The Boy From Oz

Year: 2017

Director: Michael Gracey

Cast: Hugh Jackman, Michelle Williams, Zac Efron

Run Time: 1 hour 45 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

You guys, the Mamma Mia 2 trailer premiered before The Greatest Showman, and if that movie isn't the most exciting slice of glitter pie that cinema has to offer in the coming year, then I'll eat my bedazzled hat. I can't wait to hear what obscure ABBA songs they're forced to pick and see how many clunky lines they can shove into Cher's mouth. The fact that a two and a half minute trailer for a movie that will almost certainly be a beautiful disaster excited me more than The Greatest Showman should probably say something, but this review still isn't a negative one. Let's jump into it!

Hey Hugh Jackman, it's nice to see you without mutton chops.

The Greatest Showman is a highly fictionalized (read: lies, all lies) telling of the life of P. T. Barnum (Hugh Jackman), which has opted to take his life full of exploiting "freaks" and enslaving animals and turn it into a wholesome movie about one man's dream to bring happiness to all people in spite of the haters. And here I thought The Disaster Artist was going to be the most thoroughly sanitized whitewashing of a real person's horrifying tendencies I saw in theaters this year.

Anyway, whatever. It's a movie musical. We don't get enough of them for me to go around boycotting any of them, and since when have movies actually been good with biographical material? So Barnum is struggling to make ends meet for his born-into-privilige-but-unwaveringly-supportive wife Charity (Michelle Williams) and their two ruthlessly adorable daughters. Through a bizarre combination of white savior-itis and feeling on the fringes of society, he decides to create the circus, a spectacular show of derring-do that highlights the outcasts of society including a little person dubbed Tom Thumb (Sam Humphrey), a bearded lady (Keala Settle), a brother-sister duo of African-American acrobats (Zendaya and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), what seems to be Kate McKinnon in ghost makeup, and basically the entire cast of Newsies with either wigs or goop on their faces.

Seriously, these freaks are hot as f**k.

I don't want to be a bummer, so I'm gonna start with the worst thing about The Greatest Showman and work my way up into what I secretly kinda love about it. Here goes: The plot is totally boring. Anytime we're forced to spend any prolonged time with Barnum and his drama (or Michelle Williams, who is totally wasted in one of the most reductive, passive female roles in years), it begins to slide back into being a sludgy, nuance-free biopic, and nobody wants that.

Honestly, these parts can get really dreary. They feint toward depicting Barnum as a lying, thieving scumbag but aren't willing to commit to that interpretation, and the constant pulling back leaves a lurching feeling in your stomach. And the scenes at the circus aren't much better, almost entirely forgetting to explore the inner lives of the circus performers who form the central theme of accepting yourself for who you are. There is a halfhearted stab at the idea that being black makes you just as Other as being a dogboy in America in the 1800's, but this is not a political movie. It's not really an anything movie, jamming a square peg of reality into the round hole of upbeat musical mayhem. 

There hasn't been a tone so ill-suited to biographical material since the sitcom Heil Honey, I'm Home!

But one good thing about The Greatest Showman is that it speeds though its plotty bits in strokes as broad as Fifth Avenue. Sure, that prevents engagement with any of the characters but who needs that, this is a musical extravaganza! Now, the music itself is... fine. Songwriters Pasek and Paul have proven themselves to be very capable at crafting catchy pop Broadway numbers (they wrote lyrics for La La Land, provided the best song to Trolls, and had a recent stage hit with Dear Evan Hansen - the former and the latter presumably being the reason this movie finally got the green light after seven years), and they provide the same service here.

None of the songs are incredibly memorable, matching the hollowly inspirational themes of the plot with rousing riffs on Rihanna, Mumford & Sons, and other pop subgenres that are invariably upbeat. The litany of interchangeable, on-the-nose "believe in yourself" lyrics can be a little numbing until they throw in a bit of variety late in Act 2. Plus there's a supposed opera number is hilariously off base, but god I've missed musicals. There's no genre more suited for frothy, nutrient-free material, and here's the thing: the choreography is not to be missed.

Yeah, there's a reason I still seem excited about this movie after all that complaining.

