OKReviewer Reviews

30 Minutes or Less (2011)

Ouch

[14 August 2011]

There are plenty of bad puns to be had with the title of this movie, but the cheesiest and most appropriate I can offer after watching it is "83 Minutes Long and Still a Mess." In the age of the three-hour comedy, I thought it would be a relief to watch a laugher with a tighter belt. Unfortunately, even with the fast title, Less dragged on much longer than I wished it to.

Less seems like a half-a**ed debacle, where everyone including the Captain jumped ship when they felt the movie sinking. The direction, if you can call it that, was done by Ruben Fleischer, who couldn't have possibly given his maximum effort on this film. His recent film success was directing the 2009 film Zombieland, which was a taut and intriguing comedy. Zombieland had a less original premise than Less, but consistently provided laughter and a few tense action sequences. Less similarly attempts to combine action and comedy, but provides an extremely flat and jumbled film.

The writing is slovenly. There are cheap laughs aplenty, and even a few good belly-busters, but laughter is inevitable when you try and force a joke every single line of the movie. My question is, why did the writers, and director for that matter, keep the crap that didn't stick to the wall? Watching Less felt like watching a movie shot in one take before it hits the editing room; so many intended jokes fall flat and fail to register. Even lazier than the joke writing is the character writing. Of course Less is a comedy, and an intentionally stupid one at that. Viewers shouldn't go in expecting to see detailed character development a la Mad Men; I certainly didn't. But the characters in Less change personalities and character traits on a whim and at an alarming rate.

In the movie's first scene, we see Jesse Eisenberg's character Nick, calmly and deliberately con two teenagers out of 40 dollars. But, after the first ten minutes of the movie, even before he gets the bomb/plot device strapped on his chest (which admittedly would make anyone change their disposition), he turns into a manic motormouth. The most offensive and unexplained character shift is that of the amateur criminal Travis, played by Nick Swardson (who in a side note needs to find a new agent after agreeing to star in the upcoming guaranteed bomb Bucky Larson. Find the trailer if you haven't seen it already; I almost clawed my eyes out in the theater seeing it before Less). Travis starts out as a complete imbecile, seemingly unable to think independently. Then, throughout the movie, Travis tries on about three or four different personalities before Swardson gives up altogether. And with writing that uneven, who could blame him?

Aziz Ansari predictably throws down the best performance in Less, and not simply by default. Unlike his stand-up comedy, which is a consistently high-pitched freight train of energy, Ansari is able to give his Chet character a dynamism I didn't expect from him. Sure, there are plenty of squeaky outbursts, but he knows that the outburst seems louder and more hilarious if there is a calm before the detonation. Ansari is the only actor relishing the gags, but unfortunately is fed plenty of misfired jokes by the writers as well. Danny McBride, deservedly renowned for his Kenny Powers character on HBO's Eastbound and Down, seems content to cash the paycheck and move on. He plays Dwayne, a much less funny Powers reprise, whose bumbling criminal character the writers mistakenly believe we care about. They inexplicably allow the movie to take a plot turn into his domain, yet the audience could care less what fate awaits him.

Good comedy shouldn't be as strenuous a venture as it is watching 30 Minutes or Less. Luckily, we all live in the internet age, and while I no longer have this option, you can save your ticket money and watch Aziz Ansari stand-up videos on YouTube instead.

For my other movie reviews, visit http://scottsdoublefeature.blogspot.com

The Help (2011)

The Help is Worth Your While

[14 August 2011]

Watching The Help is an exercise in absorption and immersion. From the first frame I could feel the muggy, sticky summer drip out of the screen. There were scenes where I could taste and smell the chicken, the pies, and the diner milkshakes of Jackson, Mississippi. In short, the set pieces are tremendous, and the cinematography is crisp and warm. Yet, the era is not only depicted by the outfits, classic cars, and antique-stuffed houses, but the tense, near boiling-point relationships that permeate the film.

