Sex Tape

Pros leave the roller skates on

Grade: C –

Director: Jake Kasdan

Starring: Cameron Diaz, Jason Segel, Rob Corddry, Ellie Kemper and Rob Lowe

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hr. 34 min.

The presence of Rob Lowe in a movie titled Sex Tape is as witty as this flaccid farce gets—Google “Rob Lowe sex tape” if you’re too young to get the reference. The film even momentarily goes next level when the setting shifts to madcap sequence inside the mansion of Hank, Lowe’s character, which is adorned with a series of paintings featuring Hank’s face drawn into classic Disney movie stills, including The Lion King, Pinocchio, and—yep, you guessed it—Snow White. [Google “Rob Lowe Snow White” if you don’t get that one, either.]

A bawdy bore, Sex Tape is the unsexiest movie about sex, and that’s saying something considering one of its derriere-bearing stars is Cameron Diaz. Diaz reteams with her Bad Teacher director Jake Kasdan and co-star Jason Segel as a couple, Jay (Segel) and Annie (Diaz), whose red hot college romance has transitioned into a decade of familyhood and movie martial malaise.

In an effort to stoke their erstwhile sexual sparks, Jay and Annie decide record their three-hour romp through “The Joy of Sex” on Jay’s iPad. Unfortunately, Jay forgets to delete the video, and utter contrivance intercedes when a syncing app uploads the risque recording to a passel of other iPads gifted to various friends and family.

In the real world, an app able to accomplish such an online syncing process would also be capable of deleting uploaded files remotely from their source. Of course, that process would take about 30 seconds. Instead, Jay and Annie frantically spend all night—and the bulk of the film—chasing down the now tawdry tablets, including a visit to best friends Robbie and Tess (Rob Corddry and  Ellie Kemper, a much funnier pair than the lead duo) and Hank (Lowe), a CEO hoping to buy Annie’s mommy blog as the face of his family friendly company.

Moreover, when someone extorts Jay by threatening to upload his video to an online porn website, a sane person would contact the website and formally request them to block and/or remove the improperly obtained recording. In Sex Tape, Jay and Annie pile their moppets into the family SUV, then use it to ram their way into the site’s corporate headquarters in order to take an axe to its servers.

There’s precious little spark between Segel and Diaz, and most of the script is the sort of forced shock dialogue that actually makes us think less of our protagonists. There’s not a truly funny or believable moment in all of Sex Tape, down to our eventual glimpse of the actual tape, which was ostensibly filmed with a stationary iPad yet somehow contains multiple camera angles. Well, there’s one believable moment: when Hank and Annie share lines of cocaine, Lowe and Diaz’s portrayals suggest some prior personal experience. Just Google “Rob Lowe and ….,” well, you get the idea.

This is 40

The humor is as out-of-date as your shirt

Grade: C -
Director: Judd Apatow
Starring: Paul Rudd, Leslie Mann, Megan Fox, Albert Brooks, John Lithgow, Jason Segel, Charlyne Yi, Melissa McCarthy and Chris O’Dowd
MPAA Rating: R
Running Time: 2 hr. 14 min.

With only the strained sinew of pop culture binding its skeletal structure into any recognizable form, This is 40 fits nicely within a holiday season full vapid gatherings populated by mildly familiar acquaintances you’d really rather not have to hang around. It’s the maladjusted product of a director and his actress wife who would continue to cast their blood moppets and then ask both they and the actors around them to hurl profane invectives for well over two hours. And it’s a comedy whose notion of timely gags involve Viagra, the final season of Lost, and a reunion of Graham Parker and The Rumor, which coincides not-so-coincidentally with the release of their new “comeback” album.

The main selling point for This is 40 is that it follows the continuing domestic disquietude of the more irksome couple from writer-director Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up. When last we saw them, Pete (Paul Rudd, still playing Paul Rudd) was tripping on shrooms and Debbie (Leslie Mann) was getting dressed down by Seth Rogen in a hospital waiting room. Five years later, Pete and Debbie are still a quarreling, neurotic mess, aggravated by the sort of dire money troubles that allow folks to buy big a house, start a record company, run a side business, own an original doodle drawn by John Lennon and funnel over $10,000 to your father.

