"Funny" movies

The guys behind Scary Movie and its ilk. [Link]

Isn't it massive consumer fraud to charge $10.50 for a barely hour-long movie? Perhaps, but it would've been unforgivable to make Meet the Spartans any longer than an hour. This was the worst movie I've ever seen, so bad that I hesitate to label it a "movie" and thus reflect shame upon the entire medium of film. Friedberg and Seltzer do not practice the same craft as P.T. Anderson, David Cronenberg, Michael Bay, Kevin Costner, the Zucker Brothers, the Wayans Brothers, Uwe Boll, any dad who takes shaky home movies on a camping trip, or a bear who turns on a video camera by accident while trying to eat it. They are not filmmakers. They are evildoers, charlatans, symbols of Western civilization's decline under the weight of too many pop culture references.
As Bryan Curtis has pointed out in Slate, the spoofs of Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker—the team behind Airplane! and The Naked Gun—are characterized by their facility with the tone and detail work of genre films and their genius combination of straight-faced B-movie actors with lowbrow punch lines and sight gags. Friedberg and Seltzer, rather than tweak the clichés of the movies they parody, take a NOW: That's What I Call Movies! approach, using farts and leather underwear to not-critique a collection of pre-chewed moments from recent blockbusters. In Meet the Spartans, the mere act of referring to Transformers, Happy Feet, Spider-Man 3, Ghost Rider, Rocky Balboa,Stomp the Yard, Shrek, Lindsay Lohan, Kevin Federline, or Deal or No Deal is presumed to be hilarious. (If you'll indulge me for a second, I will pause to crack up Friedberg and Seltzer: "Paris Hilton.")