Odds
Not this past weekend but the weekend before, I saw four very different comedies that nonetheless feel like they could've swapped stars, writers, and directors in various permutations. The new film-comedy scene of the mid-aughts has expanded beyond the Stiller/Wilson/Black/Ferrell/Vaughn axis to include just about any mainstream comedian with any aspiration of making something at least pretty good, and the directors who want to help them (and/or work with people who can get their movies released theatrically).
The biggest hit and highest concept I saw over that weekend was 21 Jump Street by a mile; semi-miraculously, it's also the funniest. The directing duo made Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (also funny!), and the pace of Jump Street is similarly antic and cartoony; compared to Jonah Hill's other high-school buddy opus, Superbad, this one is a little more slapdash about its character relationships and story developments. But teaming motormouthy Hill with a dim but mostly sweet Channing Tatum is something of a masterstroke; they're very funny together, as is the supporting cast. This one gets the action-comedy mix just right, which is to say it's far more of a comedy with some larger-scale slapstick danger than an action movie with a few jokes. It's great fun; I'm shocked that the same dude wrote Project X.
21 Jump Street is the kind of hit comedy these guys want early in their careers to establish that they're here to stay. Casa de mi Padre, meanwhile, is the kind of movie you make when you've made a bunch of successful comedies and want to do something for the hell of it. Hence, Will Ferrell, having logged five or six big hits, now stars in a feature-length spoof of telenovelas. A lot of comedies get tagged as being like a Saturday Night Live sketch stretched to feature length, and often that either means "this movie isn't very funny" or "I became bored with laughing at funny stuff after ten minutes." But Casa really does have the feel of an SNL project - specifically, the kind of oddball, sometimes filmed bit they might drop in the last fifteen or twenty minutes of the show. Ferrell, acting entirely in (pretty credible, to my ears!) Spanish, plays it semi-straight; sometimes his intense delivery is funny, but he doesn't chase big, broad laughs. The movie is consistently amusing and odd, with some wonderful sight gags (often centering around the bargain-basement aesthetic -- although in its own way, the movie is weirdly nice-looking), and it's a neat experiment. That said, it's the kind of oddity that even at 84 minutes, would probably play better to me at 70 or 75, and I'm unlikely to rewatch it with the same frequency as the best Ferrell comedies. Still, it's great to see a comedian following his muse rather than figuring out which kiddie franchise he can slide into. I wrote in my column a few weeks back how much I admire Ferrell for never doing that myopic comedian thing of refusing to hire funny supporting casts or good directors lest they detract attention from him or money from his quote or whatever (hey, Eddie Murphy!). Stiller is pretty good with that too, but Ferrell has nothing like Meet the Fockers or A Night at the Museum on his resume (I'll take Bewitched over those any day of the week). Ferrell is the comedy superstar who shoots a million and a half feet of film to make Step Brothers and takes a month out of his schedule to produce and star in a deadpan Spanish-language comedy for no good reason.
Jeff, Who Lives at Home also finds relatively big comedy stars going the indie route, but it's less of a goof. The Duplass Brothers give Jason Segel and Ed Helms relatively persona-familiar parts as the flaky stoner brother and the uptight awkward brother, but both of them turn out to have more nuance than you might expect -- especially Helms, who between Hangover Part II and some of the weaker Office episodes and even Cedar Rapids, which I quite liked, had begun to feel like a limited performer with fewer modes than, say, Ferrell or Steve Carell. But Helms plays a jerkier yet more grounded character, and Segel is enormously touching as the Signs-obsessed slacker. The Duplasses have strange, sometimes shaggy, sometimes undercooked ideas about how to actually tell stories, but Jeff builds to something better than probably any of their other movies (I like Cyrus a lot but after a point it can't do much but hug it out and call it a day), and has their best ending so far. They're the only mumblecore guys so far to get into mini-major studio filmmaking and use bigger stars, and their work in this area has been impressive.
