Pun Salad

I don't think very hard about the reasons, but it's difficult for good movies to be made from good books. Even the sucesses seem to be a step down in quality. (For example, The Princess Bride was a fantastic book; the movie was pretty good, but not as good as the book.)

It's even harder, I think to translate humor between media; it's unusully context-dependent. That's why we say things like, "You had to be there, I guess."

All this is leading up to say: this movie isn't very good. Even though Dave Barry is one of the funniest guys on the planet. The book on which this movie is based is very funny. But it doesn't translate well.

The movie is (essentially) a bunch of skits on the general theme of guyness. The actors (except for the immortal John Cleese) aren't comically gifted. Dave appears as a narrator, and he's not bad. It would have been better to just have had him onscreen reading his book out loud. Then we could have turned the picture off and it would have been like a book on tape. That might have worked.