Friendship (3/5 Stars)

Sometimes, as the iron is hot, it is best to strike it, whether you are ready or not, lest the opportunity pass you by. Tim Robinson is on the upswing. His sketch comedy show “I Think You Should Leave” is one of the best shows of the last five years. Given his success, now is the time for him to move onto bigger things, like a full scale movie. And given that he specializes in portraying a type of socially catastrophic middle aged man, someone had the bright idea to conceive of a movie in which he strikes up a friendship with the “I Love You, Man” middle aged man himself, Paul Rudd, whose comedic reputation is of the exact opposite nature. At the very least it should make for a great marketing campaign.

There is so much potential here that I kind of wish that someone had done just another rewrite of the script before they had jumped into it. This movie should be very good. Instead it is mediocre and the laughs are sparse. There are plenty of good moments, but too many of them are throwaway. The main problem is that an integral part of the storyline doesn’t quite make sense and so the movie is never truly grounded in reality. If the story does not have a base level of reality, it is hard to build jokes on top of it.

For those unacquainted with “I Think You Should Leave”, it may as well be the present vanguard of comedy. There is something special and new about what is going on in that show. If I were to pick one particular sketch to illustrate what is ground-breaking about it would be the “Haunted House Tour” in which the Tim Robinson character, after being informed that this was the “adult” tour that takes place after 10pm, decides to ask a bunch vulgar questions because, and this is important, he thinks that cursing is the socially acceptable thing to do in an “adult” tour. It is hard to describe and I think you should just watch it. But the main development comedically is the context. As a millennial, I grew up in a place and time where vulgarity was met with shock, and that shock value was funny. For the longest time, comedians seemed to be on an unending and ever more predictable quest to top themselves in vulgarity, a comedic strategy which sometime between There’s Something About Mary and Stepbrothers experienced diminishing returns. In the “Haunted House Tour” sketch, the vulgar questions aren’t met with shock. No-one is scandalized. It just feels weird and inappropriate. After all, it is 2022 and all the adults have seen StepBrothers, which came out in 2008. The incredible thing about the Tim Robinson character is that he wants to be socially acceptable, he is just utterly clueless as to how to do it and is making and committing to blindingly wrong choices to that end. In the “Haunted House Tour” the character is so well developed, and so well acted, that I experienced not only hilarity but a dramatic catharsis.

It is a very good idea to take this Tim Robinson character and insert him into a movie wherein Paul Rudd, that very cool and easy going guy, moves in across the street, and the chrance develops for them to develop a friendship, that is before Paul Rudd realizes just how strange and off putting the Tim Robinson character is. This is basically the plot of “Friendship”. It is a little like “The Cable Guy” but told from the point of view of Jim Carrey.

The main problem here is that the Tim Robinson character (named Craig Waterman) is inexplicably married to a successful business woman played by the beautiful Kate Mara. They have been married for so long that they have a teenage son. Craig Waterman also has a good, if not reputable, job as an advertising executive for addictive phone applications. Make no mistake, this is the Tim Robinson character, who is prone to giant social gaffes and inexplicable moments of wrath. So, what is he doing gainfully employed and happily married for more than a decade? That doesn’t really make sense. And you can’t blame his behavior on the added presence of Paul Rudd. Paul Rudd is playing the stereotypical Paul Rudd character. He’s just a cool guy. It’s not like he is driving Craig Waterman crazy.

What would make more sense is if Craig Waterman had an obscure dirty job and lived at home with his mother, and maybe one or both of them were hoarders. (That’s the backstory of the “Haunted House Tour” after all). I think this would make Craig Waterman more endearing, and Paul Rudd’s cute circle of friends more snobbish/elistish when they (understandably) reject him.

Still, besides the missed opportunity, there are several good moments in this movie. One of my favorites included the quick scene with an obscure actor named Connor O’Malley along with his character’s viewpoint about the forever war in Afghanistan. I also really like the toad-acid trip scene in which Craig Waterman orders a sandwich. Man, I just wished the move was better because the concept is such a good idea. And these opportunities, they don’t come around all that often.

Avengers: End Game (5/5 Stars)

A victory lap is the perfect description of Avengers: Endgame. It is a good enough story on its own, but is not afraid to tack on much earned nostalgia. If Lord of the Rings: Return of the King garnered a Best Picture Oscar in part because it was the culmination of a gorgeously executed triology, I don't see why the same logic wouldn't apply to Avengers: Endgame which is the perfect culmination of ten years and twenty-two movies of Marvel storytelling

Leaving off where Avengers: Infinity War and Ant-Man and the Wasp ended, half the life in the universe has been snapped out of existence by Thanos and his Inifinity Guantlet. The Avengers not snapped out of existence conveniently include the original assembly: Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, Black Widow, The Hulk, and Hawkeye. Captain Marvel shows up almost immediately after and they all get in a spaceship and track down Thanos. Unfortunately by the time they get to him, he has already destroyed the Infinity Stones. It's over. What happened cannot be fixed.

Then the movie jumps five years. It is a ballsy move and cements a feeling of reality over the events of Avengers: Infinity War. Usually comic book movies don't have dramatically acted scenes, but this one contains a particularly good bit of acting by Robert Downey Jr, as Tony Stark/Tony Stark, who excoriates Chris Evans, Steve Rogers/Captain America, decision several movies ago in Captain America: Civil War which broke up the Avengers and made Thanos harder to stop.

There is a catch of course as there must be. It comes in the form of Ant-Man who was stuck in the quantum realm when the Snappening happened and comes back five years later. (There is an emotional scene where Paul Rudd, Scott Lang/Ant-Man, finds his name on a memorial for those who died during the Snappening and when he reunites with his daughter.) Scott shows up at the Avengers headquarters with an idea that has to do with time-travel through the quantum realm. Much exposition is needed in this movie and quite a bit of it is people explaining things to Ant-Man who hasn't been around in the last five years. Most of it is quite funny.

Alot of this is quite funny. Some characters' arcs are rather dramatic like Iron Man, Captain America, Hawkeye, and Black Widow. But other characters are firmly in the camp of comic relief. Two characters that have completely hit their stride are Hulk, who is now Professor Hulk, a big, green and unangry Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo). Then there is Thor. What happened to him over the past five years is the stuff of comedic legends.

