Fred and Vinnie

2011 comedy

Rating: 8/20

Plot: The titular Fred is an awkward almost-successful actor living in L.A. The titular Vinnie is his friend and pen pal, an overweight agoraphobic guy with a parrot. When that parrot dies, Vinnie decides to move out to L.A. himself to attempt a career in showbiz. He says with Fred, and it doesn't work out too well.

I'm going to reread this later and feel really bad about writing it. I really don't want to make fun of Fred Stoller, the writer and star. You know him even if you don't know the name, and chances are, you're even usually happy to see him in the small roles he usually plays, like Ray Romano's cousin on the Everybody Loves Ray Romano show. What you learn from this movie is that you're not going to be happy seeing him for about an hour and a half. In fact, his acting is awful in a way that made me embarrassed for him and manages to out-bad the writing in this movie. And the writing is bad. When the funniest part of the movie is a bad subtitle--"Wow, Nolan Ryan, Ted Griffin, Barry Bonds," says Fred as he's looking through Vinnie's baseball cards--then it's a bad comedy. This feels very much like a first draft comedy, the kind of writing where they thought, "We'll look at this again later and add some funny parts," but then ran out of time. Either that, or it's entirely improvised by a bunch of people who didn't realize they were making a comedy. I just don't understand how a guy who's been in the business this long can write a gag about a movie called Ski Potty and not only think it's good enough to stay in the movie but be a recurring joke. Of course, after a while, I actually kind of wished I was watching Ski Potty. But back to Stoller. Again, I don't feel good about picking on the guy, but I don't like anything about him in this movie. I don't like how he holds his arms, how he runs, how he talks (kind of like Ray Romano), how he blinks, or how he clears his throat. I don't like how he says "Huuuuuuh?" after a character asks him if he's finished in the bathroom. I've heard playing yourself in a movie or television show is really difficult, but you'd think Fred Stoller could at least pull off "human being" convincingly enough. Nobody else is any good either, and Scott Chernoff, playing a stereotypically gay man, might even be worse. Stoller's not the only Fred in this movie. Fred Willard, who seems to be popping up everywhere, makes a very brief appearance, one that just might be more embarrassing than his Paul Reubens-esque theater behavior a couple years ago. After seeing a 7.2 for this on imdb, I thought maybe I was about to stumble upon a hidden gem of an independent comedy. Instead, I'm wondering how I even finished it.

If you're reading this, Fred Stoller, I'm really sorry. At least that subtitle error was kind of funny though, right?