When chuckleheads teen Calvin and JJ (Young and Cagley) decide to prank Calvin's geeky little brother Baxter (Eash), they lamely come up with Movie 43 as a title for the most-banned movie on the internet. As Baxter searches for it, he finds various clips that take a childishly rude approach to male-female issues. A woman (Winslet) tries to get through a blind date with a man (Jackman) who has testicles on his neck. A guy (Pratt) tries to give his girlfriend (Faris) her wish to be pooped on. Robin (Long) faces other superheroes on an embarrassing speed-dating night. An idiot (Knoxville) kidnaps a leprechaun (Butler) for his pal's (Scott) birthday, but getting the pot of gold isn't easy. At another blind date, a couple (Berry and Merchant) gets into an increasingly high-stakes game of Truth or Dare. And a woman (Banks) struggles to cope with her boyfriend's (Duhamel) jealous cartoon cat.

Virtually every segment makes fun of male insecurity about sex in the most simplistic way possible. Even though the ideas behind each short are packed with possibilities, the filmmakers consistently go for the cheapest, ugliest and therefore unfunniest gags. And only a few segments feel properly formed. The clip in which Watts and Schreiber homeschool their son (White) to learn about life's pain strikes an amusingly anachronistic tone and almost has a good double-whammy ending. The dialog between Culkin and Stone as bitter exes is brilliantly deranged. There's squandered potential in the period-style short about a 1959 basketball coach (Howard) trying to convince his black players that they won't struggle to beat their white opponents. And Banks' segment, in which a teen (Bennett) is horrified when his friend (Moretz) gets her first period at least makes us laugh at how men panic about menstruation.

This segment also links to one of three advert spoofs. Others include an eerily dark satire about child labour and a ludicrously cheery ad for the iBabe, a music player shaped like a full-size naked woman. This one leads into a boardroom where the CEO (Gere) fails to grasp why this is a bad idea. Which kind of makes you wonder if there was a similar scene in the room where they came up with this movie. You can kind of understand actors coming onboard since the ideas are relatively witty. But you'd think the producers would have at least insisted that the segments were funny as well as nasty and cruel.

themes, language, nudity, violence, innuendo

25.Jan.13