Flight Risk (3/5 Stars)

The appearance of “Flight Risk” in movie cinemas would be a non-story if not for the unexpected pedigree behind the picture. The movie is a small-scale bottle episode that takes place entirely within a 90 minute plane flight from an unnamed non-descript town in Alaska to Anchorage, Alaska. The movie is so small the characters do not have last names. It appears to be the first produced screenplay by screenwriter Jared Rosenberg.

The conceit can be summed up in a few sentences. Winston, played by Topher Grace, plays a fugitive accountant for a mobster. He gets picked up by federal law enforcement, played by Michelle Dockery, and immediately surrenders and pleads for a deal. He appears to be much more afraid of his mobster boss then the feds. In order to get Winston to New York to testify in trial a trial that is happening right now (for the purposes of expediency, it is helpfully mentioned that the judge is a hard-ass and won’t agree to an adjournment) the feds charter a small plane to take Winston to Anchorage and then onto to Seattle and then New York. This plane is piloted by Daryl, played by Mark Wahlberg, who is not who he says he is. Spoiler alert, he works for the mobster, and the totality of the movie is contained in his efforts to kill everybody on board either slowly or immediately depending on his present circumstances. I really can’t say more without going into spoiler territory.

What is interesting about this movie is that it has a legitimate movie star, Mark Wahlberg, that seems out-of-place in such a small-scale project. Case in point, Mark plays a supporting character and yet he is the only person on movie poster. Mark's presence is likely explained by its director, one Mel Gibson. This is the first movie Mel Gibson has directed since 2016’s Hacksaw Ridge (a movie I did not get to review because it was unheralded on release, but one I ultimately considered the best of the year), and second movie since 2006’s Apocalypto (one of the more unique movies ever made). Mel Gibson would have directed plenty more movies since 2006 had he not gone off the deep end and said some very awful things. (I am generally forgiving about what people say and in particular what people say in private. For instance my bar is low enough to give Jon Gruden a total pass. Having said that, Mel Gibson said some crazy shit and as far as these things go, his cancellation is one of the more reasonable ones out there). Which is a shame because whenever he does put something out there, regardless of whether it is enjoyable or not, it is usually well made and distinctly original. If Hollywood truly cared about diversity (and you know I don’t), what it should do is employ more people like Mel Gibson because he actually has a different point of view from most of the movie industry. He has a different point of view from most people in general. I see online that he is making a sequel to Passion of the Christ, entitled The Resurrection of the Christ. It is about time, if only because of the tremendous commercial opportunity that it is likely to represent. It is easy to make a lot of money when you are the only person catering to a very deprived audience (see James Cameron’s Titanic and blockbuster movies made for women as of 1997).

“Flight Risk” feels like a director getting taking a practice run on a smaller project just to remind himself how it works. It is competent. The actors do their jobs with respectability. The screenplay is a little too on the nose with Topher Grace’s sarcasm and Mark Wahlberg’s creepy threats, but really, if you have confined yourself to the cockpit of a small plane for 90 minutes, this is basically as good of a movie as you are going to get. It has a brisk running time, enough action, and some of the jokes land. Michelle Dockery is likable. It came out in January. What are you going to do? Hey, at least it gave me an excuse to write about Mel Gibson as a director. I’ve been doing this blog for twenty years and I haven’t had that opportunity.

Pain and Gain (4/5 Stars)

You may think you have seen this movie from director Michael Bay before. You may have taken a look at the trailer, noticed the macho men, the strippers, and the conspicuous consumption of fast cars, big houses, flashy clothes. You’ve seen it before glorified and sensationalized in other Bay movies like the “Bad Boys” franchise, “Armageddon,” and the “Transformers” franchise. And yes “Pain and Gain” has all of that but there is a fundamental difference here. “Pain and Gain” does not glorify any of that. Instead it has contempt for the arrogance, greed, and stupidity that all of the above. It’s like Michael Bay grew a conscience about the types of movies he was making or something. There is morality in this picture. This movie, like his previous, is still heavily tasteless of course. It contains gratuitous violence, heavy substance abuse, and a cast largely made up of beefcakes and supermodels, sure, but it is not an amoral movie. The message is clear: The characters being portrayed here are, to borrow a direct quote from the movie, really “fucking dumb,” and the movie quite successfully makes much humor out of their stupidity. That is of course before they get so stupid that people start dying. Then the laughs kind of peter out and one watches the movie in what must be described as a state of awe.