The question here isn't if Avengers: Endgame will reverse the outcome of Infinity War. We know it must simply due to sheer amount of marketable product that was snapped out of existence. The question is whether how this is accomplished is too predictable or too confusing. It isn't predictable and it generally makes sense (in a comic book science sort of way). A few times in the movie I was sitting there wondering how they were going to accomplish what they had set out to do and then how they did was quite satisfying.

Without giving away too much of the plot, the Avengers actually visit previous movies. Three in particular: The Avengers, The Dark World, and The Guardians of the Galaxy. The team splits up into groups to go back in time and retrieve what they need from those films. It is always when you have many full formed characters and then mix and match teams so people who have not really met or interacted before are doing so for the first time. Thor's interactions with the Guardians of the Galaxy is great in particular. Captain American fights himself and that is satisfying too. There is a lot of good stuff all over the place here. One particular moment, where Captain America finds himself standing alone in front of an evil army, and the moment right after, garnered cheers from the audience that I was in. I felt like cheering too. I really like these guys.

Following the example of other great culmination of movies, the last hour of Avengers: End Game has a lot of goodbyes in it. I believe the movie earned these moments. I look forward to the next twenty films.

Ant-Man and the Wasp (4/5 Stars)

Like an antidote to universe-sized seriousness, Ant-Man and the Wasp sneaks into theaters just a few months after Avengers: Infinity Wars. Importantly, it takes place before that movie. A good thing since the Ant-Man franchise is notable in its complete lack of bigness in both themes and superhero size. It stars the nice and cute Paul Rudd as a petty thief named Scott Lang who teams up with the reclusive scientist Hank Pym (played by Michael Douglas) who engineers for him a suit that shrinks his size but outsizes his strength, you know, like an ant. Hank’s daughter, Hope Pym (Lost’s Evangeline Lily), gets her own suit this time around and becomes The Wasp. Really, she was better at this thing than Paul Rudd was even in the first movie. She was the one who trained him after all.

Ant-Man and the Wasp is all fun and action. I mean really, it is a Paul Rudd movie (everybody is nice or at least means well) but with car chases and quantum mechanics. However, to explain anything that happens in this movie takes a stupid amount of exposition. In fact, this movie could serve as a screenwriting class on exposition. There are some really good examples and others not so good.

Exposition is something that all movies need to do. Since Ant-Man and the Wasp is like the twentieth movie in an intertwined Marvel Universe, much exposition is needed to explain what this particular movie is about. The best exposition in this movie happens in the first ten minutes as a soliloquy performed by the scene-stealing Randall Park. (I’ve been doing this for so long that I can say about Randall Park what I said about Paul Rudd after “Knocked Up”, I think this guy is a leading man who needs his own movies). Randall Park plays a FBI agent who is checking in on Scott Lang during his house arrest. Scott Lang’s seven-year-old daughter asks why the FBI doesn’t like her daddy. Randall gets down on his knee to better connect with the little girl. “It must be hard to understand for you,” he relates and then speaks at length in a direct and literal tone about the various legal codes in effect since Avengers: Age of Ultron and Captain America: Civil War. Classic. This does three things: One it explains the most important events of past Marvel movies concerning Ant-Man’s situation. Two and Three: It is a character-defining joke, the FBI agent seemed like he knew how to relate to a girl by getting down on her level but comically revealed that he was too straitlaced to do so.

The worse exposition concerns all the explanations concerning Hank Pym’s wife being lost in the quantum realm, how the quantum realm works, and the nature of the movie’s bad but not so bad guy Ghost. These do not come along with jokes or character development. They are necessary scenes but pales in comparison with good exposition as above. In fact, it pales in comparison with a scene of unneeded exposition provided by Luis (played by the scene-stealing Michael Pena) who answers the simple question “Where is Scott Lang?” in a very funny not simple at all way.

But besides the exposition, what is this movie like? Well, it’s got a bunch of good people trying to figure out problems. There are a few bad guys but they are either kind of goofy (Sonny Burch played by Walter Goggins) or mean well (Ghost played by Hannah John-Kamen). They have car chases over and about the hills of San Francisco. You may have seen that before, but have you seen it with cars that shrink and unshrink and sometimes a huge Ant-Man? It is good times.

This movie has notable diversity. It is a casting laundry list of the better actors of various ethnicities in its supporting roles. Obviously Paul Rudd is the straight white male. But two main superheroes beside him are both female (The Wasp and Ghost). Paul Rudd’s friends who run a security agency are hispanic (Luis), some sort of Eastern European and black. The FBI agent is Korean. The lesser bad guy is a southern gentleman (Walter Goggins) who employs at least one Indian. Given the movie’s location, San Francisco, the cast seems possible and besides me, I don't think anybody has made a point of it.

The Ant-Man franchise adds another complexity to the nature of the Marvel Universe. Thor and Guardians of the Galaxy added the vastness of the universe. Dr. Strange added new dimensions. Ant-Man adds the minute quantum realm. The science behind these complexities is real if thinly realized. What is more interesting perhaps is how these various thin interpretations of real science will interact with one another. This is bound to happen in the next Avengers movie given how Ant-Man ends.

Captain America: Civil War (4/5 Stars)

At least once a year I feel the need to point out the moral ambituity of large-scale action sequences in modern blockbusters, specifically the untold and unfelt thousands of deaths that necessarily must occur when entire cities are reduced to rubble. I had been crying in the wilderness to nobody in parituclar about this for so long that I expected that I would continue to do it indefinitely. Imagine my pleasant surprise then when Marvel’s new movie, “Captain America: Civil War” not only admits the reality of human collateral damage but makes it the focal conflict for the entire story.

It starts with a covert operation in an African country by Captain America, Black Widow, Hawk, and Scarlett Witch (new to me but apparently introduced before). A bad guy is trying to steal a biological weapon. The fight starts in a parking lot moves to an office building and finally ends in a crowded marketplace. The bad guy has a suicide bomb in which he means to kill everybody. Scarlett Witch, whose mutant power is to telekinesis, moves the bomb explosion from the marketplace to the air but miscalculates and ends up killing about fifteen people in an office building. The Avengers given that they are conducting vigilante military operations are held suspect for this outcome. A proposal is passed to give the United Nations oversight over the Avengers.

Iron Man, aka Tony Stark, feels guilty enough for this occurrence (The fifteen dead were charity workers although any fifteen dead people would have been good enough for me) to support the resolution. Captain America, coming out against democracy, believes that the resolution would stop him from taking action for or against whatever he deems himself to be important. It may be obvious whose side I am taking in this conflict. I’m with Iron Man all the way. Captain America apparently thinks he knows better than entire democratic societies. That is the sort of behavior that gives Freedom a bad name.

The amount of characters and superheroes already introduced in this umpteenth of Marvel movies makes listing all of them and the actors playing them time prohibitive, but they line up in equal numbers on each side. Thankfully Thor and The Hulk are somewhere else, as their presence would seriously tip the scale against the more destructible members of the Avengers. The action sequences are better and more entertaining than previous Marvel movies. This is because instead of relying on the spectactles getting bigger and more explosive, the superheroes fight themselves (and thus aren’t nameless pushovers) and thus humor and creativity have to be employed to make sure nobody gets embarrassed. The abandoned airport fight is especially good. Also, as I said before, no massive human collateral occurs. The result is a very enjoyable movie and my favorite Marvel movie so far.

Joining the Marvel universe for the first time is SpiderMan (the other two Sony franchises have not happened in this particular franchise) and Black Panther. Now this is a good opportunity for a compare and contrast between what is considered to be one of the most beloved characters of Marvel and what is sure to be the most boring.

Spiderman, aka Peter Parker, is a dorky teenager who lives with his Aunt May in Queens, New York. Black Panther is the handsome well-mannered prince of the aforementioned African nation. When Stan Lee created Spiderman, his stated intention was to give the character all the regular flaws a teenager generally has like immaturity, acne, and a hopeless crush on a girl. Such honesty and relatability became endearing pushing Spiderman to an upper echelons of popular superheroes. Black Panther, in contrast, seems to be a corporate marketing committee’s response to an outcry for political correctness. He stands in like Two-fer in “30 Rock” as proof that the corporation believes black people can be noble, properly educated, and not sidekicks. It is perhaps a good thing that the effort was made but the fact that they went about it in a way that crossed all the t’s and dotted all the i’s goes a long way in making the character generally unrelatable and almost as important, boring. He has no flaws and by the end of the movie his one conflict is resolved. I can’t imagine what will happen in the next movie that will allow the character to learn and grow in complexity. Perhaps he will join Thor battling interstellar ice monsters. Peter Parker as we all know has a long journey ahead of him since not incidentally he starts from a far humbler beginning.

(I doubt anyone else has noted this but the term ‘black panther’ refers to the militant wing of an oppressed poor minority group. Is it not culturally insensitive for a wealthy member of a ruling majority class to appropriate the moniker? Or does this not count because they are both black.)

But enough about this. I really liked the movie and would recommend it to anyone interested in seeing a blockbuster. The humor, the action, and most importantly the maturity set it apart from most others. Finally I have added the original Captain America movie to my DVD queue. For the first time I have wanted to see it and fill in that particular gap in my Marvel movie knowledge.

Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues

“Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues,” the sequel to the 2004 movie “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy,” may serve as an insightful comparison for those interested in charting the career evolution of the long partnership of Actor Will Ferrell and Director Adam McKay. The two have certainly changed in the almost decade since the original movie came out. Someone in Clown College could totally write a thesis about the transformation. No, not me, I don’t have the credentials or motivation suited to such a task. Oh, all right I’ll do it.

Back in the way back day when dinosaurs ruled the world and the Mayans had not yet arrived on their galactic starships, there were two Saturday Night Live alumni named Will Ferrell and Adam McKay. Their SNL colleagues, obsessive, neurotic, and urbane New Yorkers, all of them I tell you, incessantly wrote about the trivial and not so pleasant pleasantries of daily life of people who live close or at least nearby people. But not these two for they hailed (or at least Ferrel) from a land of strip malls, culdesacs, and an almost ludicrous amount of grass fields, I mean really. It was known as “The Bubble,” for legend has it nobody from the outside ever came in and anyone from the inside who ever wanted to ‘do something’ had to leave the city limits, generally in bumper-to-bumper rush hour traffic, a feat few ever accomplished, at least on a regular basis. But to Ferrel it was merely called Irvine, California. Out from “The Bubble” came a new kind of comedian, the Ferrel Man Child: loud, brash, and wholly absurd. But above all other lowly adjectives, the Ferrel Man Child was defined by his overconfidence. He was a man not challenged in any meaningful way by society or civilization and walked this great land like a King: that is with a deluded sense of self-importance and entitlement.

The Ferrel Man Child was first seen in the realms of cinemadom in “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy,” as a local anchorman in sunny 1970s San Diego. It was ripe territory for the Ferrel Man Child. The employment allowed his character to take all the credit for an entire bureaurcracy and think he deserved it too. He had a grand mustache at a time when that sort of thing was without shame. And he had a news team of enablers. Brian Fantana (Paul Rudd) was the man on the street. Champ Kind (David Koechner) was sports. And who could forget dear Brick Tamlin (Steve Carell) on weather. Turns out, the man was retarded, but nobody knew for years because doing weather in San Diego takes no brains at all. It’s Sunny! Everyday!

But Hark! What’s this?!?!? Out of nowhere and not taking notes or bringing coffee was a woman, a female reporter named Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate). The original movie relied heavily on one Ferrel Man Child joke in particular: that is making Christina Applegate look as uncomfortable as possible. Ten Years later, the Legend Continues, and even though there is still plenty of deluded male chauvinism still around, the themes are an entirely different animal, like say a sneaky snake instead of a giant panda, that sort of metaphor. Starting around 2010, after one great movie about NASCAR (Talladega Nights) and one okay movie about forty-something men living with their parents (Step-Brothers) the Ferrel Man Child reinvented himself in that grand old country of satire, lampooning Wall Street (The Other Guys) and Politics (The Campaign).  

It should be said that the choice of a sequel for ‘Anchorman’ by Team Ferrel/McKay is not simply a ‘get-the-gang-back-together-for-another-paycheck’ kind of job. They chose this sequel because even though the original movie was not a satire there lay in the promise of a sequel, the good territory for it. After all, it is a decade after the 70s (that means it’s the 80s) and although dinosaurs no longer roam the Earth, there is this new thing called 24 hour NEWS. This too is ripe territory for the Ferrel Man Child. Turns out everything that is stupid and petty about the 24 News Networks is Ron Burgundy’s fault. While enjoying a breakfast buffet in the New York Headquarters of his new workplace, Ron has an idea to get more ratings. “How about instead of telling people what they need to know, we just tell them what they want to hear?” What an idea! Cut to lots of patriotic talk about how great America is, a ridiculous amount of flashy graphics, highlight reels of only home runs and touchdowns (Whammy!) and sticking Brick Tamlin outside in the middle of a hurricane. They also have the idea of using police car chases as Breaking News. Ron has the great idea of speculating on air as to who is being chased and why when he has no real information to go on. The ratings for the 24-hour news network go through the roof.

For those who liked the first movie there are plenty of sequel jokes, that is jokes that are just like the ones in the first movie but bigger. So Ron recites even more absurds warmup phrases before airtime, plays his Jazz Flute in bigger fashion, and has an even bigger newsman brawl with even more famous celebrities in cameos. That’s great as long as there is plenty of fresh material and there is plenty of fresh material, but my personal problem with it is that I happen to be regular viewer of “The Daily Show with John Stewart.” That show skewers the 24-hour news networks on a regular basis so the jokes that are supposedly fresh for Team Ferrell/McKay is actually stuff I am already familiar with. I bet though that those who don’t watch “The Daily Show” on a regular basis will find all the 24-hour news network satire on the money.

My favorite part of the movie is neither a sequel joke nor a 24 Hour news satiric piece. For me that would be the inclusion of the great Kristin Wiig as a love interest for Brick Tamlin. It’s a match made in comedy heaven. She is as big an idiot as he is if which seems impossible but hey that’s how you know that they are meant for each other. It is a little dismaying though to see Wiig in this role at all. After the critical and commercial success of ‘Bridesmaids,’ I bet that she would finally become a movie star with her own annual string of movies. Somehow though Melissa McCarthy became the breakout star of that movie and Kristin Wiig has once more been relegated to supporting roles in the movies of inferior comedians. (I don’t include Ferrell/McKay in that group. I would say they are equals in comedy). This is idiotic and makes the capitalist in me a little sad. There is plenty of money to be made on the Kristin Wiig ticket and the studios are refusing to make it due to what has to be a sexist lack of imagination. 

The weakest part of the movie deals with a series of racial jokes. Ron Burgundy’s new boss at the station is a black woman. This unfortunately is as far as her character development goes as much of the scenes she is in don’t go further than Ron’s bewilderment as to what a black woman is doing in the room. Inexplicably she likes him enough to start dating him and eventually brings him home to her classy Upper East Side African American family. Ron spends his time at the table loudly talking jive, in order to instill racial harmony you see. The black people don’t do much of anything other than gasp in shock and anger. There is something that doesn’t quite work about this scene and it is kind of been milling around humor for a while now. Let’s say you had two white guys making racial jokes about ghetto blacks. That would not be okay, right? But for some reason this is okay here because of the presence of well-dressed and educated middle class blacks looking offended. Who is the joke on here? Is it on Ron Burgundy who can’t tell that the people at the table are not the type of people he thinks they are? Or is it on the black people at the table who are made to be nothing but insulted and uncomfortable? And what does it actually say? I think it says that Burgundy is deluded because these particular black people are not poor and uneducated and thus would not be speaking jive. But it also sidesteps any recognition that there are indeed black people who are underpriviledged, in poverty, and live in violence who do speak jive. This would be especially true in 1980s NYC, which had some of the most dangerous and dilapidated ghettos in the country at that time.

How about if this were the scene? The black woman takes Ron Burgundy back to a family dinner in a scary ghetto, but Ron Burgundy mistakes the family for a version of The Jeffersons. He makes idiotic references to moving on up to the East Side and doesn’t seem to notice that people are underemployed, come from terrible schools, and that brother 15-Year-Old Keenan was shot last week in an escalating series of gang violence. Ron can even start singing the theme song at one point and declare the virtues of Reagan Era trickle-down-economics. Edgy Satire, right? And it should make everybody not just black people uncomfortable to see it. Anyway that’s just a thought. Otherwise all the other jokes in this comedy land pretty well and I look forward to the next comedy by Team Ferrel/McKay.   

Prince Avalanche (4/5 Stars)

Enjoying the Silence

This is the kind of movie that renders a star rating system kind of silly. It is a perfect movie in its own right, which should mean it would get 5 stars, but the movie and its ambitions are so small it should seem like it would get 3 stars at the most. So in essence, it is one of those 5 star 3 star movies. I gave it 4/5 stars, which in no situation would make sense but hey as Roger Ebert would say, forget the stars and read the review (or watch the movie). That’s the only real way to get a sense of how good it is.

The movie concerns two weeks in the lives of two men Alvin (Paul Rudd) and his brother-in-law Lance (Emile Hirsch). They are painting new road lines on a desolate Texan highway ravaged by wildfire. It is the late 1980s, although there is no reason for this movie to be set at any time in particular. The wildfires are not based on any specific wildfires. Actually I think the movie may be set in the 1980s just as an excuse to deprive the characters of their smart phones. After most of the conflict deals with how the two men deal with isolation from the rest of the world. Alvin, the older and seemingly more mature man is more comfortable with the silence. He knows how to gut a fish, tie a knot, and make a campsite. Lance on the other hand knows nothing about camping and really really does not care to learn. What he is going through is a special type of hell. His current life goal is to get laid as much as possible. Being in nature around nothing, he explains, just makes him hornier. Lance does not understand why Alvin won’t take the chance to go home for the weekend to visit his long-time girlfriend. He jumps at the chance to leave while Alvin is happy with having some real alone time. There is a particularly good scene in which Alvin in an attempt to bridge the gap between the two takes an interest in listening to the story of Lance’s weird weekend, a monologue delivered splendidly by Emile Hirsch. Imagine having a bonding heart to heart conversation with someone and walking away from it firmly convinced that you have absolutely nothing in common. “Somehow in your head,” muses Alvin, “you really believe you are a gentleman.” “Huh?” asks the still hung over Lance. A pause. “(Nevermind in German)” says Alvin.

This movie was directed by David Gordon Green, an accomplished director of stoner comedies like Pineapple Express and some movies he made before that I have not seen, but had some critics saying he was very much like Terrance Malick. (I read that in a review about this movie). I can sort of see that, in that way he is quite content to slow the movie down and pay attention to puddles and rain and yellow paint in a pretty way. There are also a couple of scenes in which Alvin and Lance are separately visited by what might be the ghost of an old woman who may have died in the wildfire. The use of voiceover in lieu of dialogue makes them strangely effective scenes.

I can’t talk too much about the plot because if I start explaining it in detail, then I am giving away too much of what happens in the movie because you know very little happens in the movie. It is of course done well in a way that perhaps you have not seen before and will not see in a mainstream movie. The movie is also funny in that way in which humorous things happen but not enough of them for the movie to actually be considered a comedy. Then again it is never a bad thing to just hang out with Paul Rudd for 90 minutes and for those of you who have liked “Into the Wild,” here is Emile Hirsch out in nature once more. It is a relaxing movie. I liked it.

Wanderlust (4/5 Stars)

This can't be the place

“There is a reason that human beings long for a sense of permanence. This longing is not limited to children, for it touches the profoundest aspects of our existence: that life is short, fraught with uncertainty, and sometimes tragic. We know not where we come from, still less where we are going, and to keep from going crazy while we are here, we want to feel that we truly belong to a specific part of the world.”

-       James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere

The ending of “Wanderlust” is a cliffhanger, although I suspect most people (and perhaps even the filmmakers) will not realize how. The story itself follows a married couple named George and Linda (Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston) as they search for a home that is “real,” for lack of a better word. They start out in Manhattan, a place that demands endless toil to make barely enough money for a sizable mortgage on a very small studio apartment. When George loses his job during a massive corporate layoff, the city unceremoniously ships them out in favor of richer people.

George and Linda move down to Atlanta to live with Rudd’s boorish brother Rick, played by co-writer Ken Marino. Rick is the CEO of a port-o-potty company and lives in a McMansion out in a suburban nowhere. The house may be huge and filled to the brim with really expensive stuff, but the desperate housewife Marissa, played by Michaela Watkins, soon reveals that she spends most of her day alone and drinking margaritas. She has a theory that if she smiles enough it can brainwash her mind into feeling happy.

George and Linda escape to stumble upon a commune out in the middle of the woods. It is filled with colorful characters that smoke pot, grow organic vegetables, and share everything. At first this lifestyle is infatuating but it soon wears off because of the complete lack of privacy (there are no doors to the bedrooms or bathrooms), the annoying veganism, and the free love atmosphere that basically acts as a masquerade for Seth, the leader of the commune, played here by Justin Theroux, to hit on all the women that move in.

So that place does not really work out either. But the movie does end on a happy note with the characters getting new jobs and moving into a new place with happy music all over the background. The place is bigger and friendlier than the Manhattan studio, not as fake and isolated as the McMansion, and has actual doors. But where is this “real” place? We are never actually told. Is it anywhere in America? Because seriously, I think most of us would like to live there. It does exist somewhere, right?

The ambiguity of the ending of “Wanderlust,” is what stops the movie from achieving great movie status like director David Wain’s last Paul Rudd movie, “Role Models.” The special thing about “Role Models” is that behind all the jokes about the nerdiness and weirdness of the Dungeons and Dragons community known as LAIRE, there was a sincerity that held up the group as very creative and really fun to be in. Taking part in that community redeemed the cynical Paul Rudd character in the end. That cannot be said about the bohemian commune in “Wanderlust,” as they are shown to fall into the same hypocritical and selfish habits of all people no matter how vehemently they claim that it is not allowed there. The ending is a bit of a deux ex machina, a miracle that basically saves everyone from dealing with the main problem of the movie by making them all too rich and successful to care anymore. So this is not as satisfying as “Role Models.” But it is basically just as funny and employs just as large an ensemble of great comedic characters.

You’ve seen these actors before if you saw “Role Models.” Coming back in supporting roles are Kerri Kenney and Jordan Peele as the some of the hippies. The incomparable Joe Lo Truglio once again performs the feat of creating a complete character within thirty seconds of screen time. He is the commune’s nudist/winemaker/novelist. I suspect the reason why I found the ending forgivable is because it is this guy’s miracle. Joe Lo Truglio seems to be the kind of guy who could pull that off.

(It should be noted that creative freedom for full male frontal nudity has finally been achieved in this movie. When I saw this sort of thing in “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” it still seemed like they were still trying to hide it by quickly cutting away. In this one, there are no quick cuts, and for some weird reason the fact that the movie does not seem to be afraid to have little Joe Lo Truglio just hanging out there for extended periods of time actually makes the whole thing less distracting.)

Then finally there is Ken Marino who reprises his role as a very funny asshole. He is joined this time by Michaela Watkins, an old (she’s 40) newcomer on the comedy scene. The comedic dynamic that these two create is the sort of thing that makes you wish the movie visited the McMansion more often. Watkins in particular is very very funny. You may remember her brief one year tenure as a featured played on Saturday Night Live, where she was funny in basically every scene she was in and then was inexplicably fired the next summer. I am glad she is now popping up in feature movies, but really, someone who cares about comedy ought to see this movie and start granting her more screen time doing anything in any other movie. She is the real thing and talent is a-being wasted while Eddie Murphy still gets to make a horrible movie every single year.

