The Devil's Playground

Year: 2015

Director:  Jonathan Milott & Cary Murnion

Cast: Elijah Wood, Rainn Wilson, Alison Pill 

Run Time: 1 hour 28 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

By every sense of the word, cinematic zombies are dead. The gargantuan success of The Walking Dead (and all the other sub-Romero shows that have latched onto its influence like remora on a shark) has creative a sucking void in the silver screen. Other than decent but hardly exemplary dribbles of undead revenants in flicks like World War Z or Warm Bodies, the gut muncher craze of the 2000s is dead as a doornail (that’s been shot in the head).

And out of death, rebirth. Spectrevision’s zombie comedy Cooties could hardly be considered a massive release, but certainly releases massive laughs, applying a jolt of electricity to the heart of the languishing subgenre.

Just when you thought you were safe.

If you’ve ever wanted a detailed account of how chicken nuggets are made, you’re in luck. Following a sickeningly detailed opening sequence that will get you swearing off McDonalds with the force of ten Super Size Me’s, young substitute teacher and aspiring horror novelist Clint (Elijah Wood, whose career path is always an adventure) discovers that  nugget-borne virus has affected the students in the school, transforming them into ravenous zombies with a taste for human flesh.

He must band together with the other teachers, including macho gym coach Wade (Rainn Wilson), his girlfriend and Clint’s crush Lucy (Alison Pill), right wing Sarah Palin clone Rebekkah (Nasim Pedrad), socially awkward biology teacher Doug (Leigh Whannell, who also co-wrote the script), and Jack McBrayer character Tracy (Jack McBrayer), as well as the few surviving students, to attempt to beat back the horde and survive the day. So, basically, a regular shift for a substitute teacher.

Ask not for whom the school bell tolls, it tolls for thee.

Whenever one is assessing a horror comedy, it’s always important to get a bead on which genre it favors. It just wouldn’t do to go into Ghostbusters expecting spine-chilling frights (unless you’re six-year-old me, in which case it might just cause some detailed emotional scarring). So I’m going to let you know right now that Cooties is primarily a comedy, trafficking in horror scenarios and carnage, but always more content to tickle your ribs than wrench them out.

The element that separates Cooties from your average horror comedy is that it’s actually pretty damn funny. It’s of a sophomoric and irreverent bent, but if you open your heart broad enough, it’s a ray of sunshine. Only the main characters are developed to any point past a particularly funny SNL sketch, but they provide such consistent humor that it’s hard to complain. In fact, the best moments of the film come from when it just lets the characters be themselves. Their rowdy caricatures match the heightened tone of the film, bouncing off of one another in epically silly displays.

The real strength of Cooties is its cast, most of whom are seasoned comic performers. However, their experience comes from such different mediums (sitcoms, sketch comedy, feature films) that bringing them all together leads to a tangle of unexpected directions. Leigh Whannell is perhaps the standout here, because his character is so deliciously strange (either he saved the best part for himself or he’s growing into his front-of-the-camera talents), but there’s not a sour note in the entire cast. Even Elijah Wood, whose experience lies farthest from the wacky, provides a clueless earnestness and a keen awareness of his character’s buried flaws that he’s a more or less perfect straight man and audience entry point with a few good punchlines of his own.

He’s the one ringer to rule them all.

Although the comedy is the focal point of Cooties, it’s still a pretty terrific film in other respects: We all know by this point that I’m a sucker for a bold color scheme (“You had me at that red wash”) but the block color lighting present in many sequences highlights the childish fantasy aspect of the film with lurid primary colors. At its heart, Cooties is about the generational war between younger adults and children, and these highly saturated hues emphasize how these character are desperately clinging to their juvenile motivations and antics. They’re forced to take responsibility and grow up when the new generation rises up, forcing them to assume more adult roles. And you thought that this was a movie about zombies.

I mean, yeah, it totally is. The gruesome, pigtail ripping, entrail gnawing “suffer the little children” gore setpieces kind of betray that. But Cooties is smart enough to use the Romero approach to its undead revenants, bringing them into a social and political context that elevates the film from its bare bones survival plot.

Isn’t horror fun?

Unfortunately, the effortless entertainment of Cooties has an expiration date. By the time the third act drags itself to the finish line on bloody stumps, much of the film’s high quality has deteriorated, It just plain has no earthly idea how to end, wandering from setpiece to setpiece as it attempts to find the missing link that wraps this whole story up It never does, and the film does end so much as it peters out. It’s like a song fading on its chorus, slowly deflating until it vanishes completely.

During the course of this lamentable excursion, a major thematic throughline (Clint’s horror novel) is abruptly dropped like a Beyoncé album, and the film introduces an unnecessary tertiary character that is both trite and kinda racist. Generic third acts betray a lot of quality horror films, but the chasm between the final twenty minutes and the rest of the film is dizzyingly wide.

