This is a perfect example of why you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.  What Planet Are You From? might be the dumbest name for a feature film since Stop or My Mom Will Shoot.  And on the surface, the story of an alien being sent to Earth to impregnate a woman seemed awful.  Knowing the title of the film, and that it starred Garry Shandling, I envisioned the actor covered in a Lycra spacesuit with antennae, wrinkling up his nose and asking everyone if his ass looked big.

Don’t let the name and the plotline scare you off.  Sure, Shandling isn’t much of a leading man, but he did create two of the best television shows in the last dozen years (Fox’s It’s Garry Shandling’s Show and HBO’s The Larry Sanders Show).  Planet‘s story was conceived by Shandling, who also shares a screenwriting credit with three other writers (including Sanders and Analyze This scribe Peter Tolan).  It’s basically just the combination of two old, over-used plot formulas – the “guy trying to get laid” story and the “fish out of water” story.  Think of it as a cross between American Pie and…well, anything starring Brendan Fraser.  Except Planet is very entertaining.

Shandling plays H1449-6, a resident of a planet four solar systems removed from our own.  Their sphere is thousands of years ahead of Earth technologically, its inhabitants cloned as opposed to bred.  Thanks to the cloning, they are also genetically free of emotion and their shriveled private parts are totally useless.  Of course, their lack of both sex and emotion makes them want to take over the entire universe.  H1449-6 is hand-picked by Graydon (Ben Kingsley, Alice in Wonderland), the planet’s leader, to travel to Earth and father a child in what will be the beginning of their slow transformation of Earth into a planet full of similarly dressed, sexless clones.  Which makes it sound like the crowd at a NASCAR race.

H1449-6 assimilates into Phoenix, Arizona as Harold Anderson, a banker specializing in commercial and residential lending.  Armed only with corny pick-up lines, Harold starts trying to get laid before he even hits terra firma.  Having been taught that complimenting women will lead to fornication, Harold is surprised when his “You smell nice” and “I like your shoes” greetings are rebuffed by every female he comes in contact with.  To make matters worse, Harold was also fitted with a mechanical penis that whirs to life at the slightest hint of a sexual encounter, growing louder and louder as the chance of sex approaches.

Harold comes in contact with a zany bunch of Earthlings, including his pussyhound co-worker (Greg Kinnear, Mystery Men), an FAA agent (John Goodman, Bringing out the Dead) and a struggling real estate agent (Annette Bening, American Beauty) that eventually becomes the target for his super sperm.  Sure, there are problems with the script (why isn’t his mission to knock up as many women as possible?) and anyone should be able to figure out that Harold will start to act like an Earth male and develop emotions, but Planet is a still a laugh-riot.

Planet was directed by Mike Nichols (Primary Colors), who successfully captures Shandling’s unique brand of humor and is nearly able to pull off the idea of the awkward comedian as a leading man.  The acting is fine all around, especially Bening, who, once again, plays a real estate agent (a la her Oscar-nominated turn in American Beauty…and when did Bening replace Jane Wyman as Columbia’s torchbearer?).  Planet co-starts Linda Fiorentino, Camryn Manheim, Nora Dunn and Ann Cusack, while Janeane Garofalo appears in just one scene.

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