The Way, Way Back (3/5 Stars)

I am going to say something rather mean a little bit later. So watch for that.

“The Way, Way Back” was inspired by an experience of Jim Rash, one half of the writing/directing team behind the movie (the other writer/director is Nat Faxon). When he was a youngster of 14 his family spent a summer at his stepfather’s beach house. On the way there his stepfather told him to rate himself between a 1 and a 10. Little Jim answered 6 thinking it was a safe number. His stepfather disagreed and said he was more like a 3 and that he should use the summer as an opportunity to get that number up. What a dick thing to say and apparently this entire movie is a sort of cinematic revenge against Jim Rash’s stepfather. The main character Duncan (Liam James) is a youngster of 14 who is insulted by his stepfather in exactly the same way in the first scene of the movie. Now I will say the mean thing. Based on the movie I saw, I think Duncan is about a 3 too.

There is an impressive cast in this movie. Steve Carell and Toni Collete play Duncan’s parents. Next-door is the hard-drinking town gossip, Allison Janney and her conveniently attractive teenage daughter played by AnnaSophia Robb. Rob Corddry and Amanda Peet hang around as friends of friends. And right down the road is a water park staffed by Sam Rockwell, Maya Rudolph, Jim Rash, and Nat Faxon. This is as good a cast that anyone can have for a comedy. But Steve Carell and Rob Corddry, seasoned comedians, are not really given a chance to tell jokes. Sam Rockwell, an actor who can’t be uninteresting, could be giving a seminar on why scenes of dialogue don’t work when only one person is trying. Maya Rudolph continues her lengthy movie streak of severely unwritten roles. And AnnaSophia Robb perhaps has the hardest job of all but I will get to that later. The main problem is that the character Duncan is in every scene. And Duncan is a truly sad and boring presence. He has no interests or hobbies. He has nothing to say. He is a truly pathetic dancer. His situation with his father and especially the first scene engenders him a great deal of sympathy, but as a movie character this can only go so far. At some point he has to prove himself on the merits of his character. Instead the movie situates the kid in the midst of cool people that have no particular reason to hang out with him and have him win certain battles that can come off as contrived. It’s like watching a youth soccer league give a trophy for “Most Improved” to the worst player on the last place team. It is an exercise in self-esteem generation with no concern of whether it is deserved.

I want to make a point of comparison here so it doesn’t seem like I’m just bashing pale emo kids. In 2008 a movie called “Role Models” came out. It starred Paul Rudd as a man that was sentenced to 100 hours of community service as a Big Brother. He gets a kid named Augie, played by Christopher Mintz-Plasse. Augie is a pale nerdy emo kid with a stepfather and a mother that think he is a loser. So it is basically the same sort of story. However in “Role Models” Augie is given a hobby. He enthusiastically participates in a real life medieval role-playing game named LAIRE. He has made his cape and costume. He is practicing his sword moves. He knows so much about it that it is successfully demonstrated that he is involved in something very fun and interesting. So by the end of the movie when Paul Rudd gets mad at Augie’s parents and says he would be “psyched” to have a kid like Augie, the scene really works. It is not an exercise in self-esteem inflation. Augie really is a great kid. “The Way, Way Back” merely has a series of characters, mainly his stepfather and a series of girls that are unnecessarily mean to Duncan. But merely having some characters being mean to another character does not make the latter likable. It makes the latter pitiable.

Which takes us back to the impossible job of AnnaSophia Robb, the hot girl next door, who is tasked with finding some reason any reason for being the romantic interest in this story. I pity her perhaps the most. I think it was a very good thing that the writers decided to make her sullen and boring too because if a vibrant enjoyable girl fell in love with Duncan I think I would actually be annoyed to the point of anger. Once, just once, I want to see a movie about a teenage loser that does not somehow get the most beautiful girl in town to fawn all over him. I know Jim Rash did not get any action when he was 14. Why did he decide to write such this girl of cliché into his story?

There is also a problem with much of the humor in the story, which is generally mean. This usually would not be a problem but it is in this case given Duncan’s main personality trait as a kid being unnecessarily picked on. Let’s take a scene that the creators apparently found so funny that they put it in every single movie trailer. At the largest water slide in the park an attendant played by middle aged Nat Faxon is in charge of spacing out the kids going the slide. He likes to play a joke in which he deliberately makes teenage girls wait to start for an inordinately long time so he can ogle them in their bikinis. Duncan gets a job at the water park and later on he pulls the exact same prank. If the whole thing about this movie is that it is uncool for people to be unnecessarily mean to Duncan, why is Duncan presented as cool when he is being unnecessarily mean to other people. In fact, there is a character (played by Jim Rash) in here whose sole purpose is to be mercilessly made fun of by the entire water park staff. This is admittedly consistently funny because Jim Rash is consistently funny but that doesn’t mean it isn’t hypocritical, a concept of which this movie seems to be completely unaware. Guess what? That is bad writing and I am going to double down on what I said about the writing team of Nat Faxon and Jim Rash in my review of “The Descendants.” They are not particularly good at what they do. I don’t care if they just won an Oscar for it.