As far as Paul Rudd is concerned, he continues his now five year string of anchoring at least one good comedy in a year. (Wanderlust, Our Idiot Brother, Dinner for Schmucks, I Love You Man, Role Models.) That’s a good streak and he is a very good leading man for comedies. His humor is nice, subtle, and normal. This enables the plenty of wacky other characters around him to be crazy and all he has to do is twitch his face the correct way to round out the scene.

I still do not know what to make of Jennifer Aniston as a comedian. She has been in some great comedies and done some very good work (Office Space, The Good Girl, and Horrible Bosses), but she has also been in a string of really bad not funny movies. Oftentimes her characters lack the eccentricity needed to be funny and spend most of their time looking out of place while everybody else gets laughs. There is a part in this movie where the movie stops being a story about a couple and starts being a movie about Paul Rudd. Were missing something here. There has got to be a better way to make Aniston interesting besides having her take her top off, especially since it is blurred out anyway. Back to the drawing board on that one. Learn a thing or two from Michaela Watkins and Kristin Wiig on how to make women funny. Here is a link to one of their SNL skits for educational purposes.  http://www.hulu.com/watch/56640/saturday-night-live-today-show

Our Idiot Brother (4/5 Stars)

Good writing and nice people: A typical Paul Rudd comedy

The majority of comedies are about mean and obnoxious people. The idea being that gleeful and aggressive shocks of violence and rude behavior elicit laughs. And they do. Quite a lot of these movies are very funny. But every once in a while it is a pleasure to see a comedy take the opposite route and have the running joke be that the characters are too trusting, lovable, and sweet. Or in Ned’s case (played by the funniest nice guy in movies, Paul Rudd) all those characteristics to an idiotic degree.

What a good and compassionate heart Ned has. In the first scene we see him happily running a biodynamic vegetable stall at the local farmer’s market. He charges fair prices and lets little kids steal strawberries with a smile. A uniformed cop walks up to him and asks for marijuana. Ned is hesitant. The cop confides in Ned that it’s been a really rough week for him. Ned, ever so trusting and empathetic, decides to give him a bag of marijuana on the house. No, the cop insists, he wants to pay for it. Ned relents and gives a price that must be a rather large discount for that amount of marijuana. The cop pays and informs Ned that he is being arrested for selling drugs. It takes Ned awhile to realize that the nice cop had been lying to him all along.

Ned is thrown in prison for eight months and is released four months early for being “Most Cooperative Inmate” three months straight. Outside he finds that he has lost his job, his girlfriend, his place to live, and his much loved dog, Willie Nelson. The way he handles all this would make Socrates, Thoreau, and Jeffrey Lebowski very proud. He even makes dudely peace with his girlfriend’s new boyfriend, played here by the very funny T.J. Miller. He drops by his mother’s house where there are still family dinners routinely held. Around the table are his three sisters. One is Emily Mortimer, a wife and mother to an oily Steve Coogan and ten-year-old Dillon respectively. Another is Elizabeth Banks, a hard-working journalist on the verge of a career-making story. Finally there is Zooey Deschanel, a stand-up comedian currently engaged to Rashida Jones, a hipster lawyer with a must-mention sense of style. This is a very good cast. Most of them have worked together before and it has a way of showing. Elizabeth Banks was Rudd’s opposite in “Role Models” and Rashida Jones was Rudd’s opposite in “I Love You, Man.” Those movies too were very nice and funny comedies about good people. You can put this one up there with them. Good writing and nice people. I think it can be said that Paul Rudd is developing a solid reputation for these types of movies.

From there on, Ned couch surfs from home to home causing problems with his honesty and humility. Generally speaking, the problem already exists but Ned has a way of bringing them out in the open because of how his compassion and empathy (which makes him very easy to confide in) combines with his complete inability to tell a lie and childlike belief that the truth brings out the best in people. People tell him things he shouldn’t hear and he shares things to others he isn’t supposed to tell. Soon Emily’s marriage to Steve Coogan is on the rocks (as it should be because the guy is no good), Elizabeth’s career is put in danger (as it should be because her employers are telling her to do shady things), and Zooey’s relationship with Rashida is endangered (as it should be because Zooey has a bad habit of infidelity). All of this happens because of “our idiot brother.”

The first half of the movie is enjoyable but there were very few laughs. The movie did pick up steam, however, as it went along and by the end the laughs were big and numerous. The characters in general are so likable that laughing becomes a very easy reaction to indulge in. I especially liked the raid on the organic farm by Ned and Rashida Jones to steal back Willie Nelson. It goes bad almost immediately and they don’t get the dog back, but T.J. Miller is a really cool dude about the midnight trespassing and all. He even goes so far as to sort of apologize for not giving Ned the right information for when him and the girlfriend would be out of town to see a Dixie Chicks concert. “Next Thursday” apparently in Miller’s mind means every Thursday down the road that isn’t “this Thursday.” Ned kindly informs him that for future reference he should say “Next Next Thursday” if he means the Thursday after next. Sorry Dude, my bad. That’s totally okay, Dude, sorry for the trespassing. The movie did miss an opportunity in its underutilization of Zooey Deschanel though. This is an actress I have seen being truly hilarious before (The Good Girl, (500) Days of Summer). In this movie she plays a stand-up comedian. It would have been funny if she had a decent act that made people laugh or something.

Is Ned truly an idiot? The sisters treat Ned with that special kind of passive aggressive disdain women reserve for honest and humble men. Ned isn’t really an adult in their eyes. Ned tolerates this not only because he has to in that he is sleeping on their couches but also because he loves his family and understands their various problems. There is a very telling scene where Ned finally gets angry. Here is a man who was unjustly sent to prison via an act of compassion, lost his job, his home, his girlfriend, and essentially the respect and dignity in the eyes of his family. Does this make him bitter? No, he is still a good person, tries to do better, and spends much of the movie apologizing to those who are unfairly pissed off at him. What does he get angry about? He gets angry when on family night his sisters essentially ruin a game of charades. They break the rules, won’t have fun, and treat the concept of a family game as a stupid waste of time. It is easy to roll one’s eyes and claim that this is an idiotic thing to get angry about. Or one could perhaps reflect on their priorities in life.