Finally, keeping it real for the transgressive set, there's Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie, which stars the guys from Tim and Eric's Awesome Show, Great Job, but supported by some more famous comedy guys like Ferrell (again, always doing the kind of weird cameos that guys like Jim Carrey seem to have just realized they can do in the past year or so), John C. Reilly (who was in Cyrus), and Will Forte (who's in Ferrell's next movie!). I've actually only ever seen a handful of Tim and Eric sketches; I saw the movie because those sketches were often funny (if nonsensical), I like the supporting comedians, and because of my fond memories of the proudly anti-narrative Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie. I didn't enjoy Billion Dollar Movie as much; it's just as bizarre and sometimes grotesque as Aqua Teen, but as surreal as that cartoon gets, the characters do have pretty clear personalities, which is not so much the case (as far as I can tell) with the "Tim" and "Eric" characters, who are mostly interchangeable and arbitrary. I do love the wasteland-ish milieu of their movie, which finds them accidentally blowing a billion dollars on a three-minute movie that they believe stars Johnny Depp, but does not, and then running away to manage a broken-down mall to make the money back. Many of the scenes are funny; I laughed a lot, especially at Ferrell playing the mall's owner and Reilly as a childlike inhabitant. But it does ramble on, and after awhile simulating low-budget weirdness no longer feels all that difficult or hilarious.
This weekend, of course, was all about The Hunger Games. I didn't exactly review that movie in part because I wanted to go see it at the Ziegfeld with (deep breath) Marisa, Amanda, Harald, One Maggie, Another Maggie, Tom, Andrew, Lily, Ben, Nathaniel, Anne S, Tim D, Katie, Sara, Dave and his friends, Jill and Dustin... not everyone I know in NYC, but a pretty good cross-section of the different types of people I know. However, I did have the opportunity to write about the movie in a bit of Monday morning QB for The L Magazine, which is basically a long and semi-organized sorta-review through the filter of having read the books pretty recently before seeing the movie, which happens not so often.
One point about The Hunger Games I didn't go into in my sorta-review is about the rating: PG-13, instead of the R that the events of the book would likely garner if depicted in full. Of course, this illustrates the silliness of a rating system at all, that kids of literally any (reading) age are free to pick up a book that describe some horrific violence for them to picture in their heads, but a movie that shows even half of it onscreen would be unavailable to a large chunk of its target audience, because, you know, someone please think of the children or whatever (although it bears repeating because a lot of people seem to forget this: the MPAA, totally not law!). But that's the system we're dealing with, and I know some people feel that the Hunger Games movie is hampered but stylistically (by fast-cutting and shaky-camming around the violence) and thematically (by softening the brutality in the book). Stylistically, well, it probably isn't a coincidence that much of the movie's strongest stuff doesn't have much to do with the thrilling or violence sections, although I didn't find the shakiness or fast cutting particularly egregious in that I could follow what was going on just fine. Thematically, sure, I can understand how it might feel like a shortchanging, but I think within this idea there's a pretty outdated and/or simply inaccurate idea about how onscreen violence plays: that is, that a more violent version of The Hunger Games would be more "real" and therefore more attendant to the consequences of the violence. I mean, superficially it might be more disturbing, especially for younger audiences, and certainly you can use realistic violence to instill disgust and horror, a la Saving Private Ryan or any number of other movies. But The Hunger Games is nigh-inescapably placed in a thriller context. I don't see how you can divorce the story from that without altering it pretty severely. For better or for worse, richer thematic concerns or not, it's an exciting, page-turning book. Isn't it entirely possible that maintaining the book's level of violence would not automatically get audiences to not cheer for Katniss? Do audiences not stomach ultraviolent imagery all the time? Would really gruesome kills suddenly make audiences stop rooting for Katniss's survival and start rooting for the more abstract collapse and cessation of violence in general, as writers who perhaps give Suzanne Collins a touch too much credit as a cunning and unrelenting satirist seem to think might happen? I don't know, man. A lot of audiences are fine with extreme violence, even if it's horrific. Maybe it would be worse if it's inflicted upon kids, but a lot of the focus in Hunger Games is on the career tributes who are less sympathetic than the kids who get immediately slaughtered (which is certainly sad and horrifying but even in the book is treated more matter of fact than truly lingering).
