Movie review in the Friday, April 27 Oregonian....
This isn't even a criticism, exactly, but the only real charge a viewer might be able to level against the new Aardman Animations film "The Pirates! Band of Misfits" is that it's better at being droll than laugh-out-loud funny. The spirited voice work, morbid throwaway gags, inventive set-pieces, gleefully odd story, detail-choked production design and stunning marriage of stop-motion and computer animation more than compensate.
The film -- directed by Aardman vets Peter Lord and Jeff Newitt from Gideon Defoe's book series and screenplay -- was originally released in the UK as "The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists." We meet the Pirate Captain (voiced wonderfully by Hugh Grant) and his tiny, weird, loyal crew in a bit of a slump. They're more interested in fun and ham dinners than actual piracy, but the Captain's gunning for the 1837 "Pirate of the Year" award, so they try to step up their game. They highjack a research vessel carrying a young Charles Darwin (David Tennant) -- who realizes the Captain's "parrot" is in fact the last dodo bird in existence, prompting Darwin to try and steal it for the perfectly awful Queen Victoria (Imelda Staunton).
What's best about "Pirates!" is that you never quite know where it's heading. It starts out as a fairly easy spoof of the pirate-movie tropes resurrected by Depp and Disney -- but quickly finds humor in everything from Victorian science to awards shows to Jane Austen and Elephant Man cameos to extreme food snobbery while mostly avoiding the easy pop-culture gag. Darwin's civilized chimpanzee sidekick, who communicates exclusively through flashcards and deadpan looks, will be a big hit with kids. Be sure to stay through the end credits, in which the punny signs, silly paintings and absurd knickknacks that filled every inch of this movie's backgrounds are laid out in an endless, awe-inspiring scroll. _____
During the Friday, April 20 "Cort and Fatboy" podcast, we talked about movie marketing, "Justfied," "Soul Train," "The Lucky One," "Lockout," Wolverine hair gel, "Rango," mumblecore, Will Ferrell, and Whit Stillman Day, among other things.
When it sticks to its central flirtation, the latest Nicholas Sparks Romance™ "The Lucky One" is blandly pleasant enough. In true Sparks fashion, the lead characters (played by Zac Efron and Taylor Schilling) have each suffered loss, but mostly they're just collections of desirable attributes, fated to kiss after speaking a number of unremarkable words.
He's an ex-Marine who can fix tractors and boats and reads philosophy and plays piano and takes long walks and stares meaningfully into fires and works hard and has piercing eyes and loves children and other small animals! She's a plucky single mom and former cross-country champ who works at the family dog kennel and loves her grandma (Blythe Danner) and got good grades in school and supports her kid's intellectual growth!
As long as director Scott Hicks ("Shine," "Snow Falling on Cedars") puts these two through their inevitable romantic paces -- in perfectly lit, artfully distressed environments -- the movie more or less sells its disposable soul-mate fantasy. But man, when the film tries to inject anything resembling high drama, it gets dumb in a hurry.
Efron walks from Colorado to Louisiana to meet Schilling because he found her photo in a pile of rubble in Iraq and it brought him good luck (luck it failed to bring its previous owner, it's worth noting). But for the most contrived reasons imaginable, Efron can't quite bring himself to share this simple anecdote amid all the folksy music montages. But this foolishness pales in comparison to the subplot involving Schilling's super-wicked ex-husband (Jay R. Ferguson) -- a bully hick lawman who might as well have wandered in from a very special "Dukes of Hazzard" episode. Imagine Biff from "Back to the Future" crashing a Pottery Barn catalogue spread. It's that jarring. _____
I also tried to talk about the ideas in "The Cabin in the Woods" without spoiling too much. If you're a genre nerd, you should make a special effort to see it. It's a gory, funny horror-comedy that also happens to be a carefully structured film essay on the importance of horror movies. I've never seen anything quite like it.
Elaboration on a movie review in the Friday, April 6 Oregonian...
The original "American Pie" (1999) is a minor raunch-comedy classic because (a) it found fresh spins on the staple gags of the teen sex comedy, but also (b) because it balanced the serial-onanism jokes with teen characters who come off as actual human beings.
The kids in the original film started out as naive idiot horndogs -- but most of them learned to approach sex with tenderness, consideration or some sort of parody of adult sophistication by film's end. The movie ended with a surprising sweetness that's actually aged better than that pervy scene with the webcam.
"American Reunion," on the other hand, is worthless, witless, tone-deaf, cash-grabbing cynical junk.
The fourth film in the series to feature the main cast (there have also been four direct-to-video sidequels) finds the original leads coming to town for an oddly timed 13-year high-school reunion. (Really? They couldn't just set this flick in 2009?) Most of the men are struggling with adult compromise.
