The Soon To Be Forgotten Off Season Folly Of IDENTITY THIEF

Opening today at a multiplex near you:

IDENTITY THIEF (Dir. Seth Gordon, 2013) 

Jason Bateman, in his standard exasperated everyman role, takes on Melissa McCarthy as a con artist who’s racked up a huge debt in his name in this uninspired comedy that deserves to be dumped into this sorry season.

Bateman plays Denver-based accountant Sandy Patterson - a name that could be a woman’s name which, of course, equals lotsa laughs - a straight laced family man married to the suitably bland Amanda Peet, who travels to Florida to confront McCarthy, and bring her back to confess her identity theft to Bateman’s boss (HAROLD & KUMAR’s John Cho) so that he won’t lose his job.

In what’s largely a PLANES, TRAINS, AND AUTOMOBILES (minus the trains) or DUE DATE-type road movie, Bateman and McCarthy are pursued by drug dealers (Genesis Rodriguez and T.I.) and a skuzzy bounty hunter (Robert Patrick), as they go through by-the numbers car chases, gay panic jokes, and even a night in the woods in which Bateman tangles with a seven foot snake.

With her tacky hair, gaudy fashions, hideous makeup, and constant inappropriate innuendo McCarthy is a broadly drawn archetype that never feels fully fleshed out. Craig Mazan’s (SCARY MOVIES 3 & 4, THE HANGOVER PARTS II & III) screenplay exploits McCarthy’s BRIDESMAIDS persona, but in a manner that’s too sketchy for the character to have any depth.

This makes for a distinct lack of emotional pull and an overriding emptiness when the movie gives up trying to make us laugh, and piles on the sentiment.



Only one moment, set in a cheap hotel room, involving Modern Family’s Eric Stonestreet as a rich good ol’ boy who falls for McCarthy has any weight to it.

Otherwise, despite Bateman tossing off a few dry one-liners, and a running gag involving McCarthy's defense mechanism of punching people in the throat, there is very little that even slightly resembles humor here.



It’s also way too long at 112 minutes, something that makes its lack of laughs even more noticeable. The in and outs of its tedious narrative so lost my interest, that I can’t remember what the significance of Breaking Bad’s Jonathan Banks’ prisoner character was in the rest of this mess.

McCarthy, who has proven her considerable comic talent in BRIDESMAIDS and a stint hosting SNL (I’ve never watched Mike and Molly), will undoubtedly get better chances to bring the funny in future films, so this will soon be a forgotten off season folly that won’t be much of a black mark on her resume.

As for Bateman, the much anticipated Arrested Development reunion reboot can’t come soon enough.

More later...

Taking A Look Back At The Michael Cera Era

Remember the Michael Cera era? What, you don't?

C’mon, surely you remember that period, just a few years back, when it seemed like there was a new Michael Cera movie out every few months. Cera, who first captured our hearts as George-Michael Bluth on the cult TV show Arrested Development in the early to mid-aughts, was in a steady stream of movies, basically playing the same awkward yet lovable geek again and again.

The era began with the huge high school hit SUPERBAD in 2007, and ran through the audience favorites JUNO and NICK & NORA'S INFINITE PLAYLIST, but started to wane when the caveman comedy YEAR ONE, which teamed Cera with Jack Black, crapped out in the summer of 2009.

Then the era officially ended when Edgar Wright’s action comedy SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD, starring Cera as the title character, released in August of 2010, and flopped despite basking in fanboy praise when it premiered at Comic-Con earlier that summer. Cera hasn’t had a substantial role in a major movie since.

Feels like he just schlepped out of our lives.Around that time, rumors were swirling about a possible Arrested Development movie in the works. All the original cast members were said to be up for it, but Cera, remarked about the project: “I'd possibly play, I'd possibly put the script in my shredder.” Why would he have to go back to being a Bluth, when his movie career was riding so high?

In an episode of the NBC comedy drama Parenthood a season or so back, the rebellious teen Amber (Mae Whitman, also a Cera co-star in “Scott Pilgrim”) is helping her cousin Haddie (Sarah Ramos) with an alibi so she can go on a date unknown to her mother. They rehearse a scenario concerning seeing a Michael Cera movie - Haddie: “Well, I mean, it was okay. But Michael Cera was obviously hilarious.” “Obviously hilarious and cute,” Amber adds.

Even though that was only 2011, that dialogue has really dated. I mean, by then we had all moved on to Jesse Eisenberg. There were no new Cera movies in a multiplex near those girls anymore, right?

