The message of the last days must be: Some times things just don't add up.
Take RICKY STANICKY. Three grown friends have used a made up person -- Ricky -- to cover for their mistakes and failures and to get out of doing things they don't want to do. Don't want to go to the baby shower? Ricky's got cancer again! They take it too far and have to produce a Ricky. They hire Rod (Jon Cena) to pretend to be Ricky.
A rated-R comedy with Zac Efron in the lead? Why not? He's delivered comedy gold in THAT AWKWARD MOMENT, NEIGHBORS, NEIGHBORS II, DIRTY GRANDPA and the comedy classic MIKE & DAVE NEED WEDDING DATES.
And with Peter Farrelly helming?
Should add up to comic gold -- in theory.
But it doesn't.
LOW LIGHTS AND TRICK MIRRORS -- the name of the one best unproduced scripts ever. Studios didn't get behind it because the two main characters were women. People loved to read it. No one wanted to get behind it. Its rather infamous. Could it be made today? Probably, but it wouldn't have the shock value it did when people first read it. It would still have a lot of the humor.
Jeffrey Bushell's script has not aged well. Over 14 years ago, it had a quality. In fairness to Bushell, certain ideas and certain lines got raided over the years by people reading his unproduced draft. What would have played in 2010 just is nothing in 2024.
Oh, people worked on the script before filming -- five, including Farrelly. And that may be why the idea falls apart early on. It's certainly why it's one of the worst scripts of the year.
Supposedly, the film is about three best friends -- Efron's Dean, Jermaine Fowler's Wes and Andrew Santino's JT -- from childhood who invented Ricky Stanicky as a scapegoat and excuse. Something went wrong? Ricky did it. But they're not friends, they're barely two-dimensional characters. In fact, Wes isn't even that.
Some have objected that Jermaine Fowler's Wes is a pot head who doesn't work. Were this not a raunchy comedy, we'd join them. It is strange that the only one with no ambition is also the only African-American male character in the film. It's even stranger that he's the second-billed performer in the film and one of the big three friends but is forever disappearing from the screen.
Dean, Wes and JT have used Ricky as an excuse repeatedly. And that includes to duck out on their romantic partners. Dean's girlfriend's reaction to the news of Ricky being a fake is very much covered. She almost jeporadized her career as a journalist due to the lie. She's outraged. JT's wife? She's ticked about being lied to. She rages. She tells JT he will be sleeping in the backyard for the next six months. Keith? We never see Keith react.
Who is Keith? The underwritten Wes' even more underwritten live-in boyfriend. At one point in the first half of the movie, Ricky has to pretend to be Wes' ex-boyfriend. Wes wasn't sure what he thought of Keith when they first started going out so he told Keith he'd just broken up with Ricky with the intent to pretend they got back together if Wes didn't want anything longterm with Keith. So made up Ricky has this whole conversation with Keith that he doesn't have with Dean's girlfriend or JT's wife.
You don't think Keith's going to have a reaction to finding out this is a lie?
It's a bad movie.
And Peter Farrelly's made a lot of bad films at this point. DUMB AND DUMBER, THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY and ME, MYSELF & IRENE are the classics. Every other comedy he's done is a failure. Are we going to blame the actors? Why do those three work? Because they contain actual characters. It's not just that you care about Lloyd, Mary and Charlie, you care about all the characters in the film -- even Magda. These were great characters.
But when you've got Gwenth Paltrow in a fat suit (SHALLOW HAL), you don't have a character to root for. You don't have anyone worth liking. Peter and his brothers were accused of being nothing but gross out merchants. Except for their trinity of comedy, all their other attempts at comedy have been failures.
Failures.
Pramila Patten.
As noted last week (here and here), she was not the objective fact finder the media tried to present her as but someone that the Israeli government invited in -- and this while they rejected other officials with the United Nations. She was not objective. She returned last week with a 'report' about something that the media tried to pass off as an 'investigation.' Rapes had happened October 7th, she insisted in her press conference about her non-report. Rapes had happened, she insisted. She had no proof. She had nothing but what the Israeli government told her. But she was happy to whore for the Israeli government that invited her in.
While the media celebrated her (and her lies) reality wasn't as kind and she's felt persecuted and misunderstood.
We're told this bothered her and that she tried to walk it back a bit yesterday when speaking to the United Nations Security Council by emphasizing assaults and rape on Palestinians by Israeli forces.
No, that doesn't balance anything.
She misled the world by pretending to prove something she hadn't. On Twitter, one fool after another cites her as proof that rapes were carried out on October 7th. Deluded clowns embrace her as their personal savior.
Reality: She doesn't add up and she never will.
She spoke to no one who was raped. She did not conduct an investigation of any kind. She went to Israel because the Israeli government wanted her there -- her, not anyone else with the UN.
She doesn't add up.
Nor do the rape claims. As two who have been assaulted, we're not buying that rape was carried out and that surviving victims exist who can't step forward -- that five months later can't step forward.
None of it adds up because it's always been a like put forward by the Israeli government in order to justify their war on Palestinians.
If there's a lesson here, it's that if it doesn't feel right, there's a probably a reason for that.