The Five-Year Engagement (Thursday, April 5, 2012) (34)

In the ever-rising tide of adult-themed romantic gross-out comedies comes The Five-Year Engagement, a totally preposterous film with one of the weirdest, most fat-laden stories and scripts I've seen in awhile. There are lots of funny moments (many provided by Jason Segal, who is quietly turning into one this era's most talented comics... er, except for the fact that he co-wrote this screenplay... OK - so let's call him inconsistent...), but much more excess and overly graphic situations, making watching it more of a chore than a joy.

Directed and co-written by Nicholas Stoller (of Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Get Him to the Greek fame), the movie revolves around Tom (Segal), an up-and-coming chef in San Francisco, who gets engaged to Violet (Emily Blunt). They fully plan to have a timely wedding, until she gets into grad school in Ann Arbor. They move and his life begins to spin out of control after he's unable to get a "respectable" restaurant gig (featuring a fun "A-squared" resto montage, for anyone who went to school or ate dinner there). She thrives and he shrivels and their wedding moves further away. In the meantime his best friend (Chris Pratt) and her sister (Alison Brie) get married and have babies and the world moves along. Just when you think they're gonna figure it out, everything falls apart, possibly irreparably.

Typical of many recent gross-out comedies, the stakes are raised to silly heights as we see the characters behaving ridiculously and see frank pain and embarrassment in every other scene or so. At one point, when Tom freaks out about their pending wedding, he gets drunk and sleeps in the woods in the middle of winter, almost naked. He wakes up with frostbite on one of his toes, which has to be cut off. In another scene, the couple's niece shoots one of Tom's arrows (he's a bow hunter) into Violet's leg -- but just for shits and giggles and no real plot point.

I actually appreciate the frankness of these moments, and the reaction they bring to us in the audience (shock and horror with uncomfortable laughter), but they're especially difficult to endure as they're interspersed with typical RomCom comedy and come generally as surprises. It's all a bit too much for too little pay off.

The real sin of this film, of this script, is that it's just not very efficient and almost every scene goes on about one to four minutes too long, making the whole film feel bloated and cumbersome. The transitions between one bit and another are clumsy and the amount of serious reflective time allotted to each character is too much, making this weirdly heady at times -- not the best tone for a stupid comedy.

This really feels like it was cut down from a script that was probably twice as long, a script with every joke and every set-up the writers could imagine, but then cut it to this overweight 120-some minutes. I think if they had trimmed the script more (like by another 30-40 mintues) they could have had a pretty good movie. Instead we get a weird movie that's not really enjoyable and doesn't move well, despite some honestly funny moments.

Stars: 1 of 4

Friends with Kids (Saturday, March 10, 2012) (26)

The fundamental flaw with Jennifer Westfeldt's Friends with Kids is that it serves no audience, or, rather, it serves an audience who doesn't totally get the jokes its making. In her directoral debut (after writing the 2001 indie comedy Kissing Jessica Stein), Westfeldt presents a film that is really meant for an audience of single, middle-30s, cosmopolitan white people who don't have kids and hate people who do -- those people are known as New Yorkers (everywhere else people get married by 28).

The problem is that the film gets New York so incredibly wrong and is so banal in its judgments that it would only appeal to people who don't live here... or who pay rent here and think 59th Street is waaaaay too far south for them. Westfeldt (who also wrote the script) adds to this a lot of foul-mouthed dialogue to show that this is a young-hearted movie that might upset your parents, about which you can talk with your girlfriends (Carrie, Miranda, Samantha) at brunch... because all young people talk about how they like "tight pussies" (how scandalous!).

Julie (Westfeldt) and Jason (Adam Scott) are best friends who are both serial daters. They love playing around with the hot people they meet and like the freedom of being able to live in the same Riverside Drive rental building (on different floors). They're close with two couples, Ben (Jon Hamm, Westfeldt's own life partner) and Missy (Kristen Wiig, who is barely in the movie) and Leslie (Maya Rudolph, who's working way too much these days) and Alex (Chris O'Dowd, thankfully playing an American). Both couples have babies (or will be having them soon) and are totally boring and square and live in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn (which is a $77 cab ride away from somewhere in Manhattan... which is impossible and stupid).

