Rated PG-13 for prolonged sequences of action and violence including intense gunfire and explosions, some language and a brief sexual image
Cast: Channing Tatum, Jamie Foxx, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jason Clarke, Richard Jenkins, Joey King, and James Woods
Written By: James Vanderbilt
Directed By: Roland Emmerich
OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN... AGAIN
Review By Andrew Shuster
There will be obvious comparisons made between White House Down and the identically plotted March release Olympus Has Fallen. Both films are essentially Die Hard in the White House. There are only so many ideas in Hollywood, so this type of thing has happened before. 2006 saw the release of two Truman Capote biopics within months of each other. In 1998, a team of astronauts were sent on a space mission to destroy a meteor on a collision course with Earth, in both Armageddon and Deep Impact. However, of this year’s two 'White House taken by terrorists' movies, the scenario is better executed in White House Down, which almost comes off as Olympus Has Fallen’s superior sequel. It’s bigger, louder, dumber, and of the many Die Hard knock-offs, it’s one of the better ones.
What’s refreshing about the film is it feels like a throwback to the summer blockbuster’s of the 90’s, before the superheroes and robots took over. The movie has a very similar vibe to Air Force One, The Rock, The Sum of All Fears, and all of the other Jack Ryan movies that used to be the big action summer spectacles before everything went CGI. It also shares similarities with Independence Day, sans aliens, especially in that movie’s iconic destruction of the White House, and director Roland Emmerich gets self-referential in that regard. Emmerich was behind 1996’s alien invasion blockbuster, and early in the movie a White House tour guide mentions, "this is the building they blew up in Independence Day." Michael Bay did a similar thing in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, in which a college student displays a poster of Bay’s Bad Boys 2 in his dorm room. A shout out to yourself is perhaps a bit egocentric, but for those who get the reference, it’s a fun ‘easter egg’. (For those who don’t get that reference, an ‘easter egg’ is an intentional inside joke or hidden message featured in a film).
Personal political opinions aside, the film could be accused of pushing a left-wing agenda in the implementation of a not so subtle conspiracy theory that the government and big business are scheming to keep wars going in order to rake in huge profits through the sale of ammunition. Unlike the North Korean enemy in Olympus Has Fallen, the bad guys in this film are homegrown. They’re made up of a team of scorned ex-military members, white supremacists, and right-wing sociopaths. I know that the film takes place at the White House, but it’d be nice if they kept political conjecture out of a preposterous action movie.
The movie itself is formulaic and riddled with action movie cliches, but you’ll be having too much fun to really care. The basic plot is that secret service reject John Cale (Channing Tatum) takes his politically obsessed eleven-year-old daughter Emily (Joey King) on a tour of the White House. When a heavily armed group of paramilitary invaders take over the Presidential Palace, Cale must spring into action to save both his daughter as well as President James Sawyer (Jamie Foxx). The setup to this is a little long, and the movie is a bit bloated in general, but it’s filled with enough ‘bang for your buck’ action sequences that it still thoroughly entertains throughout.
As President Sawyer, Jamie Foxx is an obvious Obama stand-in, down to the detail of him being an ex-smoker. He also rocks a cherished pair of Nike Jordans which he exemplifies while kicking a terrorist multiple times in the face declaring, “Get your hands off my Jordans!” The movie has more comic relief than you might expect, with Tatum and Foxx bantering back and forth, and a tour guide who is more upset over the priceless White House artifacts being destroyed than he is about the hostage situation. Tatum is a crackerjack action hero and the filmmakers smartly use his character’s precocious daughter as the victim, getting the audience invested in him to save the day. The film also has a solid supporting cast including James Woods, Jason Clarke, Richard Jenkins, and Maggie Gyllenhaal, whose roles are best left undiscussed to avoid spoilers.
Sure, you’ve seen this all before, but when it’s executed this well it hardly matters. Emmerich is the ultimate professional when it comes to big-budget action extravaganzas and the craftsmanship of the film is quite impressive. The action sequences are worth the price of admission alone, a highlight being a car chase around the front lawn of the White House that’s one of the funnier vehicular pursuits in a long time. It’s not everyday you see the President of the United States brandishing a bazooka out of a car window. Throughout the film there’s a game of cat-and-mouse as Tatum and Foxx try to navigate their way through the White House undetected, a plot tactic very reminiscent of Die Hard. Then there’s the over-the-top final 30 minutes that pulls out all of the action movie stops to ensure you leave satisfied.
Big dumb action movies don’t get much bigger and dumber than this and I mean that as a compliment. The movie knows its audience and goes out of its way to deliver on their expectations. If you're a 15-year-old boy, you’ll probably think this is one of the greatest movies ever made. For the rest of you, remember to remove your thinking caps before entering the theater and you’ll have a grand old time watching the White House go down.
