REVIEW: This Is the End

This Is the End (2013): Written and directed by: Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen. Starring: James Franco, Jonah Hill, Seth Rogen, Jay Baruchel, Danny McBride, Craig Robinson, Michael Cera and Emma Watson. Rated R (Language and assorted apocalyptic debauchery). Running time 106 minutes.
 

2 ½ stars (out of four)

There are so many references and in-jokes in This Is the End, an end-of-the-world comedy written and directed by Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen, I can’t imagine the movie will be very funny even just a few years from now. Still, if you see it on a Friday or Saturday night in the next couple of weeks (a comedy like this is always more enjoyable with a packed house), you’ll get your money’s worth of laughs.

And if you already think the guys in this movie are funny, then seeing This Is the End in theaters is a no-brainer. When all hell is (literally) unleashed on the world, a group of Judd Apatow regulars hole up in Hollywood hoping to outlast the apocalypse.

Everyone plays themselves, or rather, caricatured, sometimes self-deprecating versions of themselves. For some of them, the movie is an opportunity to reinforce an already established persona. Seth Rogen, as always, is the affable stoner. He has a remarkable ability to give you the impression that he is already your friend. James Franco is the playboy. He’s the charismatic jerk who hosts the epic banger of a party in his newly bought mansion on the night of the rapture.

Other actors use the movie to play with their celebrity personas. Jonah Hill, wearing a diamond earring in his left ear, is effeminate and full of himself. Apparently still high off his Oscar nomination from a few years ago, the Hill character sees himself as a cut above the rest of these lowbrow comedians. Like many of the other actors in the movie, Hill is one of those guys people always accuse of playing themselves in every movie. Here, he actually does play himself and it’s one of the most individually distinct characters he’s ever played.

Michael Cera has a memorable cameo, playing against his usual awkward adolescent character as a coke-sniffing womanizer. Emma Watson shows up too to prove she’s more than Hermione Granger. (About a dozen more actors and stars have cameos, some of which are inspired.)

Danny McBride was never an actor I particularly liked but here, maybe for the first time, I understand what it is that people like about him. His comedic timing is on point and he is relentlessly, cheerfully tasteless. After a while though, I remembered why it is I can only take him in doses. His sense of humor is exhaustingly crude and cynical. It can be a bit much.

For my money, Craig Robinson made me laugh the most. He’s been stealing scenes in supporting roles for the better part of a decade now and is always a welcome presence in a movie. Perhaps the most likable and relatable guy here, Robinson squeals like a little girl in the face of danger and is delighted to find that drinking his own pee isn’t so bad. He can switch back and forth between straight man and goofball in a way few comedians can.

Then there’s Jay Baruchel, who usually plays the whiny, goody two-shoes of the group. In This Is the End, he plays the whiny, goody two-shoes of the group. With everyone else so gleefully playing into his type or against it, why isn’t Baruchel allowed to join in on the fun? Did Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen think the movie needed a moral center for the audience to relate to? Someone who scorns the vain lives of Hollywood celebrities? The movie does not need that and would have been more fun without it. Similarly, his bromance with Seth Rogen (in the film, the two are childhood friends reuniting for a weekend of smoking weed at Rogen’s place) is tired and weighs the movie down.

These scenes aside, This Is the End is a lot of fun. These actors are great at banter and the biggest laughs in the movie come not from the gross-out gags but the slick, fast-paced dialogue. At one point, bored in Franco’s fortress of a home, the guys decide to make a homemade sequel to The Pineapple Express. The best thing about This Is the End is that it feels like a movie made by a bunch of friends. All the CGI demons and other hellish effects made possible by the movie’s big budget aren’t necessary. This Is the End puts its stars front and center. They’re having a good time and you will too.

- Steve Avigliano, 6/15/13

REVIEW: 21 Jump Street

21 Jump Street (2012): Directed by: Phil Lord and Chris Miller. Written by: Michael Bacall. Story by: Jonah Hill and Michael Bacall. Based on the TV show created by: Patrick Hasburgh and Stephen J. Cannell. Rated R (Non-stop vulgarities and some graphic, comic violence). Running time: 109 minutes.

