Ted (4/5 Stars)

People let me tell you about my best friend....

Comedy is like magic. There’s an explanation but you don’t need to know it to enjoy it. You may even enjoy it more not knowing it. I’m trying to give Seth MacFarlane, the writer/director of “Ted,” a serious compliment. The movie, “Ted,” looks and feels so simplistically drawn that one may mistake the whole thing for being an easy thing to accomplish. But there is plenty of good material, much it is rather edgy (R rated Teddy Bear style sex, drugs, racial humor, and violence), and it is a comedic accomplishment that the movie comes off as a simple, funny, and ultimately harmless movie. 

It starts with the Christmas wish of a small Bostonian boy named John. He doesn’t have any friends so he wishes his stuffed Teddy Bear would come to life and be his best friend forever and ever. And the Teddy Bear does and wants nothing but to be his friend forever and ever. The concept of a Teddy Bear stuns the nation and Ted becomes a minor celebrity. But as explains the kindly narrator of the story, “No matter how big a splash you make in this world whether you’re Corey Feldman, Frankie Muniz, Justin Bieber, or a talking teddy bear, eventually, nobody gives a shit.” 27 years later, Ted is still alive and still living with the now 35-year-old John, played by Mark Wahlberg. They are still the best of friends but Ted is no longer an innocent child’s plaything. He lives on the couch, smokes pot, and brings home hookers. This is why Lori, John’s girlfriend for 4 years, played by Mila Kunis, presents an ultimatum: The Teddy Bear from your childhood or the woman you met as an adult. 

This is Seth MacFarlane’s first feature film. You may know him a lot better from the TV show “Family Guy.”  Living proof of that is the voice of Ted, a perfect copy of the Family Guy himself, Peter Griffin (both are voiced by MacFarlane.) This is a masterstroke as that voice, with the very very strong Beantown accent, is one of the funniest voices I have ever heard. There is an inherent vibe of glee inhabiting every syllable that makes me smile every time I hear it.

Even better is what isn’t taken from Family Guy and that is the avant-garde style of crappy humor that makes it an inferior sitcom (I stopped watching halfway into Season 3). Family Guy had this repeated obsession with this thing I will deem, “the absence of a joke-joke,” where characters would setup a situation and then blankly stare at each other, the joke apparently being that this is where a punch-line should be but there isn’t a punch-line and isn’t that funny? Well, perhaps the first time it was. Then you start wondering if the blank stares are simply there because the writers couldn’t think of anything funny to say. Anyway the good news is that this does not happen in “Ted.” There are real jokes here and the movie is filled wall to wall with them.

One especially great thing the movie does is present situations that should feel awkward but somehow stay comfortable the entire time. A good example of that is how the movie presents Laurie’s employer, played by Joel McHale, who hits on her everyday at work. These scenes should be awkward but aren’t and I think it’s mostly because of the blunt kind of whatever way Joel McHale brings it up, the way he doesn’t particularly care when being rejected, and the way it doesn’t touch upon anything truly creepy like leering stares, demeaning remarks, promises of material rewards, or threats concerning Laurie’s status at work. Then once Laurie and John temporarily separate because of something really funny involving Flash Gordon in a previous scene, the boss asks her out again to a Norah Jones concert. The way he phrases the reasons why she should say yes to this should be framed and put on somebody’s wall because I was like nodding along and going, ‘okay, fuck it. I would go to the concert too.’

That brings up what happens at the concert itself, which in most other movies would be awkward, but here became the funniest scene I have seen in a movie all year. John gets backstage at the Norah Jones concert, due to Ted’s past romantic liaison with the singer, and gets permission to go on stage and sing a song to his ex-girlfriend in the crowd. Impromptu love songs in public places are ripe territory for stomach-churning embarrassing moments. But here because of the way it’s done, it couldn’t have been more enjoyable. For one thing, Norah Jones is totally cool with it and even puts on sunglasses and plays along with a saxophone. Second, the song being sung is the theme song to “Octopussy” which is not a love song and actually not even about sex. It just happens to be the theme song of the TV show they watched the first night they met. Third, and most important, is that the reactions shots of Laurie don’t show somebody who is embarrassed and to top everything off, when they get to Joel McHale’s reaction, he smirks and says “Holy Shit” as if he is about to witness the greatest thing in the world.  The result is this sense of safety because even if it goes terribly, the outcome won’t be awkward because none of the characters will feel terrible if it does. In the meantime enjoy Mark Wahlberg singing “Octopussy,” really really poorly and all the people in the crowd getting really really angry.

