I guess you don’t need me to tell you this movie is a big hit. It had the second largest Memorial Day weekend opening ever, but was it because it stars Jim Carrey and it rained all over the East Coast last weekend?
Well, I’m glad to report it opened big because it’s a very funny movie. Jim plays a TV reporter for a Buffalo station. In the opening sequence, he’s covering a bakery’s attempt to bake the worlds largest chocolate chip cookie. The place is run by an immigrant Polish family and the laughs come early as Carrey makes his faces and one of the bakers standing behind him starts picking his nose on camera.
The basic story is that Carrey’s character would rather be a news anchor than a field reporter doing light entertainment pieces. He lives with his girlfriend, played by Jennifer Aniston, but dreams of bigger things. I’m normally not big on “behind the scenes” movies about people in the TV business, but the inside stuff is largely avoided here as the pure frantic comedy of Carrey comes through. Did you ever wonder what a guy who has to do the cookie story is really thinking?
His character is a smiling, happy guy on camera, but off camera he’s jaded, cynical and resentful. That’s actually very true of plenty of TV reporter people. There are two very funny scenes in this movie and one of them is when Carrey finds out he’s lost out on the anchor job just as he’s about to go live with a story from Niagara Falls. His on camera rant about the dopey story and his backstabbing, incompetent co-workers is a major hoot.
After this, he meets up with “God”, played by Morgan Freeman. Hey, maybe God is a black man – Freeman certainly has the right voice. Anyway, God gives Carrey his powers while he takes a vacation. Of course, Carrey uses them first to try and get that anchor job, which brings us to the other major funny scene. Carrey decides to mess with the guy that did get the anchor opening by sending the guy into a “Tourettes” fit on the air. What’s truly remarkable about this bit is that not only is the guy playing the anchor great as he does the face contortions and shouts out the profanities and non-sequiters, but at the same time we see Carrey off camera feeding the nonsense and that is almost equally funny.
They added just the right touches to this movie, from Carrey singing the “What if God Was One of Us” song to his attempts to housebreak the dog by giving the animal the ability to use the toilet. I can’t tell you how I still laugh when I think of the scene where Aniston walks in on the puppy while he’s on the bowl reading the paper. He looks up at her and , I swear, seems to be barking at her to get out of here.
Jim Carrey is probably the only living comic actor who can overact and get away with it. His dramatic body movements and facial contortions put you in just the right mood instead of turning you off. There’s simply nobody who goes “over-the-top” better. I often walk into see his movies expecting to roll my eyes and that almost never happens- somehow he wins me over. The only downside to this movie is near the end when the more serious “message” is conveyed about what really matters in life and getting Carrey and Aniston back together and blah-blah-blah. But I forgive that easily, because from start to nearly the finish this is about the funniest movie I’ve seen this year. I give “Bruce Almighty” a “9.0” on the scale.
