This Is the End

OMG, it's the future...our careers going up in flames!

Grade: B -

Directors: Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen

Starring: Seth Rogen, Jay Baruchel, James Franco, Jonah Hill, Danny McBride and Craig Robinson

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hr. 47 min.

There’s a good, even ingenious movie floating around This Is the End. It’s not the promise of an apocalyptic end to the raunchy, gross-out comedy subgenre, although if I truly believed that was the metaphor writer-directors Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen were aiming for, I might laud the film as one of the year’s best.

No, the bulk of This Is the End is a repackaged rehash of the same ribald assortment of scatalogical/pharamacological gags that most of the lead actors, in varying combinations, have foisted before: Seth Rogen and James Franco in Pineapple Express; Rogen and Jonah Hill (plus Michael Cera and Christopher Mintz-Plasse) in Superbad; Rogen and Craig Robinson (plus Paul Rudd) in Knocked Up; Franco and Danny McBride in the atrocious Your Majesty; and so on.

The hook here is that all the actors are playing themselves, or in some cases variations of themselves under their real names. Jay Baruchel has flown into LAX to visit best bud Rogen (who has to run the gauntlet of prying paparazzi on his way through the terminal). A weekend of good weed, bad food and video games is interrupted when Rogen drags a reluctant Baruchel to a star-filled party at James Franco’s house.

The opening scenes, especially after action shifts to the house party, are the most titillating. The camera roams the room in Altman-esque fashion, eavesdropping on scripted conversations laced with hints of veracity. Jason Segel chats up Kevin Hart; Emma Watson and Mindy Kaling say hi; a lewd, coked-up Michael Cera smacks Rihanna’s behind; there’s a mini Superbad reunion. For his part, Baruchel loathes the Hollywood scene, preferring a jaunt to the corner grocery over one more minute in the company of Jonah Hill. This is what the entirety of This Is the End should have been: a comedy that skewers the artifice of celebrity and excess, where friendships are fake and/or fleeting.

But just as we’re settling in, well, a giant sinkhole opens up in Franco’s front yard and swallows up most of the partygoers. It’s only the start of a stroll through the Book of Revelations, where flames engulf the Malibu Hills, fire rains down from the sky, and a well-endowed (yes, that figures in as well) demon slaughters the survivors.

Rogen, Baruchel, Franco, Hill, Robinson and Danny McBride find themselves holed up inside Franco’s home. As they squabble over everything from food rations to sleeping arrangements to petty rivalries, the group’s petulance and narcissism outlast the reckoning outside. However, despite some uproariousness interludes, the audience eventually suffers in the same claustrophobic weariness as the housemates, especially when it comes the uncouth McBride. Even once the action finally ventures outdoors, the overarching life lesson of “Be Nice” isn’t particularly profound.

The parlor game here is guessing which on-screen personalities cut closest to the truth. Is Rogen really a self-loathing sellout? Is Franco a self-absorbed, neurotic gonzo? Is Jonah Hill a passive-aggressive phony? Is McBride a foul-mouthed lout (well, I’m pretty sure about that one)? We’re pretty sure Cera—the most outrageous playing himself against type since Neil Patrick Harris in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle—isn’t a lascivious jerk, and that Watson doesn’t turn into an ax-wielding thief under pressure. But it’s fun to imagine.

30 Minutes or Less

Amos 'n' Aziz

Grade: C

Director: Ruben Fleischer

Starring: Jesse Eisenberg, Danny McBride, Aziz Ansari, Nick Swardson, Dilshad Vadsaria, Michael Peña, and Fred Ward

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hr 23 min.

30 Minutes or Less describes the approximate length of time the premise of this merrily profane, hyperactive buddy action-comedy merits your attention. Unfortunately, common sense departs the theater not long after the opening credits.

Two do-nothing slackers – Dwayne (Danny McBride, temporarily hitting the snooze button on his 15 minutes countdown) and Travis (Nick Swardson) – split time between strip clubs, assembling homemade explosives and dreaming of opening a tanning salon/brothel. All they lack – other than couth and rudimentary aptitude – is the startup cash, which Dwayne hopes to inherit from his lotto-winning father, a ramrod ex-Marine nicknamed “The Major” (Fred Ward).

