Tag Archives: john lithgow

Review: “This Is 40”

22 Saturday Dec 2012

Posted by in Film Reviews

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , ,

21FORTY-articleLarge

“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: “The Campaign”

12 Sunday Aug 2012

Posted by in Film Reviews

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , ,

“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: “Rise of the Planet of the Apes”

06 Saturday Aug 2011

Posted by in Film Reviews

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

“Orangutangulous!”

Movie Review: “Rise of the Planet of the Apes”

Grade: B+/A- (SEE IT)

THE FACT THAT star James Franco (“Howl,” “Milk”) is currently studying British Romantic literature at Yale University in pursuit of his PhD – what’s next? Anne Hathaway as college chancellor? – may help to explain his initial attraction to the script for “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” (2011), a  prequel to the “Planet of the Apes” franchise which will have you saying to yourself: Go monkey, go!   After all, it’s in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), that Romantic caveat of a classic which more or less spawned the entire science-fiction genre, that Victor Frankenstein describes his laboratory as that “workshop of filthy creation.”  What gives “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” its chill (and genuine thrill) is that the pharma-medical lab at the film’s center is anything but filthy.  Instead, the scientific headquarters known as Gen-Sys look like a state-of-the-art facility: sleek and silvery countertops, Plexiglas cages in which primates pace and occasionally scream out, Franco (as Will Rodman) in an immaculately white lab coat.

The glossy exterior of Gen-Sys belies what goes on behind (sliding and keypad-operated) doors: primates are routinely tested and tortured in pursuit of a cure for Alzheimer’s.  The drug restores memory in humans and turns primates into Super-Simians.   Rodman’s own dad, Charles (played by a befuddled looking John Lithgow) is himself an Alzheimer’s sufferer and another guinea pig for his son’s trials.  Therein lies the film’s recipe for disaster: just as Will is boasting to Gen-Sys’s investors that he and boss (smooth operator David Oyelowo) have found the cure, an ape known as Bright Eyes busts out of its cage and through the window to a board meeting only to be shot dead by security.  Bright Eyes leaves behind a baby chimp whom Will smuggles out of the lab and names Caesar.

It’s a portentous name, Caesar, and until he finally realizes the dictatorial power of his moniker, we’re left waiting for Caesar to rise and rule a maligned race of apes just dying for a leader.   With the help of Will’s panacea for Alzheimer’s, which he steals from the kitchen fridge, Caesar crosses the Rubicon into San Francisco and starts a revolution.  Who knew the City by the Bay had an incompetently run monkey house sitting on its borders like a ticking time bomb, and that silverback apes, looking for spears to throw at cop cars, could pull parking meters out of sidewalks like they’re picking daisies? In a film really about the horrors of captivity, this George is more furious than curious.

Director Rupert Wyatt (“The Escapist”) maintains a breezy pace as Caesar’s insurrection gathers speed and force.  One notable scene is set on Will’s street where drivers and pedestrians alike stop, mouths agape, to see something amazing:  scores of monkeys swinging through the trees above in a gathering storm.  The standoff on the Golden Gate Bridge is truly something to behold; one would be hard-pressed to think of another confrontation on film between ape and mounted policeman (ape: 1; S.F.P.D.: 0).  Though “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” delivers the exploding helicopters and car chases we expect from a summer blockbuster, Wyatt also maintains a thoughtful plea for animal liberation.  Sympathy was central for the Romantics, especially Mary Shelley whose Creature in Frankenstein longs for someone to sympathize with his plight, and the traces of that creed are still visible in Caesar’s all-too-human cries for freedom and non-violence.

The most affecting revelation in Frankenstein is when Shelley’s monster, with his “dull yellow eye,” confesses to his crimes, saying: “I’m malicious because I’m miserable.”  His motivation all along was the simple, childlike desire to be loved and needed, but looking the way he does, humans only reacted with fear and horror.  This is more or less the point of Wyatt’s eco-positive parable, “Rise of the Planet of the Apes”: all monsters are man-made just as every futile attempt to contain the animal other via zoos and laboratories ultimately backfires.  So long as we continue to oppress all other species, the threat of their violent takeover will remain both a fear and a fantasy.

As a modern-day Frankenstein’s monster, Caesar wants to lead a bloodless revolution – he even stops his monkey underlings from killing humans indiscriminately – but it’s just not in the cards, especially in a Hollywood movie.  It’s telling that his only line in the movie is “No,” which he utters to the surprise of his inept jailers in the ape house.  If you’re listening, Patrick Doyle’s pulsing score will stay with you until you reach the parking lot, but it’s the final image of Caesar finally in his element, free (for now) in the treetops overlooking San Fran, that will enliven you long after.

For my review of Franco as poet Allen Ginsberg in “Howl,” see:

“A Movie Based On a Poem”

(Review of “Howl”) in the _G&LR_

http://www.glreview.com/article.php?articleid=316