A MILLION WAYS TO DIE IN THE WEST

I'm not exactly sure why critics seem to pissing on a great height over Seth MacFarlane's new comedy, A MILLION WAYS TO DIE IN THE WEST.  The only legitimate criticism is that his highly concentrated humour, with visual and verbal hits coming at you at a rapid-fire pace, is hard to take for over two hours.  But other than that, what's not to like?  This film is funny, wry and has genuine heart and I honestly don't see what there is to criticise in the performances either.  

The movie works in the same way as MacFarlane's smash hit comedy, TED.  Take some outlandish premise and apply that extreme harsh MacFarlane humour. In this case, we're put in the Wild West, complete with shoot-em-outs, warehouses and corrupt oligarchs and asked to laugh at how absurd it is.  Hence the title of the film. The West isn't a place to romanticise but a filthy, disease-ridden misogynistic and racist era in which nature and man conspired to kill you.  So if you get the one person in the film, played by Seth MacFarlane, bitching about how absurd life is within the context of a spoofily all-happy Western, then that, to me, is really funny.

The plot is as follows. MacFarlane plays Albert Stark - a hapless sheep farmer who has been rejected by his sweetheart Louise (Amanda Seyfried) in favour of the rich moustache-bearing merchant Foy (Neil Patrick Harris). Albert then forms a friendship with Anna (Charlize Theron) who teaches him how to shoot properly so he can survive a duel with Foy. Little does he know that Anna is really the wife of an outlaw called Clinch (Liam Neeson.)

So what we have is the classic rom-com set-up where a guy tries to impress the one girl while really falling in love with the other.  We even have a song and dance number that is absolutely brilliant and probably the best thing Neil Patrick Harris has done since Dr Horrible's Sing-a-long Blog.   We also get a side plot that pokes a lot of fun at an earnest guy (Giovanni Ribisi) dating a whore (Sarah Silverman) who refuses to sleep with him until they are married.

Like I said, I loved TED and I loved this film. It was half an hour too long, for sure, but I found its analysis of the absurdity of the Western myth spot on and its casting superb.  

A MILLION WAYS TO DIE IN THE WEST has a running time of 116 minutes and is rated R. The movie is on global release.

ABOUT LAST NIGHT

ABOUT LAST NIGHT is a romantic comedy from director Steve Pink (HOT TUB TIME MACHINE) based on the 1980s David Mamet play "Sexual Perversity In Chicago" and remaking the 1980s movie starring Rob Lowe and Demi Moore.  In this iteration we have two contemporary African American couples discussing sex and dating.  Kevin Hart and Regina Hall (THINK LIKE A MAN) play Bernie and Joan who have a one-night stands at the outset of the film and so introduce their friends Danny and Debbie, played by Michael Ealy (BARBERSHOP) and Joy Bryant (Parenthood).   

I started off really hating this movie and maybe that's because it focusses up front on Joan and Bernie, who come off as crass, drunk and trying to be funny. It's the kind of humour that asks you to laugh when a couple try to have sex on a toilet and accidentally hit the flush.  But at least Kevin Hart was sporadically funny whereas the handsomely banal couple Danny and Debbie are just going through the motions of every other relationship drama we've ever seen on screen.  They have an instant chemistry - all is loved up - they move in - he feels cramped - they have a massive argument - they could cheat with ex-es - they don't because they are fundamentally nice people. 

I did eventually mellow forward this film. It's an easy enough watch even though it doesn't surprise AT ALL.  For instance, you just know that when Danny takes Debbie to the old Irish bar he visited as a kid, and sees it fall on hard times, that there's going to be some kind of hipster-ish extreme makeover.  The actors are ok.  Kevin Hart and Regina Hall have their comedic moments. But it's one for DVD night at best.

ABOUT LAST NIGHT has a running time of 100 minutes and is rated R.  The movie is on release in Canada, the USA, Kenya, Nigeria, the UAE, Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Syria, Egypt, Ethiopia, Vietnam, Ecuador, Australia, South Africa, Malaysia, Uruguay, the UK and Ireland.  It opens in April in Philippines, Thailand, India, Chile, Indonesia and New Zealand. It opens in May in Denmark and Taiwan, in June in Hong Kong and Germany.

TED - Less Subversive Than It Thinks It Is

Seth Macfarlane of Family Guy fame comes tothe big screen with an R-rated stoner movie that thinks it's radically subversive, but is really just another tired Judd Apatow-esque movie about infantile men wooing back their long-suffering mature girlfriends.  For the life of me I can't figure out why they fall for it.

Mark Wahlberg plays fit loser John Bennett who, as a bullied child wished upon a star and found that his Teddy Ruxspin had come to life.  Fast foward twenty-five years, and Ted is a washed-up former child-celebrity who drinks, does drugs, swears and treats women as cheap sex objects.  John has become a car rental agent and is implausibly dating successful businesswoman Lori (Mila Kunis) - that is until Ted invites round a hooker who shits on the floor of their apartment.  I kid you not. The rest of the film has two threads.  The first sees Ted get a job and move out to allow John to try and impress Lori with his new-found maturity.  The second sees Ted abducted by a psycho (Giovanni Ribisi - typecast), which of course allows a final act redemption as everyone realises just how much they love Ted after all.