Rated R for pervasive language, strong crude content and some violence
Cast: Sandra Bullock, Melissa McCarthy, Demian Bichir, Marlon Wayans, Michael Rapaport, Jane Curtin, Spoken Reasons, Taran Killam, Bill Burr, Tony Hale, and Tom Wilson
Written By: Katie Dippold
Directed By: Paul Feig
BAD GIRLS
Review By Andrew Shuster
The Heat is an average buddy-cop comedy that happens to feature women as the buddies. But, aside from the casting, there’s nothing innovative or original about the premise or its execution. It almost seems as if the script was written with the intention of casting men until someone got the idea to hire Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy. There’s a surprising lack of social commentary in the implementation of women in a genre typically reserved for men. The filmmakers are happy just letting the girls get to do what the boys usually do, without giving them a voice of their own. While The Heat is sporadically funny and suitably entertaining, it’s also kind of pointless.
What’s really surprising is how low-brow the film is. Director Paul Feig created Freaks and Geeks, one of the smartest, funniest, and most insightful television programs ever made. He also directed the much superior Bridesmaids, which some have described as the ‘female Hangover’, but Bridesmaids wasn’t merely a party movie that featured women, it was about women. The Heat features women, but it isn’t about women. It isn’t really about anything. It’s a generic action-comedy about two mismatched cops, the straight-laced Sarah Ashburn (Bullock) and the loose-cannon Shannon Mullins (Melissa McCarthy), who are forced to partner up much to each other’s chagrin. But guess what? After the initial personality clash, they begin to bond, and find they’re not so different after all.
It’s disappointing that the filmmakers didn’t try to play with the conventions of the genre more, settling for the fact that the ‘straight-man’ character is now a ‘straight-woman’ and the crazy guy is now the crazy gal. Beyond that, it just tells the story of two cops trying to nab a gang of drug dealers. What if it were a female gang of drug dealers they went after? Now that would be toying with genre conventions. What if their captain (Tom Wilson) was also played by a woman? What if they really went for it? The film doesn’t have the same self-awareness and self-mockery of its played out genre as last year’s 21 Jump Street so cleverly did.
Your enjoyment of this movie will be highly dependent on your appreciation of McCarthy’s shtick. If you think a little of her goes a long way, you’re in for a very long movie. McCarthy is funny, energetic and gives the performance her all, but she is probably better suited for supporting roles. Perhaps the reason she was such a highlight in Bridesmaids is because she never wore out her welcome. Her character in The Heat is very similar to the role she played in Bridesmaids, although even more aggressively offensive and crass. McCarthy drops more F-bombs than Joe Pesci in Goodfellas. She does have a lot of funny one-liners, usually in the form of her barrage of insults to every other character in the movie.
It’s no secret that McCarthy is a big woman, but the film mostly ignores her physical appearance; yet if it were a man in this role, the film would contain a barrage of fat jokes pointed in his direction. Take Zach Galifianakis in The Hangover series for example, who is dubbed the name ‘fat boy’ by one of the other characters. No one would dare call McCarthy ‘fat girl’. But, if they’re going for this ‘girls can be just like the guys’ mentality, why not go for it? To a small extent they do; in one scene McCarthy tries to wriggle her way through a car window, but they mostly shy away from it. McCarthy’s character viciously insults Bullock’s character throughout the film. But, the other way around is not allowed.
There are issues with pacing and at a full two hours the movie overstays its welcome. There’s definitely a solid 90 minutes here that could have made for a much breezier comedy. As is, many scenes go on for too long while stretching out their one-note jokes. There are a handful of belly laughs, most of which come from McCarthy’s diatribes, but also an equal number of jokes that fall flat.
Now, I may be being a bit hard on the film due to its missed potential and not fulfilling the inspired idea of a buddy-cop action-comedy starring women. Taking it for what it is, the movie does have its good aspects. Credit is due for going for a hard R-rating, with non-stop crude language and surprising spurts of bloody violence (including an emergency tracheotomy in a Denny’s restaurant that’s one of the grosser gags in recent memory). Although a generic police procedural, the movie still entertaining and often fun.
While it’s refreshing to see women get a stab at the buddy-cop genre, there’s not a lot of material here to differentiate itself from the myriad of male buddy-cop movies. There are laughs to be sure, but their not big nor often. Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy are likable actresses and as far as mindless entertainment goes you could do worse, but overall, The Heat is only lukewarm.
Rated PG-13 for thematic elements, some sexual content and brief drug material
Cast: Steve Carell, Sam Rockwell, Toni Collette, AnnaSophia Robb, Maya Rudolph, Allison Janney, Rob Corddry, Amanda Peet, and Liam James
Written and Directed By: Nat Faxon and Jim Rash
WAY, WAY TOO FAMILIAR
Review By Andrew Shuster
The Way, Way Back is so formulaic that it almost seems like a parody of coming-of-age dramedies. It tries too hard to be this years Little Miss Sunshine or Juno, but those films put an original twist on a common story. This film is generic and has nothing new to say about being an awkward teenager. The conventional approach wouldn’t be so bad if the movie were funnier or more entertaining, but the jokes often fall flat and the screenplay is too uneventful. Steve Carell and Sam Rockwell might be the only saving graces of the movie, both of whom give solid performances, but their talents are worthy of a better script.
