Photo courtesy of Magnet Releasing
Eric Wareheim in TIM & ERIC’S BILLION DOLLAR MOVIE
- Photo courtesy of Magnet Releasing
- Eric Wareheim in TIM & ERIC’S BILLION DOLLAR MOVIE
* star
Opens today at the Colony Theatre
I don’t smoke weed, which perhaps give me a slight disadvantage in enjoying things weed smokers would normally find amusing.
One of those things is the comedy team of Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim (aka Tim and Eric), the duo whose surreal sketch show Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! has been a staple on Adult Swim, the Cartoon Network’s pothead-friendly block of nightly programming.
Like most comic performers whose weird, subversive brand of humor has found them a cult audience on cable, Tim and Eric bring their act to the big screen in Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie. In the movie, Tim and Eric are inexplicably given a billion dollars by a psychotic mogul (Robert Loggia) to make a movie, which they blow on a three-minute short starring a Johnny Depp impersonator in a diamond-covered suit.
When the mogul demands his billion dollars back, they try to come up with the money by skipping town and attempting to operate a shopping mall, a run-down wasteland filled with strange businesses (a used toilet-paper store?), vagrants and a wandering wolf.
Tim and Eric's style of transgressive anti-comedy, with its moments of random bizarreness (usually populated by oddball folk Tim and Eric find somewhere) often digitally doctored for hallucinatory effect, has always been a prime example of love-it-or-hate-it humor. But as it's been proven on their Adult Swim show, where the episodes usually run under 15 minutes, Tim and Eric are more tolerable in small doses. When they try to stretch their shenanigans to a feature-length format, the results are even more nonsensical—and even more antagonistic.
Apparently taking a cue from when Tom Green sought out to annoy and repulse movie audiences with his directorial debut Freddy Got Fingered, Tim and Eric (who also wrote and directed) throw in bits and gags that range from irritating to full-on disgusting. (If you can sit through a certain scene that merges sex toys with explosive diarrhea, you’re a braver person than I—and YOU NEED JESUS!) And even when Tim and Eric have Will Ferrell (who also serves as a producer), Zach Galifianakis, Jeff Goldblum, Will Forte and John C. Reilly (who sadly doesn’t show up as incompetent, man-of-medicine Dr. Steve Brule, a character from the Adult Swim show I always found funny) co-sign for them by making cameo appearances, their involvement don’t add much to the proceedings. It’s Tim and Eric’s world—they all just do their best not to get sprayed with shit or sodomized with dildos.
While Tim and Eric may be two rule-breaking comics who prefer their audiences to be more disturbed than amused (Blowing up a kid for a laugh? That's acceptable!), it's likely even their most diehard fans may fail to find the entertainment value in Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie. Then again, they may be high as hell when they watch this and not might give two shits one way or the other.
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