Trainwreck

Amy, let's toast you leapfrogging me on the marquee

Grade: B –

Director: Judd Apatow

Starring: Amy Schumer, Bill Hader, Colin Quinn, Brie Larson, Tilda Swinton, Vanessa Bayer, Mike Birbiglia, John Cena and LeBron James

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 2 hr. 5 min.

Although Trainwreck strikes a cursory blow for comedic gender equity, it’s really a perpetuation of conventional mores gussied up in broad-based, off-color garb. Comedian Amy Schumer carries over her biting TV and stand-up act to this ribald rom-com directed by Judd Apatow (Knocked Up: The 40-Year-Old Virgin). While the film puts on airs of female empowerment, its derivative message is that the women can’t achieve happiness until they embrace sports, curtail the crazy and settle down with a man.

Amy (also the name of her character) was weaned from childhood on the mantra that “monogamy isn’t realistic” by her racist, rascal father (Colin Quinn). Years later, Amy is a YA living in NYC and working at a lads’ mag for a merciless editor (Tilda Swinton in a terrific, rare comic turn). At night, a (usually drunk) Amy hops from bar-to-bed with a carousel of anonymous men—she wakes one morning and, spying a Scarface poster on the wall, quietly intones, “Please don’t be a dorm room.”

Her closest thing to a steady is Steven (WWE wrestler John Cena, sneaky good), a beefcake with intimacy issues and a predilection for ambiguously gay exclamations. He’s into Amy. Amy isn’t into anyone—for her, sex is a grim chore.

The more intriguing character for this setup would be the charming city girl whose sensuality is divorced from a recognition about the corrosive consequences of her selfish sexual appetites. Instead, Amy is caustic and emotionally abusive to everyone, particularly Aaron Conners (Bill Hader), New York’s hottest orthopedist to the sports stars, whose wide grin and easy manner stir Amy’s inner romantic, much to her chagrin. The inexplicably single Aaron is drawn to Amy despite her pathological efforts to sabotage their relationship.

Amy constantly lambasts the suburban family life of her sister Kim (Brie Larson, badly in need of another starring vehicle), her milquetoast husband (Mike Birbiglia) and her precocious stepson (Evan Brinkman). But that idyllic ideal is Amy’s—and the film’s—teary destination. Even the New York Knicks cheerleaders that Amy skewers as a gyrating exemplar of female ideation ultimately figure into her scheme to finally win back her man.

There’s also the recurring elitist streak that runs through much of Apatow’s recent work, typified by a supporting cast seemingly recruited from one of the filmmaker’s dinner parties. LeBron James acquits himself well as one of Aaron’s devoted patients. But long, lumbering scenes feature Aaron and LeBron getting lunch, playing basketball and attending a glitzy charity jam fest of some sort. Meanwhile, the film devotes scant time to hilarious slice-of-life sequences, like one featuring Leslie Jones (Saturday Night Live) showing the reflexive rudeness of New York subway passengers.

At one point, LeBron, Matthew Broderick, Chris Evert and Marv Albert conduct an intervention on Aaron for no discernable reason other than Apatow’s stargazing. Trainwreck could have used similar assistance. At its best, it’s a gender-reversal, neo-Woody Allen comedy. If only it hadn’t settled down.

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.

Bridesmaids

Divine Secrets of the Apatow Sisterhood

Grade: C +

Director: Paul Feig

Starring: Kristin Wiig, Maya Rudolph, Rose Byrne, Ellie Kemper, Melissa McCarthy, Wendi McLendon-Covey, Jon Hamm, and Chris O’Dowd

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 2 hr. 5 min.

In anticipation of the rush to anoint Kristin Wiig the funniest female Saturday Night Live alum since Tina Fey, it might be instructive to contrast Fey’s Liz Lemon in 30 Rock to Wigg’s madcap maid of honor in Bridesmaids. Admittedly a dorky child of the 1980s, it always seems Lemon’s marked neuroses are the put-upon product of a career woman stubbornly living sexless in the city, an executive competing in a male-dominated industry and coping with the prejudices heaped upon female who goes without a spouse or child past a particular age. Her obstinate independence is both her strength and comedic curse.

In Bridesmaids, on the other hand, Wiig’s Annie shuttered her Milwaukee bakery when she could not handle the pressure and is locked in a pointless relationship with a vain, wealth playboy (Jon Hamm) who doesn’t even bother to unlock his front gate of his mansion after he unceremoniously kicks her out following a night of awkward coitus.

Broke and lovelorn, all Annie apparently has left in life is her longstanding friendship with bride-to-be Lillian (Maya Rudolph). So, when Lillian’s newest BFF, the rich and pretty Helen (Rose Byrne), begins to usurp Annie’s position as maid of honor, Annie’s eccentricities explode into full-blown personality disorder.

Annie and Helen first clash by trying to one-up each other’s toasts at an engagement party. It’s a scene that rambles well past its amusing set-up, like many in Bridemaids that Wiig conducts as if they were one of her interminable Gilly or Penelope SNL sketches.

Directed by Freaks and Geeks’ Peter Feig and operating under the imprimatur of producer Judd Apatow, Bridesmaids is essentially an estrogen-filled knockoff of The Hangover, minus the roofie-induced amnesia. A bachelorette party in Vegas is canceled after Annie’s midair drunkenness gets her kicked off the plane; a group meal at a local Brazilian dive leads to an attack of proverbial scatology.