This is a true story. The screenplay was based off of a series of Pete Collins’s news articles in the Miami New Times. Now what does that matter? For anyone who has seen Michael Bay’s “Pearl Harbor” we all know he would gladly and immediately sacrifice the truth if it means he could use more explosions.

(One of my favorite movie critic anecdotes belongs to a man who took it upon himself to listen and rank every single audio commentary in the Criterion Collection. Apparently the best one ever consists of the science advisors from the inexplicable inclusion of Michael Bay’s “Armageddon” sharing anecdotes about how they kept on telling Michael Bay that none of what was on the screen was good science or remotely possible and Michael Bay ignoring their advice in favor of more explosions.)

And it is true that Michael Bay still does not care about the truth. I had the pleasure of looking up the news articles and finding out that about half of what is on screen never happened. But here is the best part: The story is so wacky and bizarre that I bet you would not be able to tell just by watching the movie which parts were made up. You may as well flip a coin for true or false on every unbelievable thing you see. That is after all the reason the real police (as they do in the movie) did not believe the story and refused to investigate even in the face of an incredible amount of evidence left over by really dumb criminals. Imagine my shock when I learned that Michael Bay did not add any explosions. That one explosion happened. It did.

Mark Wahlberg stars as Daniel Lugo, the manager of Sun Gym. He is the type of guy who believes big muscles and the right attitude as opposed to say an education or honest work is the key to success in America. He attends get-rich-quick seminars from a Tony Robbins-like personality named Johnny Wu, played by Ken Jeong. Johnny believes in the American Dream and it isn’t the old 1950s consumerist fantasy of a house in the suburbs with a white picket fence, two cadillacs, a wife, and a couple kids. His American Dream is a mansion bigger than your neighbors, a flashy speedboat in addition to a flashy car, and the ability to pick up the most expensive golddiggers at the most expensive strip club. “I had a wife and kids,” says Johnny, “then I stopped being a loser. Now I have seven honies to pick from.” And Johnny points to seven supermodels in the front row. Daniel Lugo nods his head and thinks, “Man, this guy totally gets me.” To my great delight he also references the Al Pacino character in 1983’s Scarface as one of his role models. Like I’ve said before, no other statement in a movie or in real life will so easily certify a person as a Grade-A moron. What is Johnny Woo’s golden advice: “Do be a doer. Don’t be a don’ter.” This mantra will be repeated throughout the movie to justify kidnapping a millionaire, torturing him in a warehouse for several weeks, forcing him to sign over all his assets, and then attempting to murder him. And then doing it again to an unluckier soul once the original money is all gone.

Nobody has played dim more successfully in more good movies than Mark Wahlberg has (Boogie Nights, The Other Guys, Ted) and I’m trying to phrase that in a way that sounds like a compliment to his acting ability. After all playing stupid convincingly requires the intelligence to know why what you are doing is stupid and the humility required with the knowledge you are doing is something stupid. Tack on that the many scenes where Wahlberg is either shirtless or in a kiss the cook apron and I think you can say this is a pretty brave performance. The role of Daniel Lugo could have very easily taken a dark turn and in doing so sacrificed much of the humor in this picture. For instance at one point Daniel Lugo decides it is a good idea to take back a malfunctioning chainsaw to Home Depot for a refund. The chainsaw is malfunctioning because human hair has gotten stuck in the chain. Only halfway through the conversation with the return desk cashier does Lugo realize it might not have been a good idea to return a chainsaw with human hair and blood on it. The scene is macabre but Wahlberg’s performance never allows Lugo to be a more frightening presence than he is a laughable one.