The framing, movement, and design of the production numbers is sublime. The choreography, which in no way represent what the actual circus looks like but who cares, is a tremendously athletic, physical approach to dance that I haven't seen in quite some time. It's electrifying, blending perfectly with the percussive, in-your-face foley work that pulls elements from all around the scene into the musical sphere. Every frame comes alive with color and light in a way that's just busy enough to not drip into Moulin Rouge excess while still featuring the painterly backdrops and fantastically unreal settings that turn 1800's New York into a lurid fairy tale.

The dancers rush full bore into dazzling feats, to the point that I was worried that Michelle Williams' double was gonna have her head whipped right off, but there's also a gloriously unsubtle approach that revels in just how Big the emotions of the songs are. Possibly my favorite moment takes place on a rooftop where rows and rows bedsheets are invariably hung out to dry (the beds in the Barnum household must be numerous and bare), where Barnum and Charity pull off a gravity-defying reverse dip into the air, the movement of her dress perfectly matched by the flapping of the sheets in the wind.

Almost every sequence is knock-your-socks-off spectacle, but the number "Rewrite the Stars," although the song feels the most like a reject from Smash season 2, features incredible trapeze work and the Efron/Jackman duet "The Other Side" has a minute and a half of beautiful, minuscule choreography that takes place while Barnum is just sitting at a barstool. Big or small, The Greatest Showman paints a tapestry of music and feeling that's well worth your time.

Jackman obviously is a massively talented theater performer, and it's nice to see him actually have fun in a big screen musical, but the standout here is probably Broadway diva Keala Settle, a big personality with an even bigger voice. Plus Zac Efron can move, and he even sings OK! (I think he took lessons between High School Musical 1 and 2). Everyone and/or their doubles is actually massively talented, and it's a pure pleasure to see them make their magic, sugary spectacle. Even if you have to suffer through the rest of the movie to get to it.

TL;DR: The Greatest Showman is a terribly bland approach to the material, but the production numbers are unspeakably gorgeous, and it's not like there was any other reason to go see it anyway.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1235

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

Trouble In Paradise

Year: 2016

Director: Jake Szymanski

Cast: Zac Efron, Adam Devine, Anna Kendrick

Run Time: 1 hour 38 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Zac Efron is killing it this year. He’s starred in no fewer than three R-Rated comedies in 2016 (four, if The Disaster Artist is ever set free from the James Franco vault), and with heartthrobs like him, quantity is always more important than quality. Which is great news, because the only semi-decent movie he’s been in all year is Neighbors 2. Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates isn’t as flagrantly despicable as Dirty Grandpa, but there’s no universe where I’d call it a “good” movie.

I mean, come on! He only takes his shirt off ONCE!

Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates takes place in a world where the phrase “wedding date” is used in casual conversation waaaaaay more frequently than our own. Mike (Adam Devine) and Dave Stangle (Zac Efron) are brothers who love themselves a good debauch. When their parents (Stephen Root and Stephanie Faracy) force them to bring dates to their sister Jeanie’s (Sugar Lyn Beard) Hawaii wedding in order to curtail their antics, they put out a Craigslist ad looking for nice girls to bring so they don’t ruin the wedding. The ad goes viral (this part actually happened in real life) and they end up on Wendy Williams, where they catch the eye of local girls-about-town Tatiana (Aubrey Plaza) and Alice (Anna Kendrick).

The hard-drinking duo fake being respectable so they can econ their way into an all-expenses-paid Hawaii vacation. Antics ensue and they’re at least a little less racist and homophobic than Dirty Grandpa.

So there’s that.

Obviously, that’s a high bar for offensiveness, so Mike and Dave still has plenty of room to muck about in frivolous bigotry and general stereotyping. I will say this: The stereotypes they use here are some deep cuts, so your average moviegoer won’t’ have as much of a problem with them as I do, but that doesn’t make them any less ill-advised. We get a predatory lesbian, a black side character who only acts as a hype man for the white people’s antics, a genuinely baffling cross-dressing sequence that would have been stale in the 90’s, and Kumail Nanjiani’s first truly bothersome Indian role. But they do depict an interracial wedding and restrict themselves to only one joke about it, so they get a gold star for that, I guess.

Honestly, I’d be able to overlook these patches of cliché crassness if there was anything else in the movie to latch onto. The comedy is a relaxing, genial sort that keeps you comfortably above the boredom line without actually reaching for any big laughs. While it’s certainly diverting, it’s far from memorable. It’s not bad, it just immediately slips from your mind like a fistful of sardines.

