Suzanne and I took advantage of our temporary kid-free status and saw Year One over the weekend.
This movie has been lambasted by critics, but we both really enjoyed it. It's pretty much exactly what you think it is--Jack Black being Jack Black, Michael Cera being Michael Cera. Also featuring David Cross as Cain, Paul Rudd as Abel, Hank Azaria as Abraham, Christopher Mintz-Plasse as Isaac, and, in what's really a star turn for a criminally underappreciated actor, Oliver Platt as the High Priest of Baal.
I suppose it's true that the movie is not pee-your-pants funny, but it is a lot of fun. So if I wasn't roaring with laughter the whole time, I had a stupid grin on my face throughout the movie. I thought of it as kind of a cross between Spies Like Us and History of the World Part 1. Works for me!
And here's something else I enjoyed: this is quite a subversive little movie. A lot of reviews have acted like it's really dumb to have these primitive hunter/gatherers cavorting around in Biblical times, but they've missed the whole point of the movie, which is this: religion is stupid.
I ahven't seen a movie that so thoroughly holds religion up to ridicule since, well, maybe ever. Our heroes encounter three distinct religions: their own hunter/gatherer religion, early Judaism, and Baal worship. All are shown to have ridiculous ideas and silly prohibitions that our bumbling heroes break, usually intentionally, with no consequences whatsoever.
It's very clever on the part of the filmmakers--since Judaism is the only extant religion they mock, and Jews, even the conservative nutcase ones, can pretty much take a joke, they managed to avoid the kind of huge controversy that would have ensued if the conservative nutcase Christians thought they were being made fun of.
I give it a big thumbs up--not brilliant, but a fun night at the movies.