However, Cooties pulls through on life support. The sheer exuberance of the first hour makes up for the creative deficit of the final third and it’s short enough not to painfully overstay its welcome. I do wish it closed at a much clearer point, but I’m happy it opened in the first place, delivering us plenty of insight, belly laughs, and irritating children getting what they deserve along the way.

TL;DR: Cooties is an exuberant, fun horror comedy with an unfortunately lame third act.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 1040

When Harry Met Silly

Year: 2014

Director: David Wain

Cast: Paul Rudd, Amy Poehler, Cobie Smulders

Run Time: 1 hour 23 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

As I make my way through the cinematic landscape of 2014, I'm beginning to notice a pattern. For every tepid comedy film released in 2014, there seems to be a similar and better comedy waiting on the horizon. For every irritating and pointless Zac Efron's That Awkward Moment there's a sprightly and effervescent Zac Efron's Neighbors. For every funny but average Date and Switch (review pending) there's the delightfully twisted They Came Together, our topic for today. And what exactly is that special element that makes all the difference between these sets of paralells?

Randall Park.

Hello.

OK, maybe the films don't live and die on his performances because he's only ever given bit roles. But I continue to maintain that this man is one of the most underutilized Hollywood performers working today. I'm excited for his appearances in the upcoming comedies The Interview and Sex Tape, despite the fact that every time I see his face I will be reminded of the time I walked into a screen door and sliced my nose open when helping him look for his shoes on the set of Awesome Asian Bad Guys (That's right, I just name dropped. Right in front of your face. What are you gonna do about it, punk?).

Anyway I love the guy and I think that any casting director who agrees with me is worth their salt, making any movie with his presence a more well-cast film across the board than its compatriots. See? I was going somewhere with that.

Because jumpin' bananafrass is They Came Together well-cast. This romantic comedy parody would perish without Amy Poehler's sharp-as-a-tack skewering of clumsy leading ladies and Paul Rudd's beatific smile. The overwhelming sincerity of their performances gives the film the straight face it needs in order to avoid drowning itself in winking, clumsy meta humor.

Although goodness knows I love that too.

They Came Together tells the story of two lovers telling the story of how they met. Molly (Poehler) and Joel (Rudd) are two typical romantic comedy protagonists. He, the successful corporate drone with a cheating girlfriend (Cobie Smulders), she the quirky and klutzy owner of a small candy shop in NYC. When Joel's company, Candy Systems & Research, decides to open up a massive shop across the street from Molly's, this complicates their already reluctant love-hate relationship even more.

This plot provides the basic structure for a battalion of cameos from TV actors including New Girl's Max Greenfield, SNL's Bill Hader and Kenan Thompson, 30 Rock's Jack McBrayer, and The Office's Ellie Kemper and Ed Helms. Much in the vein of the slightly less successful but equally buoyant 2013 comedy The To Do List, the film acts as a sandbox for these actors to break out of their established characters and just have some fun playing around in a feature.

The film begins with its most meta moments, which are frequently its weakest. Although it's funny in small doses, nearly the entire setup for the parody is comprised of winking reminders that this is, in fact, a corny romantic comedy. Now, I love self-aware humor, especially in this vein, but even the most delicious chicken risotto would be ruined by the chef standing over your shoulder and whispering "It's chicken risotto. Go on, taste it. It has all the qualities of a chicken risotto. Look, there's the chicken. There's the risotto. Put those together and guess what you get? Chicken risotto!"

In this case Paul Rudd is the chicken and Amy Poehler is the risotto. If you can't see why, you clearly need to get on my level of sophistication in film analysis.

I'll repeat, this is funny, but just a little wearying, like some of the more blatant "IT'S THE SAME" moments in 22 Jump Street. Luckily, as the movie settles into its narrative, it relaxes and allows itself to explore the winding avenues of absurdist humor and sight gags that populate the genre.

But this is no flimsy Meet the Spartans production here. Somewhere significantly closer to Airplane! (my absolute favorite film comedy of all time) than Date Movie, They Came Together delights in lampooning tropes of the genre rather than merely name dropping specific films and hoping people go "Hey! That was a movie I saw! I guess that means I should laugh." It is at this level on which the film operates at its most inspired, including a scene hilariously mocking a cliché I saw naught but four days ago in The Fault in Our Stars.

For there is practically no other film genre more prone to excessive adherence to formula and rife with trite banality than the romantic comedy. This allows They Came Together to set up gags in the vein of some of the strongest humor from the Golden Age of The Simpsons (which will probably come up a lot on this blog, because I've been watching the entire show for my job), meaning that a familiar joke or story beat will be set up, but subverted at the last second with a bit of twisted humor or negated entirely by literalizing the setup in the most preposterous scenario imaginable, provoking incredulous (and inexorable) laughter at every turn.

