VOD/Digital/DVDebut: CRAZY FAMOUS, Farkas /Jarrett's nitwit ode to gaining fame at all cost

In these current times of, rather than Warhol's famous "15 minutes of fame," we get 15 million hits on the Internet, before the crowd moves on to the next big thing, the idea of a movie comedy based around someone so obsessed with getting famous that he'll do anything to achieve it sounds like it could be fun.

For a very few minutes a new movie called CRAZY FAMOUS, written and produced by Bob Farkas and directed by Paul Jarrett, might have you thinking that it will be just that.

Soon however -- after the noticeable lack of talent, creativity or amusement in the screenplay and dialog kicks in -- the movie becomes progressively worse as it plods along. TrustMovies suspects that most of the blame must rest, not on director Jarrett (shown at right), who does a professional job technically and simply gives us what his writer/producer, Mr. Farkas (shown below) has handed him to serve up: an interesting premise that begins goofily enough before quickly descending into a swamp of tired cliches, cutesy caricatures and, yes, more fart jokes.

This is particularly too bad for the actors on board because they are, to a man and woman, pleasant enough and probably quite talented under other circumstances that would show them to their advantage rather than making them grate on us something fierce. The obviousness and stupidity of the screenplay and dialog forces most of the actors to simply serve what's on the page, which thoroughly undercuts any kind of performance they might deliver. The single exception to this comes via the surprisingly smart and thoroughly professional job done by an actor new to me, Richard Short (shown below and at bottom, right), playing a mental patient named "Smith" who doubles as a secret agent with a nifty British accent. (Mr. Short is British, so that was not difficult to achieve.) Whenever the camera and microphone remain on him, the movie grows bearable.

Otherwise, this silly film, with its bent-on-being-famous-for-no-good-reason hero, played by the affable-but-little-more Gregory Lay, below, goes from its cute beginning in which Mr. Lay, accompanied by a trampoline, does a strip-tease and then bounces into a forbidden area, to being institutionalized in an asylum in which, yes, every patient (two of them are seen further below) is a walking-talking cliche.

From the asylum into a plot to assassinate an evidently still-alive Osama bin Laden, the movie lurches along, with all the characters piling on board to serve its nitwit cause.

Along the way there is a little would-be romance for our hero, a look at his younger days as a fame seeker (that's Ashton Woerz, below), a later visit to his parents for some worthless guilt-tripping,

and government bad guys, a car chase, bullets flying, and then Osama and his nurse -- all of this crammed into a mere 78 minutes that somehow seem much longer.

I hate to stomp on what was probably someone's labor of love. On the other hand, since I spent the time first watching and then writing about this film, I feel it might be worth warning others: Unless you've a very high tolerance for the ridiculous, maybe look elsewhere for your entertainment.

From Gravitas Ventures, Crazy Famous will hit VOD, Digital, and DVD this coming Tuesday, January 9 -- for purchase and/or rental.