A Room Of Our Own

Note: I wrote this review of The Disaster Artist over a year and a half ago, after I saw a preview screening of the film. I watched it on opening night to learn that not only was it not substantially changed, not a frame other than the opening and closing credits was touched. On a second viewing, I'm a lot colder on the film, but I stand by the feelings I express in this review. It just doesn't have a lot to offer other than a one-time gimmick. Once that's used up, there's no reason to return to that well whatsoever.

Year: 2016

Director: James Franco

Cast: James Franco, Dave Franco, Sharon Stone

Run Time: 1 hour 45 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

I’m a huge fan of oddball auteur Tommy Wiseau’s bad movie masterpiece The Room. So much so that it’s not even listed on my index in the section that’s sorted by rating, because that would have broken the system entirely, not to mention my credibility. I’m also a huge fan of Greg Sestero’s behind-the-scenes book The Disaster Artist, which is hands-down the most fascinating nonfiction book I’ve ever read. It’s not only an insight into the twisted mind that birthed The Room, but the story of a man rattling against the bars of the cage of normalcy who would eventually become that twisted mind's best friend.

So when I heard they were adapting that very book into a movie, I was mighty intrigued. When it was announced that stoner comedy icon by day/berserk artistic soldier by night James Franco would be directing, I was concerned, but realized there’s hardly anybody better to bring that madcap, deranged nightmare to life.

I was wrong.

You’re tearing me apart, James Franco!

In The Disaster Artist, Greg Sestero (Dave Franco) is a young aspiring actor in San Francisco who meets the mysterious, ineffably accented, appallingly dressed Tommy Wiseau (James Franco) in an acting class. The shy young man comes to respect Tommy’s bravado and total lack of elf-awareness. They become fast friends and move to L. A. to pursue their dreams. However, Greg’s success at finding an agent (Sharon Stone) and a girlfriend (Alison Brie) makes Tommy dangerously jealous.

When they decide that the industry isn’t ready for them, they agree that they should make their own movie. They assemble a crew (Seth Rogen, Paul Scheer, Charlyne Yi…) and a cast (Ari Graynor, Josh Hutcherson, Zac Efron, Jacki Weaver…) with Tommy’s bottomless pit of money and it’s off to the races!

Oh hi, cult classic.

At its heart, The Disaster Artist is about the relationship between Greg and Tommy more than it’s about The Room itself. This is as it should be. And as a movie adaptation of said story, some details are changed to smooth the narrative along. This is also as it should be. As much a fan as I am of the book, I understand and respect that certain choices had to be made when adapting the material. However, the end product is both completely unrecognizable as the original true story and kilotons less interesting. The quasi-horror story of a dark, twisted friendship between a bipolar lunatic and an insecure ingénue has been transformed into a wacky, whitewashed buddy picture about never giving up on your dreams.

It lurches so hard to fit a three-act structure that it’s gut-churning. And again, to make myself clear, I’m not upset that they streamlined the casting process or combined multiple characters into one or cut out the subplot about Retro Puppet Master (OK, maybe I’m a teensy bit upset about that one). I’m upset they capsized years of bizarre behavior, manipulation, homoeotic tension, and drama in favor of a bog standard “girlfriend jealousy,” man-child, Apatow-approved plot structure, which they go ahead and totally ignore in the third act, arriving at zero resolution for either character. And this is not a “true stories don’t have endings” situation. By this point, everything true about this story is rotting under a stack of old TV Guides at the landfill.

I guess they were too chicken to commit to their story. Cheeeep, cheepcheepcheep.

That’s not to say that The Disaster Artist isn’t funny. It completely misses the point of its own story but it still has the juice to be pleasantly amusing. It’s not an uproarious affair, but there is plenty of that awkward comedy that’s rampant in The Room itself, especially in any scene where Tommy has to interact with people out in the real world. It certainly helps that James Franco completely disappears into the role, delivering a pitch-perfect imitation of Wiseau’s haunting strangeness. His comic timing is on point, and frankly he saves the movie from itself, the cuckoo center of the maelstrom of muddled plot elements.

Franco has also assemble a veritable A-Team of essential comic actors for lightning quick cameos, though – mysteriously – some of them (including Dirty Grandpa-redeemer Jason Mantzoukas) aren’t even given any real gags to work with. My favorite would be John Early, who plays a major agent's assistant and needs to get noticed by more people immediately. But frankly, the non-Tommy/Greg cast of The Room are given short shrift in a series of rapidfire scenes that blast through the actual making of the film. Only Ari Graynor (as Juliette Danielle, who played the blonde temptress Lisa) and Zac Efron (as Dan Janjigian, who played the psychotic drug dealer Chris-R.) make any sort of impression as the film completely ignores them. Seth Rogen also livens up several scenes from the peanut gallery, eking comedy around the edges.

To be completely honest, the film’s only acting liability is Dave Franco, who puts almost no effort into crafting a distinct personality out of Greg Sestero. Where James is playing Tommy Wiseau, Dave is just playing Dave Franco, coasting on his looks, his stock mannerisms, and a truly pitiful fake beard that looks like he got tarred and feathered by Fozzie Bear.

