Mother, May I Sleep with Treacher?

Run Ronnie Run on DVD 9/16/03

According to Kevin Parrott. It seems like 20 years since Cross & Odenkirk first announced it, and I'm sure they're sick of people asking about it. Unfortunately, the bootleg I saw wasn't that good. Since I'm in the mood to "repurpose" my old Blogspot crap, why not repost part of my review from last September...

I just watched a bootleg of Run Ronnie Run, the as-yet-unreleased Mr. Show movie about a drunken redneck moron who does a lot of stupid shit, becomes a TV star who does a lot of stupid shit, and then tries to win back his one true love while engaging in many activities that indicate a marked lack of brainpower. Bob Odenkirk and David Cross are right when they say it actually isn't that great, or at least this edit isn't. It has its moments, and narrator David Koechner could read the phonebook with that Backwoods Genetic Mishap accent and I'd laugh (almost as funny as his "Jerry Prastis" character), but it's just not as good as even the lesser episodes of the series. The Ronnie Dobbs sketches in 2 episodes of the show, maybe 15-20 minutes in all, had more laughs than this entire movie.

Part of the greatness of the show was that once a sketch had reached maximum laugh potential, they were already doing one of their patented transitions to the next sketch. But here the pacing is all off, you get pretty sick of Ronnie less than halfway through, and the handful of non-Ronnie bits don't work (including a Survivor parody and some sort of obscenity-laden Mary Poppins-type thing with Jack Black). It's just anvils thudding left and right for 86 minutes. It's like an SNL movie, and I can't tell you how much it hurts to say that.

But New Line needs to release it anyway, at least on video, because 30 seconds of Nikki Cox flouncing around in a shiny leopard-print bikini makes up for the rest of it. A still picture just doesn't capture the sheer seismic activity going on there. And Jill Talley there on the left, she ain't bad either. She looks even better now than she did on the show, however many years ago.

(So that was back in September. I'll probably still rent it when it comes out on DVD and freeze-frame that particular scene for "research" purposes, but I'm thinking it won't be worth buying. Here, read this glowing review of Hooray for America to balance things out.)

Posted by Jim Treacher at June 2, 2003 10:09 AM