Just the ticket for your summer time-killing purposes
There are a few ways you can get yourself to wonder what you are doing with your life. One, read Sartre and/or Camus—and risk getting depressed. Two, bang your head against a cinderblock wall for 15 minutes, and risk having to go to the hospital. Three, watch Zoolander, a film satirizing the male-model world cowritten and directed, and starred in, by Ben Stiller. It’s one of those satires whose targets are already half a self-parody anyway, and you wonder at how much film-production money was put into this one.
I mean, it may seem I am bluntly dismissing this film, and I’m really not; you should consider it merely for the kind of fun you seek at an amusement park—the home of all intense noise, flashing lights, bad food, and seeming lack of socially redeeming features.
Stiller is the film’s “hero,” a dumb-as-nails male model who is supplanted in some kind of awards event by Hansel, played by Owen Wilson. There is a ridiculous main plot wherein a devious designer, Mugatu, played in one of his more outlandish turns by Will Ferrell, strives in labyrinthine fashion to brainwash Zoolander into assassinating the prime minister of Malaysia at a coming fashion show, to reverse the P.M.’s reforms whereby slave or child labor, or such, is no longer used to manufacture the clothes the designer world designs.
A noirish subplot where a mysterious informant tells Zoolander about this plot—and its predecessor plots throughout the centuries, putting the male fashion industry on a par with the major world-historical conspiracies like that alleged about the Freemasons—is a component of the larger, stupid story, but in itself is rather amusing.
There’s a Saturday-morning cartoon quality to so much of this story; you can see it fitting right in with some shenanigans by Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo. And in its edgier moments, Zoolander seems about as wacky-humored as the Austin Powers series (especially in such things as set design and in certain relatively inspired vignettes), but without quite the latter films’ inventiveness and sly fun. I think Stiller’s Tropic Thunder (2008), a satire of Vietnam War movies, shows a lot more smarts, where a satire needs them.
Not only are Stiller, Wilson, Ferrell, and a few other familiar names (like Jerry Stiller, as Ben/Zoolander’s crass manager) stars of the movie, but there are plenty of cameos—by Natalie Portman, Winona Ryder, Lenny Kravitz, Snoop Dogg…so many that, because I am not well versed on all of them, I can’t give you an exact number.
Interestingly, at least two of these actors— Ben Stiller and Wilson—also appeared in The Royal Tenenbaums, an artier and delicately melancholy film directed by Wes Anderson, which came out later the same year. Also interestingly, a producer who served for both films (each of which had multiple producers)—as different as these films are—is Scott Rudin.
