The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard

There once was a little film about a car salesman. That film garnered a bunch of crappy reviews and was out of theaters within seven weeks. That was this film.

Despite a cast that included Jeremy Piven as a loudmouth salesman (typecast much?) and a parade of other character actors and comedians, The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard mostly just flopped hard — at least with critics.

Blame the base humor — everything from racism to homophobia to sexism to the simply puerile are here. Blame Will Ferrell for not having a large enough role. Blame Jeremy Piven's wig. Blame whatever you want — to me, this film is pretty funny despite the flaws.

I've seen films that fancied themselves comedies, but weren't funny — Scary Movie sequels for example, or maybe latter-day Leslie Nielsen spoofs. I don't even consider Mel Brooks' Robin Hood: Men in Tights all that worthwhile.

The Goods works for me, though. This is a low-budget comedy with low-brow humor and low aspirations, but a lot of gusto. I'm fine with that.

This film was budgeted at $10 million and grossed $15 million. I might not understand the particulars of accounting or budgeting for a major motion picture or how to balance my own checkbook, but by gum, even without balancing my checkbook, I know $5 million is more money than I have in the bank, and probably more than you have in the bank, so there.

The Goods doesn't aspire to bring in the teen audience that would pay to see something like Epic Movie (or pretty much any other comedy with "Movie" in the title). This film is smarter than that.

I mean, they reference Thoreau's line about lives of quiet desperation, which is something I've referenced here a few times. The music is solid. There's a Bandit car. This isn't a movie for the teenage crowd. This is a film for adults who just want to watch a silly comedy and let go.

Sure, they could've handled this scene differently, but for the most part, The Goods features characters and situations that I'd want to write. Stupid comedy comes easily.

I once heard this guy say that that "life is too short to write stupid comedies." As a writer, I couldn't disagree more.

My buddy Brian and I have a weakness for stupid comedies. The Goods is exactly the kind of film we'll watch over and over. We're not alone.

Why shouldn't I aspire to write a film that people want to watch over and over? Nobody's saying this is an Oscar contender. Stupid comedies have an audience, and they're not all stupid people.

Sometimes even smart people want to watch a film and laugh a bit and forget about life for a while, as the song goes. The Goods is the kind of film that would make my family laugh. Who wouldn't want to make his/her family laugh? Who doesn't enjoy laughing at the same jokes that make your parents and siblings laugh?

I grew up in the country. We didn't have cable or a dish. Mom or Dad would rent a stack of movies on the weekends, and that was our entertainment. We couldn't go to theaters or theme parks or museums or do much traveling.

Instead, we watched a lot of movies. I kept a list of the titles for a while, but gave up after the first several hundred. We rented damn near everything in our local video store. We saw our share of crappy movies, but we also rented quite a few comedies that we all could laugh at together.

You've got to understand, for me, sitting down with family and laughing at the same movies was pretty much the extent of how I could relate to them. We weren't joiners. We didn't sit and play board games. For the most part, we led a crushingly boring existence.

But we loved watching movies, and I loved watching movies with them. Still do. Of course, The Goods isn't exactly a family film, but family films mostly suck. I don't want to write family films.

I want to write stuff for other families who are as screwed up as mine, so other people can laugh and connect in the best way they can find, when functional conversation at the dinner table isn't an option, and when love and support look quite a bit different than what you see on television.

I want to write stuff that can help. To me, that's a humble, honorable aspiration.