Half-Assed Movie Reviews

September 13, 2009:  The Loved Ones

I’ve long made a habit of seeing one of the Midnight Madness shows at the Toronto International Film Festival.  These tend to be quirky or otherwise out-of-the-mainstream films, often with a youth focus since that’s the demographic most likely to see a movie (they run every night through the week) which starts at 11:59pm.  Usually at least one or two of them are horror films, and I’ve seen the premieres of the likes of Saw and Hostel in years gone by at these exhibitions.

The Loved Ones was hyped as being clearly in the vein of the grotesque horror offerings at recent festivals, comparable to last year’s Martyrs and the similarly twisted A L’Interieur from the year before, both discussed in my earlier review of Martyrs.  In this case, we return to the horror-standard high school setting, and after a brief setup it becomes clear that we’re dealing with a psycho student taking revenge for her earlier mistreatment.  Aptly described as Pretty in Pink (1986) meets Carrie (1976) meets Misery (1990), we’re clearly in for some teen romance, teen torment, and teen torture.

For what it is, this is a well-constructed and engrossing little flick.  The characters don’t make sense and it certainly doesn’t fall into any plausible reality, but that’s entirely acceptable.  The Loved Ones knows what it wants to be and goes for it, tongue-in-cheek where necessary but not an overall joke or parody in the manner of Scream (1996).  Mind you, even though this isn’t rocket science, in the Q&A after the film – an entertaining but sometimes frustrating staple of film festival screenings – a lady asked for clarification on the point of whether two characters were brother and sister, which I found distressing since I had been specifically thinking that I liked how the suggestion of that relationship was refreshingly subtle for this type of film.

The Loved Ones has commercial potential, tying together retro horror conventions and the modern-day penchant for torture porn.  Who knows whether it will see any significant release, though.  There isn’t a lot of room in the marketplace for this type of stuff, and the Saw franchise, weaker though it may be following the October 2009 box office disappointment of Saw VI (which I have not yet seen), still commands a lot of visibility.  This one’s fine for fans, though, and should be sought out on home video.

Horror mixed up with teenage angst.

September 6, 2009:  Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story

I can’t believe that Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story is 5 years old now.  Looking back, it precedes the bulk of the Judd Apatow comedy craziness of the past several years but proves itself a solid example in a genre which was just beginning to reinvent itself after a long dormancy since the 1980s.  This is ridiculous, exaggerated, high-concept comedy that’s just tasteless enough to be lowbrow, and just smart enough to be highbrow, both at the same time.  Big names abound, and the supporting players are a who’s who of modern-day comic character actors.  This is fun stuff.

The plot of Dodgeball follows a simple formula, and the writing and performances are what really bring it to life.  Vince Vaughn plays a small-time fitness club owner, whose clientele is decidedly lower tier, comprising the geeks and losers and crazies of the world.  His main competitor, Ben Stiller, operates a national chain of fitness clubs which cater more specifically to the Beautiful People, though Stiller’s past, more or less paralleling that of Richard Simmons, still haunts him.  When Vaughn’s gym ownership is in peril because he runs out of cash, he and his members try to win a bunch of money playing Dodgeball.  They enlist the help of a legendary 1960s dodgeball player, played in the present day by Rip Torn, and he whips them into shape, leading to the final showdown at the dodgeball national competition against , you guessed it, Stiller’s team.  I won’t spoil this complex and nuanced story by telling you who wins.  Of course, there’s also a love interest, a lawyer working for Stiller who ends up being won over to Vaughn’s side, played by Christine Taylor, Stiller’s real-life wife.

This is a good background movie, and true to form, I only half-watched it while cleaning up my basement.  It provided a nice change of tone after A History of Violence.  This is a silly story, it knows not to take itself too seriously, and this is exactly the right amount of Ben Stiller to have in a movie.

