Showing posts with label Jonah Hill. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jonah Hill. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 14, 2023

Love at First Slight:
YOUR PLACE OR MINE and YOU PEOPLE

Movies should more often be about beautiful people falling in love. It’s one of the most pleasurable plots cinema has to offer. When a movie can make you root for appealing celebrity performers twinkling with charm to finally get on the same wavelength to swoon and smooch, that’s a magic no effects can buy. I, like most who came of age cinematically in the 90s, have a particular affection for that era’s brand of romantic comedy artifice: high-gloss and high-concept, shot in big bright urban spaces and glamorously implausible apartments, and loaded up with reasonably clever banter and pop montages. When all of that is working at a decent clip, what more could you want? We don’t get that enough these days, especially in theaters where the comedy of any sort is a dying breed, and the rom-com leading the way out to the streaming services. That’s why last fall’s Ticket to Paradise was an oasis in this genre desert. How pleasant an afternoon to sit with an appreciative crowd and watch stars pantomime an inevitable slide in romance. Credit Netflix for trying to keep this sort of movie alive, I suppose, although a decent evening home is no substitute for the crowd when it’s a clear crowd-pleaser on screen. They have two new, prominent ones out now, and they each make for a good watch.

I had an amiable time with Your Place or Mine, the directorial debut of screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna. She’s the voice behind The Devil Wears Prada and Morning Glory, so she knows her way around a charming studio movie of this scale. It stars genre vets Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher as longtime pals who once, in their younger years, might’ve been more than that. They live on opposite coasts, though, and therefore have an entirely call-and-text based friendship. Circumstances contrive to get them to swap houses for a week—he moving into her LA home to supervise her teenage son while she’s crashing in his New York apartment during a business trip. As with Sleepless in Seattle, it makes the most of the continental separation to stretch this romantic tension. But by keeping up their phone chats—in perfunctory split-screen that could’ve used a bit more Pillow Talk cleverness— while settled in the trappings of the other’s routine, they slowly and unknowingly edge back toward their earlier romantic possibilities. Witherspoon and Kutcher can crank up the charm in their voices, even as their eyes sparkle and they slide through the genre’s usual paces. The result is cute and sweet and full of the usual cast of supporting eccentrics of clever friends, oddball neighbors, and other potential partners (Tig Notaro, Steve Zahn, Rachel Bloom, Zoe Chao, Jesse Williams, and more). This is a soft and comfortable version of this sort of movie, with just enough charm to keep proceedings pleasant.

There’s a bit more superficial edge to Kenya Barris’s You People, but it comes around to a satisfyingly sickly sweet sentimentality in the end. It’s the feature debut of the prolific sitcom writer best known for Black-ish, and treads some similar water angling into modern race relations while brushing past class. Co-writer Jonah Hill stars as a Jewish podcaster who falls for a Black Muslim costume designer (Lauren London). Would you believe meeting the parents becomes a rolling social satire once the couple decides to get married? This Apatowian riff on Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner gets most of its comic energies here. Hill’s parents are cringingly well-meaning liberals who are so flop-sweat desperate to appear accepting that they circle all the way around to offensive. Played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus and David Duchovny, they are devastatingly awkward in scenes that stretch their niceties to clumsy outrages on the regular. Even better are London’s parents. Mother Nia Long side-eyes like a pro and jabs with cutting quips. Her father is Eddie Murphy, who can still take a so-so line of dialogue into the stratosphere of hilarity through nothing more than sheer charismatic commitment. In a supporting cast full of funny people (every role, down to the smallest is cast with amusing figures), he’s the biggest reason to see the movie. His constant testing of Hill is a fine, funny skewering, from needling the young man about the title of a rap song to backing him into blustering corners by pressing about the specifics of books it’s clear Hill hasn’t read. The whole thing builds to the mistaken breakups and inevitable apologies and the lovey reconciliation. (And a dance party over the credits, natch.) It errs on the side of sitcom styling, and is gilded with stylistic tics in scattershot establishing shots, but has an ear for honest stumbling conversations that erupt in big punchlines at a good, regular clip. I could imagine a packed theater crowd rolling with satisfied laughter, and maybe sniffling a bit at the finale.

Sunday, February 6, 2022

Falling Skies: MOONFALL and DON'T LOOK UP

Moonfall is so perfectly awful I was almost charmed. In this high-gloss chintzy approximation of an A-level blockbuster 90s disaster picture, the moon has been knocked out of its orbit. Every time it circles the Earth, it gets closer. That thing’s bound to crash. It’s such total lunacy—and gets weirder by the reel—presented with casual pomposity stretching beyond its budget. It has a choppy opening hour that over-complicates every subplot and races through exposition as if it half-heartedly realizes we won’t care about its convolutions. As the ensemble is brought on stage and the moon looms larger, the vast cast is sketched in with shorthand and cliche. There’s disgraced astronaut Patrick Wilson and glamorous NASA chief Halle Berry and annoying pudgy British wannabe scientist John Bradley, each with a part of the solution as to how to get the moon restored to its proper place before it touches down. Also in the mix are the usual ex-wives, step-fathers, elderly mothers, conspiracy theorists, foreign exchange students, troubled adult sons, adorable moppets, and a general with a key to the nukes and a reluctant trigger finger. All the while, passable effects whip up CG floods as tides go wild, flooding cities of panicking refugees and looters before, during, and after the gravitational disruption kicks off earthquakes.

Where once these sort of big-screen natural disasters lingered on their big effects moments, now they can just wallpaper indiscriminately until it leaves little impact. It’s the kind of movie that relocates the top of the Chrysler building and barely blinks an eye. (The best moments are the most novel, in a crackpot derivative way: a space shuttle outracing an enormous gravity wave, or exploring the secret inner chambers of the moon.) But there’s an odd underplaying throughout, like when a son looks at his father, on the brink of potential apocalypse, at the moment a last-ditch plan has fallen through and shrugs: “I’m sorry that didn’t work out.” The second hour is a little zippier, and moderately wilder, as the apocalyptic stakes cut between a daring mission into the center of the moon, and a family trying to get what appears to be a mile or two down the road back on Earth. The imbalance is a little funny. Par for the course is when the general stares down a guy who wants to bomb the moon and says: “You can’t do that! My ex-wife’s up there!!”

So it’s good for a few laughs, and it might remind you passingly of better sequences in other movies like it. But that the production is helmed by Roland Emmerich, a king of the industrial-strength big budget ensemble disaster flick, having Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, and 2012 on his resume, gives it the distinct feeling of a director making his own knockoff. It hasn’t the balance between the spectacle and melodrama that the better versions of the disaster ensemble can pull off. Heck, even his own former co-writer Dean Devlin did a better spin on the all-star global calamity space-junk explode-o-rama with the under-appreciated gargantuan cheese wheel that was Geostorm a few years back. One of that movie’s stars, Gerard Butler, even did it well in a more serious register with the oddly affecting meteor-on-the-way thriller Greenland from Christmas before last. (It went VOD, like the bulk of that season’s offerings, so who knows how many actually saw it?) Just goes to show you we are in a little boom for talking our destruction to death. Gee, what could cause that? We can't expect every attempt to work well.

