After about a 6 1/2 year hiatus, I'm going to try revving this thing back up again. Since I can't get to the theaters as often as I used to, most of my reviews won't be particularly timely. In fact, it's probably best not to even call them reviews ... more like observations and responses. Hopefully this time around I'll be a bit more consistent but no promises.
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Many many years ago, my friend and I went to see Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael. We knew nothing about this movie other than it starred Winona Ryder (my favorite at the time) and Jeff Daniels (my friend's favorite). To be honest, we weren't expecting much: the previews we had seen seemed kind of stupid, no one we knew had seen this film, and the only reason we were going to go see this movie was because we were both bored out of our minds that afternoon. So, it was perhaps because we were expecting so little that we ended up enjoying the film so much.
I can barely remember now what the story is about -- something about an absent mother and a teen girl who feels lost -- and I've been tempted to check it out on DVD but I don't dare. I'm afraid that I'll end up hating the movie and it will ruin the nice memory I have of that lazy afternoon in Berkeley. I mention all this because Adam Carolla's The Hammer fits into this category. I remember a the preview being mildly amusing but the movie came and went in the theaters so quickly, I barely remember it existing at all. One day, when I logged into my netflix account, The Hammer popped up as a recommendation. I figured, what the heck, might as well give it a try. This is not a great film but it is a thoroughly enjoyable one. I've never cared for Carolla -- I thought his shtick on "The Man Show" as well as on "Loveline" were tiresome at best. His morning radio show wasn't so bad but definitely nothing I would go out of my way to listen to. Perhaps because the film is scripted, it seemed to really contain Carolla in such a way that it was possible to appreciate his humor without being completely annoyed by his whiney voice or his man-child antics. As horribly cliche as this might sound, The Hammer had a really good heart -- it was a film that could sometimes throw really mean jokes but they never got overly obnoxious (unlike Carolla's radio stuff). The basic premise is simple: Carolla is an unemployed construction worker who moonlights as a boxing instructor for people who want to learn basic self-defense or just get a nice aerobic workout. A trainer looking for someone to take to the Olympic tryouts spots him and offers him a chance. Hilarity and mischief ensue. The film is about as low-budget as you can get. The boxers take a road trip to Phoenix (why they wouldn't fly is beyond my understanding). The film was made entirely in Los Angeles (not a big deal) but they can't even shoot it so that it actually feels they left LA (during the Phoenix trip). Despite all that (or maybe because of it), The Hammer was still an amazingly fun way to kill 90 minutes. As I noted in my review of I Love You Man, I have a love-hate relationship with Apatow. While I thought 40 Year-Old Virgin was an incredibly funny and fresh comedy, his shtick quickly grew stale. Really, how many times can you retreat the same old ground: man-child suffering from arrested development. After a certain point, you just want to yell out, "come on, dude, grow up." What's especially frustrating is that Apatow's short-lived television series Freaks and Geeks was amazing. It seems that those directionless high-school students that Apatow created just never managed to grow up.
