Big screen turns 'Candy' into the real stranger

Plotless Comedy Central knockoff isn't funny enough

Robert Denerstein, Rocky Mountain News

Published July 14, 2006 at midnight

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If Strangers With Candy were a 22-minute slice of impolite weirdness on Comedy Central, I'd watch one episode, marvel at some of the outrageous humor, chuckle a few times and tune out for the rest of the season.

But wait.

In the 1999 and 2000 television seasons, Strangers With Candy was a 22-minute TV show on Comedy Central, where it revolved around one of the strangest characters in creation, a 47-year-old former convict and prostitute who also happened to be a recovering junkie and high-school student.

In trying to make the leap to the big screen, Strangers becomes one of those nearly dreadful efforts that still manages to create some laughs. I don't know whether fans of the TV show will embrace the big-screen version, but the uninitiated may experience as much bewilderment as amusement.

Strangers With Candy revolves around Amy Sedaris, who plays Jerri Blank, a sleazy, oversexed, bucktoothed woman who begins the movie (a prequel to the TV show) by being released from the slammer. Blank returns home to make some astonishing discoveries: Her mother has died, her father is in a coma and she has a new stepmom and a teenage half-brother.

When a physician tells Blank that a severe shock just might bring dad out of his coma, she decides to return to high school and win an award for best project at the science fair, something that surely would shake Dad out of his unconscious state.

Consider the plot. No, on second thought, don't. Sedaris, who certainly seems familiar with every corner of this twisted character, winds up in a science class taught by a closeted gay teacher (co-writer Stephen Colbert) who's having a fling with the school's art teacher (co-writer and director Paul Dinello).

Strangers began as a parody of the simplistic morality of after-school specials. Like a camera placed too close to a less-than-glamorous face, the big-screen tends to emphasize pockmarks. Over the course of a full-length feature, the main character grows wearisome, the comic acting seldom rises above sketch levels and some of the clever touches are too casually tossed off by a director who doesn't seem to know how to punch up a gag.

The movie offers a string of cameos that includes visits from Matthew Broderick, Sarah Jessica Parker, Ian Holm, Allison Janney and Philip Seymour Hoffman, but these offer little delight and, at least in Hoffman's case, generate feelings of dismay. No Oscar winner needs this kind of work.

But this is Sedaris' show, and she approaches it without apparent inhibition.

Some funny moments keep the movie from becoming unbearable, but they can't turn 22 minutes into 87. A little Strangers With Candy goes an awfully long way.

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