As is commonly seen today, Dodgeball happens to be a perfect example of the small world of comedy.  Vince Vaughn doesn’t seem to have a particular entourage attached to him aside from Jon Favreau, who is absent here, but we see representation from Mike Judge’s typical crew in Stephen Root’s nerdy gym member and Gary Cole’s earnest commentator on ESPN 8 “The Ocho”.  This is an early example of the resurgence of Jason Bateman after Arrested Development brought him back to the spotlight (Stiller and Taylor also appeared on that show).  Rip Torn has long been known as a courageous and versatile dramatic actor but really showed his comedy chops in The Larry Sanders Show back in the 1990s, and here he brings much-needed weight to the patriarch Patches O’Houlihan, the most legendary dodgeball player of all time and the key to Vaughn’s team’s strength, as they find the aging athlete and he agrees to train the team.  Justin Long, as another nerdy entry on Vaughn’s team, spans the Apatow universe as well as those of Judge, Vaughn, and Kevin Smith, with dramatic acting sprinkled in there as well.  Hank Azaria is a legend after 20 years on The Simpsons and has a cameo as young Patches O’Houlihan in an old scratchy black-and-white Dodgeball promotional film, laying out the rules and the essentially barbaric nature of the game.

Seeing Rip Torn throw an assortment of wrenches at his trainees, proclaiming from his wheelchair that “If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball”, is priceless.  This movie knows what it is, and is content with that.

Smart and stupid comedy in one.

August 30, 2009:  Gremlins

Gremlins (1984) was another in the stream of 1980s movies for which I’ve braced myself when revisiting, because some of them really hold up and are timeless, and others clearly don’t rise above their era.  Gremlins, for me, is one of the latter.

Gremlins, for those who aren’t familiar, is a story of a father (a travelling inventor/salesman) who brings his son Billy a strange pet for Christmas, which he finds in a creepy Chinatown shop.  The palm-sized little creature (known as a mogwai, and named Gizmo) emotes as a human, of course, and provides plenty of cute factor for the kids.  Needless to say, the three simple rules for caring for this new addition to the family – don’t expose him to bright light, don’t get him wet, and don’t feed him after midnight – are violated one by one and we witness the results as things fly out of control in this small town after the cuddly creatures turn into nasty, ugly Gremlins.  Can Billy and his hot new girlfriend (played by Phoebe Cates, very popular at the time in large part due to her co-starring role in Fast Times at Ridgemont High a couple of years earlier) save the day?

I was around 10 years old when this was released in theatres, and managed to see it twice, which was very unusual for me at the time.  I recall loving it, and what I remembered most were the opening sequence in the Chinatown shop, the father’s strange inventions, and the cozy scenes in Billy’s attic bedroom where he got to know Gizmo and where the first occasions of the rule-breaking occurred.  I didn’t recall much about the second half of the movie, aside from the iconic scenes of the theatre filled with Gremlins eating popcorn and watching a movie.  I watched this with my wife and 11-year-old son, figuring that if this was OK for me when I was 10, it was probably an OK movie for kids.

It seems we were wrong, and I remain confused about who the target audience actually was, unless movies for kids 25 years ago simply weren’t sanitized the way they are now.  Of course, when I point out that kids’ movies today are “sanitized”, even that is a perverse claim, since they still throw in plenty of sexual innuendo, violence as long as it’s not against human characters and doesn’t cause permanent injury, and bathroom humour for cheap laughs.  Gremlins doesn’t contain any more sexual tension than you’d expect among young adults and their budding movie romances, and the bathroom humour isn’t there, but the violence is over the top in a disturbing way for a movie which is marketed to children.  More on that later.  Additionally, we have a liberal sprinkling of racist and politically incorrect comments, including Chinese stereotypes, and a guy ranting about foreign cars as if people from other countries couldn’t possibly build anything of quality (which itself is a curious foreshadowing of today’s typical American attitude and the offshoring of manufacturing).  I turned to Roger Ebert’s original review of the film for some perspective, and I think it’s telling that he focuses on the movie cliché parody aspect of Gremlins and nowhere does he talk about this being aimed at children at all.  That’s a good angle from which to approach the film, and on that level it works to some degree, but the marketing is clearly aimed at children and thus I declare Gremlins to be muddled in its intent and disappointing to revisit.

