Hi, this is Mike from the Substream.com, and this is an episode of Watch This Instead for the week and then the ninth of April, 2010. And tonight comes date night, the unholy, hilarious union of two of NBC’s Thursday Night comedy stars, Steve Carrel from “The Office” and Tina Fey from the very funny “30 Rock”.

They play a married couple looking to lighten up their more abound work a day, drag me down marriage by having a special date night out on the Island of Manhattan in a Fancy Restaurant called Claw, and they steal someone’s reservation which leads to more crazy mix up of wacky high jinx and mistaken identities, car crashes and secret agents, corrupt cops and good cops and a helicopter and a funny crash with a funny taxi driver. It’s exactly as funny in there, it is exactly as funny as you think that they’re going to be. These are two very talented people, people that can write their own material and they’re very, very, very good performers, and they got legitimately great chemistry together.

The problem with the film is everything except the two of them, except for Tina Fey and Steve Carrel. The whole thing’s bill is really cheap for some baffling reason. It was shot quite obviously on digital video. Not the really kind of cool artistic breaking, 21st century, artistic cinematographic boundaries, Michael Mann kind of digital video, but the really cheap looking, high gain, you didn’t render enough lights to light your scene kind of what you could get off of a camera from Best Buy kind of digital video and that makes the thing look and feel cheap. It’s just the important scene right in the film, and a strip club. It’s not just a strip club, it’s a strip club owned by a really powerful Mafioso on the Island of Manhattan. I’m sure they called it Frequented by extremely rich well adored perverted people. And the strip club suffers from massive, incurable student filmitis. It’s apparently a 10x10 foot red cube of a room filled with three dudes and two dancers in spangly bikinis. It’s like Tina Fey phoned her buddy, the brick layered Bob and said, “Bob, I need you to come to the set tomorrow in the strip club because we can’t get enough people.” Somehow, we’re making a film with Tina Fey and they can’t afford enough extras to make a strip club look like an actual strip club. It feels and looks cheap.

And because the film feels and looks cheap, it feels meager. And because it feels meager, it feels boring. Wonder to yourself, “Why did I pay $12 for this film when Avatar also caused $12?” They clearly skimped on Date Night. It ruins all of what very good chemistry between the two stars in the film. By the way, the film is directed by the Canadian that made the first Pink Panther remake, and also directed Night at the Museum with Ben Stiller.

So what would you be watching instead? On the recommendation of the fabulous Tom Burger who comes in sometimes and volunteers his time as an editor to cut some of our little video short, the winner of the 2003 Emmy Award for excellence and the achievement of the editorial arts for student editing in Los Angeles where he was introduced to Anne Hathaway and who spurned her, Tom recommends that you watch instead, and I agree, What’s up Doc, from 1972 with Barbara Streisand, Ryan O’Neal, directed by he very, very good, Peter Von Donovich. It’s an homage to the great screwball comedies of the thirties, and it itself is a great screwball comedy. It’s got mistaken identities, jewels, secret agents, secret documents, which bag is which, wacky high jinx, oh my goodness, laughs, tears, bills. It doesn’t feel meager. It doesn’t feel cheap and you should watch it instead.