Half-Assed Movie Reviews

July 19, 2009:  Idiocracy

I am a longtime fan of Office Space, the first live-action feature film from writer-director Mike Judge of Beavis and Butthead fame.  Released in the summer of 1999, it perfectly captured both the drab life of the office-bound computer software professional in the late 1990s, and the desire to have the money to escape from the working world and do “nothing”.  Both of these really spoke to me at the time since I was one of those computer software guys and because I’ve always wanted to not have to work.  I will always cherish the irony that I actually took off with a co-worker in the middle of the work day to see a matinee showing of this ode to the über-slacker attitude.  Idiocracy (2006) is Judge’s follow-up feature, which I had seen once before, though not in the theatre.

I have been wanting to revisit Idiocracy again for quite a while, since I was severely disappointed in it when I first saw it.  I suppose my expectations were very high, and that’s often a recipe for disaster.  So I wanted to see whether Idiocracy was as bad as I remembered it, and knowing that Mike Judge’s next film, Extract, was to be released this fall, I wanted to re-immerse myself in his world.

Idiocracy is about a man and woman, hapless guinea pigs in a military experiment, who are put into suspended animation for one year, however, when military disorganization takes over and the boxes they are in are unintentionally discarded, the two end up instead being suspended for 500 years.  Waking up in this new world, after dozens of generations of stupid people breeding recklessly and smart people never finding the right time to start a family, everyone they encounter is unbelievably dumb and the world’s problems include a gigantic tower of dumped garbage next to each city, and crops dying due to being “watered” with a sports beverage instead of, uh, water.

Well, it was much better this time around.  I think the combination of having my expectations suitably adjusted, eagerly anticipating the bits I really liked, and the knowledge of my usual misperceptions of pacing which are corrected on a second viewing of a film, helped me to go in knowing that I was going to find this experience to be some combination of enjoyable and educational.  The film has definite weaknesses, including inconsistent writing and some paper-thin acting by leads Luke Wilson and Maya Rudolph.  Granted, Rudolph didn’t seem so bad this time and her screen time was far more limited than I recalled, but Luke Wilson really doesn’t hold this film together as the lead character, which I suppose is one of the major failings.  This time around, I found myself more jarred by the logical inconsistencies in the script.  The whole premise is that everyone has become stupid and as a result society has more or less collapsed, but there are still insidious corporations running things, including heavily automated police forces and high technology and barcodes tattooed on everyone’s wrists, with no explanation about who is actually designing, building and running these systems.  Is it believable that the few remaining smart people in the world would happen to be evil but also content to exploit and control all the rest of humanity from behind the curtain?  It’s certainly true that there are people who would do that, and some of them are smart, but most smart people tend to lean more towards the public good.  This was my major complaint about Idiocracy this time around.

Overall, I can’t recommend this film.  It’s got a few great moments, like the restaurant name changes and the big garbage piles and the whole Brawndo vs. water debate and the fact that the Oscar-winner for Best Picture is called “Ass: The Movie”, but the story doesn’t hold together, and Mike Judge can do much better.  I look forward to Extract, but with low to middling expectations.

Weak follow-up from respected cult auteur.

July 14, 2009:  Brüno

Brüno, British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen’s in-concept follow-up to 2006’s Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, takes another of his characters from Da Ali G Show and expands the character’s universe to include a feature-length adventure.  Again we have an opinionated, socially awkward and horribly politically incorrect foreigner taking the USA by storm on a quest which takes him through the big cities and the deep south for reality-comedy hijinks arising from shocking prejudice and rampant American nationalism.

Title character Brüno is a gay fashion reporter from Austria, who has recently been fired from his weekly TV show and decides he needs to go to America for the purpose of gaining fame.  The particulars of this pursuit are neither here nor there, aside from setting the stage for a flamboyant romp across the USA.  Brüno tries to be a good person and bring disparate groups together (Israelis and Palestinians) in awkward and out-of-place segments, he tries to experience different cultures throughout America, and eventually decides that in order to become famous he needs to become a heterosexual because clearly no Hollywood stars are gay (based on his cited examples including Tom Cruise and John Travolta…hint hint).  This conveniently sets up a number of scenes with puritanical and bigoted southern US officials and groups.

