Jim Carrey has proved himself, to me at least, that he is a friggin smart and talented person. He understands physical comedy obviously, since he basically like invented this whole new crazy breed of it with “classics” like The Mask, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, Dumb & Dumber and my favorite, The Cable Guy. And he can pull off drama, with movies like The Truman Show, Man on the Moon and of course, the fucking brilliant Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Minds. And need we not forget the role that truly jump-started his career, which was starring as old Joe Wenteworth in Simon Birch. It seemed to me that in the late 90s, people were either a ‘Jim Carrey’ dude or an ‘I don’t like Jim Carrey’ dude. I was a medium sized ‘Jim Carrey’ dude. Basically, if Jim Carrey was in a new movie, that didn’t necessarily mean I would go out and see it ‘sight-unseen.’ But after seeing Eternal Sunshine, I am a ‘Hell yes let’s go out and see the new Jim Carrey movie sight unseen’ dude. And to me, when that movie came out, along with The Truman Show and Man on the Moon, it made every one of his prior performances better. It was like overnight, all of his movies before Eternal Sunshine had been givin’ this extra kick. Because I guess what it comes down to is that an actor’s motivation is important to me. Think of it like listening to music. You hear Abbey Road and really dig it initially. Then, you find out that some fifteen-year-old punk kid who hadn’t experienced anything wrote the album by just saying meaningless shit that rhymed into a microphone, and it wasn’t written by The Beatles. It would lose a little something. For me, it would lose a lot and I wouldn’t bother listening to it any more. Well that’s the same for movies. When I know an actor is intelligent and really tries to make their characters dynamic, then I can sit back and relax and put my full faith into the actor and their movies. And sure, everyone fucks up, but with an intelligent actor I can see the effort being made. The Majestic is an example of this. That movie really really sucked, but Jim was trying man, and it was a good try, a try that made sense. For idiots who happen to be actors, I’m just left completely confused. So this movie, Fun with Dick and Jane. It’s not an INCREDIBLE movie but, as promised, it is fun. The film starts out with a pretty cool 50s style nostalgic opening. Things happen like Jim Carrey jumps and it freezes and THIS IS DICK is printed on screen. And it would be really cool, but then they start taking advantage of their coolness by saying stuff like THIS IS THE DOG and then it’ll unfreeze and the dog will bark and it’ll freeze again and say HE LIKES TO BARK, and the dog has no part in the movie at all really. So yeah, there’s some dumb stuff like that. The movie follows Dick, who gets promoted to Vice President of this huge corporation called Globodyne. And then the day he gets promoted, a huge “Enron-like” scandal emerges and the company tanks and everyone working for it is unemployed and without pensions and stuff like that. And the mom quit her job unfortunately because Dick had just been promoted. So yeah, needless to say, they turned to what any other white collar corporation executive would turn to had they lost their job: crime. With the fear of losing their house, Dick and Jane begin to rob banks and gas stations and jewelry stores and head shops and Starbucks and mean neighbors and eventually, Alec Baldwin. To me, this is a kick-ass idea for a movie, one which I wished I had come up. In my defense, the original Fun with Dick and Jane with Jane Fonda was made in the late 70s, before my mom and dad had sex to have me. I haven’t seen the original, but from what I can gather, the two versions have very little in common. Here are my two favorite things about this movie. The first I’ve already touched on, and that is Jim Carrey. To sum it up, Jim Carrey makes me love physical comedy when I usually see myself as not loving physical comedy. I think he’s essentially re-invented it, and you can tell especially with this movie. And the other thing I love about Fun With Dick and Jane, is that at the end of the movie, their crime spree is never resolved. And what I mean is that all the robberies during the movie, they’re never caught for and they’re not even talked about. Basically, the movie doesn’t make Dick and Jane out to have done anything wrong. They needed money, so they stole from places, and then they screw the guy who made them poor out of money and the movie ends. THAT’S the movie. If you have any sense of common “movie-ness”, you would expect them to get caught, or have to return the money they stole or something. But no. It’s just something they did. AND THAT’S AWESOME! If more movies just let people do bad things without learning lessons from it, then we’d all be better off as a species.

The film is set in the year 2000 and the big kicker at the end is supposed to be that now all their buddies that got screwed at Globodyne are now going to work for this “really cool” company called Enron. Maybe I’m just not a fan of corporation jokes, if there are such things, but I thought this was a pretty cheap and stupid gag. Even though I guess the whole movie was supposed to be a reaction to these recent scandals, I thought it could have done without it. They even thank all the executives involved with the scandals in the credits, which I guess is kind of funny. Judd Apatow wrote the screenplay for this movie, and I wish he would start writing more stuff like he did with Freaks & Geeks. That’s one of the most well written TV shows ever in my mind, but Apatow’s movies never seem to click AS WELL with me. 40 Year Old Virgin and Anchorman were overrated to me, however I did like Celtric Pride and  Heavyweights a lot. I don’t know. People should go see Fun With Dick and Jane movie though. I thought it was really funny.