It's not that Ted isn't funny.  There are a handful of laugh out loud scenes.  But as ridiculous non-PC subject matter goes, TED isn't in remotely the same league as, say, TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE, BAD SANTA or Armando Ianucci's The Thick Of It. And after a while the nostalgia for 1980s popculture - notably Flash Gordon - became a little tired.  Most of all, the movie just wasn't consistently funny enough for my taste, and when that happens you start questioning the endless gay jokes and crude talk.  Don't get me wrong, I love filthy humour more than most, but the only excuse for that kind of language is that the comedy hits the mark, and TED just didn't.

TED was released in June in Canada and the USA; and in July in Australia, Taiwan, New Zealand, Iceland, Croatia, Portugal, Estonia, Romania and Slovenia. It was released earlier this month in the UK, Czech Republic, Germany, Russia, Bulgaria, Israel Finland, Norway and Spain. It opens this weekend in Lithuania.  It opens next weekend in Greece, Hungary and South Africa. Ted opens on September 6th in Argentina, Denmark, Singapore and Poland; on September 14th in the Netherlands and Mexico; on September 21st in Brazil and Turkey; on September 28th in Hong Kong and Colombia; on October 4th in Sweden and Italy and on October 10th in Belgium and France. 

London Film Fest 2010 Day 3 - EVERYTHING MUST GO

You lose your job. You come home. Your wife has locked you out of your house, left your belongings on the front lawn and asked for a divorce. What do you do? If you're Nick Halsey, you drink beer, you order take-out, you shower with a hose and start a yard sale, largely to pass the time. You strike up a friendship with the nice pregnant lady across the street, you ask your neighbours to throw you some electricity, and you play ball with a young bored kid. Maybe you even start to think about your life - about the alcoholism that has landed you in this situation - and try to reconnect with an old high school friend. But there are no easy answers.

It's a great movie set-up, and Dan Rush's debut feature, based on a short story by Raymond Carver, is a quiet, sympathetic little movie. Will Ferrell, in the lead role, gives a muted, restrained performance that is convincing and charming. He is ably supported by Rebecca Hall, Laura Dern and, in particular C J Wallace as the little kid. I like that Rush/Carver give the alcoholic no easy wins - this isn't that kind of film. But, still, this movie has a sort of Hollywood sheen to it - a warm glow - that was entirely subverted in another low-key film - CYRUS. During the movie, I really did care about what happened to the lead character. But once the lights came up, it was utterly forgettable. There wasn't enough bite to it - or enough content to sustain the run-time. Apparently this movie started off as a short-film, and I couldn't help but wonder if that was the best format for this novella turned movie.

EVERYTHING MUST GO played Toronto and London 2010. It doesn't yet have a commercial release date.

YOU DON'T MESS WITH THE ZOHAN - do you find the idea of Adam Sandler catching a fish in his butt-crack funny?

Do you like to see one-joke movies based on two-dimensional SNL characters?

Can you live without a plot so long as you see lots of comedy shagging?

If so, YOU DONT MESS WITH THE ZOHAN is the film for you.

In all seriousness, I almost admire Adam Sandler for the balls-out energy he throws at the screen and his chutzpah in making a gross-out comedy based on the Middle-Eastern conflict. OK - all those humus jokes fall flat, and I really don't find Sandler's character schtupping old age pensioners funny, but you can't deny that this movie means well. It tries so hard to make you laugh, I almost felt bad that I didn't like it more. But I really didn't like it. I hated the Zohan character - a deadly Mossad agent who just wants to be a hairdresser, love his Palestinian girlfriend, and live in peace. I've seen Sandler do the 80s hairdo schtick too many times before, and the accent just rips on Borat. There's nothing intrinsic in Zohan's predicament that requires that he shag older women - Sandler just sticks that in to pad out forty minutes before he can fall in love and protect the neighbourhood from a property developer. Weak. Very weak. And just because it's better than LITTLE NICKY doesn't mean it's good.

Whatever happened to the Adam Sandler who did PUNCH DRUNK LOVE?

YOU DON'T MESS WITH THE ZOHAN is on release in Canada, Iceland, Mexico, the US, Australia, Israel, Russia, Singapore, Sweden, Hungary, Panama, Estonia, Romania, Poland, Indonesia, the Philippines, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Germany, Austria, Brazil, Turkey and the UK. It opens this weekend in Belgium, Croatia, Colombia, Denmark, Finland and Spain. It opens on August 28th in France, Slovakia and Venezuela. The movie opens in Argentina and Norway on September 19th and in Italy on October 3rd. It is released on Region 1 DVD on October 10th.