One more thing, and I say this with but the expertise of a person who has seen an almost ridiculous amount of movies. Movies do not glamorize drugs, at least not the good ones. I have seen people drink themselves to death (Leaving Las Vegas), I have seen people ruin their lives with heroin (The Wire, Requiem for a Dream, Basketball Diaries), I have seen people make ridiculously bad decisions while on cocaine (Goodfelllas, Casino, Scarface, Boogie Nights, Bad Lieutenant). I have seen drug overdoses aplenty (Pulp Fiction, Traffic, Trainspotting, SLC Punk). Not once have I seen the movie where somebody smoked marijuana, became addicted, overdosed, or routinely went about their self-destruction. I think the worst I have seen was the case in Dave Chappelle’s Half Baked where one of the characters literally smoked himself retarded. True I have seen potheads that are lazy and stupid, but being lazy and stupid is not a crime and here is the point I want to make. We don’t need to be wasting the police’s time and the taxpayer’s money putting people like Ned behind prison bars. It has been argued that marijuana may lead to heavier drugs and more criminal behavior. You can say the same about losing your job, your girlfriend, and your home, which has a tendency to happen when someone gets thrown in prison. The problem isn’t being solved. Thank God that in this movie, Ned had a good family to fall back on. I think we must remember that there is a difference between behavior that is morally objectionable and behavior that is criminal. It can definitely be said that it would be better for the smoker or drinker to exercise prudence and refrain from intoxicants. But it must also be understood that indulging in mind-altering substances is a universal thing amongst human beings as a species. Basically every religion on the face of the planet has some kind of drug that they use in their functions or tolerate in society. It is a truth that people in general have rough weeks and look for a chance to escape every now and then. When this is made a crime, there will be a ludicrous amount of people behind bars that otherwise could be functioning productive citizens (ex. the United States of America). Drugs use is a very serious thing and those that are addictive, manipulative, and dangerous should be illegal. Marijuana is not one of those. If you would like to know exactly what it does, please read Michael Pollan’s “The Botany of Desire.” Of course, like anything else, marijuana may be abused. But that is a problem that should be dealt with by a family, a church, a support group, or a community. Using lawyers, courts, prisons, and parole officers to solve such a problem is akin to swatting flies with a baseball bat. You’re bound to cause far more damage than if you did nothing at all. 

Dinner for Schmucks (3/5 Stars) September 9, 2010

What a freak show.
Dinner for Schmucks stars Paul Rudd as an up-and-coming midlevel executive at some sort of financial business. He is in line for a promotion. The catch is that he has to take part in a dinner party where the various invitees, all top level executives in the company, compete as to who can bring the biggest idiot along as a guest. Rudd serendipitously happens upon Barry, played by Steve Carell. Barry’s hobby is taxidermy and he specializes in scavenging mice road-kill and inserting them in the place of humans in intricate dioramas of artistic masterpieces, or as he calls them “mousterpieces.” What an idiot, Rudd thinks, and decides to take him to the party. Now you may be thinking: inviting people to dinner party just to make fun of them. Isn’t that a bit mean? Yes it is, and the movie agrees. So there is a strange dichotomy here. We are presented with a freak show and than asked to empathize with the freaks and dislike the people who laugh at them. As a consequence the movie isn’t as funny as it should be because it suggests that we would be assholes if we thought it was. This movie was based on a French film called, “The Dinner Party.” I heard that one was much meaner than this one. It was probably funnier too. But that doesn’t mean you can’t be nice and funny at the same time. May I suggest a way that this movie could have done exactly that? First though I feel I have to discuss what exactly makes us laugh. 



These aren’t my ideas. They are Freud’s and they come from a book aptly titled “Jokes and their Relationship to the Subconscious.” Very good book, I suggest it if you take being funny seriously. I will try to briefly summarize. There are mainly three things that make us laugh. They are Economy, Misdirection, and Aggression. 

I’ll skip the first two. What mainly concerns us here is Aggression, or Schadenfreude, the pleasure we get from other people’s misery. We all have aggressive natural instincts. Your boss may be a nice guy, but his pain is easy to laugh at because deep down you are unhappy that you have to take orders from anybody. To some degree we all want autonomy. There doesn’t even have to be an “actual joke” associated with it. If there is a person you feel routinely bullies you and then one day somebody else stands up to them or simply says, “Fuck that guy” behind his back, you would probably feel visceral pleasure and laugh. It is an outlet for the aggression you would normally act upon on if you weren’t suppressing it to say keep your job. The same goes for sex. When a guy calls a woman a slut (or construction dudes catcall) the words are an outlet for sexual aggression. The problem isn’t necessarily that the woman is being sexually active as much as who she’s not being sexually active with, namely the guy who is insulting her. The holy triumvirate of comedy is Religion, Sex, and Politics. Why? Because God, the Government, and Women (or Men) are the main players in the world who are limiting your natural inclination to do whatever the fuck you want. 

The problem with this movie is that Barry is completely harmless. There’s absolutely no reason why you would feel intimidated by him. He controls nothing. He doesn’t get the women. He’s a fantastic artist but certainly not somebody you would find yourself in competition with. If he’s funny at all in this movie, it’s because Steve Carell has him say funny things along the levels of Economy or Misdirection. He doesn’t even make you feel guilty for existing. (I bring this up because I’m sure we’ve all heard people rant about homeless people or other unpopular but completely powerless groups. I fear sometimes that people are so hostile because the insulter feels that the simple presence of societal decay on the streets impugns all of society and declares us all guilty. Thus the resentment.) Barry is clueless but not pitiable. He likes his art and is very good at it. Normal people may ostracize him but he is happy in his mind. Thus his solitude is blest and makes it almost impossible to make fun of him. Really, you would have to have some sort of grudge against happy harmless people. (i.e. you would have to be a total asshole.) 

