Tag Archives: comedy

Review: “This Is 40”

22 Saturday Dec 2012

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“Happy Babies”

Grade: A- (SEE IT)

THE LATEST FROM Judd Apatow, the kinky king of comedy, is “This Is 40.”  As romantic comedies go, this is funny and his best work since “Knocked Up” of 2005. The indefatigable Paul Rudd plays Pete, a struggling record label owner, and Leslie Mann plays Debbie, a devoted mom.  She’s turning forty, or is she?  Even Debbie’s physician scolds her for fudging her birth-date on her paperwork.  The tone of this comedy is this-is-40-movie-posterlight; Apatow has clearly matured since the bathroom humor of “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” though we haven’t left the bathroom entirely: Pete is prone to retreat there for a little peace and quiet.  But Debbie will abruptly draw back the door, asking who sits on the toilet for such a long period of time. It’s a relief to see that Pete and Debbie aren’t going for each other’s throats.  Their quarreling is not of the catastrophic kind – “This is 40” opens with Debbie horrified to learn that Pete has taken a Viagra to turn him “turbo,” as he puts it – but a kind of banal back-and-forth and the doe-eyed Mann is an expert at looking comically confounded.  “Why do we even fight?” she asks during a getaway in which Pete brings pot cookies and clowns around the hotel room.  It’s a question that all couples have asked themselves, especially when things are going smoothly. Just give it ten minutes for the mood to change.

There’s something adorable about a writer-director casting all the women in his life inThis-Is-40_02 his films. Mann is Apatow’s wife off-screen and, on-screen, Pete and Debbie’s daughters, Sadie and Charlotte, are played by Maude and Charlotte Apatow, respectively. The fact that they’re a Hollywood family doesn’t mean they feel fake.  Maude is 14 and accosts her folks for limiting her cell-phone and iPad use; Sadie, still their little girl, stands back and snarks that her big sister was nicer before her “body got weird.” Maude and Paul butt heads over the merits of TV shows like “Lost” and “Mad Men” while Debbie harasses one of Maude’s classmates for dissing her daughter’s looks on Facebook.  The boy’s mother is played by the marvelous Melissa McCarthy of “Bridesmaids.” Stick around for the outtakes, which are often funnier than anything in preceding 155 minutes.  Yes, “This is 40” runs a bit long, but it’s one lengthy salvo of jokes, jokes that work. (The film was pegged as “This Is 40 Minutes Too Long” by insiders prior to release.)  Pete’s father Larry (Albert Brooks) is on his second family with blond triplets; he’s always hitting his son up for cash.  Debbie’s father Oliver (John Lithgow) meets his granddaughters for the first time at a party; it’s an interaction Charlotte can only describe as “awkward.” Apatow’s film affirms family life but without any piety; this family feels ferociously real.

this_is_40_a_lIf you’ve ever taken a yoga class, you have probably been put in happy baby pose. That’s the one where you lie on your back and grab the soles of your feet like some blissed-out toddler.  “This is 40” features Pete and Debbie in their own adult versions of happy baby pose: Debbie discovers her husband on his back, legs up, asking her to examine his anus for him.  Again, she’s horrified and looking quickly, says “It’s a hemorrhoid” before running for her life.  Debbie, too, finds herself at the gynecologist in a similar pose as two nurses and the doctor breeze in, prattling away as she’s trapped with her legs up and open.  A yoga teacher of mine once described happy baby as “a vulnerable position,” and that’s an apt metaphor for where Apatow likes to position his characters and his audience.  “This is 40” makes happy babies of us all.

