“Why’d you try to kill yourself?”
The question is asked quite a lot throughout the movie. For those of who are special enough to have ever seen the show “Upright Citizens Brigade” then you know right off the bat what will be happening in Martin and Orloff and what kind of insane, crazy, out of control antics all the characters will be getting into. But for those of you who have no seen anything by the UCB… you’ve been warned this movie is odd and ridiculous to all proportions.
Ian Roberts plays Martin Flam with Matt Walsh playing Dr. Eric Orloff. Throughout the movie we see that Martin is actually the sanity while Orloff is the insanity. Orloff surrounds himself with the oddest of people including his friend Keith who has a problem with shitting in sinks. Orloff drags Martin all over New York starting with a softball game he had to get to in the middle of Martin’s first session. From then on Orloff drags Martin to a hot dog vender where the guy’s face and hands got messed up from oil exploding on them, to a strip club where his girlfriend is a striper and has the best sweet potato pie, and to a theater play that is about someone killing themselves. Orloff is always saying to Martin “this will be good for you” and then something crazy winds up happening.
As with the show, everything is all crazy from start to finish and comes together nicely at the end. He meets Kasha who is Eric’s stripper girlfriend, her friend and fellow stripper Patti, Patti’s overweight and very well endowed ex-boyfriend Jimbo, a writer named Dan Wasserman, and a patient of Orloff’s with severe daddy issues. All these people come together at the end and help Martin with his problem and standing up to his boss.
Martin creates character costumes for a marketing company. He was to make an eggroll costume for this company called China Chef. The guy from China Chef is out of his mind and did not want Martin to make a costume with eye holes because he did not want people to be reminded there was a human inside he wanted it to look as real as possible. The actor in the eggroll costume went for a smoke but because he could not see where he was going he walked off a pier and drowned. The guys from China Chef covered the whole thing up and cut eye holes in the costume when the body was brought up.
On the way back to Orloff’s office in one scene they stop for Chinese food (“It’s the best in the city.”). When they get back to the office Orloff takes out an eggroll and tosses it to Martin. Martin freaks out seeing the eggroll and says “I don’t want to talk to you I want to talk to the eggroll.” We along with Orloff that Martin tried to kill himself because he blamed himself for the actor in the eggroll costume dying.
Martin and Orloff is one of those movies that you need to have a special kind of humor for. The story is outrageously ridiculous and the characters are all out of their minds in some way. This is a fun movie to watch for all the actors: Kim Raver plays Kasha who is affectionately called “Strippy” by Orloff, Amy Poehler plays Patti, David Cross is Dan Wasserman, Matt Besser is Martin’s boss, and Tina Fey, Rachel Dratch, and Janeane Garofalo play the Southern Ladies a dinner theater play. This movie was before Amy Poehler was on Saturday Night Live, you can tell because her top front teeth were not capped yet. It was odd in one part to see her kissing Ian Roberts in the scene when Patti takes Martin back to her place, I can’t explain what makes the whole thing awkward and weird but it just is.
If you are in the mood for some dark, ridiculous, non sophisticated, humor watch Martin and Orloff. This is a movie I show all my friends at least once, it’s different from all the other comedy movies that have been made in the last ten years. Martin and Orloff is fun to watch when you think the weight of the world is upon you and nothing has been going your way, you see Martin and what he is going through and you realize that your life no matter how insane it is at the moment is nothing compared to what he goes through.
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