You are NOT my favorite customer, Dave.

The film has its ups and its downs, but it’s only half bad. It feels more like a home movie of celebrities hanging out than an actual work of cinema, but there’s certainly a place for that. I do wish it spent more time on the process of creating The Room (in fact, the longest segment of the film is the totally pointless premiere scene, where we get to sit with the actors and watch their weird facsimiles of actual scenes from The Room for what feels like hours. I’ve already seen The Room. I don’t need to watch fans watching a fan recreation of it, celebrities or not), because that’s where the more interesting story lies (in this watered-down version, anyway). And as it stands, if you haven’t actually seen the film, you’ll be flummoxed by the whole process. But I don’t mind spending 90 minutes with these people in this setting. If you’re a Room acolyte, seek this movie out. If not, leave your stupid wallets in your pocket.

TL;DR: The Disaster Artist is an oddball biopic that misses the story mark but lands the humor.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1189

Popcorn Kernels: Movies I Missed (On Purpose)

In which we release mini-reviews of two fairly recent comedy films that managed to pass me by until now.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno

Year: 2008

Director: Kevin Smith

Cast: Seth Rogen, Elizabeth Banks, Craig Robinson

Run Time: 1 hour 41 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

In order to make enough money to pay their rent, two slacker friends decide to produce and star in a porn film, but how will this affect their relationship?

Pretty much any movie starring Seth Rogen between 2007 and 2010 was created explicitly to cater to the greasy, speckly daydreamers of the world who wanted to believe the busty blonde down the hall would find the lovable oaf buried deep beneath the Cheeto dust-crusted exterior. It’s the kind of nerd-fulfillment fantasy Judd Apatow has been trafficking in since day one, and the only person I can think of who is more suited to bring that icky feeling to life is Kevin Smith. …Enter Kevin Smith.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno is about Elizabeth Banks falling for Seth Rogen and while both are admirable performers, the spark isn’t even there on paper. I’m not even talking about their disparate physical attractiveness. Zack could be played by Hugh Grant and Miri’s interest in him would still be deeply questionable. It’s all in the writing, which is skeevy and sweaty in a deeply disconcerting manner despite the supposed sex positivity of the script. 

The film crows over the female form like a cackling magpie, exempting men altogether from its bone-chilling leer. This is a movie strewn with completely naked women that treats its one full frontal male scene like it’s something shocking and disgusting. Male perspectives in sex films are just the worst, aren’t they? Despite Banks’ attempt at creating a shaded, multi-dimensional human being, Miri is merely a prize to be won: a fun fair sack of flesh, blood, and mammary glands. 

And Zack and Miri treats its minor characters even worse, if you can believe it. Craig Robinson is forced to contort into every stereotype in the book, and some that have been scribbled in the margins (whipped sitcom husband, wise best friend, irrationally angry black man), and the rest of the porno cast are given no introduction, with personalities ranging from one-note (Jason Mewes’ clueless sex fiend) to topless window dressing to “no seriously, who are you?” Then they’re sent floundering through a fundamentally broken story with a distended first act that swallows half the run time, a bungled time jump that kills the momentum at a climatic juncture, and a central relationship that vomits out manufactured filler drama in an unending stream. There are such deep cracks in the narrative here that James Cameron wants to make a documentary exploring them.

Is it funny? I suppose. Justin Long has an excellent extended cameo as a gravel-throated gay porn star, and there are jokes throughout that work when they’re not being extravagantly racist, sickeningly misogynistic, or they completely miscalculate the film’s capacity for scatological humor. Zack and Miri aims to shock, and it succeeds, but hardly in the way it intends to. Its sex is too tame to be titillating, and it can’t sustain such a deeply disjointed story on a pocketful of dick jokes. I say Zack and Miri Make a Porno is a tremendously lazy film, and the Windows Movie Maker credits that grace its front and back end seem to agree with me. I’d love to see this material handled by another director, but unfortunately Zack and Miri – and especially Kevin Smith – just don’t turn it on.

Rating: 4/10

Vacation

Year: 2015

Director: John Francis Daley & Jonathan Goldstein

Cast: Ed Helms, Christina Applegate, Skyler Gisondo 

Run Time: 1 hour 39 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A now grown-up Rusty Griswold decides to take his family on a road trip to Wally World in an attempt to smooth over their problems.

Now, here’s a movie I never thought I’d see, let alone like. A belated straggler from the 2000’s remake boom (seriously, other than Ghostbusters, who’s making remakes anymore? Remakes are so passé, sequels are what’s In this season), updating material that nobody has given a passing thought to in over a decade, Vacation seemed like the most obnoxious kind of family comedy. And to be honest, it doesn’t really try to be anything different. All the scatological gags, picked-clean sexual references, and oddly violent slapstick that you might expect are front and center, but Vacation prevails in spite of that.

