Saving Silverman (2001)

When Jack Black is onscreen in Saving Silverman it's nonstop hilarity and when Amanda Peet is onscreen it's nonstop cleavage. Amanda or Jack or both are in all the best parts. I love Saving Silverman mostly for Amanda and for Jack. Jason Biggs and Steve Zahn are both really good and funny and Amanda Detmer is so cute. I love Amanda and Amanda. Coach is funny. Saving Silverman is classic. I saw Saving Silverman in the theaters with high school friends back in 2001, in high school, and it was a fun and memorable experience. Saving Silverman is awesome, really sexy too cuz of the 2 Amandas, and super funny. This is a top 100 comedy for sure and more like top 50. There are so many funny moments I'd love to reference but whoever wrote this is really funny and from a funny perspective there is nothing to dislike about Saving Silverman. It's a great COMEDYYAAYAAH!!! Neil Diamond rocks!

I started watching this "movie" on the TV, hoping for some light relief. What I found instead was: Jack Black, Steve Zahn, the guy from American Pie (whose name I can't remember and don't care to check) and Amanda Peet. They played characters with different names, but given the extremely limited range of these "actors", names are irrelevant. Guess what? Black was an immature musician-slacker; Zahn was a dim-witted pushover; American Pie-guy was a passive weirdo and Peet wore a lot of plunging necklines. The plot, if there was one, was so irrelevant that I started wondering why women get breasts enlargement. If they wore what Peet wear in this, they would get full male attention, regardless of their breasts size.I digress… back to the plot… whatever it was, it was so well disguised by a truckload of gross jokes that I lost track of it. I guess the plot was an excuse for Black to be Black and for Peet to strut around. If you find that entertaining, then you might enjoy this….

I was introduced to "Saving Silverman" by the same two friends of mine who talked me into watching that abysmally bad piece of garbage "Van Wilder," a picture whose appeal I will never comprehend as long as I live. But "Van Wilder" is better than "Saving Silverman" for one fundamental reason. With "Van Wilder" I was mostly bored out of my mind. "Saving Silverman", by contrast, spat in my face with its abundance of senseless profanity, sickening concepts of humor, and offensive misogyny even though it's supposed to be about friendship and true love. I saw this picture many, many years ago and I can still recollect to this day sitting there with a gaping mouth, my eyes glued to the screen only to see just how much more offensive and morally mordacious it could get.The movie's stars are Steve Zahn and Jack Black, two people who I think show talent but are wasted here, as two of a longtime threesome friendship. The third man of their group is Jason Biggs, playing a lovesick dweeb of a loser (that means he's pathetic) who thinks he's found the love of his life in a tenaciously autocratic woman played by Amanda Peet. When Biggs's high school crush (Amanda Detner) steps into the picture, Zahn and Black decide to try and break Peet from Biggs by any means necessary and reunite him with his former love.In theory, this could have been more than efficient. Yes, I like the idea of "Saving Silverman." Two friends are shut off from their buddy by a tyrannizing lover and try to save him. Yes, I even like the *idea* of them kidnapping her as effort to save him. Yes, I liked the concept. What I didn't like - what I hated - was the tasteless, astoundingly bad methods that the screenwriters and director Dennis Dugan decided to go with. The most harmless 'humor' in this picture is people getting beat up, slapped around, and getting attacked by raccoons. Typically boring routine slapstick. That's dull, but harmless. Insulting are the lack of taste in the satire of nuns (and overused excuse for humor), the tiresome profanity, and the always tiresome gags about closet homosexuals. The fact that they are still using that, nine years later in "The Other Guys" gives me little hope for modern-day slapsticks. I'll take Joe E. Brown or Jerry Lewis over this any day. These jokes here are not only not funny, but a little sickening, as is that visually disgusting moment where Jason Biggs has plastic surgery on his hindquarters. Yuck!What I also found morally repugnant was the movie's look toward women. I already mentioned the unfavorable approach on profanity-spitting, macho nuns. Let's talk about how the two Amandas are presented. The two central female characters in the picture. One is a despicable tyrant and the other is portrayed as a slattern. A goodhearted slattern, but a slattern nonetheless. Amanda Peet having nothing to do but be vicious and chew up her scenes and Amanda Detner being clothed in the thinnest of clothing and yet at the same time, be trying to achieve chastity by becoming a sister. Why is it, I ask that women are treated a lot in modern-day comedies as (insert word for female dogs) or sluts? Can't they be respectable? They're actually treated with less dignity than the male stars. And I couldn't stand their characters, either.Now "Saving Silverman" did hold my attention, because I had a strong reaction to what I saw. But reactions go both ways. Positive and negative. I had an intensely strong negative reaction to his picture and I was thunderstruck at just how offensively dumb it could get. It's a good idea with a good cast that should have been utilized with a good script. The only element I found interesting was R. Lee Emery's performance as the former coach of the three dummies. It's better for a movie to be forgettably bad than memorably bad. This is the latter. It's been years and I can still taste the bitter detestation.

Sometimes a silly movie is really funny. This is one of those.Jack Black is perfect as J.D., a well-meaning but moronic slob. Steve Zahn is great as his slightly brighter buddy, Wayne. Darren Silverman (Jason Biggs), the title character and the third member of the trio of losers who've had a bond and a band (Neil Diamond tribute band) since grade school.Although the title character, and the man who the plot spins about, Silverman is seldom in the thick of the fun. That is provided by the antics of his two buddies in trying to save him from Judith (Amanda Peet), a successful educated women who finds Silverman convenient to have around after feigning interest in him to fend off a magician clumsily trying to hit on her. Their relationship is that of female domination of a willingly submissive male, although overt use of that terminology would ruin the movie. The domination includes Judith denying Darren sexual favors but demanding it from him.Darren's true "one and only" love is Sandy (Amanda Detmer), who left town with her family while in grade school, but moves back shortly after Darren gets besotted by Judith. Sandy is a novitiate who is to take her vows in a week.