Our first introduction in the film is to the voice of the film's star (who is not the white, auburn-haired Emma Stone as many of the movie posters and promotions might have led many to believe), African-American maid Aibileen Clark. Clark, portrayed subtly yet passionately by Viola Davis, has been a caretaker for several white children for her entire adult life, and simply has to swallow all of the racially-charged realities of mid-20th century America. Davis is nothing short of a dynamo in Help; she becomes Maya Angelou's "caged bird." She emotes an intelligence and dulled anger that have both been stifled by years of "yes, ma'ams" and "of course, ma'ams." Davis' Aibeleen Clark is baffled by, yet forced to graciously accept, the way Jackson's sons and daughters grow up to mistreat and dehumanize the very women who spent their lives raising them. In this world where Clark has given love and kindness, and received only disdain in return, she feels she has no agency. And indeed she alone has none.

This is where we need Stone's character, "Skeeter" Phelan, to turn the tide slightly in Clark's favor. An aspiring journalist, with a moronic local paper job, she decides to undertake the writing of a tell-all book from the viewpoint of Jackson's black maids. She is a digital-age woman stuck in a relatively barbaric place and time. Skeeter is all moxie and ambition, while her cancer-ridden mother and high society friends just wish she would shut up, get married, and start churning out babies for the maids in town to take care of. Just naive enough to believe her book can succeed, and having not nearly as much to lose as the maids she asks for stories, Skeeter is the perfect catalyst to provide Aibeleen Clark with the dignity she's resigned to having lost. Stone, who has swiftly ripened as a can't-miss leading lady, plays the part aptly; she has just enough quick-tongued retorts and wide-eyed eagerness to endear the audience to "Skeeter" (who could have just as easily been a grating character).

Where the movie truly shimmers is in its meditation on hate and injustice, occurring within the characters aside from the predictable plot structure. Help shows how, contrary to what most film and art shows us, hate is much more simple than love and virtue. As illustrated by the film's venomous Hilly Holbrook, played with maniacal fervor by Bryce Dallas Howard, it sometimes takes only a single person to perpetuate odiousness. Mrs. Holbrook, looking as if her head could explode at any moment, is at the head of Jackson's high society table, and the other white ladies in town absorb her every hostile word. As is true of all of history's great villains, and especially Hilly Holbrook, they gain great followings because it's easier to bend to hate and fear than resist it. Opposing spite requires courage and sacrifice, while abetting it only requires that one steps out of the way. In contrast, none of the heroes in Help can accomplish their goals alone or without sacrifice. Aibeleen can't act alone because no white person in Jackson will listen. She must also put her well being in danger to help Skeeter, who in turn can't write a book without Abileen's words and endurance. Neither of them can succeed without the help of many other maids: Skeeter's book won't be published unless at least a dozen maids give her their stories. As shown by the maids in Help swallowing their pride and showering their future oppressors with affection, love is often courage while hate can simply be acceptance of the world as it is.

There are a flew flaws in Help, mostly minor. One moment that stands out as particularly horrific came from maid Minny Jackson, otherwise played with gumption by Octavia Jackson. The line spoken, word-for-word, is "I love me some frieeed chicken." While it's not necessarily racist to portray a Southern black person liking traditionally Southern food, the line as written feels cheap and unnecessary, as if the audience is too stupid to deduce that Minny likes fried chicken from the action of her cooking it enthusiastically. There is also an oddly forced love interest for Skeeter's character. I believe the writers place him there to show what Skeeter would have to sacrifice to reach her goals, yet the character is so small and underdeveloped that the romantic subplot seems expendable in a movie already approaching an 150 minute running length. Yet, despite a few ignorable mishaps, The Help is a welcome break from much of the other inane drivel Hollywood rolls off of the conveyor belt and passes off as drama. The ensemble cast is fantastic, most notably Ahna O'Reilly and Jessica Chastain. O'Reilly plays the emotionally-battered second fiddle to Hilly Holbrook, and steals one of the Help's best moments in the closing sequence. She is the perfect vessel to display Holbrook's parasitic effect on Jackson's white residents. Chastain, portraying the painfully sincere housewife Celia Foote, gives a career-making performance. Celia hires Minny, and they repair each other's lives as outsiders in a world they feel helpless in. Their relationship is probably the most stirring in an exceptionally poignant film. Celia's boundless innocence and Minny's seen-it-all steadfastness combine to give both women the fortitude to withstand all that is 1960's Mississippi.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011)