Julie and Jason decide to have a baby together as friends and raise the kid together, but not get married and continue to date other people... because, well, it's never really clear. They have a baby and all is great. Jason meets a Broadway chorus girl (played by Megan Fox, one of our greatest actresses) and Julie meets a contractor and divorced dad (played by Edward Burns, who will always just be a contractor in our eyes). Things get a bit dicey, however, when Julie starts to fall for Jason (didn't see that coming!) and he doesn't see her in the same way.

It's all so boring and stupid, so banal and recycled. There's never any chance that they'll do something unexpected. They break up, they get back together... big whoop! I've seen it all before (in When Harry Met Sally, if not in It Happened One Night or any number of screwball comedies from the pre-war era). Westfeldt trades originality and surprise for style... but that style is predicated on the false idea that just saying "fuck" makes something edgy and "realistic". It doesn't -- it makes it garbage that I could have read about on dozens of mommy blogs and Glamour Magazine ("Hello, Vagina, Are You Alive Down There?").

This is a weird pastiche of romantic comedy, screwball comedy and gross-out comedy, but is not really all that romantic, screwball or gross. It's so incredibly safe that it's totally uninteresting. ("Oh! There's that scene when they're all at a ski lodge and Scott and Fox are fucking really loudly -- that's just like when I went skiing with all my friends and there was that couple who fucked so loudly! It's funny because it's true!" Vomit.)

To be unfairly picky, I have to also say that Westfeldt's characterization of New York City living (Manhattan and South Brooklyn) is so completely off it's embarrassing. One unfunny set-up requires Julie to buzz a date into her building... but she lives in a doorman building that wouldn't have a buzzer... because it has doormen. In another scene, Fox talks about how she does eight performances a week in her Broadway show, "and has to be ready to go out of town for other work at a moment's notice." But why? You're on Broadway! Might you have to go out of town to perform in a road company in St. Louis? I'm not sure when the last time Westfeldt lived in New York was, but all the detail feels very stupid, fake and forced.

This desperate movie has the gauzy characteristics of an old-timey comedy, but made in this very contemporary, cynical voice that relies mostly on dirty words to convey naturalism. That style doesn't really change the fact that it's a dull movie with a bunch of painful jokes that are only funny if don't really know why you're laughing. This has a terrible script and is directed equally hamhandedly. There is no subtlety to this film. That wouldn't sell well on the check-out aisle and you might miss the joke or not know exactly when to laugh. How dumb.

Stars: .5 of 4

Cedar Rapids (2011) (Wednesday, February 29, 2012) (156)

I had missed Cedar Rapids when it came out in theaters, but then it showed up on a handful of best of the year lists by several critics, so I decided to give it a chance. It is a funny gross-out comedy, but less than overwhelming.

You say that insurance sales is a prime subject for juvenile comedy? Well, you're in luck!

Tim Lippe (Ed Helms) is an insurance salesman at a small company in rural Wisconsin. After the death of his colleague (by auto-erotic asphyxiation, of course) he's sent to a regional insurance conference in Cedar Rapids, an annual event of drunken debauchery. Tim is a grown nerd and a manchild who is having a relationship with his former junior high teacher (Sigourney Weaver). He has never done anything substantial in his life and the puddle-jumper flight to Cedar Rapids is his first time on an airplane.

When he gets to the conference he finds he'll be sharing a room with Dean Ziegler (John C. Reilly) a wild man who loves to drink and party more than he loves selling insurance policies. Tim has to concentrate on the task of getting a top rating from this regional group while Ziegler pushes him in all the wrong directions, including into bed with Joan Ostrowski-Fox (Anne Heche), a married red-head from Omaha.

There is a lot of funny and silly stuff here, and a lot of surprises including one of the strangest and most straightforward crack-pipe-smoking sequences I've ever seen (because that's funny!). There's also a lot of rather dumb, preachy sentimentality that really has no place in the story.

The third act is typically dull here -- I say typically because it's rare for a comedy like this to be solid for three-straight acts. I don't really care that Tim is a moralist or that he loves being a goody-two-shoes. This movie is not about good people - it's about bad and dirty people. Stop trying to force me to feel something deep for these cartoonish characters.

