by Linda Holmes

When Funny Or Die posted this video yesterday, after spending a day hyping it, expectations were high. It's an impressively large cast -- Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens, Nicole Sullivan, Brody Jenner, Carmen Electra, Queen Latifah, Lance Bass, Nicole Richie...a veritable cavalcade of ninnies, which is apparently supposed to be the joke.

The problem is that...the joke isn't much of a joke. There are a few good line readings from Sullivan, but for the most part, the rest of it is unfunny, wooden people being wooden and unfunny, apparently hoping to get laughs because they are lame and vapid. Brody Jenner saying "Keynesian economist" isn't as funny as it's supposed to be, because Brody Jenner is dumb, but can read scripted lines, so...so what?

There's just no idea here. Rich idiots having a pool party? Even one crashed by a couple of non-rich idiots? Who cares? The thing is five minutes long (and feels much longer) and it doesn't have a center. The Jenner joke seems to be that these people are secretly really smart, which could have been entertaining, but it's not pursued in the other...oh, four minutes and 45 seconds.

It sort of feels like there have been enough things like this -- celebrities doing drop-ins in unexpected places, like Matt Damon did with Sarah Silverman and so forth -- that now, you can't just say, "Hey, these famous people are taking time out to appear in an Internet-only venture!" This is way too on-the-nose, far too clearly begging to be made viral.

The difference between this and James Franco acting out scenes from The Hills is that the Franco bit contains a joke. It's not just, "Lookit! James Franco! Pass it around!"

There's no ironic distance at which Vanessa Hudgens becomes funny. Funny Or Die does some great stuff, but this is a miss.

categories: Internet

10:11 - April 9, 2009

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