I Love You, Phillip Morris (4/5 Stars)

A beautiful lie.

Mozart’s K. 492: No.20 Duet: Sull’aria from The Marriage of Figaro holds a special place in prison movies. You may remember it from ‘The Shawshank Redemption.’ It’s the song that Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) subversively played on the prison PA system, which pissed the warden off some and landed him in solitary for a month. Red (Morgan Freeman) commented in his voiceover that he hadn’t the slightest idea what the Italian women were singing about but liked to think it was something too beautiful to express in words. It is a very beautiful song. One of the most sublime pieces of music Mozart ever composed. It also happens to be a lie. In the Opera, the two women are writing a trick letter in which one of them pretends to profess love in order to set a trap that will catch the other’s philandering husband in the act of adultery. The song is played in its entirety at the end of “I Love You, Phillip Morris,” a love story about a compulsive liar and scam artist Steven Russell (played by Jim Carrey) and the man he “falls in love with” during a stint in prison, Phillip Morris (played by Ewan McGregor). I put that in quotes because it is impossible to tell whether Steven Russell means it. He has no code, no honor, and no qualms about looking somebody straight in the eye and lying about the most ridiculous things. But he also does incredibly romantic things. Things that you would think only a person crazy in love or simply crazy would do. So I don’t know, maybe Red had the right idea when he never tried to translate the words to that Aria.

Steven Russell apparently is a real person who right now is in a Texas penitentiary serving a 144-year sentence in solitary confinement. It’s an unprecedented sentence for a nonviolent offender. How one gets such a sentence is a pretty unbelievable story. It’s best to start at the beginning. When Steven was eleven his parents revealed to him that they weren’t his parents. Steven was adopted. (It was a very weird case of adoption. Steven was a middle child. His real parents kept the first and third kid.) Right about that time, Steven also realized he was gay. But he didn’t let anyone know because he lived in Texas. He married a very Christian woman (Leslie Mann), became a police officer, and did such kinda-gay-but-not-if-your-a-Christian things as enthusiastically play the church organ at Sunday Mass. On the side he had numerous illicit and secret affairs with other “not gay” Texan men. Then one day as he was driving home a truck blindsided him, totaling his car and nearly killing him. As the paramedics carted him away, he loudly vowed that he was going to live life the way he wanted from now on. “I’m going to be a faggot!” he declared, “I’m going to really fag it up!” At the hospital he promptly tells his stunned wife that he’s gay and divorces her.

That’s when the stealing starts. Steven Russell moves to Florida in order to realize his dream of being the most stereotypical gay man ever. Flashy cars, clothes, boyfriends. He does it all. Money is no object and none of it is his. He’s stealing from his company, purposely slipping-and-falling in grocery stores, taking nose dives down escalators and suing businesses for his pain and suffering. He gets caught and is arrested. His wife shows up and asks his current boyfriend, “The gay thing and stealing, are they connected?” She is rightly treated to a disdainful response, but I will surmise that they are, at least in the sense that being forced to lie your entire life about something so essential to your identity could probably aid your ability to lie in general or simply be enough to convince a person that God, Family, and Country are bullshit and life should be lived accordingly. Throw in an uncanny ability to survive fatal car wrecks and several suicide attempts, and you can see start to see how a person as brash and reckless as Steven Russell might be possible.

There are some roles that only Jim Carrey can play and this is one of them. Jim Carrey isn’t how you say, a “natural” performer. He’s very much an Act. So is Steven Russell. The nerve of the guy is incredible. He escapes from prison not once but several times. A couple times the first thing he does outside is to buy a suit, go right back to the prison, and impersonate the lawyer of Phillip Morris in an attempt to bust him out of jail as well. (It works at least once.) Other things he does: Lie his way into being hired as the CFO of a corporation and stealing millions, Practicing law without a license, selling bad tomatoes, insurance fraud, credit card fraud, fake tans etc. etc. etc. He also keeps getting caught. Over and over again. At some point the ordinary person would get a hint and cut their losses. But Steven Russell isn’t normal. His Plan B when lying doesn’t work is to commit suicide. He does that several times. Waking up in a hospital not dead becomes a running joke in the movie. This really happened.