The comedy here does what every establishing shot shows: coasts. All four of the leads here are charismatic young stars and that counts for a lot, but they lean heavily on their established personas to do all the work here. Devine is the sputtering, half-improvised jackass. Efron chugs along with his surprisingly sharp comic timing and his baby doll eyes that never seem to focus on anything. His mouth and body move, but his eyes just stare vacantly into the middle distance like he’s having an apocalyptic premonition. It’s kind of frightening. And then of course there’s Plaza with her sardonic bravado. Only Kendrick is creating any sort of character here, but the role is a meek little dishrag that doesn’t bring anything particularly interesting to the table.

It’s like if you put a chipmunk’s brain in a human body.

Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates is just too easygoing. It lets its performers noodle around while the spinning plates of the plot fall to the floor one by one and shatter into a million pieces, using exhausted clichés to rush through an ill-thought-out scenario (of course Zac Efron dreams of being a graphic novel artist). The central conceit (bad girls faking being good girls) loses gas long before the midpoint, sputtering and stalling after about two and a half scenes (in fact, this slippery conceit is eerily similar to Efron’s earlier easily-distracted opus That Awkward Moment). If Charles Lindbergh had tried to fly across the Atlantic using Mike and Dave, he would have crashed in the New York Harbor.* And then the final 20 minutes pretend we’ve been watching an actual story the whole time and drown us in a deluge of unearned character development.

Oh, and did I mention this film indulges in some of the most frustrating trends of modern comedy? We get some of that alarmingly violent slapstick that non-Paul Feigs love to dole out on Melissa McCarthy. Then there’s a lovely selection of half-hearted post-Hangover gross-out body humor. Oh, and then there’s a dash of sitcom setups just for bland flavor (they don’t realizes their microphones are on! What a pickle!). And the film’s occasional feints toward absurdism wither make less than no sense or completely dismantle a character (The script never does manage to establish whether Dave is a drooling idiot or the vastly more intelligent straight man for his brother’s antics. Maybe it’s both, come to think of it.) Like I said, it’s enjoyable enough, but it’s just so unambitious.

So, all in all, Mike an Dave Need Wedding Dates isn’t, like, a deplorable waste of your time. Just a milquetoast one. And it’s still the second best Efron comedy of the year, so if you loved Dirty Grandpa, have at it. You have my blessing, though I mostly feel like cursing that I spent money on this.

*This has nothing to do with Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates, but it’s far more interesting. I was doing a spot of research on Lindbergh, and a glance at the list of his children led me through a mind-boggling array of discoveries. After fathering six children by his wife, it was discovered on his deathbed that he had seven more children spread between three secret families. Two of his secret European brides were SISTERS. He didn’t cross the Atlantic to break records, he just wanted to get some. It’s like an American Pie prequel up in here.

TL;DR: Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates is mildly amusing, so it's never a chore, but it fails entirely to impress.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1067

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)

Popcorn Kernels: Aw, Screw It

Hello, hello, hello, faithful readers! Normally I do my best to bestow full length reviews on current films, but I am so damn close to clearing my backlog that I can’t resist knocking out some of the less important, less current selections from last year with another slate of mini reviews. There’s got to be a statute of limitations on this kind of thing, right?

In the Heart of the Sea

Year: 2015
Director: Ron Howard
Cast: Chris Hemsworth, Cillian Murphy, Brendan Gleeson
Run Time: 2 hours 2 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG-13

In the story that inspired Moby Dick, the captain and first mate of a whaling ship pursue a massive white whale that destroys the vessel, leaving the crew stranded.

As helpfully pointed out by Hunter Allen (of Kinemalogue) in the comments on my Muppet Treasure Island review, I’m a hard sell on ship movies. So right off the bat, I was disinclined to adore Ron Howard’s massively ill-advised seafaring epic In the Heart of the Sea.

But you know what I dislike even more than schooners? Movies that use the lazy framing device of an author coaxing a story out of somebody for the express purpose of reminding people that hey, they read this book in middle school, isn’t that neat? This technique can be used well, but here it’s just an excuse to slice the film’s pacing into ribbons in order to bridge plot gaps by using the “storyteller” to handily provide us with an airdrop of exposition and convenient analysis. There is literally zero reason why the Chris Hemsworth storyline couldn’t have stood alone, and the film takes on a lot of water thanks to this decision.

