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.

BETTER LIVING THROUGH CHEMISTRY

BETTER LIVING THROUGH CHEMISTRY is a cool dark comedy feature from first time writer-directors Geoff Moore and David Posamentier. It stars Sam Rockwell as a bored suburban pharmacist married to a hyper competitive wife (Michelle Monaghan).  He falls for a glamourous rich bored housewife (a wonderfully slick Olivia Wilde) and their joint use of drugs gives him the confidence to get petty revenge on the people who've held him down until the drug use spirals out of control and the DEA get on his back.  The whole thing gets unravelled in an elegant manner and despite the overall tone of wry dark humour, perfectly captured in Jane Fonda's voice-over and the ironic sound-track, there's actual deep emotion  in there. The final scene between Rockwell and Wilde subverts the fantasy elements of the film in a genuinely affecting way.  I really want to see what these directors do next.  I also really want to see more of Sam Rockwell. Why isn't he a bigger star? When he can do proper gonzo goofball comedy and proper depth? 

BETTER LIVING THROUGH CHEMISTRY has a running time of 91 minutes.  It was released earlier this year in the USA and is currently available on DVD.

Justifiably overlooked DVD of the month Part Deux - ALL ABOUT STEVE

From writer Kim Barker (the risible LICENSE TO WED) and debutant director Phil Traill comes a romantic-comedy so unfunny, uncharming and just plain irritating it's hard to believe it stars Miss Apple Pie herself, Sandra Bullock. I could never have imagined that Sandra Bullock, typically the best thing about the movies she chooses to make, would pick such a completely sans-merit script, and be so utterly charmless within it. This is the woman who, after all, won a Razzie for her role in this film and ACTUALLY TURNED UP, charming the pants of the audience in the process. This woman can work with rom-com dreck. But I guess even the luckiest actress occasionally hits a pot-hole.

So here's the deal. Sandra Bullock plays a geeky cross-word competition creator called Mary. She lives at home with her parents, is a complete social misfit and may in fact have a behavioural disorder. Her parents set her up on a blind date with Steve (Bradley Cooper) and she thinks he's so hot she practically jumps him in the back of his car and then stalks him around America while he covers stories as a cameraman for CNN. Steve's vain front-man, Hartman Hughes (Thomas Haden Church) thinks it will be great fun to egg Mary on, and before we know it she's fallen into a deep well in pursuit of her "lover" and becomes the centre of the story herself. Steve feels guilty about how the press are depicting her as a dweeb and decides to give her a break, just as she realises she needs to get some frikkin perspective.

There is no chemistry between Steve and Mary. How can there be? Mary isn't so much a frog waiting to be kissed into a princess but just deeply deeply odd and unappealing. It's also basically hypocritical for the movie to spend an hour mocking Mary for being weird and then to ask us to be understanding. She doesn't need a boyfriend so much as therapy. This is an enormously mis-judged "comedy".

ALL ABOUT STEVE opened in Autumn/Winter 2009. It is available on DVD and on iTunes.

London Film Fest Day 9 - EXTRACT

What is EXTRACT doing in the London Film Festival? It's not a high-brow art film looking for UK distribution. It's not the latest movie from an acknowledged auteur - Jarmusch, Egoyan, Haneke. And it's not a high profile glitzy premiere designed to lure the sponsors - a necessary evil. Nope. EXTRACT is an enjoyable but ultimately lightweight comedy from Mike Judge. Worse still, it's less conceptually interesting than IDIOCRACY, if better executed.

So, let's approach this as if it were just another Saturday night movie. Jason Bateman stars a successful businessman called Joel. On the surface he has it all: great house, great car, pretty wife, and his own business - a flavouring factory. But everything's going wrong for Joel. His staff are morons; his wife won't sleep with him; his neighbour's a creep; and he's falling for a con woman. Worst of all, his best friend (Ben Affleck) keeps advising him to do drugs and other crazy shit.

As the movie opens you think the con woman (Mila Kunis) is going to be the star but she drops off the radar. Then the movie almost becomes a bromance with Joel as Dante from CLERKS and Ben Affleck as his Randall. (Without the swearing and Star Wars jokes, of course.) It all feels a bit PG Kevin Smith. Stuff happens; Affleck, J K Simmons and the guy who plays Brad the gigolo are funny; a few laughs are had and it all winds up happily enough.