For the record, quite a lot of the jokes in “Ted” contain pop culture references to really old TV shows like Flash Gordon and Octopussy. You don’t need to know anything about these shows to find the jokes funny. Case in point, I’ve never seen any of these shows and found all of the jokes funny. Use your comedic intuition and you’ll be just fine filling in the holes.

Let’s talk about acting and what makes it “good.” Here, Mark Wahlberg is playing a 35 -year -old schlub working at a rental car agency whose best friend is a talking teddy bear. Cut all the prejudicial crap you may have that states only actors playing biographical men with incurable diseases or physical handicaps deserve to win awards. Now judge this performance on its terms. Ask questions like, was it as funny as it could have been? As a lead character, did Mark empower the supporting actors to be as funny as they could have been? And perhaps the best question of all: Was the talking teddy bear believable? The last question is the linchpin here, because if Mark had done his job poorly, it would be really obvious that he was actually acting against an invisible spot on the floor. Ted, a product of James Cameron-ish special effects, was added entirely in post-production. This includes all the scenes where the two get in fights. During shooting, Mark was pretending to fight with someone who wasn’t physically there, not exactly an easy thing to do. This type of performance always gets overlooked because the better it is done the less people notice it. But it is there and deserves recognition. Billy Murray will probably get the Oscar for portraying Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a biographical President of the USA who is paralyzed with polio, this year. I don’t even have to see that movie in order to predict he will get nominated for it. But that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate actors that can pull off playing opposite to a CGI teddy bear an entire movie. I submit that takes just as much skill if not more. This is one of the best performances of the year.

One other thing that is noticeable in not this comedy but too many others. None of the women are funny. This is not simply just a problem in writing, but also in casting. All of the women here are supermodels, even the coworker that works at the rental car agency. I don’t particularly care about the realism of that, it’s just that if you hired an actual comedian, they probably could have done more with the part. I sort of got the sense here that MacFarlane’s imagination is limited in that respect and figured that all women are the same in the comedy department so why not just hire the most beautiful ones. Funny women exist! I have witnessed them in movies before. There are a million places I could go to look at incredibly beautiful women and their perpetually bored expressions. I paid money to see “Ted” in order to laugh. Hire funny women. If you don’t know how to write jokes for them, ask them to make something up.

Anyway good job on the first feature, MacFarlane. Now go out there and make another. 

The Dark Knight Rises (4/5 Stars)

Occupying Wall Street, if only

I would say that director Christopher Nolan’s greatest ambition with his Batman trilogy is to make the effort worth his time and talent. Here is a guy who has made some of the best and most original movies of the past ten years (Memento, The Prestige, Inception) and yet finds himself in between each of his better projects having to make yet another Batman picture. He made the first one because he was not yet a famous director. He made so much money that he was practically forced to complete a trilogy. Of course, in this day and age, trilogies are things of the past when more money can be wringed out of the type of fans that feel they are honor bound to “must see” every movie about a character (see Twilight, Harry Potter, Terminator, Pirates of the Caribbean, Spiderman).  But with this movie I think we can be certain that Christopher has finally paid all of his Hollywood dues.  From here on out we should be able to enjoy his creative license unfettered by silly comic books

Comic books are silly. They are so silly that almost every trick a serious movie director can throw at an adaptation of one cannot completely overcome the unreality of it all. It takes a great director to come close though and Nolan employs some rather great tricks to get as far as he did.  

First, he has created a true never before scene spectacle by embracing IMAX and physical effects as opposed to 3D and CGI in his action sequences. There is a rawness and realism to physical effects that makes violence feel more visceral than computer generated effects. Compare the fight scenes in this movie with another comic book tent-pole this year, “The Avengers,” and you will see what I mean. There is an element of horror present in the way the main villain Bane, played by art house muscle-man Tom Hardy, goes around beating the shit out of people with his bare hands that is noticeably absent in “The Avengers.” You look at the way he kicks ass and go, “ouch.” It’s good stuff. (On another note, a serious detriment to the effectiveness of the action is the PG-13 rating. Bane twists and breaks a lot of necks in this movie, but these actions are only visually implied and always just off-screen.)  The IMAX is incredible and actually worth paying more money to see (as opposed to say anything but “Avatar’ in 3D). The cool thing is that Nolan is not just using IMAX for cityscapes and sunsets; he is using it for conversations and fistfights. And it isn’t for just a scene; half of the movie was filmed with IMAX cameras. There is more clarity, there is more detail, and it is far grander.