You know what I dislike even more than flimsy framing devices? The fact that Chris Hemsworth can apparently only get roles if they take place either centuries ago or in ultramodern yet inexplicably Medieval cultures. The man has talent, but he’s constantly shunted into stuffy roles with awful hair that clamp down on his range like an iron vise and surround him with such illustrious (read: pale) performers as… That guy from Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. And maybe wait until his Marvel contract is finished before you strand him on a desert island. With his scraggly beard and perfectly waxed chest, he looks more like a hipster barista than a marooned sailor.

But you know what I dislike even more than Hemsworth’s Buff, Waxed, and Stranded photo shoot? The whale! The CGI technicians do not commit to making this khaki monstrosity seem huge or white or menacing in any way, shape, or form. I’m all for cinematic realism, but would anybody be mad if the whale was a couple yards longer and bone white? If I had to hazard a guess, marine biologists are not in the primary demographic for this flick. Plus, it really doesn’t do anything impeccably beastly other than trawling around after our heroes like it’s Jaws: The Revenge and providing really obvious metaphors to conclude Our Hemsworth’s character arc.

If you don’t particularly mind any of these things, we are not on the same page and you can feel free to check out In the Heart of the Sea. But even putting those gripes aside, it’s still only a blandly functional adventure picture populated with stock characters and depicting oddly brutal animal violence. So have fun with that.

Rating: 5/10

Goosebumps

Year: 2015
Director: Rob Letterman
Cast: Jack Black, Dylan Minnette, Odeya Rush
Run Time: 1 hour 43 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG

A teen boy moves in next door to R. L. Stine. He befriends the author’s teen daughter, then must team up with the two of them when he accidentally unleashes Stine’s creations upon the town.

Because I am nothing if not a consummate academic, I am much more familiar with the Goosebumps books than the TV show. As such, I had absolutely no nostalgia for any visual R. L. Stine property and came to the Goosebumps film unclouded by expectation. This is the best way to approach it, though I feel that all but the grumpiest among us would be hard-pressed not to have a good time.

Goosebumps might be fashionably generic (new kid in town, single mom, struggling to find place amid wacky mayhem, it’s not exactly Proust), but it enacts those typical plot beats with an energy that at least makes them feel fresh. Dylan Minnette and Amy Ryan forge an excellent mother-son relationship, and the movie’s humor and heart branches out from there. This is primarily a comedy film of course, especially when Jillain Bell (as an eccentric aunt) or Timothy Simons and Amanda Lund (as two inept cops) are on the scene, but there actually is a decent amount of juice in the horror side of things.

The monsters are all rendered with a cartoonish CGI, which in a family film isn’t actually a liability (Mama, eat your heart out), but the effects spring into high gear when they get sucked back into the books from whence they came. Their bodies begin to unravel in a tornado of ink that’s both beautifully rendered and quite gruesome. It’s Goosebumps, so it won’t turn your stomach, but it’s just raw enough to remind you that kids movies can be scary too. Anybody who has seen Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory can attest to that.

Funny, scary, campy… Sounds like Goosebumps to me! The movie plays with a lot of classic monsters and scenarios, even conjuring up its own wicked twists. It might not be a perfect iteration of the Goosebumps mythos (sometimes the structure of a feature inhibits its ability to evoke some traditional Goosebumps storylines), but it captures the gleefully macabre atmosphere with no shortage of charm.

Oddly enough or perhaps no quite so unexpectedly, even taking into consideration the green teen talent, the weakest link is most obviously Jack Black. He hams it up like he works at a deli, and the taste of flop sweat curdles the tonal mixture a little bit. Goosebumps does exist in a heightened reality, so it makes a game attempt at assimilating his boisterous performance, but there are many moments that he tramples over by pulling faces and generally clowning around. It’s immensely frustrating, but this isn’t a movie about him. It’s about the young generation that loves Goosebumps, and for them the film is mostly a blast.

Rating: 7/10

We Are Your Friends

Year: 2015
Director: Max Joseph
Cast: Zac Efron, Wes Bentley, Emily Ratajkowski
Run Time: 1 hour 36 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

A young DJ meets an older producer, igniting a friendship that will lead to love, loss, success, failure, and eventually growing up.