What’s most maddening is that This is 40 is more a series of scenes than a cohesive whole. Set during the week when both Pete and Debbie turn 40, Apatow jumps from one vignette to another, whether it’s far-less-funny reprise of Debbie going clubbing or Pete combatting a hemorrhoid. For intrigue, decide which is more offensive: Debbie threatening to physically harm a youngster who dared issue some benign insult about her daughter on Facebook, or deeming that the employee embezzling money from Debbie’s clothing boutique isn’t the hip, voluptuous Megan Fox but rather the Asian girl who looks and talks funny.

The inclusion of Albert Brooks and John Lithgow as Pete and Debbie’s dads, respectively, at least breaks up the stagnation. Still, Apatow makes Larry (Brooks) a mooch lacking social graces or much in the way of dignity. And while Debbie wants to mend fences with Oliver (Lithgow), her estranged biological father, five minutes in her presence gives you some idea why daddy might have stayed away all those years.

Ultimately, nothing of substance really happens in This is 40, which is overlong by at least the same number of minutes. There’s little empathy for a couple already intolerable in short spurts five years ago. If there’s more than a modicum here that rings true about your own life, seek immediate marriage counseling.

The Five-Year Engagement

 

Grade: C +

Director: Nicholas Stoller

Starring: Jason Segal, Emily Blunt, Chris Pratt, and Alison Brie

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 2 hr. 4 min.

Beyond the requisite nude and crude guffaws, The Five-Year Engagement is a formulaic Judd Apatow production that strikes a creaky chord of monotony as a rom-com built around the deconstruction of a seemingly sturdy relationship. Off that basic premise, the film has already co-opted elements from 500 Days of Summer, Blue Valentine, and Like Crazy, and that’s just looking back through three years of cinema.

The film’s purported hook is that it begins where most romantic comedies end: a boy and girl, deep into a long-term relationship, deciding to finally tie the knot. Substitute Emily Blunt for Mila Kunis, and Five-Year Engagement could be the unofficial sequel to Forgetting Sarah Marshall, both collaborations between writer-director Nicholas Stoller and star Jason Segal.

Life becomes complicated as soon as Tom (Segal), a sous chef working in a high-end San Francisco restaurant, and Violet (Blunt), an aspiring academic psychologist, get engaged. Their impending nuptials are first upstaged when Tom’s oafish chef buddy Alex (a scene-stealing Chris Pratt) and Violet’s sister Suzie (Alison Brie) hook up and hurriedly hold a shotgun wedding. Then Violet, after being rejected by Berkeley, is accepted to a two-year research post at the University of Michigan. Tom, on the cusp of being named top chef of his own eatery, rather willingly leaves his job and moves with Violet to Ann Arbor.

The laughs in Five-Year Engagement—a film that feels as long as its title suggests—come in fits and spurts, filtered through a series of disjointed segments and sketchily written side characters. The acting talent often outstrips the material, particularly Violet’s coterie of college classmates (played by Mindy Kaling, Kevin Hart and Randall Park) and their pervy department head (Rhys Ifans), and Violet’s daft mom Sylvia (the wonderful Jacki Weaver). Chris Parnell slots in as a fellow faculty husband with a penchant for deer hunting and knitting. Brian Posehn—who plays Tom’s boss at Zingerman’s, a renowned hangout where Tom finds work making deli sandwiches—is basically asked to occasionally pop up and say something risqué. And Molly Shannon is onscreen for literally no more than 15 seconds.

So much feels off-kilter, including the fact that nothing is really impeding Tom from launching his own restaurant in Michigan, or that a bustling college town like Ann Arbor is cast as a barren, Dakota-esque winterscape that would trigger Tom’s descent into depressive cabin fever.

The appeal of Five-Year Engagement leans heavily on the interplay between Segal and Blunt. The two work well together—they practiced being as love interests in Stoller’s version of Gulliver’s Travels—but don’t seem completely at ease in their roles. Segal works best as the endearing goof (Forgetting Sarah Marshall, I Love You, Man, The Muppets, and even Bad Teacher). He’s less convincing as the long-term love interest for Violet or a young, obsessively energetic minx like Audrey (Dakota Johnson), Tom’s flirtatious coworker. Frankly, Blunt doesn’t exude a tenth of the chemistry with Segal that she did with Matt Damon in the sci-fi thriller The Adjustment Bureau.

The Five-Year Engagement rambles along in the same vein as Tom and Violet’s courtship, with good parts that are generally worth enduring the mundane ones. But, the film is also like the stale donuts Violet uses in her oddball college research experiment: not very satisfying.

