1) Dane Cook performs at Philips Arena.
2) Corndogorama returns to East Atlanta Village.
3) Richard Blais gives a cooking demonstration at Variety Playhouse.
4) Woodruff Arts Center hosts STIR (Sounds Through Ideas and Rhymes).
3) Dad’s Garage Theatre stages Beach Blanket Improv.
(Photo by Tony Duran)
Partly because it was not pre-screened for critics, today I saw My Best Friend’s Girl (reviewed here), a cookie-cutter romantic comedy with some surprisingly nasty sweetener. Mega-successful stand-up comedian Dane Cook plays Tank, a customer satisfaction representative who moonlights as a “professional asshole:” he hires out to take women on terrible “rebound dates” so they’ll appreciate their less-lousy ex-boyfriends and go back to them. Tank’s best friend and roommate Dusty (American Pie’s Jason Biggs) asks him to “tank” his beloved co-worker Alexis (Kate Hudson, apparently consigned to rom-com hell in perpetuity). Wouldn’t you know it, Tank falls for Alexis and rethinks his horndog ways.
A Bill Murray or a Vince Vaughn (heck, even a Seann William Scott) could have struck gold as Tank, but for Cook, the role provides little more than an extension of his swaggering frat-boy image from his stand-up comedy. My Best Friend’s Girl tries to make us sympathize with Tank, even playing John Hiatt’s “Have a Little Faith In Me” on the soundtrack, but we can’t bring ourselves to care. For several years Cook has been trying to parlay his popularity to a screen career, but hasn’t developed the acting chops yet to transcend his douchey stage persona, and he has yet to work with directors who can cultivate his strengths and minimize his weaknesses.
Over the years Cook seems to have downplayed the physical humor that was, for me, the most memorable part of his stand-up comedy. Maybe he should work with the Farrelly Brothers, like Jim Carrey did with Dumb & Dumber. Check out this clip from an early Comedy Central special and see his impressions of snakes and aliens — he’s sort of like Will Ferrell on Red Bull:
