Tag Archives: paul rudd

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: “The Perks of Being a Wallflower”

06 Saturday Oct 2012

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“Teenagers on the Verge of A Nervous Breakdown”

Grade: B- (RENT IT)

SOMETIMES WISE, SOMETIMES FUNNY, always infuriating, “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” is only a semi-success.  The source material is Stephen Chbosky’s eponymous coming-of-age novel, published in 1999 and adapted-directed by the author himself for the screen.  The film version of “The Perks” isn’t just a drama of adolescent angst but a retro playlist that, stuffed with Crowded House, The Smiths, and Cracker, alerts us to the film’s setting: Pittsburgh in the early Nineties.  Chbosky’s adaptation is a schizophrenic affair, however: admirably, it doesn’t shy away from the messiness of teenage sexuality, love and longing and yet many of its moment are so precious that they practically demand a collective “Aww” from the audience.  It’s a relief to not see much of the parents in “The Perks” though the kids, wise beyond their years, are too much like adults for the film to really strike a chord.  They’re already looking back.

Our protagonist is Charlie (Logan Lerman), a burgeoning writer and nerdlet who has placed in Advanced English under the tutelage of Paul Rudd as a high school teacher supplying this freshman with Salinger and words of wisdom.  Charlie has survived two traumas: the suicide of his best friend and the  death of his aunt (Melanie Lynskey), which he may or may not have caused.  Flashbacks of that time  – a sure sign that a book is being compressed into film – swim in and out of focus.  After seeing an outlandish and openly gay upperclassman named Patrick act out in shop class, Charlie develops a fascination with his classmate and even scoots closer to him at a football game to introduce himself.  Enter Samantha as the third musketeer; she is played by a pixie-ish Emma Watson who has left Hogwarts behind for her first adult leading role only to be upstaged by Ezra Miller as stepbrother Patrick.  (Miller made our blood run cold as the sociopathic Kevin in last year’s “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” and he proves once again to be a fearless and funny scene-stealer.)  Patrick has been carrying on a secret relationship with a closeted quarterback and Sam has a reputation of sorts.  They welcome Charlie to what they describe as their “island of misfit toys.”

The three actors have terrific chemistry together despite the fact that their get-togethers and traditions are completely implausible.  Since when do high schoolers host Christmas parties only to exchange presents like antique typewriters and men’s suits?  Sam and Patrick say things like “It’s rock and roll!” and, taking over the school dance to bust a move to “Come on Eileen,” Patrick reels: “This is what fun looks like!”  The line lands with a thud only because American teenagers haven’t said such things without irony since they wore poodle-skirts and tuned in for “My Three Sons.”  The Nineties were never this nice.  Chbosky smartly undercuts such phony sentimentality at key moments, like when Charlie abruptly tells Sam that his friend shot himself or when he discovers Patrick and the quarterback kissing in an upstairs room, but like any act of nostalgia, “The Perks” is closer to how one might want to remember high school rather than the actual experience.  The Eucharist melts into a hit of LSD; Charlie is given pot brownies and admits he’s “baked like a cake.”  This is the stuff of real adolescence rather than the stuff that dreams are made of.  Less floweriness, more ferocity.

Review: “Wanderlust”

01 Thursday Mar 2012

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“Tahini Green”

Review: B (RENT IT)

BELIEVE IT OR not, it’s been fourteen years since Jennifer Aniston and Paul Rudd first co-starred in “The Object of My Affection,” a bold rom-com (for its day) about a New Yorker named Nina who falls for her gay best friend George.  By now, Aniston and Rudd, two of the most prolific comic actors on screen, are masters of the straight face, that concealment of laughter and/or derision.  “Wanderlust” (directed by David Wain of “Role Models” and “Wet Hot American Summer”) is a reunion of sorts, both for Aniston and Rudd, as well as for members of the ‘90s-era MTV sketch troupe, The State, such as Kerri Kenney-Silver (“Reno 911”), Michael Ian Black and Joe Lo Truglio.  (Stay for the outtakes and see the actors lose it.)  This time around, Rudd plays it straight as the grounding force in a comedy about a hippie commune in north Georgia populated by kooks, yogis, and nudists.  Because Aniston delivers a comedy seemingly every full moon, her flicks are a bit like pistachios: only one in a batch is truly savory and “Wanderlust” is that flick, affectionately light-hearted and genuinely funny.

As George (again) and Linda, Rudd and Aniston are New Yorkers (again) struggling to make it in a city later defined by three things: “Stress. Blackberries.  Sleeping Pills.”  Wain’s comedy opens with the couple, perfectly matched as a pair of motor-mouth Manhattanites, buying what their realtor (Linda Lavin) calls a “microloft” in the West Village.  There’s barely room for them to lower their Murphy bed.  But George abruptly loses his job just as Linda’s pitch to HBO to buy her dead-serious documentary falls through.  A pregnant exec at HBO shoots down Linda’s project about penguins with testicular cancer, telling her: “We do violence and heartache.  But it’s sexy.”  Off the couple goes to visit George’s brother Rick (played by Ken Marino, also the film’s co-writer) and zombie-like wife (a scene-stealing Michaela Watkins) who tells Aniston at her fancy margarita mixer:  “I have a little Sky Mall problem.”  Their pathetic existence within a McMansion sends the couple back to the hippie commune, Elysium, which they stumbled upon only nights before.  They’re taken to the leader, Seth (an unshaven Paul Theroux), who waxes philosophic on veganism, anti-materialism, but when he sings the praises of free love and wife-swapping, it’s really Aniston he wants.

Apart from the commune’s patriarch (an unshaven and always likable Alan Alda), there are some great supporting cast members, namely Lauren Ambrose (“Six Feet Under”) and Malin Akerman (“Couple’s Retreat”), the latter of whom has her eyes on Rudd.  Elysium’s motto?  “We share everything here.”  Laughs aside – and there are plenty – “Wanderlust” is diagetically deranged: this urban couple is hardly the type to last long in a commune, even if it is an “intentional community” as Seth terms it, and the film goes on long after the thrill of “Wanderlust” is gone.  If drama’s pitfall is sentimentality, the death of any comedy is sheer stupidity and there are a few truly dumb moments in “Wanderlust,” especially the pep-talk Rudd gives himself before trying to even the score with Aniston-Theroux and bedding (but blowing it) with Akerman.  Much of the comedy also is a transparent opportunity to see Aniston in jean cut-offs, cowboy boots, and camisoles.  Call it (Bob) Marley and Me.  Neverthless, the couple’s choice between deadening conformity and free-spirited escapism rings true.