At least all of the above are better than Don’t Look Up. That movie imagines a world-ending calamity is on the way, and getting people to care about or even accept the reality of the situation, let alone examine possible solutions, is nigh impossible. Sounds familiar. Adam McKay wrote the movie as a climate change parable, but the intervening pandemic and its response surely fed into it as well. Here we open on two scientists at Michigan State University (Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence) identifying a planet-killing meteor that’ll hit Earth in a matter of months. They try to alert the government, but the president (Meryl Streep) is too image-obsessed and election-focused to care and demands the information hidden. (The movie’s funniest joke is her son (Jonah Hill) insisting on double checking the info with experts from a better college. Ha.) So the scientists try to leak it to the media, but most outlets don’t care, and the best they can do is getting laughed off a morning show whose hosts (Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry) can’t bring themselves to understand what their incongruously serious guests are trying to say. There’s clear anger in this telling, a well-intentioned ranting about humanity hurtling toward its doom and too ignorant and selfish to face it and fix it.

But as the movie spirals and complicates for over two hours, it stays on that grinding pitch of justified anger. It starts to seem less sharply targeted and more tiresomely mismanaged. The characters, no matter how well-acted by an all-star cast, are broad caricatures, and McKay’s rush to condemn doesn’t leave time to actually understand their motives. This is a bloated political cartoon stumbling backwards toward preordained conclusions. Compare it to, say, Dr. Strangelove, and you’ll see how Kubrick’s classic dark comedy of nuclear annihilation is a witheringly hilarious look at nightmarish Cold War logic precisely because it understands how fallible and specific personality types could stumble toward accidental apocalypse. Here, though McKay has understandable outrage at the prevailing forces of prevaricating pundits and the corrupt short-term individualism eroding all sense of common good, he’s made a movie that’s the equivalent of a “raising awareness” campaign. Yeah, I know, and I agree, somewhat, I think. But now what?

This sociopolitical comedy is still somehow McKay’s best of that sort, though this, Vice, and The Big Short are all considerable steps down from his Anchorman, Talladega Nights, and Step-Brothers heyday. He no longer makes exuberantly goofy comedies with serious subtext. Now he’s making self-serious political comedies where his Big Ideas are all on the surface where they won’t stop needling, jabbing, scalding, and condescending at the expense of entertainment and, just as deadly, a point that can get past the surface of the matters on display. Attacking shallowness with shallowness without even the deceptive nuance that, say, Verhoeven might bring, is awfully wearisome. He’s clearly an intelligent and passionate thinker—but when his works about Wall Street corruption or Dick Cheney flatten out the issue as they scream to the choir that it’s all our fault, too, well, if you’re going to think so little of your audience, at least you could actually be better than them. These movies are both contemptuous and scatter-brained. He really thinks he’s telling you something new and vital instead of repackaging common complaints. It looks at massive systemic issues and futilely wags its finger at the viewer. We’re all implicated, yes, but now what do I have to do about it?

As Don’t Look Up widens its lens, with some vigorous absurdities that sparkle here and there, it bogs itself down and clutters itself up with characters and plot lines all pushing in the same direction at the same grim pitch: our society is incapable of saving itself. Everyone’s pathetic and cringingly one-dimensional. There are red-meat military men (Ron Perlman) and weary astronomers (Rob Morgan) and social media celebrities (Ariana Grande and Scott Mescudi) and right-wing propagandists (Michael Chiklis) and progressive journalists (Himesh Patel) and a tech billionaire cutting a real Musky Zuckerbergian Bezoar (Mark Rylance), among others. No one can meet the moment. Of course there’s even a right-wing messaging movement to just avoid the issue entirely. “Don’t Look Up” becomes their rallying cry. (Years of “if climate’s changing, why do we have winter?” and “if masks and vaccines work, why is there still COVID?” make even that sadly believable.) To watch a government and society flailing in the face of overwhelming disaster is painfully familiar. That the movie is willing to condemn a shallow media, lying right-wing authoritarians, and neoliberal corporate shills is not nothing. But the cast is stranded in a movie with ugly blocking and clanking rhythms, scenes that feel hacked together and indifferently covered, unable to build up character or perspective beyond the movie’s insistence that all of these horrible, fallible people are worthy of our scorn.

Though there’s plenty of blame to go around, the movie ends up somehow too much and not enough. Yes, this is a close match to the lunacies we’ve seen lately, and it carries that out to its logical calamitous conclusion on an apocalyptic scale. But it’s not exactly a thrill to see a movie as mean and absurd and judgmental as those it’s trying to condemn. Its final image of cynical comeuppance—spoilers: a nude body double standing in for a beloved actress getting chomped by a CG creature—is the ultimate grotesquerie. By then, the whole final stretch of the film leading up to it, a wild mix of surprise unearned sentiment and nihilistic cynicism and cheap nasty gags, has already made it clear the movie has nothing meaningful to explore or suggest. What a bracingly stupid movie: whipping up a frenzy of ugliness to serve as a funhouse mirror of our current problems and expecting us to thank it for its meager insight. Hey, at least it has a couple laughs, too.

Sunday, August 21, 2016

Wolves of War Street: WAR DOGS


A true crime story told like a business school case study, War Dogs is about a reckless pursuit of profit leading straight into fraud and disaster. It’s loosely based on the real story of how two twenty-something college dropouts blustered and hustled their way to millions upon millions of dollars in defense contracts during the first years of the Iraq War. In over their heads, they ultimately cut too many corners and bring about their own downfalls, but not before getting filthy rich providing guns and ammo to fuel the military-industrial complex. Recent history, it’s an object lesson in the downside of an irrepressible entrepreneurial spirit. Director Todd Phillips, trying his hand at drama after making the likes of Old School and The Hangover, pitches the movie at the same coarse bro-centric smarm that powers his comedies. In some ways that’s smart, making the characters’ proud ignorance and irresponsible greed a dead ringer for the dominant political climate of Bush-era foreign policy. But the whole project is too clumsy to really activate what’s most interesting about the story. The good version of this movie is hiding just underneath the bad one, which doesn’t trust the audience to follow along.

It begins when the opportunistic Efraim (Jonah Hill) discovers that the United States has an open bidding process for defense contractors. Using his knowledge of arms dealing he picked up from his shady uncle, he lowballs on small bids the big companies mostly ignore, and then fulfills them through a patchwork of grey-area backchannels and whole sale purchases. Work pours in, so he asks David (Miles Teller), an old schoolmate unhappily working a massage therapist job, to join the scrappy upstart company. As the only employees, they manage to turn a pretty penny. The war is taking off and the government is willing to look the other way if it means saving money on the arms race. Phillips shoots these early scenes like a cross between Scorsese’s Wolf of Wall Street – with its slick excess and loose morals – and Bay’s Pain & Gain – with dumb guys and big dreams sleazing around Miami Beach cooking up their not-quite-legal plots. That’s compelling enough, with intrigue, double-crosses, and the intoxication of sudden wealth before the hollow pit in the stomach as it threatens to crash down.

There’s something compelling about watching these characters find room in the margins of the defense budget to siphon off some business for themselves, fast-talking generals, cooking the books for audits, and even smuggling weapons into Iraq in a rickety truck with an amusingly blasé local (Shaun Toub). Hill and Teller work well together as a study in contrasts, one moving his bulk like a presumptuous smooth fat cat, the other lean and hungry for any scrap. Hill has a braying laugh and intimidating presence, while Teller is meeker, ready to go along with whatever is happening as long as it means money to support his family. His wife (Ana de Armas) exists in the story only to be extra incentive to make ends meet, and to serve as a moral conscience. She’s not a character, but a symbol. Then again, so are the guys, who enter the picture and leave the picture pretty much the same. The plot progresses, but the movie never deepens their relationships or surprises us with new shadings or complications.