Review: “Silver Linings Playbook”

16 Sunday Dec 2012

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“One Flew Into the Cuckoo’s Nest”

Grade: B- (RENT IT)

FOR A GOOD while at least, “Silver Linings Playbook” is a film that is proudly off its meds and taking no prisoners.  Its opening has all the panicked pacing of a jailbreak and very nearly resembles one: Pat (Bradley Cooper) is being released from a court-ordered stay at a Baltimore mental health facility and he takes his friend and fellow patient (Chris Tucker) along for the ride.  Eight months earlier, Pat savagely beat his wife’s boyfriend after discovering the two in a shower with his wedding song – Stevie Wonder’s “My Cherie Amour” – wafting in the steamy air.  Hearing even three seconds of the love song will set him off and set him back on his road to recovery.  We want to see him well and when Cooper, who has a vulpine face, steadies his closely set blue eyes, he has a scrappy-boy look of desperation that cries out for his mother or at for a prescription refill. In terms of mental illness, “Silver Linings Playbook” endorses a dangerous diagnosis, as simple-minded as the eponymous Beatles song: all you really need is love.

Silver-Linings-Playbook-2Back in Philadelphia, Pat’s homecoming is met by his worried mother (Jacki Weaver) and Pat Sr. (Robert De Niro), an obsessive fan of the Eagles and sports bookie who has no other way of communicating with his wife and son except through professional football.  He keeps his remote controllers in a tidy row and thumbs a lucky handkerchief as he watches every game on the edge of his seat.  Apparently, madness runs in the family.  There’s also mental illness just around the corner, in the form of Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence), a policeman’s widow already popular with the local pervs for putting out.  Pat and Tiffany appear to be a match made in Halcyon and when the two cross paths at a dinner party hosted by Tiffany’s older sister Veronica (Julia Stiles), it’s a contest to see who can say the most outlandish thing or do the most impulsive thing to shatter any sense of civility and calm. They trade their experiences on different anti-psychotics as if they were vacation towns they’ve visited and walking Tiffany to the end of her driveway, Pat is invited inside for casual sex and slapped across the face in quick succession.  Both find that the other is useful in some way: Tiffany can help Pat get to his ex-wife, Nikki, who has placed a restraining order against him, and Pat can help Tiffany win a local dancing competition. To that end, she has converted her parents’ garage into a dance studio and once he agrees to train as her partner, she insists on daily dancing lessons.  This allows for the film’s pas de deux to take literal shape and pulling Pat in close, Tiffany brings her nose to his. “You feel that?” she asks of Pat. “That’s emotion.”

It’s sad to think that movie-goers born after 1988 only know Robert De Niro as theSilver Linings Playbook 2 paranoid patriarch in “Meet the Parents” and “Silver Linings Playbook” restores the actor to the realm of serious and sensitive cinema.  These same youngsters only know Bradley Cooper as the playboy ringleader in “The Hangover” and after such misfires as “Limitless” and “The Words,” he has finally found his mojo as a leading man. Yet “Silver Linings” runs off the rails in its last reel; it wants a happy ending and its lovers to ride off into the sunset when, in reality, people like Pat and Tiffany are missing the gene for Hollywood-like happiness.  There is no way that Pat’s therapist Dr. Patel (Anupam Kher) would attend an Eagles game with his face painted, nor come to Pat’s home like he’s one of the family, and the swanky Philadelphia hotel in which the dancing competition takes place is not the sort of place Pat Sr. would visit without criticizing his son for trading in his football jersey for a pair of dancing shoes.

I have to admit I felt a little like Pat who, earlier in the film, flies off the handle when he reaches the unhappy ending of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms.  Enraged, he throws the paperback out an upstairs window, breaking it, and wakes his parents in the middle of the night to blast the novel for its depressing but decidedly realistic ending.  If only director David O. Russell (“Spanking the Monkey,” “The Fighter”) had taken a page from Hemingway’s playbook and not Hollywood’s.

Review: “Celeste and Jesse Forever”

01 Saturday Sep 2012

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“Love You, Mean It!”

Grade: A- (SEE IT)

APPARENTLY IF YOU want to play a smart, complicated woman on screen – the kind Hollywood still has trouble conceiving – you have to write the role yourself.

