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mjoop
Reviews
Big Helium Dog (1999)
This was a sad little movie
Did somebody, maybe me, forget to push my laugh button before ``Big Helium Dog'' began? It's a comedy, and I know people who think it's a funny one, and intellectually I can appreciate some of the stuff they're trying to do--but of course intellectual appreciation is deadly to comedy, which needs to originate at a more elemental level of the being, and arrive at the mind only after the laughter begins. On that more visceral level, I found it less a comedy than a curiosity.
The title, "Big Helium Dog", refers to expensive bad loud big budget Hollywood movies and I guess this movie is supposed to satirize those types of movies, but it feels more like a bad episode of Saturday Night Live on acid. It has an extremely low budget and unlike other more talented directors Brian Lynch cannot make it look like anything other than an extremely low budget movie. In fact, it plays like it was directed as a do-it-yourself project, following instructions that omitted a few steps, and yet the movie has some charm. Michael Ian Black is the engine that drives the movie and he does a good job at it, but he is not enough to save it from the pits of comedy hell.
There is a plot, which somehow arrives at a conclusion, but the movie doesn't tell a story so much as move from one 'skit' to another. I felt they were too busy being hip and ironic to connect at the simpler level where comedy lives. They were brought down by their own self-protective devices. It's not cool to seem to want to be funny, and so the modern strategy is to adopt the pose that you are funny by not seeming to want to be funny. The audience laughs because the performers are being hip by trying to be funny without seeming to try to be funny. Thus everybody has an irony orgy and goes home, if not satisfied, at least unexposed as unhip.