Thursday, June 18, 2009
One hundred years from now, when the history of American surrealism finally is recorded, Land of the Lost undoubtedly will warrant a chapter —both in the form of its original Saturday afternoon Sid and Marty Krofft television show and this Brad Silberling cinematic soufflé. Not satisfied with a gloriously cheese-bag premise, both the movie and the show offer brilliant inventiveness, filling in rubber-suit sci-fi with unforgettable details, like the part-funny, part-frightening Sleezak and a lost dimension (not in the past or the future, but slightly to the left of ours) where pop culture icons dot the sand; it’s a place even Salvador Dalí would envy.
Unfortunately, Silberling’s film does suffer from Will Ferrell’s overdone shtick. Though funny, Ferrell has become the comic cul-de-sac where campy deadpan jokes go to slowly die. Luckily, however, the movie is owned by Danny McBride as Will Stanton and Jorma Taccone as the hilarious Cha-Ka, who triumph in a scene involving psychotropic plants, French kissing, and a giant boiled crab. The sets strike an equally silly balance between high art and low camp, and any film that ridicules the Today Show and Matt Lauer so relentlessly certainly is making important contributions to cultural criticism as well.
It’s absurdist cinema that’s not really for kids. And though it may take a little too long to get sufficiently goofy, the film is confident enough to allow Ferrell to pass unscathed through the digestive system of a dinosaur. Maybe it’s not as inventive as Mel Brooks in his prime, but it’s pure anarchy, and that’s a land that big studios lost a long time ago.
For showtimes, check the Independent's movie listings, here.