Of course stealing scenes left and right is Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in what is perhaps the first and only decent role he has landed in his entire movie career. He plays the third and most innocent wheel of the Sun Gym Gang: a body builder of enormous size and recently sober and born again Christian. He is roped into helping Lugo and his partner Adrian Doorbal (Anthony Mackie) because he really needs the money and is dumb enough to believe Lugo when he promises there will no be violence in the operation. The man is a huge contradiction but then again so is Dwayne Johnson, which is at least my theory as to why he has never had a good movie role before. The man is incredibly hard to write for. Because he is such a huge guy, you would think that he would be perfect for action blockbusters. The problem is that he does not have a tough looking face. In fact, it can be described as angelic, which would explain why he has done a lot of children’s movies. So the perfect role for this guy would seem to be a really shy body-builder. And guess what? Pain and Gain is one of those rare movies that contain such a non-cliché character. Dwayne Johnson plays his character with as much humility as Mark Wahlberg. In fact, I would say the action sequences are better characterized as physical comedy routines, especially when Johnson tries to rob an armored car and the bank bag explodes green slime in his face in the midst of a crowded beauty salon. That was funny.

This is Michael Bay’s best movie. It is not totally without flaw however. You may at several points think to yourself, say isn’t this movie running a bit long. Such is always the problem with Michael Bay. He generally does not understand that simply because he can do something with a camera, that it does not mean he should. Each shot taken as itself looks good but there are too many superfluous scenes that taken in whole extend the movie at least a half hour past where it should end. I am still of the belief that one of the best things Michael Bay has done was achieved when he still made commercials. He is after the creator of the first “Got Milk” commercial; a true achievement in how much information can be conveyed in a one-minute time frame. The important thing about this movie though is that Michael Bay limited himself to 25 million dollars and almost no special effects. As such, the movie is far more interesting to watch than the epics of catastrophic proportions known as all his other movies. I swear the more limitations put on the man, the better his movies will be. When he gets several hundred million to make his movie and creative control as well they turn into three hour long gargantuan messes. Pain and Gain succeeds where his other movies fail more because of what he is not doing (focusing on robots and special effects) than what he is doing (characters and story). I hope he makes more small movies in the future.

It is at a time like this when the death of Roger Ebert comes into full focus. Ebert never wrote better reviews than when they were aimed at a Michael Bay feature. I would have loved to read his review of this movie. Perhaps we can imagine his surprise when he found out he did not completely hate it. 

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 Fighter (4/5 Stars)

About Mickey who can't get a word in.

Director David O. Russell’s new boxing drama is about the real life Mickey Ward’s fall and comeback to the World Welterweight Championship. But to say it is about Mickey, played by Mark Wahlberg, is to assume something else. It is also about his family: his brother Dickie, his mother and his five sisters. Mickey may as well be synonymous with them as he can hardly ever get a word in whenever they are around. Mickey may be in the ring but he isn’t in charge. Several times he even says, “Dickie taught me everything I know,’ or “I won that fight because Dickie told me what to do.” The problem is that his family is telling him the wrong things to do, like say fight a guy twenty pounds heavier than he is with absolutely no preparation. And then there’s the fact that Dickie is a crackhead and that his sisters really don’t do anything but sit around the house, smoke cigarettes, and agree with their mother no matter how obviously wrong she is. Mickey’s future success depends on ditching his blood and finding other smarter people to tell him what to do. Is this movie anti-family or just the least pro-family movie you’ve seen in a long while? There’s a good topic for discussion after the film. A Gold Star to anyone who has balls enough to take their family to see this one.

