One movie that came out on May 6, 2005 was Ridley Scott’s crusades epic KINGDOM OF HEAVEN. It was poorly received in the U.S. at the time but later had a widely-considered-superior director’s cut, which I have reviewed. Today I’ll consider a different May 6th release that has not yet had its director’s cut re-evaluation moment.

I don’t remember if I knew about JIMINY GLICK IN LALAWOOD when it came out in its limited release, during which according to Box Office Mojo it collected $36,039. (I assume they rounded to the nearest dollar – the real total could be as much as 49 cents higher.) But there was no chance I would’ve gone to see it then. I confess that as much as I’d loved THREE AMIGOS and Ed Grimley growing up, in the aughts I did not think Martin Short was funny anymore. I was also instantly turned off by fat suits (which I wasn’t really wrong about), so I turned my nose up to Primetime Glick, the Comedy Central show where this hack entertainment journalist character did sort of Space Ghost Coast to Coast style awkward improvised celebrity interviews.

But let me point you to a historical note. Two weeks before JIMINY GLICK IN LALAWOOD came out, the first ever Youtube video, Me at the zoo, was uploaded. During the intervening two decades, through the medium of Youtube clips, I have become aware that Jiminy Glick does in fact make me laugh, so I was actually excited to watch the movie version.

Well, the character is still funny. And it seems like a great idea for an improvised movie: he goes to the Toronto International Film Festival. They were able to improvise scenes with actors attending the actual festival, and debut the movie there the following year. There is a plot and new characters and what not, but most of the laughs come just from Jiminy saying ridiculous things to real celebrities. They take advantage of the setting to interview actors on the red carpet (Kiefer Sutherland, Sharon Stone, Jake Gyllenhaal, Forest Whitaker, Susan Sarandon) and even film some bits with Jiminy at parties (annoying Kevin Cline by following him around, thinking Whoopi Goldberg is Oprah Winfrey). They also cheat by having in-studio interviews like the show, including Steve Martin, Kurt Russell and Rob Lowe. All of these people get the joke, but some are better at playing along.

I’m kind of fascinated by these movies that take a simple comedy sketch character and try to build a world and story around them that will fill a movie. STRANGE BREW, ELVIRA MISTRESS OF THE DARK, CONEHEADS, STUART SAVES HIS FAMILY, the list goes on. Here we learn that Jiminy has round twin sons named Matthew (Landon Hansen) and Modine (Jake Hoffman) and a burping/farting wife named Dixie (Jan Hooks, BATMAN RETURNS). They thought they had reservations at the Fairmont, but it was actually the Fairmount, a spooky Twilight Zone Tower of Terror type place inspired by BARTON FINK, according to a DVD commentary track.

The thing I was surprised I didn’t know about the movie, and maybe you’ll be surprised too if you didn’t know this, is that Short plays a dual role of Jiminy Glick and… David Lynch. Yes, the first thing you see in the movie is a match lighting a cigarette, and then Short as David Lynch says, “In the beginning there is neither a script or a story. Just fragments. Images.” If I’m not mistaken, the fictionalized Mr. Lynch is talking about the improvised process of JIMINY GLICK IN LALAWOOD when he says, “I like the idea of a dark road, for I know that the darkness of the unknown is like a magnet, luring the innocent into a world of corruption.”

So Lynch is sort of hosting the movie, and then he becomes an actual character when Jiminy finds him sitting at a hotel bar.

“Excuse me, do you work for the hotel?”

“No, I’m David Lynch. I’m a director.”

“Well, who isn’t, dear? And I bet you have a treatment.”

He starts narrating a story about Lana Turner and the death of Johnny Stompanato (the late great Darren Shahlavi of IP MAN 2 fame!), and I thought it was some kind of non-sequitur true crime show parody or something, but Short explains on the commentary track that Lynch is supposed to be sitting at the bar dreaming up his next movie and then when he meets Jiminy (who’s blathering to him about an E! special on Joey Travolta and other celebrity siblings) he starts working him into the plot. I didn’t really think most of the Lynch stuff was funny per se, but you gotta appreciate something so inexplicable in a silly lowbrow comedy like this. It’s interesting, at least.

