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| Director
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Dean Parisot
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| Starring
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Jim Carrey, Téa Leoni
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| The plot of
Fun with Dick and Jane |
When well-to-do marrieds Dick and Jane Harper
(Carrey and Leoni) find themselves unemployed
and in the red, they turn to armed robbery to
pay the bills. |
Fun with
Dick and Jane Review
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Review by Justin
Chang:
A screwball heist comedy
for the Enron era, the new "Fun With Dick and Jane"
gives the finger to scandal-ridden big businesses everywhere.
Breezy, uneven update of the 1977 George Segal-Jane
Fonda vehicle is the rare Hollywood remake that, by
daring to reinterpret its source material within a fresh
political context, actually has a reason to exist; the
results, if not exactly subtle, are still fun enough
to fend off any charges of titular false advertising.
Fans of Jim CarreyJim Carrey in full-on manic mode should
help Sony bank some B.O.B.O. during a competitive holiday
frame.Some might argue that by lambasting the giant
corporations whose politically entrenched top dogs and
fraudulent accounting practices have wreaked havoc on
the American economy in recent years, pic is basically
shooting fish in a barrel. True enough, but when the
fish are this rotten, why complain?Pointedly setting
their story in the year 2000, pre-Enron, scribes Judd
ApatowJudd Apatow and Nicholas StollerNicholas Stoller
(who previously collaborated on TV's short-lived "Undeclared""Undeclared")
imagine a cartoonishly exaggerated version of the doomed
corporate behemoth in Globodyne, a company specializing
in "fiber-optic content provision," among
other things..more..
Review By Jeffrey
M. Anderson:
The advertisements portray “Fun with Dick and
Jane” as a happy-go-lucky comedy about a slick
husband-and-wife robber team.It takes a long time to
get to that portion of the film, and even then the fun
doesn’t last long. The film’s first half
deals with the deadly serious issue of American workers
finding themselves lost and jobless within a bad economy
because of evil corporate giants.However, “Fun
with Dick and Jane” is too cowardly to actually
satirize any of these issues head-on. Based on a half-forgotten
1977 film starring Jane Fonda and George Segal, the
new film distances itself by avoiding satire and embracing
big, dumb comedy.Things look bright for Dick Harper
(Jim Carrey), who receives a major promotion within
his giant corporation. Unfortunately, Dick doesn’t
know that the bubble has burst, the stocks are plummeting
and the company is about to go under. At the same time,
Dick’s confident wife, Jane (Téa Leoni),
has also quit her job as a travel agent, leaving them
both unemployed. In rapid succession, they lose their
furniture, landscaping, electricity, etc. It’s
as if the filmmakers tried to make a comedy out of “The
Grapes of Wrath.”“Fun with Dick and Jane”
winds itself up into the predictable happy ending and
another Enron joke, just in case we didn’t get
the implication. Carrey barely survives under Parisot’s
haphazard direction. Leoni, as well as Alec Baldwin,
are likewise squandered..More..
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