Planet of the Apes Delivers the Summer Goods

[9 August 2011]

Making a prequel to a movie with a deliberately ambiguous ending is a tough chore. Viewers of the original Apes movie project a number of different possibilities as to how the planet run by apes got that way. However, Rupert Wyatt directs Rise with a steady confidence and pitch-perfect pacing. In his first Hollywood movie, he serves up a film that should be studied by aspiring action directors for its tasteful use of CGI. Unlike a certain director, whose name begins with "Mi" and ends with "chael Bay," Wyatt understands that the effects should push the plot forward instead of the movie acting as a limitless canvas for explosions. Sure, a helicopter explodes in Rise, but it blends with the emotional pageantry occurring alongside the action.

When the movie does ramp up the adrenaline, the set pieces look majestic. The climactic action scene taking place on the Golden Gate Bridge was one of the most enthralling I've seen. The effect work is top-notch, and there's just the right amount of it so that the audience can still tolerate the CGI by the end of the film.

Rise is at its heart a summer blockbuster, and the actors do a nice job of realizing that fact. None of them go for over-the-top, Oscar grubbing performances, yet they lend a strong emotional tone to the movie. James Franco, his hair just shaggy enough to convince us that he is a geeky scientist and not James Franco, plays Will Rodman, a researcher for a pharmaceutical company. He is desperate to find a cure for Alzheimer's disease, which afflicts his deteriorating father (played by John Lithgow). The writers wisely allow Will to make several ethically ambivalent choices in the movie, so that he appears not as a triumphant hero but as a relatable lead. The audience is able to project their own moral feelings about sickness, death, and scientific ethics onto Franco's character.

Freida Pinto, of Slumdog Millionaire fame, appears in a small yet crucial role. She enters the movie midway as Will's love interest, and provides a moral mirror for Will's questionable decisions. Even Draco Malfoy, I mean Tom Felton, appears in a fun yet slightly overcooked role as a sadistic worker at a primate holding center. He continues playing the same one-note, reviled antagonist he aptly portrayed in the Harry Potter series; but it's a good note for him to play.

Of course, the movie (having "apes" in the title) revolves around our primate ancestors (although I should be careful claiming that fact as I am currently writing in the western end of the bible belt). The protagonist is "Caesar," played in the early stages by puppeteer Richard Darwin and mostly by body-manipulative maestro Andy Serkis. Serkis, who has "played" Gollum in the Lord of the Rings series, and King Kong in the recent remake, is utterly engrossing to watch. Using the motion capture technology to his full advantage, Serkis provides the best acting performance with the least dialogue since silent films were the norm. His virtuosity in controlling every small muscle, tendon, and eyelash in his body highlights just how physical acting really is; the emotions felt are lucid with nary a work spoken. Certainly the effects team had plenty to do with the excellent portrayals of the apes in the movie, but Serkis should be lauded for his work in Rise. Are we near seeing a best acting Oscar go to someone partially played by computer? Perhaps Hollywood in recent years has gone down the wrong road with the action blockbuster genre. The budgets keep growing exponentially, but Apes, with a comparatively paltry $90 million budget, outdoes many of the biggest action flicks of recent years. Perhaps unlimited budgets lead to excessive CGI sequences that blend together intolerably after being beaten into the audience for hours. After I've seen a helicopter turn into a robot 25 times, I get the point. But most importantly, Rise asks the right questions. It is a movie about scientific progress, longing for eternal life, and our progressing relationship with nature. And as an added bonus, stuff blows up on the Golden Gate Bridge as well.

Final Thought: See it in theaters. The great action sequences should be seen on the big screen.