(By the way, there is a Short-Lynch connection: in the late ‘80s Short and Steve Martin were cast in a Lynch movie called ONE SALIVA BUBBLE, but it was cancelled due to Dino De Laurentiis’ money problems.)

At the festival, Jiminy attends the premiere of a movie called GROWING UP GANDHI, “mega-star bad boy” actor Ben DiCarlo (Corey Pearson, SUMMER CATCH)’s directorial debut about a young Mahatma Gandhi being a boxer. The joke is much too close to UHF’s Rambo-inspired GANDHI II, mixed with a generic parody of supposedly pretentious art films (though I did laugh at the dumb guy director saying during his intro, “For those of you who are new to art movies, I’ll just give you a little helping hint: keep an eye out for the falling rose petals.”)

The crowd hates the movie, but Jiminy sleeps through the whole thing, assumes it was great and raves about it on TV. Desperate to turn its reputation around, management arranges for the one critic who liked the movie to interview its reclusive star, so Jiminy lives the dream of being a slightly less obscure hack entertainment reporter.

What really kills the movie is the fake celebrity characters, who just don’t seem like stars, aren’t accurate satire of anything and at least to me don’t get any laughs. Elizabeth Perkins (THE FLINTSTONES) and Linda Cardellini (BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN) do what they can with the straight roles of famous actress Miranda Coolidge and her daughter who get tied up in the quasi-Lynchian mystery, while Janeane Garofalo (MYSTERY MEN) is pretty much entirely wasted as their publicist. John Michael Higgins (G.I. JANE) goes the hardest as Miranda’s homophobic Russian boyfriend/manager, but his laugh rate is only higher because he’s taking more shots. Aries Spears (JOSIE AND THE PUSSYCATS), DeRay Davis (FULL CLIP) and Gary Anthony Williams (RADIOLAND MURDERS) do hacky racial stereotypes as gangsta rappers at the festival to promote an animated movie about roaches. Their highlight is probly the joke about trying to teach their African friend to say “nahmean” and he confuses it with “Yao Ming.” That’s about it. They’re mainly there so there can be a part where Jiminy joins them on stage and raps, which is important to the plot because he chugs a drugged 40, passes out, dreams about waking up next to a dead Miranda Coolidge, and finds a bloody handkerchief that makes him worry he’s a murderer.

Unfortunately I do not think this is a good movie. That the end credits interview outtakes are more consistently funny than the movie itself kind of shows that this character wasn’t really meant for a narrative format. Most of the laughs are the usual Jiminy Glick things, like the way his voice gets really high and then really low, and all the little random asides he blurts out, like “Listen, the next person who shushes me is in trouble. Lest we forget that I was leg-wrestling champion of my dormitory.”

Director Vadim Jean was once respected for LEON THE PIG FARMER. Short, his brother Michael, and SCTV’s Paul Flaherty are credited as writers, which they say on the commentary means they wrote a 50 page story treatment, only scripting the film parodies. The track is a little funnier than the movie, and the most interesting tidbit is that they apparently shot part of an abandoned sequence where Jiminy and David Lynch were little league coaches (sadly not included in the deleted scenes).

On the commentary Short says he doesn’t think Lynch has seen the film, but does think he would find it funny. At the time, Lynch was working on what would end up being his final film, INLAND EMPIRE. In an interview published in Healthy Wealthy n Wise that September, Lynch said, “This film is very different because I don’t have a script. I write the thing scene by scene and much of it is shot and I don’t have much of a clue where it will end. It’s a risk, but I have this feeling that because all things are unified, this idea over here in that room will somehow relate to that idea over there in the pink room.” Kind of a JIMINY GLICK IN LALAWOOD approach, sounds like.