"The Other Guys" film

Summary

There are two police detectives in New York City, one an dorky accountant, one effective but highly strung. They investigate stuff together, some of which is funny.

Good Things

I empathised immediately with both of them. The first conversation, where the maverick gets up in the accountant's face, and the accountant gives this long spiel about how his metaphor is stupid, is lovely, because you can imagine why each would be annoyed with the other. Too many films have the geeky half of a pair unable to stand up for himself AT ALL, rather than unable to stand up for himself in the right jargon his partner will appreciate. And the geeky one is obsessed about different stuff, but is also pro-active in the stuff he wants to do.

Several bits were very funny.

Bad Things

Fiction is often pitched at different levels of reality. Some films are mostly realistic. A typical action comedy has stuff that is exaggerated, and a different set of premises, like "handguns work like they do in movies, not in real life" and "everyone will be ok, so if you fall over, laugh, don't be scared" and "the protagonist will meet people in the street who are disproportionately eccentric, but not normally physically impossible by the standards of the film".

Conversely, some films, typically out-and-out parodies or gross-out comedies, depart even further from reality, and have scenes spontaneously segue into the movie studio, accidentally leaving the world of the film, or into visual metaphors, like someone getting cross, and then turning into a big green incredible hulk.

This film seemed to be a weird mix of "action comedy" and "surreal parody". The action comedy stuff was generally great. The surreal stuff was generally just... not funny, at least to me. I felt like it had been cobbled together by two different people (and maybe it had, but I'm not sure I want to know). It feels like a shame as I liked half of it.

A typical example was when one of the men's wife asks her mother to convey a love message to him, which descended into graphic detail, and he wanted to send one back. Except that the graphicness of the detail was massively, surreally exaggerated. It felt like it could have been funny if you felt like the character was sending this graphically detailed message because it was the only way to convey their feelings, and they _reluctantly_ asked the mother, who _reluctantly_ agreed. That would be potentially painful, but also funny. However, it seems someone, somewhere along the line, said "an old woman talking about sex? THAT'S THE MOST HILARIOUS GROSS OUT THING EVER! MOAR MOAR MOAR MOAR MOAR!" Which maybe plays to SOME of the audience, but basically torpedoes the whole joke, because to people over the age of fifteen, it's funny BECAUSE it's a train wreck, the characters slowly slipping into the incredibly awkward situation. If instead of starting with being unable to deliver a love message without _some_ physical affection, reluctantly asked, and THEN exaggerated as it goes on, it becomes a "how far does it go" joke. But if they START with a surreally exaggerated "want to screw you in [many explicitely described degrading positions", it's not because it's anything anyone would ever actually say, but just because the script calls for it. And if that's all, why then repeat the joke?

Criticism I read but felt was off-target

Many people are obviously incapable of distinguishing (or didn't mind) the different sorts of comedy, and hence all the reviews read either "WOW BEST THING EVER [list of good bits]" or "BORING OFFENSIVE SUCKED [list of bad bits]"

Many people quite rightly objected to some of the sexual description, which could well be seen as offensive, but I point out that the majority of it was _supposed_ to seem crude, as it was delivered by someone crude. I may be wrong, but I think it was supposed to seem _somewhat_ accurate, but also deliberately offensive.

Avoid instinctively clarifying a sentence by adding more explanation afterwards

On the one hand

I started writing this this afternoon, after trying to articulate it for a while.

There is a great urge, if you realise that what you want to say may be incomplete or may be misinterpreted, to add more explanation. Often this is necessary (like adding scaffolding to a building, or explaining something which is too detailed to encapsulate in one sentence) but often it isn't (like using too much duct tape instead of building something right to start with, or trying to retroactively remove a bad connotation).

This leads to horrible conglomerations where someone tries to retract something in a sentence, which typically only draws attention to it, or at least takes up more effort.

A clarification is a useful thing if both (a) it clarifies and (b) it takes LESS EFFORT TO READ than spelling the whole thing out in full, either because it's available in some axillary way, or because it has a standard phrasing the eye can scan past. If it doesn't, then using a so-called clarification will be very little better than just adapting the sentence to include it, and if you want to be clear, you need to decide up-front if the small cost of everyone reading a possibly-unnescessary clarification is better or worse than people having a chance of misunderstanding something.

"Did you see any tits in your garden (birds[1], not women)," is often not as useful as "Did you see any tits at your bird feeder?"

"Is [blah blah] legal? I know it's different in different jurisdictions, I'm just wondering?" is often not as useful as "Is [blah blah] legal under UK law? Are there any regional variations?"

On the other hand

Being clear is work, sometimes a very very large amount of work. That's why producing well-written prose is part of many professions. Thus, if you WANT to be clear, the advice applies. And if you spend more time writing the clarification than deciding and changing the problematic content would take, it's probably wasted. But if you're writing a comment on the internet, it is often NOT worth the extra effort to polish your prose and reduce it down.

The above advice is how to write more clearly if you have the time. If you DON'T have the time, slapping an incomplete disclaimer, or otherwise posting a comment that could yet be improved, is eminently reasonable, and only a problem if it's SO unreadable any sensible conversation is overwhelmed. So I shouldn't get annoyed at people being superfluous (unless they wasted disporportionate effort to do so, or are for some reason held to a higher standard of prose.)

Ironic footnotes

[1] I realise "birds" can also mean "birds" or "women", but (a) it's not slang I'd typically use, and (b) as it's used in contrast to "women" it's unambiguous what it means[2].

[2] The previous footnote is deliberately an example of a superfluous clarification, since I could easily have said "avians" instead of "birds". But I retained it not because it's clearer but because I think it's funny. If you're trying to be clear spurious clarifications are to be guarded against. If you're trying to be funny I find that very very useful. (Because they often make me laugh.)