The Change-Up (2011)

Change-Up fails in spite of some game acting

[9 August 2011]

When a trailer for an upcoming movie is plastered on TV every single commercial break for a month prior to its release, there are two distinct possibilities. Possibility A is that the film studio has an underground hit on its hands, and wants to spread the word aggressively, as the movie might not have a box-office stud in the director's chair or any top-shelf actors. Possibility B is that the studio is furiously attempting to polish a bona fide cinematic turd. The Change-Up falls under the second category.

Director David Dobkin, after directing the masterpiece of hilarity Wedding Crashers in 2005, has since churned out Mr. Woodcock and Fred Claus, two comedic atrocities. After hitting it out of the park with Crashers, Dobkin has forgotten the difference between a laugh and a groan, a fact mind-numbingly evident in Change-Up. The "gags" in the movie are actually more likely to induce gagging than authentic laughter; I honestly can only recall two or three moments of audience laughter in unison. A great comedy is intelligent, sharp, and most importantly really funny. Dobkin decides to provide the audience with none of those traits.

On top of that omission, the direction of the movie is bizarre; the movie just felt odd. There was no narrative or comedic momentum, which drove comedies like The Hangover to greatness. Hangover was able to overcome a similarly tired premise with taut directing, several standout performances, and crisp writing. The Change-Up reminds us that there are only a few degrees between The Hangover and Dude, Where's My Car, and that a gimmicky premise leads to a stinker most of the time.

In Change-Up, the stunts and jokes don't build on each other, and the movie takes a strange U-turn in tone in the middle, as if the audience were willing to follow the film in a more serious direction. When the first scene of the movie is of a father unwillingly receiving a large amount of his baby's diarrhea in his mouth, viewers tend to reject the attempts at trembling emotion later in the story. Of course, this is also the fault of the movie's writers, Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, who were responsible for the Hangover II disaster earlier this summer.

Though not given much original or engaging material to work with, the actors in Change-Up put on a brave face, and actually seem to have fun with the material. Jason Bateman does his usual solid turn as the "straight" man, and after switching bodies with Ryan Reynolds' foul-mouthed dropout character, relishes the opportunity to go beyond his usual typecast everyman. The problem with Reynolds' character is that he is neither interesting or particularly likable, mostly due to the ineptitude of the writers. Reynolds and Bateman are both perfectly smarmy and manic as the Mitch character, yet it's extremely difficult for the audience to cheer for him. He claims to be a womanizer, and enough of one that Bateman's character, Dave, envies his prowess; yet, all we see Mitch do in the early-going is wake up late, smoke weed, and mope around because of his father's impending marriage to wife number five or six (Alan Arkin's talents are completely wasted in the barely-existent role of Mitch's father). Even when Mitch's fortunes take a turn for the better, we don't really believe that he deserves it.

Leslie Mann, perhaps best-known as the "shellfish sandwich girl" in 40-Year-Old Virgin, or an unsatisfied wife in Knocked Up, nearly steals the movie, falling just short mostly because she has the least interesting part of the four leads on the page. Yet even when the movie takes an unwise turn for the deep and dramatic, Mann holds the movie together by showing a previously unseen dramatic range.

Olivia Wilde, as Dave's delectable secretary, Sabrina, utilizes the movie's best part to her advantage. She is at once wry, sexy, sweet, spontaneous and intelligent. Wilde has seemingly avoided the various traps befallen to many actresses at her level of beauty (ahem, Megan Fox) by honing her craft to the point where her looks accentuate her acting instead of being a crutch to lean on in place of skill. She seems at ease in front of the camera, and willing to allow just the slightest hint of vulnerability on her face to reel us in.

Mann and Wilde's performances add to the belief that so far 2011 has been the year of the woman in comedy. Bridesmaids, hands down the belly-twisting laugh riot of the year, was written and acted in primarily by women. Jennifer Aniston excelled against type in the surprisingly enjoyable Horrible Bosses, lending a healthy amount of sadism to her portrayal of a sexually-harassing dentist. And even down in the comedy scrap heap with Change-Up, it's the female leads who shine beyond the movie's tight confines.

Final Thought: Wait for its inevitable weekly run on TNT.

For other reviews visit: https://scottsdoublefeature.blogspot.com