Muppets Most Wanted

Grade: B

Director: James Bobin

Starring: Ricky Gervais, Tina Fey, Ty Burrell and Ray Liotta

MPAA Rating: PG

Running Time: 1 hr. 52 min.

The cagiest moment in Muppets Most Wanted comes during its opening number, “We’re Doing a Sequel,” when Kermit and co. allude to the fact that movie sequels are rarely as good as their original—the Swedish Chef’s Bergman-esque vision of what cinematic style this film should adopt is an early laugh-out-loud moment.

In the case of The Muppets’ movies, it’s not a matter of comparative quality. The 2011 comeback film was lacquered with wistful nostalgia for the 1970s felt-covered vaudevillians. On the other hand, its follow-up is higher on the sort of self-aware satire that made the original Muppets television series so popular. The laughs, while hit or miss, are sufficiently sly to make this an enjoyable, knowing, star-studded romp.

Literally picking up where the last film left off, the Muppets are barraged with offers to help capitalize on their rediscovered stardom. Chief among the pitchmen is Dominic (Ricky Gervais), a talent agent who proposes a Muppets world theater tour. As Dominic skillfully upstages Kermit as leader of the troupe, the Muppets are unaware that Dominic is in league with Constantine, “the world’s most dangerous frog” recently escaped from a Russian gulag. Constantine looks just like Kermit except for a facial mole that once covered by green makeup allows Constantine to assume Kermit’s identity. Moreover, he plans to use the Muppets’ tour as cover for the eventual heist of The Crown Jewels in England. Meanwhile, Kermit is apprehended and shipped back to the gulag, which is run by Nadya (Tina Fey), a stern taskmaster with a secret affinity for stage shows.

The original songs span musical genres, from Broadway to disco to cabaret ditties. A number of Muppets sidelined in the last film enjoy expanded screentime this time around, notably Sam the Eagle (something else wryly noted at one point). And there are the cameos: some last a few minutes, like Salma Hayek, Céline Dion, and Christoph Waltz (a show host who dances, naturally, a waltz); some you’ll miss if you blink, like Sean Combs and James McAvoy as a UPS deliveryman.

The thin storyline is propelled by a string of subplots, including Kermit’s task to train the gulag’s prisoners into a chorus line, and the investigation in Constantine’s crimes carried out by Sam and Jean Pierre Napoleon (Ty Burrell), a Clouseau-type detective used for a recurring gag about Europeans’ propensity for short workdays and extended holidays. And, of course, there’s ultimately (yet another) wedding planned between Kermit/Constantine and Miss Piggy.

But the irreverent moments of Muppets Most Wanted are its best, including a moment where it reminds the audience that this is actually the eighth Muppets movie, a fact that smartly detracts and insulates it from the critical devotion bestowed upon the 2011 revival. This sequel isn’t designed to save a franchise—it’s just here to play the music, light the lights and raise the curtain on the Muppet show. It’ll make you laugh, and then you’ll forget about it an hour after it’s over. That’s entertainment.

Killing Them Softly

What, were you expecting Brad Pitt or something?

Grade: C
Director: Andrew Dominik
Starring: Brad Pitt, Scoot McNairy, Ben Mendelsohn, James Gandolfini, Richard Jenkins, Ray Liotta and Vincent Curatola
MPAA Rating: R
Running Time: 1 hr. 37 min.

“America’s not a country, it’s just a business.” While uttered in the closing moments of writer-director Andrew Dominik’s gangster pastiche Killing Them Softly, this subtle-as-a-sledgehammer motif smacks you in the head beginning with the film’s disorienting open shot. In it, Dominik shoots a two-bit hustler emerging from a New Orleans culvert—as if exiting through the dull end of a kaleidoscope—with a disembodied 2008 speech by presidential candidate Barack Obama acting as narrator.

While George V. Higgins’ 1974 crime novel Cogan’s Trade was set in the seamy seventies Boston underworld, Dominik updates the tableau to post-Katrina New Orleans, the 2008 U.S. Presidential race and the Wall Street bailout. Billboards, speeches and television news clips are omnipresent, as candidates bloviate about America as the land of promise and President George W. Bush explains the supposedly dire need for why $700 billion of no-strings-attached cash must be immediately earmarked to purchase failing bank assets.

