During the Friday, April 24 "Cort and Fatboy" broadcast, we talked about "Anvil! The Story of Anvil" -- a funny/sad/inspiring/mortifying gut-punch of a documentary that follows a struggling heavy-metal band in Canada as its 50-year-old founders basically endure the same trials and tribulations as Spinal Tap, only for real, and with far greater emotional heft. It's one of the best movies I've seen all year, and it's playing at Cinema 21 in Portland.
(If you're curious, I turn up somewhere around 33:50. And I brought a toy USS Enterprise into the studio.)
Slightly longer version of a review in today's Oregonian....
Let's suppose you decide to film a Bret Easton Ellis book. Let's suppose it's an overlapping series of short stories about vapid, drug-abusing narcissists in '80s California -- with a satirical edge provided by the narcissists crossing paths with literal, supernatural vampires (or at least characters who believe themselves to be vampires; it's ambiguous).
But then you decide to completely remove the vampires from the script. What's left?
Incredibly, this is what director Gregor Jordan ("Buffalo Soldiers") has done to Ellis' "The Informers." Mr. Ellis apparently co-wrote a longer, more freewheeling version of the screenplay that included undead bloodsuckers (or people who fancied themselves thus), and the author hasn't exactly come out swinging for what ended up onscreen: an excruciating, grim, open-ended study in smooth surfaces, skin and 25-year-old pop-culture references. (I have seldom read a more ambivalent movie-promo Q&A than the one Ellis just did with The AV Club.)
The opening scene -- a pool-party-cum-music-video that ends in violence -- suggests Jordan might be trying for a deadpan moral satire. But the film never recaptures that initial shock, and spends most of its time falling in love with its own reflection.
An ensemble cast (including Kim Basinger, Billy Bob Thornton, Mickey Rourke, Chris Isaak and the late Brad Renfro) speaks in relentless shallow-isms -- attempting to underscore (often through Ray-Bans) profound thematic insights about the dangers of reckless hedonism and living without a moral compass. (Spoiler alert: It can leave you feeling kind of empty and sad!) It's pretty, icky and boring all at once, and feels like nothing so much as an unusually depressing Bain de Soleil commercial. _____
D; 98 minutes; rated R for strong sexual content, nudity, drug use, pervasive language and some disturbing images. Playing in Portland at the Fox Tower.
Only three projects in, writer/director Jody Hill has carved out his turf: All his comedies are darkly funny ballads saluting delusional losers in America's heartland.
Whether it's Danny McBride's egomaniac taekwondo instructor in "The Foot Fist Way"; McBride's mullet-rocking ex-baseballer in HBO's "Eastbound & Down"; or, now, Seth Rogen's mentally ill mall-cop in "Observe and Report," Hill's characters are a bit like Wes Anderson's in that they're strivers with irrational self-confidence. The key difference is that Hill's working-class strivers would give wedgies to Anderson's prep-school strivers while doing cookies all over Anderson's preciously art-directed lawns.
"Observe and Report" opens with an awesome slo-mo montage of middle-class patrons at an Albuquerque mall before finally settling on Head of Mall Security Ronnie Barnhardt (Rogen). Ronnie, like all of Hill's lead characters, is ignorant, obsessive and delusional. This time, he's also clinically bipolar. Ronnie wears a calculator watch and says "Boom!" way too frequently for comfort. Mall employees have restraining orders against him. He's also surrounded by enablers -- including a meek boss, a loyal team of gun-nut subordinates and a drunk mother (Celia Weston) -- who allow him to maintain the self-created myth that he's "getting God's work done" as a rent-a-cop.
His world starts falling out from under him when a serial flasher targets women at the mall and Ronnie imagines himself the equal of the police detective (Ray Liotta) investigating the case. "Part of me thinks this disgusting pervert is the best thing that ever happened to me," says Ronnie, before embarking on a series of overreaching moves that include running his own rogue investigation, applying for the police force, going off his meds and asking out the party-hearty ditz who works the makeup counter (Anna Faris).
That story synopsis could easily describe a pitch-black indie drama instead of a pitch-black low-budget comedy. While "Observe and Report" does toe the tidy studio-comedy line at some key moments and can't quite settle on how implausible it's going to be, I loved how Hill frequently took things much, much further than expected -- occasionally to scary places. Ronnie's mom is a slurring, on-the-floor drunk, not the harmless Hollywood-comedy variety, and the film's violence gets shockingly brutal. This is one of those comedies where the humor lies in the audacity of tone and character rather than any particular sight gag or one-liner. (Same with "Foot Fist Way," which is absolutely worth your rental dollar.)
