Deck The Halls With Pills Of Molly

Year: 2015

Director: Jonathan Levine

Cast: Seth Rogen, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Anthony Mackie

Run Time: 1 hour 41 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas! OK, if you’ve been in a Target any time since October, it might feel like it’s been Christmas for millennia. But December is finally here and the holiday season is once again upon us. And this time the present we’re receiving is much sweeter than the unwarranted ire of North Korea. From director Jonathan Levine (of 50/50, Warm Bodies, and All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, because rest assured if there’s a slasher hidden in your closet, I will dig it out) comes The Night Before, the movie Judd Apatow would make if his heart grew three sizes.

Health warning: The Grinch is not scientifically accurate. If your heart should swell this holiday season, seek medical attention immediately.

The Night Before is your standard Apatow stable tale of a manboy learning to grow up. This time it’s Ethan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a 30-something with no direction in life. In a tradition that began the Christmas Eve 14 years ago when his parents died, he and his friends gather together on December 24th to celebrate and attempt to find a mythical party known as the Nutcracker Ball. However, this particular celebration will be their last, because Isaac (Seth Rogen) is expecting a child with his wife Betsy (Jillian Bell) and Chris (Anthony Mackie) is a rising football star with a lot on his plate. And a lot of syringe marks on his ass, if you catch my drift.

As the night progresses, Ethan must learn that friendships change, and that’s not always a bad thing. When the friends’ three different goals for the night inevitably clash, Chris and Isaac must also face harsh truths about themselves. Also, Ethan pursues his ex, Diana (Lizzy Caplan), who is a woman in a bro comedy and as such doesn’t get very much to do.

Although there’s at least a solid reason she might consider forgiving Ethan. Have you SEEN his face?

Obviously, question number one when reviewing a comedy is “Is it funny?” For my rule of thumb, I propose a secondary question: “Is Randall Park in it?” I’ve written about Randall Park until the cows came home and then left again because I wouldn’t stop, so I won’t belabor the point here. But! If Mr. Park blesses a movie with one of his mystical 30-second nuggets of screen time, it’s pretty much worth watching. Here, he gradates from Thankless Role to Hyperbolically Earnest Bit Part. Progress!

Yes, The Night Before is funny. It isn’t funny in quite as explosive a way as last year’s Neighbors, but it isn’t trying to be. Jonathan Levine has confirmed that the script largely concerned the film’s dramatic beats, leaving the comedy to the improvisational whimsy of its actors. This leaves the film with a laid back, hang-out quality that’s consistently pleasant but each scene lives and dies on the strength of its various performers.

For example, whenever Seth Rogen, Jillian Bell, Mindy Kaling, or Broad City’s Ilana Glazer are onscreen, they spin even their most tripped out, dubiously conceived moments into comic gold. Gordon-Levitt on the other hand, really nails the dramatic beats despite being a bit slow on the uptake humor-wise. And then there’s Anthony Mackie. He doesn’t give a poor performance by any stretch of the imagination, but he is woefully underserved by a character that leaves him physically stymied.

Take a look. Does any part of him scream “roided up footballer?” Because at best I see “investment banker with a lacrosse habit.”

The Night Before is a wholly modern comedy that actually integrates current slang, technology, and social issues in a way that doesn’t feel like a Cool Dad giving Tumblr a whirl. But it’s also a loving look back at Christmas traditions past that covers cultural touchstones as far flung as Run DMC, Die Hard, and Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Or maybe it was the Muppet Christmas Carol. Or Mickey’s Christmas Carol. Or Scrooged. Wow, we as a culture really can’t let that one go, can we?

Regardless, we’re dealing with a fun, nostalgic, but forward-looking movie. There ain’t nothing wrong with that. The movie has its share of icy patches, like some obvious foreshadowing, a scatterbrained plot, and an absurd level of focus on a minor character that hardly works at all, but you know what you’re getting when you sit down to one of these movies and it certainly delivers.