That’s what Rashida Jones did, with a little help from her “Parks and Recreation” costar Will McCormack, to create the breakup comedy “Celeste and Jesse Forever.”  Not exactly a romance, Jones’ screenwriting debut is a charming and contemporary take on what’s become as common as matrimony itself: divorce (the amicable kind).  This film, which feels fresh and is stuffed with slang, centers on the neurotic Celeste: excessive exerciser, Facebook stalker, pot-smoking author of a book on declining American culture called “Shitegeist.”  If Celeste is an irritating character – deceiving herself that she’s actually over her ex – it’s because she feels relatably lifelike.

Directed by Lee Toland Krieger, “Celeste” was filmed in just 23 days for under $1 million.  Consequently, the performances have an honest, improvisational inflection as if the actors are actually friends.  That’s because they are: Jones and McCormack, who briefly dated in real life, would simulate sex acts using baby-corn and Chapstick when suffering from writer’s block.  Here, they have their fictional counterparts (Celeste and Jesse) do the same while in the car and at the wedding of friends Tucker (Eric Christian Olsen) and Beth (Ari Graynor), the latter of whom abruptly leaves a dinner because she objects to the divorced couple’s closeness.  There’s nothing but truth-telling in “Celeste and Jesse Forever”; “I go to yoga to meet girls” confesses Celeste’s love-interest Paul (the always dependable Chris Messina).  Namaste!

Andy Samburg (“I Love You, Man”) plays Jesse, an oversensitive visual artist living in Celeste’s spare room and suspended in a kind of romantic abeyance while the ink on the divorce papers dries. Ex-wifey is none too happy when Jesse  rebounds in a matter of months and, we’re told, “puts a baby in a lady.”  When Celeste phones Jesse to help her assemble an IKEA purchase, the two turn to red wine and reminiscing.  We all know where that leads.  Rewind to when we first met the hipster couple at the film’s opening and we’re not exactly sure what Celeste and Jesse mean to each other as they drive around Los Angeles, cracking inside jokes with their scorched-earth sense of humor.  Jesse reminds his soon-to-be-ex-wife that she dislikes the sight of architect Frank Gehry’s Disney Hall, that blasted tuna can of a landmark and an important metaphor for the couple’s romantic life: open and messy and, well, kinda’ lovely.

Review: “The Campaign”

12 Sunday Aug 2012

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“Attack Lads”

Grade: B (RENT IT)

THE PHRASE “DIRTY POLITICS” acquires a new meaning in the amusing but ultimately frivolous “The Campaign,” directed by Jay Roach (“Meet the Parents”) based on a story by Adam McKay (“Anchorman,” “Talladega Nights”).  The film is a veritable raunch-o-rama that makes strange bedfellows of the already strange Zack Galifianakis and Will Ferrell.  No one will be surprised to learn that they have great comedic chemistry together though the script is cynical and ultimately too silly to really leave a black-and-blue.

As political opponents Marty Huggins and Cam Brady, respectively, the pair square off as congressional candidates in North Carolina and along the way, poke fun at the emptiness of political rhetoric in America today – Brady runs on the platform “America, Jesus, Freedom” but confesses off-stage that he doesn’t believe it much less know what it means – while satirizing the hypocrisies of campaigning and the deep pockets that make it all possible.  Pulling the strings, and downing brandy after brandy, are the film’s villains, John Lithgow and Dan Aykroyd, who, as Glenn and Wade Motch, mirror the real-life Koch brothers, the Tea-partying billionaires who abominate President Obama.  There’s also Dylan McDermott as the Motch’s errand boy and, in Brady’s bunch, Jason Sudeikis, as a campaign strategist.

The problem is that “The Campaign” doesn’t exactly rise – or is it sink? – to the level of great satire; its best bits involve what you have likely already seen in the previews (Ferrell taking an accidental swing at a baby on the campaign trail) and Sudeikis coaching his boss through a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, which Ferrell botches badly but with brilliance.  A crazy-eyed Ferrell is little more than a haircut here and the Bush impersonation he does so well distracts.