Because of this it is perhaps a not so good thing that the movie spends so much time on Barry. It would be better if we spent more time with the odious company executives. They are the type of huge arrogant jerks we all know too well. Two of them are played by Ron Livingstone (Office Space) and Larry Wilmore (The Daily Show). Certainly they are capable of more comedy than what we see here. 

The executives should have at least gotten as much character development as the only truly villainous person in the story. That character is Thermen, played by Zach Galifinakis. Thermen works at the IRS (Booo!), stole Barry’s wife (Boo!! Hiss!!), and controls Barry via mind control (Boo- wait what?) Oh what a jerk. Zach’s presence marks the funniest scenes in the movie. It’s a visceral pleasure watching Barry take him down in the climax. There is no reason why the executives couldn’t have been made as ugly as Thermen. You don’t have to give them weird hobbies. Watch or read “American Psycho.” That’s how you go about making fun of rich, good-looking people. 

Steve Carell is still pretty funny here but most of the jokes seem to come from non-sequitors and throw-away lines. Here is an example of a particularly good exchange he has with Jemaine Clement (Flight of the Conchords) who plays a psychotic modern artist as they sit and overlook a goat ranch:

Clement: Have you ever spent five months living with a herd of goats as one of them?
Barry: No
Clement: That surprises me. The thing about a goat is, it never denies itself what it wants.
Barry: A goat eat'll anything. It could probably eat a bike. 
Clement: A goat could eat itself, it was driven to it. I'm just a goat halfway through eating itself.
Barry: Just to be clear, what exactly are we talking about?
Clement: Everything.

Most of the humor in this movie is like that. Paul Rudd essentially plays a straight character. He also has a girlfriend who isn’t funny at all and an assistant, played by very funny Kristen Schall, who is sorely underused. Then there is a psychotic ex-girlfriend who is just too weird to be funny. People need a reason, no matter how tenuous, to be truly crazy. Perhaps they should have made her a religious zeolot on a mission from God, or addicted to LSD, or just a diagnosed schizophrenic. Then she would have made sense and probably would have been funnier. I can’t say I completely recommend this movie, but I am still interested in seeing the French version. So take that for what it’s worth.

p.s. If you go to an AMC movie theater before noon, the movie costs $6. It’s like 1998 student prices all over again!

I Love You, Man April 1, 2009 (4/5 Stars)

I love Paul Rudd and I’m beginning to really like Jason Segal too. Those two would be cool to be friends with, I’m sure. I Love You, Man is about a newly-engaged man who finds himself getting ready for a wedding which he doesn’t have a best man for. Thing is, Peter (Paul Rudd) has always been a girlfriend guy; he makes friends with girls easily and has never had any real guy friends. When eavesdropping on ladies-night, he hears his fiancé’s (Rashida Jones) friends talk about how weird that is. Completely embarrassed Peter goes on a mission to make man friends. Cut to a montage of awkward man dates (all of which are funny) till he meets Sidney Fife (Jason Segal) at an open house he is throwing to sell Luc Ferrigno’s (playing himself) mansion. Sidney is a master at reading people. He readily points out to Peter a guy who is trying to hold back a fart. We all look on enraptured by Sidney’s keen observance of the human scene.
This movie is the vein of ‘Forgetting Sarah Marshall,’ Jason Segal’s last movie, in that most of the characters are nice people who spend their time on screen being wonderful to each other. If for some reason you don’t find the movie funny (which probably won’t happen) there is no reason to hate it. All the characters are likable (except Jon Favreau’s grumpy guy, but he still is funny, so is still welcome). There is the likable Andy Samburg (SNL) who plays Peter’s gay brother, and thus is perfect for advising him how to take out a guy. There is the likable J.K. Simmons (Spiderman, Juno) who plays Peter’s dad, who talks mostly about how his gay son is his best friend. Rashida Jones plays Peter’s fiancé and she is every bit as sweet as he is. Sidney Fife, although uncouth, is undoubtedly a great friend. Rounding out the cast in small supporting roles is Jane Curtain, the gay dude from Reno 911, and stock Apatow bit player Joe Lo Trugilio (who might just break the record for creating distinct characters with only minutes of screen time in each movie he is in.) The movie ends with a wedding where everyone tells each other that they love each other. It is completely believable. I love these guys too. 
The curious thing about all these bromantic comedies is that they seem to feel the need to be Rated R. It’s probably in order to save face in lieu of their obvious emotional core, that and swearing is funny. But despite the R, there is really nothing here that I would feel weird showing a preteen. There’s absolutely no violence or sex. I’m not sure I care whether people say the F-word any more. 
This movie was written and directed by John Hamburg (previously unknown to me). It must have cost little to nothing. I wonder if that’s Luc Ferrigno’s house in the picture. It does have a huge sculpture of him in it. Either they borrowed it or it’s the most expensive thing in the picture. Some movies you can tell that the author is speaking through the characters (Like say in Woody Allen, Coen Brothers, Mamet, and Shakespeare movies.) Not so in this movie. I have trouble even imagining the words spoken in this movie on a script page. Everything thing just seems so natural and realistic. It sounds even more naturalistic than a Christopher Guest movie (Mighty Wind, Best in Show) and they don’t even have scripts. It really seems like Paul Rudd is just making up the words as he goes. I have trouble believing that someone actually wrote down the words “jobin” or “totos magatos.” If someone actually did, then Paul Rudd is truly a great actor because that guy just makes it seem so easy. The situations in the movie are also dangerously close to real life. Whether its Peter trying to introduce his favorite band, Rush, to his fiancé on crappy laptop speakers, or when he tries to crack mannish jokes that turn out incredibly awkward, or the travails of playing sports with women, or when he asks for his Lost Season 2 DVD’s back because he wants to find out what happens in the hatch. Like I said, I had trouble hearing any voice from the writer because everything seemed so real. I’ve seen a lot of movies. I almost never say that. 
If anything is stopping this movie from being great it is its lack of any real antagonist. Like I said, everyone is basically really nice. It wasn’t like ‘Forgetting Sarah Marshall’ where at least the ex-girlfriend had been a jerk. Here the worst thing done is a toast by Sidney Fife, which concerns a topic I wouldn’t for a million years give away because it happens to be the funniest moment in the movie.