The Night Before

Just what I always wanted ...

another Seth Rogen stoner comedy

Grade: B

Director: Jonathan Levine

Starring: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Seth Rogen, Anthony Mackie, Lizzy Caplan, Jillian Bell and Michael Shannon

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hr. 41 min.

Sometimes lowbrow humor can produce high art. The Night Before is bawdy and irreverent, a stoner Christmas comedy that skewers everything from parenthood to celebrity worship to both religious and secular iconography. An expectant father smokes marijuana that causes him to envision his unborn daughter as an adult pole dancer. His friend is beaten up by drunk Santas. His other friend, a famous footballer, cavorts with a hippie chick who only wants to steal his weed.

It’s uproarious, yet somehow coalesces as a yuletide film that references classics like A Christmas Carol and The Grinch Who Stole Christmas as well as postmodern holiday flicks like Die Hard, Home Alone, and a convivial jab at The Polar Express. The Night Before is far too ribald to join the perennial rotation of family Christmas films. But if you like your stockings stuffed with shrooms, then this is the movie for you.

For the past 14 years, Ethan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), Isaac (Seth Rogen) and Chris (Anthony Mackie) have reunited on Christmas Eve for an evening of revelry, a tradition started after Ethan’s parents suddenly passed away during the holidays. Today, Chris is a popular, thirtysomething footballer whose suddenly stardom stems from a syringe. Isaac is a lawyer facing impending fatherhood with wife Betsy (Jillian Bell). And Ethan still can’t cope with the breakup from his longtime girlfriend, Diana (Lizzy Caplan).

On the occasion of their final Christmas Eve get together, Ethan pilfers passes to the mythical Nutcracker Ball, a secretive soiree somewhere in midtown. While waiting for directions to the party, the trio traverse their normal haunts: the piano mat at FAO Schwarz; a karaoke bar; Chinese food. Ethan trips out on the box of drugs Betsy bought off Craigslist and gifted to him, accidentally swaps cell phones (and “coke blood”) with Diana’s friend Sarah (Mindy Kaling) and happens upon a hallucinogenic Christmas Eve mass. Chris loses his weed to a Grinch-style groupie (Ilana Glazer) and doesn’t really want to run into his mom, while Ethan hopes to rendezvous with, and win back, Diana at the ball.

Director Jonathan Levine jettisons the emotional complexity of his previous dramedies The Wackness and 50/50, which also starring Gordon-Levitt and Rogen. The Night Before is raw and ribald, placing it squarely in Rogen’s wheelhouse and reminding us that comedy is Gordon-Levitt’s strong suit. Mackie’s comic timing is sharp, but the real sardonic standout is Michael Shannon as Mr. Green, the boys’ past and present pot dealer who doubles as their intense guardian angel.

Despite its plentiful pop culture ferences and literary derivations, The Night Before runs on the thinnest of plots, a deficit that emerges once it finally arrives to the big bash. The narrative comedown is accompanied by Miley Cyrus, a faux-crucifixion and James Franco’s Cheshire Cat grin. Still, the sunny denouement is a necessary detox from the preceding debauchery. The film is just funny—it doesn’t make much sense, but neither do many fables.

Warm Bodies

Even in a post-apocalyptic future,

you'll end up next to this in the $5 bin at Walmart

Grade: C
Director: Jonathan Levine
Starring: Nicholas Hoult, Teresa Palmer, Analeigh Tipton, Rob Corddry, Dave Franco and John Malkovich
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 1 hr. 37 min.

It takes more than Kensington Gore to make a good monster movie, and it takes more than spackling your film with Shakespearean tropes to lend it Meaning™. Warm Bodies tries to have to both ways, along with harvesting the teen romantic-comedy market for good measure. Isaac Marion’s source novel of the same name was published in late 2011, an important fact in nailing down its sundry pop-cultural influences. It’s Romeo & Juliet meets The Walking Dead meets Twilight meets a steaming pile of rotting entrails.

Our narrator is a zombie named R (Nicholas Hoult)—as in Romeo, get it?—who falls for a girl named Julie (Teresa Palmer)—as in Juliet, get it?—and has a best friend named M (Rob Corddry)—as in...oh, forget it. There’s also a scene where R appears below Julie’s balcony. But while R and Julie’s respective tribes don’t get along, it has less to do with family squabbling and more to do with the fact that R’s undead pals want to feast on Julie and the last vestiges of humankind.

But R is unusual, starting with the fact that while he can’t talk, sleep, dream or do anything but amble around all day waiting for a dollop of viscera to fall his way, he can provide an entirely articulate, introspective voice over narration. While on food patrol one day, R and his buddies happen upon a band of gun totting 20-somethings, including Julie and her boyfriend Perry (Dave Franco). R munches on Perry’s brains, allowing R to absorb and envision Perry’s memories, which are projected somewhat miraculously in two-shot and multi-angle imagery. R becomes infatuated with Julie and sneaks her to his home, an abandoned 747 parked on the tarmac of a derelict airport.