And then there’s the love story, which the movie treats as real and sincere, as it might have been although there really is no way to tell. Russell falls in love at first sight when he sees Morris in the prison library. Soon he is sneaking letters and chocolates to Morris (who is diabetic but its the thought that counts) via the prison smuggling system and finally he cons his way into actually getting transferred into Phillip’s cell. There’s a screecher down the hall who likes to yell all night long. Steven pays to have him beat up. Phillip remarks that it is “the most romantic thing anyone has ever done for me.” Happy Days ensue inside and then outside the prison where Russell's subsequent cons are largely perpetrated for the "purpose" of providing Phillip with an extravagant lifestyle. Phillip is largely ignorant of where the money is coming from because Russell lies to him about that too. Most of the humor in the story is situational. The Writer-Directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa are the same writing team behind the BillyBob Thornton movie “Bad Santa” (and, inexplicably, the kid’s movie, “Cats & Dogs.”) Taboo subjects and people behaving badly are not avoided but mined for laughs and cringes. For example it is clearly explained to a new prisoner that to get anything in prison you have to pay for it or you can suck a dick. Nobody in this movie treats this conversation as anything but normal. There is also a scene of loud gay sex, just in case you were wondering. 

If none of the above bothers you, this movie could be quite enjoyable. The story is pretty amazing just in itself. The best parts are the various ways Russell manages to escape from prison. I won’t give away exactly how he does this suffice to say that it takes quite a lot of balls and just as much brilliance. There is a main drawback to this movie though and that is Russell himself. You can’t take the love story seriously because the guy is so unreal. Plenty of the scenes feel strangely empty when it is clear the makers want all those gushy romantic feelings to take over. Or maybe that’s just me being a heterosexual.

Funny People (3/5 Stars) August 26, 2009

Death by Penis Jokes! 


The third movie from Writer/Director/Producer Judd Apatow is “Funny People,” starring Adam Sandler as a rich and famous comedian who has just received news from his doctor that he has a terminal illness, a newly thinned Seth Rogen as an up and coming stand up comic that Sandler hires as his assistant, and Leslie Mann as Sandler’s “one who got away.” Rounding out a strong supporting cast are Jonah Hill and Jason Schwartzman as Rogen’s fellow standup comic roommates, Eric Bana as the Mann’s Aussie husband, and Aubrey Plaza as Rogen’s love interest. There are also an impressive number of cameos by other comics playing themselves like Andy Dick, Paul Reiser, Norm MacDonald, Dave Attell, and Sarah Silverman. Inexplicably Marshall Mathers (Eminem) also shows in one scene where he impressively rants about the annoyances that come with being a celebrity and tells an eavesdropping Ray Romano to go “Go F*** Himself.” As in ‘Knocked Up,’ Apatow’s own daughters play the children. Both of them do a good job of acting like they are Leslie Mann’s (who is Apatow’s wife) actual children. 

The title notwithstanding, this movie is not a comedy. It is a drama that happens to be about comedians. Since comedians have a tendency to draw on their lives’ tragedies to produce humor, this movie has many jokes in it. But the jokes in this movie don’t work like the jokes in a regular comedy. In a regular comedy the jokes would work for the purpose of making the tragedy somehow okay by various techniques. Perhaps the best example of a joke making DEATH okay is King Arthur’s fight with the Black Knight in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” A more modern example is South Park’s Kenny being murdered in almost every single episode for several seasons. These jokes take the big topic of DEATH and belittle it by absurdly suggesting that a) it doesn’t hurt (Tis’ but a flesh wound!) and b) it isn’t necessarily terminal (OMG they killed Kenny…Again!). In this movie, jokes are made about death, but they aren’t successful in belittling it. The story wants us to take George Simmons (Sandler) terminal illness seriously. There is one scene where this is especially telling. Ira Wright (Rogen) has brought upon himself to make George an itunes list of reflective songs to help him cope with the illness. Simmons asks to hear some of them and jokes about how hokey and phony the first two are. Then Rogen puts one on that is undeniably moving. George finds his mind blanking on jokes, is reminded of why Ira made the list, and angrily berates him as he storms out of the room. Let the record show that Adam Sandler can be a nuanced actor when he feels like it.

I would compare the experience of watching this movie to the experience of watching Scorsese’s “Casino.” Let me explain myself. I could tell the movie had top-notch directing, editing, casting, acting, and writing. The creators knew the material inside and out. The stand up routines that were meant to be funny were actually funny. The pathos made sense. Technically speaking, everything seemed to be fine about this movie. The problem is that “Funny People” is an especially long movie about essentially miserable characters. George Simmons is an isolated and alienated comedian who lives alone in a huge house that seems to be useful only for attracting groupies for one night stands. He has to pay Ira to be his assistant and confidante. He constantly berates him about his last name and private parts. For the whole movie it seems that George is not learning any lessons from his illness. His first act after learning he is may be well is to get back the woman that ‘got away’ i.e. he cheated on her and she left. He does this by attempting to breakup a troubled marriage. That guy can be quite a vicious clown. It simply isn’t easy to feel sorry for a rich and famous dude who lives in a mansion and treats other people like shit. 

