just watch it!

Horrible, fascist and poorly acted

I have absolutely never seen anything like this movie before. You have to see this movie.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

This was an opportunity for some truly biting satire, but it was instead a rather pedestrian and forgettable bit of fluff. Reading a description of the plot- "An ethically-challenged anthropologist concocts a completely fake tribe and fools the whole world"- it should be a brilliant send-up of the goofier aspects of anthropology. Perhaps a digression is in order.Anthropology is a strange field. In their zeal to become as "objective" as the scholars of the natural sciences, anthropologists have sometimes forgotten that their subject of study is homo sapiens, a species which frequently frustrates attempts at "objective" scientific analysis (except where quantitative measurement is possible). Because of this, anthropology, during its long history, has seen more than its share of hoaxes, frauds, and rank nonsense (George Psalmanazar, Vilcabamba, the Tasaday, Margaret Mead and the Samoans, "The Third Eye", etc). Sometimes anthropologists are taken in by the wild tales of tribesmen playing a grand practical joke on gullible foreigners. Sometimes anthropologists exaggerate local peculiarities, ignoring the great similarities between the locals and Westerners- or, trying to prove that differences are only skin-deep, they do the opposite, ignoring obvious biological differences in favor of cultural explanations. At other times, anthropologists are taken in by complete fraudsters whose elaborate nonsense confirmed those anthropologists' preconceptions.Undergirding and feeding nearly all such hoaxes is one constant- Western observers who project their own fantasies and pet theories onto strange and distant peoples about whom they have insufficient information. Whether it is Rousseau with his "Noble Savage", credulous 20th-century advocates of "free love", communitarian socialists, earnest anti-racism crusaders, or people desperate to explain away the differences between men and women as nothing more than "culturally constructed", anthropological frauds always find a fertile market among people who are more concerned with critiquing their own societies than with learning about strange ones. (None of this, by the way, is meant as a dismissal of the work of serious and sober anthropologists who study and analyze the human animal).This constant is exactly what is missing in "Krippendorf's Tribe", and its absence means that the satire never bites or cuts, but only gently prods. As far as the film is concerned, the only thing driving the popular interest in "Krippendorf's Tribe" is simple prurience- part of the equation, no doubt, but only one aspect of a much larger issue in real-life frauds.A better approach would have been to highlight the way that intellectuals could use a phony tribe to serve as a justification for their own crackpot theories about human society and human nature. "Krippendorf's Tribe" dances around this slightly, but we don't see much of it. Part of the problem is that Krippendorf himself remains more or less fully in control of whatever information comes out about his concocted tribe, the "Shelmikedmu". He only invents things on the spot, based on aspects of his own life. It would have been more pointed to see the Shelmikedmu tribe taking on a life of its own, with other hucksters, fraudsters, and over-zealous academics contributing their own (equally bogus) information and theories about the Shelmikedmu. Surely, someone with experience of backbiting and jealousy in academia could have helped sharpen the rather dull-edged satire here.Another part of the problem is the film's attempt to manipulate us into looking at Krippendorf as a sympathetic character, despite his lies and fraud. The movies uses most of the classic techniques- his wife died, he was under stress, and one lie just snowballed into another in true Fawlty Towers fashion, until other, more sinister people started manipulating him into bigger and bigger lies. We have seen all of this before, and it's not very convincing. A better approach would have been to portray Krippendorf as an unalloyed con artist, morally dissolute and positively eager to tell any whopper to keep the fraud going. This would have opened up many more opportunities for the kind of first-rate satire that this film should have had in spades, but didn't.At any rate, one does not wish to judge the film too harshly. The sexual jokes are crude and not nearly as funny as the filmmakers seem to think, but in most other respects, this film is adequate entertainment for a rainy afternoon in front of the TV.

Richard Dreyfus. An anthropologist creates a fake New Guinea tribe to further his career.This sounded like it would be painful to watch, and in some places, it is just that. but overall, this bears an endearing tone, and a genuine humor, which consistently colors the work, throughout.Dreyfus's character, Krippendorf, is a frantic/manic anthropologist who tries to seem as though he is calm and collected, on the surface of the deception he has laid. Dreyfus is a phenomenal actor, who needs another Jaws/Close Encounters to revitalize his career. I wonder if Spielberg is listening? His performances come off as direct projections from the heart, no matter how low the budget they allow him, or what horrendous costars they saddle him with.This work features a quirky story line with quirky subplots, and quirky characters, but none as enigmatic as Krippendorf himself.This is a great way to spend a couple of hours, but as a Disney movie? Disney rewrites known history to suit its ends, and usually does so with great panache, but the return to ethnocentrism is potentially damaging to the field of anthropology. However, if you can suspend belief, which you must do to enjoy any Disney movie, then you may find the enjoyment from it that I did, but as usual, I'm in the minority.It rates a 7.1/10 from...the Fiend :.

