Smiley Face
December 30, 2007
Rated: R Runtime: 85 min Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
Bad movies are, many times, fun to write about. You can get a rant going and the words just flow right off the fingertips like bile out of your gall bladder. But that isn’t the case with all bad movies. Comedies, specifically, are just painful to write about when they suck. Comedies don’t rely on acting, cinematography, continuity, special effects, or any of the other things that movies need. No, all a comedy needs is a funny script and actors with good comic timing. And when those elements are missing, the result is something that is more lame than awful.
Such is the case with Smiley Face. I must confess that I had at least some hope for this one. The cast was a pretty solid one and the “buzz” on the movie seemed legit. But, no. It just sucked. Only one movie has ever been so bad that I quit watching it before it was over but this one came really close to that point. Some nugget of journalistic integrity, however, guilted me into enduring this one until the end.
The details, if you really want them, are as follows: Jane (Anna Faris) is a pothead. She has things to do one day which include making it to an acting audition, paying the power bill, and buying more pot. That’s pretty much it. As you might have guessed, however, things go wrong. For starters, she accidentally (probably for the first time in her life) gets explosively high. Some other things then get added to that list of things to do but it really doesn’t matter by this point. Jane stays high for the entire duration of the movie. When in this state, she is unable to do anything right and thus, I’m sure, is where the writer and director thought all the comedy would pour forth from. Somebody should have told the people in charge that a girl acting high and screwing things up is NOT automatically funny.
You have to get imaginative with the gags. And it would help if the main character wasn’t alone most of the time acting and pratfalling in a vacuum.  Another helpful hint would be that characters wanting to get high are much funnier than characters who are already high. Harold and Kumar go to White Castle, for instance, followed all these tips and it was a FANTASTIC movie.
Unless death is your only other choice, JUST SAY NO to this pile o’ cinematic road apples. Hell, I might even consider a slight maiming rather than submit to wasting another 85+ minutes of my life on crap like this.  I think now I’ll go watch a Cheech & Chong marathon to see if I can get the taste of this one out of my mouth.
Popularity: 24% [?]
Seen it? How many stars do you give it?
(1 votes, average: 1 out of 5)
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>> Only one movie has ever been so bad that I quit watching it before it was over but this one came really close to that point.
Which one was that?
m19
Fortunately, the one movie I couldn’t finish is one that, to my knowledge, has not yet gone into distribution (and hopefully never will). As such, I can’t comment publicly on it. To be fair, though, it *was* much worse than Smiley Face. There wasn’t a single member of the cast and crew of that one who had ever had any experience making a movie. That should tell ya all you need to know.