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Review- Many performers don't take chances. They stick with what made them famous and decide to continue with that until people find someone else who can do the same thing just as good. Well, Jim Carrey takes a chance here, albeit a safe one. He's still up to his old antics, but in a much darker and odd way. I admire him for that.
Matthew Broderick stars as a young executive recently separated from his wife. One day, his cable goes out. so he calls the cable company. Of course, the cable guy arrives late, and at an inopportune time. Broderick slips him $50 to get free cable channels. Chip does it for him, and thinks hes found a new friend. Broderick humors him at first, but when Chip starts to get a little pushy, such as getting a prostitute for him, Broderick tries to back out of the friendship.
The rest of the movie deals with Carrey making a living hell out of Broderick's life. The movie is quite creative in the situations the characters are placed in. A game called Porno Password is played at the home of Broderick's parents. In the movies funniest scene, Carrey purposely flirts with Broderick while Broderick is in prison and other prisoners are watching. There is also amusing happenings at a basketball game, and a hilarious jousting battle between the two at Medieval Times.
Ben Stiller has creativity in almost every scene. He paces the film well, and gets amusing cameos from Janeane Garofalo and Andy Dick, both alumni of his wonderful tv show, The Ben Stiller Show. Broderick plays it straight, and does a very good job of it. But the movie belongs to Carrey, of course, and he gives his best performance yet. And at the end, Stiller wonderfully explains the message of the movie in a very amusing sequence. The Cable Guy has a dark, satrirical edge to it that is very refreshing, but may not be embraced by most of Carrey's fans. If you're looking for Ace Ventura 3, this is the wrong movie. If you're looking for an energetic and intelligent black comedy, see this movie.
By : Larry Mcgillicuddy
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Source:
rec.art.movies.reviews newsgroup
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"I am the bastard son of Claire Huxtable! I am the lost
Cunningham! I learned the facts of life from The Facts of Life!
Don't you get it? Someone has to save all the other cable boys and
girls, someone has to kill the babysitter."
These are probably the best and worst lines in THE CABLE GUY, and in a knowing, twisted film-student-with-a-vengeance sort of way, the combined effort of director Ben Stiller (whom I hereby forgive forever for making REALITY BITES) and writer Holtz is a dark and magnificently lunatic mock-celebration of the flickering blue parent generation. OK, it's also an excessive throw-in-all-the-popular-media-references-you-can type of smartass caper with more intelligent directing than most of Carrey's other films (although that isn't saying much), but being the first with an actual body-functions-joke minimum, this film could very well be Carrey's first into the comedians-can-act-too spectrum of Hollywood.
Unlike previous Jim Carrey successes like the Ace Ventura movies or DUMB AND DUMBER, which were no more than empty vehicles for Carrey's manic personality and a surprisingly inventive number of flatulent jokes, The Cable Guy not only has a plot that follows to conclusion, more importantly--gasp!--it has a concept: too much TV is, well, it's just bad for you.
This is overwhelmingly proved by Chip Douglas (Carrey), the cable guy who fixes architext Steven Kovacs up with free cable television channels and then, taking Kovacs' unwilling friendship for granted, proceeds to mess up his life in a number of ways: he throws mind-splinting karaoke parties, wrecks friendly basketball games, stalks Stephen and eventually lands him in jail. As Chip, Carrey is the optimum product of self-conscious popular media gone deliciously and disturbingly wrong. He relates everything to television past and present, assaulting his newly appointed *schlemielman* with catchphrase melanges from sixties sitcoms and reenacting movie scenes with a screaming, maniacal sense of irrelevence that is darkly engaging to us postmodern audiences (or maybe just me), and morally unsettling to people like my parents, who would consider Mr Carrey to be a product of a satanic cult instead of mere television.
But then of course, isn't that the point? CABLE GUY is *about* the dangers of television, if we are to believe the desperation on Chip-Carrey's face as he dangles from a gigantic satellite above imminent doom. *Somebody has to kill the babysitter*, he implores, bringing to mind the kitschy flashback the film provided its audience earlier about Chip's childhood loneliness, sans siblings and parents, leading to a life of absorption in front of the TV.
But the moment, like everything in this movie, turns on itself with a beautiful slow-motion climax that intensifies to blackness, resembling the same metafictional acknowledgement of media-constructed realities in the ending of that British bastion of silliness now revered by millions across the world--Carrey's earlier counterparts--Monty Python's Holy Grail.
In the end, CABLE GUY is worth watching if only to see Carrey actually sort of act. Or at least, acknowledge the presence of his cast. Perhaps this is more to director Stiller's credit, who refuses to allow the film to degenerate into yet another Carrey showcase. Delightful surprise guest appearances from Stiller and longtime partner in crime Janeane Garafalo also keep the enjoyment going when Carrey's hyperactivity annoys--and make no mistake, he will annoy, though far less than in previous movies--and Carrey's own performance, subdued as it is, is near-perfect for the media pastiche (the word no self-respecting postmodernist would leave home without) that he represents.
Like Mork (and much like Robin Williams himself), Carrey's comedy evokes every pose, every gesture, every facial expression, tone and technical idea ever used in the history of modern media, aggrandized and fast-forwarded to grotesque proportions to pass for humor. Like Mork, Carey's Chip Douglas (the name itself, the film reveals, is filched from "My Three Sons," so Carey's character is literally nameless, never truly identified, and a macabre inversion of Leone's Man With No Name) merges real life conversation with commercial snippets and a movie quotes compendium, and a paranoid self-consciousness that ironically blends fantasy with real life. "If this were a movie, there would be danger music," he snarls while playing villain with Stephen's girlfriend, singing along *with* the actual soundtrack with knowing vengeance.
It is therefore perhaps the film's self-awareness on the whole that makes THE CABLE GUY weird, what with its parodic freeze frames and the vicious mock-reality celebrity trials to name a few of the fun things Stiller gets the film up to. And Hollywood has never taken to metadramatics very well. THE CABLE GUY was generally badly received by critics and grossed little more than it took to make at the US Box Office (according to figures taken from the Internet Movie Database). Still, I recommend this film for its widescreen absurdity, great performances all round, and its
By : Rebecca Wan
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