I blame the cast. Ed Helms has always been a reliable comic presence, even if he doesn’t stand out in a sea of funny 40-something white guys. And he’s surrounded by a bevy of delightful professionals, first and foremost Christina Applegate. I’ve never paid much attention to Applegate beyond her cameo appearance on Friends, but she’s utterly brilliant here, wrapping up the classic Apatowian pent-up manboy archetype within the guise of a tired suburban mom. And then we have, packed in like sardines, Leslie Mann, Charlie Day, Caitlin Olsen, Michael Peña, Keegan-Michael Key, and f**king Chris Hemsworth, who Ghostbusters has taught us is a bona fide force of nature.

This cast elevates the mostly generic material, making it funny enough that when the script hits its patches of actual genius, they don’t seem out of place. The family car is a bubbling fount of hilarity with its endless absurdities and M.C. Escher-esque design, the young brothers are a wonderfully mismatched pairing, and there is a spot of psychosexual terror that cold-cocks your funny bone. It’s not highbrow, to be certain, but there are actual laughs here - laughs that Vacation comes by honestly, and that is a remarkable achievement.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 953

Cleanup On Aisle 69

Year: 2016

Director: Greg Tiernan & Conrad Vernon

Cast: Seth Rogen, Kristen Wiig, Michael Cera

Run Time: 1 hour 29 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

I can take or leave Seth Rogen. When he’s doing Neighbors or plying himself in The Comeback, I’m all in. When he’s working with Judd Apatow, I’m 50/50. I’ve never disliked a performance of his, nor have I been utterly enamored of one. But when it comes down to his producing and writing choices, I can’t deny that he’s hit his stride. While I haven’t adored every movie in his recent string of films (This is the End, The Interview, Neighbors 2), he’s unafraid of being conceptually audacious, and I have heaps of respect for that.

Which brings us to the latest entry in his oeuvre: Sausage Party, an R-rated twist on the Pixar ethos. While he comedy’s juvenile at best, the script has no right to be as thematically sharp and satirical as it is. He can put one more notch in his belt because, no paper, this one’s another win.

Butcher paper, that is.

In Sausage Party, the food in the grocery store is sentient, and all they want is to be taken home to the Great Beyond by us, the Gods. They believe we will grant them an eternity of happiness and sensual pleasure. However, when Honey Mustard (Danny McBride) is returned by a customer having become a shuddering wreck, hot dog Frank (Seth Rogen) begins to have doubts about the Great Beyond. His antics cause him and his devout bun girlfriend Brenda (Kristen Wiig) to fall out of their cart, forced to find their home aisle before they lose their freshness.

Brenda wants her journey to lead her home, and Frank wants his journey to lead to the truth. They’re joined by Kareem Abdul Lavash (David Krumholtz) and Sammy Bagel Jr. (Edward Norton), two walking stereotypes that act out the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for some godforsaken reason. Also there’s Barry (Michael Cera), a stunted hot dog who has seen the truth about the Great Beyond – that kitchens are essentially less-fun Jigsaw traps for groceries – and struggles to return to the store to warn his friend. Oh, and a douchey Douche (Nick Kroll) wants to destroy Frank and Brenda for accidentally bending his nozzle.

I don’t know whether it’s the fault of the middling-at-best, horrifyingly-inelegant-at-worst animation or my blissful ignorance, but I definitely thought he was a toilet brush for like 15 minutes.

Do you think cartoon characters cussing is the funniest thing in the world? Then you should just pre-order your special edition quadruple disc Blu-Ray now, because you are going to love the s**t out of Sausage Party. As expected, the film has one foot firmly plated in the sophomoric at all times, but it’s the other foot that’s going interesting places.

This whole script is a feature-length allegory about the creation of religion, the horrible things it makes people to to one another and themselves, and why we shouldn’t be so quick to cast judgment on people who subscribes to different belief systems than us. Also, the moral is that raging hedonism is our only defense against our inevitable mortality, so it’s pretty much like Toy Story 3. I know, right? You got your subtext all over my R-rated comedy! How did this get in here? It’s an incredibly clever story that has heck-all to do with naughty hijinks, but whatever. I’m there.

It’s to the point that I can actually see somebody’s life philosophy changing to some degree after a screening of Sausage Party. As alarming as that sounds, that honestly might just be a good thing. I’m physically upset by how deeply I respect the intellectual cogs spinning behind the movie’s colorful cartoon façade. And then, of course, the rest of the movie is mostly super racist.

Thanks, everybody. I was getting too deep into liking this movie.

Not only is the humor desperately crude, which I’m fine with, it gives in to its urge to pattern every ethnic food after the most revolting racial stereotypes that can be produced by a screenwriting cabal of white dudes. Shock humor is all well and god, and the film does manage to convert the hideously insensitive Lavash and Bagel arc into something sweet and then appropriately twisted, however most of the racial humor is not only distasteful, but kind of lazy.