2 ½ stars (out of four)

21 Jump Street has nothing to do with the late-1980s TV show, 21 Jump Street, except, of course, such trivial commonalities as their title and premise. Such is the state of Hollywood today. Stories are bought like brand names and sold anew to audiences. Sometimes these recycled ideas are marketed under the guise of an “update” or a “reimagining” and sometimes, as is the case here, they actually come clean about their motives.

In a self-referential speech early in 21 Jump Street (the movie, now), a police captain (Nick Offerman) informs two doofy, slacker bike cops that his superiors are talentless, uncreative hacks who have dusted off an old project from the 80s. They will go undercover as high school seniors and befriend student drug dealers in order to learn the identity of the supplier of a new synthetic drug.

A scene later, Ice Cube stomps onscreen playing the sting operation’s chief officer. He announces that, yes, he is an angry black man and that that is a stereotype and so what? He proceeds to point out to more stereotypes from the group of young officers who stand before him: the brawny, handsome dunce, Greg (Channing Tatum), and the short, insecure, brainy Morton (Jonah Hill).

So 21 Jump Street is quite upfront about its intentions, which suits me just fine, having never seen the TV show and feeling no particular reverence toward it. The movie preemptively dismisses criticisms that it is lazy or politically incorrect and sets out to make as many race and gay jokes, and score as many raunchy laughs as possible.

To the film’s credit, it is decently, if only intermittently, funny and I found it hard to hate its Will Do Anything For a Laugh attitude. The movie skips along as a series of just barely linked sketches and achieves its low ambitions.

Jonah Hill, who has convincingly transitioned from husky sidekick to the yammering, neurotic Michael Cera type he once played opposite to, is as good at physical comedy as he is fast-paced banter. But the movie’s secret weapon is Channing Tatum. Mr. Tatum wears his good looks with a shrug and believably embodies that charming high school jock who could get you to laugh at any joke, no matter how mean or dumb the punchline.

But his Greg, a former football captain, runs into trouble when he finds that high school cliques are not what they used to be and that the social hierarchy no longer rewards rowdy intolerance. The current batch of students is an eco-conscious bunch of Tweeters and their definition of “cool” is something more like “hip.”  This neat, little twist benefits the once-nerd Morton, and Greg finds himself on the outskirts of popularity.

The movie, directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, and written by Michael Bacall (he and Mr. Hill are credited with its story), relishes in subverting what expectations we may have of buddy cop movies, high school comedies or a decades-old TV show. For all its flaunting of the rules though, 21 Jump Street rarely does anything risky. Greg and Morton fall out of friendship so that they may fall back into it and their jobs are put at risk so that they may win them back again.

The movie loses steam as it plods through these weary clichés, though it does get another big laugh from a predictable (but still surprising) cameo late in the game. There are still twenty minutes after this irreverent jab but nothing else tops it, not even one last, disgusting gag that aims for the Gross-Out Hall of Fame but, for me, felt like it was trying too hard. Sometimes even the captain of the football team tells a joke that falls flat.

- Steve Avigliano, 3/20/12

REVIEW: Get Him to the Greek

Get Him to the Greek (2010): Dir. Nicholas Stoller. Written by: Nicholas Stoller (based on characters created by Jason Segel). Starring: Russell Brand, Jonah Hill, Sean "Diddy" Combs. Rated R (strong sexual content and drug use throughout, and pervasive language). Running time: 109 minutes.

2 ½ stars (out of four)

Aldous Snow, the scene-stealing British rocker from 2008’s Judd Apatow-produced film, Forgetting Sarah Marshall (also directed by Nicholas Stoller), returns in a loose spin-off of that film that builds off comedian Russell Brand’s wonderful parody of the womanizing frontman and delves deeper – sort of – into the life of the fictional rockstar.