The film just seems to have aged really badly, in the way that some 1980s TV shows have, where it’s impossible not to cringe when watching them again and wondering who in their right mind thought this was good at the time.  The heavy-handed metaphor for “gremlins” as the mysterious little monsters we like to blame when things go wrong with mechanical devices is demonstrated in the approach to the climax, with a number of fun little scenes of machinery breakdowns and the catastrophic results (curiously reminiscent of Dead Like Me), a montage played out with goofy music running the whole time.  The only problem with this is that the malfunctions we witness cause death and serious injury and destruction – a woman’s stairway chair-lift goes haywire and shoots her out the top of her house and to her death on the street out front, wonky traffic lights cause major car crashes, the gremlins themselves attack people with knives and other weapons.  The tone is jarring – is this a case of mischievous little creatures causing mayhem, or evil little creatures destroying lives and property?  And in either case, how does this warrant silly music as we play it all for laughs?  Going back to Ebert, parody of movie conventions explains the situation, but family entertainment it is not.  And let’s not even get into the story Phoebe Cates tells about the death of her father, which is enough to give children nightmares just on its own.  It’s almost like this movie wanted to be in the lighthearted but horror-violent adult-comedy tone of An American Werewolf in London, but was hampered by pressure to keep a PG rating.  Notably, this was the other film in 1984 (along with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) which triggered the push for the PG-13 rating in the US.

And in that pressure may lie the answer.  In what may have been a sign of my movie obsession to come, pretty much all I remembered of the original trailer were the intro “Steven Spielberg presents Gremlins…” and the outro “…directed by Joe Dante”.  This was in the era when Spielberg had all the Hollywood clout one could hope for but not enough time to direct all the movies he wanted to make, so he acted as executive producer on a huge pile of films, and Dante was one of the journeyman directors he could count on to not personalize the movie too much, so it would get made exactly as Spielberg wanted.  With the prominent placement of Spielberg’s name in the marketing, the film got the desired attention.  But Spielberg has always, with really very few exceptions, been known for keeping his movies fairly clean, content-wise, in order to keep his audiences general and BIG.  I suspect he wanted to dabble in the burgeoning comedy-horror genre pioneered by John Landis with An American Werewolf in London a few years earlier, but didn’t have the guts to take it all the way and lose his popular audience, most importantly children and the related merchandising opportunities they would bring.  He had seen his good friend George Lucas become a near-billionaire by that point with Star Wars merchandising tie-ins, and Spielberg’s own E.T: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) a couple of years earlier was no slouch in that department either.  Tell me you’re shocked that you could buy a wide variety of mogwai and gremlin action figures and other toys at Christmas time in 1984.  In light of the controversy surrounding the updated re-release of E. T. recently, for which Spielberg digitally removed guns which were carried by some federal agents, I shudder to think what kind of havoc he would wreak on Gremlins if it were to be “updated” as well.

Alas, we won’t likely see Gremlins return to the forefront any time soon (despite a recent video re-release), and not just because it is a curious retro piece which has aged very badly, but because of the embarrassingly prescient coda which wraps up this tale and which is in fact a very fitting ending.  The old man from the shop in Chinatown returns, after the Gremlins have been destroyed but not before they caused their fair share of destruction, to reclaim Gizmo and take him home (he did not initially permit the sale of the mogwai to Billy’s father – it was the shopkeeper’s son who arranged the deal).  The old man quite bluntly suggests that the Chinese have the patience and temperament to keep the gremlins under control, pointing out that the over-the-top lazy consumer lifestyle is a conceit of the west.  Billy’s father being an inventor of newfangled convenience gadgets of course only serves to emphasize this point.  Seeing these scenes play out in the context of today’s US economic collapse and loss of manufacturing base, as China has patiently and quietly built its power and influence over the past 2-3 decades, is striking.  Does it make it worth revisiting this movie, though?  I wouldn’t say so.

Classic turns out not to be.

August 26, 2009:  Funny People

The faithful Half-Assed Movie Reviews reader bears with me through a lot of “reviews” of crude modern comedies, which has inevitably involved plenty of talk of Judd Apatow and his influence, but I try to keep that discussion brief for the sake of the sanity of the readers.  Every couple of years, though, Apatow actually directs a movie, and then all bets are off for as long as I can keep typing.

Funny People, as the previews proudly proclaim with a manufactured air of exclusivity, is only the third film directed by Judd Apatow.  He has directed episodes of his earlier television shows Freaks and Geeks as well as Undeclared, and he has produced an endless stream of films over the past 5 years or so (Year One, Pineapple Express, Step Brothers, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, Superbad, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy).  This pattern is typical of comedy directors once they gain the Hollywood clout necessary to give long-overdue explosure to the writing, acting and directing talent of their circle of friends and colleagues.  We’ve seen similar behaviour from the likes of John Landis (cut short in the mid-1980s due to tragedy surrounding The Twilight Zone: The Movie), and Ivan Reitman (through the mid-1980s although he stayed bigger in directing and didn’t produce as much).  Outside the comedy genre, Steven Spielberg and Steven Soderbergh also went mad on the producing front after achieving widespread artistic and commercial success directing, proceeding to bring their core groups of colleagues to the forefront.  Compare this approach, for example, with Woody Allen or Clint Eastwood, who direct a lot of movies but mostly only act as producers for their own movies.