As Huggins, the great Galifianakis gives us another of his effeminate manchild personae – he does essentially the same shtick in the road-trip comedy “Due Date” – that makes you wonder if he is parodying gay men for cheap laughs or, more subversively, playing it “straight” to ultimately undo masculine gender norms.  [New York Times film critic A.O. Scott raises the question in his review, asserting: “Marty is squeaky-voiced, easily flustered and just a wife (Sarah Baker) and two sons (Grant Goodman and Kya Haywood) away from being an egregious gay stereotype” (8/10/12).]   You half expect his macho enemy, Cam Brady, to out Galifianakis’ character and though that doesn’t happen, it is hard to know what Galifianakis wished to achieve with this queer performance and whether he is sending a knowing wink-wink to the audience.  The joke could be that the American mainstream demands a put-on masculinity.  “The Hangover” remains the apotheosis of man-cinema and yet no one talks about how the character of Alan deviates from the hetero-dullness of the typical buddy film.  The rest is simple: Galifianakis is the most dynamic comic actor of our time with the hardest working facial hair in show business.

If not for him, however, and Sarah Baker as his bewildered wife, “The Campaign” might even further lose the race.  It could have been a contender – and it packs in the laughs, for sure – but winds up as something of a minority leader.

Review: “To Rome with Love”

29 Sunday Jul 2012

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“La Dolce Vita”

Grade: A- (SEE IT)

FOLLOWERS OF WOODY ALLEN’S long and important career have likely found themselves haunted by a tennis ball.  Central to his last great drama, “Match Point” (2005), the tennis ball is seen during the opening credits, being batted back and forth, with the film’s killer intoning: “People are afraid to face how great a part of life is dependent on luck.  It’s scary to think so much is out of one’s control.”  So much depends upon where that unpredictable little ball lands, and matched later by a wedding ring (a crucial bit of evidence which helps the film’s homicidal anti-hero to escape unpunished), Allen’s “Match Point” suggests that chance, rather than religious notions of prescribed order and continuity, governs the universe.

If “Match Point” milked the related roles of chance, luck, and contingency for murder and existential mayhem in “Match Point,” Allen’s new comedy, “To Rome with Love,” plays the selfsame themes for laughs.  If you sense the film’s big idea – that romance, too, is determined by the undeterminable – you’ll be grateful Allen has furthered developed his atheistic world-view but in gentler ways.  “To Rome with Love,” which follows on the heels of last year’s best film, “Midnight in Paris,” is comprised of at least thirteen major characters and four parallel narratives.  Even the combination of those disparate but related stories is driven by randomness.

First, there’s Ellen Page as Monica, a seductive actress who threatens to come between two American students studying in Rome (played by Jesse Eisenberg and Greta Gerwig).  (Actresses are duplicitous divas to be avoided in all of Allen’s films.)  Second, there’s Judy Davis and Woody Allen himself as tourists visiting their daughter and new Italian beau Michelangelo whose name Allen can’t pronounce correctly (Alison Pill, who played Zelda Fitzgerald in “Midnight in Paris” and Flavio Parenti, respectively).  Third, there’s Leopoldo, the Italian pencil-pusher who inexplicably becomes a celebrity overnight, and lastly, two more Italians (Alessandro Tiberi and Alessandra Mastronardi) also threatened by another woman (a prostitute played with panache by Penélope Cruz).  For once, someone has written a role for an Italian actor that doesn’t typecast them as the erotic tiger.  These two, not to mention the always excellent Eisenberg, don’t make the mistake Will Ferrell did in 2006’s “Melinda and Melinda” by channeling rather than simply impersonating Woody Allen’s famous persona.