The movie is very funny at times, and unabashedly crude, but I really can’t recommend it to anyone who wasn’t already planning to see it.  This is a pale imitator of Borat, partly because the premise has been done before and the shock value has partly worn off, and partly because it’s harder to tell here whether the humour is all in good fun or at someone’s expense.  Borat was such an exaggerated character, and the skewering so widely spread across different prejudices and attitudes, that it was clear that the ridiculousness was the point and nobody needed to take actual offense.  With Brüno, we’re forced to try and figure out whether this is incisive commentary or just easy gay-bashing.  I don’t think that Sacha Baron Cohen sets out to create a homophobic film, but the targets are a little too easy, and general societal discomforts are too conveniently exploited, and it becomes hard to tell whether the film is denigrating homophobia or merely joining in.  Add to this the fact that North American audiences seem to have a hard time dealing with male nudity, gay or not, which blurs the line about what people are reacting to.  There was a woman in the theatre audience who couldn’t stop saying “Oh my God” out loud to the outrageous things she saw on screen, and it was clearly an unconscious reaction, but is it because of what she really feels, or what she’s been conditioned to feel, or what she feels she needs to express in order to have her friends not think she’s weird?

Brüno tries, and in a few scenes it succeeds.  However, the concept is not fresh, the plot, such as it is, doesn’t flow as naturally as it did in Borat (keep in mind that I’m comparing to a film in which a cross-country pursuit of Pamela Anderson based on a chance TV viewing of Baywatch was a main plotline), and opportunity for parody with this character is far more one-dimensional than with Borat, which limits the potential for the film and makes it clear why Borat was the first choice of the Ali G characters to be brought to the big screen.

Disappointing, but I can understand why.

July 4, 2009:  Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

I had of course seen Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in the theatre upon its release in the summer of 2008, being a longtime fan of the series and having for the past two decades eagerly awaited this long-anticipated sequel.  I was fully prepared for it to be bad, but found myself pleasantly surprised with only a few caveats.  Many people were not satisfied with this sequel, and having revisited the previous three films, Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), shortly before seeing Crystal Skull, I maintain that anyone who is unsatisfied with the latest entry may not be making a fair comparison with what went before.

We meet up with Indiana Jones several years after we last saw him, in the 1950s this time (befitting the significantly older-looking Harrison Ford, who is in his mid-60s now, nearly 20 years after the previous film).  Icons from the popular culture and social mores of the time are exploited for light comedy, and the alien invasion conspiracy theories of that era are the backdrop for the specific quest.  Indiana Jones gains a new sidekick, meets up with an old flame, battles grossly caricatured baddies and wins in the end.

Many of the disappointed fans, it seems to me, are completely forgetting the caricatured bad guys, supernatural themes, silly wisecracks and goofy Saturday-afternoon popcorn mentality which the first three films were deliberately channelling in their own parody of 1930s adventure serials.  That tone and that technique may be more dated now, and it certainly doesn’t live up to what the kids of today are expecting compared with the kids nearly 30 years ago, but I see Crystal Skull as being intentionally faithful to the original films and their 1980s expectations, rather than being slickly updated to the new millennium and losing the original charm.  Sure, there’s some CGI thrown in, but this is no Transformers.  Speaking of which, Shia LaBeouf fits right into the tone of this matinee adventure, and the supernatural conceit in this film really isn’t any more far-fetched than those in any of the previous three films.  Count me as a fan, but one who understands why some found this entry lacking.

I don’t want to watch this movie over and over again, but having recently re-watched the originals, I’m not sure my appetite for repetition is as strong any more for those films either.  This second viewing of Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, at home, flowed significantly better for me, with the parts I recalled dragging being over fairly quickly, and the good parts blending better as I gained a greater appreciation of the movie as a whole.

Recommended, but be fair with comparisons.

June 29, 2009:  Shadows

I think of John Cassavetes as having lived a double life in Hollywood.  He paid the bills with badass roles in movies like The Dirty Dozen, and poured his real time and passion into being one of the most honest and respected American writer-director auteurs ever to work in the industry.  Cassavetes’ films became well-known through the 1970s as showcases for actors who really wanted to exercise their craft, and Shadows was the 1959 directorial debut which kicked off this marvellous side of his career.

Shadows, true to its murky and multi-faceted title, explores racial interactions among the social strata in contemporary New York City.  It was a racially charged time, with equality nominally on the books but civil rights not yet fully established for African Americans.  The protagonist, Lelia (played by then-18-year-old Lelia Goldoni), is a young mulatto woman with a black brother and a mulatto brother, both of them struggling musicians.  She falls in love with a white man, but due to her relatively pale colouring, he doesn’t realize her racial heritage and flips out when he realizes “who she is”.  Lelia later bows to pressure from her brothers and tries to date a black man instead, but struggles to understand him.  Additionally, Shadows presents a real slice of life of the struggles of musicians, and the necessary decisions about where to draw the line between making a living and retaining self-respect, struggles with clear parallels to the plight of the racially (or otherwise) marginalized.

