Asses

It's the understatement of the year to say that the movie Jackass Number Two is not for everybody. There were moments when I questioned why I was in that theater. Then I started laughing again.

Aside from laughter that often led to coughing (tail end of a nasty cold), I was also heard to often utter, "No, no, no, no..." and "You're f*cking kidding me," along with a phalanx of sympathetic groans, moans and shouts.

Assuming you actually buy a ticket to go see this, a #1 box office hit no kidding, you can't watch the movie and not react in some visceral, physical fashion. Each little "skit" comes with a spoken or overlaid title, like "Terror Taxi" and "Butt Chug". Each one appears to top the last in outrageousness. The movie itself is like one giant dare on you as a viewer. If you can't handle watching grown men drink fresh horse semen, you are not the audience for this movie. If you can, however, you'll spend an hour and a half in the company of some very courageous, moronic jackasses.

Based on the MTV series and a (reportedly) superior sequel to a first Jackass movie, this film consists of a series of stunts and pranks, sometimes at the same time.

The stunts range from getting jetted out over a lake in a shopping cart to being human bait for sharks.

The pranks are perpetrated on the fellow members of the Jackass gang or the unsuspecting public. Pranks on fellow cast members include electrocution, surprise punches to the face, or obscene gags with pubic hair. Often a prank is piled onto a stunt, doubling the pain for the jackass who's up this time. Pranks on the public can be obscene or just surreal, the most chaste involving a midget being chased by a hugely obese man, both in their underwear, through a street in some foreign city.

Germinated by ringleader Johnny Knoxville and director Jeff Tremaine out of their association at a skateboarding magazine, the core performers seem part of a thrasher fraternity, so often do their deliver severe pain to themselves and each other, so often do their get intimate with each other's bodily grotesqueries. But what holds it all together is the legit nature of the entire enterprise.

These guys are doing the stunts themselves, cut together like assemblage, loving each other's company and each member garnering massive cred and cheers for performing and surviving "skits" inspired by Wily E. Coyote and Tom & Jerry. This version opens and closes with sequences obviously staged in a Hollywood studio, the first on some sort of outdoor/indoor suburban neighborhood set, the closer a psychotic Jackass-ified Busby Berkeley number. But neither plays fake, they're more like celebrations, or dressing up just a little for the theater audience, showing a little respect.

The overall impression, in its own galvanizing yet revolting way, is actually one of surrealism. The bullrun through the burbs, into the yards and houses, is kinda like L'Age D'Or on adrenaline, a notion confirmed by the inclusion of Luis Bunuel in the Special Thank You credits.

While they may be skateboardheads, Knoxville and his Asses are the modern day -- MTV -- version of the Surrealists and the Situationalists, both 20th Century outlaw art movements that challenged all convention with wit and savagery, for their times. The performance artist who springs immediately to mind is Chris Burden, who in the early 1970's performed hotly debated pieces like "Shoot that was made in F Space in Santa Ana, California in 1971, in which he was shot in his left arm by an assistant from a distance of about five meters."

Two of the trailers were particularly apt. One was for The Prestige, the upcoming Christopher Nolan movie about Victorian magicians pushing the limits of physical determination through an intense rivalry. The other was for Borat, eliciting wild laughter and applause, the perfect match for the crowd.

Sacha Baron Cohen was picked up the Andy Kaufman mantle and is running like crazy with it. His is a combustible satiric combo of character comedy and reality TV, now reality cinema. So this is the theatrical fruit of our reality television age, Jackass and Borat, and as long as it's extreme and fresh and feels authentically real enough, it's what earns a large paying audience.

At the surrealist core, like their maybe more highbrow predecessors, the Jackasses upend assumptions of normalcy with their acts, pushing the boundaries of human experience and, by filming it, pushing the boundaries of the audience experience. What makes it so appealing is the camaraderie and a fizzy joy, even in the worst pain (like when three of them take the blast of a claymore mine), like a real-life Fight Club the sense that whatever insanely moronic stunt you survive just makes you stronger.

And maybe experiencing all at the movies will make it easier for some of us to get through the work week.