So it’s not a particularly deep or insightful movie, ultimately a fairly shallow treatment of a story that could’ve been a better unraveling of process. Instead Phillips, with co-writers Stephen Chin and Jason Smilovic, steers into his comic instincts, letting Hill and Teller riff and spar and joke. Throughout he adds layers of explanatory text – obvious symbolism, thuddingly on-the-nose jukebox soundtrack spelling out subtext, endless narration, freeze frames, title cards, and affected chapter headings named for lines of dialogue we’ll hear later in the section. It never stops explaining itself, underlining every motivation and walking the audience through every thought process step-by-step. There’s a great story here, and a good cast up to the task of selling the emotional and business throughlines. (Best is a brief appearance by Bradley Cooper, who effortlessly uses every iota of his star power bringing an infamous arms dealer’s notoriety to life.) But the movie can’t step out of its own way and let what’s so inherently interesting play out unimpeded. Phillips provides a terrific surface slickness, but, like Adam McKay’s The Big Short, the result is a movie that is too afraid the audience will miss the point to take full advantage of the material’s potential.

Sunday, June 15, 2014

High-Flying Adventure: HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON 2


Like all good fantasy sequels, Dreamworks Animation’s How to Train Your Dragon 2 takes the world its predecessor built and expands upon it. The first film introduced us to the tiny island of Berk where a village of Vikings lived to fight off dragons preying on their flocks of sheep. It followed Hiccup (Jay Baruchel), the shrimpy son of the leader (Gerard Butler), as he learned dragons aren’t so bad once you get to know them. By the end, he’d trained a fierce and adorable one he named Toothless as a pet and saved his village from destruction in the process. Now, as the sequel starts, the village lives in peace with the dragons, having realized they’re lovable, loyal, useful animals. There’s no conflict there, so the movie pushes forward, opening five years later on Hiccup and Toothless flying out over the ocean exploring new islands and finding new species. When they land on what is to them uncharted territory, he takes out his hand-drawn map and adds a new page, as fitting a symbol for the start of a new chapter as any.

Writer and director Dean DeBlois, who served as co-writer and co-director with Chris Sanders on the first film, takes the light boy’s adventure and enriches it by foregrounding the boy’s evolution into a man and bringing the cast of background characters more clearly into focus. While struggling with his status as heir, Hiccup, now taller, more toned, and with a touch of stubble on his chin, is drawn into conflict. First, he runs into dragon trappers, led by a hunky, ambiguously bad guy voiced by Game of Throne’s Kit Harington. They’re mercilessly poaching the majestic beasts. But that’s merely prelude to bigger trouble care of a distant warlord (a growling Djimon Hounsou) who threatens hostilities with his army of captive dragons. With a name like Drago Bludvist, pronounced “blood-fist,” he’s born to be bad. Riding out to help quell this new conflict are Hiccup’s father, as well as a likable ragtag band of villagers (America Ferrera, Craig Ferguson, Jonah Hill, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, T.J. Miller, and Kristen Wiig) who last time were background color, but this time come into focus as their own distinct characters with subplots and emotional throughlines. 

The first time around, the dragon training was a highlight, a boy-and-his-dog dynamic between a scrawny teen and a jet black, bat-winged, puppy-dog-eyed salamander. Never better than when in flight, the 3D animation dipped and spun with immediacy and vertiginous beauty. It was a thrill. This time, the thrill comes not just from that relationship and the dragon flying, which is as nicely and excitingly rendered as before, but also in the conflicts complicating this fantasy world. The threatened destruction is at a higher magnitude, the characters have more at stake, and the scale towers over them with subwoofer-rattling rumblings. New dragons include a skyscraper-sized alpha beastie that breathes icy breath leaving jagged icicles in its wake. The damage to dragons is also more personal. The introduction of a mysterious figure in the wild, a protector of dragons (Cate Blanchett) who unlocks further secrets of the species, finds time to highlight sliced wings and missing limbs, the result of near-misses with hunters. There’s an ecological weight to this film, a sorrow and responsibility.

The dragon protector has an important connection to Hiccup and much to teach him. The way the plot unfolds finds surprisingly rich emotions to tap into as their relationship is fully explained. The scene where this woman meets Hiccup’s father is astonishing in its tenderness and maturity. It could’ve gone in many big ways – tearful, scary, or regretful – but instead goes for a hushed whisper and a sweet folk song. The film is all about surprising with those kinds of scenes. An early moment between Hiccup and his love interest has a loose conversational quality as they flirtatiously tease each other. A late turn that deepens and darkens the relationship between boy and dragon is unsettling and a real shock, making the resolution all the more stirring. There’s seriousness to the storytelling here that respects both the fun of its colorful fantasy and the emotional lives of its characters.

It’s a movie about responsibility, aging, death, abandonment, and environmental destruction. You know, for kids! It’s bright, vibrant, has a soaring score and rousing action. But there’s a melancholy beneath that’s unexpected in its gravity. I appreciated how respectful of its audience the film is, unwilling to talk down to children and not feeling the need to stretch for adult attention. It’s simply a good story told well. And that’s more than enough to captivate. The animation is gorgeous, digital-painterly tableaus of fantasy landscapes and fluid character movement. The images within stir the imagination. A swarm of dragons flutters about like a flock of birds. Rising slowly and silently out of the clouds, a lone rider wearing a horned mask and carrying a rattling staff, sits atop a massive creature. A boy flies his dragon into the wild, and returns something closer to a man. It’s a terrific, exciting, involving adventure told with great feeling and a good eye.

Saturday, June 14, 2014

Do It All Again: 22 JUMP STREET


Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s 21 Jump Street reboot knew you’d be skeptical. The 2012 comedy based on the late-80’s TV series has an early scene in which the police captain (Nick Offerman) tells his new undercover cops (Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum) that the department is out of ideas and is recycling old ones in the hope no one really cares. Once again, two young cops will go undercover in a high school. From there, Lord and Miller surprised with a movie that’s funnier and smarter than you’d expect. It didn’t care too much for its detective plot, which is transparently simple and resolved too bloodily for laughs. But it was a fun movie with some funny lines, a perfect pair of cameos, smart observation about how quickly high school changes as you leave it behind, and a charming buddy-cop pairing in Hill and Tatum. That’s the kind of short/tall, chubby/fit, motormouth/lunkhead pairing that sounds like it might work on paper, and then wildly exceeds expectations on screen. Together they were better than either would’ve been alone. It was a pleasant surprise.

And now here’s 22 Jump Street, a sequel fully aware that sequels are usually inevitably worse than the first, especially when it comes to comedies. It has Offerman state the problem right off the bat. He wants his undercover cops to team up and infiltrate a new school, a college this time, and root out the source of a deadly new designer drug. He wants them to just do what they did last time. And so the movie sets out to skewer blockbuster sequels’ competing tendencies to A.) go bigger, louder, longer, and more spectacular, and B.) repeat everything that worked the first time around. The plot literalizes this dilemma by having Hill and Tatum’s direct superior (Ice Cube) show off their flashier, more expensive – “for no reason” – resources while telling them to do what they did before. Like Gremlins 2 and Ocean's Twelve, this is a movie that makes its sequel struggle part of the narrative in amusing ways.

Nerdy Hill and jock Tatum are again posing as brothers, now pretending to be college freshmen. Hill gets drawn into the art students’ circle while Tatum pledges at a fraternity and wants to join the football team. Though they became best friends and good partners last time, here they’re drawn apart, only to rediscover and reaffirm what a great team they make together. In between are parties, petty jealousies, a drug trip, slapstick, dirty jokes, homosocial bonding, a couple great cameos, and a token amount of police work. The screenplay by Michael Bacall, Oren Uziel, and Rodney Rothman lays out the pitfalls of sequels repeating the same character beats and riffing on similar scenarios right up front and then does them anyway, winking at its self-referential tendencies. Do it just like last time, our heroes are told. That’s what keeps people happy.