Not bad but nothing special either.

And will someone please give Mila Kunis a decent part?

EXTRACT was released in the US and Canada in September. It opens in Iceland on November 20th and in the Netherlands on April 29th 2010.

17 AGAIN - crimes against the R8

First up, I may not be the target demographic for this flick (teen chick) but I am a great fan of body-switch comedies like FREAKY FRIDAY and BIG, and I also really liked Zac Efron in HAIRSPRAY and the HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL flicks. Therefore, I came to this film predisposed to like it.

Sad to say, I didn't just NOT laugh, I was positively squirming in my seat for most of the film. This is because screen-writer Jason Filardi (no previous work of note) has totally mis-conceived this movie. The whole point of body switch movies is that you get a double-comedy. On the one hand, we see a young kid act preternaturally mature, which is cute. (viz. Fred Savage in VICE VERSA or Jodie Foster in the original FREAKY FRIDAY). On the other, we see a grown-up goof off, which is adult wish fulfillment (the best example of this is Jamie Lee Curtis rocking out in the FREAKY FRIDAY remake).

But 17 AGAIN breaks this fundamental rule. Instead of a body switch comedy, adult loser Mike O'Donnell (Matthew Perry) is magicked back into a 17 year old body (Zac Efron). In said body, he gets to turn his teenage son (Sterling Knight) from loser to basketball team member and comfort his daughter (Michelle Trachtenberg) when her school bully boyfriend dumps her. Instead of being preternaturally mature in a cute way, he preaches abstinence in an awe-shucks absurd manner, kills the reputation of the Audi R8, and makes eyes at his adult soon-to-be ex-wife (Leslie Mann). I found the love story between the 17 and the 40 year old deeply, deeply disturbing to watch.

Because there's no statutory adult-goofing-off in this movie, the writer has had to invent a comedic sub-plot all of his own. Accordingly, he casts Thomas Lennon as Mike O'Donnell's geeky, infantile, adult best friend, and shows him wooing the similarly geeky school Principal (Melora Hardin). It's a piss-poor attempt at humour.

And what of the target demographic? I took The Kid and she was similarly unimpressed. And the cinema of mostly teen girls squealed at the opening shot of a topless Zac Efron shooting hoops, but after that, ominous silence.

HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL is on release in Australia, the UK, New Zealand, Singapore, Iceland, South Africa, Sweden and the US. It opens next weekend in France, the Netherlands, Denmark and Estonia. It opens on April 20th in Spain and Romania and on May 6th in Belgium, Argentina, the Czech Republic, Greece and Lithuania. It opens on May 14th in Egypt, Germany, Italy and Japan and on May 28th in Russia and Bulgaria. It opens on June 5th in Finland, on June 19th in Norway, on July 10th in Brazil and on July 23rd in Portugal.

IDIOCRACY - a world where the biggest-selling movie is called "ASS"

IDIOCRACY is a live-action comedy from the creator of Beavis and Butthead and King of the Hill, Mike Judge. Sadly, the wickedly funny mind that brought us perfectly formed short-format animation hasn't quite mastered the feature length format. The writing is uneven, with a smattering of biting satire offset by some weak dialogue, obvious humour and the inexplicable casting of Maya Rudolph in a lead role. Still, there's enough comedy in the central premise to warrant a DVD rental.

Mike Judge starts from the following worrying fact: idiot chavs are having more kids than clever, professional people. This demographic dumbing-down is pushing evolution into reverse - we're all regressing into...well....Beavis and Butthead. Luke Wilson and Maya play a present-day Joe Average and a hooker who have been cryogenically frozen and wake up in the future imperfect. In the new IDIOCRACY, dumb people water crops with gatorade and convicts get "rehabilitated" in a Running Man style TV show.

Ultimately, Mike Judge can't sustain the satire and the narrative is pretty weak. But there are enough unpleasant truths to prevent me from dismissing this film in the manner of the studio that buried it in straight to video hell.

IDIOCRACY went on limited release in the US in September 2006 but didn't get a cinematic release in the UK. It is, however, available on DVD.