Who's Your Caddy? review by Rosie

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Who's Your Caddy

There is an unspoken secret among those of us who write as critics of pop culture. And since my lawyers have assured me that “writing” it is still technically not “speaking” it, I feel confident that I can let you in on it here without breaking that unspoken trust in a way that would be grounds for my disbarment. The secret is this: we are predators. Like the savage lions of the Serengeti, we hunt for our prey and feed on the weak. We use our best reasoning to size up our prey, and certainly there are plenty of strong works out there that command our respect and inhibit any attacks. But every now and then, out of nowhere, a lost and injured gazelle will just come hobbling right into our lair at dinnertime. Our eyes get wide, we lick our chops, look around at each other for a second, and then just pounce and feast relentlessly.

So when ads for Who’s Your Caddy? started hobbling over the hillside and into our sights, critics everywhere started salivating and prewriting the pithy remarks with which to slaughter their prey. (Any critic who tells you they didn’t spend several days debating whether their editors would let them call it “Caddyblack” is a shorts-soiling liar.) It’s not so much that the commercials looked terrible, though they did. It’s not even so much that someone would try to do an updated remake of the revered classic that is Caddyshack to appeal to what snivelingly milquetoast marketing executives euphemistically refer to as a more “urban” demographic, though they did. But the fact that they would do so with the unmitigated gall to try to pass it off as an original work, without so much as an implicit acknowledgment that this movie literally was Caddyshack (or at least Caddyshack 2), now THAT was the rub. And so we went with our crude hunting tools – the sharpened pencils, the dog-eared moleskin notebook that we want girls to see us writing in, the stupid Matt Drudge hat – to slaughter the beast and consume its entrails with melted butter and extra salt. But a funny thing happened to me when I gnawed off my first hunk of furry skin. I laughed (and a little blood came out my nose).

I didn’t laugh alot – but still. I mean it was only like four or five quick times (and three of them were literally at the same exact joke, used the exact same way at three different times in the movie), but they were out loud. I was mortified! How could I face my smarmy, self-important peers? How could I face my smarmy, self-important self? I felt like George in that Seinfeld episode where he gets a massage from a male masseuse and then spends the rest of the day racked with embarrassment and self-doubt because he “thinks it might have moved.” (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) What about all my pithy remarks? They had all that pith! What about all my searing commentary? It seared so freaking much! I can’t kind of like this movie, I’m me!

And so it is that I find myself at this proverbial fork in the road (I don’t remember exactly which Proverb this same situation was found in but I think it was, uh, ten). In the past when I have been faced with other such difficult decisions in my life, I have found that it helps to find a quiet place, turn off all the distractions of the outer world (except the TV. And the strobe light), relax in the lotus position, and write brief plot synopses until the path of truth reveals itself to me. Excuse me now while I open my mind to receive this truth.

Who’s Your Caddy? is the truly, completely and unapologetically unoriginal story of a group of cool, young fun-lovers who stand up to the stodgy, old establishment and show them that rules were made to be broken, man. This time, the young, fun-lovers consist of millionaire rapper C-Note, played by proud pit bull farmer and Outkast rapper Big Boi, and his sassy posse of stereotypes. The old establishment is played mostly by the increasingly creepy Jeffrey Jones, in what will probably go down as his last appearance in anything outside of a Roman Polanski ‘Special Interest’ film. Despite this solid casting, I couldn’t help but notice that just about every major golf equipment company in North America remained conspicuously absent from a number of obvious product placement opportunities throughout the film. Hey Ping, dog-fighters and felony sex offenders golf too, you know. Think outside the box.

The “story” (if you can call a hodgepodge of boilerplate plot points from crappy 80’s movies, piled on top of a premise brazenly looted from Caddyshack a story) is about a bunch of wild and crazy, black guys who want to join a golf club run by snooty white guys, and – if you can believe this – hilarious hi-jinks ensue. When the the black guys first show up they’re all like, “Whazzup!?”, and the white guys are all like “Harumph, harrumph, harrumph, harrumph.” Then the black guys are all, “Say what?”, and the white guys are all, “Ahem, Harvard and Yale and Protestantism.” So then the black guys leave, but they’re thinking, “A’ight, a’ight.” And the white guys are all clinking their glasses together over a model for the new toxic waste dump and bullet factory they’re planning to build over the old orphanage and laugh like, “Whhoooohooooohoo, whhoooohooooohoo, whhoooohooooo HA-HA-HA!”

But what they don’t know, is the black guys are about to come back on them and be all like, “Mo’ money, mo’money, mo’money!” And then the white guys all spit out their brandy and say things like, “Outrageous!” and “Nixon was a great man!” So then they all put their heads together and start whispering like, “Pssst, pssst, pssst, pssst, tax sheltered annuities, pssst, pssst.” But while they’re doing that, the white guys’ hot, unsatisfied young wives are making eyes at the black guys, going, “Grrrrrrrrr”, and their kids are trying to get their autographs and asking “What up, homies, did I say that right?” Then there are a bunch of scenes with all kinds of hip hop honeys in bikinis pop and dropping all over the place for some reason. And finally, they all decide to bet everything they’ve ever cared about in their entire lives on some kind of contest that the black guys have never done before and the white guys are condescendingly overconfident in. But in the end (************SPOILER ALERT************) the black guys are all like, “Awwww, yeeeeah! Tiga-Tiga-Tiger Woods, y’all!” and the white guys are all like, “Bu-, bu-, bu-, Arnold … Palmer…” And the black guys end up taking the white guys’ golf course, wives, kids and cigars, and generally proving to the world that the white guys were all just a pack of evil, soulless, gassy, impotent, corporate dog-molesters.

Speaking as someone who has already admitted that I kind of liked this movie, I would say that that is an entirely fair and accurate synopsis. And, yes, my meditation has led me to see now that the path I must follow is to embrace the truth and accept the consequences, come what may. And so, here, now before all of you I, Rosefeld “Rosie” Rosenrose, am here to declare that in the matter of the almost universally reviled, largely pointless, insultingly stereotypical, and predictably forgettable film Who’s Your Caddy?: I didn’t totally hate this movie. I laughed out loud more than one (but less than five) times. All of them were at one actor (Faizon Love), and three of them were at the same joke. But still, I can’t in all good conscience just give this film the thorough skewering I might have been expecting to. There I said it.

But before you attack with your onslaught of groans and gasps and finger-pointy disbelief, just remember, my closet is empty now. I have no shame admitting to this, so you should believe me when I tell you that I have nothing left to hide. I don’t have any Michael Bolton secretly labeled as Dropkick Murphys songs on my mp3 player. I can’t stand reality TV and have no embarrassing history with Melrose Place or The O.C.. Can you say the same thing? The bottom line is that every now and then, we all pick up guilty pleasures here and there that we just can’t explain. We don’t choose them, they choose us. Statistics show, and my judgment would agree, that you probably won’t like this film. In fact, you probably will hate this film. But I have to say, I didn’t.




5 out of 10 Jackasses
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