We Are your Friends is not a lucky movie. If no for the box office cavalry of Jem and the Holograms, WAYF would have scored the lowest opening weekend of the entire year. Seeing how I’m obsessed with cinematic failure and Zac Efron is on my celebrity freebie list, I couldn’t rest giving the film a looksie. Boy, am I glad I did.

We Are Your Friends isn’t ever going to be unearthed as a true buried gem, but taken as the generic coming-of-age story in the modern world that it is, it couldn’t be better. It’s a mini prestige picture, hitting all the beats of larger, more successful films with just enough twists to keep it lively. My single favorite element is the editing, which a voids the temptation to turn the whole thing into an EDM music video, rather creating a slick visual rhythm that jumps off the screen with graphic and text overlaps. It’s an edgy, modern style that has certainly been seen before, most recently in The Big Short, but it’s an exciting cinematic presentation that works wonders for the film. These flashy technical moments unfortunately decrease as the movie foes on, but their presence gives WAYF a spark that never fades.

Also, honestly, the cast is pretty incredible. Wes Bentley is magnetic as a self-destructive mentor, Walking Dead alum Jon Bernthal gets his Matthew McConaughey in Wolf of Wall Street moment in the sun, and Zac Efron turns in what is unequivocally the best performance of his career, one that’s tempered, at least slightly layered, and miles away form his standard dreamboat duties.

Please don’t leave this blog thinking We Are Your Friends is a life-changing motion picture, but aside from a bit of an unfocused narrative drive and a deeply generic plot structure, it really ain’t half bad. It’s messy, it’s foolhardy, occasionally deep, and plugged into some great beats; an imperfect love letter to modern youth that doesn’t talk down to them. I genuinely enjoyed this movie. That may or may not be a socially suicidal admission, but it’s the truth. Check it out!

Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 1468

It Ain't A Lemon Party Without Old Dick

Year: 2016

Director: Dan Mazer

Cast: Robert De Niro, Zac Efron, Zoey Deutch

Run Time: 1 hour 42 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Would you believe me if I said that Bad Grandpa is the best comedy film I’ve seen in years?

No, neither would I. Aside from the fact that my yearly rewatching of Airplane! would inevitably preclude such a claim, Dirty Grandpa is a swollen hernia poking from the torso of Hollywood. And I’m saying this as a person who actually watched this movie on purpose. It’s perhaps the most January-ish January comedy ever released, lazy and charmless in all the wrong ways. But let’s not beat around the greying bush, let’s dive on into this sucker!

The things I do for you people.

In Dirty Grandpa, Jason (Zac Efron) is a Stepford grandson. He lives a yuppie fantasy, working at his dad’s law firm, wearing sweater vests, and preparing his wedding with the blonde-haired, blue-eyed, Meredith (Julianne Hough) a controlling shrew so ludicrously unpleasant that she passive aggressives Jason into picking his rehearsal dinner tie color during his grandmother's funeral. When Jason agrees to drive his bereaved grandfather, Dick (Robert De Niro) to Florida for a couple days, the old man reveals that he’s hot to foxtrot and hijacks the trip, taking Jason to Dayton Beach for some raucous carousing with filthy co-ed Linor (Aubrey Plaza) and her friend Shadia (Zoey Deutch), Jason’s high school classmate with whom he has an instant rapport. 

Oh, they also have a gay friend who’s about as reductive a stereotype as poor Meredith (though without being actively sociopathic), but he’s also black so De Niro can have a two for one deal on offensive material that screenwriters think old people can get away with. They get to Daytona, De Niro makes approximately one kiloton of vulgar jokes that are only intermittently recognizable as humor, and then more plot attempts to happen at the very end.

Help, I’ve fallen and I can’t get it up!

The thing about Dirty Grandpa is that it so obviously adheres to the male bonding sex comedy formula that it literally doesn’t even need to go through the motions. You can so intimately understand where the plot is going from the very first scene that it almost feels like you’ve watched an entire film even when it only skims through the story at its broadest points. Much in the same way that Julianne Hough’s shrieking beast of a character exists solely to make the boring, kind of deluded Shadia seem desirable in comparison, the plot falls back on lazy comedy movie stereotypes so it seems like it actually exists.