It doesn’t take more than a teaspoon of thought to make Grits (Craig Robinson) an angry black stereotype or to name your Native American liquor character (Bill Hader, why) firewater. So it’s pointless as well as disrespectful. This is humor that’s older than anyone reading this, and it’s certainly not funny today, if it ever was to begin with.

I’m terribly sorry to have such bad news to report about that aspect of the humor, because a lot of Sausage Party is really fun. When it goes whole hog depicting violence or sexuality, the film is at its best, and I’m not just saying this as a horror fan. Watching a film so gleefully unafraid to push the envelope of Hollywood sensibilities is a massively liberating experience. It’s certainly not for everyone, but as a cartoon about food, it’s enough degrees separated form human experience that even non-gorehounds should be able to get a kick out of it.

So much of Sausage Party is fun and intelligent and so much of it is crass and low-rent that it’s difficult to synthesize a proper score for the monstrosity. What I’ll say is this: Go see t if you have a high threshold for fratty, tasteless comedy. If you don’t, who cares. Have a nice day.

TL;DR: Sausage Party is mostly irreverent, weirdly intelligent fun despite its unfortunately prevalent racism.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 962

Girls Next Door

Year: 2016

Director: Nicholas Stoller

Cast: Seth Rogen, Rose Byrne, Zac Efron

Run Time: 1 hour 32 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

As you may recall, the frat comedy Neighbors landed on my Top 10 list of 2014. It’s a movie that really resonated with me, what with my love of college movies and shirtless Zac Efrons. But more than that, it was a definite surprise: a genuinely funny comedy that was from the Apatow school of filmmaking yet had a hilarious woman up front and center with the man-children. That woman was, of course, Rose Byrne, who proved in neighbors what she would cement in stone and toss into the river with Spy: that she is a tremendously gifted comic talent, capable of delivering outrageous punchlines with deadpan certainty.

As you might imagine, I brought a lot of baggage to Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising. I won’t say the movie completely hefted the load, but it certainly called over a bellboy to pick up a suitcase or two and help me upstairs. But enough with this needlessly elaborate metaphor! Let’s let the movie answer for itself.

Well-spoken, Neighbors 2.

In Neighbors 2, Mac (Seth Rogen) and Kelly Radner (Rose Byrne) are living a quiet life (literally quiet since the frat next door moved out) with their daughter. When Kelly gets pregnant, they decide to move into a bigger home, but they skimp on the escrow, meaning that they have 30 days to keep the potential buyers convinced that they’re making the right decision, or else they will end up with two homes and empty bank accounts.

Unfortunately, as is wont to happen in comedy sequels, this is the exact time that a group of hard-partying sorority girls led by Shelby (Chloë Grace Moretz) decide to move in next door, frustrated by the American university system’s refusal to allow sororities to throw parties in official sorority houses. They are being mentored by Teddy (Zac Efron), the ex-frat president who is trying to find a place where he belongs now that his friends are all growing up, getting careers and fiancés and whatnot.

Now that we’ve plugged the requisite “man-child who needs to learn to grow up” into the Apatowian formula, let’s get this review rolling.

Basically, the fulcrum on which Neighbors 2 is balanced is sexism: what it is, how it works, what to do if you get it. This is most likely a knee-jerk response to Ann Hornaday’s wildly misguided claim that films like Neighbors promoted misogyny, more or less directly leading to the tragic shooting at UC Santa Barbara back in 2014. Obviously, I’m not here to defend Judd Apatow’s work as un-misogynist, having leveled that complaint against the man myself, but Neighbors (a production in which Apatow held no official role) was very unfairly caught in the crossfire.

However, the film’s use of feminist themes and lessons give depth to what is otherwise a pretty standard comedy sequel plot. It allows its protagonists a new avenue in which to grow rather than undoing their previous character arcs, thus continuing their story in a satisfying, organic manner. One drawback to this approach is a rather overstuffed cast list (between the Radners, the real estate people, the frat bros, the sorority girls, and the crammed-in cameos that waste returning players like Lisa Kudrow, the population of Neighbors 2 is higher than my hometown’s), but that’s a small price to pay for an actually interesting comedy part 2.

One admirably strange side effect of this approach is that it evokes the work of Russian director Sergei Eisenstein. His films, including the famous Battleship Potemkin, have no discernible characters - focusing on the exploits of the collective rather than the individual. And such is the case here. Rather than any one character rising from the pack, it’s just an old collective vs. a young collective. This is not a compliment, but it’s too odd to be quite as frustrating as it could be.

However, the fact does remain that the sorority sisters, as the only major characters that are entirely new to the film, are given no opportunity to develop a real backstory or personality. The character moments for anyone are few and far between, but the girls really do get the short end of the stick, acting as mouthpieces for the film’s feminist themes rather than genuine, unique personalities, skating through a plot that we’ve seen a million times and thus doesn’t feel the need to go into too much detail.

Chloë Grace Moretz does manage some interesting work, ingraining her overconfident bravado with a vulnerable fear about finally being out on her own for the first time and not really understanding how the world works. But overall, her performance falls back a little too often on hers standard, shouted line readings to really assert itself.

