Review of The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980) by Carolina V — 30 Apr 2009

Went to a screening of this for film class, as I stated around the boards yesterday, and it was pretty good. The mockumentary style is interesting and makes the time with the Bushmen tribe really enjoyable, plus the landscape looks really nice. Not sure if it was actually shot in Africa or not, but it's a really pretty film. The direction is actually really good and the humor mostly works, though the amount of slapstick (or is it screwball? I'm not sure) really grates at some points and is really enjoyable during others. As I drove home today I recalled probably one of the best uses of slapstick in a film, Unfaithfully, Yours (the review is coming, Thor!), and this film had a few sequences that really worked on the same level that final sequence in Unfaithfully worked, but I think the reason that sequence worked so well was because it was largely one of the only uses of slapstick (maybe the only) in that film, whereas slapstick was very abundant here. I had thought there would be more outright satire after about twenty minutes in, but that was not completely the case, actually I think most of the direct satire was finished after they got the female out of the city, so that sort of disappointed me. The disjointed narrative is okay, nothing that really adds to the film as a whole, but the noticeable change in direction style from the common story to the Bushmen sequences. The narration works surprisingly well too and was probably my favorite part of the film, it kind of reminded me of that one Herzog film I watched. The performances were not all that special either, though the guy who played the main Bushman guy was pretty good at what he did, I guess. Oh yeah and that guy who played the rival to the love interest was really funny and gave a pretty above average performance. The film is a good enough time, too much slap stick for it to be a comedy I can see myself going back to numerous times, but it was a fun enough watch. A lot of the sequences really reminded me of that show "The Banana Splits" too, which made me happy because I used to enjoy that show a good deal.

C+ or 3.28936724612300456.