Its comedy is low key, but it still packs two of the best cameos of the year and a genuinely side-splitting dinner table scene that I’ll be quoting non-stop for the next, oh, several dozen years. Likewise, its drama is routine and predictable but can wring your tear ducts dry if you’re not too careful.

In other words, The Night Before is a nice movie. It’s a none-too-challenging, safely R-rated holiday treat that just wants you to have a good time. It knows it can’t compete with the classics like A Christmas Story, It’s a Wonderful Life, or Silent Night, Deadly Night III: Better Watch Out! (you know… for some people), so it doesn’t try. It won’t be in my annual holiday rotation, but I sure am glad I watched it.

TL:DR: The Night Before is a pleasant, predictable, but funny bro comedy.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 906

Oh Mandy

Year: Who even knows?

Director: Jonathan Levine

Cast: Amber Heard, Anson Mount, Whitney Able

Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A quick caveat: Because this is a slasher movie, I'm going to stomp all over spoilers here. With these films it's not really what happens but how it happens that matters. If you care about spoilers, just check out the TL;DR and come back later.

Let's discuss that whole "year" thing, shall we? All the Boys Love Mandy Lane is a slasher flick produced in 2006 that then proceeded immediately nowhere. Over years and years this film struggled to get on its feet until it finally managed to get a limited release seven years later on September 6, 2013.

Over the years, the hype has built and built because there's nothing the horror community loves more than a Little Slasher That Could. I myself have been following its progress for some months now, unfortunately missing it in theaters (C'mon, a one week release in the middle of a challenging semester? Give me a chance!) and falling into a deep depression when RedBox promised me it was in stock then proceeded to claim it never existed.

So was it all worth it?

Not at all, really. But it was OK. 

Kind of like this guy's torso.

In the grand tradition of slasher films everywhere, All the Boys Love Mandy Lane begins nine months before the main action during a terrible accident. Douchey jock Dylan (Adam Powell) is having a pool party and invites Mandy Lane (Amber Heard), a goody goody who, over the summer, has been bestowed a gift from the Puberty Fairy. 

She drags along her dorky friend Emmet (Michael Welch aka Bella's annoying friend Mike from Twilight, which is oddly prescient considering Heard's overwhelming resemblance to Kristen Stewart) who then talks Dylan into jumping into the pool from his roof to try and impress her.

It does not go well.

And it would be hard to tell if she's impressed anyway considering that she gives off about as much emotion as that chimney.

Nine months later, she is invited to a weekend ranch party (those are wild, I hear) in the middle of nowhere by some of her Meat. I mean friends.

There's Red (Aaron Himmelstein), the stoner whose family owns the ranch and is in love with Mandy Lane; Bird (Edwin Hodge, whose best known role is as the Bloody Stranger in The Purge), the obligatory black friend who is in love with Mandy Lane; his best friend Jake (Luke Grimes) who looks oddly like Harry Styles and is in love with Mandy Lane; and Garth (Anson Mount), the hot older ranch hand who against all odds is in love with Mandy Lane.

There's also Chloe (Whitney Able), the requisite coked out blonde bitch whose primary means of travel seems to be tripping; Marlin (Melissa Price), the slutty brunette who flashes her boobs at random gas station workers. And of course, Mandy Lane. Who is certainly pretty, but that doesn't make up for her deficit of any discernible human characteristics. She is a virgin. She doesn't do drugs. She has boobs.

That's about it. And she runs in slow motion a lot. Basically the film is entirely comprised of shots of Mandy Lane Baywatching around the ranch interspersed with violent deaths from time to time.

According to the filmmakers, running is an adequate substitute for personality.

So it turns out that Mandy Lane's old dorky friend Emmet is orchestrating the murders (this isn't even a spoiler because they show his face more or less immediately - an uncommon move in a slasher like this) decked out with a beanie and a shotgun.

