The Cable Guy (1996)
Directed by Ben Stiller
When recently single Steven moves into his new apartment, cable guy Chip comes to hook him up—and doesn't let go. Initially, Chip is just overzealous in his desire to be Steven's pal, but when Steven tries to end the 'friendship', Chip shows his dark side. He begins stalking Steven, who's left to fend for himself because no one else can believe Chip's capable of such behaviour.
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What critics compared The Cable Guy to
The movie seems to be striving to be a comedy of tone and discomfort -- something in the neighborhood of "The Cable Guy" or a really dark "Bottle Rocket" -- where the humor lies in the sheer strangeness and meanness of the characters' behaviors rather than in overt one-liners and slapstick.
It’s rare for one of these types of movies — let’s call it the Creepy Friend or Neighbor genre, with examples ranging from Pacific Heights to Fatal Attraction to, well, The Cable Guy — to keep this level of suspense and uncertainty going for this long.
As fans of "The Cable Guy" and "The Larry Sanders Show" know, Apatow has been writing and producing comedies for a long time.
The casting is perfect; you may not know the names but the faces are all too familiar: Jake Busey (Starship Troopers super-marine), Jamie Kennedy (the horror-movie buff in both Scream films), Jack Black (Bordericks jealous buddy in The Cable Guy), and a host of others with solid MTV generation credits.
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An obvious departure for comedic star Jim Carrey, The Cable Guy follows Matthew Broderick's mild-mannered Steven Kovacs as he's increasingly menaced by his demented cable-tv installer (Jim Carrey's Chip Douglas).
So, in 2013, the task rests in the reliable – if not entirely expected – hands of actor Ben Stiller, who has steadily built up his directorial CV with challenging comedies The Cable Guy and Tropic Thunder, not to mention the surreal Zoolander and his debut feature, the oh-so-1994 Reality Bites.
Ben Stiller excels at playing genial outsiders lost in their personal grievances; as a director, from the unfairly maligned broadcast satire of "The Cable Guy" through the outlandish fashion world satire of "Zoolander" and the Hollywood satire of "Tropic Thunder," Stiller has shown a penchant for wacky energy that builds on seemingly real world situations with cartoonish absurdity.
His follow-up The Cable Guy is pretty on the nose as far as its distain for modern media goes, and when that fizzled at the box office he went off and acted in a string of not-exactly hilarious dramas (Permanent Midnight, Your Friends and Neighbours).
In the past, Stiller has given us some terrible films, including “The Cable Guy,” “Zoolander,” and “Tropic Thunder,” but with “Walter Mitty” he shows a lot of promise for being able to make much better films than he has been.
His crazier, darker films The Cable Guy (1996) and Tropic Thunder (2008) worked much better for me, so it's a step up for Stiller to go back to being sweet and earnest without feeling too calculating.
Like “Blade Runner” or “The Cable Guy,” two bad, mucked-up movies that refused audiences the pleasure of a clear story or decipherable emotion, “The Hulk” could, in a few months’ time, start to attract a coterie who will lament that it was too dark and daring for mainstream audiences.
Neither of his other two films as director, Reality Bites or Zoolander have the same sting.
Stiller, who co-wrote the screenplay and directed, is no hack (I thought his previous "The Cable Guy" was a vastly underrated dark comedy), but his film is nonetheless generic, uneven and self-indulgent.
The critically-mauled dark farce "The Cable Guy" (1996) was prefigured by the self-conscious Generation X navel-gazing of "Reality Bites" (1994).
It's obvious from the turgid Bond-ian opening that something is amiss, and you quickly wonder just how long Stiller, the put-upon star of "Meet the Parents" and the occasional director of such films as "Reality Bites" and "The Cable Guy," can drag this catwalk spectacle out.
Yet, Stiller (who directed "The Cable Guy" and "Reality Bites") and co-writers Drake Sather (making his feature film debut) and John Hamburg ("Safe Men," co-writer of "Meet the Parents") don't pursue the jugular vigorously enough, resulting in a spoof that's amusing and occasionally clever, but far too often benign and unimaginative for its own good.