Finally.. A Different Comedy !

Rating: 8/10 (6 May 2011)

OK, comedy is comedy. Meaning laughs. But humans are different. So comedy had to be as well. However, in the last years, the American mainstream comedies aren't. They are all about teen gross-out sex comedies, romantic - not too variant - comedies, the family, mostly horrible, comedies, the lately always-awful parodies, and the buddy comedies which is the best kind, or at least the more merciful. And there is no black comedies, unless we're talking about that status quo!
Thus, with the continuity of this production, nothing became different. Or maybe the different viewer, who got board of all of the above, came to a point where he finds nothing attractive, or unique. Simply, the molds have frozen, so the viewer's ambition. But this time, in Hot Rod, being different was the goods, and being hot wasn't in the title only.
It's a story of some underachievers, and their disordered journey to achieve. The thing is they could be teen, but their comedy isn't gross. It could be about the family love, yet in the most extraordinary ways. And it could be a parody, yet not out of movies or TV shows, just the decade of the 1980s.
Well, it isn't all un-formulaic, but maybe huge part of its comedy is. It handles the matters really creative, with so right sense of humor. The examples are many, and beautiful; how a reconciliation between 2 brothers turns into rap song-like, a familiar scene of gathering the team; walking challenging whatever, turns into a public riot.. etc.
Then ironies that can't be more ironic; The sick stepfather is like the evil guy. The big event at the climax, with the motorcycle's jump, is sponsored and transmitted by "Radio" station; this is wild and smart idea (it spoofs a matter that had always bewildered me; which is broadcasting footballs matches in the radio!). The rational owner of the station is anything but rational. His station, which he tries to make successful, broadcasts antique songs.
There is a funny and lovely nostalgia to the 1980s. Funny in terms of using the old customs, or using the Magnum's so macho mustache. And lovely in terms of using a rallied soundtrack of some of the 1980s most enthusiastic, largely rock, songs. It makes you think that the 1980s was the time of singing for hunting the dream, and fulfilling the hardest!
The method of acting relied on being serious while doing, and saying, entirely nonsense. That won 2 results. Firstly, it produced laughs, without turning the cast into buffoons. Secondly, it deepened the honesty of the story, giving those farcical characters a spirit of credibility, and true feel of sympathy; to be a movie about determined achievers-wanna be, not only a comedy that poke fun of them.
So it shows known-by-heart story by going off the known-by-heart roads, making its own special personality, to work comically, and a bit seriously too; noticing that the end isn't so happy, with the lead winning due to his try not his striking success, while not resorting to cheap and easy tricks. I know well movies that assumed themselves comic by using the F word heavily, or dealing with: farts, feces, urine, and semen.. Nothing else!
Save couple of lines that I didn't like, I enjoyed Hot Rod. It's where you laugh at something, then admire the novelty, and the ingenuity, of it. It managed to be another type of comedy; creative, unpredictable, hence rare. The ones who made it proved how wonderfully different they were. All of that allow one question to leap in my head: Why this didn't have a proper publicity?!