Case in point: the violence in the Indonesian action movie The Raid: Redemption is definitely horrific. There's plenty of standard martial-arts fighting that, as Andrew pointed out toward the end, would result in multiple concussions if not outright brain-death for most humans attempting those hits and kicks for longer than a few seconds. But there's also loads of gunshots to the head and martial arts knife-fighting galore, and I definitely recoiled a few times. It basically has all of the unflinching stabbings and gorings left out of The Hunger Games, and it's treated not as a seriously grim horror movie, but an ass-kicking good time. Which it is: it's a kick-ass martial arts movie that I generally had a blast watching (although, sorry, for anything to be remotely like the best action movie of the past ten years, I probably would have to care about or like the characters in it a bit more than this one. This is basically like a Jackie Chan-level movie -- which is no small praise: I really like Jackie Chan movies -- with a little more style from the director, a lot less charisma from the star, and empty faux-hard-hitting seriousness in place of Chan's usual light comic touch). There are some truly wild, stunning fight sequences with fists and blades. But the extremity of the violence (which in terms of gore isn't at cartoonish Evil Dead 2 levels or anything) doesn't make it more serious, or suddenly about the consequences of violence, any more than Drive (which I loved!) is really super-serious about its violence. I don't think it's all a jape for the filmmaker or anything, but I don't see a serious statement being made.
I guess my point is that it's up to The Hunger Games as a movie to convey its themes or messages independent of rating or violence levels. If you find the movie too casual or flip about the consequences of its violence in a PG-13 form (and I don't, particularly; I'd say some of the non-violent characters were softened in a way more detrimental to the movie than the cutting around of some carnage), you'd probably find the R-rated version lacking in that department, too. Just a hunch.
More violence! Seeking Justice, which I saw to review, is more Nic Cage thrills! Except not that thrilling! Hang in there, Nic Cage.
Non-violence! Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, which I also saw to review. It's watchable. It will not interefere with any possible crushes on Ewan McGregor and Emily Blunt, but you might wish they were making another, better romantic comedy together.
Finally, a few weeks back I saw this movie The Deep Blue Sea for review, and I was genuinely surprised to find out that it's receiving critical acclaim. Minute for minute, it may be the worst movie I've seen this year. Not the most morally reprehensible or worst-made or most empty... just the plain old worst.
The biggest hit and highest concept I saw over that weekend was 21 Jump Street by a mile; semi-miraculously, it's also the funniest. The directing duo made Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (also funny!), and the pace of Jump Street is similarly antic and cartoony; compared to Jonah Hill's other high-school buddy opus, Superbad, this one is a little more slapdash about its character relationships and story developments. But teaming motormouthy Hill with a dim but mostly sweet Channing Tatum is something of a masterstroke; they're very funny together, as is the supporting cast. This one gets the action-comedy mix just right, which is to say it's far more of a comedy with some larger-scale slapstick danger than an action movie with a few jokes. It's great fun; I'm shocked that the same dude wrote Project X.
21 Jump Street is the kind of hit comedy these guys want early in their careers to establish that they're here to stay. Casa de mi Padre, meanwhile, is the kind of movie you make when you've made a bunch of successful comedies and want to do something for the hell of it. Hence, Will Ferrell, having logged five or six big hits, now stars in a feature-length spoof of telenovelas. A lot of comedies get tagged as being like a Saturday Night Live sketch stretched to feature length, and often that either means "this movie isn't very funny" or "I became bored with laughing at funny stuff after ten minutes." But Casa really does have the feel of an SNL project - specifically, the kind of oddball, sometimes filmed bit they might drop in the last fifteen or twenty minutes of the show. Ferrell, acting entirely in (pretty credible, to my ears!) Spanish, plays it semi-straight; sometimes his intense delivery is funny, but he doesn't chase big, broad laughs. The movie is consistently amusing and odd, with some wonderful sight gags (often centering around the bargain-basement aesthetic -- although in its own way, the movie is weirdly nice-looking), and it's a neat experiment. That said, it's the kind of oddity that even at 84 minutes, would probably play better to me at 70 or 75, and I'm unlikely to rewatch it with the same frequency as the best Ferrell comedies. Still, it's great to see a comedian following his muse rather than figuring out which kiddie franchise he can slide into. I wrote in my column a few weeks back how much I admire Ferrell for never doing that myopic comedian thing of refusing to hire funny supporting casts or good directors lest they detract attention from him or money from his quote or whatever (hey, Eddie Murphy!). Stiller is pretty good with that too, but Ferrell has nothing like Meet the Fockers or A Night at the Museum on his resume (I'll take Bewitched over those any day of the week). Ferrell is the comedy superstar who shoots a million and a half feet of film to make Step Brothers and takes a month out of his schedule to produce and star in a deadpan Spanish-language comedy for no good reason.