This is an OK movie. It's not brilliant, but much better than a lot of stuff out there (30 Minutes or Less, Bridesmaids). I don't know why people would say it's one of the best of 2011... but some people thought that about The Help, which is much more offensive.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

The Sitter (Friday, December 9, 2011) (113)

There are two tracks to director David Gordon Green's career in film: a gritty, dirty, independent, Southern American Gothic dramatic line featuring films like George Washington, Undertow and his best film, All the Real Girls; and a totally different, goofy, gross-out, pot-hazed comedy thread featuring Pineapple Express, the brilliant Eastbound and Down TV show and his latest film, The Sitter. It would be easy to dismiss this latter category as "director-for-hire movies," though I think that would miss the point. I see these two streaks as closer to a director more like Howard Hawks, who made brilliant westerns (Rio Bravo), brilliant film noirs (or is it films noir?) (The Big Sleep) and hilarious screwball comedies (His Girl Friday). I'm not saying DGG is as good as Hawks (that would be silly), but he's just about the only active director now who has that same flexibility with tone and genre. (For what it's worth, he only wrote the dramas he directed; the other films were written by other people.)

Sadly, the script for The Sitter is pretty typical, which results in a rather average movie, rather than a hilarious one. It's a pretty typical babysitter movie. The loser dumbass sitter, Noah (Jonah Hill), gets into all sorts of shenanigans when he's looking after three very self-determined kids (one of whom is played by the brilliantly named Max Records from Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are). They get wrapped up in a chase with drug dealers and cops and have to end up back home by 1am. It's very light, very dirty and has a very warm heart throughout.

Green does a great job with one of the funniest tongue-in-cheek gay camp sequences I've seen in a long time. He's clearly a talented guy. I just wish he would make a few more small dramas again, as his comedies are a bit too silly for his chops.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Your Highness (Sunday, August 28, 2011) (75)

I had big hopes that David Gordon Green, Danny McBride and Ben Best's Your Highness would be much better than the reviews and box office numbers suggested it was. After all, the three of them are best friends with and close associates of Jody Hill, the brilliant creator of Observe and Report and Eastbound and Down (Observe is one of the best films of 2009 and the best comedy of the past decade). Sadly this film is every bit as terrible as one would understand from the hype. It's directionless and one of the most totally random ideas for a movie I've seen in a long time.



By randomness, I mean, of course, that the film is set in some sort of fantasy dungeons and dragons medieval-type world. Fabious (James Franco) is the son of the king and an all around fantastic guy. He is honest and brave and kills dragons and monsters all the time. He returns to his father's castle after a campaign and brings with him his new fiancee, Belladonna (Zooey Deschanel). Thadeus (McBride) is Fabious' ne'er-do-well brother who hangs out, smokes pot and fucks as many young wenches as he can find.



During the wedding of Fabious and Belladonna, bad wizard, Leezer (Justin Theroux... JenAn's babydaddy), comes and kidnaps the bride to take back to his dark castle. The two brothers have to set out with their knights and associates to rescue her, marking the first heroic thing Thadeus has ever done. Along the way he randomly meets Isabel (NatPort), a totally hot woman who also is randomly also seeking to kill Leezer. She joins the gang in their quest.



There isn't really much pot smoking or pot jokes in the film, unlike a past Franco-DGG effort, Pineapple Express (which was also not funny). Clearly the biggest problem here is the script, which is more forced than funny. That the story takes place in this fantasy world is sorta funny (in a stoner way), but random beyond all understanding. Why on earth are they making a stoner knight movie? Nobody was asking for this film (and there's a suggested of a sequel at the end... which will probably never happen).



This has the overall feel of the Evil Dead films - in that it's a monster/fantasy movie that has a very tongue-in-cheek tone to it. Clearly it's not that good (Evil Dead II is a great film). It doesn't feel nearly as self-knowing or self-confident as that film, and much of the awkward humor seems to be from the fact that the actors (particularly Franco) know that what they're doing is stupid and they're laughing at it as they act it (like the worst parts of Seinfeld).



