THE END OF THE TOUR - BFI London Film Festival 2015 - Day Ten

THE END OF THE TOUR is a deceptively simple movie.  It chronicles the five days that Rolling Stone journalist David Lipsky spent interviewing the famous writer David Foster Wallace at the end of Wallace's book tour for his novel, Infinite Jest.  I was a bit nervous walking into the screening because I haven't read any of Wallace's work, and only vaguely new the story of his depression and eventual suicide.  Also, I was a bit nervous that the two Davids were being played by Jason Segel and Jesse Eisenberg respectively.  Not that I don't think they're good actors. It's just that they tend to play the same sort of characters all the time. Siegel in particular tends to go for those big loveable man-child comedy characters and I was wondering if he could play a quieter, more intellectual, more complex character and actually disappear into the role.

Well, my fears were utterly overturned by what is a subtle, quiet, nuanced performance that truly shows Segel's range. This is his film.  

SEX TAPE

Jake Kasdan directed BAD TEACHER starring Jason Segel and Cameron Diaz and it was a genuinely wickedly funny, subversive movie. So why is SEX TAPE, directed by and starring the same actors, so painfully unfunny?  I mean, seriously, I did not laugh once for the entire running time of the film. I didn't even do that inward smile thing. It's not that it was even awkward, what will all the sex-talk.  It was just banal and so at pains to be earnest and good-hearted.  It also features the most absurdly in-your-face and annoying product placement. 

The plot is simple. Diaz and Segel play a happily married couple who realise that they just don't have enough good sex. So one night they get drunk and make a sex tape which the husband is meant to erase from his iPad but doesn't. Worse, it gets synched to all the people who he have his old iPads too, because in the most unbelievably contrived plot necessity, he's a DJ who gives people iPads but doesn't let them resynch them to their own accounts because that would rob them off his awesome playlists.   

Obviously if the film were funnier, the threadbare premise would bother us less. But it isn't witty and the physical humour is just juvenile.  This is most evident in the extended scene where the couple go to the house of the businessman who is on the verge of buying Diaz' website. He espouses family value but is a cokehead.  So while Diaz snorts coke to distract him (how we laughed! not) Segel runs through his mansion chased by a vicious guard-dog. I mean, really?

The whole film is basically just a banal and dull watch where sex is the preserve of well-meaning earnest couples and even pornographers have hearts.  Pass the sick-bucket.

SEX TAPE has a running time of 94 minutes and is rated R.  The movie is on global release.

THE FIVE YEAR ENGAGEMENT

THE FIVE-YEAR ENGAGEMENT is a banal, over-long romantic comedy firmly in the will-they-won't-they-oh-get-on-with-it.  Jason Segel and Emily Blunt as two people so manifestly right for each other, that one can only lose respect for them and their relationship by the amount of faux-obstacles they put in the way of the final, compulsory, over-the-top, wedding scene.  

He's a successful San Francisco chef who moves with her to Michigan for he dream university job. Reduced to selling tacos he becomes resentful, and she resents his resentment.  A mild indiscretion on each side leads to a temporary break-up and a third act epiphany and reconciliation.  I say that very quickly - in reality it's an hour of really dull cinema. 

Whatever comedy there is, is provided by Community's Alison Brie as Blunt's sister, complete with pitch perfect English accent, and her husband. They even steal the show at the leading couple's wedding!  Poor Rhys Ifans is saddled with the most unbelievable Professor in film, and Mindy Kaling, as his research assistant, is utterly wasted. 

What's really sad is that the dilemma posed by this movie is a real one. Lots of us have been in relationships where one person has to take a back seat to the other's career, whether because someone had to move to get a degree or a job, or whatever. It's a real everyday problem.  This movie had the potential to introduce some authentic, clever, observational comedy.  But I'm guessing that neither screenwriter has been in that position and that neither really gets it.

Overall, this is the second piss-poor film that Jason Segel and writer-director Nicholas Stoller have been involved with since GULLIVER'S TRAVELS. Enough already.  

THE FIVE-YEAR ENGAGEMENT was released earlier this year in the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Iceland, Serbia, Slovenia and Taiwan. It is released today in the UK, Ireland and Lithuania. It opens next weekend in Croatia, the Netherlands, Russia, Poland and Turkey. It opens on July 5th in Israel, on July 12th in Germany, on August 1st in Belgium and France, on August 10th in Mexico, on September 7th in Spain, and on September 28th in Italy.