The plot pukes along in a seemingly random and inconsistent manner, almost as if the writers were just flipping through a dictionary and incorporating whatever word they landed on into the script. The lights go out because one of the boys pulled out the fuse as a prank (even though he was clearly in the room during the outage and couldn't have done so). They send Bird to the emergency generator which is just chillin' under a tree in a field. Two teens stop their escape attempt to make out in front of the car they should be using to get the hell out of there. There's hella lesbian tension that goes nowhere. And my personal favorite exchange, when Garth laments Mandy Lane's beauty and complains that she's too young for him.

Garth: "If only you had a sister ten years older..." 

Mandy Lane: "I have a cousin! She's 21."

I know that can't possibly be what she meant but I like to imagine that Mandy Lane is actually 11 years old this whole time.

I mean, that's what I looked like when I was 11.

So there is some fun to be had in the inept corners of the plot (including a truly hilarious scene where a kid in a lake has a gun pointed at him and immediately ducks underwater like an ostrich in the sand), but at some point it all gets tangled up in the big "Why?"

It is revealed that Mandy Lane and Emmet are working together on this when she stabs Chloe. For some reason, they both have apparently committed to offing themselves right after their murder spree, but all of a sudden she changes her mind and turns on Emmet. The film tries to force her into the part of a quippy Final Girl but it just doesn't mesh considering that not two minutes ago she was knifing her friend in cold blood.

And there's loads of plot holes and loose ends, the most damning of which is "Why these people?" There is no motive for the mass murder or the suicide or Mandy Lane's eventual betrayal. The film as advertised could have been a cool story about a jealous young man offing potential romantic rivals but somewhere along the line it unraveled into the moth-ridden musty sweater of a film you see before you.

Boys will be boys, I guess.

It's actually a pretty great slasher throwback in the sense that it's not really very good at all.

The substandard production values remind me of some of the trashier Census Bloodbath entertainments in a genuinely grubby way that I haven't seen this side of Y2K. The video is all a little overexposed and washed out and the audio is about as clear as listening to music playing in somebody else's headphones from across the room.

In fact, for about half the movie I couldn't even tell what names they were calling each other and thought we were watching a film about Garp, Fred, Burt, and Marley. They didn't even half enough money for pretty boys, which is shocking but refreshing for a film from 2006. So it's all very genuinely, almost heartwarmingly bad (which is a quality I greatly admire in this sick world of intentionally bad fare) and the gore is pretty neat when it shows up.

But the most noteworthy thing about the film is Amber Heard's performance. A full two years before Twilight, she had the whole "hair twist, bite lip, blank stare" thing down pat. I swear it's like watching Bella Swan in a slasher film. Which also begs the question: We all know KStew's performance as Bella is not so great - but could it also be a rip-off?

Can a just world exist that contains two Bella Swans?

Perhaps we are better off not knowing. 

Killer: Emmet (Michael Welch)

Final Girl: Mandy Lane (Amber Heard)

Best Kill: Marlin gets a shotgun shoved in her mouth. But instead of pulling the trigger, he shoves it in deeper, crushing her windpipe and severing her jaw. Totally unexpected and cool gore.

Sign of the Times: An American Idol reference; A girl gets excited about her new belly button ring; somebody's emoticons look like this: :).

Scariest Moment: The LAKE SNAKE.

Weirdest Moment: Marlin gives Jake a handjob under a map in the backseat of a car during a conversation with their friends.

Champion Dialogue: "I admire you so. Will you protect us from the bandits?"

Body Count: 8

1. Dylan hits his head on the edge of the pool.
2. Jake is shot with a shotgun.
3. Marlin's jaw is broken with a shotgun.
4. Bird is stabbed to death.
5. Garth is shot with a shotgun.
6. Red is shot to death.
7. Chloe is stabbed in the stomach.
8. Emmet is shot and decapitated. 