The most impressive thing about this movie is that it is full of great performances. Leading the pack is Christian Bale as Dickie Ward, the motor-mouthed, crack-addicted, sparring partner and older brother of Mickey. The effect is almost immediate. The first frame shows Christian sitting on the couch talking very fast and his eyes nearly bugging out of his emaciated frame. I couldn’t believe it. Christian did it again. He completely transformed his body to play a role. For those who unaware, Christian has been putting on and taking off weight for the last ten years as if his body was made of Play-Doh. Take a look at his perfect body in “American Psycho,” which turned into thinnest man outside of a concentration camp in “The Machinist” which turned into the muscled action star in “Batman Begins” which turned into the starving prisoner of war in “Rescue Dawn” which once again turned into an action star in “The Dark Knight,” and is now the skinny shriveled figure of a crack addict in “The Fighter.” To think all he could have been looking like Patrick Bateman (“You can always be thinner, look better.”) all this time. The man has no ego at all. He is pure dedication and self-discipline. His poster and movies should be passed out as inspirational devices in all WeightWatchers. As far as his performance goes in this movie, it is perfect. Dickie looks and talks like he’s on crack and all his self-aggrandized tales of the past and deluded plans for the future pretty much steals every scene. He is being followed by a documentary crew, which he thinks is making a movie about his comeback. In reality they are documenting the perils of crack addiction. Dickie doesn’t get that until about halfway through watching the HBO special. In many ways, Christian is playing against type in this movie. He usually has the role of the boring straight character that holds together a movie like say Batman as opposed to the Joker, or the non-showy magician in “The Prestige,” or Patrick Bateman who isn’t even there. Here he proves that he can play the wild part and yet in perfect Bale style he still does a great job of helping everyone else give great performances as well.

Playing against Dickie for control over Mickey is the new girlfriend, played by Amy Adams, who is also playing against type in one of her best performances. You may remember her as the naive nurse in “Catch Me if You Can,” or the Disney Princess in “Enchanted,” or the timid nun in “Doubt.” Here, she is a hard and fierce barmaid who can hold her own against a very large and loud family. There is an unbelievable scene where the mom, played by Melissa Leo (who I didn’t even recognize until I saw the credits), and the five sisters pack into a four-door sedan and take a trip across town to confront Adams. Then they all yell at each other on the porch while poor Mickey stands around looking like he might have something to say if he could possibly get a word in.  

Every now and then you watch a movie with what is called, “Culture Shock.” This is when you are presented with something that seems real but is so foreign and weird you can hardly believe that real people would be doing it. That happened several times while I watched this movie, but one scene really stood out. One of the main problems with the girlfriend as far as the family is concerned is that she went to college. Now the girlfriend actually never finished college, but to the family that is still enough to condemn her into a snobbish elite that shouldn’t be taken seriously. Specifically they call her an “MTV skank.” Like I said, that sort of thing for me goes beyond merely insulting or absurd and into something like disbelief or confusion. It’s just so out there I don’t know what to think. I actually hesitated writing this review because so much of the movie took place in an alternate universe where people are like that. But hey, that is what watching movies is all about. Perhaps now if I were to be called something worse than an “MTV skank,” for actually finishing college, I wouldn’t be caught completely speechless. Maybe.

The movie takes place in the 1990s. Biopics are becoming pretty recent for someone my age. We also seem to be getting into the era where a movie in a theater is not the first, but the second or third time a story is told. In this movie Director Russell does a very good job of dodging all the other camera crews in the story, first the HBO documentary and then the highly televised boxing matches. The world is becoming such a documented place that we are now watching cameras watching cameras. Who knows where the road goes?

p.s. Now that I think about it, here is the retort. I’ll quote Jack Nicholson in “The Departed” after Leonardo Dicaprio has just finished saying that school is done, out. His exact words: “Maybe someday you’ll grow the fuck up.”