Neil Morris

Bad Teacher

There's Something About Daisy Duke

Grade: C –

Director: Jake Kasdan

Starring: Cameron Diaz, Jason Segel, Lucy Punch, and Justin Timberlake

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hr. 29 min.

Lately, Cameron Diaz is known more for the men she dates than the movies she makes. Over her 16-year film career, it’s hard to tell the difference between versatility and never quite finding a niche. She has starred in romances (My Best Friend’s Wedding; The Holiday), dramas (Gangs of New York; In Her Shoes), action films (Charlie’s Angels; Knight and Day), psychological thrillers (Vanilla Sky; The Box), animated movies (the Shrek series), and fantasy fare such as Being John Malkovich and A Life Less Ordinary.

Still, it is comedies like There’s Something About Mary and The Mask where Diaz made her name, so it would seem natural for the now 38-year-old actress to return to her familiar stomping grounds with Bad Teacher. The passing years have done little to dim Diaz’s outside personality (a welcome trait for this genre) and it helps that she doesn’t look like she’s aged a day over the past decade.

However, it’s another black comedy, the similarly titled Bad Santa, with which Bad Teacher shares its comedic DNA. Unfortunately, that connection predominantly involves irreverent, irredeemable and unlikable protagonists we’re asked to cheer for against all sense of logic and decency.

After getting dumped by her rich fiancée for being a gold digger, the suddenly cash-strapped Elizabeth Halsey (Diaz) reluctantly returns for her second year teaching at John Adams Middle School. Elizabeth is hostile to her students and coworkers. She spends her nights – and often work days – getting drunk and high, and then sleeps off the hangover by babysitting her seventh graders with school-related films like Stand and Deliver, Lean On Me and Dangerous Minds.

Elizabeth also decides that her road to happiness includes breast enlargement surgery. Unable to afford a boob job on a teacher’s salary, she dons her daisy dukes to raise money for the school’s annual car wash fundraiser just so she can skim the profits. She solicits bribes from parents in exchange for giving their children good grades. She makes advances towards Scott (Justin Timberlake), a rich, feckless substitute teacher with a predilection for cardigans and dry humping. And, when she learns a bonus for the teacher whose class has the highest end-of-grade test results, she drugs a school administrator in order to steal the answer key and use it for test prep.

The most devious trick of Bad Teacher is slyly luring the audience into rooting for Elizabeth’s foul-mouthed misdeeds to win out over her nemesis, Amy (Lucy Punch), a holier-than-thou coworker whose main transgressions are taking pride in being a good teacher and ferreting out Elizabeth’s actual misconduct.

That unsavory sleight-of-hand, together with director Jake Kasdan’s send-up of classroom pieties, isn’t enough to compensate for the lazy scatology and off-color one-liners about blacks, Jews, gays, and “Orientals” that are offensive principally because they lack any satirical context. Only Jason Segel gets good quips as Russell the sardonic gym teacher, whether he’s taking Elizabeth down a peg as he doggedly pursues her affections or arguing with a student that Michael Jordan was a better basketball player than LeBron James. Otherwise, the wayward jokes, like the film’s disjointed storyline and superficial characters, lack wit or rhythm.

In the end, the only “nice” thing Elizabeth does is salvaging the cred of the class nerd (Matthew J. Evans) by starting the false rumor that she caught him groping an eighth grader. No matter – the only apple this Bad Teacher deserves is one with a worm in it.

Neil Morris

*Originally published at www.indyweek.com - http://goo.gl/ylpTm

Despicable Me

Is there a Mrs. Super-Villian?

Grade: C +

Director: Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud

Starring the voices of: Steve Carell, Jason Segel, Russell Brand, Julie Andrews, Will Arnett, Kristen Wiig, and Miranda Cosgrove

Running Time: 1 hour, 35 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

Despicable Me, Universal Studios’ animated summer entry, seems as though it should be rebranded Unlucky Me by having the misfortune of being released while the superb and superior Toy Story 3 is still filling theaters.

Trying to summarize the plot suggests part of Despicable Me’s problem. Gru (voiced by Steve Carell) is a megalomaniacal, past-his-prime professional villain who cuts in line at coffee shops and rumbles around down in a gargantuan, environmentally unfriendly tank. Gru also desperately yearns to get back into the dastardly deeds game by heisting the moon. So, he adopts a trio of pint-sized orphaned sisters selling scout cookies in order to help him pilfer a shrink ray off Vector (Jason Segal), a geeky, tracksuit-wearing rival baddie. Got it?

