Evan Almighty’s lackluster performance at the box office last weekend is being blamed on a lot of different factors. Some people think bad marketing was the issue, others are hanging their hat on lousy reviews or the fact that the movie simply wasn’t very good. None of that was the problem. I have the answer, and her name is Molly Shannon.
Yes, she’s only in the movie for all of 30 seconds, but the world is really sick of her. The audience I saw Evan Almighty with sighed audibly when she first appeared on camera. It wasn’t a sigh of contentment or satisfaction. It was a collective, audience-wide sigh of complete and utter defeat. It was as if her appearance on the screen, five-minutes into the film, signified the moment when the entire audience instantly decided to give up on the movie. People check out when they see Molly Shannon in a scene, and it’s not just because she’s always been completely untalented, it’s also because for some inexplicable reason Hollywood insists on inserting her into everything.
I don’t know how she does it. Every time I see her I throw up in my mouth a little bit. She’s not funny, she can’t really act, yet Molly Shannon gets plumb roles in what to my active imagination must be at least half the movies released on any given weekend. She always plays the same character too. Oh it may not have been written that way, but when Molly Shannon wraps her arm pits around a role they all become some horrible variation on that idiotic, completely unfunny Mary Katherine Gallagher character she played on Saturday Night Live. She may not actually stop and stick her fingers in her arm pits, but no matter what part she’s playing there’s always the possibility that she might.
Maybe she simply knows the right people, or maybe Hollywood mistakenly thinks America likes her. Maybe in real life she’s such a nice person that those lovable, huggable studio executives out in California simply feel sorry for her. Whatever the reason, she’s on her way to invading every aspect of your daily entertainment. We’re only half way into 2007 and she’s already been in three major motion pictures. Last year she had a hand in making six of them, which puts her right on track to hit that same number again this year. Unless.
It’s time to do something about Molly Shannon and tanking Evan Almighty is a start America. I’m calling for a Molly Shannon boycott and I don’t care if Steve Carell’s career experiences collateral damage as a side effect. I’m not watching her anymore, and I’m not going to stop not watching her until she’s living under a porch somewhere with Margot Kidder. We can’t agree on global warming or Iraq, but maybe we can all agree on this:
Enough with Molly Shannon Hollywood. Enough.
