Review: Strange Wilderness

Starring: Steve Zahn, Allen Covert, Jonah Hill, Justin Long

Director: Fred Wolf

Release Date: February 1, 2008

Running time: 87 min

MPAA Rating: R

Distributor: Happy Madison Production

As I was walking out of seeing this movie, a group of people were in front of me talking amongst themselves as they walked out. One of them dropped a folded up piece of paper. I picked it up and tried to chase them down to hand it back to them, but I lost them in the lobby. After reading it (what, you wouldn’t?), I thought I’d share given the nature of the afternoon we just spent together.

Dear Hollywood,

I writing this letter on behalf of the group of young people you so affectionately refer to as ‘stoners’. While we appreciate your trying to speak to our demographic in recent years, I as chair person speak for the entirety of the group when I say, “enough is enough”. We are tired of being talked down to like we should expect nothing more simply because of the choice of recreation we decide to embark on.

To say ‘enough’ is not to say we don’t get it. We get that you are trying to pigeon-hole us into watching admittedly dumber movies because well, we have in the past. But we’ve sat through the last “stoners trying to save, their own ass” saga. I’m sure you, like us, no doubt understand the mathematical equation of the basic stoner comedy.

(s2+ T) x W = A

Or, two stoners plus a ridiculous task times weed equals awesomeness. But if you have a grasp these basic algorithmic concepts, then you surely understand the problems that can occur when you disrupt the flow of control within these individual statements. In computer science, a loop is a sequence of statements which is specified once but which may be carried out several times in succession. Most programming languages have constructions for repeating a loop until some condition changes. This is all well and good, but you flew too close to the sun, didn’t you? While operating under the notion of a condition-controlled loop, you tried too hard to force the idea by creating events that will run on their own; events that would eventually create an infinite loop. The only problem with that is that these loops are only designed to work until an exceptional condition such as an error arises. In other words, an event-driven program may be intended to loop forever handling events as they occur; only stopping when the process is killed by the operator. You sirs, dear operators, have killed this very process. A process that is know and understood by us, and previously held dear – the stoner movie. As a result, we are no longer interested in your product or products of similar likeness.

We will no longer become test subjects in an experiment that does not allow us to think for ourselves. We will no longer watch people of lesser intellect pass off their lack of skill as that of being “high”. While we appreciate what you are trying to do for our own sake, please allow us to respectfully spit it back at you as we have had our fill, thank you.

Not that we would ever tell anyone what to do because, you know, it goes against that whole ‘voice of a generation’ thing we have going, but a few pieces of advice: in the future, when trying to recreate the feeling of our group taking part in our recreation of choice, please do not attempt to “get one over on us” because you think we wont notice. Please do not include players from previously successful movies in your own. If they cannot produce on their own merit, then don’t insult us by assuming just because we see Farva from Super Troopers that we are going to clap and cheer and say, “oooh, far out. Look, it’s Farva!” in response. Please do not include people like Steve Zahn in you film and hope to rest lightly on the fact that he can be very funny, because he wasn’t here. At all. Jonah Hill is not funny, stop giving him work. Aside from Die Hard and those Mac commercials, Justin Long isn’t either. And as cute as it is that your characters in your movie are named after the same people that made it, the next time you all decide to make a movie, do us all this one little favor: Take the paper you were going to waste printing the script, roll it up with your favorite bud (kind or otherwise cleverly named), and smoke it. Smoke like you never smoked anything in your life. Then for the love of all that is holy in this world, we hope you fucking choke on it. Given the choice, next time I’d rewatch Norbit.

Repectfully (of course),

The Stoners

Huh? All this time I thought I was the critic. Go figure.

And there’s the rub.

ZERO out of ****