By Debbie Schlussel
You have to wonder who greenlights the movies that debut this weekend at the movies. They’re so awful, you have to wonder which Hollywood fools have so much money to burn. I did not screen “Welcome Home, Roscoe Jenkins.” Why not? Three words: Martin Lawrence, Monique. ‘Nuff said. The others:
* “Fool’s Gold“: You’re a Fool if you spend your Gold seeing this awful movie. It’s on the level of a ’70s or ’80s sitcom. Sorta like an episode of “Three’s Company,” in which Jack and Chrissy get in a fight, then get confused, and are chased by Don Knotts and the Ropers to the Bistro. Really awful. “Fool’s Gold” is filled with stupid, “mad-cap”, goofy jokes and stunts, all of which fall flat. A lot of groans while watching this one.

The anti-American Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaghey star as a newly divorced young couple. He’s a loser treasure hunter who never pays his bills and is on the run from a murderous Black rapper who funded his failed treasure hunting. She’s a steward on the yacht of an English billionaire (Donald Sutherland, complete with bad accent–everyone has a bad foreign accent in this horrid “film”). McConaghey stumbles on a secret treasure he and his ex-wife once wanted to search for. They spend the rest of the movie fighting and making up and searching for the treasure, while bankrolled by the billionaire, putting up with his airhead Paris Hilton-esque daughter, and being chased by the Black rapper and his hitmen.
Oh, and guys, don’t be mislead by the movie posters with a photoshopped Kate Hudson on a body double’s sculpted, bikini’ed body. She is mostly fully-clothed, surly, and bitchy in this movie. No-one ever said movie posters are about truth in advertising.
The only upside to this movie is that in the dead of winter, this takes place in the warm, balmy Caribbean. But even that ain’t enough to warm anyone to this stone cold waste of time and exercise in on-screen stupidity.
To paraphrase Elvis, wise men sing: Only Fools rush in to see “Fool’s Gold.” Beyond Terrible.
John Ritter is turning over in his grave. And Suzanne Somers is wondering how someone got so successful ripping her off on film.
* “Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show – 30 Days & 30 Nights – Hollywood to the Heartland“: Aside from having the longest, most pretentious title of any movie ever, this so-called “documentary” about four remarkably unfunny “comedians” is long, boring, and a waste of time.
It’s no surprise that such an awfule movie with a marked agenda–an unfunny Muslim comedian shows us how nice and oppressed he is in America–would be made by “West Bank Story” movie-maker and self-hating Jew, Ari Sandel. I previously interviewed Sandel (who, of course, won an Oscar for his short film morally equivocating Jewish Israelis with Palestinian terrorists), the son of an Israeli man. At that time, he felt that there would not be a problem making a musical equivocating the Nazis and their victims, too.
So, it’s no surprise that Sandel made this absolute piece of tripe. A fellow movie critic, who is a liberal, said to me:

Wow, if I were Bin Laden, I’d use this film as a recruitment tool because it shows everything that Bin Laden keeps saying in his video attacks on America.

I wholly concur.
Vince Vaughn, who is remarkably conceited and self-important in this movie, decides that since he’s had such success uttering lines that others crafted for him in funny movies like “Wedding Crashers,” he must be funny on his own. So he decides he’s going to share some of that “funny” with the little people all over America. He takes for extremely unfunny, self-important “comedians” on a bus tour throughout the little towns (and some bigger ones) in America. We get to watch these groanworthy, no-name comedians–who confuse comedy with uttering the F-word–talk about how

With our credentials, back in the day, we’d be headlining like the Rat Pack.

Sure you would. You keep tellin’ yourself that.
We watch the comedians whine as they’re asked to go visit victims of Hurricane Katrina. Mr. Vaughn, apparently, is too important to go with them. He’s a big star, after all. You can “entertain” the little people, but don’t get too close to them. We watch as the movie consistently looks down on the Katrina victims and the rest of “hickish” America, in Sandel’s and Vaughn’s eyes.
Then we meet the families of these incredibly uninteresting comedians. They are equally as uninteresting, although in the case of the Muslim comedian, the Egyptian Ahmed Ahmed, we do get to see two of the ugliest, transvestite-looking women on the planet–his sisters.
But other than that gawker factor and being forced to sit through Ahmed’s various “comedy” claims of highly-exaggerated post 9/11 American oppression of Muslims and Arabs, there’s nothing noteworthy about this long, boring yawner. And occasional laugh in two hours of dull groans does not a “comedy” make. Nor does seeing how uncharming the cute child actor, Peter Billingsley, turned out twenty-odd years later. As Vaughn’s “best friend”–which there seem to be a lot of in this flick–he makes several unnoteworthy appearances in the movie.
There’s nothing worth “documenting” here. Save yer ten bucks, little people.