Full spoilers for NerdLand, a fairly obscure animated comedy film starring two of our nation’s funniest men. An interesting endeavor, to be sure.

NerdLand(2016) stars Paul Rudd, Patton Oswalt, Hannibal Buress, Kate Micucci, Riki Lindhome, Eric Bauza, and Mike Judge. It was written by Andrew Kevin Walker and directed by Chris Prynoski.

IMDb says this is “The story of two best friends whose dreams of success and stardom have fizzled, so they decide to become famous in one day – at all costs.” We’ll see how it is. This feels very unlike anything I’ve had to watch for this blog before. I go back and forth on adult animated comedies, so I don’t know yet.

• The animation is interesting, I like the look of it, it feels like a comic book or kids graphic novel gone wrong. It’s quirky and sketched on.
• We open on two roommates and friends with discolored noses. On of them is buff and sounds like Paul Rudd, and he’s going to go have a meeting with some generic actor named Brett Anderson. The other one is scrawny and sickly and sounds like Patton Oswalt and claims he’s going to write before his shift only to lament “Mocking white rectangle. Agony of spinning yarns from nothing but sheer imagination. Will anyone ever appreciate my genius?” He them writes out different kinds of genitals using punctuation and then writes half a page about Rip Van Winkle, the God of time, killing “big bosomed” strippers and tries to have sex with his inflatable doll. Great. Yuck.
• In turn, Paul Rudd loses his job as a reporter for a concessions based website by annoying Brett during his interview, trying to sell Patton’s alien sex script, with him as the co-lead, sweating, ripping his pants, and farting. Ugh. I get the sense this will be a long one hour and twenty-two minutes.
• After being rejected once again by the women at the mall they have crushes on, John and Elliot decide they want to get insta-famous by using YouTube to make a dumb video that goes viral.
• They think the way into it is to film themselves giving a check for less than $200 to a homeless man, like pre-Mr. Beasts. It immediately goes wrong because their tripod lets them get out of shot, and when they try to re-film the giant check giving, the homeless man thinks they’re robbing him, beats them up, and skateboards away on his shopping cart.
• Luckily their friend the Nerd King lets them borrow his camera from his porn and knick knack emporium.
• What I like about animated films is they can do interesting things with the camera angles if they like, and this one does that. There are none I can describe so eloquently, but lots of dutch angles and zooms and I should stop giving this movie credit, Paul Rudd’s list of “alphabetized pornography” just got stolen.
• After trying to save an old lady from a burning house and getting saved by her instead, they change their tactic. They want to go down in infamy, so they try hacking a mega-billion dollar company to become Robin Hood style societal legends, but get counter-hacked by the rich and evil Paul Scheer instead.
• Next they try getting beaten up by the cops on camera, but the cops outsmart them and trick Paul Rudd into turning the other way while they beat him up. Ha. Timely. And depressing.
• It should also be stated that some characters in this randomly have pink or purple or blue skin tones. There’s no real rhyme or reason to it.
• This movie does follow a similar structure in terms of plot to Two Days, but they’re two very different sides of a coin. In Two Days Paul plays someone who’s done looking for fame, he just wants to film the end because he’s depressed, whereas in this he gives himself a one day deadline to become famous.
• The funniest and best part so far comes at the halfway mark when Paul decides he’s so obsessed with infamy that he’s going to go on a killing spree, which makes sense for these characters, and Patton’s not on board, so in quick succession we get a beautifully surreal animation sequence of a handshake that dissolves into just the two of them, a background of knives and blood. It’s hard to describe but I like it. That segues into the classic rom-com/best friend movie where they split up for a minute because Patton says he doesn’t want to do a killing spree and they’re on different pages and a sad song plays over a montage of animated depression. Only Patton quickly changes his mind and they go buy chloroform from a pharmacy. I feel like every other post I find myself surprised by how weird and insane a Paul Rudd movie is.
• The weird animation coupled with someone saying the words “Sweet Tooth” makes me just really frustrated we never got to see that Sweet Tooth TV show. I love that comic so much. Go back to my Top 10 Favorite Comics list to hear about that.
• They decide to kill their sweet old lady neighbor first, and Paul Rudd quickly realizes his head isn’t in the game. Patton has already chloroformed her while Paul was in the bathroom, so they make it look like she got really drunk and it wasn’t their fault. Crisis mostly averted.
• Lucky for these idiots, they were caught on security camera right as an insane criminal man goes into a gas station. He’s an armed robber. So now, they’ve been dubbed the Mystery Witnesses. They have the fame they want. And the girls at the mall that they won’t leave alone claim them as their boyfriends. So.
• Here’s a good line for which I will give no context: “Once the head’s off, for even a split second, it’s almost always fatal.” Heh.
• The irony of course is that the guy they walked by is a famous and deadly member of a large Cleveland crime family, so the police only have one option, to place them in witness protection. The anonymity though, it’s not in their best interests. So instead they leave the police station and discover their mall friends, voiced by Kate Micucci and Riki Lindhome, are now very interested in them. “I’ve never been so wet for an ugly guy before.” Jesus.
• Another solid line: “We’re giving you the gift of deniable plausibility.”
• They realize the only way to escape this issue of probably getting killed by many criminals is to kill the mystery witnesses. So I guess they do decide to go with witness protection, in a way? They’re idiots so the logic doesn’t work.
• This movie does have good visual gags in the animation, like the red-faced buff Cleveland criminal spit-skewering a fly with a toothpick, the Nerd King’s favorite childhood show Robo-Wizard, the random quirks throughout. It is an occasionally very funny movie.
• They throw old corpses into their car and crash it to fake their deaths but Kate and Riki already invited every press/publicity person into their apartment, meaning they’ll have to go into witness protection. They ask the girls to go with them, just as the new Hollywood sign, sponsored by a biscuit company (An ongoing plot thread I forgot to mention) is unveiled, and we don’t see it but apparently it sucks.
• In the end the girls end up on reality TV and the guys grow facial hair and take on new names and… the movie’s over. Alright, man. Cool.

Overall Rating: 5.4/10(I will never rewatch this movie ever. But I’m positive I’m rating it too low because it has actors I love and some good jokes. It’s just most of the writing letting it down.)
Rudd Rating: 7.1/10(As animated performances go, it’s entirely solid. He does nothing excellent in this, but it’s also not an actively bad performance. So. That’s Nerdland.)

Next time… we revisit some old classics and recent terrible non-classics to determine for the second and probably not final time what is the definitive current ranking of all this shit I’ve watched. Yay!