Jeff, Who Lives at Home also finds relatively big comedy stars going the indie route, but it's less of a goof. The Duplass Brothers give Jason Segel and Ed Helms relatively persona-familiar parts as the flaky stoner brother and the uptight awkward brother, but both of them turn out to have more nuance than you might expect -- especially Helms, who between Hangover Part II and some of the weaker Office episodes and even Cedar Rapids, which I quite liked, had begun to feel like a limited performer with fewer modes than, say, Ferrell or Steve Carell. But Helms plays a jerkier yet more grounded character, and Segel is enormously touching as the Signs-obsessed slacker. The Duplasses have strange, sometimes shaggy, sometimes undercooked ideas about how to actually tell stories, but Jeff builds to something better than probably any of their other movies (I like Cyrus a lot but after a point it can't do much but hug it out and call it a day), and has their best ending so far. They're the only mumblecore guys so far to get into mini-major studio filmmaking and use bigger stars, and their work in this area has been impressive.
Finally, keeping it real for the transgressive set, there's Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie, which stars the guys from Tim and Eric's Awesome Show, Great Job, but supported by some more famous comedy guys like Ferrell (again, always doing the kind of weird cameos that guys like Jim Carrey seem to have just realized they can do in the past year or so), John C. Reilly (who was in Cyrus), and Will Forte (who's in Ferrell's next movie!). I've actually only ever seen a handful of Tim and Eric sketches; I saw the movie because those sketches were often funny (if nonsensical), I like the supporting comedians, and because of my fond memories of the proudly anti-narrative Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie. I didn't enjoy Billion Dollar Movie as much; it's just as bizarre and sometimes grotesque as Aqua Teen, but as surreal as that cartoon gets, the characters do have pretty clear personalities, which is not so much the case (as far as I can tell) with the "Tim" and "Eric" characters, who are mostly interchangeable and arbitrary. I do love the wasteland-ish milieu of their movie, which finds them accidentally blowing a billion dollars on a three-minute movie that they believe stars Johnny Depp, but does not, and then running away to manage a broken-down mall to make the money back. Many of the scenes are funny; I laughed a lot, especially at Ferrell playing the mall's owner and Reilly as a childlike inhabitant. But it does ramble on, and after awhile simulating low-budget weirdness no longer feels all that difficult or hilarious.
This weekend, of course, was all about The Hunger Games. I didn't exactly review that movie in part because I wanted to go see it at the Ziegfeld with (deep breath) Marisa, Amanda, Harald, One Maggie, Another Maggie, Tom, Andrew, Lily, Ben, Nathaniel, Anne S, Tim D, Katie, Sara, Dave and his friends, Jill and Dustin... not everyone I know in NYC, but a pretty good cross-section of the different types of people I know. However, I did have the opportunity to write about the movie in a bit of Monday morning QB for The L Magazine, which is basically a long and semi-organized sorta-review through the filter of having read the books pretty recently before seeing the movie, which happens not so often.