Hill and Tatum’s performances are sharp and consistently on-point. You have to be smart to play dumb so well and without losing audience sympathy. Improbably, in a film so silly and frivolous, I cared about their friendship and wanted them to catch the bad guys. They have great underdog chemistry, approaching the material from opposite directions and meeting expertly in the middle. They really do love each other and cherish their time together, holding back tears whenever they hash out the state of their friendship. It’s sweet. Hill and Tatum’s relationship feels more intense and charming even as the movie gets looser, goofier, and stranger as it steers into the skid, getting around sequel traps by playing them up. They’re terrific anchors for the silliness in which they find themselves. Because the central duo has such considerable charm, Lord and Miller are free to experiment around them.

The directors have clear movie love, an inside-out understanding of how blockbusters work and what makes their tropes so ridiculous(ly charming). Their hugely enjoyable, hard-working films - the Jump Streets, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, The Lego Movie - are so packed with imaginative jokes and concepts that you can almost hear them snickering behind the camera, “Can you believe we get to make a movie!?” What makes 22 Jump Street so funny is the filmmaking breaking the fourth wall without quite letting its characters get through. The movie starts with a rapid-fire “Previously On” montage that somehow manages to reference Annie Hall, then hurtles through its self-aware sequel plotting, ending up in end credits that imagine the franchise’s future in a series of jokes so fast and dense I need to see the movie again just to catch them all.

Lord and Miller, with a more accomplished visual style that gets close to the visual density of their superior animated efforts, shoot the action in a Hot Fuzz-style parody of the Michael Bay style (minus most of his uglier tendencies). With explicit nods to Bad Boys specifically, this movie has low-angle hero shots, emphatic circling cameras, and saturated magic-hour lighting. Then they throw in a dash of split-screen foolishness, like Looney Tunes directed by DePalma, that doubles down on the doubling effect of sequels, a motif carried through by two sets of twins in the supporting cast. (“Twins again?” Tatum groans late in the picture.)

Meanwhile, the college plots are shot and played as typical collegiate comedy, with everything from soft-focus campus romance and vulgar hazing. There are funny scenes with an earnest art major (Amber Stevens), her sarcastic insult-comic of a roommate (scene-stealer Jillian Bell), and a doofy frat boy football player (Wyatt Russell). The movie is constantly drawing attention to its own implausibilities, but the various genre elements in the plot are played somewhat straight, allowing plenty of room for the inherent humor of a goofy pair of undercover cops trying desperately to blend in and solve a crime while working through their own problems.

All of that is complicated and made funnier by the mystery plot always lingering in the back of our leads’ minds. It’s more smoothly threaded through the comedy than last time. There’s a literal red herring symbol. A car chase is sped up as the vehicles zip around the “Benjamin Hill Department of Film Studies.”  It’s somehow thrilling and silly, thrillingly silly. Everything is both serious and a joke. It’s a messy mockery of the same formulaic arcs just barely holding it all together, like a Marx Brothers movie where the very structure of the plot itself is the chaos accelerant.

The film manages to be wild, raucous, self-critical, and often very funny. It has a handful of scenes that had me laughing the hard, short-of-breath, aching-sides laughter that can’t be denied. 22 can’t have the surprise of its first outing, but the filmmakers more than make up for it by energetically and excitingly goofing around the very struggle of doing a sequel. It’s bigger, louder, longer, with meta tricks that start clever, get too clever, and then circle back around again. In the process, the filmmakers made a sequel that captures a different sense of surprise. It’s sloppily satisfying.

Friday, December 27, 2013

Smell of Success: THE WOLF OF WALL STREET


His first day working on Wall Street, young stockbroker Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) accepts an offer to go to lunch with his boss (Matthew McConaughey). Over a martini meal, the older, richer man imparts his basic rule of business: move your clients’ money to your pocket. Not long after that, the firm goes bust in the stock market dip of 1987. Out of work, Belfort doesn’t doubt that core ethos of finance his boss told him. Instead he gets right back in the game, building his own firm bundling penny stocks with blue chips and getting wealthy clients to buy. There are huge commissions off these risky bets. Belfort explains this to us in the narration that runs through The Wolf of Wall Street, but often stops and sneers that it’s all too complicated for us to understand. He has utter contempt for anyone with a paystub south of his. For him, complaining about his yearly salary consists of annoyance that it was just shy of a million a week. To celebrate an earnings milestone, his firm orders a marching band and strippers to march around the offices. As the bacchanal erupts, a secretary is held down and her head is shaved. She’s paid $10,000 for it, told to use the money to buy breast implants. Though Belfort announces before hand that she’s in on the joke, the camera hangs back and watches her clutching the stack of bills, her face awash with turbulent mixed emotions.

Martin Scorsese’s film is a raucous look at Belfort’s rise and the atmosphere of carousing frat boy cruelty that followed his addiction to greed and the enabling economy that allowed him to funnel ever more money after his other addictions: booze, cocaine, sex, pills, power. What Belfort and his crew did to accrue their massive fortunes was legal, at least for a while, and they felt entitled to it, pumping up stock prices artificially before selling them for a huge profit. They worked hard at all this quasi-legal money moving and partied harder. Belfort tells us “money makes you a better person” and really believes it. To him, wealth is proof he’s doing something good. The film sets up some opposition to his suffocating solipsism: his father (Rob Reiner), a blustering guy who tries to pull him back, at least when he’s not too tickled by the unrestrained behavior; and an FBI agent (Kyle Chandler) who is sure something is up with the brash new firm and steadfastly investigates. But the humanity etched on these paternal faces doesn’t sink into our narrator. Only Scorsese, with juxtapositions and cutaways, like to a quickly glimpsed crime scene photo of an employee’s future suicide, can cut through Belfort’s cheery smugness. His mindset, the aspirational affluenza of the gospel of prosperity, of monetary might making right, is not just his. It is a poisonous boil on the American psyche and Scorsese is working on a satirical lance.

It hardly feels like taking your medicine. This is probably the most entertaining way of making a movie about insufferably smug, endlessly hungry fattening cats, as a wild, boisterous comedy in which the joke is on them. Stretching out over two hours and fifty-nine minutes, this epic tragicomedy follows Belfort, his business partner (Jonah Hill, with frightening grin of gleaming white oversized chompers), and his hometown buddies (P.J. Byrne, Kenneth Choi, Brian Sacca, Henry Zebrowski, Ethan Suplee), recruits into the ground floor of his new brokerage firm. As the business quickly grows, they find more ways to funnel money out of their clients’ pockets and into theirs, treating everyone else as property. Belfort trades in one wife (Cristin Milioti) for another (Margot Robbie) and though he tells us he feels bad about it, it’s only for a moment. He and his colleagues abuse and bully their employees, sneak money into tax shelters and down ratholes, pop pills, slam back beers, and call in prostitutes. The screenplay by Terence Winter who, between work as a writer on The Sopranos and the showrunner of Boardwalk Empire, knows a thing or two about criminal entrepreneurism, constructs a screenplay that hurtles forward with digressions and debaucheries and still manages to make sense of how the firm got off the ground in the first place and how it worked its way towards insane profits and a legal implosion. It's all about business as an outlet for unchecked id and how that takes morality and responsibility completely off the table.

The film is loose and freewheeling, growing bigger and overwhelming in its implications. It’s about an entire system that allows such an operation to thrive, a system with a massive disincentive for the greedy and selfish to behave responsibly. They squirrel away large amounts of money in whatever way they want in order to fuel whatever drunken high they’re chasing this week. There is no stopping people who have no guilt, no shame. Even when Belfort has a setback, his confidence carries him through. Once you are filthy rich, you can unapologetically monetize even your most shameful wrongdoings. A key sequence finds Belfort fuming about a magazine hatchet job that labeled him “the Wolf of Wall Street,” writing in no uncertain terms about his firm’s grey-area ethics and frat house atmosphere. He’s angry right up until he arrives at work and finds the lobby stuffed with résumé waving young jobseekers, phones ringing off the hook with prospective clients. His buddies start calling him “Wolfie” affectionately as they generate an ever more powerful cult of personality around their fearless immoral leader.

