Thursday , March 28 2024
'Not Another Celebrity Movie' spoofs 'Oceans 11' with an entertaining cast of celebrity lookalikes.

DVD Review: ‘Not Another Celebrity Movie’

The tag line for Not Another Celebrity Movie is “A hilarious new comedy with the biggest `celebrity’ cast on the smallest production budget ever filmed.” Well, “hilarious” might be a bit of hyperbole, but this parody of Oceans 11 does have many ways to entertain us.

AFirst of all, the “celebrities” in this spoof aren’t really celebrities, but rather lookalikes playing them. For example, the story opens with an unbalanced Charlie Sheen (Dave Burleigh) heartbroken over losing Paris Hilton (Natalie Reid) to Usher (Johnny Boyd) and is living with porn stars. Johnny Depp (Ron Rodriguez) gives Sheen a new drug to help with his woes, but, under its influence, Sheen becomes convinced Justin Beiber (Danielle Owens-Reid) is his illegitimate son.

Trying to contact Beiber, Sheen finds himself on the receiving end of a restraining order courtesy of Beiber’s manager, Usher. Then Sheen learns Beiber will be performing at the Riviera Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas. He assembles a team to help him kidnap Beiber which ends up including Brad Pitt (Reed Thomas), George Clooney (Joey Sagal), Lady Gaga (Cheryl Lyone), Robert Deniro (Roger Kabler), Tom Cruise (Cole Downing), Mark Zuckerberg (Scott Cooper), Angelina Jolie (Nicole Lari-Joni), Kanye West (Baron Jay), and Donald Trump (John Di Domenico). Sheen needs all this help as it turns out Beiber doesn’t perform onstage but rather a hologram of him appears in his place to protect the singer from his fans. In this case, Beiber is doing his moves in a protected vault in the casino basement, hence the need for the Oceans 11 planning with a healthy dose of Tom Cruise doing his thing accompanied by the strains of the Mission: Impossible theme.

Not Another Celebrity Movie can’t really be called a joke fest, beyond the barbs the ersatz performers throw at each other about bad movies they’ve made. The main pleasure is comparing the lookalikes to the people they’re portraying, and pretty much all of them do commendable jobs. Domenico clearly has fun doing Donald Trump, a character who lends himself to easy exaggeration. He wants to fire everyone even though they don’t work for him. Some scenes are priceless such as when Robert Diniro does an updated version of his “You talking to me?” bit from Taxi Driver. It would be a spoiler to describe Lady Gaga’s wardrobe and what she and Usher perform when . . . well, that would be telling. Oh yea, a number of other celebs have brief appearances as well including Justin Timberlake, Kim Kardashian, Jimmy Kimmel, Daniel Craig, and Oprah.

While the film made its festival debut in 2013, its arrival on DVD comes on November 18. Directed and produced by Emilio Ferrari (Baby on Board, Lucky Town, White-Out, Entrapment), the spoof was filmed on location in Los Angeles and Las Vegas. This means while it’s obvious the budget wasn’t top-drawer, it’s also obvious this wasn’t a mere Youtube fan flick knocked out in someone’s garage. All you need to be entertained is to know something about all the actors and singers parodied. It would be helpful to have seen Oceans 11 to catch the drift. I just hope the producers cleared all the legal hurdles. Some of those folks could be real contrarians. Me, I’m wondering why the big prize is riding into the sunset with Paris Hilton. That seems like a fate worse than being trapped in a secure vault with Justin Bieber.

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About Wesley Britton

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One comment

  1. funny funny funny…watch it