The entertainment world lost a giant yesterday, when Garry Marshall, creator of some of the most popular television shows in the medium’s history and a director of some of the most beloved movies of the last 30 years, died after what The New York Times called “a series of strokes.” He was 81 years old.
There’s no silence quieter than the one in a movie theater during an bad comedy. At times during Mother’s Day, director Garry Marshall’s newest debasement of a beloved holiday, a hush fell over the theater to rival the quietude at a Benedictine monastery. When the laughter finally came, it’s always at the movie’s expense. This disaster is less deliberately funny than the last movie titled Mother’s Day, and that was a violent horror film.
Having already planted his flag of squeaky-clean ethnically homogeneous courtship on New Year’s Eve with New Year’s Eve, Valentine’s Day with Valentine’s Day, and America’s most tragic hour with 9/11 Remembrance Day, Garry Marshall will expand his Holiday Cinematic Universe with Mother’s Day this spring...
What is the worst franchise in Hollywood? Transformers? Alvin and the Chipmunks? Underworld? They’re all pretty crummy, but they pale before the abject awfulness of the unnamed franchise Garry Marshall’s been working on for the last couple years, where he takes a holiday everyone loves, cast a bunch of movie stars everyone loves, and puts them in a terrible, terrible movie that everyone hates (but which make a ton of money). First came Valentine’s Day featuring Julia Roberts, Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Garner, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Biel, and Jamie Foxx, and it was bad. Then there was New Year’s Day, with Halle Berry, Katherine Heigl, Zac Efron, Michelle Pfeiffer, Hilary Swank, and Robert freaking De Niro and it was, somehow, much, much worse. Now Marshall’s reign of calendarian terror will continue with Mother’s Day.