Ex

Here's how The Ex was made: someone took a big shit. Someone else ate the shit, and then barfed it up. Then it sat until maggots infested it. It's at this point that some Hollywood grassfucker found it in a dumpster and thought it'd make a great movie. So he smeared it all over paper, and a whole other group of grassfuckers either read it and liked it, or didn't bother and just said they did.

When it comes to comedy, the difference between the dipshits in L.A. who read a script and those who don't is zero. That city is infested with more humorless, screw-up-their-ass, self-interested half-witted dimfucks than the hookers by the railroad tracks are with crabs. At least the crabs are small and quiet. The movie parasites scurry around sucking off host projects, draining the life from original ideas, and clamping onto any project with a pulse. The Ex must have looked to them like a 500-pound man with vast forests of pubic hair as tall as the redwoods would to pubic lice.

This movie has all the hallmarks of hackneyed, worthless, idle, greedy fuckwads with laptops. There is not a single fresh idea here, and it forgets to put punchlines on its setups. Instead, it's a sloppy assemblage of cruelty posing as humor, and premise as joke.

Zach Braff and Amanda Peet play a pair of uninteresting, self-absorbed yuppies about to have a baby and completely unaware that this little "miracle" happens to millions of folks, not just them. It amazes me that screenwriters and directors who want you to give a shit about their characters can only come up with shallow, unpleasant, impetuous assholes who don't even have interesting jobs or hobbies. I guess they are secretly hoping that we care about people like them.

Well, when Zach loses his job as a cook, the couple has to move to Ohio from New York City. Supposedly, Braff really loves NYC and this move is a big sacrifice, but the movie doesn't bother showing us that. They just tell us and expect us to fill in the blanks. Before childbirth, of course, Peet is some sort of social-working lawyer. That's the shitty cliche the movie uses to tell us she's a good person. We're also supposed to like Braff because his coworkers say he's the only guy who will stand up to a prick boss, despite the fact the rest of the movie is about what a big fucking selfish coward and weenie he is. Never mind that for the rest of the movie, neither of them does a single good or decent thing. Braff looks out for himself and Peet just pouts.

Anyway, Braff becomes an ad executive at some ad agency that is supposed to be humorously new-agey. I suppose having some jokes after the set up of it being new-agey would have helped it be funny, but come on, you can't expect the dicks in Hollywood to do all the work, can you?

After it fails to set up the workplace gags and fails to capitalize on the "wacky" cast of coworkers and the father-in-law who thinks Braff's a failure, The Ex piles on handicap-guy jokes. Jason Bateman plays a dude in a wheelchair who once dated Peet and is now Braff's boss. He still wants her, and in yet another unfortunate attempt at humor, they make him a dick who can really walk. Hey asshole filmmakers: that was funny for Guy Caballero, but it ain't funny here. Bateman eventually gets hit by a bus, thereby really crippling him. Oh man, any time your big scene is a guy getting hit by a bus, you have to want to kill yourself for being such a schmuck.

But The Ex has no clue. Not about feelings, jokes, what an audience will root for or care about. We're supposed to think Braff and Peet's marriage is in jeopardy. She moves out on him, she tells him he's a jerk. And then at the end she says she would never leave him. Oh, I see. She'd just move out and call him an asshole. But leave him? Never. Braff beats the shit out of Bateman. It's squirm-inducing and powerfully unfunny for the very reason the hacks behind this shit think it is: because making fun of handicap people is taboo. Well, it's taboo for a reason: because it's so fucking unfunny. At what point during the scene that Bateman falls down a flight of stairs was I supposed to laugh? Remember, we don't know he's faking it yet, but we do know that Braff is an asshole.

Ultimately, Braff and Peet move back to New York because, I guess, his heart is there, and Ohio was so unbearable. Again, neither of these ideas is every substantiated by the script, so I don't understand why I should be so fucking glad for the miserable couple.

I fucking hate movies that think just putting in new-agey people is as funny as making good and original jokes about new-ageism. Or that wacky workplaces are funny, even if nothing funny ever happens at them. Or to give the main characters such shallow aspirations and superficial personalities. You've got to be a total hack to write such lame premises and than not even be able to think of a gag about them. But, that's the shit that gets made, because Hollywood's grassfuckers are even less creative than the worst writers. And the more obvious the setup, the more likely it is that they'll get it. One Finger for the godawful The Ex.