Funny People, then, might be considered Apatow's first real attempt at a grown-up comedy. Adam Sandler plays a thinly-veiled version of himself, George Simmons. A middle-aged comedian who's had a run of successful films, Simmons is faced with a terminal disease. Much to no one's surprise, this results in his reflecting back on his life and realizing that all the success that he's had doesn't amount to much. At this point, there's nothing new here in the film's overall story line and structure. What really makes this first part of the film worthwhile are the three supporting characters, three young comics trying to make it in Hollywood. The energy of these struggling three makes for an interesting contrast to Simmons' very established yet lonely life. If the film had stayed on course and focused on this, I think Funny People would have been a far more worthwhile film. As it is, the film veers away from this story and dramatically changes gears. In the second half of the film, Simmons seeks redemption by looking up an old girlfriend -- "the one who got away" when he chose his career over love. At this point, then, the film turns into a drab romance. While Eric Bana's short cameo is entertaining enough, it hardly makes up for the clumsy storyline. There's something about American films that no matter what the subject matter, there has to be a romantic element, some kind of relationship angle. If you're lucky, the romance is fairly innocuous but, more often than not, it tends to really diminish the film. In this case, it really diminishes the film. The J and I saw this on the same night that we saw AWAY WE GO. Of course, if you're reading this blog for the first time right now, you would realize it by going to the very next entry -- an entry that was put up months ago. I don't know what the hell happened during the summer, but the last three months just whizzed by and I've got a backlog of movies to get through. To help get through this pile, I've decided that I'm only going to review films I've seen for the first time. I spend a lot of time re-watching older films (some for pleasure, some for class). If I were to comment on those, I'd have to live in front of my computer. The J. and I originally went to the theater to watch 500 Days of Summer (which we did ... see above) but after the film, I stood in the lobby waiting for her to return from the bathroom and noticed that right in front of me Away We Go was about to start in ten minutes. While the movie intrigued us mildly because it was directed by Sam Mendes (American Beauty and Revolutionary Road) and it featured Maya Rudolph in her first dramatic role, we figured it was ultimately DVD-worthy. Turns out we were right. This is not a particularly new idea but it's been done better (Lawrence Kasdan's The Big Chill and Hal Hartley's Trust come immediately to mind). There's a thin line between a deeply personal film and a flawed, self-indulgent one. This definitely felt like the latter. I can respect Mendes' desire to work through these ideas, I just wish he didn't feel compelled to make
I have no idea why vampires seem to be such a part of our zeitgeist. I do think there's some kind of connection but, alas, I think it will only reveal itself through history. I will conjecture, however, that the vampire fascination is closely linked with the zombie revival that's been a regular part of cinema for at least fifteen years. At the risk of revealing the extent of my geekiness, I like to think of the relationship between vampires and zombies as analogous to the relationship between elves and orcs (from The Lord of the Rings). If you've read my earlier review on Year One, you'll know that the movie I had really wanted to see, was anxiously waiting to see was this one, The Hangover. I went to see this with the Mini-Ster who, by the way, has an excellent little food blog. I only mention this because prior to seeing this movie we met for dinner at this cool little faux deli, Goldberg's Famous Delicatessen. On the surface, this is yet another horrific attempt to create a completely sanitized cultural experience: in short, Goldberg's feels like the suburban mall version of a NY deli. But, the good news is that the food is actually quite good and while it may not be Katz's or some The Stage Deli, it's a pretty darn good substitute. So, let me explain: I was in Atlanta, it was crazy hot, the Hangover was sold out. Those are the three conditions that led me to see a film I otherwise would never have bothered to watch in the theater. It's not that I thought Year One would suck, but I saw it more as a mildly entertaining, mindless throwaway films much like those old Canonball Run movies starring Burt Reynolds and Dom Delouise. This was one of those great dinner and a movie nights. The J. and I met up with the Mini-Ster and Waldorf at La Tavolata for a light pasta dinner and then rushed over to Cinerama to stand in line. This was opening weekend and we knew it would be a packed house. I had been looking forward to this film for some time and while such anticipation can often lead to unrealistic expectations that inevitably fall short, I'm happy to say this was not such the case. Even the J., who was originally reluctant to go, turned to me immediately after the film ended and said, "oooh, we should watch this again." I really feel bad about admitting that I like this film -- part of me is so sick and tired of the fraternity of Judd Apatow films. I realize that Apatow had nothing to do with this film but it definitely fits into his little cinematic universe of inhabited by half-men, half-children. It's always seemed odd to me how much we enjoy celebrating male characters with sad, pathetic Peter Pan complexes. Is it really so laudable to refuse to grow up and take responsibility? Think, for example, about Dustin Hoffman's character, Benjamin, in The Graduate. Say what you want about cultural revolutions, generational differences, etc. At its core, The Graduate is a film about a guy who refuses to take responsibility for his actions, who refuses to act like an adult. Sure, the world might suck but moping around the swimming pool all day doesn't make it suck any less. As many of my film students have commented: I don't understand what the hell is his problem. |
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