The Other Guys (4/5 Stars) August 12, 2010

The most recent collaboration between comedian Will Ferrell and writer/director Adam McKay (Talladega Nights, Anchorman, and Step Brothers) is a stereotypical action adventure movie about an odd couple of N.Y.P.D cops. One is a take charge tough guy played by Mark Wahlberg, and the other is a nerdy desk mammal played by Will Ferrell. They are known as the Other Guys as opposed to The Popular Guys who are played by Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. Those Guys specialize in the types of car chases and action packed machismo you see in run of the mill superhero/cops movies. Wahlberg, relegated to being Ferrell’s partner because he accidentally shot Derek Jeter, bemoans his sorry existence and takes it out on his partner. He calls Ferrell a “fake cop,” kidnaps him at gunpoint, hijacks his Prius and they both head out into the world to fight crime like The Popular Guys. Can Will Ferrell man-up and stop being such a pussy? Watch and find out!

The most recent collaboration between comedian Will Ferrell and writer/director Adam McKay is a sly social commentary that isn’t as much a parody of regular cop movies as it is a veiled insult to the entire demographic the earlier paragraph (and this movie’s marketing campaign) would appeal to. Out on the beat fighting petty crime, Ferrel and Wahlberg stumble assbackward into something much bigger. The only problem is that they have no idea what it is. It involves a sleazy Wall Street type played by Steve Coogan (Hamlet 2) and a huge investment bank named Llendl Corporation. Llendl’s company motto is “Were into Everything.” Wahlberg persistently assumes that drugs are involved. But as the movie points out, he only does this because he’s an idiot. It is the Will Ferrell character that figures out that they are witnessing a $32 billion dollar theft from unwitting investors in order to make solvent the huge investment bank. (In contrast, that high speed chase involving the Popular Guys at the beginning of the movie achieved nothing but the arrest of a couple of Jamaican’s selling marijuana). The Will Ferrell character is routinely bullied by the other cops (Rob Riggle amongst them) and called a pussy, a queer, a bitch, and several other epithets. His Prius, which gets great mileage, is also routinely derided for its unmanliness. This is all done in Ferrell/McKay style. So the insults are clever and we are invited to laugh at Ferrell. But then the movie’s plot does something quite extraordinary. It gives Ferrell’s character a smoking hot wife played by Eva Mendes and has him almost single-handedly solve an enormous crime that has as much complexity as the scheme in “Chinatown.” So was it wrong to laugh at Ferrell? Am I the idiot for having done so? 

The most recent collaboration between comedian Will Ferrell and writer/director Adam McKay is an absurdist comedy where realism is abandoned at every whim in order to get laughs. This is most evident in the presence of several ridiculous characters. One is a mild-mannered police chief played by Michael Keaton who moonlights at Bed, Bath, and Beyond and inexplicably quotes song lyrics from TLC. Another is Dirty Mike and the boys, a gang of homeless men that like stealing Priuses and having orgies in the back of them (“Soup Kitchens” I believe they’re called). There are also a host of very funny comic situations like a whisper fight at a funeral, Ferrell’s back-story as an accidental pimp, and the deaths of the Popular Guys via mind-blowing stupidity. Finally there is plenty of funny dialogue, the best of which is an argument about whether a lion or a tuna would win in a fight. The big question though is whether you can still take a movie seriously once the writer/director casts himself as Dirty Mike. Does Adam McKay want us to think? Or is this all for shits and giggles?

Perhaps this movie’s biggest fault is that it is intent on being all three movies. This makes the movie feel like it is constantly interrupting itself. Near the end when one of the movies becomes a little more interesting than the others (for me it was the social commentary) it seemed like a distraction when it changed course again. The parts of this movie are all very good, but there are too many parts and makes the movie seem overlong at points. This is a small complaint though. I would rather a movie gave me too much than too little and there is quite a lot here. 