David Gordon Green remains a total mystery to me. He started out his career with some very dark, small dramas that had interesting aesthetic tones and a powerful melancholic sensibility. He has now made two terrible comedies in a row (with his buddies) (although, in fairness, he's directed a few episodes of Eastbound). Where is he going? Has he told all the serious stories he has to tell? I feel like it's somewhat of a shame that he's doing this. I'm sure he's having fun, but it's a weird direction for his oeuvre, n'est-ce pas? Clearly this is a misfire of a film. I just hope it's not the sign of things to come for the people involved in it (almost all of whom I really like).

Stars: 1 of 4

30 Minutes or Less (Saturday, August 13, 2011) (68)

The title of Ruben Fleischer's 30 Minutes or Less comes from the fact that the main character, Nick (Jesse Eisenberg), works for a pizza delivery place that has one of those deals where if you don't get your pizza in 30 minutes you don't pay for it. Considering the plot of the film involves a bomb/kidnapping, you'd expect some sort of "you-have-30-minutes-before-the-bomb-goes-off" sorta thing, but, alas, writer Michael Diliberti apparently isn't that clever.

Nothing about this film is clever or particularly funny. Nick and his best friend Chet (Aziz Ansari) are fighting over their past jerky behavior and the fact that Nick slept with Chet's sister, Kate (Dilshad Vadsaria) (which, of course, is totally uncool, brah). Meanwhile across town (this town is Grand Rapids, Michigan, home of great tax-free filmmaking!), losers Dwayne (Danny McBride) and Travis (Nick Swardson) are trying to kill Dwayne's dad (Fred Ward) so he can inherit the lottery money he won a few years ago.

Their dumb plan involves them ordering a pizza from Nick's place, kidnapping him and strapping a bomb to his chest, then forcing him to go rob a bank. Oh-kaaay. Nick has to enlist the help of Chet to rob the bank and save his butt.

There are a bunch of moments here where you presume what you're hearing was written as comedy, but none of it is very funny. The plot is stupid in the worst banal way and the acting all around is wooden (and I'm a big fan of Zucker- ... uh, I mean Eisenberg and McBride). Ansari's style is to normally rather monotone with punctuations of high-pitched shrieks; that's normally funny, but here it just comes off as line-reading and uninspired.

This movie is a bomb.

Stars: .5 of 4

Bridesmaids (Monday, May 23, 2011) (34)

Lord help us. Beginning what is sure to be a never-ending trend in girl gross-out comedies, Bridesmaids come out swinging (and talking about giving blow jobs, swallowing cum and having explosive diarrhea). What begins as a funny movie in the first half devolves into a rather banal rom-com way off-target for what it should be. The worst part is that considering this is such a long movie, at 125 minutes, 40 minutes could have easily be cut out, making the final product near perfect.

Annie (Kristen Wiig, who also co-wrote the film) is a sad middle-30s woman in Milwaukee (home of great tax breaks for filmmakers, dontcha know!) who is unlucky in love and in life. Her best friend, Lillian (Maya Rudolph) is having better luck as she's getting married to a very wealthy guy in Chicago who moves in a circle of a very rich set. Lillian asks Annie to be her maid of honor and introduces her to the other bridesmaids. One of them is Helen (Rose Byrne), the rich wife of one of Lillian's husband's work buddies, who immediately gets into a competitive battle with Annie over who is a better friend to Lillian. Of course, Annie is dirt poor, after her baking business collapsed in the recession, and Helen is a fancy housewife with nothing to do but be a fancy hostess. This back and forth sets off a series of silly vignettes where Annie ends up looking like an ass as her average style doesn't cut it with Lillian, Helen or the other bridesmaids.

Somewhere in the second act, this turns into a pity-party for Annie, who alienates everyone and screws up every wedding event by pushing too hard against Helen. There's an aborted trip to Las Vegas (hello, The Hangover 1.5: Girls Gone Wild), a bridesmaid's dress fitting with tainted food that causes everyone to get sick, and a tantrum at the wedding shower. Everything goes downhill for Annie (and for Lillian's wedding). Meanwhile she meets and sparks a relationship with a local cop... from Ireland... uh... (to say nothing about her English roommates... it seems that Milwaukee is some International City of Significance for the English-speaking world).