Second, Nolan actively tries to ignore elements of the comic book. Take for instance the character of Selina Kyle, played by Anne Hathaway. In the comic book she is a leather bound fanboy fantasy known more often as “Catwoman.” The name “Catwoman” is not uttered in this movie, nor does Selina Kyle spend her alter ego time in fetishistic leather carrying a whip. Nolan rightly chooses to drop these details and focus on the woman. In fact, he does this with Batman, played again by Christian Bale, as well. There is far more Bruce Wayne in this movie than his alter ego. And it works too. Usually it is the villain that spruces up a sequel because the hero is already established. Not here, Bruce Wayne is a more compelling character than the mysterious Bane. Of course it doesn’t hurt that Bane is never without this breathing contraption that covers his features and masks his emotions and motivations. You need to be able to see evil geniuses without their disguises in order to grasp the understanding needed to truly fear them. Masks are for flunkies like Darth Vader. Keep that in mind as you watch this movie.

Third, Nolan always contains an undercurrent of current political issues in the Batman movies. In the second movie, we had the Dark Knight providing vigilante justice against terrorism using techniques Dick Cheney would deem absolutely necessary. (It is a relief to see a movie tilt right in its politics every once in a while if only for originality’s sake.) In this movie, we have a strong current of class warfare. One of the early targets of Bane is the stock market where he takes several bankers as hostages. Then there is Selina Kyle, the cat burglar who steals from mansions and tells a vacuous billionaire, “There is a storm brewing, Mr. Wayne. You and your friends better batten down the hatches. Because when it hits, you’re all going to wonder how you thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us.” It would be an incredible and ballsy thing to do and pull off this type of conflict. Here you have Batman, whose alter ego is a billionaire playboy who inherited all his wealth and stature, and on the other side you have Bane, a man born with nothing in what is referred to as the worst jail on Earth. He escapes and builds his army of menial laborers and wayward forgotten youth underground in the sewers of Gotham city till one day he rises up to daylight and takes over the city. Unfortunately even though Bane professes that his many acts of terrorism are acts of class warfare against the greedy and ungrateful rich amongst us, it turns out it is just a cover for more humdrum motivation. Bane wants to simply destroy Gotham entirely. I know, I know. That disappointed me too. It’s a recycled nefarious plot that the movie freely admits is identical to the one in the first movie, “Batman Begins,” except this time the villain is going to try it with a nuclear bomb.

 There is a problem with that of course visually speaking. For those that remember “Batman Begins,” the Gotham in that movie looked and felt like a leaking shit-bucket, something that would actually make sense (using warped logic but still some logic) to wipe off the face of the Earth. You can’t say that of the city in which “The Dark Knight Rises” takes place. There has been a rather grand transformation of Gotham between the years, even more so considering the way the city looked like in “The Dark Knight.” I mean the first place looked fictional, the second place looked very much like Chicago, and this one is obviously Manhattan. The inconsistency is something that might make one wonder just where the hell is Gotham and why can’t the makers make up their mind about it. As far as I can tell, they changed the city to Manhattan in order to service a plot point. They needed a place with bridges to blow up. Again, the problem is that Manhattan nowadays looks unavoidably like a big pile of money. So a story about class warfare could certainly work, but a story about destroying a city because of its wretchedness wouldn’t. I will however give the movie credit in one important respect. It wasn’t the logistical nightmare that “The Dark Knight” was. Bane’s plans may be too grandiose to be plausible but they still followed the internal logic of the character as opposed to the meticulously thought out miracles of foresight the Joker, supposedly an agent of chaos, kept accomplishing.

Let me take a moment to explain what I mean by “too grandiose to be plausible,” because that phrase strikes to the heart of what the problem is with most comic book movies. Nowadays these movies are not simply content to be fun-filled frivolity. Nolan’s Batman trilogy is perhaps the best example. There is plenty of psychology, pathos, and Deep Meaning all over these movies. However the schemes of the villains are far too successful to make any sense given how simplistically they are accomplished or on the other hand how simplistically they are brought down. Because of this, the movie gains a feeling of unreality whenever say an entire police force armed only with handguns decides it would be good tactics to charge a line of tanks and machine guns at least fifty feet away from it in a narrow alley (and actually succeeds in doing so). This feeling of unreality tends to undercut all of the psychology, pathos, and Deep Meaning. There’s this great quote from Spiderman. It goes, “With great power comes great responsibility.” In respect to moviemaking, writers and directors have the power to pull heartstrings, change minds, and make us care deeply for the lives of fictional people. At the same time though, if they choose to commit the viewer to such catharsis, they also have the responsibility to not fill the rest of the movie with contrived bullshit. That means if you want to make me care about Michael Caine crying up a storm, I better not see action sequences that confound the laws of logic or physics or both later on in the movie. I really don’t think that is too much to ask. For the record, “The Dark Knight Rises,” for the most part does not have this problem. It just has it to the point where I cannot say it is a great movie. It isn’t. 