The movie is rated R and is 124 minutes too long.

THE MUPPETS

The new muppet movie is, in the manner of THE BLUES BROTHERS, all about putting the band back together to play a benefit concert for a worthy cause - in this case, saving the old theatre from which the old beloved TV show used to be broadcast.  The movie drips with an earnest nostalgia for the days when kids TV was about gentle humour, song-and-dance acts, with a healthy dollop of liberal "rainbow" politics thrown in.  The Muppets was all about trying your best; accepting yourself for what you are; pulling together; and putting your friends first.  

It's obvious from the goofy smile on his face, that Jason Segel - the star and key instigator of the movie - totally buys into the Muppet ethos.  In a sense, he really is Walter, his character's muppet kid brother.  How sad then, that instead of trusting to that earnest charm, Segel and screenwriter Nick Stoller (GULLIVER'S TRAVELS) decided NOT to play it straight.  Rather, THE MUPPETS is a movie that constantly winks at the audience - it drips with post-modern ironic commentary on its core story and characters - knowingly pointing out through sight-gags and one-liners the hokiness of the genre.   

The result is a movie that wants us to believe that the world hasn't changed so much - that kids would still fall in love with the plain vanilla muppets franchise.  On the other hand, it clearly doesn't believe this to be the case, and feels it has to go for a post-modern snarky "SHREK" style of children's movie-making.  It rather smacks of trying to have it both ways. 

For all that, I still had a good time watching the flick. For sure, the first half is far too knowing - far too slow to build - far too reliant on commenting on its own montages and Chris Cooper saying "maniacal laugh" rather than actually laughing.  But by the time you get to the telethon and we focus on the old fashioned muppet vaudeville show, the movie settles down.  It's hard for anyone who grew up with the muppets not to enjoy seeing that famous intro, hearing the "rainbow connection" or just seeing Animal play the drums!  And yes, you do leave the cinema singing "Am I am man or a muppet".

That brings me to another point - the use of Brett McKenzie of FLIGHT OF THE CONCHORDS fame to write the songs.  I'm a huge fan of CONCHORDS but I found the use of McKenzie distracting.   Because as fun as it was to see Chris Cooper doing a rap pastiche; or Amy Adams doing a 70s disco pastiche; I just couldn't help but feel that it wasn't as fun as seeing McKenzie or Jermaine Clement doing the numbers. In particular, Clement should definitely have played the Cooper part. 

Anyway, all this griping is definitely not in the spirit of the muppets.  Problem is, neither was this film half the time.  Still, happy to see the old gang back on our screens. Let's hope the franchise gets reinvigorated - but hopefully on TV - it's proper and fitting format.

THE MUPPETS was released last year in the USA, Canada, India, Mexico, Brazil, Israel, Singapore, Kuwait, Chile and Estonia. It was released earlier this year in New Zealand, Slovenia, Panama, Argentina, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Germany, Hong Kong, Bulgaria and Poland.  IT goes on release on February 3rd in Italy, Spain and Portugal; on February 10th in the Netherlands, Denmark, Ireland and the UK; on February 17th in Belgium, Lithuania and Turkey; on March 16th in Sweden; on March 29th in Ukraine and on April 11th in France. 

iPad Round-Up 2 - GULLIVER'S TRAVELS

When I was a pre-teen and we all obsessively watched the lo-rent sci-fi TV comedy, RED DWARF, the phrase "almost Swiftian in its rapier-like subtlety" became a standard term of praise, long before we'd read Swift in class and fully appreciated the radical, deliriously scabrous nature of his political satire. That was back in the day when schools taught children useful shit like calculus and Latin.  Nowadays, family audiences have no use for political satire - although one might have thought that in the post global financial crisis world - with governments insolvent and political systems ossified by special interests - now would be EXACTLY the time for it.  And so, dear reader, we get the movies we deserve. Towit, Rob Letterman's utterly banal children's movie, GULLIVER'S TRAVELS - a film based on Swift only insofar as it incorporates a man who wakes up in a land filled with tiny little people called Liliputians.