By the way, if possible, I’d like some kind of plaque to acknowledge that I’m the first person to ever compare a Zac Efron movie to Battleship Potemkin.

I suppose that, buried beneath the dissertation on sexism, there’s a comedy movie in there somewhere, so let’s talk about it. Neighbors 2 opens with a surprisingly delightful scene that adds a fresh tag onto a totally predictable joke, breathing new life into its gross-out humor and proving that this sequel will have the exact same crude sensibility that made it such a gonzo comedy the first time around.

Obviously, the humor is a notch or so lower than the original, such is the price of sequeldom. But all things considered, Neighbors 2 is a bit of triumph, maintaining much of its comic potency thanks to Rose Byrne’s continuing excellence in the field of machete sharp comic timing and Zac Efron’s continuing willingness to poke fun at himself, adding an element of giddy darkness to his role this time around. If Dirty Grandpa didn’t hang on his filmography like a malignant lump, I might say hew was improving by the year.

There are a lot of genuine laughs in Neighbors 2, especially if your sense of humor is as sophomoric as mine tends to be in my shameful heart of hearts. Only one gag truly rankles, a bit on police racism that scrapes across the film like a jagged edge, capsizing the comedy’s tone with a whiff of too-grim hyperviolence. But other than that, neighbors is a peculiarly solid sequel, never matching its predecessor but always defeating the middling expectations of a comedy continuation.

TL;DR: Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising is an excellent continuation of the original film that's a little too overstuffed to have any real characters but nevertheless funny.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1104

Reviews In This Series

Neighbors (Stoller, 2014)

Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising (Stoller, 2016)

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

It's Hard Out Here For A Pimp

Sharp-eyed readers may have noticed some of the movie posters schizophrenically flickering along the "Coming Soon" section of my blog's sidebar. Rest assured, everything truly is coming soon. "Soon" is an exquisitely relative term chosen for its very nebulousness. But over this summer, between work, the Scream 101 podcast (which I am very proud of), and the inordinate amount of movies that I have been watching, it's just been a struggle to prioritize which reviews to get out first according to the system of extremely complex algorithms I have set in place for myself.

My accountants are hard at work figuring things out and you can prepare for an onslaught of reviews like you've never witnessed before, but in the meantime, please enjoy these two mini-reviews for films that I watched recently, but about which I had only relatively minor thoughts to share.

Hustle & Flow

Year: 2005

Director: Craig Brewer

Cast: Terrence Howard, Taryn Manning, Taraji P. Henson

Run Time: 1 hour 56 minutes 

MPAA Rating: R

A small-town pimp thinks he has what it takes to make it in the hip hop business.

Some movies with that exact plot line are inspiring. Some are treacly and shrill. Most are painfully generic. But a very special few anchor themselves around a protagonist so vehemently, ho-slappingly unlikeable that you actively root against him. Perhaps this isn’t what Hustle & Flow was going for, but that’s at least what makes it interesting.

“Interesting” does not always mean “good,” but Hustle & Flow flirts with the combination when it’s not being nauseatingly misogynistic. Which is most of the time. You see, Mr. Pimp, played by the terrifyingly good Terrence Howard, lives with three of his hos, one of whom is pregnant, one of whom he kicks out on the street with her baby, and all of whom he menaces with precise regularity like the world’s most evil cuckoo clock. And then he turns around and records songs like “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp” or “Whoop That Trick” about how these skanks need to understand that he’s actually a super sensitive guy who’s beating them for their own good. As he performs a job that they could easily do themselves. If they even wanted to. Which they don’t.

It’s tough to process the urge to strangle your protagonist with 8-track tape when you’re not watching a horror movie or some other genre actively meant to shock or horrify you. The really disheartening thing about Hustle & Flow is that it doesn’t seem to notice any of this. There’s an awe-inspiring level of cognitive dissonance going on between the Take the Lead/Freedom Writers story that it imagines it’s telling and the GTA XXI: Harlem Shake amorality that actually plays out onscreen. In the film’s most triumphant, romantic moment, a kiss between Howard and Taraji P. Henson, it’s hard not to think, “What, she suddenly forgot that the only reason he’s not forcing her to sleep with a stranger is that because she’s carrying another stranger’s baby so she’s damaged goods?” It’s not exactly Sleepless in Seattle.

As a character study, there is a mild degree of nuance, but the film is far more interested in exploring how the man’s ambitions and talent have led him to believe that he deserves instant success and the consequences of his realization that that’s not exactly how it works. The film’s acknowledgement of reality – that just being a good rapper is only a start to getting big, that there’s a lot of hard, thankless work involved, is its biggest strength.

Its second biggest strength is its setting, which effortlessly evokes the town’s poverty in simple, sad, beautiful details: a splash of garish neon in a rain puddle, water slowly dripping into buckets through the leaky roof of a strip club, and the ever-present, grotesquely un-Hollywood sheen of sweat that glistens on every performer, a la The Fighter or Do the Right Thing. And Howard is admittedly terrific, bolstered by strong, committed performances by his side-hos, Taryn Manning and Taraji P. Henson. But damn, is this film unpleasant to watch.

