"That's a good choice. You won't stop laughing. You'll laugh so your stomach will ache" said the officer when he saw 'Mr Bones' DVD in my hands. And I had no reason to think opposite.
DVD starts advertising new Schuster candid camera work. Well, for a trailer you can't put long jokes, so that's probably why these new pieces looked so pale and superficial, I told myself, still waiting for movie to start. Yankee Zulu was not a masterpiece, but had its charms, and some really great scenes. And Mr Bones was supposed to be much better.
However, you must be careful who will you trust. For someone who grew up with Austin Powers, matured with Porky's and American Pie and finds Scary Movie to be the ultimate comedy, Mr Bones can be a top pleasure to watch. But the rest of us have problems to understand what took Schuster eight years to finish the script. If he had completed it in first year of work, it would probably be much better, because bowel humor was not so popular then, and I guess we would be free of few tons of feces missiles precisely targeting actors' faces.
It is even more pity because the story isn't bad at all. Original - no, but comedy doesn't always ask for a brand new story; sometimes best scenes can be funny just because of similarity to something that everyone knows. Schuster also didn't fall into usual trap to focus too much on confrontation of two worlds. These movies were popular in 80's (Starman, Crocodile Dundee, E.T., Coming to America) and, as usual, too many copies make jokes repeat. Mr Bones contains few minutes of understandable misunderstandings, enough to stay unobtrusive (though one of them again concentrates on of body excretions, when he looks for toilette). And there is more logic in developing the plot than in many other modern movies, including Schuster's own ones.
Dialogues have never been Schuster's best side. In candid camera you can't plan them, so he sometimes neglects them in movies, too. The number of characters is rather big but each of them has personality (one more step forward for Schuster). And, unlike Schuster (co)author, Schuster actor was equal to his best roles. Music is used a lot, and it seems to be one of Hollywood influences (but this one well done).
Since Jamie Uys it seems that RSA movies made for foreign audience can't avoid a lot of animals. They may be exotic and thus attractive to Europeans and Americans (though for most of them cows and ducks are equally exotic as leopards), so it can help selling the movie. However, in Mr Bones birds fly only to drop their bowel contains on human noses (when Mel Brooks made that it was original and was integrated in the story), not to mention bigger animals. If a medium size bird is supposed to make a big laugh every time it empties its intestines, imagine what an epic movie would be made if someone could get a pterodactyl! (Remember, we're in the age of bird influenza...)
Apart from this type of humor (I use this word without believing in it), I noticed that the story, though settled in RSA (even some landscapes were the same or at least similar to Yankee Zulu), didn't show much about complicated relations between local races and nations as former Schuster's movies. And all this golf players and the whole movie can't hold a candle to a single scene taking part on golf terrain in Schuster's "Panic Mechanic". But since then Schuster obviously became a victim of Hollywood bowel-humor influence. I hope that a cure will be found soon enough.