Beyond the strained storytelling – think Annie meets Dr. Evil – the entire setup smacks of contrivance. Beginning with Carell’s overcooked Eastern European brogue, there are also uneven, ethereal 3-D visuals (the product of a French animation house), an original, ill-fitting soundtrack by hip hop producer Pharrell Williams, and Gru’s throng of pill-shaped yellow Minions, who go off on their own misadventures and whose ultimate purpose is to serve as the film’s marketing face in lieu of the less cuddly Gru. The voice actors – Russell Brand, Julie Andrews, Miranda Cosgrove (iCarly) – are brand-name but virtually unrecognizable, which usually means they are misused.

Still, Despicable Me remains carefree enough, especially for its younger target audience. The filmmakers’ keen sense of comic timing aids many of its sight gags, and make sure you don’t watch the 3-D enhanced roller coaster sequence on a full stomach. I chuckled that the only person more sinister than a super-villain is a loan officer at the Bank of Evil (“formerly Lehman Brothers,” says its marquee). And, the film hoists up enough semi-credible, late-game moral lessons to preserve a semblance of integrity, although the notion that the girls will eventually thaw Gru’s heart is as predictable as squealing preteens at a Twilight screening.

Despicable Me is light, mildly entertaining, and entirely forgettable – think of it as the anti- Toy Story 3. Funny thing, for your average summertime kids’ diversion, that might just be enough.

Neil Morris

I Love You, Man

You wouldn't like me when I'm angry.

Grade: B –

Director: John Hamburg

Starring: Paul Rudd, Jason Segel, Rashida Jones, Sarah Burns, Jon Favreau, Jaime Pressley, Andy Samberg, Jane Curtain, and J.K. Simmons

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hour, 45 minutes

The delightfully uncomplicated (see also simplistic) I Love You, Man eagerly draws from the Judd Apatow casting pool and comedic tableau. Its import, however, does not flow from its mixed bag of sardonic wit, gross-out gags, and the way it playfully inverts the hoary rom-com genre. Instead, the film is indicative of the current state of movie comedies: the Apatow playbook run to exacting, rhythmic precision. While not officially touched by the comic Creator, the significance is that his disciples are now cranking out facsimiles like so much grist for the Hollywood mill. [Another critic recently wrote that “Apatow is beginning to look like the Johnny Appleseed of bad indie comedy.”] Next up: Adventureland from Superbad director Greg Mottola, and Seth Rogan’s Observe and Report by Foot Fist Way director Jody Hill, both dropping next month.

In the meantime, I Love You, Man is a formula-flipping tale about a friendless milquetoast and struggling L.A. realtor, Peter (Paul Rudd), whose fiancée, Zooey (Rashida Jones), pushes him into man-dates in search of a BFF and, hopefully, best man for their wedding. Enter Sydney (Forgetting Sarah Marshall’s Jason Segel,), a Lebowski-esque layabout whose gonzo, devil-may-care attitude belies the same inner longing for male-bonding as Peter. Their platonic, borderline obsessive bromance, rife with reverence for (the band) Rush and walks along Venice Beach, threatens to hamper Peter’s pending nuptials and his vain efforts to sell Lou Ferrigno’s mansion (whose presence fully furnishes the script with a glut of Hulk jokes that run until the closing credits).

By design, Peter and Sydney is the film’s most charismatic coupling: the script crackles whenever Rudd and Segel share the screen and riff off each other’s pop-culture repartee. Moreover, the duo’s thematic shrewdness is a microcosm of a culture so shaped by girl-power that men like Peter find it easier to relate to women than act like – much less interact with – members of their own fraternity. However, Peter and Zooey’s comparative lack of sizzle is symptomatic of a screenplay too preoccupied with infantile homo-hilarity and recurring gags focused around dog poop and Peter’s social anxiety (Rudd’s solo ad libbing grows tiresome whenever Segel isn’t around to play comedian to his straight man). Only a bickering married couple played by Jon Favreau and Jaime Pressley augment the humor; seriously, isn’t it high time that the quick-witted Pressley gets cast as the lead in a feature film comedy?

Director John Hamberg uses this project to boost a big-screen resume previously highlighted by the Ben Stiller-Jennifer Aniston clunker Along Came Polly and penning Stiller’s Focker series. Admittedly, whenever Russ and Segel share the screen, I Love You, Man is cooking with gas. The rest of the time, it’s merely an amuse-bouche whetting your appetite for another bona fide Apatow entrée.