Safety Not Guaranteed (4/5 Stars)

The source material for this movie is a real classified advertisement from 1997 that received thousands of responses. It went like this:

Wanted: Someone to go back in time with me. This is not a joke. You’ll get paid after we get back. Must bring your own weapons. SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED. I have only done this once before.

In the early 2000s, it became an Internet sensation when a photo of a man with the most serious 80s mullet in the world was added to classified advertisement. Now it is 2012 and there is a movie. Given the source material you would probably expect a dumb action/comedy with plenty of low budget action and at least one great mullet. And you would be completely wrong. The movie, “Safety Not Guaranteed,” written by Derek Connolly, directed by Colin Trevorrow, and starring Mark Duplass and Aubrey Plaza, has action and comedy but also comes with several fully developed characters, a totally unpredictable plotline, and a really sweet romance. It is a far better movie than the source material commands or requires.

The story starts with the classified advertisement. A magazine writer finds it and pitches writing a story about it to his boss. He gets permission to take two intern, a nerdy Indian and the sarcastically depressed Darius, played by Aubrey Plaza, with him on the road trip to hunt down the weirdo.

A movie like this has two storytelling traps in it that would doom the ordinary independent movie. The first trap has to do with time travel and the fact that it ought to be impossible. At some point in the story the writer is going to have to give us a decent explanation as to what is going on there. The second is the presence of a sarcastically depressed character. These people overpopulate indie movies. They usually are underemployed artists/actors/writers/dancers who are depressed, most of the time because they aren’t famous and successful artists/actors/writers/dancers. The problem with this sort of character is that they tend to be pretentious and annoying (because seriously only a pretentious and annoying person would be depressed that they can’t be famous and successful for doing something profoundly useless like, for instance, art.) An intern for a small magazine seems to fit that mold pretty well.  

It is a credit to this movie that both of these traps are deftly averted. The main reason for this I believe is the movie’s treatment of the advertiser, a middle-aged supermarket employee named Kenneth, played by Mark Duplass. The character is one of the most weirdly endearing characters in movies. He truly believes in his mission and is sincerely looking for a partner to go back in time with him. In fact, it is revealed that he has been seeking out theoretical physicists over the Internet and engaging them in discussions about time travel. And yes, he is actually building some sort of big mechanical thing in his garden shed.

But more importantly he also happens to be shy and protective. When the magazine writer shows up at his door and asks to help, he flatly rejects him because he rightly senses that the writer doesn’t really want to go back in time. This guy may be delusional enough to believe in time travel but he can also tell when somebody is making fun of him. Darius is more sympathetic in her introduction and succeeds in gaining enough trust to start Kenneth’s brand of time travel training, but it is still a long time before he feels he can trust her enough to actually tell her the reason he is going back in time. It is a really nice reason that I am not about to spoil it here.

How the movie portrays Kenneth avoids the traps because at some point I started to not really care whether the time machine worked. And I did not care because Darius starts enjoying the sincerity and enthusiasm of the strange guy in the woods to the point where she loses much of her sarcastically depressed persona and stops caring whether the time machine works too. The story becomes more about a romance then about time travel. As far as plots go, that’s ridiculously original. What’s more ridiculous is that it really works. 

Now I can probably guess what you are thinking, and that might be that what I just described is a great cliché in romantic comedies: the oft-seen and inexplicable romance between an outlandish out-of-shape comedian and a ridiculously tolerant supermodel. Believe me this is not the case. This romance is not inexplicable. This is brought out by a superior performance with some very tricky material by Aubrey Plaza. It should be mentioned that it is never suggested that her attraction to Kenneth is a normal thing. This is even highlighted in one of the best scenes where Plaza interviews for the article a sort of ex-girlfriend of Kenneth, played by Kristen Bell, (who you may fondly remember as the ex-girlfriend in “Forgetting Sarah Marshall”). She gives a totally understandable explanation of why she did not get too involved with the guy and does so without coming off as a total bitch. Instead, the attraction Darius has to Kenneth isn’t just a foretold conclusion because the screenplay necessitates that the guy has to get the girl in the end, but something that develops between two fully realized imperfect personalities that just happen to be perfect for each other. Darius has actual reasons for wanting Kenneth that make sense. It’s a pleasure to watch a comedy go through the trouble to do that every now and then.

I have yet to not be impressed by an Aubrey Plaza performance. Of course, I have only seen her in this and in her small part in “Funny People,” but I’m already at the point where I’m looking forward to seeing her in plenty of other movies. I have finally added “Parks and Recreation” to my Netflix queue.