Hamlet 2

In a summer with more than the usual number of smart comedies, Hamlet 2 is the best of them. It's a clever parody of the Inspirational Teacher Movie, at it's best zany, filthy and sharp. One can complain about an underused cast - Elizabeth Shue and Catherine Keener are both great actors who barely register here, for starters - or the sheer ridiculousness of the enterprise, but why bother when you have Steve Coogan's best film performance to date, a case of a great comic actor slipping completely into the skin of his character.

Or when you have co-writer Pam Brady, who co-wrote also South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, and is a producer of the TV show, most certainly putting the phrase, "Those Bible-humpers can suck a bag of dicks," in Amy Poehler's mouth, or helping to pen the glorious "Rock Me, Sexy Jesus" musical number that is Coogan's apotheosis.

If it doesn't work at all times, I am inclined to forgive. Director Andrew Fleming also directed Threesome, a 1994 Harlequin Romance in which Lara Flynn Boyle, Stephen Baldwin and Josh Charles have a kind of drawn-out, repressed ménage à trois. I remember watching this film with two female friends of mine in, perhaps, 1995. It was a fun evening.

So, again, Fleming gives us a movie that is an enjoyably bad farce; here, there's also something brilliantly subversive about it. It celebrates free expression with a fuck you attitude, a foul mouth and its "heartsoul" in the right place.