Duncan (Liam James), an awkward, unconfident fourteen year old is forced to spend summer break with his mother Pam (Toni Collette) and her new boyfriend Trent (Steve Carell) at Trent’s beach house. What seems to be shaping up to be an endless summer of dread takes a turn for the better when romance sparks between Duncan and his pretty blonde neighbor Susanna (AnnaSophia Robb), and he gets a job at a local water park where he is taken under the wing of park manager Owen (Sam Rockwell).
A film like this relies heavily on characterization and therefore on the performances of the actors. Liam James isn’t particularly engaging in the lead role. He’s meek and mopey, which is the point, but even when he begins to learn confidence at the hands of Owen, his newfound aplomb is unconvincing. It’s mandatory that this kid has a character arc by the end of the movie, but two months working at a water park with a bunch of 30-something slackers who give him life lessons doesn’t seem like enough to necessitate a complete personality shift. Not to mention, the water park setting makes this feel like an adolescent version of Adventureland.
As previously mentioned, the standouts of the film are Steve Carell and Sam Rockwell. Steve Carell plays against type in a role that couldn’t have less in common with the lovable buffoons he usually plays. To sum it up, who knew Steve Carell could be such a d*ck? Trent is a lying, cheating, manipulative a-hole who mistreats both Duncan and his mother. In the opening scene, Trent asks Duncan, “What would you say you are on a scale of 1-10?”, Duncan answers, “I don’t know... a six”, “I think you’re a three” Trent responds. There’s nothing about this character on paper that would make one think “Steve Carell would be perfect for this!”, so the casting is inspired and Carell shows real acting chops. Rockwell’s Owen is the consummate wiseass who shirks all responsibility, throws caution to the wind, and views his job and life in general as one big joke. Of course, he has a bigger heart than he lets on. When he notices the lonely and sad Duncan at the water park, he decides to hire him, taking on the role of mentor and teaching Duncan to come into his own. Contrary to Carell and his character, Rockwell has played this sort of character many times before, but he’s tailor made for the part and the level of fun noticeably amps up when he’s onscreen. Carell and Rockwell elevate the material, but it’s a shame they aren’t surrounded by a better movie.
There’s some illogicalities with the finale that I can’t get into without going into spoiler territory, but why does every indie need to have an ambiguous ending? It’s come to a point where filmmakers use an enigmatic conclusion because they deem it more intelligent, but it’s often more of a copout. The best use of such an ending is when it’s germane to everything that preceded it, but there’s no point in being inconclusive just for the sake of it.
Writer/directors Nat Faxon and Jim Rash riddle their script with coming-of-age cliches. Why does every town in the movies have an attractive young blonde who finds the average looking gawky boy to be so endearing? Why are the adults always whacked out of their skulls while the kids are levelheaded? Faxon and Rash aren’t without talent, they won an Oscar for co-writing The Descendants, but this movie is lightweight and misguided compared to that one.
For the undemanding, the movie will probably be a big crowd pleaser. For what it’s worth and in all fairness, the audience at the screening I attended seemed to eat it up. I wasn’t sure what everyone else found so funny. The jokes were cheesy and the story was bland. So maybe it’s me, and I’ve been known to be a contrarian before, but aside from some good performances I found The Way, Way Back to be uninvolving and forgettable.
Rated PG-13 for intense frightening zombie sequences, violence and disturbing images
Cast: Brad Pitt, Mireille Enos, Daniella Kertesz, James Badge Dale, David Morse, Ludi Boeken, Fana Mokena and Matthew Fox
Written By: Matthew Michael Carnahan, Damon Lindelof, and Drew Goddard
Directed By: Marc Forster
ZOMBIE DARK THIRTY
Review By Andrew Shuster
Approximately two and a half minutes into World War Z, Philadelphia is invaded by zombies, causing large scale destruction and mass mayhem throughout the city. It’s one of the quickest dives into action of any apocalyptic movie. Armageddon had an action packed prologue with meteorites descending upon New York City, then took about 40 minutes to establish its overcomplicated yet simple plot and introduce a dozen characters. 2012 didn’t get around to wiping out Los Angeles until about 45 minutes in, up until then the U.S. government and conspiracy theorists rambled on about the possibility of the end of times. Typically, the most dull sequences of a horror/disaster movie are towards the beginning, as the audience knows what they’ll eventually be in for but need to learn every character’s backstory before watching them get killed off one by one. World War Z doesn’t have this problem. It takes two minutes to introduce us to the protagonists, then it’s off to the races and doesn’t stop. For the first two-thirds anyway. Then it does stop. The film is intense, lots of fun, and a very satisfying big summer blockbuster. Until it isn’t.
