Goodness Gracious Great Balls of Fury

Let me begin by saying I am sorry for the long delay in blogging. I have actually been watching movies but I have just not taken the time to write a review. Additionally, my co-blogger Matthew has been asleep at the wheel for quite a while now. I know he is busy decorating his new digs with Jonas Brothers posters and attending speed dating seminars, but there is really no excuse for either of us to have not written a couple of paragraphs for our legions of fans!

A couple of nights ago I came upon a real gem of a movie called Balls of Fury. This movie, written by Thomas Lennon and Robert Garant of Reno 911! fame, was just terrible enough to keep me laughing and simultaneously put my visiting mother-in-law into a ping-pong induced coma for 70 minutes. The problem is, I am not sure if I was laughing because the M-I-L was snoring like a Sesame Street character or because the jokes were so obvious and generally involved a kick to the grapes.

The star of this movie was Dan Fogler of whom I had never previously heard. I thought this guy was OK as the star and for some reason a lot of B level movie stars signed on to participate in this picture. The big draw for this movie was everyone's favorite movie star and cultural icon Christopher Walken. His character really made no sense and his lines were poor at best, but with the voice and the mannerisms and the delivery, Christopher Walken again made this into a memorable character. I, of course, was really hoping that at some point he would say "I have a fever, and the only prescription is more ping-pong," but that never came to fruition.

James Hong was in this movie as the blind master/teacher of ping pong. I remember him best as David Lo Pan in Big Trouble in Little China but it is hard to believe that that movie came out 22 years ago. If any of you are Dukes of Hazzard fans, I also remember him appearing in an episode of that show. I wonder if James Hong ever tells his agent he is being type cast? I mean, how come he always has to play the Asian guy?

The real reason I wanted to type a few paragraphs about Balls of Fury is because I am amazed that a picture like this not only got made, but also was released in theaters, printed onto a blank DVD and even purchased by HBO for home broadcast. I would have loved to be in on the creative meetings of this sales job. I can just see Thomas Lennon explaining that they have a ping pong picture that stars an unknown overweight actor with frizzy hair and James Hong. I am sure that the movie studio exec (or more probably, his secretary) said "OK, now what is the real movie you want to talk about" and then Lennon probably played the trump card by saying "we've also got Christopher Walken."

I don't want to be too hard on this movie though, I did laugh quite a bit. But I think that Lennon and Garant may have watched way too much America's Funniest Home Videos when they were growing up (I know I did). Although that show was an important part of the American experience in the 90's, and put an unknown host named Bob Saget on the comedy map (I don't recognize the existence of Full House), pretty much every week it was just 25 minutes of kicks, football throws, baby punches, and head-butts to the scoring zone (crotchal region). Balls of Fury had a number of re-occurring kicks and punches to the grapes along with a series of prat falls and "blind guy facing the wrong way" sight jokes (blind guy sight jokes...get it).

As for the cinematography on the ping pong scenes, this was a part of the movie I really enjoyed. I thought they did a good job of making the ping pong scenes look real, even though we all know that ping pong is not played with that speed and accuracy. In fact, when I was a little tiny baby blogger I recall that the home based rules of "pong" included hitting the ball back in forth until the full word P-I-N-G-P-O-N-G was spelled out just to determine who served first. At our home table, it was quite a feat just to keep the ball in play long enough to spell out that word. Not even in my foggy sports hero memory (imagination?) are there any reels of my father and I hitting smashes and lobs back and forth for five minutes.

So my verdict on Balls of Fury is....it will put your mother-in-law in a ping pong induced coma in less than three minutes - Guaranteed!

Warren