Balls of Fury

At last! And really, it was very funny. It was made by Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon of "Reno 911," and had a lot of that show's virtues: performers who know what they're doing, genuine wit in the writing, and a weird way of actually making their idiotic characters sympathetic. Thomas Lennon is a white-hot bolt of energy as the deranged East German ping-ponger who challenges our hero, former child champion Randy Daytona. The latter is played by Dan Fogler, whom I would normally call the poor man's Jack Black, except that he's actually fantastic and, the IMDB informs me, a Tony award-winner. Christopher Walken swans about in kimonos and Gary Oldman's "Dracula" hair without so much as a wink at his ridiculous get-up, dropping his lines in that weirdly langorous New Yawk honk of his. I loved him. I liked the whole thing, but this much I know is true: no one in the world liked this movie better than my spouse. Did he chortle at every testicle-injury joke? Yes he did. It is a fact that on the ride home he started to worry that the movie wasn't well-enough publicized, and to wonder how he might launch a word-of-mouth campaign.