One might say it metaphorically throws the leaves in our faces.

With an absurd streak visible from space, the film is certainly one to remember. After a decade and change of increasingly anemic pop culture spoofs, They Came Together might just be the film to set Hollywood pop comedy on the right track again.

It's not perfect. It falls prey to an ill-advised scatological gag and the first half is certainly less promising than the second, but if it doesn't blindside you with wickedly sharp satire and keep you cracking up faster than a glacier in an Emmerich film, I'll eat my keyboard.

TL;DR: They Came Together is a breath of fresh air and one of the best genre spoofs since the parody heyday in the 80's.
Rating: 8/10
Should I Spend Money On This? I think you should. only It's 7 bucks on Amazon VOD! Fun for the whole family! You don't even have to put pants on!
Word Count: 1042

No Man Is An Island

Year: 2008

Director: Nicholas Stoller

Cast: Jason Segel, Kristen Bell, Mila Kunis

Run Time: 1 hour 51 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Judd Apatow is the Joss Whedon of rom coms. He has a massive pool of recurring cast members to pull from at a moments notice (generally stars of the short-lived TV series Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared), a rabidly supportive fanbase, and a time-tested storytelling formula. For Joss it's witty genre sendups. For Judd it's overlong but pristinely funny raunchy comedies.

Needless to say I'm in the Whedon camp, but I've slowly been catching up on the Apatow repertoire. This Is 40 was a non-starter, but that one came late in the game. The 40-Year-Old Viirgin was pretty dang funny. And I absolutely adored the obscenely brief run of Undeclared. Forgetting Sarah Marshall, riding high on the success of Knocked Up and Superbad, is another success although perhaps in a slightly more low-key register than its predecessors.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall tells the story of composer Peter Bretter (Jason Segel). He works on the trashy TV show Crime Scene: Scene of the Crime and is dating its star, one Sarah Marshall (Kristen Bell). Well, not for long. After she breaks up with him he decides to get away from it all and visit a Hawaii resort. Little does he know that Sarah and her new boyfriend (Russell Brand) are staying at the same hotel.

If you shaved both of their heads, you could have enough hair to provide wigs for the entire cast of Kinky Boots.

He befriends a gorgeous hotel clerk named Rachel (Mila Kunis) and can you guess what happens? It's basically an island sex farce with celebrity cameos so, in essence, it's pretty dang good. Kristen Wiig has a fabulous cameo as a condescending yoga instructor, 30 Rock's Jack McBrayer has a hilarious turn as a religious newlywed, and Paul Rudd steals the show as Koonu, a forgetful island dweller.

There are several scenes that are laugh-out-loud hilarious (if you're ever feeling down, check out any scene from Sarah Marshall's television show), but for the most part the film is lambently funny in that uniquely Apatowian way. It's like watching a movie while waiting for the doctor to call you in; you're aware that you're laughing consistently but you're not really focused on the film itself. 

The Hawaiian setting has a similar effect, drawing the eye behind the actors except for the dazzling moments where the beautiful landscapes draw out Kunis' natural color into sparkling relief.

It's really just unfair how pretty she is.

I'm aware of many people who sing their praises of this film's comedy to the heavens, but the overlong scenes didn't tickle me as much as my peers. Perhaps this is because I have been inoculated against the type of bro humor Forgetting Sarah Marshall employs. Jason Segel is naked in the opening scene? So what? It's a penis. I know you might be shocked and scandalized, but I have been naked before. 

It's funny to a point, but I suppose I'm just too crotchety and jaded to be receptive to some of the more non-character-related humor. Because that stuff is all great! The screenplay by Jason Segel is laden with hoary romantic comedy tropes, but there are enough clever twists on the genre to keep it feeling fresh, a personal favorite of which is that neither character is the bad guy. Peter and Sarah are equally at fault in their split, even if neither of them feel that way.

Better yet, the film is only a little bit misogynistic, which technically shouldn't be a compliment but I'll take what I can get in this barren genre.

Go Uncle Marshall!

The island's scenic vistas are beautiful, if uncreatively shot, and the film's visual vocabulary relies less on the Orange and Teal Disease that would plague later Apatow efforts until it reached terminal velocity in This Is 40.

And against all odds, I enjoyed Russell Brand in a movie. This was one of his breakout roles, so it's only fitting that it should be his best, but I was remarkably surprised when his performance allowed me to overlook what a massively unpleasant person he seems to be.

All in all, I really did have a good time watching Forgetting Sarah Marshall although I'm not sure I'll be champing at the bit to grab the DVD for my collection. But I shall certainly be thanking Sergio for turning me on to this clever and colorful comedy.

TL;DR: Forgetting Sarah Marshall puts a couple twists on a worn-out genre and is an unremittingly pleasant exercise in Apatow-style comedy.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 776