Apatow’s earlier feature directorial efforts, Knocked Up in 2007 and The 40-Year-Old Virgin in 2005, are influential for their groundbreaking willingness to show dorky guys as genuinely nice people despite the crap heaped upon them by society, and to let them come out on top for a change.  It’s not nearly so overt as a Revenge of the Nerds style of story, since it doesn’t portray popularity and success as zero-sum game.  Everyone can end up better off, and the dorks have a lot to offer to those who take the time to get to know them.  This could all be dismissed as a fantasy scenario for the regular schlub, and indeed it is, but proudly so and without irony.

One of Apatow’s early producing efforts, The Cable Guy (1996), long preceded most of the above-mentioned films, and speaks to the notion of him being ahead of his time and needing to wait around until the world took notice.  Freaks and Geeks (1999-2000) and Undeclared (2001-2002) are full of the exact type of humour and characters and comedy we’ve come to demand, some even portrayed by the same actors we’ve seen meet with success in the past few years (Seth Rogen, James Franco, Jason Segel, Jay Baruchel), and it was all right out there on network television in front of our eyes a decade ago, but it took the slap in the face of The 40-Year-Old Virgin to bring all of this to serious mainstream attention.

I get the sense that Apatow is blessed with a natural producer’s mentality, along the lines of several other instructive examples.  Lorne Michaels, the longtime Saturday Night Live producer, found himself the boss of his contemporaries at a young age because of his innate business sense along with palpable charisma and unquestioning pursuit of success.  Warren Beatty became a film producer in the 1960s with essentially no experience, but he had the right attitude and people listened to him.  Steven Spielberg was an intense character and certainly not “cool” by any real sense, much less by Hollywood standards, but was clearly destined for power even when he was just starting out.

So now, with Funny People, Judd Apatow takes a significant risk and puts together a film which doesn’t so much aim to be funny on its own, as to peer behind the scenes and figure out what drives the people who aim to be funny.  Adam Sandler, in the lead, plays a character with strong parallels to himself, a former stand-up comic who builds a hugely successful film career based on increasingly ludicrous high-concept conceits.  In a fictional twist, this mega-star finds himself suddenly facing a grave medical prognosis, and begins to reflect on what he gave up along the path of his life, reconsidering what is important.  He has few real friends among the hordes of casual acquaintances, few emotional ties to a string of girlfriends and one night stands, and get no deep satisfaction from playing with the toys money can buy.  He turns in desperation to his roots, and begins making random ad-hoc appearances to perform at comedy clubs.  It is here that he befriends Seth Rogen, playing the archetypal struggling stand-up comic who is questioning whether his career passion (and accompanying years of poverty-stricken rejection) is a realistic dream to even pursue.  Sandler hires Rogen to write jokes for him, and to be his personal assistant, and they seem to grow close, but Sandler is unwilling to let himself open up to – and trust – his new friend.  At the same time, Sandler also tries to reconnect with an old flame, the only woman he ever loved, to win her back despite her husband and two children.  Options are explored, friendships blow up and are rebuilt, and in the end, can a man who hurt people so much during his life manage to regain what he foolishly gave up, in his short remaining time on earth?

Apatow and Sandler are former roommates, and there are clearly autobiographical elements incorporated from both of their lives.  Apatow’s real-life wife Leslie Mann, who has appeared in his previous films, has a meatier role here as the former flame, lending additional layers of complexity to the story and further blurring the line between fiction and reality.