Rating: 6/10

Knocked Up

Year: 2007

Director: Judd Apatow

Cast: Seth Rogen, Katherine Heigl, Paul Rudd

Run Time: 2 hours, 9 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

An entertainment news presenter accidentally finds herself impregnated by an unemployed pothead.

Speaking of movies by noted misogynist filmmakers starring a pregnant woman and a less than credible romantic lead…

OK, obviously I took a lot of creative license with that description, but surely it hasn’t escaped the notice that in Judd Apatow’s parables of schlubby man-children learning about the splendors of adulthood and heteronormative pair-bonding, the women are vehicles for this transition more often than they are thinking, breathing, flesh-and-blood human beings. That said, Knocked Up is one of his better efforts, thought I believe I can be forgiven for slightly preferring Forgetting Sarah Marshall.

First and foremost, Knocked Up is funny. That’s the important thing, I suppose. However, much like Trainwreck (review pending) and many other flicks in his filmography, he film is funniest when Apatow throws open the floodgates on his massive stable of comic actors, allowing thrilling fringe performances from Jason Segel, Kristen Wiig, Ken Jeong, Adam Scott, Bill Hader, Charlyne Yi, Craig Robinson, and Alan Tudyk to wring laughs from the sidelines. In the midst of such a squall, Heigl and Rogen hardly make any impression at all, finding themselves likewise outshone by co-leads Leslie Mann and Paul Rudd, as the squabbling married couple providing a benchmark for how our unhappy pair shouldn’t strive to be.

In fact, the strongest scenes with any of the leads are when they buddy off into same-sex pairs: Mann with Heigl and Rudd with Rogen. It hobbles this romantic comedy somewhat that its romantic pair is by leaps and bounds its weakest link, also stunting the flow of several of its major story arcs, but there is enough genuinely good material at work here to buoy the movie past any obstacle.

At the end of the day, it’s quippy, poppy, and a lot of fun, and I can’t begrudge it of that. It doesn’t leave me with a strong sense that I truly understand the mechanics of this couple or the reason they decided to keep this baby and raise it together, but damn it, it’s a good enough time that it’s hard to care too much. Nothing a nice, even slicing of fifteen minutes couldn’t fix. Even in the early years, Apatow never knew how to edit himself.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1093

Kim Jong Oops

Year: 2014

Director: Evan Goldberg & Seth Rogen

Cast: James Franco, Seth Rogen, Randall Park

Run Time: 1 hour 52 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

It is at this point obligatory to point out that it's obligatory to point out the controversy surrounding Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg's new film The Interview. But all this hand-wringing will get us nowhere, so let's get right to it. Sony was hacked and theaters that premiered The Interview on Christmas day were threatened. You can read all about it in my article here. 

But after a swift backtrack (possibly having realized that thanks to the media coverage and first amendment-touting American audiences, they would make approximately a kerjillion percent more in box office than if the release were uneventful), Sony gave the film a limited release in a couple hundred indie theaters nationwide and allowed flag-hungry viewers to do their patriotic duty and purchase it via online streaming one day early. Everyone in the media and across the globe seems a little muddled about the ramifications of this decision, especially now that there's considerable evidence that North Korea might not have actually been directly involved. But let's just agree not to take anybody on the entire planet at their word at this point and look at the facts.

The Interview has been released. So far, nothing terrible has happened. And, from the physical evidence of the film itself I can conclusively say that if nuclear tensions arise from this decent but underwhelming comedy, then the world is in even worse shape than I thought. It was not wise of Sony to greenlight a film about the assassination of a currently standing leader, especially one as notoriously three-crayons-short as Kim Jong-un. Nor was it wise to release it on Christmas because seriously, who is programming these Christmas releases this year? American Sniper? Unbroken? I'm gagging on the gritty bioptastic jingoism.

But The Interview is a lark. It's just another frat comedy, using the background of a derelict regime to lend gravitas and irony to the parade of dick jokes.

In the measuring contest, the tank wins by a landslide.

As just about everyone in the solar system knows at this point, The Interview is about entertainment "journalist" Dave Skylark (James Franco) and his producer Aaron Rapaport (Seth Rogen), who are asked to assassinate North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un (Randall Park) when they score an exclusive interview with him. The two best buds see this as a way of pushing their careers forward, but when Kim and Dave form a fast friendship and Aaron falls head-over-heels for Sook (Diana Bang), a sexy propagandist, things get complicated.

And by "complicated," I mean "North Korean boner jokes." But I don't mean to devalue the film in its entirety. There are some genuinely decent moments of comedy and - it must be said - the dick jokes can be pretty great. As is to be expected by anyone who has been awake in the Anglosphere for more than five minutes, there are moments that tip into the less sensitive end of the spectrum, but the whiffs of misogyny, racism, and homophobia are not strong enough to be truly poisonous.

