reading this, I was about to observe that Schneider can dish it out but he can't take it. Then I found he's not so good at dishing it out, either. I went online and found that Patrick Goldstein has won a National Headliner Award, a Los Angeles Press Club Award, a RockCritics.com award, and the Publicists' Guild award for lifetime achievement.
But Schneider is correct, and Patrick Goldstein has not yet won a Pulitzer Prize. Therefore, Goldstein is not qualified to complain that Columbia financed "Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo" while passing on the opportunity to participate in "Million Dollar Baby," "Ray," "The Aviator," "Sideways" and "Finding Neverland." As chance would have it, I have won the Pulitzer Prize, and so I am qualified. Speaking in my official capacity as a Pulitzer Prize winner, Mr. Schneider, your movie sucks.
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
SUCKED!
There was no hidden meaning. There was no value. And the gay orgy--Ebertesque at its finest.
You do know Ebert is straight right? He's married.
pretty hard to live up to the outstanding movie he had in
"Manimal"
I think he might have said Happy Happy Joy Joy, but was definately not a major part.
You seem awfully quick to defend Ebert.
He said the gay orgy was "Ebertesque." He did not say Ebert was gay. But it is well-established that Ebert often prefers films that are dark, disturbed, and deal with various perversions. He seems to revel in the tawdry merely for the sake of tawdriness. He just calls it "art." Anything that makes God-fearing red-state Americans squirm and feel uncomfortable, Ebert loves.
It's fairly rare that Ebert praises movies that have redeeming values.
I praise him because, at his best, he's a terrific film critic and scholar. He's not always at his best. Anyway he usually points out how whatever tawdriness there is functions in the context of a given film and its not jsut there for pernicious reasons. Remember he hated Blue Velvet.
It would've been better if they simply change the title to: "Clemenza in Paris: June 2005."
Russ Meyer had great taste in women. He was married to Kitten Natividad after all.
Did you ever see the SNL skit where Siskel and Ebert reviewed gay porno films?
I haven't but that sounds amusing. SNL has been so bad for so many years it's hard to even leave it on for more then a few moments at a time.
I swear in that movie, Arnold became president in the future, very eerie.
You like the gals with the hairy legs??
I've always thought Schneider was pretty funny in a sidekick kind of way. I read an article not long ago that said that Hollywood is so desperate for leading men that they put these guys like Martin Short who are great sidekicks and try put them into lead roles. It just doesn't work.
The general consensus has been for years that she's his beard.
This movie doesn't deserve it, but I've noticed a lot of Ebert's reviews don't actually discuss the movie.
He's generally a good film critic.
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