Title: I Think I Love My Wife
Genre: Comedy/Drama/Romance
Cast: Chris Rock, Kerry Washington, Gina Torres, …
Director: Chris Rock
Release: (2007)
If anyone reading this has access to Chris Rock, please do him (and all of us) a favor. Walk up to his house, ring the doorbell, wait for him to come out, look him dead in the eye, hold it, raise your arm out straight ahead and dramatically drop a copy of Eddie Murphy: Raw on the floor in front of him. Hold the stare a moment longer and then just walk away. It’s basically just a little twist on his own “drop the mic” gimmick, so if you’ve ever seen him end a stand-up set you’ll know how to do it right. Hopefully adding this little personal touch to an already unambiguous message will finally get his attention and make it actually sink in: “Hey, dummy, if you want to make a movie out of your stand-up routine – just make a movie of your stand-up routine.”
I Think I Love My Wife is Rock’s most recent in a string of thinly veiled, embarrassingly forced vehicles designed to recycle his favorite stand-up bits for a new audience, and maybe get some of his old audience to pay for them twice. There is a very simple and specific formula to creating these movies, known sarcastically in writer’s circles as “CB4.0”. Once you understand the code of CB4.0, you’ll be amazed at how easy it is to recognize. The formula is designed to produce four general structural variations, each of which produces a largely empty plot shell, which can be later easily filled in with any prewritten material that may have been initially designed for a more monologue delivery. The process begins by [1] throwing together some sort of boilerplate plot line that pretty much writes itself (Head of State) or [2] going online to find a script of some old movie that most people probably won’t recognize and writing a remake of it (Down to Earth). And by “write a remake” I mean “write your name on a new title page, then just cut and paste lines from your stand-up routine over the old dialogue.” When it comes time to cut and paste, there are a few options as to how this can be done.
The first option is [a] to paste the existing jokes into the dialogue of whatever character Rock is set to play. This option may require some minor additional tweaking of the script in order to have the supporting cast set up his rants by asking questions that would seem to justify them. For example, if Rock were to remake Dirty Harry, he might take the line: “… you’ve got to ask yourself a question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?”, and just fine-tune it a little to something like, “… you’ve got to ask yourself a question: Do I have any incisive observations on the nature of modern racial tensions that I can express in a manner that combines the pain of real experience with the brutality of unflinching satire? Well, do ya, punk?”. Did you notice the difference? Relatively minor change, and now – boom! – Rock can be off to the races while still within the context of the story. This “set it up and knock it down” approach is also the preferred option of any directors of other films looking to use Rock in a comic relief supporting role (Lethal Weapon 4).
The second option is [b] to create a narrator and just lay in the routines as a voice-over during non-sequiter scenes of everyday life. This option is particularly appealing to star and studio alike, as Rock doesn’t even have to show up for anything and the producers save all kinds of money on studio time by just cutting up audio from existing HBO specials and splicing them into the film. So, for instance, say Rock had been cast for the role of Red in The Shawshank Redemption instead of Morgan Freeman. Instead of having Red say (in that early scene where he narrates over a quick montage of shots to set Andy’s backstory): “Andy came to Shawshank Prison in early 1947 for murdering his wife and the fella she was bangin’.”, it would be a simple edit to just chop off a cut from Rock’s old O.J. routine and punch that up to: “Andy came to Shawshank Prison in early 1947 for murdering his wife and the fella she was bangin’. Now I ain’t sayin’ he killed her – but I understand.”
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