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. 

Cedar Rapids (4/5 Stars)

What happens in Cedar Rapids, stays in Cedar Rapids.

There’s a tendency to think of insurance sales as a nondescript profession and insurance salesmen as stereotypical nondescript people. There’s also a tendency to think of Iowa as a nondescript state. Besides political primaries and corn what else is there? Cedar Rapids happens to be the second biggest city in Iowa. Des Moines, the capital, is top dog. (Although according to inside information I have from a Cedar Rapids native, it is definitely the better city as Des Moines is full of pretentious d-bags.) Enter Tim Lippe, played by Ed Helms, an insurance salesman who has never left his even smaller Iowan town of Brown Valley but is attending for the first time the big insurance sales convention in Cedar Rapids. His excitement is palpable. The hotel the convention is being held in has a pool inside of it. Wow! The best thing about this movie is that it takes all these people that we tend to have a preconceived notion of plain vanilla boringness with and crafts funny, likable, but nevertheless believable characters. I’ve always known in some vague speculation that there are insurance salesmen in Iowa. Well here they are cracking jokes, drinking in excess, and having sex. You know just like real ordinary people. Who knew?

What this movie is, above all, is a Coming-of-Age story. Forget that Tim Lippe is middle-aged; he has spent his entire life in the small town of Brown Valley and is experiencing the big city for the first time. He’s never been on a plane and takes it very seriously that he is in the emergency exit row. When the city’s sole prostitute, Bree (Alia Shawkat), approaches him outside the hotel, asks him for a cigarette, and lets him know that she is down for a party, he thanks her for her friendliness, explains he doesn’t smoke, and offers her a butterscotch candy instead. When he meets his roommate, Ronald (played by Isaiah Whitlock Jr.) he is legitimately surprised that he would be black. He also happens to be completely oblivious that most of the other conventioneers view the experience as a chance to take a vacation and let loose for a change. Tim Lippe on the other hand has a mission. He is on direct orders from his boss to give a presentation that will win the coveted Two Diamonds award. This award stands for ethics, good work, and godliness. In order to accomplish this, his boss gives him one more direction helpful direction: Stay away from Dean Ziegler. A glitch in the hotel room accommodations however allows Tim and Ronald to upgrade to a Junior Suite on the condition that they get another roommate. That third roommate is Dean Ziegler.

The “Deansy” (an affectionate nickname self-given), played by John C. Reilly, is a welcome invasion of constant one-liners and crass buffoonish behavior. You know this person from somewhere. He’s the type of immature loudmouth who makes up for his impolite garish persona with an extremely egalitarian view of friendship. Namely, he’s the type of person who will be friends with anyone who will take shots with him. These types of people, though immature and reckless, happen to lend life a certain sparkle. Who else will convince you to take a swim in the indoor pool (which closed at 11pm) at 3 am in the morning? This complete lack of self-consciousness is on full display in one great comedic scene when The Deansy decides to have a serious heart to heart with Tim and it never occurs to him to think of putting on a shirt first. As he is describing how to dance with the tiger (a loose metaphor for the insurance business) his ample gut his is in full view swaying as it were quite noticeably during his remarkably physical explanation. Here is a man eminently comfortable with himself. John C. Reilly should be commended for his self-less virtuoso performance. Rounding out the gang is Joan, played by Anne Heche, a married woman who is intent on letting what happens in Cedar Rapids stay in Cedar Rapids and Ronald, played by Isaiah Whitlock Jr. who is quite conservative but does have his guilty pleasures. For instance he collects antiques and does a pretty good impression of “Omar” from his favorite TV show HBO’s “The Wire.” Guess which one you get to see him do when the shit gets real.

