The Hangover: Part II (2/5 Stars)

“10: The author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate; and he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones. But the reader of the “Deerslayer” tale dislikes the good people in it, is indifferent to the others, and wishes they would all get drowned together.”

- Mark Twain, Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses

Comedy happens when somebody gets exactly what they deserve. Tragedy happens when bad things befall good people. If you do not have the ability to grasp this very simple basic difference than you might just be one of the makers of “The Hangover: Part 2,” a movie that discards nearly everything that made Part I a superior comedy and leaves behind a mess of awkwardness, unpleasantness, and a story that, if it took place in the real world, would be really sad.

The original conceit of the first Hangover movie was nothing short of brilliant. Four guys go to Vegas for a bachelor party. The next morning, Alan (played by Zach Galifinakis), Stu (played by Ed Helms), and Phil (played by Bradley Cooper) wake up in a trashed hotel room with disastrous hangovers. The groom is missing and nobody can remember where they lost him. But there are several clues around: a hospital band, a receipt from an ATM, a tiger, a chicken, a baby, and a police car. The rest of the movie concerns the three trying to piece together the mystery and meeting many different comic characters along the way. “The Hangover: Part II” follows this formula but in a vastly inferior way. This time it is Stu getting married. The wedding is taking place in Thailand. A couple of nights before the wedding, the four guys plus the bride’s 16-year-old nephew, Terry, have one beer by a campfire. Stu, Alan, and Phil wake-up the next morning with disastrous hangovers in a vagrant apartment in Bangkok and Terry is missing. But instead of a multitude of clues there is but two, a monkey and a severed finger. Both are dead ends and don’t lead to anything. In fact, whenever a clue or lead is finally brought to light it is usually entirely explored in the very next scene. Thus, there is very little mystery to Part II and that is a huge problem both in terms of the movie’s pace and comedy.

One of the more brilliant things about the first movie’s structure was the way it efficiently set up subplots. A clue was shown at the beginning and this gave the movie an excuse to switch tracks from one comic situation to another via some hilarious shock moments. Some good examples are the cops busting into a room, Mike Tyson waiting for the guys in their hotel room, or an Asian gang purposefully ramming the guys’ car. These moments don't exist in Part II because nothing is ever set up. So instead of quick comical transitions we are left with the guys walking around in depressed moods to locations that seem arbitrarily chosen. This movie isn't nearly as intelligent nor as interesting to watch unfold.

But this wouldn’t be nearly as big a problem if the movie were funny. And this is where “The Hangover Part II” inexplicably fails consistently. For one thing, all the characters have turned into jerks. The most notable transformation is Alan. What was a very funny weird but well-meaning oddball in the first movie has turned into a total asshole. He is mean to his parents, his friends, and most notably to Terry, who hasn’t done anything to deserve all the insults. This isn't funny. It's awkward. Generally speaking, a movie should make the audience like the good people in the story and dislike the bad. That way the movie is enjoyable when good stuff happens to the good people and bad stuff happens to the bad. (You would think that this would go without saying). But here there is no difference between the good and bad. They are all assholes. This goes for all the side characters in the sub-plots as well. Where Part I had some variability in the types of people the guys met (like say sweetheart Mike Tyson, heart of gold hooker Heather Graham, macho cop Rob Riggle, the annoyed doctor, etc.) everyone in Part II seems to be slightly different versions of the same jerk. The tattoo guy is a jerk. The Buddhist Monks are jerks. The drug dealers are jerks. The father-in-law is a jerk. The crime boss, played by Paul Giamatti, is a huge snarling screaming jerk. Nobody seems to be having any fun. Even the flashbacks of the night before don't show anybody having fun. The one exception is Mr. Chow, played once again by Ken Jeong, and he’s dead for half the movie. The story takes place almost entirely in a dank cesspool of inner city Bangkok. Everything is the color of puke. The funniest lines are spoken by Alan and these are mostly non-sequitors. You know a comedy is in trouble when the best jokes are funny precisely because they have nothing to do with the storyline.