Get Him to the Greek finds Aldous Snow at a low-point in his career after a misguided foray in political music yields the offensive bomb of a single, “African Child (Trapped in Me).” Snow’s failure, however, provides Aaron Green, an intern for Pinnacle Records and longtime fan of Snow’s music, with an opportunity to resurrect his favorite artist’s career. Green (played by Jonah Hill) pitches the idea of a comeback concert for Snow to his boss (Sean “Diddy” Combs) so that the record label can commemorate the ten-year anniversary of Snow’s famous concert at the Greek Theatre and cash in on the CD re-releases of Snow’s back catalog. The label agrees and gives Green 72 hours to fly to London and get Snow back to L.A. for the show.

The set-up is a little forced, as though it were constructed to be neatly summarized in a 3-minute trailer – or perhaps a poster’s tagline – but once the proceedings get going, the film delivers good on its high-concept promise. As Green struggles to get Snow on time to the concert, we’re treated to a series of inspired party montages that breathe new life into sex and vomit gags… I mean that as a genuine compliment. For all its crudeness though, Get Him to the Greek also has an unfortunate reliance on sentimental sitcom-quality drama. Green’s storyline is a tired moving-away-from-home-for-his-girlfriend’s-career conflict and even rocker Aldous Snow can’t escape the film’s tendency towards trite drama. When Snow reconnects with his child near the end of the film, the tone is unclear and we’re unsure if the moment is meant to be a funny or a genuine one. Where other Apatow-produced affairs deftly blend comedy with heartfelt emotion, Get Him to the Greek isn’t as good a fit for that treatment. The film’s dramatic moments fail because Snow is too much of a caricature to show any real emotion and the cheating Green is too skeevy to muster any audience sympathy.

All these issues are rendered irrelevant, however, when the film lets Russell Brand loose in a fine comedic performance. Brand captures the air-headed rockstar persona, but his character’s insistent affection for that drug-addled lifestyle of meaningless hook-ups keeps the character an endearing nitwit and less like some of his more unlikable real-life counterparts. His confession to Green about why he continues his drug addiction (“I don’t have to worry about anything except drugs,” he says.) manages to be quite funny and maybe even a little poignant coming out of Brand’s mouth. Brand’s scenes are such breaths of fresh air, you wish the film had cut down on Jonah Hill’s character if only to give Brand more time for one-liners. Hill does fine in supporting roles (such as Forgetting Sarah Marshall), but he can’t quite hold his own when sharing the spotlight with Brand. There are some good supporting players though, such as Sean “Diddy” Combs’s quick-to-anger record label manager. Combs struggles in his first few scenes, but ultimately succeeds in his portrayal of an exaggerated music executive that stays just shy of the extreme territory tread by Tom Cruise’s Les Grossman from Tropic Thunder.

Brand’s excellent performance is complemented by a soundtrack of faux songs by Snow’s fictional band, Infant Sorrow. The songs – written by Brand, Sarah Marshall screenwriter Jason Segel, and a host of real musicians including Jarvis Cocker and Libertines-frontman Carl Barat – are skilled parodies of Killers-esque arena-rock anthems. One song, “Bangers, Beans & Mash,” is so convincing, it might be mistaken for an Oasis b-side in a different context. Another, entitled “Going Up,” features emphatically delivered lines such as, “Like a dog who’s gone insane, you’re putting me down, down down,” and “African Child” is a wonderful send-up of the rockstar-gone-political. We even get the Lady Gaga-imitation pop icon, Jackie Q, whose vulgar dance lyrics are less than subtle. Still, these songs aren’t as strong as the ingenious Dracula puppet-opera from Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and they pale too in comparison to another Apatow-produced film, Walk Hard, whose songs were so well written, they almost held their own against the Johnny Cash originals they parodied.

There’s plenty of ripe material for a satire on the music industry, but Get Him to the Greek never points its gun at the fans who worship morons like Snow or the media that propagates them, preferring instead to use the extravagant rockstar lifestyle as a launching pad for raunchy comedy. More might have been done with the Snow character, but the film is an earnest comedy and you can’t fault a film for setting its sights low when it hits its target fine.

- Steve Avigliano, 6/10/10