To speed up the line of intestate succession, Dwayne and Travis first need $100k to hire a Latino killer (Michael Peña) to take out The Major. So, they devise a plan to strap a vest full of dynamite to some stranger and threaten to explode it unless he robs a bank and delivers the would-be blood money to them within 10 hours.

Their hapless patsy turns out to be Nick (Jesse Eisenberg), a harried pizza delivery boy whose only pal, Chet (Aziz Ansari), defriends him after learning that Nick once deflowered and still harbors feelings for Chet’s twin sister, Kate (Dilshad Vadsaria).

If for no other reason, the story’s madcap frenzy is needed to squeeze out any encroaching questions about the puzzling plot before they take cerebral root. Who knows why Dwayne presumes his disapproving dad hasn’t willed his wealth elsewhere, or why Dwayne and Travis just don’t get Nick to steal enough money to start their business and cut out the middle hitman? There’s little to explain why Chet, a school teacher, readily agrees to help Nick carry out multiple thefts – including a getaway car from a neighbor – or how Nick can’t manage to elude Dwayne’s watchful eye in order to elicit help from the police when he’s able to duck out long enough to climb a rooftop and profess his love to Kate. And, when the two yokels kidnap Kate to pressure Nick into finally delivering the stolen loot to them, you wonder why they bothered with the vest in the first place.

However, the most perplexing aspect about 30 Minutes or Less is why director Ruben Fleischer – whose last film, Zombieland, also starred Eisenberg – thought it was good idea to make a zany knee-slapper obviously patterned after the tragic true story of Brian Douglas Wells, a pizza deliveryman killed in 2003 by a time bomb strapped around his neck after being forced to rob a bank by two co-conspirators. For this to work, Fleischer and writer Michael Diliberti needed to fashion a Coen Bros. facsimile, teasing the inherent farcical elements of this dark comedy with a sidelong perusal of the cultural and sociological rot that spawned it.

What keeps the film palatable is the absurdist chemistry exhibited by Eisenberg and Ansari (TV’s Parks and Recreation) along with McBride and Swardson. While their characters make little sense, their snappy repartee references dated touchstones (Arsenio Hall and Point Break) and skewers contemporary tableaus like Netflix, 5-Hour Energy drink, and Facebook – Nick/Eisenberg, Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, tells Kate that he didn’t review a friend’s status because “(y)ou know I don’t check that s*#t; I’m off the grid.”

Still, even at 83 minutes, 30 Minutes of Less feels protracted. Unlike late pizza, you might not necessarily want your money back. But, you won’t be coming back for seconds.

Neil Morris

Your Highness

Please, put me out of my misery

Grade: F

Director: David Gordon Green

Starring: Danny McBride, James Franco, Natalie Portman, and Zooey Deschanel

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hr. 42 min.

In a millennia when apes rules the Earth, it is quite likely their museums will display copies of Your Highness to memorialize the nadir of cinema during the time of the beast Man.

So awful is this waste of celluloid and so misbegotten is its premise that it is barely conceivable that real studios spent real money on it, or that real actors with real careers (and presumably real agents) waste months out of their professional lives participating in this dumpster fire of a film.

Your Highness is The Princess Bride if it was remade by Russ Meyer, and it’s not nearly that appealing. That the writers and director of this wretched rubbish all met while attending the North Carolina School of the Arts only adds local insult to injurious calamity.

Thadeous (Danny McBride) is an indolent, cowardly prince overshadowed by his young brother, the fabulous Prince Fabious (James Franco). When an evil sorcerer named Leezar (Justin Theroux) and his bevy of plasma-spewing witches kidnap Belladonna (Zooey Deschanel? Not you, too…), Fabious’ virginal bride, the two brothers embark on a quest to rescue Belladonna and save the kingdom from Leezar’s wicked plan.

What might that be, you ask? Well, it involves ravishing Belladonna the night two moons align in hopes that she will spawn a dragon that Leezar will use to conquer the world. Moreover, at the point of penetration, the witches cast a spell on Belladonna that makes her welcome Leezar’s impending penetration. Because, you know, rape is so hilarious.

