Your Highness: Dung Delicious

In the past fifteen years, I have watched thirty movies.  I read, listen to, and watch movie reviews obsessively, but since the line “the Fourth of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day the world declared in one voice: ‘We will not go quietly into the night!’” I haven’t been able to stomach the silver screen.  Perhaps if it was just corny and trite, I would have been able to soldier on until the release of The Fast and the Furious five years later.  But the producers of Independence Day sullied Dylan Thomas, the coolest poet ever, and that is a transgression I couldn’t condone by shelling out ten dollars to see The Piano with a sorority girl.  Not that Campion’s masterful tale of love and lust in the nineteenth century should be compared to either of the aforementioned rotting bags of rhino dung, but since Independence Day all movies come glossed with prosaic goo.  No matter how sublime the acting, all motion pictures look like another installment of Scary Movie. 

That is why I rejoiced when one of my homeslices at AltDaily.com posted the trailer for Danny McBride’s (Kenny Powers) new epic fantasy farce Your Highness.  Even the trailer is NSFW (read: deliciously bawdy), so please hide your kids and your conservative peoples before viewing.

You see, pop culture that takes its self seriously is doomed to be lifeless and derivative.  Movies like 1977’s The Kentucky Fried Movie are good because they know they are bad.  They know all movies are bad, and from that self-depreciatory posture greatness is born. 

Your Highness, which will be released next spring, trades heavy in foul language, Natalie Portman in a thong, and Natalie Portman in a thong.  It is the classic tale of a not-so-charming and not-so-skinny rogue, questing out into the wilderness with his hot (James Franco) and noble  brother to rescue a damsel in distress.  The jokes are juvenile and precocious, written and acted by artists who know they are on to something.  The special effects look surprisingly real, and like all great comedies, things like plot and character development are mocked openly.         

Will this be the start of a movie viewing renaissance for me?  With winter beginning to darken our afternoons, falling in love—even with movies—in the springtime sounds like a fine hope to cling to.