Most, if not all, of these storylines revel in silliness.  Allen plays a former opera director who hears Michelangelo’s father singing in the shower and insists that he take stage despite the fact that Giancarlo (played by real-life operatic tenor Fabio Armiliato) will need an actual shower on stage to overcome stage-fright.  As Leopoldo, Roberto Benigni helps to blur the boundary between romantic comedy and satiric farce; he wakes up one day, à la “Groundhog Day,” to find himself suddenly in the spotlight where the most mundane details of his day, like whether he likes he bread toasted or not and where he scratches himself, attract national scrutiny.   As an older version of Jesse Eisenberg’s character, Alec Baldwin is something of a characterological question mark: is he the guardian angel Clarence from “It’s a Wonderful Life” or a Shakespearean spectre?  All the great films of 2012 thus far have been comedies – “Bernie,” “Moonrise Kingdom,” and now this – but I doubt you will spot a smarter meditation on happenstance this year.

As with “Midnight in Paris,” wherein the City of Lights is as much a character as the spellbound humans contained inside it, Rome itself is undeniably a player here.  At one point, Alessandra Mastronardi is as turned-around and lost as Owen Wilson’s Gil is in “Midnight,” and Darius Khondji’s splendid camera (also turned-around) pulls a 360 to show us the tawny exteriors of the Eternal City, always somewhere between ruins and romance.   Who else but Woody Allen keeps giving us that very modern feeling of being every bit the flaneur?  That being said, not all of “To Rome with Love” is perfect: just a little of Benigni clowning around in the street is more than enough and the film’s loose-ends take too long to wrap up.

One third of that terrific trifecta – Spielberg, Scorsese – Woody Allen has been writing love-letters to his favorite cities for some time, and though “To Rome with Love,” may not rise to the unmatched “Manhattan” (1979) or even the London of “Match Point,” his latest is still a thinking person’s Roman holiday.

Review: “Moonrise Kingdom”

18 Wednesday Jul 2012

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“Over the Moon”

Grade: A- (SEE IT)

“FICTION IS ABOUT what it means to be a ******* human being,” said the late, great David Foster Wallace.  I have censored the post-postmodern author of Infinite Jest and A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again only because Wes Anderson’s newest opus, “Moonrise Kingdom,” not only delivers on Wallace’s challenge to all contemporary ironists to rise about their sometimes stilted aesthetic and to show some heart, but because, at Camp Ivanhoe, the summer scout camp setting of Anderson’s adolescent romance, cursing is forbidden.

So, too, is running away from home (and camp), the double infraction of the comedy’s twelve-year-old couple, Sam (Jared Gilman) and Suzy (Kara Hayward).  She’s a little runaway, carrying a suitcase of obscure books and a pair of scissors for lefties.  Remember, however, that “Moonrise Kingdom” is a Wes Anderson movie, which means that the couple beats to their own drum and moves at the pace of molasses. Think of Shakespeare’s star-cross’d lovers after the pair had given blood and/or ingested a large-animal tranquillizer.

Sam and Suzy’s escape throws Khaki Scouts’ leader, Scout Master Ward (Edward Norton) into his bloodhound mode and hot on the young couple’s trail, he enlists the support of Suzy’s parents (Andersonians Frances McDormand and Bill Murray).  Yet “Moonrise” follows a higher law: Walk, Don’t Run!  There’s no real hurry in Anderson’s world: Scout Ward pauses to smoke, sip scotch in his plaid, zippered tent and record his reflections.  Co-written with Roman Coppola, “Moonrise Kingdom” excels because it delights in the fascinations of childhood and the complexities of adulthood in equal measure.  Enter Bruce Willis as Captain Sharp, whom Suzy’s mother has been seeing extramaritally, and as much as Suzy fights her mother, we can’t help but notice the major way in which she becomes her by the film’s end.