So with the plot comfortably out of the way, Dirty Grandpa frees itself up to crap all over Robert De Niro’s legacy. Hell, it craps all over Zac Efron's legacy. The High School Musical trilogy doesn’t deserve this. How does Dirty Grandpa’s humor suck? Let me count the ways…

1) Are you a minority? Screw you.

Mind you, Dirty Grandpa’s “old people are racist and homophobic and ableist and make rape jokes apparently” shtick is less prevalent than some of its illustrious peers, but when it crops up, it’s all the more painful for its halfhearted commitment to its abrasiveness. They seem to think that they can render gags that are both insanely offense and stale acceptable by having a character point out just how offensive they are. Nice try, Dirty Grandpa, but you can’t cover your ass. It’s swaying gently in the wind, exposed to the elements. Speaking of, this kicks in at about the 20-minute mark, at which point the twelve people in my theater are reduced to six.

2) “Sandra Bullock in Gravity” gags

Certain one-liners just drift through the void of the film, haphazardly colliding into scenes at the most inopportune times. My current working theory is that the original draft underwent a heavy rewrite, but the script editor forgot to delete certain lines, leaving them jammed into the middle of scenes like rocks diverting a stream. That’s the only possible explanation for the mind-boggling preponderance of non sequiturs that crash into the middle of otherwise unassuming scenes.

3) Grandpa is a felon

In the middle of his wacky erotic rampage across the Florida coast, nobody seems to notice that Grandpa Dick is a straight-up psychopath. When an old man assaults a guy with an improvised beer cannon that inverts his nose, that’s not the time to sigh and go, “Oh, Pop-Pop.” That dude belongs in freaking jail for that and many other violet criminal acts that are treated like the mayhem caused by a toddler. There is more or less a pile of steaming bodies in this guy’s wake.

4) They break the laws of physics to force jokes to work.

There’s a scene that requires a stuffed animal that is manifestly present on the ground to not be there, so it vanishes without a trace. There’s a scene that forgot it could have been set up an hour ago, so a hacker on a moped materializes from thin air to bridge the gap. Almost every scene has a square joke being rammed into a round hole, because nobody realized that, if they took the time to sand the edges, it would actually fit the way it was supposed to.

5) There’s a grandpa rapping scene.

Yes, this is that kind of movie.

The dream of the 90’s is alive and well.

Not only is the humor scraped off the bottom of a crusty plunger, it’s not even presented well. The editing hops, skips, and jumps around dialogue actively destroying punchlines by cutting around lines and arbitrarily inserting over-the-shoulder shots in a manner so conspicuous that I suspect no cast member could actually complete a take without breaking down into heaving sobs and cursing their agent’s name, forcing the scene to be cobbled together in ADR. The editing has the rhythm of a drunk woodpecker and it totally obliterates most of the film’s potential.

But do you want to know the absolute worst thing about Dirty Grandpa? It has some damn hilarious scenes, Mind you, there’s as widely scattered as M&M’s in cheap trail mix, but they’re there. These moments are almost exclusively provided by Adam Pally as Jason’s indecorous cousin and Jason Mantzoukas as the friendly neighborhood drug dealer. My sense of moral integrity wants to believe that their lines were entirely improvised, but I’ll be fair and give credit to the screenwriter for allowing these two characters their moment in the sun. Frequently, their scenes are actively gut-busting and quotable, which makes the film even more disappointing because here’s actually a reason to endure the cinematic napalm that forms the remainder of its runtime.

The one other savior of Dirty Grandpa is Aubrey Plaza, who is delightful for about 75 percent of the time. When she’s forced to flirt with De Niro, her discomfort is palpable, especially taking into consideration the film’s weird aversion to actually depicting sexuality despite its rampant vulgarity (as far as I can recall, there’s not a single topless woman in the movie, and the film’s only scene of the sex act is between two people who are more or less fully clothed and evidently plan on using their own underwear as contraception.) 

Well, there you have it. Even Dirty Grandpa doesn’t want to watch Dirty Grandpa. So why should you?