Where this film loses its mainstream appeal, as evidenced by the disappointing box office numbers, is in its realistic and heartbreakingly honest look at the lives of stand-up comedians.  I understand that stand-up comedy is a topic of limited appeal, and the real personalities behind it are even lesser known, but it happens to be an area of great fascination to me.  I loved the depictions of how material is developed, the self-doubt fuelling the open-mic nights, and the emotional roller coaster of being forced to work with the crowd’s fickle reactions and attitude during any given performance, whether you’re an amateur just starting out or a seasoned pro.  I’ve been a long-time fan of stand-up comedy (going back to my youth when I encountered George Carlin, Roseanne Barr, Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor, Drew Carey, and even Gallagher).  I rediscovered it in the late 1990s with the new crop of edgy and crude comics (Patton Oswalt, Robert Schimmel, David Cross, Doug Stanhope, Ron White).  It’s also been tremendously entertaining to see how Comedy Central in the US has made roasts popular again (bringing to cult celebrity status the likes of Jeffrey Ross, Lisa Lampanelli, Nick DiPaolo, and Greg Giraldo).  There is also a massive crop of British comics (Jimmy Carr and Rickey Gervais, to name a couple) bringing their unique flavour to the party.  Funny People explores the difficult choices facing these folks as success strikes suddenly and unexpectedly, and integrity so easily gives way to big paycheques for stupid movies and TV shows, and how truly difficult it is to maintain the respect of the group you sweated and toiled with, while at the same time figuring out how to fit in with the established Hollywood society and maintain success.  How acceptable is it to turn from the friends who supported you emotionally, when the pressure becomes so great to support them financially and/or simply move on?  Scattered cameos by lots of established comedians playing themselves (Paul Reiser, Norm MacDonald, Ray Romano, Dave Attell, Charles Fleischer, Andy Dick, Sarah Silverman) lend weight to the film’s themes by forcing us to consider the incredibly diverse career paths of these very funny people (perhaps I’ll exclude Andy Dick from that last claim), and the choices they must have been faced with along the way in their real lives.  This could almost be a documentary, so plausible is the plight of this composite/variation on Adam Sandler whose life we’re plunged into.

Sure, there are some issues with Funny People, most notably the farcical stuff from the trailers, which is not in keeping at all with the overall tone of the movie but smacks of forced commercialism.  This is clearly a writing misstep and perhaps an ironic consequence of the difficult choices noted above, which even Apatow must continue to balance.  The pacing is also just a bit slow, and I might have cut about 10 minutes from this admittedly long 2 hour and 26 minute film.  Plenty of viewers will hate Funny People because they were expecting Knocked Up, plenty will be disappointed because they were properly expecting a movie about stand-up comedy but were unfortunately thinking that it would be funnier, and plenty will be confused about just exactly what is the point.  I can’t generally recommend Funny People, because it’s simply not a widely appealing film, but I thought it was great.

Emotional and career growth from Apatow.

August 22, 2009:  The World’s Fastest Indian

I had never bothered to see The World’s Fastest Indian when it was released in 2005.  I saw the previews a number of times, and they didn’t draw me in.  I guess I knew it was about an old guy trying to set a speed record with an old motorcycle, and I didn’t see any reason why that would be of interest, despite an interest in speed trials.

Well, on a long ferry ride travelling from Newfoundland back to mainland Canada, this was one of the movies running on the screens liberally sprinkled throughout the boat, and I ended up seeing probably about 80% of the movie between attempts to buy dinner in the cafeteria and other interruptions.  I didn’t see the very beginning, and missed the last 10 or 15 minutes although I did get a synopsis from my travelling companions, which is good enough for a review in my books!

Anthony Hopkins plays the aging New Zealander who travels to the USA in the late 1960s with his 1920s-era motorcycle (Indian is the brand of motorcycle) and then makes his way out to the Bonneville salt flats in Utah for an annual event in which hundreds of enthusiasts try to set land-speed records in various different types of vehicles.  A significant portion of the movie chronicles the journey Hopkins takes to get out to the proving grounds, as a fish out of water in a new country who runs into all manner of trouble but never lets it fluster him as he charms everyone he sees by being a giving soul and a genuinely nice person.  Hopkins brings real heart to this story and makes it far exceed what I had anticipated.

It’s nice to see the film touch on the technical aspects of the bikes a bit, since enthusiasts for this type of speed trial would obviously be part of the target audience.  I am fascinated by the speed trials of this era, with the likes of Craig Breedlove in his Spirit of America leapfrogging back and forth with competitors to hold speed records for brief times before their rivals nudge the bar a little bit higher.  The World’s Fastest Indian appeals to those looking for a story of personal triumph, as well as those who are particularly interested in the subject matter.  This was a surprise hit for me on a day when I hadn’t expected to see any movies at all.

Heartwarming little gem of a movie.