One point about The Hunger Games I didn't go into in my sorta-review is about the rating: PG-13, instead of the R that the events of the book would likely garner if depicted in full. Of course, this illustrates the silliness of a rating system at all, that kids of literally any (reading) age are free to pick up a book that describe some horrific violence for them to picture in their heads, but a movie that shows even half of it onscreen would be unavailable to a large chunk of its target audience, because, you know, someone please think of the children or whatever (although it bears repeating because a lot of people seem to forget this: the MPAA, totally not law!). But that's the system we're dealing with, and I know some people feel that the Hunger Games movie is hampered but stylistically (by fast-cutting and shaky-camming around the violence) and thematically (by softening the brutality in the book). Stylistically, well, it probably isn't a coincidence that much of the movie's strongest stuff doesn't have much to do with the thrilling or violence sections, although I didn't find the shakiness or fast cutting particularly egregious in that I could follow what was going on just fine. Thematically, sure, I can understand how it might feel like a shortchanging, but I think within this idea there's a pretty outdated and/or simply inaccurate idea about how onscreen violence plays: that is, that a more violent version of The Hunger Games would be more "real" and therefore more attendant to the consequences of the violence. I mean, superficially it might be more disturbing, especially for younger audiences, and certainly you can use realistic violence to instill disgust and horror, a la Saving Private Ryan or any number of other movies. But The Hunger Games is nigh-inescapably placed in a thriller context. I don't see how you can divorce the story from that without altering it pretty severely. For better or for worse, richer thematic concerns or not, it's an exciting, page-turning book. Isn't it entirely possible that maintaining the book's level of violence would not automatically get audiences to not cheer for Katniss? Do audiences not stomach ultraviolent imagery all the time? Would really gruesome kills suddenly make audiences stop rooting for Katniss's survival and start rooting for the more abstract collapse and cessation of violence in general, as writers who perhaps give Suzanne Collins a touch too much credit as a cunning and unrelenting satirist seem to think might happen? I don't know, man. A lot of audiences are fine with extreme violence, even if it's horrific. Maybe it would be worse if it's inflicted upon kids, but a lot of the focus in Hunger Games is on the career tributes who are less sympathetic than the kids who get immediately slaughtered (which is certainly sad and horrifying but even in the book is treated more matter of fact than truly lingering).
Case in point: the violence in the Indonesian action movie The Raid: Redemption is definitely horrific. There's plenty of standard martial-arts fighting that, as Andrew pointed out toward the end, would result in multiple concussions if not outright brain-death for most humans attempting those hits and kicks for longer than a few seconds. But there's also loads of gunshots to the head and martial arts knife-fighting galore, and I definitely recoiled a few times. It basically has all of the unflinching stabbings and gorings left out of The Hunger Games, and it's treated not as a seriously grim horror movie, but an ass-kicking good time. Which it is: it's a kick-ass martial arts movie that I generally had a blast watching (although, sorry, for anything to be remotely like the best action movie of the past ten years, I probably would have to care about or like the characters in it a bit more than this one. This is basically like a Jackie Chan-level movie -- which is no small praise: I really like Jackie Chan movies -- with a little more style from the director, a lot less charisma from the star, and empty faux-hard-hitting seriousness in place of Chan's usual light comic touch). There are some truly wild, stunning fight sequences with fists and blades. But the extremity of the violence (which in terms of gore isn't at cartoonish Evil Dead 2 levels or anything) doesn't make it more serious, or suddenly about the consequences of violence, any more than Drive (which I loved!) is really super-serious about its violence. I don't think it's all a jape for the filmmaker or anything, but I don't see a serious statement being made.
I guess my point is that it's up to The Hunger Games as a movie to convey its themes or messages independent of rating or violence levels. If you find the movie too casual or flip about the consequences of its violence in a PG-13 form (and I don't, particularly; I'd say some of the non-violent characters were softened in a way more detrimental to the movie than the cutting around of some carnage), you'd probably find the R-rated version lacking in that department, too. Just a hunch.
More violence! Seeking Justice, which I saw to review, is more Nic Cage thrills! Except not that thrilling! Hang in there, Nic Cage.
Non-violence! Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, which I also saw to review. It's watchable. It will not interefere with any possible crushes on Ewan McGregor and Emily Blunt, but you might wish they were making another, better romantic comedy together.
Finally, a few weeks back I saw this movie The Deep Blue Sea for review, and I was genuinely surprised to find out that it's receiving critical acclaim. Minute for minute, it may be the worst movie I've seen this year. Not the most morally reprehensible or worst-made or most empty... just the plain old worst.