The director Todd Phillips has always been very skilled at casting groups of comedians with different comic styles (Road Trip, Old School, Starsky and Hutch). In the first Hangover he hit the motherlode with the oddball Galifinakis, the neurotic Helms, and the laid back Bradley Cooper. The three played off each other very well. This was especially true whenever things would get too crazy. At that point the movie could depend on Cooper to be a relaxing agent. They wake up in a trashed hotel room. “Looks like we had a bit of fun last night,” Cooper wryly remarks, hardly worried. A valet brings around a cop car instead of their Rolls Royce. Cooper volunteers to drive it, not missing a beat. In Part II, this dynamic falls apart completely and the main reason is that Cooper can’t realistically be a relaxing agent without sounding like an uncaring asshole. The situations the guys find themselves in are far too serious. Do you understand the comedic difference between getting tasered as a punishment for stealing a cop car as opposed to getting shot for no reason whatsoever? Do you understand the difference between a very bad sunburn and a permanent face tattoo? Or how about the difference between cheating on an unfaithful shrew of a girlfriend by accidentally marrying Heather Graham as opposed to cheating on your faultless fiancé via sodomy with a transvestite prostitute? If you do, then I would argue you have a much keener understanding of what is funny and what is not than the makers of this movie. There is a very telling scene in this movie as far as the audience’s laughter level in the theater with me was concerned. It dealt with Stu’s father-in-law giving a toast. It starts with a couple of insults at Stu’s expense, which the audience definitely laughed at. It goes on for several more insults, each one drawing less laughter than the one before. And then the toast just keeps on going for much longer than the movie needed to make absolutely clear that the father-in-law isn’t telling jokes at all. Instead, he is expressing outright hatred of his son-in-law and maliciously intends to humiliate him in front of his bride to be, his entire family, and all his friends. By the end of the toast, the audience had stopped laughing. It wasn’t funny. It was just really fucking mean. 

The Hangover Part II has made so much money already that I’m sure there is more than enough financial incentive to make Part III. I am of the belief that Part III could still be very funny if it stayed competently faithful to the formula of the first movie. The first step I would think is to hire back the original writers, Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, and fire the hacks they hired to write this one.

New York, I Love You (1/5 Stars) November 20, 2009

A vision of a boring New York inhabited only by artists and sex fiends. How insulting.

“New York, I Love You,” is no doubt a great idea for a movie. It originated from a French movie called “Paris, je-taime,” which obviously is French for ‘Paris, I love you.’ It was a series of short films with different writers and directors all with one thing in common: every story took place in Paris. This movie transfers that idea to New York, that most able of cities. There is perhaps nothing worse in cinema than a great idea that gets treated like shit. Shit ideas treated like shit are, no doubt, also shit but at least you don’t get that tremendous feeling of being ripped off. You knew it was shit, it was shit, you got what you should have thought you would get when you paid the ticket. What’s especially terrible about this movie is that it squanders the chance to transform the great idea into a great movie. It’s a waste, and since the title ‘New York, I Love You,” is now taken and used up and tossed aside who knows when someone else will try the idea again. 

The idea to have several short films is supposedly to promote cinematic scope within a movie. For a movie about New York this is somewhat imperative since it is so diverse, multicultural, and enormous. You would never know that by watching this movie. I don’t recall more than a couple of the short films being upbeat at all. Never has New York moved so slow in a movie. The slowest story involves a retired opera singer that checks into an abandoned motel that has a crippled Shia Lebouf as a doorman/butler/whatever. They chitchat about the room, and flowers, and what not in strained accents for about ten minutes. Then Shia inexplicably commits suicide and an old dude walks in and reveals that the entire thing was dream…or not, I couldn’t really tell what was happening. There was a lot of whispering and mumbling. Anyway this story really sucked. What’s ironic is that the late Anthony Mingella, the Oscar winner that this film was also dedicated too, wrote it. Minghella, I have looked up, is not a native New Yorker. He’s not even American. He’s a Brit. And the story he wrote has absolutely nothing to do with New York (no an aside about unseen NYC noise outside the window does not count if no scene in the story takes place outside.) It makes absolutely no sense to dedicate a movie about NYC to a person who is not a New Yorker and wrote the most anti-New York story in the movie. All I can think is that he must have supplied a huge amount of the budget (not that anything in this movie suggests any budget at all.)

There are 8 million people in New York City. The professions of these people differ to an incredible degree. Where else do you have millionaires next to beggars, stock brokers next to park rangers, fashion designers next to construction crews, etc. etc. You would never know that watching this movie. The only people in this NYC, as far as this film is concerned, are struggling artists of some kind. In every single plot save one at least one character is a writer, a painter, a dancer, a composer, a videographer, an actress or something like that. I really cannot stress this enough: struggling artists are not interesting people. There has never been a more overdone idea in the history of cinema than a story about artist’s block. A story about artist’s block inevitably develops out of the narcissism of a writer with no real ideas. They can’t think of interesting to say so they write a story about how they have nothing interesting to say (banal justification of existence included). Blah blah blah, no that’s not original. Use some elbow grease, lazy. The huge shame about these kinds of stories is that the writers couldn’t look outside their little worlds to see that there are interesting people that are outside walking the streets. These interesting people do interesting things with their lives that don’t have anything to do with the entertainment business. Give me a story about politicians, or lawyers, or doctors, or scientists. Yeah I know, a writer would probably have to do some research to make a good movie about those people because what they do is far more complex and important than entertaining. In the end it would require actual work, an idea that most struggling artists abhor. Just take a look at what’s in the MOMA. 