It’s no secret that World War Z had one of the most problematic productions in recent memory, resulting in massive rewrites, reshoots, and a budget ballooning to well over $200 million. Director Marc Forster (Monster’s Ball, Finding Neverland) was accused of being unqualified to handle big action sequences, pointing to the lukewarm reception of his ‘James Bond’ entry, Quantum of Solace. Three screenwriters are credited with having penned the film (more are rumored to have contributed), with Lost creators Damon Lindelof and Drew Goddard brought in during post-production to rewrite the entire third act after Paramount executives watched a first cut of the film and realized the ending didn’t work. What’s Hollywood to do when all seems lost? Get the guys who made Lost! With such tinkering going on, the final product has very little in common with the source material it's based on, the novel World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks (son of Mel). For a film plagued with so many problems, the final product overcomes most of them seamlessly, delivering a cohesive story and exciting action for a long period of time. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t sustain itself to the end and is unable to walk away completely unscathed from the issues that arose while filming.
First, the good aspects. And there are lot of them. Brad Pitt plays Gerry Lane, a retired United Nations field agent with a wife and two young daughters. A Zombie invasion hits, and do to his expertise as a former U.N. investigator, Gerry reluctantly agrees to help a military team find the source of the virus that’s causing this plague, with the hope that a vaccine can be developed upon finding the origin of the outbreak. He globe-trots from South Korea, to Israel, to Wales, in search for answers, all the while fighting off hordes of zombies. When the zombies attack, they attack fast. These aren’t your Night of the Living Dead zombies, these are the sprinting, frenzied and rabid zombies à la 28 Days Later. Different types of suspense sequences are implemented resulting in a potpurri of action scenes that feel like highlights from varying genres. The opening is out of a disaster movie and brings back memories of the alien invasion in War of the Worlds. A chase throughout an abandoned and darkly-lit apartment complex has the same jump-out scares and horror elements along the lines of Dawn of the Dead. Then there’s the film’s biggest set-piece, a full-on zombie invasion of Jerusalem as Brad Pitt and the Israeli army need to take out the ‘running dead’. With helicopters flying above the city as soldiers onboard man turret guns, to a battle on the ground using assault rifles and grenades, it’s what it might of looked like had the enemies in Saving Private Ryan been zombies instead of nazis.
This is the largest scale, most epic zombie movie ever made. With a budget so big, the undead are allowed to storm major cities in lieu of a shopping mall, as was the case with the Dawn of the Dead remake. This isn’t a zombie movie made for hardcore fans of the genre. With a PG-13 rating it lacks the blood and guts that usually comes with the territory from such material. There’s no brain eating, head exploding, or decapitations, and most of the violence is suggestive, cutting away before anything really gruesome happens. However, the lack of gore doesn’t take away from the intensity of the battle scenes. Everything is still so viscerally exciting and the fact that this ins’t your average ‘grindhouse’ style horror movie, the gross-out factor of typical zombie fare isn’t necessary.
The film takes its premise fairly seriously which allows for very few instances of comic relief. Being a movie about widespread panic due to a pandemic, it shares similar themes to fear inducing thrillers like Contagion and Outbreak. Brad Pitt is a consistently solid leading man, and being front and center in nearly every scene, he carries the picture admirably. The character doesn’t get to display a huge range of emotions as he’s consistently heroic and in control of the situation. As a result, this isn’t a particularly difficult acting assignment for Pitt and he doesn’t get to ham it up as he did in Inglorious Basterds or emote like he did in Moneyball. Nevertheless he’s solid, and if a zombie apocalypse ever does breaks out, he’s someone you’d want by your side.
Before we get to the third act halt, the film features one of the of the best airplane sequences of any movie in years. There’s not much you need to know about this scene, but remember Snakes on a Plane? How does Zombies on a Plane sound? Then the third act hits. Everything that occurs after the plane sequence is the result of rewrites and reshoots. It’s not even that the third act is so bad, it’s just that it belongs in a different movie. It’s at this point that World War Z does turn into more of a generic horror movie. With the majority of blockbuster films saving their show-stopping action for the finale, this film goes the other way. The energy dissipates and the biggest spectacle you’re gonna get has already occurred smack in the middle of the movie. If this strategy is supposed to be innovative, it doesn’t work. There’s a reason most movies stick to the formula of building to an over the top climax, it does work. Adverse to the epic nature of everything else in the movie thus far, the entirety of the third act takes place in the intimate setting of a science lab. Again, the sequence isn’t an entire failure, it’s even pretty suspenseful at times, but it belongs either earlier in the film or realistically in an entirely different movie altogether. It’s a bit disconcerting that it’s glaringly obvious as to the exact moment when the script was rewritten and where the new scenes were placed. It’s hard to imagine what a mess the original ending was if this is the fixed version.