So, Swift aside, how does it fare as simple family entertainment? Shockingly poor.  A mindlessly simple plot, piss-poor CGI effects, hammy acting from the largely British cast of character actors, and Jack Black playing the character he always plays - the childish, rock-obsessed but ultimately love-able frump. Director Rob Letterman and writer Joe Stillman display none of the wit or imagination seen in MONSTERS VS. ALIENS or SHREK. Must try harder.

GULLIVER'S TRAVELS was released over the 2010/2011 holiday season. It is now available to rent and own.

BAD TEACHER - by far not subversive enough

Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky, the screen-writers who brought us the piss-poor alleged comedy, YEAR ONE, markedly improve with their new comedy, BAD TEACHER, but still have a long way to go. Cameron Diaz is deliciously scabrous as the cynical gold-digging teacher, Elizabeth Halsey. She spends most of the movie scamming her way to the cash-prize for highest student test score results - money she needs to fund a boob job, that will help her snag a rich football player, or at a pinch her flaky but rich co-worker Scott, played by Justin Timberlake. Problem is that the goody-goody co-worker is falling for the irritatingly up-beat, not to mention suspicious, Amy Squirrel (Lucy Punch). And poor Jason Segel has to look on as warm-hearted gym teacher, Russell, killing time for the third act redemption scene.

The resulting film is an entirely predictable, and pretty banal rom-com. Its virtue is that it's short (under 90 minutes sans credits), and while never as subversive as its name-sake BAD SANTA, it has enough comedy-cameos to propel it forward. Lucy Punch is turning into a regular scene-stealer with her pitch-perfect performance as Miss Squirrel, and I also really like The Office's Phyllis Smith as Elizabeth's dopey friend and fellow-teacher Lynn. Do I need to see this film again, ever? Nope. Did it have me laughing out loud? Nope. But it was a perfectly fun way to spend an hour and a half, and it reminded me just how good Cameron Diaz is at comedy.

BAD TEACHER is on release in the UK and Ireland. It goes on release on June 23rd in Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Canada, Finland, Iceland, Norway, the US and Sweden. It opens on July 7th in Argentina, on July 27th in France, and on July 28th in the Czech Republic. It opens on August 6th in Japan, on August 12th in Lithuania, on August 18th in Greece and Hungary and on August 25th in Singapore. It opens on September 1st in Hong Kong, on September 2nd in Italy, on September 23rd in Colombia and on October 20th in Malaysia.

Kids' flick round-up 1 - DESPICABLE ME

So I caught two kids' movies this week - both of which feature an Evil Mastermind who isn't as evil as he makes out to be. In both cases they have minions called Minion, and a Nemesis who out-evils them both. Both movies are set in the kind of juiced up day-glo world only animation can give us, and both try to have their cake and eat it - splicing cuddly feeeeeeelings with pop-culture banter and post-modern winking-at-the-audience in-jokes. And both feature all-star casts. I liked both, enjoyed both, but only one really moved me, and that's DESPICABLE ME.

In the old days, before the Berlin Wall fell, being Evil was easy. You leaved in a creeeepy Addams family house, you tortured people with medieval spiky things, and you affected an accent half-Soviet half Peter-Lorre. But poor anti-hero, Gru (Steve Carell), has been outpaced and outclassed by a young whipper-snapper called Vector (Jason Segel) who lives in a proper shiny evil lair complete with shark-tank and CCTV. Gru is evil, but hapless. Vector is evil, efficient, cocky and a royal pain in the ass.

Of course in our post-modern confessional culture no-one's really evil. Poor Gru had a mother straight out of developmental hell: nothing was ever good enough for her. And poor Vector was picked on at school. Really, these guys are just lovely, squeezy, fluffy little bunny rabbits on the inside.

So, when Gru adopts three cute cookie-selling orphan girls in order to use them to get access to Vector's layer, we know he's going to have his heart melted by them. And when he gets turned down by the Bank of Evil for the loan he needs to steal the moon, we know that his new kids and his minions, called Minions, are all gonna band together and build him a rocket ship anyways, MacGuyver styl-ee. Because, friends, we aren't in the world of Lemony Snicket, but little orphan Annie.