Seth Rogen also plays against his usual “Seth Rogen” oafish confident type. Having lost a lot of weight, his character Ira Wright seems a whole ten years younger than his usual fat self. He plays the guy young, starstruck, and way over his head. If there is an arc to this movie than it is in this character because he seems to be the only person who changes any. He goes from idolizing George Simmons, to doubting him, to finally willing to throw away any perks he could have gotten career wise just to tell the guy off. It is probably a shame that the movie focused on George Simmons so much because the heart of this story is in the coming-of-age tale of Ira Wright. Seth Rogen may have struggled at the box office this year, but in consecutive movies he has acted against type in two very different roles and has performed admirably in both of them. (the other being ‘Observe and Report’)

Also worth a special mention is Aubrey Plaza who has very little screen time as a struggling fellow standup comic but gives the most memorable performance in the movie. She is introduced cynically enough. The Jason Schwartzman character, a successful comic with his own TV show, brings her home and gives Ira ten days to ask her out or he will sleep with her. Three weeks later, after Ira has only gotten a tentative date set up with her to see a Wilco concert, Schwartzman sleeps with her. Ira doesn’t get mad at Schwartzman (because hey, he said he would give him ten days and ended up giving him twenty one.). He instead gets mad at Aubrey. Here is where the movie makes an interesting choice. Instead of simply using the scene to allow the audience to get vicarious revenge on groupies who sleep too willingly with stars, the movie gives the woman an impressive and ultimately sad retort, and Aubrey knocks the scene out of the park. What we come to understand is that two fundamentally good people who may have had a chance of being together, but feel that they have to compromise themselves because they are bottom feeders in a business that seems to arbitrarily pull some people up and keep others down. It is such a sad scene. Aubrey’s performance is, in my opinion, good enough for a Supporting Actress Nomination. Sometimes one scene is enough. 

Knocked Up 06/10/07

I like to think that I can tolerate obscenity in a movie to a certain degree, be it language or sex or violence, what have you. If it helps or if it doesn't neccessarily hurt the movie. Let's say I'm Joe Pesci and I'm a gangster in Goodfellas. Since I'm supposed to be more real than likable, I'm allowed to curse all I want. It fits. When I'm Seth Rogan or any of the other charachters in the movie "Knocked Up" and I'm supposed to be in a romantic comedy where one would perhaps want the guy and girl to stay together, it hurts the movie somewhat. I honestly didn't want the career woman to marry the slacker. She's out of his league and they fight all the time. Not that a couple can't fight in a movie. It's just to use that amount of angry f-bombs, makes me feel for the characthers less. I mean how am I supposed to sympathize with the wife when she's cursing out a bouncer at a club for no apparent reason. What an asshole. I don't care if she's got problems.

There's a dual nature in director Judd Apatow's films, in that he employs the vulgar language and situations and still makes a somewhat heartfelt, emotionally correct movie. This worked exceptionally in the 40-Year Old Virgin and that was a fantastic film. It only barely works in this one, and by that I mean the overall humor and the specific performance of Paul Rudd (becoming a favorite of mine) outweigh by just a little bit the collossal obscenity and bad taste. What's the main difference: Well in the 40-Year Old Virgin we had Steve Carell as the main character. He, despite being a virgin, was a nice, clean, and decent man. He rarely sweared and when he did, it seemed like he regretted it. There was a lot of vulgar jokes but at the center we had a nice guy to sympathize with. We wanted him to get the girl. In this movie we have Seth Rogan, a vulgar man-child with no job, and few prospects. We don't want him to get the girl, in fact we feel sorry for the girl for mainly the entire film. She's stuck with this loser's child. It's hard to sympathize with the guy and when the vulgarness rears it's ugly head we have nowhere to retreat except to the semi-vulgar presence of Paul Rudd, who I feel, should definitely be the main character in Judd Apatow's next movie.

The 40 Year Old Virgin 09/21/05

Quite the movie. As a comedy it's funny. As a romance it's satisfying. My only regret is that since it had built up so much, it didn't seem to need that extra gratuitous slapstick and melodrama in the end. ( i.e. Bicycle accident) Not that that really bothered me. I just thought it wasn't needed. Cahoots to the Carell for making a sex-comedy with heart. This type of film doesn't come along that often. Quite a fresh tomato.