Given the movies that Will Ferrell and Adam McKay have collaborated on, one might get the impression that they specialize in portraying arrogant alpha males behaving badly, but that would be an oversimplification. Alpha People are entitled to be arrogant to a certain degree if they actually know what they’re doing and are better at it than most people. What Ferrell and McKay are particularly good at conveying is Overconfidence. They know inside and out the type of guy who acts like he’s Alpha without actually being better. This type of guy is oftentimes confused with the Alpha Male because, at first impression, they both display a stunning amount of confidence. But there is usually a way you can tell them apart. In my opinion the main giveaway is if the guy equates his ignorance and stupidity with being manly. For example, it is common overconfident man-knowledge that the manliest beer in the bar is always the worst tasting god-awful swill you can find. Now if you knew anything about beer you might confidently point to a better brand. But it certainly takes more confidence to adamantly proclaim that the worst is the best. You may even go so far as to say that anyone who likes his alcohol to taste good is a pussy or fag. By the way, just the act of calling a guy a pussy is also very bold. Pussy, as we all know signifies feminine traits. So to call a guy a pussy in a derogatory sense is like insulting every woman in the room. If the main goal of your night out drinking is to get laid it should follow that you wouldn’t go out of your way to insult women. BUT, wouldn’t it also signify the enormity of your self-confidence to do exactly that and then be as forward as possible. I mean only someone who is truly better than other people, an Alpha Male, could get away with that sort of thing. So the logic goes around like this: You aren’t better than anybody. But to give the impression that you are better, you do something incredibly stupid because only a truly better person could afford to get away with it. And people do fall for it. Take for example, the death of the two Popular Guys. If they had actually survived their idiocy (which action movie stars do all the time), would you think they were stupid or badass? Why are some women attracted to bad boys? I mean that’s just retarded.

This line of logic leads to the sort of hilarious idiocy that is on full display in Ferrell/McKay comedies and especially in “The Other Guys.” The NYPD is full of officers that take macho pride in cracking down on petty crime while their very livelihoods are being put into risk through complicated financial schemes they find to boring and faggy to understand. A $32 billion theft is huge, but nobody besides the Will Ferrell character cares about the case. The Other Guys are ordered to turn over all the evidence to SEC, only to find out that the SEC agent is also the lawyer of the Wall Street scumbag he is supposed to be investigating. I assume that the makers of this movie we’re angered by the Wall Street fiasco of the past years. They wanted to make a movie about it but, at the same time, wanted to stay true to their chops of action/comedy. So in effect, what we have here is a subterfuge movie like Blood Diamond or Quantum of Solace. The audience walking into the theater has been promised silly action and comedy. The movie delivers on this promise but has an ulterior purpose. In this case: veiled ridicule for society’s idealization of ignorance. Of course the funny thing about making fun of overconfident people is that they won’t ever admit they’ve been insulted. They take the insult and brag about it. You can trick them, insult them, and laugh at them all you want but you will never win the argument. Take that Wall Street. 

Oh and by the way, Ferrell and McKay are huge pussies by having the safe, competent accountant married to an incredibly hot doctor. I mean she actually likes him and there is even a comic riff about them having great sex which apparently they enjoy equally. What fags.

Date Night (2/5 Stars) April 12, 2010

Somebody forgot to include jokes in their screenplay.

Money can buy you a lot of things that can make a movie better. Shelling out the top dollars will get you A-List comedians like Steve Carell and Tina Fey. It can allow you to cast great character actors like Mark Wahlberg, Ray Liotta, James Franco, and Mila Kunis in bit parts. It can allow you to shoot highly technical action sequences in primo New York spots like Times Square, Central Park, and FDR drive among others. It can get you fancy cars, gorgeous sets, and a stylized marketing campaign. It can get you perhaps anything you want in a comedy except the main ingredient: Jokes. You can’t buy laughs. This is because jokes have a very short shelf life. They can’t be told more than a couple of times before they lose all of their power. They have to be grown and cultivated. Some writer somewhere has to sit in a room, employ a little creativity and come up with something. This movie forgot that part of the process. It seems like it was built along a one-sentence pitch like, “Hey let’s put Steve Carell and Tina Fey in a movie together. Wouldn’t that be great.” Everyone agreed to make the movie way before the script was assigned to some schlub named Josh Klausner to crank it out over the weekend. It didn't need to be funny because the marketing campaign could capitalize on the actor's reputations for at least the first weekend gross. They aren't going to get me next time. Klausner’s next movie as a writer will be “Shrek Forever After.” I will remember not to see that one. 