DESPICABLE ME is just, plain, no-nonsense cute. It tugs on the heart-strings. It's corn-dog cheese. But who doesn't love it when Gru does something selfless for the first time in his life and incinerates a fairground stall because the provincial dolt manning in has cheated his little girl out of a stuffed unicorn? And who doesn't cheer when Dr Nefario (Russell Brand) and the Minnions all band together to back Gru and build the rocket - pledging faith against all reason, all hope and all experience?

To be sure, Universal studios have tried to inject some adult-pleasing post-modern wit along the lines of movies such as SHREK and MADAGASCAR, but this is largely a distraction. Having a sign above the Bank of Evil saying "Formerly Lehman Brothers" is hardly Swiftian in its rapier-like subtlety. And having Gru use modern colloquial idiom just confuses his character with that of the ruthlessly teen-modern Vector. Nope. The strength of DESPICABLE ME is that we care about Gru and his girls, and we will him to succeed. And while this movie is no TOY STORY, it understands that underneath all the clever design and witty puns, ultimately, any movie, but especially a children's movie, succeeds in direct measure to how far its main characters elicit our sympathy.

DESPICABLE ME is on global release.

GET HIM TO THE GREEK - They fuck you up, your mum and dad - Part Three

In fairness, the people doing the psychological damage in the alleged buddy-comedy, GET HIM TO THE GREEK, aren't just the parents. The record label, entourage, management and fans all take the blame in enabling viciously damaging pop star behaviour. That Aldous Snow, self-proclaimed white musical Jesus, manages to retain any humanity at all, in the haze of adulation and exploitation, is a miracle. This movie is about how Aldous Snow, washed up, alone, makes it from London to LA to play a comeback gig in spite of various attempts at self-sabotage. He does so in the company of a fan-boy turned record label chaperone, Aaron. It's meant to be a laugh-out-loud comedy, giving the character who stole every scene in FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL more screen time. The problem is that while Russell Brand IS funny as Aldous Snow, he's also too good to leave his performance at the level of superficial pratfalls and lascivious word-play. Brand's Snow is actually a very sad man, and there's something faintly exploitative in the screen-writer, director and audience trying to find laughter in his pain. It's almost as though we're milking Aldous Snow in exactly the same way that his record company is milking him. "We know you're physically and psychologically harmed, mate, but go on, do that funny song-and-dance act!"

Maybe I'm taking it all too seriously. After all, this is a film in which Sean Combs is genuinely very funny spoofing himself as a hard-balled record exec. (I loved the line "you're three zippers away from Thriller"), It's a movie in which Rose Byrne is really very funny indeed as Aldous Snow's ex-wife and fame-junkie Jackie Q. Maybe I should just be happy with the laughs? But even as simple comedy this movie doesn't quite work. I know Jonah Hill is essentially playing the straight man to Russell Brand's comedy protagonist, but even then, Aaron could've been a lot more interesting as a character. Where's that slightly geeky creepiness that Hill brought to his cameo in FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL? And as for the scene where Snow tries to instigate a threesome with Aaron and his girlfriend (Elizabeth Moss) - excruciating just doesn't cover it.

The best Judd Apatow movies are both funny and touching. FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL isn't just great comedy - at some level we really feel for Jason Segel's Peter as he tries to get over his girlfriend, and we're really routing for him to get together with Mila Kunis' Rachel. Okay, we've probably never been dumped for a rock star, but I think everyone can empathise with Peter's pain - and even Sarah's despair at trying to make the relationship work. At the heart of all comedy, there has to be an emotional core we can relate to. The relationship arcs in GET HIM TO THE GREEK - between Aldous and his dad; Aldous and his ex-wife; and most of all between Aaron and his girlfriend - just don't feel real, and as a result I didn't care about them. The only part of the movie that felt real was Snow's addiction and loneliness. And I simply wasn't heartless enough to laugh at that.

Additional tags: William Kerr, Michael L Sale, Sean Combs, Elizabeth Moss

GET HIM TO THE GREEK is on release in the US, UK, Kazakhstan, Canada, Iceland, Australia, Georgia and the Netherlands. It opens in July in Greece, Portugal and Estonia. It opens in August in Sweden, Turkey, France, Finland, Norway, Germany and Spain. It opens in September in Denmark and Argentina and in October in Hungary.

I LOVE YOU, MAN - lame

Another day, another piss-poor Hollywood comedy. Do not be fooled by a cast list including members of hit comedies like ROLE MODELS (Paul Rudd) and FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL (Jason Segel). This movie is tame, formulaic and just plain dull.

