Rock the Kasbah
Pop quiz, Jimmy Jazz. Two movies get released the same weekend. One stars Vin Diesel and his flaming sword battling CGI witches. The other stars Bill Murray as a California musician manager who gets stuck in Afghanistan and unexpectedly discovers the next Carrie Underwood . . . if Carrie Underwood were a hijab-wearin' Pashtun villager. Which movie earns better reviews?
You'd probably bet your left tit or right nut on the Murray flick. Sure, The Last Witch Hunter would make more money, but Rock the Kasbah would be the critics' darling, right? Not in this fucked up universe. Believe it or don't, Witch Hunter sits at a cauldron-curdling 15% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer while Kasbah has only managed a shitiful 8%.
To put that into perspective, Leonard Part 6 has a 9% Tomatometer rating. From Justin To Kelly earned a 10%, and Showgirls, a movie so bad it spawned its own drinking game, hovers at 19%.
Director Barry "Son Of Levin" Levinson wishes he could chalk up Rock the Kasbah's epic assiness to the work of a sinister cabal of draw-Muhammad-and-we-keeeel-you zealots or some backfired false flag operation by the Hollywood Zionist machine, but Diner was a long time ago, Barry, and you have only yourself - and maybe writer Mitch "The Bitch" Glazer - to blame for this Qurancid dung bomb.
C'mon, Barry. You got Bill "Fucking" Murray, the man/myth/legend, comic tsunami and patron saint of the Chive, to play the smart-ass, sad sack, winning loser character Murray himself pioneered. You got "The Spruce" Bruce Willis to join in as a Bruce Willis-patented tough guy mercenary, "Franny And" Zooey Deschanel to cameo as a ditzy singer and Kate "Why'd You Have To Go And Get Fake Tits?" Hudson passing through as the quintessential hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold. You cribbed your plot from the real-life story of an Afghan woman who received death threats after not covering her hair and (gasp!) daring to dance on Afghanistan's version of American Idol.
You had everything you needed to make at least a halfway decent movie, and you shat the bed worse than Spud in Trainspotting.
Some people are claiming that it's too soon to make a fish-out-of-water comedy set in Afghanistan. "The country is still war torn." they say, "And Obama just declared that American troops will be on the ground there until at least 2017. Waaaahh!" Too soon? TOO SOON?! Afghanistan has been at war on one level or another pretty much perpetually for, oh, I don't know, let's call it the past thousand fucking years! If we had to wait for peace to rule the region, you couldn't film so much as a Burqas"R"Us commercial there any time in the foreseeable future.
No, the problem with Rock the Kasbah isn't some some bullshit, NPR-offending cultural insensitivity. The problem with Rock the Kasbah is that it's boooooring with a capital "Boo!"
October 25, 2015