World War Z is really good for the majority of its running time and there’s something to be said for that. But, for the third act to be the weakest portion of a film is a real problem. Had the first act started out weak and then picked up as the movie went along that would be acceptable. Had the movie started off strong, lagged in the middle, than redeemed itself at the end, that would be okay too. But to build up such a strong momentum and goodwill only to go out with a whimper is frustratingly disappointing. Although World War Z is only two-thirds of a good film, I’m hard pressed to give a movie that I was really digging for the first hour and twenty minutes anything less than three stars. And as it goes, two out of three ain’t bad.
Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi violence, action and destruction, and for some language
Cast: Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Michael Shannon, Kevin Costner, Diane Lane, Laurence Fishburne, and Russell Crowe
Written By: David S. Goyer
Directed By: Zack Snyder
LOOK! UP IN THE SKY!
Review By Andrew Shuster
Superman is possibly the most infamous fictional American icon ever created. What is it about this Kryptonian with super-human strength that resonates so deeply with the cultural zeitgeist? Is it that we’d all like to be "faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound?” Sure, that’d be cool. But since that isn’t possible, it’s more the allegory for what it means to be a “man” in society. Superman is a selfless savior who was put on this world to do good. His alter ego Clark Kent is just an ordinary guy who isn’t impervious to the imperfections of the human body, after all he does wear glasses. So by day we might all be Clark Kent, but when the moment arrives where we need to change into the suit with an S-logo on the chest (whatever that would mean to the individual, allegory remember?) will we man up to the challenge? Do we possess the characteristics of a brave and kind-hearted hero with a strong sense of justice, morality, and righteousness? Man of Steel asks these questions even more so than some of the other incarnations of this superhero franchise.
If you’re a woman reading this and have already zoned out because you find the preceding paragraph unrelatable or even misogynistic, you’re probably right. After all, Superman was a comic book created in the 1930’s with a character inspired by Greek mythology, namely Greek gods such as Hercules. While Man of Steel casts Amy Adams, one of the better actresses of her generation, as Lois Lane, Lane’s main purpose in the film is to further the story of Superman. As a reporter she is instrumental in learning everything she can about Superman and where he came from, with her findings ultimately serving to develop his character. We learn practically nothing about Lane, and while she has moments of displaying bravery and even sass, despite her best efforts she eventually always needs Superman to rescue her. However, Amy Adams is very likable in the role and besides being very pretty, she has a certain moxie to sell the character as being willing to go to any lengths to get her scoop. And not to worry, when an eventual Wonder Woman movie is made, the boys will feel left out.
Henry Cavill, a relatively unknown actor (but probably not for long), is serviceable as Superman but comes off somewhat wooden and dull at times. This probably isn’t so much Cavill’s fault as it is the nature of the character and the material he’s given to work with. Unlike the snarky Robert Downey Jr. in Iron Man, Superman is as straight-laced and stoic as it gets. With his arms and chest bursting out of every outfit he wears, Cavill certainly looks the part, and is believable in the role if not particularly exciting. What isn’t as believable is the relationship between Superman and Lois Lane, as Cavill and Adams lack the chemistry needed to sell their romance.
This version of Superman isn’t a sequel or continuation of the series, but a reboot/re-imagining of sorts. Implementing an interesting strategy, a large chunk of the film consists of flashbacks interspersed throughout the present day action. Most superhero origin stories will use a 10 minute prologue to tell you everything you need to know about the character’s beginnings. But, Clark Kent had such a complicated and dysfunctional childhood that a we’re often transported back in time to see why he is who he is, and the structure works quite well. Before we meet the ‘Man of Steel’, we get two great examples of what a man should be, Clark's birth dad (Russell Crowe) and Earth dad (Kevin Costner), the two men integral in shaping Clark Kent into Superman. The most emotional aspects of the film come from Jonathan Kent’s interactions with his son. Clark’s father knows that the world is not ready to find out that someone with Clark’s abilities exists. Clark would be labeled a freak, probably be seized by the government and have scientific experiments done on him. Bigger than that though would be the ramifications his existence would have on the planet if everyone’s notions of what was possible were turned upside down. Kevin Costner is fantastic in the patriarchal role and with most of his scenes taking place with Clark as a child, the father/son relationship is grounded in reality, really giving you something to care about. After an adolescent Clark rescues a School Bus full of children by pushing the bus to safety and out of the river its crashed into, some of the kids start talking about Clark’s superpowers. His dad is concerned over the high-profile incident. Clark asks, “What should I have done? Let them die?” “Maybe”, his father responds. Jonathan Kent isn’t insensitive, quite the opposite. He has the foresight to do what is for the greater good of humanity.
