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April 01, 2008

Simon Sez

Dennis Rodman + Dane Cook?

By Raph

This post is a part of the 2nd Annual White Elephant Film Blogathon

If you stop reading after this sentence, I won’t be offended: Simon Sez is a comedy/action flick starring Dennis Rodman and Dane Cook.

The best I can say for Simon Sez is this: From what I’ve heard, there are still those who enjoy and appreciate the work of comedian Dane Cook. While I have little hope for these misguided souls, I am certain that if there exists an antidote for this tragic waywardness, it is Simon Sez. I propose a rigorous, Clockwork Orange–style viewing regimen, in which the patient would be hooked up to an eye-opening apparatus and forced to witness Mr. Cook as a clumsy would-be spy, clad in an array of Hawaiian shirts, rotating between his three facial expressions: smirk, grimace, and gape. Simon Sez came out in 1999, before Cook’s heyday, so his role as comic relief turned out to be cruelly prophetic. While in recent years, his wildly popular standup routine has benefited from a hefty dose of— well, let’s call it “appropriating,” to at least be a little refined about it— from other comedians, in 1999 he was left to his own creative devices and at the mercy of the script. The resulting performance seems to be a two-tiered homage to Pee-Wee Herman and a jellyfish. Writhing and pratfalling all over the set, Cook peppers his lines with what I can only imagine are adlibs, in response to director Kevin Elders’s prompt, “Okay, Dane, in this scene I’d like you to annoy Dennis as much as possible.”

But enough about the co-star. The movie, of course, belongs to Rodman. Literally. It’s been almost ten years since 1999, the Reign of Rodman, when his cross-dressing bad-boy antics dominated the celebrity news circuit (By the way, does anyone remember how he was as a ball player? I don’t. I was fourteen at the time, and only capable of digesting the soundbites fed to me by MTV News. Rodman = wedding gown. I doubt I even knew which sport he played), but it’s not hard to believe that he would get his very own Vehicle. To Rodman’s credit, his performance in Simon Sez doesn’t suggest that he thinks of it as anything more than that. He shrugs, smiles lazily and ambles through his scenes as some kind of James Bond/Jason Bourne guy on assignment in France (Sorry, have I not mentioned the plot yet? In the south of France, Dennis Rodman and his trusty sidekick Dane Cook try to retrieve a disk containing important government codes from some bad guys. Honestly, it really doesn’t matter). Rodman phoning it in rather than taking himself seriously is fine by me; consider the alternative, Paris Hilton giving it her all as Lady Macbeth. Which would be more painful to watch?

There might be more worth commenting on in Simon Sez— Rodman’s two right-hand men, for example, a stereotype-happy black guy and a walking-joke fat guy, both inexplicably dressed as monks— but the predominant thing I noticed while watching was how angry I became as the film dragged on. In this Age of Irony, bad movies are revered as utmost in enjoyable viewing experiences (Teen Witch? Pure gold), but Simon Sez was not remotely enjoyable, by any stretch of the imagination. Not laughing-at-you funny, not absurd, not kitsch… just bad. Watching it caused this awful vomity mixture of repulsion, boredom, confusion and fury. And seriously, Dane Cook— I can’t stand that guy.

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