At one point, a bespectacled Sam (replete with Scout badges and coonskin hat) exclaims, while fishing with Suzy: “Fish on hook!  Reel him in slowly!”  That instruction could serve as an apt metaphor for Anderson’s method, more self-satisfied than eager-to-please. A storybook-like plot and excellent ensemble cast (including Tilda Swinton and Jascon Schwartzman) reel the viewer in and in and in.  Again, Anderson doesn’t like to be rushed.  The reason why “Moonrise Kingdom” succeeds whereas his most dissatisfying deadpans such as “The Darjeeling Limited” and worse, “The Life Aquatic with Steven Zissou,” did not, is that adulthood is shaky ground for Anderson; his adult characters come across as precocious children whereas his children are more like puerile adults.  As paradoxical as it may seem, “Moonrise” is a fully mature work about immaturity.  Who else but this auteur could give us an over-stylized scene in which Sam’s foster father’s yellow shirt matches a yellow fan, a yellow refrigerator and a yellow rotary phone, and exchanges like this one, concerning the death of a dog named Snoopy:  “Was he a good dog?” Suzy asks of Sam to which he replies: “Who’s to say but he didn’t deserve to die.”

Meanwhile, it’s safe to say that “Moonrise Kingdom,” Anderson’s best film since “The Royal Tenenbaums” a decade ago, is the most uncampy fun you’ll have at the cinema this summer.  Walk, don’t run.

Review: “Magic Mike”

03 Tuesday Jul 2012

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“Showguys”

Grade: A-/B+ (RENT IT)

CHANNING TATUM’S NIPPLES appear on screen a split-second before the rest of his body as he slides from a crumpled bed in which not one but two ladies lay felled from the night before.  These are the first indications that Steven Soderbergh’s new film “Magic Mike” is immersed in the body electric.  How could it not?  The narrative centers around an ambitious male stripper in Tampa, Florida who takes a college dropout named Adam (Alex Pettyfer) under his wing and onto the catwalk.  (Tatum was born to play this role, literally: penned by his production partner Reid Carolin, the dramedy is inspired by the actor’s own experience as a stripper in the Sunshine State.  Since that time, Tatum has been busy making tepid movies like “The Eagle” and “The Vow,” but here, he holds his own with newfound, leading-man likability.)

The real revelation of “Magic Mike” isn’t Tatum, however, nor is it Pettyfer, or even a repitilian Matthew McConaughey as club-owner Dallas, but newcomer Cody Horn as Adam’s sister, Brooke, who provides her brother with a sofa to sleep on while he learns the ropes at Club Xquisite.  “I don’t judge him, I love him,” she tells Mike.  Horn brings some much-needed sarcasm and gravitas to “Magic Mike,” which is skin-deep in terms of character and plotting.  Anyone familiar with the best (and worst) of hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold tales like “Showgirls” and “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” (not to mention “Klute,” “Boogie Nights,” and “Detachment”) will know that Adam will have to get knocked down before he gets up again.  There is a sweetness to Pettyfer’s naivete, especially when, wide-eyed, he remarks to Mike after a wild night out: “I think we should be best friends.”

The banal title notwithstanding, “Magic Mike” is elevated by Soderbergh’s Midas touch; in keeping with “Contagion,” the film is lit in tawny, almost sepia, colors except for when the dancers at Xquisite are gyrating in tear-away chaps and thongs.  Still, from the director of “Sex Lies and Videotape,” “Magic Mike” is surprisingly chaste; it could be the first unsexy movie about male dancers and the libidinal ladies they drive wild.  Amongst those admirers is adult movie star Sasha Grey (no link provided!).  If only “Magic Mike” had gone the full monty and thought of Dirk Diggler as its sleazy muse.

Regardless, audiences don’t seem to mind much.  Otherwise known as “the stripper movie,” “Magic Mike” raked in 39.2 million dollars during its opening weekend, a record for an R-rated film, and it cost just seven million to make.  That’s an awful lot of singles.

Review: “Bernie”

27 Sunday May 2012

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“Saint Bernard”

Grade: A- (SEE IT)

THERE ARE ONLY a handful of comic actors, Woody Allen and Jim Carrey included, who elicit laughter through the sheer power of body language.  Jack Black is certainly amongst those funnymen and, as the eponymous Bernie, with his high belt-line and caterpillar mustache, he resembles a plus-size Robert Goulet.  Beloved by his Texan townsmen, he belts out gospel tunes and dons a sparkling white bandleader outfit in a local production of “The Music Man.”  You won’t see a funnier image this year than that of Black and steel magnolia Shirley MacLaine riding together on a tandem bike.  You also won’t see a better batch of black comedy than “Bernie” this year.