This movie employs a variation of what Roger Ebert lovingly calls an “Idiot Plot.” An “Idiot Plot” refers to the series of stupid misunderstandings that a couple in a romantic comedy will go through before they realize they love each other in the last scene of the movie. The idea is that if they just took a moment to sit down and talk about it then everything would be sorted out and fine. They don’t do this because then the movie would be five minutes, not a long drawn-out hour and a half. The Idiocy in this Plot has mostly to do with the actions of some very stupid and incompetent hit men and the retarded police who can’t seem to connect some fairly obvious dots. Carell and Fey play boring married couple (The Fosters) that gets in a case of mistaken identity after stealing a dinner reservation. The hit men take them into an alley, pull out guns, and ask them to provide an incriminating flash drive. To avoid getting shot, the old married couple tell the hit men that they hid the flash drive in a floorboard in the Boathouse in Central Park. (Does that sound like a believable story to you? I personally thought it was retarded.) As the hit men stare at the wooden floorboards in the Boathouse Carell sneaks up behind them and hits both of them with an oar. They are incapacitated for about 30 whole seconds as the old married couple makes their escape across the Pond in a boat that can’t go more than a couple mph. The hit men stumble out of the Boathouse and unload about five or six rounds of ammo at the row boat no more than 20 feet away. Not a single one gets anywhere close. The Fosters go to the police. A simple explanation is all that is required. But no, the Fosters spy the same hit men in the station as cops. So the Fosters don’t tell the officer that is questioning them anything. They high tail it out of there because they think the entire police station has been compromised. (It hasn’t). This is completely ludicrous but is completely necessary to the story. After all, if they did the logical thing the movie would be over in a couple of minutes. 

Don’t get me wrong; I don’t usually require realism in comedies. (I just gave a good review to Hot Tub Time Machine.) What I do require though, is that a comedy be funny. If it isn’t funny, then it might as well be taken seriously. And if I’m taking something seriously, the unreality of the plot better not insult my intelligence. (If it’s funny it can do anything it wants.) But Date Night isn’t funny. I didn’t laugh more than three or four times the entire movie. It’s quite remarkable actually. Everything that ‘Hot Tub Time Machine’ the B-movie with the second rate cast did right, ‘Date Night’ the slick A-List movie gets completely wrong. For example, both movies employ a throw-up joke. If you want to know how to do that right, watch the former. “Date Night” does it all wrong. First of all it gives us plenty of warning. (Carell going “oh I’m going to throw up!) Then the actual throwing up takes far too long. (Carell does it once, then has to do it several more times). It wasn’t funny the first time because it breaks the 1st Rule of Shock Humor: The joke NEEDS to be UNEXPECTED. Otherwise there’s no shock. It’s just yucky. For the same reason it wasn’t funny the second or third time either. The whole thing lasts about thirty seconds, about 29 more than the audience needs to get the joke. This is not how you tell a throw-up joke. These people don’t know what they’re doing. 

This pattern screws up the majority of the jokes in this movie. They will be fairly obvious in the first place and then that joke will be endlessly repeated as if the movie expects a punch line to get funnier upon each telling. There’s this bit where various side characters react with disgust at the Foster’s stealing of the reservation as if it is a huge social faux pa. After the second time, I could basically lip-sync what the next person would say the third, fourth, and fifth time. The movie is just one vacant scene followed by another. It’s a good thing Mark Wahlberg is shirtless during his entire performance because nobody in those scenes can tell a joke about anything else. If he put on a shirt, they would have nothing to say. 