Aside from the need to have jokes that you would be embarrassed to tell to your mother, the main motivation of the movie is to show scenes that make women in the audience say "oh -that happened to me too" (but, of course, these things have never happened to anyone because they're so over-the-top). It's really just a bunch of pretty girls saying ugly things. That's a lot of fun, but it doesn't have the freshness of Harold & Kumar, Superbad or Observe and Report.

Wiig, not being much of a veteran of the big screen, reverts to her signature Saturday Night Live characters too frequently, sometimes saying things under her breath like that woman on the Weekend Update (whose name I don't know, because I mostly watch it in fast-forward). She does have some good acting moments, though; probably the best moment of the movie, which died in the theater I was in, is when Annie sees Helen falling apart from stress and self-pity and she gives this fantastic smirk overflowing with schadenfruede. (I guess the audience I was with was not looking for subtlety, but just for shit jokes.)

Aside from not being particularly funny, the second half gets a bit preachy, like when Annie is told by one of the (fat) bridesmaids that she should pick herself up and dust herself off and stop feeling bad for herself. I get it, but it's totally not the right tone for this movie. This is a juvenile, silly thing, not a self-help dissertation. Yes, Annie, should stop moping around and hook herself up with the Irish cop, but she should do it through burping and saying "shit" and "fuck", not through baking a goddamn cake!

Girl gross-out movie, to thine own self be true. Motherfucker.

Stars: 1.5 of 4

Super (Saturday, April 2, 2011) (21)

Super is a gonzo comic book movie straight out of the brain of a disaffected 15 year-old boy... or out of the brain of writer/director James Gunn. There is nothing here that your mother would like. It's crass, bawdy and silly - sorta Mystery Men meets Evil Dead.

Frank (Rainn Wilson) is a loser fry cook living in Anytown Exurbia, U.S.A. He has a terrible life and his wife, Sarah (Liv Tyler), hates him and only married him because she was getting straight after a stint in rehab. She leaves him for Jacques (or Jock, as Frank understands his name) (Kevin Bacon) a piece-of-shit strip-mall strip club owner and drug dealer, which sends him into a downward spiral of self-loathing.

One day he goes into a comic book store and meets the clerk there, Libby (Ellen Page). The two decide that they will design their own super hero personae (the Crimson Bolt and Boltie) and fight bad guys on their own. It's very similar in story (and tone) to Kick-Ass and Scott Pilgrim (both from last year).

What follows is one of the silliest Looney-Tunesy riffs I've seen in a long time. It's totally gross with tons of blood and foul language, but totally enjoyable. It's a sad world of despair and cruelty and Frank, as the Crimson Bolt, is violent and remorseless. After he blows someone's head off with a gigantic gun, he steps on his brains to rub in the point.

The script here is hilarious, bittersweet and very clever. Gunn has the perfect mix of stupidity and archness to make the dialogue feel as real as anything you'd see from an art-house think-piece. The acting is fantastic, particularly the supporting cast of Bacon, Tyler and Michael Rooker. Both Wilson and Page are actors who frequently err on the side of overdoing roles, but here they are both understated and give great, painful performances.

The best scene of the film, and one of the best comedy scenes I've witnessed in a long time, has Libby throwing herself at Frank, who is not really interested in her (he is, after all, trying to win back Sarah's heart). She convinces him that if they wear their costumes the sex will be better and easier for him to take and he won't really be cheating on Sarah. She puts on music and does this weird, uncomfortable dance (reminiscent of that Elaine Benes jig from Seinfeld), which is utterly unhot. She then mounts him and proceeds to... well, to rape him in the most silly and awkward way. In terms of "funny rape" scenes (yes, there's a category for that) it's up there for me with the one from Observe and Report (the best funny rape scene ever).

More than anything, this is a tale of melancholia and pitifulness, set in the most average, beige Americana background. It is hilarious, but there is a dark cloud of pain lying below the surface. I think it's a rather deep movie (like Observe and Report) that is wearing a gross-out comedy gown. I think there is more there than meets the eye... underneath the superhero mask.

Stars: 3 of 4