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ZOOLANDER
5/10
USA
2001
director
: Ben Stiller
script : Stiller, Drake Sather, John Hamburg (story : Sather, Stiller)
producers include : Stiller, Scott Rudin
cinematography : Barry Peterson
editing : Greg Hayden
music : David Arnold
lead actors : Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, Christine Taylor, Will Ferrell
also : Milla Jovovich, Jerry Stiller, Jon Voight, David Duchovny
89 minutes
Enjoyably
daft fashion-world satire hits the ground running and gets unexpected
mileage out of its one joke – male super-models are super-stupid. It’s
basically Austin Powers meets Pret-a-Porter, with a what-the-hell
dash of The Manchurian Candidate. Airhead clothes-horse Derek Zoolander
(Stiller) realises he’s losing his number one status to his most hated
rival, uber-hippy Hansel (Wilson). Shadowy fashion-insiders want
the Malaysian Prime Minister dead before he can outlaw their child-labour
sweatshops, so our dim-bulb hero is brainwashed and ‘programmed’ to assassinate
the PM during New York Fashion Week. Investigate reporter Matilda (Taylor)
uncovers the dastardly plot, and persuades Hansel to forget old rivalries
and save his catwalk colleague…
The
whole supermodels-as-terrorists angle is straight from Bret Easton Ellis’s
‘Glamorama’, and like that novel Zoolander is stuffed with wall-to-wall
star names: Victoria Beckham, Tom Ford, Tommy Hilfiger and countless others
(including the inevitable S.Bernhard, D.Trump, D.Bowie and S.Dorff) flash
past as ‘themselves’. And with Duchovny, Voight and an alarmingly chubby
Vince Vaughn appearing in scruffy cameo roles, there’s always somebody
popping up, just as there’s always some bit of absurd business
going on to keep us interested. Preventing us, perhaps, from dwelling
on the fact that too many of the jokes are either too obvious (the fashion
scene is hardly a tough target) or not funny enough: as in Jay
and Silent Bob Strike Back, Will Ferrell (as Gaultieresque designer
Mugatu) does his level best to keep the laugh-ratio down. How does
this comedy dead-zone get work?
Luckily,
Wilson is on top form as the shaggy-haired, doe-eyed flower-child Hansel,
right from his early appearance wearing angel wings in a gloriously deadpan
tribute to Barbarella’s John Phillip Law. The comic highlight
is when he shows Derek and Matilda around his ‘party zone’ loft - this
is Wilson (and Zoolander) at their freewheeling best. Even so,
you can’t help feeling that neither character nor movie are quite
as hilarious as they could and should have been.
28th
November, 2001
(seen
Nov-28-01, UCI MetroCentre, Gateshead)
by Neil
Young
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