Full of irredeemable, unapologetic, and unstoppable characters, Scorsese’s masterful command of cinema keeps the whole thing slamming forward with energetic momentum. In his typical style, the film is painted with big bold strokes, a mix of rattling soundtrack cues, varied film stocks, speeds, and aspect ratios, finding rich nuances within. His collaborators bring welcome touches, from Thelma Schoonmaker’s swaggering edits – sloppy without feeling careless – to Rodrigo Prieto’s sleek, sunlit cinematography. This is a film that is taking place in the bright light of day, barely legal acts crossing over the line easily and with little negative consequence in the immediate future. The first time crack is smoked in the film takes place in shadow, Hill and DiCaprio huddled in the dark corner of the frame. But once the high hits they leap away, the camera tracking them into the harsh midday sun outside. They can get away with anything, anytime. The film is vulgar, dripping with sex and drugs and yet little pleasure. It’s a monotonous mechanical need for them and the film circles endlessly overconsumption of one kind or another that sends them spiraling down until the next high.

The Wolf of Wall Street is loose and rattling in its structure. Some scenes as assembled seem to stretch too long and others clip along too quickly, but there’s such an elemental cinematic pleasure seeing Scorsese operating on such a huge scale, developing his theme strongly and confidently and then noodling around, finding dozens upon dozens of variations over the runtime. He watches DiCaprio’s unhinged performance as it wriggles around in all manner of debauched positions, squirming out from under scrutiny to do bad all over again. He clashes with his second wife as Robbie’s strong performance reveals welcome unexpected depths. The trophy wife is not as shiny and shallow as she first appears, forming a key element of the time-release poison pill bitterly dissolving under each scene in the final stretch. Their final scenes together are utterly devastating, one of the few times the film brings his steamroller of desire to a dead stop. The sweep of the film threatens to feel unformed at times, and yet it all comes together in such a clear statement of purpose.

Belfort’s ego is too big to fail. The movie (the events, not the point of view) is based on his autobiography. The final shot finds a group of people eagerly awaiting his insight, desperate to learn his tricks, wanting to become his kind of success. Whatever catharsis I found when some level of legal comeuppance is at long last dealt out in the final minutes of the third hour, is squashed under his unapologetic opportunism, his ability to turn any misfortune into shameless profit. And then there’s the sense that, though this wolf may no longer stalk on Wall Street, the rest of his pack is still out there, as insufferably untouchable as ever. It can’t be a coincidence that a scene of jaw-dropping dehumanizing negotiation – the guys agree that, when it comes to the entertainers hired for an office party, “If we don’t recognize them as people, just the act, then we’re not liable” – devolves into the guys goofily reciting the famous “one of us” chant from Tod Browning’s Freaks. They’re joking about the people they’ve hired, literally scoffing at the plight of the little guy. But it’s clear that Wall Street can be more freakish than any sideshow horror. 

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Left Behind: THIS IS THE END


You can almost see the good version of This is the End within it, which makes it all more disappointing this isn’t that. The concept’s solid. Some celebrities are having a party at James Franco’s house when the apocalypse happens. That’s kind of funny, right? What follows is a film that’s entirely too self-satisfied and cripplingly indulgent, resting for far too long on the audience’s assumed delight at watching recognizable faces play themselves. The only truly apocalyptic aspect of the film is the feeling that we’ve well and truly gone past the point of caring about the umpteenth narrative of stoner manchildren haltingly realizing they need to grow up. If This is the End should represent the end of anything, it should be Seth Rogen, Jay Baruchel, Jonah Hill, and the others putting aside this played out character arc once and for all.

Filled with the gentlest of self-critical mockery and hyperbolic play with personas, the film is, for the most part, locked up in Franco’s mansion while fiery Armageddon rages outside. The opening bit of spectacle swallows up a bunch of welcome cameos and scoops up extras in the Rapture, leaving us with Franco, Rogen, Baruchel, Hill, Craig Robinson, and Danny McBride huddled together with dwindling supplies. They fight over survival strategy, have extended comic riffs, and develop spats extrapolated out of their fictional relationships. As is to be expected with this group’s standard R-rated comedy routine, there are endless gross out gags, cultural references both obscure and obvious, and lengthy conversations about every natural bodily function and a few unnatural ones as well. It’s rarely surprising, even at its most unexpected.

This has been written and directed by Rogen and his long-time writing partner Evan Goldberg. It’s pretty clear that every bit of the film is a result of a funny (more likely funny at the time) idea that either they or a member of the cast fumbled their way towards during some session of brainstorming or improvising. The result is an uneven experience, sometimes funny, usually not, as if a sloppy dorm room thought experiment has somehow made it to the big screen largely unchanged. Like, dude, what if the world was ending? And what if we hid in this house? Like, you’d be like this and I’d be like that and, oh man, you know so-and-so would totally die right away. But the difference between engaging in this kind of freewheeling teasing in a hypothetical scenario with your buddies and doing that but for a worldwide audience of moviegoers is that when a major studio bankrolls you, each dumb digression is literalized. You might think suggesting a friend would eventually get possessed and projectile vomit demon juice is a funny idea, but when seen on the screen, there’s a good chance it’ll look like overkill at best, an inside joke at worst. And so it goes here, over and over again.

I’m mostly frustrated with the way the creative energies behind this movie conjure up world-ending stakes and then use them to only poke soft fun at their public personas and circle the same tired types of jokes they’ve been making in film after film for years now.  It could be funny to take a celebrity perspective on disaster. It gets there a couple of times, like when Jonah Hill says he’d expect celebrities to be saved first: “Clooney, Bullock, me, and, then if there’s room, you guys.” But the film dwindles away into disconnected silliness that grows tedious as the claustrophobic minutes tick by, the guys repeating the same basic actions and tics. When the group finally gets out of the house, the energy picks up with the kind of surprises and surprise cameos this thing could’ve used more of. But by then we’re in the last ten or twenty minutes of the picture and it’s all too late. The movie is just a big concept filled up with small ideas, inadvertently saying the only way these guys will grow up is through the intervention of God himself.

Friday, July 27, 2012

Suburban Space Invaders: THE WATCH

Turning out to be nothing more than a belabored, R-rated commercial for Costco (actual dialogue: “They really do have everything we need!), The Watch is a halfhearted action comedy content to do nothing surprising. The story, such as it is, kicks off when the local Costco manager (Ben Stiller) shows up to work one morning to find that the store has overnight turned into a crime scene. The local cop (Will Forte) informs him that the night watchman has been mysteriously murdered. Shaken up, Stiller puts out a call for his sleepy suburb to form a neighborhood watch and is a little disappointed that the only people who respond are a needy middle aged motormouth (Vince Vaughn) who just wants a break from intruding upon his teenager’s social life, an awkward wannabe vigilante (Jonah Hill), and a bumbling British man (Richard Ayoade) who wants to join a group to fit in with the locals.

Eventually it turns out that the murderer is an alien who is simply one of many who are already in the town, poised to phone home and start the invasion proper. So, it’s up to the four flawed guys to stop the space creatures before they can move forward with their plan. Not that the film gathers any momentum from this threat. No, the movie just meanders through typical moments of male gross-out humor bonding, stumbles into a lame Invasion of the Body Snatchers lite and then lazily gets up the effort to squeak out a typical shoot-‘em-up climax.  Altogether it feels like the result of letting a bad Apatow knockoff write and direct a Hollywood remake of Attack the Block. It’s lazily paced, painfully predictable and unimaginative in all aspects, like two faded copies of copies placed one over the other.