The bridesmaids themselves are an assemblage of Hollywood archetypes: the protagonist and her best friend of color, the pretty rich girl, Megan, the brassy fat chick (Melissa McCarthy, who walks away with her every scene), the desperate housewife (Wendi McLendon-Covey), and the mousey innocent (The Office’s Ellie Kemper).

There’s also what barely passes for a love interest between Annie and Nathan (Chris O’Dowd), a state trooper who retains his Irish accent and a taste for Annie’s dormant culinary skills. But Nathan’s fixation, like every other promising subplot –hints at Helen’s volatile relationship with her preteen stepchildren; Megan’s furtive fortune – gets abandoned on the way the finale of yet another wedding comedy.

There are plenty of guilty guffaws to go around throughout Bridemaids. While Wiig’s performance in her headliner debut is fearless and endearing in its self-deprecation, the scattershot approach to Wiig’s writing insures that every 15 minutes of aimlessly will yield one minute of hilarity. But, for those who contend that the film strikes a blow for feminism, all it really proves is that women can tell poop jokes, too.

Neil Morris

Year One

Slaves to Apatow movie hell

Grade: D

Director: Harold Ramis

Starring: Jack Black, Michael Cera, Oliver Platt, and David Cross

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hour, 40 minutes

Year One is to Life of Brian, its ostensible cinematic inspiration, as Monty Python’s titular Nazarene is to his Messianic stable-mate: a pale imposter. When the book is written on bad Jack Black comedies or the first major misstep in Michael Cera’s nascent career, this misguided, humorless disaster – more akin to bad Abrahams and Zucker than Mel Brooks – will be chapter one.

As inept tribesmen banished from their home village for sampling from the Tree of Knowledge (if only the filmmakers had dined at that table…), Zed (Black) and Oh (Cera) begin a loose jaunt through the Book of Genesis, sparking everything from the fratricide of Cain (David Cross) to Abraham (Hank Azaria) sparing his son Isaac (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) from sacrifice to indulging in the pleasures and perils of Sodom. Their goal, such as it is, centers around freeing themselves and their would-be objects of affection, Maya (June Diane Raphael) and Eema (Juno Temple), from slavery.

Just as Zed and Oh wander the wilderness, so too does Year One meander aimlessly through one half-baked sketch after another. Ignoring the wit and satire all but smacking him straight in his face, director Harold Ramis falls back on anachronisms and a steady stream of scatology. You know, the usual: Feces, urine, flatulence, testicles, and a glut of gay gags.

With Cera, McLovin, Bill Hader in blackface, and an uncredited Paul Rudd as the doomed Abel, this rotten tomato is a Jonah Hill walk-on away from an Apatow family reunion. Sadly, Apatow accepts a producer credit for this mistake, but the most amazing thing is that its bottom-barrel script was penned by two regulars for The Office, Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg. Too schlocky to be good and too charmless to be a cult classic, this is an unimaginative misfire that its stars would be well-advised to instantly scrub from their resumes. Black and Cera spout off a funny line here and there, but poor editing, writing, and staging steer Year One into very primitive territory.

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

Drillbit Taylor

Freaks and Repeats

Grade: C –
Director: Steven Brill
Starring: Owen Wilson, Leslie Mann, Nate Hartley, Troy Gentile, David Dorfman, and Alex Frost
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 1 hour, 42 minutes

Ok, we get it – the teenage years were tough ones for Judd Apatow and the rest of his filmmaking cadre. As producer of Drillbit Taylor, Apatow works off an off-beat script cowritten by Seth Rogan and his Undeclared cohort Kristofor Brown to regurgitate their now-formulaic freaks & geeks coterie of a nebbish weakling (Nate Hartley), a McLovin-esque hyperdork (David Dorfman), and a rotund, foul-mouthed pal (Troy Gentile) who actually resembles a prepubescent Jonah Hill.

For a moment, set aside the rambling, rather inconsequential plot about a trio of hapless high school misfits who hire the titular homeless, Army deserter-cum-conman (Owen Wilson) as bodyguard to protect them against schoolyard bullies (led by Alex Frost) so merciless you begin to question the mental make-up of school administrators who allow the torment to continue unabated. The result is still a superbad, hit-or-miss mess that is only somewhat salvaged by Wilson’s trademark loopy adlibbing.

The rest of the would-be guffaws foisted by director Stephen Brill are endless, uninspired sight gags and high school freshmen who somehow reference 8 Mile and Blade Runner with equal aplomb. The female love interests range from Asian stereotypes (Valerie Tian, sporting the same specs from Juno) to oversexed loser-magnets (Apatow’s wife Leslie Mann, Knocked Up). Meanwhile, the rest of the women wandering through this comedic chasm are the perfunctory clueless moms and bleached-blond sun-worshipers whose only function is to pose for topless cell-phone pics with our preteens.

So bewildering is the story that by film’s end, destitute vets are fashioned into thieving villains and the presumptive crowd-pleasing climax is watching a thirty-something adult pummel an eighteen-year-old high schooler. Moreover, the vacuum at the film’s core is that its eponymous protagonist never rises above the level of an unabashed phony, fronting one false backstory after another. We never know who Drillbit Taylor really is – other than his Christian name is Bob – and as such never see the movie as anything other than another of Apatow and Co.’s cinematic exorcisms of adolescent angst.

Rarely has a movie’s advertising tagline been more apt: “You get what you pay for.”

Neil Morris