Who's in It: Albert Brooks, Jon Tenney, John Carroll Lynch, Sheetal Sheth, Amy Ryan, Fred Dalton Thompson
The Basics: Albert Brooks, that guy who used to be really funny and who now makes terrible, unfunny movies, plays a guy named Albert Brooks who used to be really funny and who now makes terrible, unfunny movies. That's why he's shipped off to India and Pakistan to do research on what makes Muslims laugh — all the funny people were busy.
What's the Deal? Sony used to be the studio behind this movie, and now Warner Independent has it. The official reason is that Sony was concerned about the movie being too much of a political hot button, what with its potentially-offensive-to-Muslims title and all. But once you see it, you know the real reason. They freaked out because it's so damn lame. It's 100 minutes of someone explaining a joke to you, a joke that sucked the first time you heard it.
"Your Mother Thinks Muslim Is a Fabric." That's a line of dialogue from Albert Brooks as Albert Brooks. It's part of a sad-clown stew of repeated — and I mean repeated a lot — references to the outsourcing of customer-service operator jobs to India, wacky cultural misunderstanding gags (American Person says, "Tell [Brooks, on his way to a stand-up gig] to break a leg!" to which Indian Person says, "Oh, please, that's mean.") and other gags about Indians, most of whom are Hindu and not Muslim.
Now You Know Whose Side to Take in the Ongoing India-Pakistan Conflict: When Brooks performs in India, he bombs. When he takes the same bad jokes over the border to Pakistan, he kills.
You Know What This Movie Needs? A Penny Marshall Cameo: Maybe Brooks thought that if he put Marshall, who is perhaps the lone person left in Hollywood who is less funny than Brooks, in here, he'd look good by comparison.