It didn’t have to be this way. The talent involved here is promising. The cast is made up of funny, skilled performers and I haven’t even mentioned Rosemarie DeWitt, relegated to a thanklessly underwritten role as Stiller’s wife, or Doug Jones, the incredible performer behind so many great screen creatures (not the least of which is Pan’s Labyrinth’s terrifying Pale Man) who suits up to play the aliens. But the story, written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (of the great raunchy teen comedy Superbad) and rewritten by Jared Stern (of the not-so-great Mr. Popper’s Penguins), is beat-by-beat dull and rote. It feels slapped together in a way that makes everyone involved appear to be shrugging towards paychecks. Everyone on screen has been vibrant and energetic, funny and sympathetic in other roles. Here, though, they’re all playing characters that are thinly sketched and vaguely off-putting while just going through the paces in a movie that can’t quite get its act together. It is witless and lame every step of the way.

The anemic script is certainly the key problem here, but it doesn’t help matters that its tone is so unformed. When it opens on Stiller narrating us through a typical day in the life of his character, the film appears to be sharpening its satirical claws on the gleaming store shelves and perfect suburban subdivisions, looking with scorn upon the hollow homogenized lifestyles of the characters. But, as more characters come into focus and the gears of the plot slowly get up to speed, it’s clear that this movie’s going nowhere fast. Strange detours into the kinky life of a creepy neighbor (Billy Crudup) and a half-formed subplot about a leering teenager (Nicholas Braun) after Vaughn’s daughter sap away momentum and cloud the tone. Are we supposed to actually validate the overzealous behavior of the central characters in so thoroughly, incompetently, poking around where they don’t belong? They’re hard to root for and when the plot resolves, it does so almost by accident.

The biggest disappointment here is the direction from Akiva Schaffer, not because it’s especially bad – it’s slick and competent – but because it’s so devoid of energy and creativity.  After directing so many terrific, hilarious Digital Shorts for Saturday Night Live and the smart-stupid new cult comedy classic Hot Rod, it’s unfortunate to see him deliver something so uninspired. There’s just about nothing here worth talking about or reacting to. I saw the movie amongst a boisterous crowd of people who, as the movie started, fell silent. As the movie played, we stayed silent. Then, a little over 90 minutes later, we all filed out. I went in hoping for a few laughs and left feeling dispirited. It’s not just bad; it’s nothing but missed opportunities all around.

Saturday, March 17, 2012

Held Back: 21 JUMP STREET

Being forced to repeat high school would be something of a waking nightmare for many of us. But isn’t it even the slightest bit tempting to get a second chance at what is, let’s face it, an important, but not that important, part of life? Surely everyone at least entertains the idea of a do-over for some piece of his or her past. To be forced back into the halls of high school would basically be a rubber-stamped approval for extended adolescence, or at least that’s what happens to the undercover cops in the movie remake of the late-80’s high concept cop show 21 Jump Street. They may be immature, but that’s kind of their job now, right?

The series ran on Fox from 1987 to 1991 and starred Johnny Depp as a fresh-faced cop assigned to go undercover as a high school student. The new big budget R-rated Hollywood comedy keeps the show’s high concept and plays it louder and faster, in a way that's more blatantly goofy, vulgar, and violent (sometimes shockingly so). And it works. It’s a slick, competent, surface-level entertainment, a smart adaptation that turns the basic plot hooks into a loving homage to buddy cop movies driven straight through a raunchy high school comedy. If the series was Miami Vice by way of Square Pegs, than the movie remake is Bad Boys in Superbad.

It starts in 2005, a time when a dweeb (Jonah Hill) and jock (Channing Tatum) barely interacted except for the times when the jock laughed at the dweeb for getting a brutal rejection from a pretty girl. They weren’t enemies; they just moved in vastly different circles. But now it’s present day and they’re both in the same police academy. They find they actually get along now. The dweeb helps the jock with the written work and the jock helps the dweeb with his physical trials and marksmanship. They’re so very excited to be cops that when their boring, low-stakes park patrol turns into a bungled drug bust, they’re dismayed to find themselves passed off into a secret program run by a mean stereotype of a commanding officer (Ice Cube) who informs them that they’re going undercover as high school students to track down a new drug ring.

To make matters worse, they’re posing as brothers. They’re a little too old. They’re a little too dissimilar. Yet pass themselves off as teen brothers they must. It’s a rich set-up for comedy and the script from Michael Bacall and Jonah Hill takes funny zigs and zags through a teen comedy terrain that is rife with youthful temptations for the rookie cops. They can’t help but fall back into their own petty high school mentalities but find themselves in an odd type of culture shock. As one who actually was in high school in 2005, I found myself gripped with a kind of mild terror. Could things be that different already? It hasn’t been that many years, has it? Time flies.

Suddenly Tatum’s cool jock style won’t fly and the nervous dorkiness of Hill is oddly appealing. You see, bullying, even of the mild variety, isn’t a surefire ticket to popularity that Tatum seems to think it is. Hill, on the other hand, marvels that the cool crowd is all about caring for the environment. Kids these days. So the two guys are startled to find themselves at the opposite ends of the teenage totem pole. The jock hangs with the chemistry nerds while the dweeb gets closer to the popular kids, especially a sweet girl (Brie Larson) who happens to be in a relationship with the main pusher (Dave Franco, James’s younger brother).

That the two undercover cops are opposites is a typical buddy cop trope. That they’re in a high school, forced to work out old differences and form new ways of social navigation, not to mention learn how to get along and how to be good at their fairly new jobs, creates a fun tension. Of course, it wouldn’t work at all without the winning chemistry between Tatum and Hill who have such a terrific brotherly rapport that they ping off each other with equal parts simpatico bluster and clashing competitiveness, an aggressive but loving friendship that develops in convincing ways. They’re both so game and eager to please that their timing develops the satisfying snap of an agreeable, comfortable comic partnership. I wish the supporting cast could have been used more memorably – Nick Offerman, Parks & Rec’s great Ron Swanson himself, appears in a single scene – but the main protagonists are wonderful anchors.

The plot is basic cop stuff complete with a couple of well-deployed twists, some mostly routine car chases and shootouts, and some perfect, absolutely perfect, cameos. The high school jokes are sometimes obvious – of course parents turn around and interrupt a raucous party – but they too are filled out with such specific and odd details amongst the students and faculty that it transcends its obviousness and finds new funny details in the corners of the hurtling pace of the rough detective through line. I especially liked the exasperated principal (Jake Johnson), the giggly chemistry teacher (Ellie Kemper), and the small gang of science geeks who have permission to go to the chemistry lab early in order to play Bakugan. I’m not sure what that is, but I know it’s some kind of game, which is better than Tatum, who angrily demands to know if it’s drugs.