Never mind the fact that R chowed down on Julie's boo—his tousled hair and ‘80s vinyl record collection, when combined with a heady dose of Stockholm Syndrome, is all that’s required for her to go gaga. In return, R starts experiencing some special feelings that spread to the rest of his carnivorous clan the first time they glimpse R and Julie holding hands.

Director Jonathan Levine (50/50, The Wackness) aims to imbue this romance with some sidelong commentary about our disconnected society. But limiting ourselves to the zombie genre, that was done better and more satirically in just the opening half-hour of Shaun of the Dead. All Warm Bodies does is offer up such puzzling queries as why these zombies are the slow-moving George Romero kind at the beginning of the film but the frenzied 28 Days Later variety by the end. Why is ‘80s rock, record players and Polaroid instant cameras featured prominently alongside iPods, Blu-ray and convertible BMWs? What is the power source for R’s airplane and the moving walkways at the zombie-populated airport? Since R is already dead, why does Julie constantly refer to the threat of him “dying” or getting “killed,” including at the hands of her ramrod, freedom-fighting father (John Malkovich)?

Levine shoots the film in a drab grayscale; apologists would say this is to capture the look of a post-apocalyptic tableau when its true intent is avoiding the sort of vivid imagery that would usually carry with it an R-rating instead of the tepid PG-13 the filmmakers clearly wanted. Moreover, if you’re going to foist Romeo & Juliet, then have the courage of your literary conceit and embrace its tragic story arc. Put these together, and Warm Bodies is the thing you’d least expect: bloodless.

50/50

 "As president of the Michael Stipe fan club, I promise...

I'm sorry, you were saying something about a break-up?"

Grade: B

Director: Jonathan Levine

Starring: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Seth Rogan, Anna Kendrick, Bryce Dallas Howard, and Anjelica Huston

Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hr. 39 min.

After his critically ballyhooed turn in the 2007 dramatic thriller The Lookout, it seemed as if stardom was right around the corner for Joseph Gordon-Levitt, previously best known as a regular on TV’s Third Rock from the Sun. Unfortunately, aside from his lead in the criminally unheralded (500) Days of Summer, his most exciting performance since was an acrobatic song-and-dance rendition of “Make ‘Em Laugh” while hosting Saturday Night Live two years ago.

Gordon-Levitt’s greatest strength as an actor is also his largest impediment to celebrity. He prefers to inhabit a role rather than inflate it, plying an acting style that is unpretentious and nuanced. These attributes serve him well in 50/50, a dramatic-comedy about a 27-year-old’s grueling struggle with cancer.

The film’s title holds dual meaning. It represents the odds a cold, impersonal oncologist gives Adam Lerner (Gordon-Levitt), a Seattle NPR staffer and aspiring documentary filmmaker, to survive the malignant tumors found along his spine. Moreover, it’s the approximate division between drama and bawdy humor employed by screenwriter Will Reiser’s semiautobiographical script.

In the hands of less capable filmmakers and cast, this balancing act between somber sentimentality and Apatow-esque comedy could nosedive into something ill-advised and even offensive. The greatest testament to 50/50 is that director Jonathan Levine (The Wackness) integrates its two halves in a way that elevates the whole.

The film is as much about the way Adam’s intimates react to his illness as the impact it has on him. The key players are Kyle (Seth Rogan, ably playing Seth Rogan), Adam’s oafish, heart-of-gold best friend; Rachael (Bryce Dallas Howard), Adam’s live-in girlfriend and as aspiring artist; Diane (Anjelica Huston), his overbearing mother; and Katherine (the equally undervalued Anna Kendrick), Adam’s perky, inexperienced therapist who eventually takes a shine to her new patient.

Reiser treads familiar territory, like the physical ravages of chemotherapy. But, he also shares stories only a survivor could tell, such as the complex dynamics of a support group of fellow suffers, new friends who might pass on as quickly as you get to know them.

The most glaring misdiagnosis 50/50 makes is its treatment of the women in Adam’s life. Most notable is Rachael, whose indefensible response to the sudden pressure of coping and caring for a terminally sick boyfriend is nevertheless grounded in genuine and complex emotions worth exploring in an intelligent fashion. Instead, she gets called the c-word and ridiculed as a personal and professional failure.

Diane’s histrionics barely subside long enough for a late, fleeting expression of motherly concern. And Reiser seems oblivious that Katherine, the story’s ostensible heroine, oversteps the ethnical line separating doctor and patient.

The tonal duality of 50/50 is more than a mere gimmick. It’s the language of ironic distance spoken by Gen-Y moviegoers who largely have not faced their mortality. When Adam, on the eve of a make-or-break surgical procedure, locks himself in Kyle’s car and finally unleashes some pent-up primal therapy, all the cackles that precede it – along with Gordon-Levitt’s talent – make the moment feel all the more real.

Neil Morris

*Originally published at www.indyweek.com – http://goo.gl/1z64n