Cera himself addressed this when he went on the TBS talk show Conan not long after this, and joked about being constantly mistaken for Eisenberg. Conan O’Brien and Cera laughed about this, then when the next guest, Modern Family’s Julie Bowen, came out she said “Hey, you were great in ‘Social Network’” to Cera. Later O’Brien got a big laugh when he announced that the big guest the next night would be, yep, Jesse Eisenberg, to the comic frustration of Cera.

Tellingly, when Eisenberg visited Conan the following evening, Cera wasn’t brought up at all. Somebody put the kibosh on that. Perhaps Eisenberg, or his agent, beforehand said ‘no Michael Cera jokes, huh?’ If that was the case it sounds like a reasonable request to me.

Apparently Cera decided against the shredder option because he is currently reprising his role as George Michael Bluth in the fourth season of Arrested Development now filming in LA.

Whether or not this new Netflix-produced reunion series (a movie will reportedly follow) will put Cera back in the spotlight it just won’t be the same as his first time around.

I am reminded of a classic episode of The Simpsons, “Bart Gets Famous,” in which Bart Simpson has a burst of fame for saying the same catch phrase over and over. After his fame fades, Marge shows him a box of Bart memorabilia she’s collected (hats, dolls, posters, etc.) and says: “I saved these for you, Bart. You’ll always have them to remind you of the time when you were the whole world's special little guy.”

You can celebrate the Cera era, when he was the whole world’s special little guy, at the Colony Theater in North Raleigh on Wednesday night, August 15th, with a screening of an original 35 mm print of SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD at 7:30 p.m.

SCOTT PILGRIM joins the Colony’s Cool Classics series which means it joins the ranks of such beloved film fare as LABYRINTH, THE PRINCESS BRIDE, EVIL DEAD II, PULP FICTION, and annual showings of THE BIG LEBOWSKI.

So take that Jesse Eisenberg!

More later...

Michael Cera Is The Putz *And* The Poseur

YOUTH IN REVOLT (Dir. Miguel Arteta, 2009)







It's funny that Michael Cera has reportedly been the lone holdout for the prospects of an Arrested Development movie since he's never quite left the character of awkward yet lovable George-Michael Bluth behind. 



Cera has never shown us that he has any versatility, yet his trademark hangdog nervousness coupled with his particular brand of soft spoken sarcasm, has worked nicely in several movie comedies in the last few years - SUPERBAD being the best of those.



As Nick Twisp, that same Cera persona is on display in YOUTH IN REVOLT, but here there is sort of a promise of a twist to that persona in the form of a bad boy alter ego named François Dillinger.



Unfortunately apart from a pencil thin mustache and an always present dangling cigarette in his lips, François is still the same Cera. He makes taunting risque comments to Twisp and acts according to the domino-effect accident-prone nature of the script, but it's still the same Cera. Sigh. Couldn't he have even just attempted an accent?




Cera affects François for the express reason of wooing the girl of his dreams (Portia Doubleday) - a neighbor in the trailer park his family fled to. Though we are introduced to Cera's Twisp by way of a masturbation scene, he fancies himself a well read intellectual who loves Frank Sinatra and in Doubleday he feels he's met his match. He longs to break away from the white trash world of his divorced mother (Jean Smart) who's shacked up with a scuzzy trucker (Jack Galifinakis), so he plots to get his real father (Steve Buscemi) to get a job and relocate so he can be close to the girl he loves. 



François appears to be the key to set this in motion. 



Mix in reliable character actors Fred Willard, M. Emmet Walsh, Mary Kay Place, and Ray Liotta (as yet again an asshole cop) and this all plays as quirk by the numbers - "Independent Teen Angst Movie" it could be called. To jazz up these stale elements there's jaunty animation that looks like it was pilfered from Nickolodeon and Justin Long as Doubleday's laid back hallucinogenic mushroom providing brother. 



YOUTH IN REVOLT was filmed a few years ago and possibly shelved because the producers (the Weinstein Brothers) sensed there was a lack of a strong hook to this material. Its release in early January seems to support this. The film has likable people, songs, and story strands but Cera feels severely miscast to the ultimate detriment of the movie. 



Unless Cera's got some major character deconstruction surprises coming anytime soon, here's hoping he reconsiders reprising George-Michael Bluth in the afore mentioned Arrested Development movie. I mean, c'mon! It's the only role he seems to have really played since.

More later...