This is literally all we can ask in a movie where every female character (of which there are a mere two) is immediately treated as a source of erotic pleasure, even if they're in a position of power - say, a CIA agent or a high-ranking official of a militaristic dictatorship. Here's a little experiment - next time you have a female judge at a hearing (although - since you are reading this blog - I am certain that you are a peace-loving, law-abiding, respectable individual and won't find yourself in this situation), wolf whistle as loud as you can and follow that up with a nice "va-va-voom" or two. See where that gets you and send me a note in the comments.

Science is fun!

There are plenty of fun, non-execrable comic moments, especially in the first half hour (in which the film focuses more or less exclusively on incisive pop culture riffs rather than uneven political satire), but none will have you carted off to the E. R. for a busted gut. And they begin to peter out once the duo actually arrives in North Korea, which isn't as thoroughly represented as it could have been, either through shyness or lack of current information. Although the destitution of the country is mentioned many times, it is almost never seen. In a way it makes sense - it's easier to understand why Skylark would have trouble seeing the problem, and this is a comedy - not a documentary. But if we're going the political route, which a movie like this inevitably can't avoid, why not go all in?

This sort of gradual wearing out as the film goes along is present in the aesthetics as well as the comedy. In fact, the very first moments of the film are its absolute best, using color theory, framing, composition, and juxtaposition to establish the bleak atmosphere of North Korea as well as the fact that Dave Skylark is an ill-informed man-child whose program can't hold up to the likes of hard news. This is all accomplished swiftly and efficiently in the opening minute and a half, a level of cinematic prowess that swiftly vanishes, like the very last of our Christmas cookies before I woke up this morning, damn it!

But despite its drawn-out decline, The Interview is never less than pleasant, though it evaporates from the tongue as soon as it's tasted. Riding as it does on the backs of a gaggle of strong performances, it may be wobbly but it never falls down. James Franco isn't far from his usual schtick, but his act of character creation is more than meets the eye, with subtle, ingrained tackiness that draws some big laughs. Seth Rogen is consistent as always, but Randall Park and Lizzy Caplan (as the sexy Agent Lacey) are the real standouts in this parade of malfeasance.

That's right, smoke that victory cigar.

I have sung Park's praises again and again, but he outdoes himself as the little-seen despot, finding outrageous humor in Kim Jong-un's stunted personality, but simultaneously harnessing a raw power that breaks through his cuddly teddy bear persona and makes him a character to truly fear. Any actor could have coasted on the realities of the dictator's presence in the audience's subconscious, but Park goes above and beyond to menace and create a subtle, cunning villain that elevates the cheery comedy into something even remotely meaningful.

And although Lizzy Caplan's character is nothing but a flesh shell with a great rack, she brings a warmth and humanity to the role, grounding even the most ridiculous one-liners into a realistically human character despite her remarkably minuscule screen time. Without these four performers, The Interview would collapse like a despotic regime after the removal of its leader.

All in all, The Interview is a decent way to kill an hour and a half, but it's nothing to write home about. It's especially nothing to write to North Korea about. Its ill-handled release is a source of great turmoil in the industry at the moment, but as the waters settle, let's allow this film to become a footnote rather than define the moviegoing experience of 2014. It's really not memorable enough to deserve much more than that.

If you take one thing away from this movie, please let it be that Randall Park deserves more starring roles. Make it happen, America.

TL;DR: The Interview is a forgettable bro comedy driven by several terrific performances.
Rating: 6/10
Should I Spend Money On This? That's your call. If you want to do your part for 'Murca, you can rest assured that you'll be pretty safe in doing so. If you want to skip it, you won't miss much.
Word Count: 1312

Boys Next Door

Year: 2014

Director: Nicholas Stoller

Cast: Seth Rogen, Rose Byrne, Zac Efron

Run Time: 1 hour 36 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Sure, Apatow comedies are funny enough. But after a couple years of increasingly bland fare like Wanderlust, The Five-Year Engagement, and This Is 40, it has been getting harder and harder to produce enthusiasm for what were already typically overlong and haphazardly misogynistic films.

What makes Neighbors interesting is that, for all its Apatow DNA (director Nicholas Stoller, co-producer Evan Goldberg, writers Andrew J. Cohen and Brendan O'Brien, and stars Seth Rogen, Rose Byrne, Christoper-Mintz-Plasse, and Carla Gallo), Judd himself is nowhere to be found. Sure, his ghost is present in the framework, but this is an Apatow-free zone and, to tell you the truth, it turned out pretty great.

I can not promise that this isn't creating bias.

At a brisk hour and a half, Neighbors is about what separates the men from the boys (and the women from the girls) in one of the most thematically relevant comedies from this group to date. Seth Rogen plays Mac Radner, a new parent who has just moved into a suburban neighborhood with his wife Kelly (Rose Byrne). Despite their attempts to stave off maturity, they can't help but be annoyed when a fraternity moves in next door, keeping them up late with their wild partying and loud music. 