Of course, analogizing mob syndicates as a subset of American capitalism has long been a pop culture staple. It’s no small wonder, then, that Dominik populates his cast with actors meant to evoke memories of previous cinematic touchstones, including Ray Liotta (Goodfellas) and no fewer than three regulars from The Sopranos, including James Gandolfini. Richard Jenkins plays the consigliere for a group of faceless mob minders—I guess Robert Duvall wasn’t available.

Dominik also reteams with Brad Pitt, who collaborated on Dominik’s previous film, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, a masterful examination of America’s affinity for celebrating its criminal heritage. In spite its shopworn premise, Killing Them Softly could have also served as a spiritual sequel, an ironic take on how American cinema has exploited and even furthered that very mythologizing. Unfortunately, the film proves ill-equipped for such heavy-handed allegory. Dominik adopts Higgins’ affinity for using pages of dialogue to illustrate events rather than chronicling them as they occur. While that might be an intriguing literary conceit, it proves infuriating on the screen when what’s being said (and said and said...) isn’t all that interesting.

Pitt is mesmerizing as gang enforcer Jackie Cogan, who is brought in to “manage” the fallout after three swindlers conspire to rob a Mob-sponsored card game run by local lackey Markie Trattman (Liotta). The film comes alive whenever Jackie is brandishing a sawed-off shotgun, interrogating a poor dolt (Scoot McNairy) involved in the heist or just jousting with Jenkins’ middle man about the complexities of mob bureaucracy. Unfortunately, those moments are subsumed by elongated conversations that do little to contribute to the storyline. One scene designed to advance a single plot point is extended to excruciating length by repeatedly cross cutting to the drug-addled point-of-view of one participant (Ben Mendelsohn). Gandolfini plays a washed-up hitman with a disintegrating home life and an unhealthy hankering for drink and degrading hookers, but his only two appearances comprise overlong, profane ramblings in which Jackie is relegated to passive listener.

What’s left is a film with high-minded posturing but little style or substance. Heck, it’s not really a gangster flick. It’s a portrait of an America ruled by avarice, where the have-nots are racked by vice and the haves are left to jockey for an even bigger piece of the pie. Lars von Trier would be proud.

*Originally published at www.indyweek.com

Youth in Revolt

Tyler Durden says to start lifting weights

Grade: B

Starring: Michael Cera, Portia Doubleday, Jean Smart, Zach Galifianakis, Erik Knudsen, Steve Buscemi, Adhir Kalyan, Fred Willard, Ray Liotta, and Justin Long

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hour, 30 minutes

It’s a familiar plotline for anyone who has watched movies since the 1980s: sexually frustrated teen seeks to lose his virginity, falls head-over-heels for a beautiful girl, and then undergoes a series of wacky exploits on his way to accomplishing his goal.

That director Miguel Areta (The Good Girl; Chuck & Buck) embraces such a shopworn subgenre in adapting C.D. Payne’s farcical coming-of-age novel Youth in Revolt is itself an ironic commentary on the landscape of cinematic comedies. Still, this is no Porky’s or slice of American Pie. Youth in Revolt owes more to Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Little Darlings, and even Jean-Luc Godard, and while it may not be in the same class as that esteemed company, it is heady, hilarious fare that is already the surprise film of the young year.

Michael Cera has seemingly played the character of precocious, neurotic teenager Nick Twisp since his Arrested Development days. The 16-year-old Nick is a Holden Caulfield with a penchant for Sinatra and autoeroticism who longs to both shed his virginity and sever ties with his divorced parents (Jean Smart and Steve Buscemi). Mom cycles through loser boyfriends while Dad is shacked up with a bikini-clad blonde closer to Nick’s age.

When Mom’s latest lout (Zach Galifianakis) lands in hot-water, they and Nick take refuge at Restless Axles, a Christian trailer park in northern California. Enter Sheeni Saunders (newcomer Portia Doubleday), an erudite Lolita with an abiding love for all things French, including her pinup of Jean-Paul Belmondo. She and Nick wax whip-smart and commence a PG-rated summer fling, but his coitus interruptus proves to be Sheeni’s handsome, French-speaking, piano-playing, Futurist percussive poetry-spouting boyfriend, Trent (Jonathan Bradford Wright).