This is hardly a perfect film – it’s lumpy and shambling in spots and fairly thin overall – but there’s an incredible energy to the way it’s put together. The script joins the two main threads in a self-aware way that draws out the implausibilities to often-great comedic effect. Directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, they bring some of the same inventiveness and willingness to variously reject and embrace cliché for laughs that they displayed in Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. They know sometimes the funniest thing is to do just what’s expected only to pull back at the last second. Yes, the directors behind the most hilarious animated family film in recent memory have created a pretty good live-action R-rated romp of an action-comedy. 21 Jump Street may not be as polished or dense with jokes (and certainly not as family friendly) as Cloudy, but it’s still a stylish, fast-paced entertainment of its own   

Saturday, December 10, 2011

Babysitting Adventures: THE SITTER


David Gordon Green, one of the best out-of-the-box auteurs of the last decade, has had difficulty adapting the style of his early art house hits to the big studio comedies he’s recently been helming. He started out his career with precisely observed little movies, gorgeous emotional films like All the Real Girls and Undertow. But ever since 2008’s Pineapple Express, a comic stoner thriller, Green’s been making comedies, working with bigger budgets to mixed results. Pineapple’s a film that spends an odd amount of time lingering on bodily harm – an extended shot of a bloodied ear with a chunk missing is just not funny – but also manages to be a scruffily charming buddy comedy that’s somewhat honest in its dealings with male friendship. Earlier this year, Green’s Your Highness, a fantasy parody, was wildly tone deaf and all around excruciating, a good concept gone horribly wrong. Now, with The Sitter, I’m happy to report that Green has found a nice spot between big lowbrow and the shaggy whimsical sweetness that made him an instant favorite for so many of us.

The film follows Noah Griffith (Jonah Hill), a guy in his early twenties who is in a painfully relatable post-collegiate funk. He’s jobless, living in the suburbs with his mom, and settling into a dangerously lazy pattern of lackadaisical attitudes. He’s barely holding on to a deeply flawed relationship with a selfish, deceitful young woman (Ari Graynor) who’s only taking advantage of his kindness. It’s a dead-end relationship for a guy who’s not just going down the wrong path, he’s sort of fallen down in the middle of the wrong path and can’t get up. One night, his mother (Jessica Hecht) is disappointed that her friend (Erin Daniels) has to cancel a planned double date when her babysitter gets sick. Summoning up a rare moment of altruism, Noah decides to fill in and allow his mom a rare night of fun and potential romance.

Arriving at the house, he’s immediately struck with a feeling of being in over his head. The thirteen-year-old Slater (the all-around wonderful Max Records from Where the Wild Things Are) is stewing on the sofa watching a gymnastics movie and helpfully informs that he can’t be trusted to babysit his younger siblings because of his debilitating anxiety when handed responsibility of any kind. His little sister Blithe (Landry Bender) is upstairs in a mismatched outfit which consists mostly of a long sleeve t-shirt and a tutu. She’s slathering her face with her mom’s make up. The mom helpfully informs Noah that the little girl wants to grow up to be a celebrity in the bobble-headed reality show brat tradition. When he bends down to talk to the little girl, she sprays perfume in his mouth.  Then there’s little Rodrigo (Kevin Hernandez), a standoffish little boy recently adopted from South America. He hisses, spits Spanish invectives, and has a destructive gleam in his eyes.

There’s a feeling that things wouldn’t go well even if the plot didn’t contrive to get them all out of the house. Noah’s would-be girlfriend calls him up and asks for some help partying, namely to pick up some cocaine from her dealer (Sam Rockwell, never not welcome). With the girl dangling an empty promise of introducing reciprocation into their one-sided relationship, Noah reluctantly packs up the kids in the minivan and drives into the big city. The film then follows a broad and crude episodic farce as the kids and their sitter get into increasingly chaotic misunderstandings involving a store clerk, the drug dealers, a group of kids at a ritzy celebration, drunken partiers, menacing pool hall patrons, cops, robbers, and more. Through it all though, the performances are so charming and Tim Orr’s camera is so shaggy beautiful in its evocation of New York nightlife both shady and swanky that the broadness (or cheapness) of some of the jokes rarely rang false for me.

What did ring warning bells for me was Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka's script's somewhat problematic treatment of some of the supporting characters. A group of African American characters, for instance, swarm about in a group that appears whenever the plot requires and without much in the way of individualized personalities. It’s an odd portrayal that leans on cheap stereotypes. Similarly, little Rodrigo is given condescending characteristics that make him seem to be hostile, unpredictable and destructive simply because he’s Latino. But then, there’s a shift. He reveals that this is his third family in as many years and he’s dreading the moment when they’ll give him away. He’s standoffish because he can’t let them get too close lest he get his heart broken again.

It’s a moment of insight into the mind of a child that is carried over into the forceful and moving running subplots with Blithe and Slater. Over the course of their night, the sitter turns out to be just what the kids need (aside from the whole hopelessly misguided trip into the city thing) to help them emotionally in ways their parents haven’t been able to care about other than by making excuses and therapy appointments. Blithe gets a subplot that turns into a lovely refutation of celebutante bad girls and Slater gets one of the most remarkable character arcs of the year, a moving and matter-of-fact inspirational subplot of self-discovery and acceptance all the more surprising for appearing so unexpectedly and so casually within a broad studio comedy.

In these moments, David Gordon Green shines. So much of his early art house efforts contain this exploration of childhood and the emotional dangers of the world between the child’s and the adult’s. I was surprised to see how nicely observed some of these characters were within a film that isn’t always so nice or observant. One could hardly accuse the film of perfection – it’s, as they say, flawed – but it’s a film of such raunch and sweetness that seems to get the proportion just right, with R-rated words and fuzzy sentiment co-existing more or less peacefully. The fact of the matter is that, whatever its problems, the film kept me entertained. It’s a derivative, scruffy one-crazy-night plot (part Adventures in Babysitting and part After Hours) but imbued with surprising energy with occasional detours into depth. It’s a solid 80 minutes of set ups and pay offs.

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Base Hit: MONEYBALL


Baseball may be a sport, but Moneyball is not really a sports movie. To be sure, it’s based on the book by Michael Lewis about the modestly budgeted Oakland Athletics’ 2002 season in which, against the objections of manager Art Howe, their general manager Billy Beane tried out an untested new method of signing players, focusing on statistics more than stars. It was a risky gambit of the kind that makes or breaks careers and, assuming you may not be knowledgeable about recent baseball history, I wouldn’t dare think of telling you the outcome. Though this movie covers the territory of men trying desperately to eke out enough wins to contend for the championship, though it follows training, strategizing, and yes, even some Big Games, this is not a sports movie. It’s a movie about business.

Major League Baseball is a multi-billion dollar business. It’s America’s pastime, and we love to pay for it. The crux of the film is the Athletics’ budget. As a team, they are dramatically outspent by bigger, more financially flush teams like the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. What Beane decides to do is to hire a recent college grad, a Yale economics major to be precise, to crunch the numbers. He, composite character Peter Brand, is a nice, pudgy guy who has never played baseball but loves the number game. He tells Beane that they shouldn’t be focused on buying players, but instead to focus on buying runs. He pours over tapes, analyzes the data, and is confident that he can identify underestimated, and therefore undervalued (and thus affordable) players.

Beane is played by Brad Pitt as a driven man with a desire to do right by his team, but there’s a part of his initiative given over to bucking baseball’s conventional wisdom. We see Little League pictures of him proudly wearing an A’s hat on his sandy blonde hair. We learn that he signed a Major League contract right out of high school, but that his career didn’t pan out. So maybe he has an all-too-personal understanding of the difference between skill and potential, about the damage under- and overvaluing players can do to a team and its members. Maybe there is some of this underdog spirit to his decision to hire the sweet, serious, and shy Brand (a character played quite nicely by Jonah Hill), and in his agreement to find players that no one else wants, like a catcher (Chris Pratt) who can no longer throw, and find new life for their careers.