The low-budget, stark, black-and-white cinematography seen here is not at all out of place for its time, and as a bonus it provides a canvas with opportunities to present further confusion.  Anyone of any skin colour can be made to look like something else, depending on the placement and intensity of lighting, and Cassavetes takes full advantage to make the point about how transient the surface impressions of people can be, and hence how meaningless.  A documentary on the DVD illustrated the restoration process for the film, bringing us much closer to the original presentation and the subtext expressed through the photography.

Shadows contains elements of improvisation, and is as raw and honest as any of Cassavetes’ later efforts, if perhaps more allegorical rather than intensely personal.  Overarching symbolic connections between the violence and the music may be there as well, but that’s beyond my depth to figure out – for example, if you ever catch me reviewing an Ingmar Bergman film, I’ll say something along the lines of “nice looking black and white film, but doesn’t really make sense”.

Cassavetes’ style is a bit of an acquired taste, and his later films are much more intimate, but Shadows stands as a classic American film and a solid illustration of how the director knew what kinds of films he wanted to make, right from the start.

Fascinating film and instructive social study.

June 24, 2009:  Year One

When I’m starting a review by pointing out that some dumb comedy wasn’t as bad as I expected it to be, I like to imagine the reactions among the various Half-Assed Movie Reviews readers.  Some may skip out as soon as it’s clear that I’m reviewing yet another ill-conceived comedy.  Others might hang in at least until I mention Judd Apatow and his influence on this industry segment.  A few be waiting for the labrynthine analysis of the intersecting career arcs of various comic actors over the past three decades, so that they can at least gain a few bits of knowledge from that.  And if we imagine for a moment that the readership is actually beyond the single digits, perhaps I’d even lose a few readers.  Such is the risk I take by admitting the full spectrum of films I take in.

Year One looked dicey even in the previews, despite a few funny lines and some obvious comedy in the absurdity of the premise.  I wouldn’t likely have bothered with this one except that my partner in stupid-comedy crime insisted that I see it with him because of its pedigree.  This was directed and co-written by Harold Ramis, who among other films had previously directed the classics Caddyshack (1980), National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983), and Groundhog Day (1993).  He also played Dr. Egon Spengler in Ghostbusters (I’ll break from my usual habit of stating the exact IMDB spelling of the title, since Ghost Busters seems wrong somehow).  OK, so let’s give Year One a shot.

Well, it wasn’t as bad as I expected it to be.  Year One is a both a caveman movie and a biblical epic somewhat awkwardly rolled up into one.  Jack Black and Michael Cera roll out their bog-standard characters, with Black being ebullient yet rude, and Cera the quiet milquetoast.  After the caveman material is exhausted, which happens fairly quickly, Black gets kicked out of the village and Cera joins him and they travel through the desert, where they happen upon a Roman-era city where they go through a Life of Brian-ish episodic parody of religion and ancient lifestyles.

I liked where the story was going, but we end up with a pretty standard redemption ending, nothing special at all, as Black and Cera realize that there’s more to life than power and fame (as long as you get the women).  In the meantime, a lot of gags fall flat, and the potential in roles played by Paul Rudd, David Cross, and Oliver Platt is completely wasted.  Hank Azaria is a lone standout among these supporting players and gets a role which is better written and contains far better jokes.  Overall, though, this is just not a strong comedy.  I’ll continue to give Harold Ramis the benefit of the doubt, and his cameo roles in recent Judd Apatow works including Knocked Up and Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story have been nothing short of hilarious, perhaps because of the weight (not literally, though he is growing in that way as well) and history he brings to the patriarchal roles he now plays, having been major player in the emergence of silly comedy since the late 1970s, having also written Meatballs (1979), Stripes (1981) and Back to School (1986) among others.  Also, Year One is another fascinating look at the confluence of a wide range of comic actors and stand-up comedians young and old, with the likes of Azaria (probably best known as many Simpsons voices though showing up more in the live-action film world these days), David Cross (edgy stand-up comedian who finally got to the mainstream with Arrested Development), Jack Black (widely known for his Belushi-esque off-the-wall energy), Vinnie Jones (scary thug who’s equally at home in the comic-violent world of Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels), and Bill Hader (SNL alum from a weak period of the show, but showing his chops in oddball supporting roles in Apatow-universe films).  Year One is a curiosity but not one I look forward to seeing again any time soon.

An interesting exercise, but not entertaining.