If the characters aren’t struggling artists then they are deviants of some kind. The first story is about a pickpocket and a professor who is cheating on his wife with a student. Another is about a guy’s (Ethan Hawke) creative attempt to seduce a woman who turns out to be a prostitute (This story is actually pretty good, doesn’t save the movie though.) Then there are about three other stories where random sex with strangers occurs. Now I know I shouldn’t knock something till I’ve tried it, but I feel there should have been at least one story that tried to be romantic. None of these relationship shorts even matched the average ‘sex and the city’ episode, which I would suggest you watch instead of this movie any day. And what was with everybody in this picture smoking. New York City is not a smoking friendly city. There are probably more laws banning it here than anywhere else. And yet in this movie it is treated as the quintessential New York way to meet people. Well, at least people you can have random sex with. Maybe my non-smoking habit is why I’ve never had that chance. 

New York City has so much great stuff in it: Parades every other week, pedestrians taking back the streets from cars, the wind tunnels in Winter, the panoramic Hudson in Spring and Summer, landmarks that sneak up on you, locations you recognize immediately from your favorite movies, a depth of history, a landscape of cityscapes shaped by great people, sports, charity organizations, international intrigue, 2am pizza, theater, culture, nightlife, business, incredible penthouses, and the most polite homeless people in the world. None of that is shown in this movie. I usually never give 1-star review to any movie I’ve seen because I save such notorious designations for movies that are more than just inferior. It is for movies that I know I could have made better myself. In this case, once I get enough money to buy a camera, microphones, and film editing equipment, I will.

The Hangover (5/5 Stars) June 18, 2009

To watch The Hangover is to witness the manifestation of a perfectly conceived comedic idea brought to full flower in a perfect comedy and also, perhaps, a couple of breakout performances that may turn some of these dudes, particularly Ed Helms and Zach Gallifinakas, into legitimate stars.
The writers of The Hangover, Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, probably uncorked a bottle of champagne and lit up a couple of cigars the moment they thought up just the concept of this movie. The must have known they had just hit the mother lode. Four buddies head to Vegas for a bachelor’s party two days before one of them gets hitched. Fast-forward to the next morning when three of them wake up in their trash-strewn suite and Doug, the one getting married, is nowhere to be found. Not one of them remembers a thing after they took Jaeger shots on the roof of the hotel the night before, although the tall handsome one (Bradley Cooper picking up a hefty load as the straight man) remarks that the place looks like they had a great time. They find clues that include a tiger in the bathroom, a baby in the closet, a hospital wristband, and an enraged Japanese gang among several other things that are too funny to give away. As Ed Helms says, “What is Going On!??!?!!” and yes that is correctly punctuated. 
The genius of this story is that it provides so much opportunity for jokes. From the beginning, the clever idea that anything can happen when one is wasted gives the writers the ability to insert crazy side characters and incredibly wacky subplots at all points of the story with very little needed context. There’s a buck-naked Japanese gang lord in the trunk of the car and he’s pissed off and wielding a crowbar. Sure I believe that, as Mike Tyson wisely intones, “People do weird shit when they’re fucked up.” On top of all this the characters themselves are well written. Phil, played by Bradley Cooper, is perhaps the leader. He rolls with the punches, doesn’t freak out too much, and keeps their course straight unless he’s personally getting them into more trouble, like say, driving on the sidewalk. Stu, played by Ed Helms, is a neurotic dentist with a girlfriend who’s a bitch (She thinks he’s in Napa, because she wouldn’t allow him to go to Vegas). He is certainly the most articulate about how horrible everything is (He is paying for everything himself). This is Ed Helms first major film role and here he is given free rein to go all out. He spends most of the movie in a state of frenzied delirium. Rounding out the trio of misfits is Alan, played by Zach Gallifinakis aka ‘Fat Jesus,’ the brother of the Doug’s fiance. He’s tagging along because he’s the type of person that “social interaction would be good for.” He doesn’t need booze to say weird shit. As far as I can tell he's some sort of Rain Man Retarded, but in a hilarious way. It’s probably helped the movie a lot that none of these guys are stars, because the level playing field between them gives each the ability to support each other’s shine through moments in the script. And there are a lot of shine through moments.
This idea is so good, the structure is so accommodating, the characters so well-developed, and the actors so perfectly cast that as soon as the story is setup in the 1st fifteen minutes before they take those jaeger shots the rest of the movie is an hour and a half of punch line followed by punch line followed by punch line followed by punch line. Every scene is funny, every joke works, not one scene falls flat. The Hangover is the best film I have seen so far this year.
Comedy isn’t easy. Making people laugh for over two hours is a hard thing to do. A good comedy is hard to come by. A great comedy (and by that I mean a movie that succeeds at making people laugh at least every thirty seconds while providing an original and meaningful storyline) is something special to behold. If Comedy got any respect this movie would be seeing nominations come awards time. I suggest one for Best Original Screenplay and perhaps another for Ed Helms for Best Supporting Actor. 
The Director Todd Phillips (Old School, Road Trip, Starsky and Hutch) isn’t the most technically proficient guy but he does have some of the best cameos. Remember that curly haired guy with the glasses who gets caught giving head in the elevator. Yeah, that’s him.