Inspired by a true crime in the East Texas town of Carthage (population 6,500), “Bernie” uses a mockumentary-style to narrate the story of a popular funeral director, Bernie Tiede, who wooed and wed an old widow before shooting her four times in the back with a gun used to kill armadillos in her garden.  Working from an article by Skip Hollandsworth, director Richard Linklater (“Dazed and Confused,” “School of Rock”) sets the morbid mood by opening the film in a mortuary class with Bernie offering the basics of beautifying the dead.  “A little dab will do you,” Bernie instructs, before gluing his cadaver’s lips and eyelids together and adding: “You cannot have grief tragically becoming comedy.”  That serves as an apt description of the film’s aesthetic, a hybrid of the Coen brothers and Christopher Guest.  So, too, does “The Music Man” with its con-man crooner and “Les Misérables” with its policeman Javert in obsessive pursuit of Jean Valjean.  Here, Matthew McConaughey (reveling in his role as District Attorney Danny Buck) is the Javert-like lawman who isn’t fooled by Bernie’s likability.  Bernie is so likable, in fact, that Buck has to prosecute him miles from Carthage because of jury bias.

As the sourpuss Marjorie Nugent, MacLaine makes a vibrant return to the screen.  No starring role has called the veteran actress’s name since she played fashion icon Coco Chanel in 2008 and Hollandsworth’s script, co-written with Linklater, is indeed worthy of her comic talents.  Yes, Marjorie is a demanding old lady who bosses Bernie around and drives him to an impulsive act of homicide but she is also a lonely soul, isolated from friends and family through decades-old grudges, and more than simple caricature.  “I can’t think of a man that has been this nice to me in fifty years,” she says of Bernie.  The pair’s intergenerational romance is one of the strangest things in contemporary cinema: is Bernie a paramour or merely a parasite?  The movie smartly doesn’t say.  There are even chapter titles that turn “Bernie” into a morality play, one of which asks: “Was Bernie Gay?”  Black knows just how to embody this mysterious figure and cryogenically frozen in character, he has the sunny disposition of a TV evangelist shot through with something unsettling and sad.  Stick around for the credits and see the real-life Bernie and Marjorie.  Consider it the sweet hereafter.

Review: “The Dictator”

17 Thursday May 2012

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“Arab Spring”

Grade: B+ (RENT IT)

KING OF OVERKILL, Sacha Baron Cohen (“Hugo,” “Bruno”) delivers the cringe-worthy laughs as a North African autocrat in the shock-comedy “The Dictator.”  Cohen has built a comic career on exploiting our most popular and pernicious prejudices: anti-Semitism in 2006’s “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan” and homophobia in 2009’s “Bruno.”  Understatement has never been in the Cambridge grad’s repertoire.  As Admiral General Haffaz Aladeen (sounds like “half-ass Aladdin”), the oppressive leader of the fictional nation Wadiya, Cohen rules his people with an iron fist.  He sees women as disposable and orders the execution of his underlings and weapons experts with a simple flip of a switch.  Described as “eccentric with unlimited oil wealth,” Aladeen is the comic embodiment of Percy Shelley’s Ozymandias, replete with “wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command” and boy is it funny when he falls.

Before that fall from power, however, Aladeen beds Megan Fox in an opulent seraglio before fixing a Polaroid of her to a wall of his past conquests (including Oprah and Arnold Schwarzenegger).  Sliding out of the Admiral’s satin sheets after collecting her pay, Fox grumbles: “Katy Perry got a diamond bracelet.”  There’s some irony in the casting: Ben Kingsley, who played the Prince of Peace Mahatma Gandhi back in 1982, plays the Dictator’s Uncle Tamir; he shepherds Aladeen to the United Nations where, in a spoof of Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s antics before the General Assembly, the leader’s body double drinks his own urine and makes a mockery of international diplomacy.  Once his double supplants him, leaving the real Admiral lost and anonymous in New York, “The Dictator” borrows from such fish-out-of-water classics as “Being There” and “Coming to America.”

