A review: “The Onion Movie”
In the last ten years, two humor outlets have established themselves as the dominant forces in their respective media. On TV, it’s The Daily Show; in print and online, it’s The Onion. It is hugely significant (and rarely noted) that both are based on the banality, triviality, and utter absurdity of the media.
Of the two, The Onion is the most insidious, because its attack on the form is so comprehensive. You can read Poynter study after Poynter study and never get the insight into the decline of daily print journalism you do in one classic issue of The Onion. The critique works two ways. First, there’s the tone; the vapid, get-both-sides-of-the-story balance and the hokey clichés. But then there’s the subjects: The Onion on the one hand takes the banality of most metro dailies to its logical conclusion, focusing on the truly trivial (”Area Man Confused by Buffet Procedure”) but on the other demonstrates vividly what the papers don’t provide, generally a sharp depiction of unspoken truths (”Barry Bonds Took Steroids, Reports Everyone Who Has Ever Watched Baseball”)—and in both cases manages to shed a more profound light on society than its subject.
Anyway, all that said, The Onion is not what it used to be, and it’s possible that a “Has The Onion jumped the shark?” story is overdue; to me, the operation has lost a lot of its originality and essentialness in recent years.
The Onion Movie, which was supposed to carry the franchise into new areas, is not going to help its image. The movie was finished four or five years ago, but never got released. Rumors came and went, and then, with an utter minimum of advance publicity, it finally came out, surreptitiously, on DVD only, this week.
I don’t know anything about its troubled history, but I do know why it didn’t get released, and that’s because it may be the most unfunny 90 or so minutes of filmed human activity since, Oh, I don’t know, Sophie’s Choice. The tragic thing is that they couldn’t even take the Onion brand off of it; what (lame-ass) story there is is set up around the set of an Onion nightly newscast.
In that framing story, the anchor of the show, played by Broadway star Len Cariou with no apparent humor sprachgefuhl, gets increasingly upset about corporate product-placement in his newscast. This is all done with such heavyhandeness and poor execution that any potential for satire is lost. The product in question is a movie called Cockpuncher, starring Steven Seagall, who appears here laboriously trying to send himself up. It doesn’t work because … well, basically because Steven Seagall, he’s kinda … fat now. And his face is such a fleshy mass of uncomprehending self-regard that it doesn’t work as a self-send-up. (And Cockpuncher in any event actually doesn’t look as bad as his recent movies.)
This wholly unengrossing story is told amid an inconsistent melange of news reports, spoof commercials, some free-floating sketches, and a few bits of bootless extra-cinematic foofara. (In one sketch, there’s a pointless appearance by a well-dressed polite black guy who asks where the local library is. The scene cuts to the inside of a movie theater where a row of what are supposed to be Nation of Islam types watch approvingly. It’s not that amusing, and the cheap set makes it worse. This movie makes Mad TV look like Woody Allen.)
Outside of not being funny, having crappy production values, lacking focus or consistency, being boring, and the fact that none of the people who star in it are watchable comic actors, The Onion Movie bears the marks of two disastrous decisions on the part of its makers. First, and most pathetically, the movie could not figure out how to transfer the Zen of the paper to the screen. The logical thing would have been to devise a way to transfer the daily journalism satire to TV news, and just do 90 minutes of fake newscast, but The Daily Show and The Colbert Report do that a lot better. The movie compromises by having the newscaster read 15- or 30-second snippets of some of The Onion’s greatest hits. Because these are newspaper spoofs, they invariably fall flat, and earns the movie exactly none of the carryover goodwill of the digital version’s audience.
And that leads to the second big problem, which is that all of that leaves no real substance to the framing story. Since “The Onion Nightly News” is made up of dumb news stories, there’s no tension in its being debauched by corporate overseers. All the paper and digital operations can do to protect their brand is hope that the DVD release flies under the radar of public perception.
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These are excellent points. So of course I’m here to dispute one example. Saying “Barry Bonds took steroids” is about as far as you can get from an unspoken truth, either in the general public discourse or in the media. The assumption that Bonds took steroids is so pervasive, not just implicitly but explicitly, throughout the sports media, that if anything what has been lost is the fact that he has never tested potitive, there has never surfaced any solid evidence, no one has ever said they witnessed him doing so, and despite baseball reporters personally loathing Bonds above everyone in sports in the last fifty years, they haven’t been able to nail him. But the standard of reporting is so low in sports — the line between reporting and opinion so barely existent — that it is not stopped the media from successfully convicting him in the minds of everyone through relentless character assassination.
(n.b.: I don’t give a damn about Bonds. I’m just entirely sick of sports reporters thinking their hatred of Bonds is relevant to me.)
Anyway, I think that Bonds piece in the Onion demonstrates one of the ways in which they’ve declined in recent years: a willingness to settle for the obvious joke, the development of which contains no surprises.
“Jump the shark” seems to be broadening from its original meaning of a specific ill-considered decision that marks the beginning of the end, to a more general indicator of recognized decline.
I really don’t agree. I think The Onion is still on top of it’s game, I laugh at it every week. Have you seen their web video, The Onion News Network? It’s hilarious and really does capture that zen of the website/paper perfectly. I’m sure that movie sucks, but it’s 6 years old and made by Hollywood so how can it have anything to do with The Onion of today?
I didn’t know the phrase was that specific; subject for further research. isn’t it idiomatic at this point to say, ‘curb your enthusiasm’ jumped the shark in its fourth season?
Hmm. The first several years I heard the phrase, it meant the specific point when it became clear that something had lost its way, derived from — forgive me if I am telling you what you already know — the two-part episode of Happy Days wherein Fonzie attempts to jump over a shark with his motorcycle. The idiom may have broadened and the meaning become more general in the inevitable manner of idiom; I just hadn’t seen it before.
Or rather, water skiing, not motorcycling.
Yeah, the original etmology of “jump the Shark” was the show was never the same after that. It wasn’t just a bad episode- it went past a point of no return where it couldn’t get back. The storytelling in particular is broken.
Other examples:
X-Files “Gethsemane” where we’re supposed to swallow Mulder seemingly kills himself after being convinced that aliens were never real by one faked alien and five minutes of exposition from a shady DoD operative. And then the next season, Mulder still doesn’t believe in aliens, despite all the evidence the SHOW has given us… and then by the end of the season he believes again because of the cute telepathic boy.
Picket Fences- episode three of season two, where Mayor Puget, after being convicted of second degree murder, explodes. Spontaneously combusts. A clear signal that the writers were going to use the show’s quirkiness to exit out of complicated storylines instead of plowing through.
Homicide- well, once Pembleton lost his war with God by begging him for Bayliss’ life, did the show even have a point?
Oz- Schillnger’s son getting off for the kidnap/murder of Beecher’s kid. That’s where the show went from being dark to being obviously dark, and torturing the characters in predictably contrived ways that the audience was always six or seven steps ahead of.
I’m not familiar with all of those shows, but those are god ones. For me, with “Curb,” it came when Larry David tried to create confusion between “Being on the TV show survivor” and “being a Holocaust survivor,” which was stupid. For “The Wire,” it was of course season five, episode one. Ditto for “The West Wing,” though that’s a different situation.