"Quit worrying about your health. It'll go away." - Robert Orben

***

Watching Epic Movie is like watching a Singapore play - cheap shots abound.


Epic Movie was fantastic, with an intellectual depth that belied its low brow marketing. Social commentary abounded.

Among other things there was a penetrating critique of racism, lambasting of George Bush's Imperialism, and a warming paen to sexual equality by showing how women, by peeing while standing up, conquer the final barrier preventing them from achieving full sexual equality with men. All this in addition to satirising the movies it was parodying.

Epic Movie sent a moving social message about the worth and validity of Gay Marriage by allegorising it through the touching and sanctified love of an anthropomorphic beaver and a faun. Social conservatives might not be able to see how two men might love each other, but in the unfamiliar context of cross-species inter-breeding in a C-grade Hollywood flick, the hollowness of impassioned pleas to prevent gay men from marrying is crystal-clear.

There is also much seditious religious commentary about how God tests us by giving us the wrong information. I never expected to see the interrogation of religion in a show written by 2 of the 6 writers of Scary Movie!

Issues of earth-shattering importance aside, the writers also turn their wit on less pressing but no less shocking areas of society. The (Evil) White Bitch is depicted as using a Mac, and the parallels with real life cannot be ignored. The amount of time she takes to realise what her email means exposes Macs as the glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults that they are.

Even the young, the presumed target audience of the movie, are not spared in the movie's biting take on society. There is commentary on how empty the life of the Internet generation is, and how touching cold plastic (Macs) and interacting through Myspace cannot substitute for face to face human interaction, as well as how looking at computer monitors for the whole day is causing our linguistic skills to degenerate. The use of music videos ad nauseum to drive the plot also puts paid to the claims that MTV is a form of entertainment; rather, it is shown to be a stupefying and repetitive medium lacking aesthetic or moral value.

Brilliant show, really.


(Tom Yum Goong review

"One of the main villains in the show is a post-op transsexual. In one of the movie's pivotal scenes, she battles discrimination, prejudice and loathing from the rest of the family to emerge triumphant and head her family business. She does this by poisoning her 2 male rivals. She also fights with a whip in one of the movie's last scenes, thus showing that post-op transsexuals are every bit as capable and ruthless as before their operation. She also has the show's only makeout scene, showing that even villains are capable of overcoming prejudice and social conditioning to appreciate post-op transsexuals for who they really are."