Rogen is a little one-note for a long stretch of movie (and kind of seems like he's doing a Danny McBride impression at times), but he's quite good in the crucial final third, when Hill takes Ronnie on a journey of genuine, not movie-cute, psychosis -- a bipolar roller-coaster of a character arc. In fact, Hill makes surprising choices with his characters nearly all the way through. Ronny isn't a stereotypical buffoon, for starters; he's actually a surprisingly nimble hand-to-hand combatant, as demonstrated in one fight scene with police batons that owes more than a little to "Oldboy" (and actually makes me think Rogen could work as The Green Hornet).
Hill also gives weird and/or moving mini-monologues to supporting characters played by Michael Peña and Collette Wolfe. And Anna Faris just kills as a particular kind of trashy suburban party girl who's only a few years away from paying for her excesses for the rest of her life. (She also may have found the single funniest possible way in which to deliver the line, "Physically? Yes. Psychologically? Noooo!")
Also, for all the crassness I've catalogued above, it's worth noting that North Carolina-born Hill shares a key quality with "King of the Hill" creator Mike Judge: He's not condescending toward his Middle American characters or culture. Despite "Observe and Report"'s occasional brutality, there's a core of empathy in Hill's work that you'd never find in a patronizing fat-guy/hot-wife sitcom produced on the coast (or, for that matter, "Paul Blart: Mall Cop"). Hill takes Ronnie to alarming psychological places, but he also clearly finds Ronnie sort of weirdly magnificent in his heroic failure. (The same is true of the characters Hill created with Danny McBride, who could almost be described as Hill's muse.)
I'm not sure how many lovable schlubs Rogen agreed to play in Judd Apatow comedies to get this dark little piece made, but I'm delighted he took the risk. It mostly pays off. _____
B; 86 minutes; rated R for pervasive language, graphic nudity, drug use, sexual content and violence.
And the absolutely appalling situation currently unfolding -- in which Fox News columnist Roger Friedman gleefully reviewed the pirated leaked workprint of the Fox production "Wolverine" and then joked about downloading "I Love You Man" later. Drew McWeeny is following the story. (UPDATE:Friedman got whacked.)
Cort and Fatboy (Friday, April 3, 2009) [ mp3 ] [ streaming ] [ iTunes ]
Longer version of a review in today's Oregonian....
"Fast and Furious" is a serviceable (if occasionally glum) fourth entry in this shockingly durable series of idiot crime-and-car-crash flicks. Director Justin Lin brings back most of the original lead cast (Paul Walker, Vin Diesel, Jordana Brewster and Michelle Rodriguez) to infiltrate one of the least-subtle heroin-smuggling rings in movie history. (The ring's audition for smuggler drivers is a public street race that does millions in collateral damage.) It's great to see Vin Diesel back doing meathead action; he excels at it. Paul Walker's a better actor than he used to be. And this time there are as many muscle cars as illegally modded fiberglass imports -- a big plus, to my tastes.
That said, this will personally go down as the flick that really made me realize how much I hate CGI stunts.
The first "Fast and the Furious" (2001) was dumb as a bag of hammers, but it captured a real moment in car culture and it had some terrific, physical stunt work -- most of it with real cars and real human beings. "Fast and Furious" (2009) has a wacky car chase through a secret tunnel between the U.S. and Mexico, much of it computer-generated, and the vehicles might as well be X-Wings zipping through the Death Star.
In 2001, the ridiculous stunts were performed by physical creatures, and made me think of the circus. In 2009, too many of the ridiculous stunts are performed by pixels, and make me think of pear-shaped dudes eating burritos in front of PC workstations. The tension's gone. I feel a loss. _____
C; 107 minutes, rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, some sexual content, language and drug references.
"Alien Trespass" is a low-budget spoof of low-budget '50s sci-fi flicks, which sounds pleasant enough, but director R.W. Goodwin (an "X-Files" vet) makes a fatal mistake: He never takes a clear stance on the material he's spoofing.
A fake newsreel at the beginning of the piece frames "Trespass" as a long-shelved sci-fi B-picture finally seeing the light of day. (It also pads the running time to just under 90 minutes.) The boilerplate genre flick that follows concerns an alien lawman named Urp who crashes his saucer in the California desert and loses his rubber-monster prisoner. Urp borrows the body of a local astronomer (Eric McCormack) to hunt down the murderous beast before it replicates. Cue small-town lawmen and golly-gee teens.
McCormack rocks a pipe and cardigan like he's fronting for the Church of the SubGenius, Louis Febre writes a lush sendup of '50s sci-fi scores and there's one kind-of-clever bit where our heroes confront the monster in a movie theater showing the movie-theater scene from "The Blob." (Meta!) But beyond that, the movie is sadly dull, thin and noncommittal: Half the effects are digital and half are purposely inept, the acting styles are all over the place and the dialogue is boring when it really ought to be funny or at least riotously deadpan. One gets the sinking feeling as "Alien Trespass" drags on that Goodwin thought he could build a whole movie out of a few formal gags about bad editing. _____
C-minus; 90 minutes; rated PG for sci-fi action and, I kid you not, "brief historical smoking." Playing in Portland at the Fox Tower.