Movies that employ a good amount of believable, funny, and likable characters tend to attract an accomplished list of supporting actors. This movie is no different. Here we have Sigourney Weaver (Alien, Aliens, Alien 3), Kurtwood Smith (Red from That 70s Show), Alia Shawkat (Maybe from Arrested Development), Rob Corddry (Daily Show, Hot Tub Time Machine), and Stephen Root (No Country for Old Men, Dodgeball) filling in the background of the scenes. All of them have their moments. Nobody in this movie is a huge star but that’s almost required given the subject material. A-list stars don’t really look like insurance salesmen. This you can verify for yourself during the many funny scenes of bare-ass nudity in the picture. Even Anne Heche has some curves where Hollywood Producers usually don’t allow them to be (still good looking). The director Miguel Arteta doesn’t even seem to have any qualms about shooting Ed Helms in a way that captures his double chinniness. That too is kind of a rare thing in movies.   

One strength and weakness of this movie is that it never gets too wacky or surreal. Nothing happens during the weekend of craziness that couldn’t actually happen at a convention. In this way the Comedy never rises to that level of ecstasy, which occurs only when watching the truly ridiculous or shocking things happen. So even though the laughs are consistent, this really isn’t a top-tier comedy. However, because Comedy never overtakes Reality, the characters and story are granted a certain amount of gravity. The screenplay, written by Phil Johnston, is not a satire. The writer actually seems to know a good deal about insurance and Iowa and declines to directly make fun of either. One scene deals with Joan subversively signing up Tim to do karaoke. He decides to sing an insurance sales parody of ‘O Holy Night.’ It’s full of inside jokes and technical language that I’m sure only insurance salesman would fully understand and enjoy. But you should get the jist of it and it should still be quite enjoyable. (Ed Helms: not a bad singer by the way). Tim Lippe may be naïve but the movie is on his side and his Coming-of-Age is infused with a sort of simple dignity. I was reminded about all the best characteristics of “The Office,” and especially that one scene where Michael Scott comments on Pam’s painting at her first art show and simply states, “That is our building…and we sell paper.” Tim Lippe is from the small town of Brown Valley. He sells insurance.

Hot Tub Time Machine (4/5 Stars) March 31, 2010

“Am I going to be the asshole that suggests we got into this thing and went back in time?”
- Clark Duke

I subscribe to the philosophy that there is no such thing as a bad idea for a movie. It all depends on how you deliver it. I will concede however that some ideas are generally easier to screw up than others. A movie based on a Hot Tub Time Machine is one of those. It doesn’t necessarily have to do with the subject matter. It’s just that when the creators of a movie named “Hot Tub Time Machine” hit a rough patch in the production process whether it be in writing, acting, or editing, there is always the temptation to be all like, “Well, only people with absolutely no standards would go see a movie with a title like this anyway, so why on earth are we trying to make it good? Let’s just half-ass it and hopefully these morons will think it’s a so-bad-it’s-good movie.” I’m glad to say that somehow that didn’t happen here. This movie could have easily gone down the tempting road to comedy hell known as “so-bad-it’s-good” but instead followed through on the noble ambition of actually being funny. It all has to do with delivery.

The movie starts off by introducing four losers played by John Cusack, Craig Robinson (The Office), Rob Corddry (The Daily Show), and Clark Duke (ubiquitous dude in the background of the party in Superbad). John Cusack just got recently divorced. Craig Robinson works in a degrading animal related job. Clark Duke, John’s nephew, spends his days in the basement, playing a much more athletic version of himself in a second-life computer game. That might be somewhat redeeming if his character wasn’t currently in prison. Clark spends all of his time telling himself* to do more simulated pushups. Rob Corddry is the worst of all of them. He’s a raging alcoholic, friendless, clueless, and apparently very stupid when drunk. He accidentally almost kills himself by gunning his car to Motley Crue in his closed-off garage. Confronted with the sobering idea that their old friend just tried to kill himself (which he vehemently denies), the gang gets back together in an effort to get their mojo back: They go to the ski resort they frequented when young to have a nostalgic weekend of drunken debauchery. Here they find the aforementioned hot tub, jump in, get blackout drunk, hallucinate about Reagan and Aids, and are transported back to a pivotal weekend in their lives in 1986.

The movie assumes you know all about the paradoxes of time travel, so there isn’t much time wasted with the ground already covered by ‘Back to the Future.’ The huge conflict is Clark Duke’s neurotic fear that if the old guys change anything they did that weekend, then a bunch of butterflies are going to attack and he will cease to exist. Problem is that this weekend wasn’t very good for the guys. Cusack got stabbed in the eye with a fork while dumping his then girlfriend. Craig had a very mediocre performance with his band that ended his musical career. Rob got his ass kicked twice by an asshole ski-instructor. After one night, there is no telling whether any of them will actually go through with the humiliation. Rob Corddry in particular is not prone to giving a shit about any undue influence on the time-space continuum.