His underdog spirit carries over into the A’s organization, where Beane finds himself butting heads with the team’s longtime scouts and the recalcitrant manager (Phillip Seymour Hoffman). Moneyball is at its best when it’s a movie about men at work, about people forming partnerships and rivalries along the basis of their business philosophies as much as true friendships, which are forged in the fires of professional camaraderie. This is not a movie with notable female roles, aside from a couple sweet scenes between Beane and his daughter (Kerris Dorsey). This is not even a movie that follows closely too many baseball games, though that makes the ones that are so very satisfying. This is a movie with its most suspenseful scene one of a telephone call with two men in one office negotiating player trades.

The script, which was written by Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin, balances the romance of baseball, the pulse-quickening athleticism and the leisurely pace, with the eggheaded tables, graphs and charts of its endless stats. Is there any other sport so beautiful and so wonkish, so skillful and so nerdy? There’s a tension between the themes that is pleasantly dissonant. The film comes from two terrific screenwriters and sometimes I could feel the uncomfortable tension between their approaches to the material, or maybe I was just trying to pin down blame for why I felt the film a little lumpy, pokily paced and overlong. But director Bennett Miller, of Capote, smoothes things over with his resolutely unshowy visual style, which serves to call attention to the small, likable moments the actors bring out of the well-written scenes. Those scenes are hit out of the park, but the rest of the time I was merely interested, not involved. I was expecting a great baseball movie, a real home run, but what I got was a nice, solid base hit of a middlebrow drama.

Sunday, November 7, 2010

Super Bad: MEGAMIND

These days, as long as an animated production has a large supply of studio money flowing in, the movie will at the very least look amazing. That’s the case with Megamind, the latest disappointment from Dreamworks Animation, which is nonetheless blest with bright primary colors and detailed designs. Director Todd McGrath, who previously co-directed the two lame Madagascars, and screenwriters Alan J. Schoolcraft and Brent Simons bring little of interest to the story, which is little more than warmed-over scraps from better animation studios’ far superior efforts. It’s takes the superhero comedy of Pixar’s The Incredibles and the inept supervillain plot of Illumination Entertainment’s Despicable Me and then drains them of wit, speed, and likability.

In fact, it’s hard not to think of the creatively underachieving Dreamworks Animation as Megamind begins with two alien infants fleeing a cataclysmic event, essentially flying through a parody of Superman’s first act on their way to Earth. One is a handsome little tyke for whom it’s all smooth sailing, landing gently under a wealthy couple’s Christmas tree. The other is a blue boy with a bulbous head who has a rocket that clatters through an asteroid field and lands in a prison. They grow up to be superpowered nemeses with the charmed life of hero Metroman (Brad Pitt) being a source of envy for the clumsily diabolical Megamind (Will Ferrell) who constantly wonders how that guy sails effortlessly to acclaim while he has to stew in the shadows. It’s easy to think that the creative team at Dreamworks would have reason to sympathize with Megamind, since their films are so critically underwhelming while their closest rival Pixar puts out films that are consistently acclaimed.

I would have been only too happy to praise Dreamworks latest film. In fact, earlier this year their How to Train Your Dragon was a film that was pleasantly surprising, great fun and the best film they’ve ever produced. (Though maybe the credit should mostly go to Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois, who definitely left their auteuerist mark on the project.) Megamind, on the other hand, is basically indefensible. It’s sluggish and grating with flat, uninspired vocal performances that sometimes inspire stiff animation. It’s also a film with thin characterization and a deeply uninteresting plot that does little to encourage an atmosphere of fun. It plays like a creation from people who know all the notes to hit when creating a family film but they can’t for the life of them actually figure out how to play the song.

Despite its visually precise and often lovely to regard locations and textures - I especially liked a moment when thousands of flying robots form a face in the sky - this is a nearly unfathomably uninvolving movie. It plays out in fits and starts of clichés and halfhearted jokes. The main battle-of-good-and-evil plot gets off to a fairly promising start with a sequence that finds Megamind, along with his talking fish (David Cross), finally besting Metroman and reacting like a dog that has for once actually caught the car he was chasing. He has no idea what to do next. The filmmakers are right there with him.

Early promise is squandered on a squirmy love-triangle between a disguised Megamind and a sloppy cameraman (Jonah Hill) battling for the affections of a local news reporter (Tina Fey). This plotline then becomes needlessly convoluted with a wholly unconvincing attempt to jump-start the superpowered conflicts. The characters are simply not defined enough to feel convincing. The stakes aren’t imbued with any real sense of danger. Even when the big climax comes and characters are literally swinging buildings around, I found it of some small visual interest but entirely empty of emotion.

Saturday, July 10, 2010

Duplass Filmmaking: CYRUS

I’m sure it’s a backhanded compliment, or, more likely, not a compliment at all, to say that the films of the brothers Duplass always leave me with a deeply felt sense of nothing. From their first film, the light but likable road-trip film Puffy Chair (2005), to Baghead (2008), their sophomore effort and experiment in meta-horror, I find their work to be slight whiffs. They’re not entirely without merit, and I basically enjoyed them both, the former more than the latter, but they don’t stick. With their new film Cyrus, the brothers have made a step into mainstream filmmaking, of a sort, with a pseudo-indie featuring big names (John C. Reilly, Jonah Hill, Marisa Tomei, Catherine Keener) while keeping the shaggy slightness of their previous films entirely intact. In fact, Cyrus is probably the best of their three features, despite ending one scene too soon where Puffy Chair found satisfying open-endedness and Baghead became self-defeating in overambitious genre tweaking.

But, before I go any farther, it must be asserted that Cyrus is in fact an often enjoyable movie. Opening with Reilly as a depressed divorcee, drunkenly seeking a new girlfriend at a party to which his ex-wife (Keener) invited him, the movie immediately makes clear that the loose, improvisational, often casually funny Duplass style has remained intact. Singing obnoxiously along to the hosts’ stereo and comparing himself to Shrek somehow wins Reilly the affection of a very warm and caring woman (Tomei). They start dating, but the other shoe drops, as it must in screen romances, when it is revealed that Tomei has, in the form of a casually threatening Jonah Hill, a 21-year-old unemployed mama’s boy living with her. Their relationship is very close and Hill is not about to let some interloper trash it.

I laughed enough at Cyrus, but the comedy seems almost beside the point. The acting here creates characters that feel raw and untamed. The exchanges and interactions between them, reportedly heavily improvised, are fumbling and offhandedly, almost accidentally, humorous. Reilly and Tomei create characters that are immediately sympathetic and understandable. It is this sympathy that pulls me through, rolling over my quibbles with the plotting as the film finds a comfort zone in its plot points then seems to get stuck on repeat for a bit before it can move on.

I liked the leads; it’s what kept me watching. But what kept me interested was Jonah Hill who is funny, yes, but also a creepy and deeply strange character here. The son’s attempts to insert himself between his mother and her boyfriend to slowly sabotage a burgeoning relationship are subtle and devious emotional manipulation. It’s to the credit of all involved that the film never goes broad with his antics. It’s slowly creepy and scarily simple the ways he unsettles Reilly and plays with Tomei’s emotions.

So this is a funny, odd, enjoyable little movie, well-acted and worthy of attention. That much is worth reiterating before Cyrus becomes doomed to be known as that movie with the crazy zooms, as some cinephiles would have you know. But those zooms are weird, often seemingly unmotivated and distracting in their eagerness to suddenly leap back or plunge in. At the movie’s best, the zooms are barely noticeable; at its worst, they’re off-putting.

I first saw Cyrus at a festival screening some months ago, catching up with it again just the other day as it moves through an expanding release. Both times, I found myself having a good time, more or less, but the months between found my memory of enjoyment evaporating. This is a movie that delivers fun on impact, but fades fast. In that way, this film is definitely of a piece with the Duplass brothers’ other films. They’re charming guys and smart filmmakers. I look forward to the day they make a film that lingers.