The crux of the story is the same as in other adaptations. A 20-minute opening sequence features Krypton on the brink of destruction at the hands of General Zod (Michael Shannon), so Russell Crowe’s Jor-El decides to send his newborn son on a spacecraft headed for Earth, with the baby being the one glimmer of hope that the Kryptonian people can live on. Jor-El’s wife is not so crazy about the idea of giving up her infant son. Jor-El convinces her that they have no other choice and she goes along with it, (again the men are always right). So baby Kal-El lands on Earth where he will be appointed with the more human friendly name of Clark Kent by his adoptive parents Martha Kent (Diane Lane) and the aforementioned Jonathan. After Clark grows into a man thanks to the values instilled in him by his farm-raised parents, he next needs to grow into a ‘superman’. Although Crowe’s Jor-El dies in the first sequence of the film, he shows up many times in spirit form, with all the memories and emotions of his mortal self. He gives some fatherly wisdom to his son that Costner’s Jonathan Kent isn’t able to give, such as how to defeat General Zod and his army. Michael Shannon (who often plays a bad guy but has never been bad in anything) gives a standout performance. He plays General Zod almost as if he were the villain of a Shakespeare play. Shannon is menacing and a pro when it comes to delivering foreboding dialogue.
At 2 hours and 23 minutes the film is a bit overlong, especially towards the end with a final 30-40 minutes consisting of nonstop mayhem. There’ve been complaints that Man of Steel takes too dark an approach on Superman, but the film isn’t nearly as bleak as The Dark Knight. It isn’t as light as The Avengers either, but as good as The Avengers is, it’s practically a kids movie. Split the difference and you have Man of Steel, a somber character study mixed with fun and over the top action sequences. However, it’s in these final sequences that the film becomes somewhat tiresome as we’re bombarded with so much imagery and chaos, it’s hard to keep track of all the spaceship flying and building exploding action that’s going on. Unlike The Dark Knight, which used mostly practical special effects to give the sense that it’d be possible for Batman to exist in the real world, Man of Steel is way too CGI heavy. The post-converted 3D only serves to blur the images, especially when mixed with the often shaky camera work. These superhero movies really enjoy destroying major cities and for the most part the spectacle is impressive, but for once it’d be nice to see a mano-a-mano showdown between superhero and super-villain go down in a more intimate setting.
Man of Steel gets a lot right and makes 2006’s mediocre Superman Returns look even worse by comparison. Director Zack Snyder (300, Watchmen, Sucker Punch) delivers his best big-budget extravaganza yet and shows a surprising restraint when it comes to avoiding filming everything in a highly stylized slow-motion, a technique used rampantly in his other films. While another look at the origins of Superman probably wasn’t necessary, (by now everyone gets the gist of the story) the movie is well done and carries an emotional weight that the other films lacked. Sure, a scene where we see how Superman learns to fly is extraneous (Superman can fly, no need to know how, we’re on board). But now that the groundwork is all laid out, the inevitable Man of Steel sequel will probably be even better.
Rated R for crude and sexual content throughout, brief graphic nudity, pervasive language, drug use and some violence
Cast: Seth Rogen, James Franco, Jonah Hill, Jay Baruchel, Danny McBride, Craig Robinson, with Michael Cera, and Emma Watson
Written and Directed By: Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg
FUNNY AS HELL
Review By Andrew Shuster
Who knew the end of the world would be so funny? Seth Rogen stars as Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill plays Jonah Hill, James Franco is James... You get the idea. A team of comedy all-stars play exaggerated, vapid, and obnoxious versions of themselves who must band together when the Apocalypse hits. This Is the End might be the most insane comedy ever made. It goes to levels of bizarre, crude, and vile that even the hardest of R-rated movies wont touch. Mixing celebrity satire and non-stop laughs, all the while working as a legitimate horror/action/disaster movie, This Is the End is up there with the best comedies of the last several years.
Actor Jay Baruchel flies to L.A. to visit his famous buddy Seth Rogen for what he thinks will be a quiet weekend of the two of them getting high and playing video games. But, Seth convinces Jay to go to a hip Hollywood party at James Franco’s house, even though Jay isn’t into that whole scene. Jay hates Seth’s friends, mainly Jonah Hill and he doesn’t think James Franco even knows his name. Begrudgingly, he goes to the house party full of famous people such as Jason Segel, Paul Rudd, Rihanna, Michael Cera, Emma Watson, Aziz Ansari and many others. Most of them complain about how hard they have it in show business. The funniest of all these cameos is Michael Cera, lampooning his awkward and geeky persona, and playing himself as a whacked out womanizing coke-head. Fans of Superbad get a mini-reunion, with Cera, Hill, and Christopher Mintz-Plasse (McLovin) yukking it up at the party. Cera blows a handful of coke into McLovin’s face without warning.
During the party, all hell breaks loose. Literally. The Hollywood Hills go up in flames while a giant sinkhole opens up in Franco’s backyard. As a result, the majority of the celebrities die horrifically. There are so many cameos in this sequence that we unfortunately don’t get enough time with all of them. I could always use some more Paul Rudd, however his entrance gets a big laugh. The survivors, Seth Rogen, James Franco, Jonah Hill, Jay Baruchel, and Craig Robinson barricade themselves inside Franco’s house, hoping they’ll eventually be rescued. They wake up the next morning to find Danny McBride eating the limited amount of food they had saved for the time being. McBride is unaware that the Apocalypse has just occurred.