The movie is directed by a young director named Steve Pink and written by a trio of writers. The story idea belongs to Josh Heald. It is his first. The two others, Sean Anders and John Morris, have been involved in other Cusack pictures like Gross Pointe Blank and High Fidelity. The movie’s humor is very broad, raucous, and scatological. But it treats it well. I have always felt that the best way to treat a throw-up joke is to tell it without buildup so it is a surprise and then go straight into something else. You don’t want to linger there. There’s a particularly good one involving a cute squirrel and Rob Corddry’s hangover reaction to it. The “punch-line” lasts about half-a-second. That’s a good time period. It doesn’t take the audience any longer than that to get the joke. These guys know what they’re doing. The entire movie is very fast paced. When there is a scene that doesn’t work entirely or isn’t incredibly funny, Pink moves onto something else fairly quickly. Hot Tub Time Machine never rises to the heights of something like “The Hangover,” but it does the best with what it has and when it notices that it might be losing the audience, it pumps out the volume, ramps up the pace, and gives the actors free rein to act as broadly and loudly as possible. 

The one revelation this movie has is Rob Corddry’s performance. I would liken it to Ed Helms’ performance in “The Hangover” last year. The guy has been funny forever on The Daily Show and in bit parts in other movies, but this is the first time that he has been given a substantial role that is custom tailored to his testorone-fueled sociopathic persona. He gives it his all and knocks it out of the park. This is the best work he has ever done. I’ve watched the guy for so long now that I felt kind of proud watching this movie. The ending of this movie is over-the-top, balls-to-the-walls, unjust, and uncalled for. But it works because it fits his performance perfectly. 

What I don’t really understand is what the hell John Cusack is doing in this movie. Lately he seems to be telling his agent to look for the craziest ridiculous movies he can possibly be in, like say 2012. Cusack has always been somewhat funny but has never been a comedian. His persona is too earnest and dare I say, normal. I don’t know, maybe I’m missing something. He was inexplicably also in such movies as Being John Malkovich, Con Air, and Bullets Over Broadway. I didn’t particularly think he fit into any of those movies either. I’m not saying he did a bad job in this one. It was just a little distracting. What the hell is John Cusack, who at one time used to be A-list, doing in a Hot Tub Time Machine? 

There are plenty of jokes and references to the 80s. Besides the parts where the characters point out Jerri Curls, leg warmers, and a black Michael Jackson, most are subtle like the iconic Sixteen Candles romantic framing, A Christmas Story inspired fight, and a direct homage to Back to the Future when Craig Robinson decides to bust out the Black Eyed Peas during his concert. Then there are supporting roles by such 80s stars like Crispin Glover and Chevy Chase as the comfortably unhelpful hot tub mechanic. The movie however doesn’t depend entirely on these references to make us laugh. It realizes that comedy requires more than just pointing them out and builds actual jokes off of the references. That’s the difference between a “so-bad-it’s-good” movie and an actually good one. The former requires an input of ironic awareness from the audience to make the jokes work. An actually good movie stands alone like say, this one.

Semi-Pro 03/16/08

(This movie is only slightly rotten) Early in Will Ferrel's career he was known as a scene stealer. (This is meant to be complimentary.) He would play these bit parts in movies such as Dick, Starsky and Hutch, Zoolander, and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. He would come into the movie, take it over for a couple minutes with a ridiculous character, and then high tail it out of there on a high note. I bring this up because Will's character in Semi-Pro is not unlike the hilarious one dimensional scene stealers he once played, except in this one, Will (Jackie Moon) stays for the entire picture. 
I never thought I would say this, but I think this movie would have been better if there was less Will Ferrel. Not that he isn't funny, its just his character is not someone you base a movie around. His character would make a kick ass scene stealer that enters when the movie needs a boost true, but then he should leave until the movie needed him again. Unfortunately Ferrel is such a big star he may not ever play those small great roles again. It was imperative that this movie was made about him, after all he was being paid the most. But the character is ridiculous and it hurts the movie that the camera would be so close that one starts seeing the impossibility of such a person. 
The movie should have been about Monix (Woody Harrelson) and Black Coffee (Andre Benjamin). These two are capable actors, though not comedians, that could have provided this movie a greater center. Instead their stories are somewhat ordinary and cliche and Andre sort of disappears in the second half. There is a host of other comedians here in bit roles. I recall seeing Rob Cordry, Ed Helms, Will Arnet, Andy Richter, and David Koechner. Andrew Daly provides the movie with some of its funniest lines as the commentator Dick Pepperfield. But the movie itself doesn't juggle these guys as well as Ferrel's other sports movies like Talladega Nights and Blades of Glory. When it comes to WIll Ferrel sports movies, this movie is not up to par with the rest. (I will say though, that a poor Will Ferrel movie is better than a lot of mediocre comedies. This movie does contain laughs)