The always outsized Cohen is cushioned by Anna Faris, an anti-Aladeen activist with unshaven armpits and described as a “lesbian Hobbit.”  He’s directed by Larry Charles (“Curb Your Enthusiasm”), also his collaborator on “Borat” and “Bruno.”  Charles and Cohen make a devious duo.  It’s taken ten years to make September 11th jokes.  Too soon?  Apparently not.  One of the funniest bits – and indeed “The Dictator” feels like an extended bit, an “SNL” skit that goes on a bit too long – involves two tourists, trapped in a helicopter tour of New York, terrified to hear Aladeen and friend pointing at the Manhattan skyline while making kablooey sounds.  Proudly politically incorrect, “The Dictator” not only makes a laughing stock of Islamic theocracies but the West’s sense of moral superiority.

“Fascist?” he asks, aghast.  “You say it like it’s a bad thing!”

Review: “American Reunion”

06 Friday Apr 2012

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“Stiff-less”

Grade: D (SKIP IT)

“CONTROL YOUR BODY!” barked one harried mother to her small son as she shepherded both her children through the movie lobby and toward the usher.  The parental command was strikingly apropos as we diverged, she into “The Lorax” and I into a nearly empty showing of “American Reunion,” the pathetically pointless addition to the “American Pie” franchise and asinine add-on to that 1999 original, the sequel from 2001, and “American Wedding” from 2003.  The teenage sex comedy occupies a peculiar place in the field of American movie genres.  Before there was Howard Stern on the radio, there was “Porky’s” (1982) in theatres to stoke the sexual fires of the adolescent mentality and later, its heir “American Pie” to show just one way to enjoy a pastry that you won’t see on the Food Network.

That “American Reunion” opens with the bedroom music of R. Kelley;’s “Bump N’ Grind” – “My mind is telling me no/But my body is telling me yes!” – further drove this point home, for the “American Pie” films have long exploited the pubescent struggle between bodily drives and social mores, libido and law, or put in more Freudian terms, the id and the super-ego.

Since “American Wedding,” poopy pampers and the “Real Housewives” series have put a domestic crimp in their single man’s style.  There are zero surprises in store when Jim (Jason Biggs), Stifler (an amusing Seann William Scott), Finch (Eddie Kaye Thomas), Oz (Chris Klein), and Kevin (Thomas Ian Nicholas) regroup for their 13th reunion at East Green Falls High School.   Freed from his corporate temp-job and living with his mother, Stifler toasts his friend with this: “Let’s make this weekend our bitch!”  What is surprising is that none of the main characters have matured much.  Written and directed by Jon Hurwitz, “American Reunion” doesn’t exactly develop the characters created by Adam Hertz; instead, they’ve regressed further into genital jokes and the antics of topless drunk girls.  Fortunately, there are comic veterans Eugene Levy (Jim’s Dad) and Jennifer Coolidge (Stifler’s Mom) to lend the film some sincerity.  Having his eyebrows trimmed by son Jim and daughter-in-law Michelle (Alyson Hannigan), Levy tells them: “Those caterpillars are my trademark.”

Earlier in “American Reunion,” after defecating in a cooler and destroying a prized pair of jet-skis, Stifler boasts to his buddies: “C’mon guys. That was funny!”  “Yeah,” Jim shoots back, “in high school.”  Ditto that.  The year of the original film’s release, 1999, is also telling because it dovetails with Prince’s apocalyptic pledge, from 1982, that “we’re going to party like it’s 1999.”

Someone needs to tell Stifler and the gang that the party’s over.