The Apocalypse Hilariously Hits Seth Rogen & Gang In THIS IS THE END

Opening this evening at a multiplex near you:

THIS IS THE END (Dirs. Evan Goldberg & Seth Rogen, 2013)

In a scenario that was no doubt conceived between bong hits, Seth Rogen and his gang of Hollywood player pals - James Franco, Jonah Hill, Craig Robinson, Danny McBride, and Jay Baruchel - all play themselves facing the end of times when the Apocalypse hilariously hits Los Angeles during a wild party at Franco’s house.



After the nearly laughless endeavors that were THE HANGOVER PART III and THE INTERNSHIP, comedy lovers have reason to rejoice this season, because the directorial debut of Rogen and writing partner Evan Goldberg (SUPERBAD, PINEAPPLE EXPRESS) is surely the funniest film of the summer.



I laughed more than I remember laughing at a screening in a long time, and with the lines and sight gags coming so quickly, I feel like I may have laughed over and missed a whole other movie’s worth of jokes.

It starts off amusingly on an easy going meta level of these people being relatable guys despite having been in hit movies, with Baruchel, who starred with Rogen in Judd Apatow’s short-lived Fox series Undeclared (2001-02) before going on to be in films like SHE’S OUT OF MY LEAGUE, THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE, and HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON, flying out to hang with his best pal Rogen in L.A.



Baruchel doesn’t feel comfortable around Rogen’s other buddies - i.e. the rest of the cast - so he doesn’t want to go to a party at Franco’s fortress of a house in the Hollywood hills, but Rogen talks him into it.



The party that the full of himself Franco is hosting is filled with other celebrities playing exaggerated comic versions of themselves including Michael Cera (one of the funniest as he portrays himself as a coked-up bisexual douche), Paul Rudd, Mindy Kaling, Rihanna, Emma Watson, Jason Segel, Kevin Hart, Aziz Ansari, and Christopher Mintz-Plasse (you know, McLovin!). When firestorms and sinkholes start appearing, some of the famous folks present are immediately goners, but the core crew of the six above-the-title stars hole up in Franco’s mansion, divvy up supplies, and try to figure out how to survive the Biblical rapture.

But Baruchel is the only one who actually believes it’s the rapture, the others stupidly dismiss that idea as much as they do him, as Hill and Franco seem to see themselves as rival BFFs to Rogen, while Robinson and McBride, who shows up uninvited and unwanted, are only thinking of themselves.

The film puts the same amount of energy into jabs at the silliness surrounding friendships, and the selfishness of stardom, as it does the scads of gross-out humor involving a severed head being kicked around the room, drinking one’s own urine (how Robinson is able to sell this with charm is a gag to behold), and, via some not bad special effects, a 60-foot Satan with a swinging penis (that’s right). This non-cynical approach to this ridiculous material reveals over and over that these guys’ only concern is pure comedy, and they go all out trying to give the audience as much as they can take.

Things that made me laugh: the makeshift sequel to PINEAPPLE EXPRESS (virally released as a fake trailer on April Fool’s Day earlier this year) that the gang produces to amuse themselves (Rogen: “We should make sequels to more of our movies.” Franco: “How about we not do ‘Your Highness’”), how Hill identified himself when praying (“It’s me, Jonah Hill, the guy from ‘Money Ball’”), McBride’s arrogant and obnoxious behavior (funnier here than on Eastbound & Down) that lead to him getting kicked out of the house, and how the film wraps up in a pop culture-fied heaven (don’t think that’s really a Spoiler!).

Looks like former mentors and collaborators Apatow (whose name is surprisingly absent from the credits here), David Gordon Green (PINEAPPLE EXPRESS, MY HIGHNESS), and SUPERBAD director Greg Mottola weren't needed by Rogen, Evanberg, and crew to help bring the funny this time.

Practically everything that was supposed to be funny in THIS IS THE END was, though I’m sure in a film with such a high volume of jokes, one-liner, sight gags, and scatological silliness in it had some misfired groaners here and there. I was just laughing too hard at the stuff that hit to notice them.

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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!

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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.

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