What transgresses is a send-up of the comedians real-life and onscreen personas as they have petty arguments, make fun of each other’s bad movies, and attempt to survive the end of days without their personal assistants. James Franco plays himself as pretentious, artsy, and sexually ambiguous. He has a major man crush on Rogen, if only for the fact that Rogen has put him in a lot of movies. Rogen’s friends accuse him of being a sell-out. Although it’s not mentioned by name, his co-starring role with Barbara Streisand in The Guilt Trip comes to mind. Danny McBride is hysterical as the wildcard of the group who has an ‘every man for himself’ mentality when it comes to survival. McBride often plays comedic jerks in his movies but in this one he steps it up to hilariously sadistic. Jonah Hill gives the most savage and self-deprecating portrayal of himself, being unbelievably phony and narcissistic. His performance is one of the bravest and funniest. As the guys talk about what their chances are of getting rescued, Hill says “Who do they rescue first? Actors! They’ll get Clooney, Sandra Bullock, me, if there’s room you guys will come”. As Hill prays to God to kill one of the other housemates instead of him, he asks “Are you there God? It’s me, Jonah Hill... from Moneyball. Hill is ultimately punished for his selfish ways when the devil appears and rapes him. Yes, you read that right. Jonah Hill is raped by Satan in this movie. I told you it goes to places other comedies dare not go. The rape scene is an almost shot-for-shot parody of the scene in Rosemary’s Baby where a demon has his way with Mia Farrow. Only, I don’t remember the demon having such a large phallus in Rosemary’s Baby.
Aside from how clever it all is, what really makes this movie something special is its functioning as an authentic genre piece. There are elements of horror, adventure, and monster-movie mayhem, and co-directors Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg smartly play this all straight. There are always laughs, but there’s also always something at stake and the danger is very real. In a typical comedy with thriller elements, it’s a pretty safe bet that the main stars are going to survive at the end of the movie. With an opening sequence that kills off half of Hollywood, there’s no such guarantee here. There’s a spoof of The Exorcist with a title card popping up saying The Exorcism of Jonah Hill as his buddies attempt to remove a demonic spirit from his body. Turns out the demon is as snarky a wiseass as Jonah Hill. There are also exciting chase sequences involving all kinds of monsters, using the same cinematography one would expect from a horror/thriller, not a Seth Rogen movie. Rogen and Goldberg prove very adept at delivering a big-budget action movie.
The film even throws in a message about the importance of hope, redemption, and being a good person. This Apocalypse, it turns out, is the Rapture, and all of the good souls have been sucked up into heaven while the bad people are damned to a hell on earth. The actors can’t understand why they weren’t taken to heaven. Franco says, “But we bring enjoyment to so many people!”. As he ruminates a bit more he figures it out, “I had sex with Lindsay Lohan while she was drunk. She thought I was Jake Gyllenhaal. I told her to call me The Prince of Persia. Craig Robinson adds, “I once gouged a man’s eyes out”. It seems the crux of Seth and Jay’s damnation revolves around working out the issues in their friendship. Jay and Seth have been drifting apart as Jay thinks his friend changed and has let Hollywood success go to his head, preferring to hang out with the “cool kids” like James Franco. The two will need to discover the true meaning of friendship in order to get ‘saved’. Nothing like the end of the world to bring people closer together.
A common theme of the movie is humility and giving back to the world, not just reaping the benefits of fame. With this, Rogen pokes fun at the egos of celebrities, taking potshots at himself and his crew. A very meta joke involves the guys passing the time by creating a sequel to Pineapple Express using Franco’s camcorder from 127 Hours. The amateur production they come up with is so haphazard, as if to say, without the help of professional filmmakers we don’t know what we’re doing. Only, Rogen wrote and directed This Is the End so the false modesty is appreciated, but he knows what he’s doing and he does it well. Perhaps an even more meta display of humbleness is Rogen, who is clearly the star of the movie, giving himself third billing after Franco and Hill.
This Is the End is one of the most outrageous comedies ever released by a major studio. But amidst all this craziness they found the time to infuse some heart. So, the same movie in which a decapitated head is used as a soccer ball and a man urinates in his own face also has a nice message and a sweetness to it. There’s no better crew in the comedy game right now than Seth Rogen and his cohorts, and they’ve raised the bar for the rest of filmdom’s comedy stars. This is kind of like this generations Ghostbusters, only if Ghostbusters was really f**ked up. The worst thing a comedy can do is play it safe. This movie knows no safety. It may not even know decency. It’s the ballsiest, most refreshing comedy in many years and one hell of a good time.