It's 2:30 am, I'm lying in bed, and I can't sleep. Flipping through channels, I see a company logo indicating a movie is about to start. Whenever this happens, I am mentally and physically unable to change the channel until I know what the movie is. Seeing that it stars Richard Dreyfuss and Jenna Elfman, I know immediately it is Krippendorf's Tribe, which I remember being advertised but never saw. Not having anything else to do, I keep watching.That was my first mistake.The second thing I did wrong was to continue watching past the first commercial break, and on to the end credits. I was completely fascinated by how utterly terrible this movie is. I don't think I've ever seen a movie this awful with so many recognizable, decent actors taking part. Dreyfuss, Elfman, Lily Tomlin, David Ogden Stiers, Stephen Root, Natasha Lyonne, Siobhan Fallon, Elaine Stritch, Tom Poston, Susan Ruttan...all names I know, all actors I've seen before, never in anything this ridiculous and pointless.During the opening credits, we see Professor Krippendorf and his family in New Guinea, hanging out with a local tribe. Next we see the Professor on his couch two years later watching his video of this trip. It is soon revealed his wife has died, and apparently he has been on this couch ever since, because Jenna Elfman shows up at his door to remind him he has a presentation that night about the lost tribe of New Guinea. She's supposed to be his former student, now fellow professor of anthropology, but she spends the entirety of the movie acting as agent between Krippendorf and a cable network. Sounds like the writer really paid a lot of attention to this character.So he sits at McDonalds with his unruly children and tries to write a speech for his presentation, but comes up with nothing. When he arrives at the lecture hall, hundreds of people wait for his groundbreaking research to be revealed. Of course, he doesn't have any research. Whatever this lost tribe is, he never found it. So it's still lost. But I'm asking myself, what lost tribe? I just saw the video footage of him with a tribe in New Guinea! Is that not them? If not, who are they? Why are all these people at the lecture hall expecting something of him? If he didn't find anything, why don't they already know that? Where did they get their expectations? Why can't he just say "I didn't find that tribe, and my wife died, and I've been kind of depressed"? Why didn't he tell them that when he got home from New Guinea?Other stupid questions: Why did he buy a big screen TV with the grant money? Why didn't he use the grant money to pay his mortgage and his bills instead of allowing his home to near foreclosure? Why is he so close to losing his house if he's still on staff at the university? If he has an office and friends there, why don't they have any idea what's been going on with him professionally for the last two years?I realize a supposedly screwball comedy requires there to be a great deception during the first act, which must then be supported through the third act until all is revealed. That's fine, but as far as the story being told, there is no reason for them to expect anything, so there is no reason to lie. It's my understanding he'd have this presentation to tell them what he found. If he didn't find anything, why can't he say so? Why do they expect something amazing? Who told them something amazing had happened? And why is this business of a "lost tribe" being brought up as if I knew what they were talking about? Is that why he went to New Guinea? To find a lost tribe? Why has this exposition not been supplied to me? All I know is, the movie opened with him talking to members of a tribe, and now he's saying he lost the lost tribe. That makes no sense. None of the first part of the movie makes any sense.That's only the beginning. The rest of movie is filled with jokes that are either totally inappropriate or just plain fall flat. Jokes about circumcision? Is this the funniest thing they could think of? One of his kids puts on some kind of show and tell about a native girl's first menstruation. Why? The only good thing about this scene is the one-line role of a young Mila Kunis as his classmate playing the native girl. He's even unwrapping a bloody cloth in the next scene. I just don't see the point, or the humor.Nothing in this movie is funny. Everything plays like a bad old sitcom at best. Three minor positive notes: One - the aforementioned Mila Kunis, who has a spectacular voice, though as I said she only has one line, but it was nice to see her. Two - Jenna Elfman's butt. In her underwear. Not exactly a reason to see a movie, but if you are watching the movie, it's there in a pair of brief scenes; yes that pun was intended. Three - cinematographer Dean Cundey, always a pro with the pretty pictures. Why he chose to work on this movie, I'm sure I'll never know. I hope they paid him handsomely.

I didn't walk into this film with terribly high expectations. It was in the bargain basement bin on DVD at my local store, and quite frankly, since only fifty people have bothered to comment on it on IMDb (so far) for a film made not so long ago in 1998, tells me that this comedy largely went under most peoples radar nets.This is a Richard Dreyfuss vehicle and the basic concept is that he is an anthropologist who has taken out a grant of money from his university to search for lost tribes in New Guinea, but after the death of his wife has kind of let his research go to pot and used the money instead to keep food on the table for his three children - Shelley, Mickey and Edmund. Put on the spot by the university to give a lecture on his discoveries so far, Krippendorf invents a tribe called the "Shelmikedmu" (an amalgamation of his children's names) and gets them to dress up in native gear in his back-yard to shoot fake videos and keep the university faculty off his back. Jenna Elfman plays the love interest, a fellow professor. The villain, or main antagonist, for want of a better name - a fellow professor who tries to prove that it is all a hoax, is played by Lily Tomlin.It is relatively amusing in places, especially when Dreyfuss puts on the body paint to become the "Shelmikedmu Chief", and there are certainly one or two good one-liners to be found within. It's a long way from ever being a perfect 10 as a film, but equally there is no way it should ever be sitting down at the bottom as a 1. There are worse comedy films out there than this, and although somewhat insubstantial and not especially memorable, it is an entertaining enough way to spend ninety minutes of your life. 5/10