Neil Morris

Forgetting Sarah Marshall

Dude, this really isn't a good way
to get back at your ex-girlfriend.

Grade: B +
Director: Nick Stoller
Starring: Jason Segel, Kristen Bell, Mila Kunis, Bill Hader, and Paul Rudd
MPAA Rating: R
Running Time: 1 hour, 52 minutes

It is worth remembering that, long before the Judd Apatow comedic reign began, the Farrelly Brothers were once the toast of Tinseltown, working in scatology the way some artists work with watercolors. After defining (and influencing) film comedy for the decade of the 1990s with Dumb and Dumber, Me, Myself & Irene and There’s Something About Mary, the Farrellys’ began to wane the minute they forgot how to balance “shock and guffaw” with an undercurrent of sentimentality. Consequently, the directors of Kingpin began rolling one gutter ball after another.

This was the fate waiting to befall the House of Apatow due to brand oversaturation and its last three entrées: Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (which I liked but apparently the movie-going public did not), Superbad (which most fans and critics liked but I didn’t), and last month’s Drillbit Taylor (which no one liked). So, the rapid follow-up of Forgetting Sarah Marshall bears all the earmarks of yet another stab at recapturing fading glory.

Instead, the film has perhaps already earned distinction as the funniest movie of the year. The film acts as the third leg of Apatow’s unofficial relationship trilogy: The 40 Year Old Virgin undressed the ethos of adult sexuality; Knocked Up explored the travails of parenthood and, to a lesser degree, marriage; and Forgetting Sarah Marshall is, well, all about the break-up.

Specifically, it begins with the split between the titular famous actress (Kristen Bell) and her schlub of a boyfriend, Peter (Jason Segel). Sarah stars alongside Billy Baldwin in Crime Scene, a cheesy, archetypal TV crime show for which Peter composes the background music. Wallowing in self-pity, Peter jets off for a solo Hawaiian convalescence, unaware that Sarah and her new beau – a Euro-pop lothario named Aldous Snow (Russell Brand), leader of the band “Infant Sorrow” – are staying at the same island resort.

What sets apart Forgetting Sarah Marshall is not merely the wit of a screenplay also written by Segel, but also the effortless way it stirs together a gumbo of shocking visual gags, romance, and pop-culture touchstones – few films could effectively (and hilariously) reference The Lord of the Rings, the JFK assassination, and Flavor of Love.

Moreover, whereas the Farrelly Brothers’ rim shots involved testicles snagged in zippers, Apatow’s payoffs are more – dare I say – meaningful. A scene in which Peter’s erectile difficulty acts as coitus interruptus with Sarah is grounded in an uncomfortable truth to which many couples can uncomfortably relate. Peter’s dream of composing a puppet rock opera about Dracula is plainly played for laughs, but it is also framed as Peter’s particularized version of the latent, sometimes harebrained ambitions everyone secretly harbors.

I defy any red-blooded male to watch this film without being utterly captivated by Mila Kunis (That ‘70s Show), who is a revelation as the fetching Rachel, the hotel’s desk clerk and a mainland expatriate. There’s definitely something about Rachel, and her dalliance with Peter under Sarah’s nose lends the storyline an added dimension of sexual politics, not to mention a credible love interest.

Meanwhile, the regular cadre of Apatow favs, including Jonah Hill, Bill Hader, and Paul Rudd, round out a terrific supporting cast that is given plenty of screen-time but is never permitted to steal the show. That said, Jack McBrayer (30 Rock) walks away with plenty of scenes as a virgin newlywed whose wife’s wildcat bedroom propensities frighten his religious sensibilities. And, as a stoner surf instructor, Rudd reels off my new favorite mantra: "When life gives you lemons, just say 'F**k the lemons' and bail."

However, the real star is Segel, a Freaks and Geeks grad now seen in the TV series How I Met Your Mother. Segel bares all – physically and emotionally – and turns in a deceptively versatile performance that binds the film together, even through its somewhat draggy second half. Although the specter of a dopy every-dude dating a famous celebrity, getting comped the penthouse suite at a Hawaiian hotel, and then scoring the prettiest girl at the resort is more incredible than Knocked Up’s Seth Rogan impregnating a gorgeous E! television reporter, we somehow buy into the tableau. It’s all part of the Apatow era – enjoy it while you can.

Neil Morris