Film Critic Quote of the Week
"Dumped by its original distributor because of its title—apparently the word "Muslim" equals instant controversy and box office death for post-9/11 movies—Albert Brooks's Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World should, instead, have been ditched for not being very funny... despite its intended goal to portray Muslims as more than simply bomb-toting terrorists, this slapdash and weak-kneed film is almost completely stripped bare of any political content, offering up a strained fish-out-of-water story colored by tepidly subversive jokes about militant Muslims and anti-Jewish sentiment."
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Nick Shrager, in Slant Magazine. I saw the movie last week and it's so, so bad- it's not funny, it has nothing even remotely of interest to say, and it's a huge missed opportunity for a premise that could easily have been mined for laughs in the hands of a better comedian. Then again, a better comedian (Sacha Baron Cohen)
has been mining the premise for laughs for several years with his Borat character. And Brooks actually used to be funny.
Posted by Stephen Silver at January 17, 2006 04:16 PM