Forgotten review: What Planet Are You From?

I vaguely remember back in 2000, seeing TV trailers for this film that starred Garry Shandling, and also remember hearing about how badly it bombed at the box office. Well, let's face it, most comedies do horribly during their theatrical release, and then eventually find some sort of an audience years later. Every once in awhile you have a film like The Hangover, that breaks box office records across the board. In the case of What Planet are you from? it was a mega bust. Its budget was listed somewhere around $60 million dollars, and it didn't even earn half of that back.

I'm hear to tell you it wasn't for it being an unfunny film. I randomly found this on Netflix the other night, and being the Garry Shandling fan that I am, from his days on the Larry Sanders Show on HBO, I had to at least watch it for a little bit and see if the film's lack of success was warranted. It was not. I found myself laughing hysterically throughout the first hour of the film, and then enough through the last half to keep it afloat. The story was co-written by Garry Shandling, and he doesn't just insert goofy material into the script, there are some subtle, serious moments where he's trying to make a point about how humanity acts on this planet.

The plot in a nutshell involves Shandling's character, an alien from a distant planet who is sent to earth on a mission to impregnate one human female, in order to start a takeover from his alien homeworld. He's pre-trained with cliche pick-up lines and the result are some hilarious scenes where you see earth females responding accordingly. The rest of the cast is top notch, with Annette Bening, who plays the prototypical crazy woman so well, Greg Kinnear who plays an adequate prick, John Goodman as a somewhat paranoid agent who has a belief that Shandling's character, Harold Anderson, is indeed from another world. Ben Kingsley even has a supporting role, playing the leader of Anderson's homeworld! Garry Shandling's facial expressions alone will have you cracking up throughout the better part of the film, and the rest of this great cast fills their roles perfectly.

As the plot rolls along, you see Anderson evolve from more of a robotic alien, with no emotions, to one who embraces the tendencies of the humans around him. This film could even be played as a how-to guide for men on what to not say to a woman, and have men and women alike laughing out loud at how absurd some of the awkward situations are.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this comedy. I have a feeling because it has some sci-fi themes embedded within the story, that this is one of the main reasons it bombed at the box-office. Comedies are tough enough to find a big, universal audience. Mix in science fiction themes, and you've just cut your audience into a thousand pieces. However, I'm here to tell you to give it a viewing. If nothing else, the fact that the main character's penis hums anytime a woman turns him on, will have you gasping for air. Nuff said!