Paul Rudd plays against character as a dorky metrosexual who discovers, pre-wedding, that he doesn't actually have any close guy friends. He turns to his gay brother (Andy Samberg) for advice, a character presumably only written into the movie to defuse any puerile quips from the audience. Eventually, the dork meets a cool guy (Jason Segel), they hang out, the fiancee gets jealous, people argue in an attempt to create some dramatic tension, but it all ends happily.

Jason Segel seems like a genuinely likeable guy. It would be good to see him in more flicks. Paul Rudd is over-exposed. And he also needs to stick to his core strength, which is being a dead-pan wise-ass rather than a low-self-esteem metrosexual. The only thing that kept me from falling asleep was an early cameo from J K Simmons. 

Seriously disappointing.

I LOVE YOU, MAN is on release in the US, Iceland, Romania and the UK. It opens next week in Australia, Germany, Hungary, Brazil, Bulgaria, Estonia, Lithuania, Mexico and Spain. It opens on May 15th in Italy; on May 28th in the Netherlands and New Zealand; on June 4th in the Czech Republic; on June 11th in Belgium, Argentina, Portugal, Russia, Norway, Sweden and Turkey. It opens in Singapore on June 18th; in Chile on July 9th; in Denmark on July 10th; in France on July 29th; and in Finland on August 7th.

Al's review of FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL

FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL is the latest romantic-comedy to bear the thumb-print of Judd Apatow (KNOCKED UP, THE 40 YEAR OLD VIRGIN). In true Apatow-style, a geek is dumped by his gorgeous girlfriend. He goes on holiday to forget her, only to land up in the same hotel as her and her ludicrous new boyfriend, a Brit rocker played by Russell Brand. Despite Judd Apatow's involvement, this movie is basically a debutante effort, from director Nicholas Stoller and writer-lead actor Jason Segel. So, let's check out what Al, our Asia-Pac correspondent, makes of it all.....

As screenwriter, Jason Segel's idea of a story is to basically make it as complicated as possible. There's hardly a moment in the story anyone pauses to genuinely think: they're all swaggering around in this giant move-about because something new happens every five minutes. A whole lot of noise: not much meaning.

It's not all bad. Some of the jokes worked, but for every one of those you had 20 stinker gags seriously testing an already bored and quiet audience. You get a heap of low ones like "You sound like the women on Rock of Love-"I'll KILL YOU"-jokes like these seriously question whether there were any standards when it came to writing jokes for the film. The best jokes were no doubt the small ones-slipped into conversations and having little to do with anything. When Segel aims big or tries to pull off situational comedy, I couldn't help flinching, thinking that maybe I had inadvertently walked into a bad Ben Stiller film.

Most of the characters are self-absorbed and obnoxious loudmouths. Jonah Hill & Jack McBrayer (who plays Kenneth in 30 Rock) gave bewilderingly humorless performances and were painful to watch. Plus it didn't look like they were enjoying themselves either. Kristen Bell (who played Veronica Mars brilliantly throughout its 3-season run) is totally devoid of sex appeal in this supposedly sexual role,and is frustratingly whiny and tool-like (appearing right when Segel seems to have come to terms with the break-up, just to inspire another "hilarious" love run-around. Jason Segel himself seems determined to thoroughly humiliate himself for humor, constantly doing dumb things to get the story going (often into new territory). The only characters inspiring real laughs were Paul Rudd's light-headed surfer and Russell Brand's pompous Brit rocker who were both consistently funny and entertaining.

With the amount of comedy talent attached, FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL should've come out soaring, but the script's limp brand of humor was a damning curse - often immature and just plain unfunny. Also,the way the film goes bulldozing past things and never once considers developing on anything (that past 90 minutes, so many things have happened but it feels like story hasn't taken off). With a loose sense of purpose and no set of bearings, it falls way off the mark and doesn't come close to the ranks of Judd Appatow's previous efforts.

FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL was released this weekend in Australia, Iceland and the USA. It opens next weekend in Hungary, Russia, Estonia and the UK. It opens in May in Norway and Sweden; in June in France, Italy, Belgium, Germany and Spain; in July in the Netherlands, Denmark and Singapore; in August in Turkey and Mexico and in Argentina in September.