I think this ought to be the last sports movie Will does. He's pretty much said all there is to say, and in this one, he wears his welcome out a bit. He needs to move on. (Actually looking at his future projects, it seems that he has. I'm looking forward to Step Brothers this Summer)

The Heartbreak Kid 10/05/07

I've said it before with the Farrelly's. Their movies would sometimes be better after being edited for TV. These guys aren't just okay with being funny, they want to shock also. Unfortunately those two things don't always go together. There are two jokes in this movie that fly off the ramp of shock/funny compatibility and completely miss the landing. They don't work and shouldn't be in the movie. I'm talking about that nude elderly woman with DDD breasts in a hot tub and the scene where there is urinating on jellyfish wounds. Both are unneeded and unfunny and probably cost this movie a dozen good reviews and millions in box office receipt. 

But I'm not giving it a bad review. Mostly because practically every other joke in this movie landed, the story itself was very good, it had real emotion, and a plot that surprised me as to where it went. Calling it 'The Heartbreak Kid' is no mistake. One feels real sympathy for the Stiller charachter and his extremely bad luck. He finds the women of his dreams on his honeymoon trip with a wife that turns out to be a nightmare. They kind of get married to quickly you know. At one point she calls him Edmund and he has to correct her. His name is Edward. Apparently they had never talked about it that much. 
This movie is filled with laughs from beginning to end, and between the raunch and filth there are moments of sincerity that give the characters real depth and sympathy. Like I said, all it needed was a few trims here and there. Take out about 3 minutes of bad jokes and this is as good a movie as the Farrelly's made in there Dumb and Dumber, Kingpin, and There's Something About Mary heyday.

Blades of Glory 06/22/07

A comforting, unambitious, solid comedy from people who are venturing into well known waters. This has to be Will Ferrel's third sports movie (following KIcking and Screaming, and Talladega Nights) and the umpteenth time he played a droll, unmitigating badass. Again he knocks it out of the park. Why? Because like a very good Broadway star he manages to keep basically the same performance looking fresh and new. He's definitely the heart of the comedy, although another great part of this movie is the number of small parts that are given to well known faces. This movie has enough second tier comedians to rank it with a Christopher Guest film. In supporting roles we have Rob Corddry, Luke Wilson, Craig T. Nelson, Andy Richter, that gay guy from Reno 911, various skating stars (including an inspired cameo by Sasha Coen), the duo of Will Arnett and Amy Poehler who are perfect sister and brother villains, and Jen Fishcer, from the Office, as the shy love interest. All of them are playing roles they've played a thousand times before, but all of them play them well. So it's no surprise that the movie doesn't suck. Then again it's no surprise the movie is good. There you have it: no surprises period.

The one part of the movie that could have been better was Jon Heder. The main problem with this guy is that his acting conflicts with the part he's playing. He's supposed to be an infemminite, graceful, figure skating star. Instead Heder plays the guy like he's Napolean Dynamite's cousin. He's not graceful, he's clumsy and stupid. It doesn't fit well. and since the main love interest is between him and Jen Fischer I would have liked a guy that deserved to have someone fall in love with. Jen likes this guy because of the script, not because he's in anyway good looking or interesting. The role would have been better cast with a Topher Grace or maybe even a Jason Schwartzman.

But I'm getting carried away. The movie works and to it's credit it's not all gay jokes which was a relief. Some of it is clever wordplay. Notice a banter that takes place when the kids realize they have to spend the night in the same room. Ferrel objects and says deeply "Nights are a dark time for me." Which Heder retorts with "Nights' are a dark time for everyone." Ferrel shoots right back "Not for those living in Alaska and Men with night vision goggles." Very true, this movie relies on snappy lines like that. The movie's climatic scene is climatic and I was apprehensive and caught in the moment. The movie ends on a note that in a lesser comedy would have been bonehead ridiculous, but since I liked the movie I let the filmmakers get away with it and enjoyed it instead. 

The best part is a new twist on the old movie cliche "the nervous first telephone conversation," between Jen and Jon. What's great about is that both are receiving insane advice from Will Ferrel and Amy Poehler respectively. They both awkwardly throw heavily weighted innuendo at each other and are pleasantly surprised when the other responds positively even though they aren't really talking to each other and they're sages have completely different agendas. Those are good ingredients in any comedy, convenient complications.