When Nick returns home and Sheeni leaves to attend a French boarding school in Santa Cruz, his solution on how they might reunite revolves around mischief created by François (also played by Cera), a pencil-mustachioed, Gitanes-smoking figment of Nick’s imagination. The brazen François – part Jeff Spicoli, part Belmondo in Godard’s Pierrot le Fou – embodies Nick’s id and represents the sort of man he believes girls prefer. Spurred on by his inner Tyler Durden, Nick conflagrates his hometown of Berkley and sabotages Sheeni’s schooling.

Payne’s sharp wit translates well to the screen in the hands of writer Gustin Nash, whose coming-of-age Charlie Bartlett plowed similar, albeit less fertile ground. There are occasions late in Youth in Revolt when its comic elements almost explode into brilliant, full-blown surrealism, especially a couple of shroom-tripping sequences: Nick incorporates sex-manual illustrations into the first, while the other finds Sheeni’s otherwise bible-thumping dad (M. Emmet Walsh) smearing mashed potatoes all over his face over Thanksgiving dinner.

However, virtually all the film’s characters are zany to the point of derangement. Without a reliable straight/sane counterpoint, the narrative nearly implodes into inanity – casualties include underwritten supporting turns from Ray Liotta and Justin Long, who plays Sheeni’s half-baked brother. These spells are saved by Erik Knudsen as Nick’s childhood friend Lefty, Adhir Kalyan – who mirrors Cera’s deadpan wit – as Nick’s new high school pal Vijay, and Fred Willard as an aging hippie. But, ultimately this is Cera’s show, and he exhibits range while carrying the film on his lanky back.

Youth in Revolt congeals romance, sex, and infatuation into one dysfunctional, indispensable confection. Circumstance forces Nick to disguise himself in drag before he can finally enter Sheeni’s boudoir. In the end, love begets masculinity, not the other way around.

Neil Morris

*Originally published at www.indyweek.com

Observe and Report

Here, take these. You'll need them
after watching this movie.

Grade: C +

Director: Jody Hill

Starring: Seth Rogan, Ray Liotta, Michael Peña, Anna Faris, Celia Weston, and Collette Wolfe

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hour, 26 minutes

It is the darkest of dark comedies that draws inspiration from Taxi Driver. But, it is not the visage of the lone, deranged vigilante that demarcates director and North Carolina native Jody Hill’s Observe and Report. Instead, shopping mall security guard Ronnie Barnhardt (Seth Rogan) is the unhinged byproduct of the Bush-era delusion that sees evildoers around every kiosk and the calls to arms as a proletarian path towards otherwise elusive notoriety and self-worth. So, when a serial flasher turns the mall into his personal peep show, Ronnie’s bipolar-fueled obsession to bring the perp to justice serves as a springboard towards applying to become a real police officer, protecting the “homeland,” and impressing a slutty cosmetics salesgirl (Anna Faris, benefiting most from the film’s hard edge).

The inanity is offbeat and uproarious at times, but Hill’s (Foot Fist Way) script is rudderless, depressing, and overly mean-spirited – there are only so many laughs you can comfortably draw from tableaus of mental illness, substance abuse, racism, and date rape. Not long into the film, Ronnie morphs from semi-sympathetic oaf to self-absorbed, dangerous tool, rendering the portrait of his boozy, slatternly mom (Celia Weston) quite sad and the advances of a sweet young pixie (Collete Wolfe) working in the food court quite incredulous. So, in his alpha-male rivalry with a police detective played by Ray Liotta, the audience embraces the profanity-laden, classic-Liotta rant he screams into Ronnie’s dimwitted ear. Later, we quietly cheer when a horde of cops go Rodney King on Ronnie’s violent, dysfunctional noggin. Ronnie isn’t an anti-hero; he’s just non-heroic.

The setting and subject-matter invite inevitable comparisons to that other, recent mall cop comedy, Kevin James’ appropriately titled Paul Blart: Mall Cop. But, there is more authentic insight into the shopping mall subculture in Zack Synder’s Dawn of the Dead remake than here, and the putrid laughs play more to the Bad Santa cheap seats. To borrow a quote from a cop who eavesdrops on Ronnie being rejected for the police force, “I thought this was going to be funny, but it’s really just kinda sad.”

Neil Morris