I will say one more thing. Action sequences can be funny if done right. Here they aren’t but yes theoretically it is possible. Sexy is never funny. I bring this up because the Fosters inexplicably find themselves in a brothel with a bunch of scantily clad strippers everywhere. Tina Fey has to get into a stripper costume and do some awkward dancing herself. I don’t recall laughing at any point. You know there is a reason that ’30 Rock’ goes to such incredible lengths to uglify Tina Fey when she plays Liz Lemon. It’s because it is very hard to laugh at someone who you are physically attracted to. Tina Fey is gorgeous. That’s why ’30 Rock’ puts her in glasses, has her walk funny, and gives her an eating disorder. It allows her to be funny because we aren’t thinking of other things. (For a very good example of this, take the SNL “Chippendales” sketch. Who is funnier: Patrick Swayze or Chris Farley?) For this reason, no comedy should ever present a truly sexed up scene. What inspires lust and what inspires laughter are completely different things. If your purpose is to make people laugh, then that scene will be a great yawning void in your movie. Welcome to Date Night.

A movie with Steve Carell and Tina Fey will never be all terrible. I liked the semi-serious scenes where they simply acted like the married couple that was trying in good faith to revitalize their marriage. These are the type of scenes that allow a critic to say the movie is a “comedy with heart.” Except here of course there is no comedy. Just a void with some heart. Anyway, those scenes allowed this movie to get a 2 star rating.


Added a couple days Later:

I have to add a caveat to what I said about sexy never being funny. There's always an exception to the rule, and that would be Marilyn Monroe. She had the ability to be sexy and hilarious at the same time. (Seven Year Itch, Some Like it Hot). I think the big reason for this is because she was always so oblivious of her effect on the men around her. In other words, she didn't know she was sexy. It's a very hard thing to pull off because it is so very absurd (and thus funny). As Marlon Brando in 'A Streetcar Named Desire" once quipped, "I never knew a woman who didn't know she was good looking without me having to tell her."

The Departed 11/08/06

I think this will be the last gangster movie Martin Scorcese ever directs. In his earlier efforts like Goodfellas or Casino there is this feeling of awe in the grandeur of the life. He brought you into this underworld with a certain amount of excitement. That excitement is gone in this movie and what remains is a certain level of detachment and acceptance. Even ith all the violence and gore it definitely sounds like an old man is telling the story. A man that has seen it all and is never surprised. The best line in the movie is also the last. I won't give it away but it says it all. Acceptance, no remorse, no real regret, no huge emotion. This whole thing, this whole crap game, this gangster life, it never stops and its gotten pretty damn old. 

Don't get me wrong this is still a great movie. and funny too. I was not expecting something, anything half as funny. There were three screenwriters on this movie: William Monahan, Felix Chong, Siu Fai Mak. I don't know who did what, but there were a hell of a lot of great one-liners that I have to go back and memorize.
This movie also had a stellar cast with everyone doing an awesome job. Nicholson, DiCaprio, Wahlberg, Baldwin, Sheen. They all did a great job. My huge praise goes to Matt Damon though, who really completes the most twisted and distorted character of them all. NIcholson and DiCaprio might get Oscar nominations. I wouldn't be surprised either way. But Damon definitely deserves one, I will be dissapointed if he doesn't garner some attention.
The one weak point in this story is the one woman character again. She had a great part as the shrink to both undercover agents. She could have been great, but oppurtunities were missed and her part became quite useless. In this story she didn't even need to be there. You could have cut her and made the movie twenty minutes shorter: which also would have been a good idea.


Added commentary: Because I felt like it, I saw this movie once more in a theater on March 6th. It is a better movie the second time around. Everything that I didn't think made sense or didn't understand the first time around, this time I got. For instance, seen again, I don't think the woman charachter was a weak part and I don't see any reason to cut anything at all in this movie. The second time around it went much faster and smoother. I also got the moral. The movie's about lying and what goes with that territory. Pay attention first time watcher. There's no good or bad guys. This isn't cops and robbers. It's a game of cat and mouse. Catch that stinking rat.