TL;DR: Dirty Grandpa is a lazy, wheezing waste of your time.
Rating: 3/10
Word Count: 1246

Hanging By A Moment

Year: 2014

Director: Tom Gormican

Cast: Zac Efron, Michael B. Jordan, Miles Teller

Run Time: 1 hour 34 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Have you ever heard of the term in medias res? It's Latin for "in the middle of things" and it is a rhetorical device used to draw people into a story by revealing details from a later point in time at the beginning, then telling most of the story in flashback. This idea has been used far and wide in movies like The Hangover, which opens with a desperate trio wondering how they will make it to the wedding before going back to the beginning to explain "how we got here." There's a whole thing about it on TV Tropes. Check it out.

As you may have gathered, That Awkward Moment begins with an in medias res moment. Jason (Zac Efron) is sitting on a park bench in the freezing cold as his voiceover narration asks "I bet you're wondering how I got here." 

No, Zac Efron. We are not wondering why you're sitting on a freaking bench. It's a park bench, not the Iron Throne. The rest of the movie is no less stupid than this opening scene, although it is somewhat less exciting to mock, alternating from being bland and tasteless to relying on the worst kind of odious gender essentialism.

And a heaping helping of white nonsense.

Jason is one of a trio made up of him and his friends Daniel (Miles Teller) and Mikey (Miles B. Jordan), two other up and coming actors. Teller attempted to make a name for himself in the quickly forgotten YA adaptation Divergent and Michael B. Jordan recently lit up the indie scene in Fruitvale Station. It is clear that they agreed to do a movie together in order to hopefully lift each other's careers up and over the high wall of success. 

It is unclear why they chose to do this particular movie with its characters that are far too old for the actors portraying them (Mikey is a married surgeon; Daniel and Jason are successful book cover designers), a director fresh off of producing the steaming pile of rat dung that was Movie 43, and non-starter dialogue and scenarios that could only be an aborted script for a sitcom pilot.

And not a particularly good sitcom. Not the kind that pushing the envelope of storytelling like or creates a zeitgeist hit based on a solid ensemble of relatable characters. But rather the uninspired style filled with (two and a) half-baked zingers and lazy gender psychology. Did you know that the one thing every woman in the entire world wants more than anything is a pair of shoes? Zac Efron knows. And all the women in the film agree.

Sure, shoes are cool. But it makes you wonder if the screenwriters have ever met an actual woman who wasn't a 3mmx3mm jpeg at the corner of a chat bar. And the inclusion of the line "So, you're gonna go full girl with it?" spoken to an emotional man was enough to cement the movie entirely into my lack of esteem. The shock displayed when a girl expressed interest in video games sent me into a supernova of anger, from which my houseplants are only now starting to recover.

True story: Sometimes they were so aware of the direness of their dialogue, they tried to mask it with a jaunty pop tune.

The film is just as blasé and careless about every other aspect of its creation. The editor cuts abruptly away from scenes before they end, any of the human emotions that are more challenging to write (i. e. anything that isn't "horny" or "bland") are smoothed over by turning them into musical montages, taking all the contrivances out of the plot would render the movie twelve seconds long, and - perhaps most egregiously - there is a date scene in the coffee shop where the scone they are sharing lies on a plate untouched for a matter of hours.

So, the plot. I guess. Let's just get that out of the way real quick. Mikey and his wife (Jessica Lucas) are getting a divorce, so Daniel and Jason make a pact with him to stay single in solidarity with their fallen brother. They of course all immediately fall into intense, loving relationships. Jason meets a Word Vomit Manic Pixie Dream Girl, Ellie (Imogen Poots), Daniel falls in love with his sarcastic best friend (Mackenzie Davis), and Mikey gets back together with his wife after little deliberation. The pact doesn't seem to matter until the very end of the movie when it suddenly does, where it is used to create a frail snotrag of conflict.

For the first hour or so, though, we are stuck watching absurdly well-off white people date each other in New York while an absurdly well-off ethnic couple does their business in private on the other side of town. There is no sense of urgency, no plot direction to speak of, just endless minutes unspooling of Zac Efron romancing his nonsense maiden.

You rang?

The humor is like a low sodium cracker - it exists, but it doesn't make you smile. The title is irrelevant to the plot and immensely pandering. The ending is bonkers if you're a sane human being. And although the production values are nice enough and the people are pretty enough to not hate spending an hour and a half together with them, they certainly tried their hardest to make you feel otherwise.

TL;DR: That Awkward Moment is entertaining enough to make me not want to drive a knife through my eye, but is too terribly put together to be much more than that.
Rating: 4/10
Word Count: 955

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)