TL;DR: All the Boys Love Mandy Lane is a genuinely bad slasher film, but that's what makes it fun.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1437

Archive: March 3, 2013

Warm Bodies

Year: 2013
Director: Jonathan Levine
Cast: Nicholas Hoult, Teresa Palmer, John Malkovich
Run Time: 1 hour, 38 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG-13

It’s poor blog etiquette to keep apologizing for long hiatuses (hiati?), but I’m a little bit ashamed of myself that I haven’t been producing content for a while. I could say I’ve been busy with schoolwork and whatever, but that’s never really stopped me before. To be completely honest, this January-February season has been so weak that I’ve had very little to say about any of the films that have been released, and am even actively sickened by a few of them (*cough cough Identity Thief cough*).

However bogged within the mire of this travesty of a season is, well I wouldn’t call it a gem, but a movie pleasant enough to watch that it seems like a masterpiece in comparison to the likes of The Last Stand, Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, and yes even Mama (And it pains me to say this, as devoted as I am to the horror genre, Jessica Chastain, and the 2-minute Spanish short film upon which it is based, but Mama just didn’t deliver for me.).

But let’s dive into the real meat of the business, shall we? Warm Bodies is a simple story (based on the 2010 Isaac Marion book of the same name) in which R (Nicholas Hoult), a zombie, and Julie (Teresa Palmer), a human girl, fall in love in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Their love starts to have repercussions - namely the humanization of the previously incurable walking dead.

Their love is forbidden. If Julie’s warlord father (John Malkovich, who is given absolutely nothing to do here) finds out that his daughter’s new boyfriend is an undead corpse, he will be none too happy. And for good reason - R is kind of a bad influence, having just hours before eaten her ex-boyfriend (Dave Franco)’s brain.

So here we have the tragic tale of two star-crossed lovers from warring families - um, factions. Their love, born from an ancient grudge, breaks the world into new mutiny and undead blood makes living hands unclean. For never was a story of more woe than this of Julie, and her slowly rotting Romeo.

This balcony scene seems famila- Ah, I see what you did there.

The biggest problem with this movie is that there’s really no actual conflict. It plays like a shallow work of theater. The plot zooms along and hits all the right points but doesn’t really seem to connect to anything on its way there.

While this movie was enjoyable, I’ve had dreams that better explore the implications of love after the zombie apocalypse, and if dream logic beats your screenwriting, we need to talk.

There is some business with the bonies - horrific CGI monstrosities (the CGI is horrific, not the monstrosities) - who, although this is never adequately explained, seem to be undead zombies that have given in to their animal instincts and are completely remorseless, incapable of the magical self-curing by love thing that the other zombies seem to have going on.

I’ve seen better special effects in an elementary school production of Alice in Wonderland

Once the zombies start to humanize, their hearts begin beating again and they become prey for the bonies, who devour any living thing. Well, in theory. You see, the bonies don’t actually seem to be much of a threat because not once did they kill something onscreen in the entire 98 minute run time of the movie. This may have been a ploy by the creators to reduce the gore in what is primarily a paranormal romance, but it greatly diminishes any sort of suspense these creatures might have generated.

Another serious problem is how inconsistent the zombies are with the rules of their own universe. In the beginning, it is stated that zombies can only talk in grunts or, rarely, drawn-out single words. Also in the punchline to an early scene, the fact that zombies can only move at a slow shambling pace is established. But whenever it’s convenient, our zombies are running around like all of a sudden Danny Boyle is directing the film or forming completely coherent sentences even before they even start to humanize.

But enough complaining. The movie delivers enough charm, especially in the form of Hoult’s performance to endear itself to the audience. And with its tight little 98 minute span, it zips along merrily, never really going anywhere profound, but also being profoundly aware that it doesn’t really need to.

Take a gander at zombie Nick Hoult. You could just eat him up.

TL;DR  Warm Bodies is a harmless little nothing of a movie that doesn’t do a lot with its core concept but is redeemed by its sweetness and charm.

Rating: 6/10

Should I spend money on this? It may not continue to be in theaters for very long, but it is still the best date movie out there at the moment, at least until James Franco: The Great and Powerful comes out.

Word Count: 865