The Last Bull Tango: A review of the return of the iconic show "Jackass Forever"
The main stuntmen of the MTV era are back to bang their heads and limbs. Like the first time.
The gang of reckless extremists is back on the screens after a decade: the faces of the heroes, who are in their fifth decade, show signs of fatigue and, in some cases, wrinkles and the characteristic gray hair. However, brittle bones and numerous injuries are not a problem for the team of "Freaks" who continue to ingeniously abuse their own bodies. It feels as if MTV's slaughterhouse days haven't gone anywhere and the triumph of idiocy continues: gray-haired Johnny Knoxville is knocked out by another bull, Chris Pontius waving his dick, new ways of surfing and skateboarding are mastered with teenage zeal, and licking stun guns and fateful meetings with a bear become an important part of the program.
The world has changed rapidly in the last ten years, casting a dubious shadow over the work of the Odd Fellows and, of course, paralyzing them in many ways. Even such hardcore crazies, as it turns out, are easily disrupted: youth culture is at the mercy of social networks, YouTube and dangerous streaming shows, taking the palm from cable - it was the era of television that once made skateboarders and extreme athletes global stars. But times are changing. Aside from the question of how to stay popular and compete with viral Internet celebrities, the "Freaks" gang experienced a major shock - the 2011 death of Ryan Dunn, whose passing left the stunt team exhausted. Many of them don't seem to have recovered yet: the fourth installment was expectedly dedicated to Dunn, and "Cranks" regular Bam Margera, being Dunn's best friend, managed to go through all the circles of hell in a decade - falling into a deep depression and addiction to alcohol. This, as well as creative differences with leader Johnny Knoxville and director Jeff Tremaine, prevented Margera from taking part in a new episode. But new recruits were brought on board: Eric Manac, Jasper Dolphin, Sean "Poopy" McInerney, Zach Holmes, and Rachel Wolfson, the first woman aboard the Oddballs, a heroine with an incredible pain threshold: she would survive a scorpion bite to the lips without even screaming.
All the while Knoxville was lovingly collecting and recording stunts, expecting a team reunion soon. What do we see in the end? A scary rodeo with the leader of the Odd Fellows that could be his last at any moment (Knoxville feared another concussion, but the rendezvous with the bull ended with a spectacular turn-and-a-half somersault and an injury). Chris Pontius and his phallic fixation: his defiant nudity is now embodied in a stunning opening scene, perhaps the best in the entire franchise, parodying the kaiju movies (his penis, it's not hard to guess, is the monster that storms the miniature model of the city). There's even more naked Steve-O, as well as bees on his genitals. The guys also do a very funny parody of Silence of the Lambs, arming themselves with night vision devices and launching the poor guys into a dark room with a snake and obstacles. Well, for the record, if you count the pain total, Eren McGee was the worst off: his balls suffered for our laughter, getting hit by muscular fighters, sniper-accurate baseball players and hockey pucks. Not to mention how strapped to the electric chair McGee survived a sudden encounter with a bear that came to him for salmon and seemed ready to eat the trickster.
To put it simply, the Odd Fellows have once again pulled it off. One does not want to cast a pitying glance in their direction, and it is unfortunate to watch five minutes of old men mocking their decrepit bodies. And even on the contrary, the bone-changing and traumatic consequences dramatize the amazing and dangerous conflict to which the Odd Fellows have dedicated their entire lives: the conflict of body and things, performing various manipulations to test the stability of their material selves. Most importantly, the Knoxville team still retains a characteristic recklessness bordering on daring and inventiveness. The march of the band on the treadmill ends with either a knocked-out tooth or a bleeding head wound. A stunt called "vomitron" turns into a vomit extravaganza as the merry-go-round gathers momentum and the participants are thoroughly drunk on milk. Hang gliding is fraught with a grandiose fall on a cactus.
Of course, "Cranks" can't avoid nostalgia - some jokes are destined to loop twenty years of experience, reminding us of former exploits: Dave England, for example, again tries to defecate in public, and Chris Pontius raises the gastronomic stakes by trying pig semen instead of horse semen. Why this is still funny (and it is, anyway, really funny) is a big question that should be addressed not to one's own humorous threshold (in the case of The Odd Fellows, say, it doesn't require a particularly high level) but to a modern culture that has emasculated and emasculated humor. Good old-fashioned physiological comedy that extolled the material-bodily low, familiar since the days of François Rabelais, who wrote the 16th-century novel Gargantua and Pantagruel. "Oddballs" spent most of their lives on the skater's deck, during their breaks healing head injuries, so they probably hadn't read any Rabelais, but they understood perfectly the whole carnival manifestation that sang the human body in its entirety-with unruly movements, external secretion, and an authentic sense of freedom. Purely on the level of intuition.
That's why a new "Oddballs" is perhaps most needed right now, when humor is going through its bad times. While a hypersensitive culture is deciding what to be offended by and what to fire in the furnace under the slogan "cancellation," the Knoxville team is bringing back the old patriarchal format, showing off its ammunition and balls of steel. We buried slapstick comedy too soon and for some reason decided to forget forever that kicking each other in the genitals is actually fun. Believe me, no TikTok is capable of such a gamut and physiology of feeling.
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