Rated PG-13 for sexuality, some crude humor, partying and language
Cast: Vince Vaughn, Owen Wilson, Rose Byrne, Max Minghella, Aasif Mandvi, Josh Brener, Dylan O'Brien, and John Goodman
Written By: Vince Vaughn and Jared Stern
Directed By: Shawn Levy
GOOGLE CRASHERS
Review By Andrew Shuster
It’s been said that landing an internship at Google is tougher than getting into Harvard. So it doesn’t make much sense that two middle-aged, out of work salesman get the gig, especially when they’re unable to operate a webcam during the interview. But fine, that’s the joke and it isn’t important for a comedy to have a logical premise. What is important for a comedy is that it’s funny. Unfortunately, The Internship is entertaining enough, but light on laughs.
Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson re-team for the first time since 2005’s Wedding Crashers. Both are likable actors with their own distinct comedic style and have great chemistry together. However, that isn’t nearly as apparent in this movie as it was back in 2005. Wedding Crashers was a crude and outrageous R-rated romp that allowed Vaughn and Wilson to let loose and push the envelope. The Internship reels the actors back in for a watered down PG-13 rating. Vince Vaughn, the “bad boy” of comedy, has no business being tame and rewording his diatribes to be less crass. It’s not to say that for a comedy to be funny it needs an R-rating. Some of the funniest movies, such as Anchorman, Austin Powers, and Billy Madison, have come with a PG-13 stamp. The difference is that those films relied on absurdist humor, abandoning the boundaries of reality and entering surrealistic territory. The Internship is very grounded in reality with it’s premise revolving around the current economic and job crisis. It doesn’t go to the absurd, weird, and downright bizarre levels that those other films reached. In fact, without the luxury to rely on vulgarity many PG-13 comedies are more clever than their R-rated counterparts. That's not the case here. Regardless, it’s just funnier to hear Vaughn drop an F-bomb.
Vaughn and Wilson play Billy and Nick, two salesman whose company has just went out of business leaving them unemployed. Nick gets a job selling mattresses for his obnoxious brother-in-law, played by Will Ferrell, and it’s troubling when a cameo appearance by Ferrell isn’t particularly funny. It brings back memories of his cameo in Wedding Crashers, which was very funny, and very (ironically) R-rated. Billy convinces Nick that they need to get with the digital age and secures them an interview for an internship at Google. The interview is disastrous, but they somehow convince the Google honchos to think outside the box and take a shot on them. They get hired for the internship program, joining hundreds of twenty-something college students all vying for a handful of positions that only a select few will get.
The first thirty minutes of the film are sort of dull but the story picks up when the guys join the Google team and the crux of the plot kicks in. Being forty-somethings in a sea of youth, they are immediately outcast when the other interns need to decide who will be their teammates for the duration of the job. The kids who would usually get picked last during a game of softball are the most sought after players in this universe. Billy and Nick join the other unpicked outcasts, forming a last string group of underdogs. From here on out the movie is entertaining and even fun at times, but not necessarily funny. They’re given various tasks such as creating an app and fixing a computer bug. Watching the technology illiterate Billy and Nick attempt to participate makes for the movie’s best moments. However, the plot isn’t always cohesive and sometimes just lends itself to implementing a comedic set-piece. Two sequences in particular stand out. In the first, Billy and Nick’s team compete against rival interns in a game of “Quidditch”, a sport played on flying broomsticks and invented in the Harry Potter movies. Of course, they just run with the broomsticks. Again, the scene has lots of energy but where are the jokes? At one point Vaughn refers to Flashdance to get his team pumped, but it just comes off stale. Quoting an obscure movie as means of inspiring one’s teammates is a joke that’s been done to death, even by Vaughn in previous films. The other sequence, and perhaps the funniest of the film, is when Billy and Nick take their dorky teammates to a strip club. This scene comes the closest they get to pushing the boundaries of the PG-13 rating, including a fairly risque joke with a hand-dryer being used for what is definitely not its primary function. Other than that you can’t help but think how much funnier an R-rated version of all this would be. Sure the kids get wasted and get lap dances, but it’s a missed opportunity that they didn’t go all out.
Though under the guise of working in an internship program, the movie could really be a generic college comedy taking place on a campus. Although Billy and Nick aren’t attending college, they’re nonetheless surrounded by an environment of young students. Like Rodney Dangerfield in Back to School, or even Vaughn’s past work in Old School, most of the comedy is derived from the differences in age and experience. Somewhat different is the added message about corporate culture and what it means to succeed and compete in current times. Two out of touch guys attempting to keep up in a digital age is at least a layer of satire that those college comedies don’t have.
There’s nothing too wrong with The Internship, it's just not that funny. The premise is solid, the actors are solid, but the jokes are lagging. Still, you have to admire an original concept amidst a summer of sequels, prequels, remakes, and reboots. Let’s just hope that the next time Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson team up they do something more along the lines of wedding crashing, not computer programming.