Along the way, Thadeous and Fabious seek the counsel of a pedophilic, Yoda-like mystic that requires sexual satisfaction in exchange for his assistance. They’re captured by a grotesque forest warlord and his harem of half-naked henchwomen. And, an aroused Minotaur almost goes Deliverance on Thadeous’ man-servant until the prince detaches the creature’s genitalia and wears it as a spoil of victory.

Then there’s Isabel (Natalie Portman), a warrior princess whose own mission may or may not coincide with the princes’. Good for Portman that Your Highness did not drop before the Oscars or it would have been her Norbit.

Speaking of which, after his recent Oscar hosting misfire, this is Franco’s second utter failure of 2011. As for Danny McBride, well, you’re on 14 minutes and counting.

However, special scorn is due director David Gordon Green. His last comedy, Pineapple Express, was a mixed bag with more hits than misses. I hoped the film’s offbeat tone and popularity would rejuvenate Green’s standing as a director and give him the latitude to continue producing the critically acclaimed gems on which he founded his career, such as George Washington and All the Real Girls.

Instead, Green and co-writers/snooty film-school buddies McBride and Ben Best lace their repugnant plot with a nonstop barrage of vulgarities and other assorted scatology that is offensive chiefly because it is so unfunny. The 40^th F-bomb heard in a Medieval milieu isn’t as amusing as the third or fourth.

Your Highness proves one of two things. Either Green has completely sold his soul to the Hollywood money machine such that he now willingly generates tripe over which he has no creative care or control, or he is so embittered over the commercial demise of his indie upbringing that he is now covertly sabotaging the movie industry from the inside out. Either way, shame on him.

Neil Morris

Land of the Lost

The Monster Montage

Grade: C -

Director: Brad Silberling

Starring: Will Ferrell, Anna Friel, Danny McBride, and Jorma Toccone

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hour, 33 minutes

Will Ferrell has perfected (and earned a healthy living as) the obliviously punch-drunk oaf, but there is not another gear in his comedic transmission. Instead, Ferrell plows ahead, forcing his films’ milieus to adapt to him rather than the other way around. If time travel were actually possible, he would be the worst sort of wayfarer.

It is the audience, however, that gets taken for a ride en route to the Land of the Lost. The Krofft Brothers’ 1970s cult classic television series is the latest victim of a Hollywood, big-screen parody, à la Starsky & Hutch and The Brady Bunch. But, as was the case with The Dukes of Hazzard movie, it is difficult to mine satire out of already-kitschy source material. The stop motion animation and latex rubber suits worn by the lizard-like Sleestak in the original series were both imaginative and charmingly cheesy. CGI technology has improved the special effects, but save a few action sequences involving a marauding T-Rex named Grumpy, director Brad Silberling somehow manages to make a feature film that feels constructed on a smaller scale than its TV precursor.

Disgraced paleontologist Rick Marshall (Ferrell) cobbles together a gizmo that is part tachyon amplifier, part boom-box blasting away the soundtrack to A Chorus Line (why and how this occurs is never addressed). When his musical thingamabob conjures a space-time vortex, Rick, his eye-candy research assistant, Holly (Anna Friel), and a white-trash survivalist/tourist trap guide named Will (Danny McBride) find themselves flung into an alternate nether-dimension populated by strange creatures and littered with historical and pop-culture artifacts from our world – a Bob’s Big Boy here, a Cadillac Ranch there. More than a waypoint for wayward adventurers, this lost world is nostalgia’s graveyard.

Sadly, the interment includes any sense of discovery or humor. Ferrell and McBride muster a hipster-doofus byplay that staves off many comic dead spots. And, I expelled more than a couple of chuckles during off-kilter jabs at everything from the Latin Grammys to Harry and the Hendersons. But, most of the botched laughs are the chronic glut of poop and urine gags, while the time travelers’ pet primate-cum-Sherpa, Chaka (Jorma Taccone), specializes in intoxicating his human masters whilst groping their private parts.

With an inane screenplay more befitting something retrieved from lost & found, Land of the Lost is charmless and, worst of all, just plain inconsequential. Squint hard at that wasteland of pop relics, and soon you might see the rapidly-diminishing remnants of Will Ferrell’s career.

Neil Morris