April Fools Day has become a bore. All the original Star Trek actors will be starring in the next Star Wars movie (Ha! As if Shatner would ever appear in a film with Chewbacca and break his own clause that prohibits co-stars with more body hair than him). Youtube is going dark because they are sick of cashing all those enormous cat-fell-down-the-stairs-again checks. Google introduces yet another impossible technical advance that we all secretly want and are now pissed that we can’t have. It’s like an episode of Two and A Half Men–the jokes are plentiful, amateurish, and older than the cocaine scars on Charlie Sheen’s septum.
Legally the hairiest man in the room.
The good April Fools Jokes are the ones we don’t figure out right away–like the photoshopped Migrant Mother, The Taco Liberty Bell, and Bush’s second term. But the very best April Fools pranks are the ones we never figure out. Which ones? I can’t say, we haven’t figured it them out yet. However I’ve had my suspicions about the movie Gigli for some time. First of all, it was released on March 31st in 2003. That really should’ve set off some alarm bells. Especially when it turned out to be so hellaciously bad.
Ben and Jen taking an on-camera break to contemplate what went wrong. Trivia: this scene actually made the final cut.
I know what you’re thinking. “I’ve never seen Gigli…it’s probably not as bad as everyone says it was.” Wrong. It was so bad, that the love scene that featured the biggest, most famous and sexiest couple in America consisted almost entirely of Ben Affleck talking about his penis and Jennifer Lopez demanding oral sex with the classic line: “It’s Turkey time. Gobble. Gobble.” It was so bad that even people who liked to say the word “Bennifer” and who bought that whole “Jenny from the block” BS didn’t like it. I mean, come on, J-Lo…you can’t have a rider demanding an all white dressing room filled with white lilies and honey peanut Balance Bars and call yourself Jenny from the block.
Speaking of white lilies, anyone who is unlucky enough to have actually watched even a small portion of Gigli, has had it inexplicably beaten into their heads that Gigli is Italian for lily. And anyone with a working knowledge of the Encyclopedia Britannica can discover that part of Ancient Greece’s April Fools day was celebrated by secretly fixing a lily to your friend’s back and laughing your toga-clad ass off when she finally discovered it. The last person walking around town with a lily on her back was a special kind of stupid and was henceforth known as Lilium Stultus.
The stealth placing of the stultus lily.
I know what you’re thinking. “Um…that sounds kind of dumb…even for you.” Fair enough, you bitch, but what about this: Gigli was directed by fallen Hollywood wunderkind, Martin Brest. Martin has since said of Gigli, and I quote, “I had nothing to do with that piece of sewage.” We assumed that he was alluding to the rumor that his original cut of the film followed a much darker plot where the adorable developmentally disabled kid gets killed at the end by Christopher Walken…instead of ending up on a Baywatch set (which is like a death in itself, isn’t it?) But does that really make sense? Wouldn’t killing the smartest character in the flick actually make it worse? (Spoiler alert: it would.)
These adorably precocious teens hate that guy.
Here’s what I think happened. The studio had some intern slap the flick together. They planned to release Gigli as an obvious April Fools joke, not only on the American public who had foolishly fallen for the Jen and Ben or Ben and Jen thing, but also on a director who had fallen out of favour after getting kicked off War Games. A movie called Lily, released the day before April Fools, starring Bennifer, directed by Marty Boobs…and we fell for it. Well played, Hollywood. Well played. … It beats the crap out of Bacon Scope anyway.
slumber party movies 