Although the Radners initially intend to bond with fraternity president Teddy (Zac Efron) and vice president Pete (Dave Franco) and feel young again, they eventually turn the frat against them when they call in a noise complaint. This initiates an escalating series of pranks as the Radners try to get the frat kicked out of their neighborhood and the Delta Psi brothers seek revenge.

All I can say is hooray for R-rated comedies. If slapped with a PG-13 rating, Neighbors could have been a delightful but routine affair. As it stands, however, it is a sharp, biting comedy that isn't afraid to go the extra mile in depicting the basest of human emotions and activities.

I mean, come on, this is a fraternity. PG-13 has no business here. 

Although the gross-out humor of this film's peers is certainly present and active, Neighbors is eminently less disgusting and crude than many of its predecessors, instead opting for character-driven comedy that comes from what seem like actual human beings, instead of the sketchy one-note constructs of your typical frat comedy. 

And the gross-out stuff that we do get is delightfully as far from misogyny as any film about a fraternity can get. There's penis humor galore and nary a wanton breast to be seen, except in the most plot-specific scenarios. Kelly has more of a character than "Mac's Nagging Wife," and there's even an entire scene devoted to deconstructing that character stereotype. Go Neighbors!

The characters are well fleshed out, getting at least as realistic as they can within this sort of scenario, all with their own motivations and goals. It's telling that the film continues to be interesting and compelling even when it dives into its more forthrightly dramatic scenes, usually an obligatory but shallow addition to this sort of comedy.

The central theme of the film is the terror of growing up and facing responsibility and each of the protagonists faces it in a different way. The Radners are afraid of losing their youth and being tied down in the suburbs with a kid when they could be out exploring the world. The frat brothers, especially Teddy, are frightened of what the world is going to be to them once the protective veneer of the fraternity is stripped away by graduation.

And that's not the only thing that will be stripped away.

So we have characters and moments with unusual resonance, comedy with unusual bite and snark, and on top of all that we get the most unusual thing of all - modern references that actually land. Because films take so long to produce, those that fill themselves with current technology and pop culture references tend to become dated even before they are released.

That's how we ended up with comedies still making MySpace jokes long after the beginning of the Zuckerberg Dynasty. Every modern touch here (including a solid Game of Thrones reference and a ponderous preponderance of FaceTime) will admittedly be dated at some point, but during this month of this year has absolute currency, proving that Hollywood is finally making a solid attempt to connect to the younger crowd instead of the feeble gimcrackery of past comedies that insist that people are still amused by the Harlem Shake.

We were never amused.

The comedy is consistently splendid, raising the question of why Rose Byrne isn't allowed to do this kind of thing more often. She is the absolute standout of the film, always halfway between her "Decent Mother" instincts and the wild impulses that make her a loose cannon, far more than any of her male cohorts. Her timing is pitch perfect and her line deliveries are consistently hilarious and Hollywood needs more Rose Byrne comedies right now!

The only other cast member who can even approach her caliber is Dave Franco, who absolutely owns his secondary role, grounding even his most emotional moments in an untouchably hilarious comedic performance. The subtlety of his role plays a large part in humanizing the entire fraternity, although the other actors do their best as well.

Including, oddly enough, the baby.

Rogen and Efron aren't standouts, but they work just as well as they need to and their later action sequence is one of the funniest moments committed to film in 2014. Other standouts are Lisa Kudrow, who shines as a pithy dean, and Randall Park as a representative at a job fair.

Kudrow has long since proven her worth as an actress, at least to me, with cult hits like Web Therapy and The Comeback, delighting in once again playing a caustic woman of authority. But Park is one of the most consistently under-appreciated comedy actors around today. I was lucky enough to get the chance to work with him on the web series Awesome Asian Bad Guys, which is the only reason I've even heard of him.

Despite his comic chops and astonishingly pleasant demeanor, he has only been given small insignificant roles for nearly his entire career. It's disappointing that he isn't getting leads (although hopefully his recently picked-up pilot Fresh Off the Boat will help him with that), but he always shines bright. And he is everywhere. 

He is on episodes of The Office and New Girl. He was in Larry Crowne and Dinner For Schmucks. Community. The Five-Year Engagement. ER. Reno 911!. iCarly. There's no escaping his circle of influence (including upcoming comedies They Came Together and Sex Tape), but nobody remembers his name.

Remember his name. I beseech thee.

So, yeah. Neighbors is a surprisingly excellent comedy about growing up with stellar performances at every level. I wasn't expecting to enjoy it as much as I did, but then again I wasn't expecting a comedy with so much Apatow influence to be so kind-hearted and full of joy. It was definitely a worthwhile experience, despite being deceitfully packaged as throwaway entertainment.

TL;DR: Neighbors is surprisingly funny and has enough thematic resonance to keep the entire film afloat, even during the more overtly dramatic sequences.

Rating: 8/10

Should I Spend Money On This? Yeah, absolutely! You won't regret it. And I should know something about regret. I spent money on This Is 40.

Word Count: 1258

Reviews In This Series

Neighbors (Stoller, 2014)

Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising (Stoller, 2016)