Philippine reality & Dumb and Dumber To

MANILA, Philippines -  Film review: Dumb and Dumber To “Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.” — Peter Ustinov One ceases being an “erudite” cineaste when one enters a theater just in need of a good laugh.

The past months were tough and so were your past four years and they were not made easier and manageable by leaders who have penchant for doing dumb things and getting dumber with their pronouncements that unmask them for what they are  — inept and equipped with brains getting hopelessly insufferable by the day.

An editor turns to watching teleseryes and old films to avoid one leader on prime news. One turns to the classic music station DZFE every time another leader has a major Palace announcement.

Last night, one got to re-live dumb episodes on film and realized the only way to deal with insufferable fools is by keeping your sense of humor.

Cleansing laughter was what one got watching Dumb and Dumber To co-written and directed by Bobby Farrelly and Peter Farrelly.

Starring Jim Carrey as Lloyd Christmas and Jeff Daniels as Harry Dunne, Dumb and Dumber To delivers the laughter where they count and you realize this is a fairly well-written comedy made for a comic duo who kept their audiences in stitches for close to two hours.

Christmas delivered a shocker when he admitted to his partner Dunne that he faked being ill in a mental institution to get the attention he needed. Dunne got his comeuppance by admitting later in the film he only made up his need for a kidney transplant.

As the film unreeled, you see a perfect comic tandem of Carrey and Daniels, both of whom managed to connect with other characters with equal zest and humor.

Laurie Holden as Adele Pinchelow made a devastating transition from a prim and proper lady to one with foot fetish and a scheming one out to filch millions by means fair and mostly foul.

To be sure, the jokes in Dumb and Dumber To were relatively varied and remained grounded way below doctorate degree expectations.

For one, the audience probably enjoyed the sex jokes because they represent something not openly discussed and are now out in the open with comic dressing. The perverse scenes probably appealed to everyone’s dark sides and how come a horny octogenarian scene (an old lady in a nursing home) had many sexagenarians in the audience guffawing till kingdom come.

It is easy to be turned off by fart jokes but the way the scene was choreographed in the movie made it far more riotous than it would be in real life.

Sure, the “low jokes” were there but the film’s humor moved a notch higher when it made fun of inventors in a science convention full of erudite researchers and invention specialists.

On the whole, one likes watching film sequels but the truth is one didn’t care what its previous origin was. But the fact that it had a sequel meant the first try was probably well-received.

One is not the kind of a reviewer who gloats on installment one at the expense of installment two or vice versa.

In one’s book, the movie one watches should hold water regardless of whether it has a future sequel or not. One doesn’t like solving algebra or trigonometry puzzles before getting a good laugh. And one likes it that one laughs at the right places and the audiences guffaw with you.

One had been to comedy films where audience laughs are few and far between, and you wonder if watching a Holy Week feature would have been the better choice.

Watching Dumb and Dumber To is probably one way of coping with bad leadership in real life.

It takes away the high blood pressure and puts back the sense of humor when in the beginning, you wanted to commit murder or throw away shoes on your least favorite person or probably heckle him the rest of his public speaking life.

One likes the way comedy works on you inside the theater like what Robin Williams once pointed out: “For me, comedy starts as a spew, a kind of explosion, and then you sculpt it from there, if at all. It comes out of a deeper, darker side. Maybe it comes from anger, because I’m outraged by cruel absurdities, the hypocrisy that exists everywhere, even within yourself, where it’s hardest to see.”

Released locally by Viva Entertainment, Dumb and Dumber To is still showing in theaters.