Jim (Jason Biggs) and Michelle (Alyson Hannigan, who's barely playing the same character she played in '99) have a kid, and it's wrecking their sex life. Kevin (Thomas Ian Nicholas) works at home and married a woman who expects him to dig "Real Housewives." Oz (Chris Klein) is a celebrity sportscaster who made a fool of himself on a dance reality show and has a conveniently horrible live-in girlfriend. Stifler (Seann William Scott) is a temp living in the past. Only Finch (Eddie Kaye Thomas, who as usual delivers all his lines wryly and acts bemused to even be on-set) seems to have pursued his globe-trotting passions.
Once there, the thirtysomethings endure multiple invitations to cheat on their wives and girlfriends -- occasionally with high-schoolers, which is way more icky than funny, and occasionally with their paramours from the first film. The women are horribly underwritten.
The movie sort of dimly pokes at the notion that You Can't Go Back Again, at what it means to redirect your passion as a grown-up. But unlike in "American Pie," the execution here is one long, embarrassing fumble.
For example:
• The relationship conversations -- particularly between Chris Klein/Mena Suvari and Thomas Ian Nicholas/Tara Reid -- are straight-up nonsense. On at least two occasions, our heroes loudly proclaim their loyalty to their wives, the Other Women get irrationally offended, and the men scramble to apologize for hurting the Other Women's feelings. And it's played for straight drama -- even when the characters happen to be standing on a crowded suburban lawn in leather gear. It's weird, like a badly done Very Special Episode of an "American Pie" TV series. The movie also stacks the deck by giving Suvari a broadly sketched jerk of a doctor boyfriend who looks like Diet Jon Hamm. Given the nuanced relationships in the first film, it's a huge letdown.
• Also, the movie absolutely fails to maintain a consistent comic tone -- sometimes within a single conversation. This gets punishing in a hurry. A scene will wander from gross-out gag to sentimental schmaltz to pervy leer to cheap nostalgia within a 30-second span, utterly free of directorial guidance. (It's surprising, given this sequel was written and directed by Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, who've skillfully mixed gross-outs and social commentary in the "Harold and Kumar" flicks.)
The worst examples of this turn up in any scene with Jim and his dad (Eugene Levy, the only actor to appear in all eight films). The sharp timing of their bedroom conversations -- the best thing about "American Pie" -- is undermined here by sudden mawkish digressions. A single conversation will wander from (a) nostalgia for old porn magazines to (b) grieving the loss of Jim's mother to (c) unsolicited sex advice to (d) earnest entreaties to get Levy back out on the dating circuit. At one point this is followed by a wacky montage of Levy trying on middle-aged dad outfits so Jim can submit his photo to JDate.
• Worst of all, none of the jokes are particularly funny. If they were, it might redeem some of the above. But "American Reunion" makes lazy choice after lazy choice -- the script feels like it was written by hurriedly feeding punch-cards into the Formula Comedy Machine. Hurwitz and Schlossberg look for humor in fat jokes, gay panic, easy TV-show spoofs and cheap callbacks to better-executed past bits. (The only material that sort of lands is a new riff involving Stifler's mom [Jennifer Coolidge].) The filmmakers repeatedly set up and punish cartoon bullies who come off about as subtle as the bad guys in a straight-to-video ski-school comedy. The movie grinds to a halt with an embarrassing, sub-"Three's Company" set piece in which the boys try to sneak a naked 18-year-old into her bedroom while keeping her parents distracted downstairs -- and it's so blandly staged, it's tough not to think of all the easier ways Jim could have headed the whole thing off at the pass with about three well-chosen grown-up sentences.
And this time around, Stifler is written less as a glandular idiot and more as a straight-up criminal pervert -- groping women in public swimming areas and ogling unconscious nude teenagers while the other guys roll their eyes in disapproval instead of alerting the authorities and/or various sex-offender websites.
As Aaron Mesh said as we were leaving the screening: "Didn't these guys learn these lessons already in the first movie? Do they receive traumatic, amnesia-inducing brain injuries between films?" If you want funnier R-rated gross-out jokes and a vastly sharper take on the whole high-school nostalgia problem, "21 Jump Street" is playing down the hall. _____
During the Friday, April 6 "Cort and Fatboy" podcast, we were joined by my professional-actor pal Ryan McCluskey. I dumped a bunch of hate on "American Reunion." Ryan shared pleasant stories of attending its premiere and hanging out with the cast. My feelings became somewhat complicated.
Also, we recorded a "Midnight Movie Commentary" for "Boogie NIghts," in honor of Cort and Fatboy's April 6 screening of the film at the Bagdad. Featuring Cort, Fatboy, Erik Henriksen, special guest Big Jim Willig (who shared a poignant/relevant anecdote from his adult-store job), and yrs. truly. _____
