This review is dedicated to the occupant of seat C4, in screen 9 of Cineworld's Leicester Square cinema, at the 12:15pm showing of The House, on Saturday 8th July 2017*1.
Now, I like to be as punctual as possible with my cinema-viewing. I aim to arrive at the doors of the auditorium itself at the start-time on the ticket, or shortly thereafter pending queues etc. I know there are twenty-seven minutes between that time and the on-screen arrival of the BBFC card (everything thereafter being the film itself). I also know that within those twenty-seven minutes, people will be entering the room on a steady basis and probably, depending on my seat-location, edging past me to get to their own. I'm fine with that (providing it's before the BBFC card), I just don't want to be that guy.
I mention this because I was pretty much on-time, as above, for my viewing of the new Will Ferrell / Amy Poehler comedy, The House. And as I entered the room, seat C4 was already occupied. Fair play, I thought, this is a man after my own heart, a patron who wants to take in the entirety of the presentation*2. Like myself, this was a viewer escaping the bustling activity of London's West End on a Saturday lunchtime and enjoying the group-solitude of cinema. What I'm saying is, this guy clearly wanted to be there as he'd arrived before I had and had bought snacks at the concession counter. Which made it all the more funny when he sat through the adverts, trailers, promo, more ads… and then left the film four and a half minutes in. Such is this man's judgement and foresight, he doesn't need to know what he then missed, he just knew when the script dropped a rape-joke*3 four minutes into the run-time that it's not going to get any better than this.
To be fair, I knew that as well, but I can't review a film after only watching the first scene. If I'm going to objectively hate something, I want all the evidence.
Scripted Joke Interlude #1 EXT. SUBURBAN STREET - DAY.
Middle-aged parents KATE and SCOTT are walking down their drive, explaining to their teenage daughter ALEX that taking drugs in college is a bad idea.
ALEX: But you're always saying how you smoked a lot of pot and peed outside in college?
KATE: Okay, they used to call me 'smoke a lot of pot and pee outside Kate'...
This is the first verbalised joke in THE HOUSE. The conversation moves on after this, the second line was the punchline. It was a joke. This is the bar that the film sets itself. A bar that the film spend the rest of its mercifully-short runtime smashing its own face into, hoping to raise laughs from the audience in lieu of words.
Now, you may be tempted to judge this film by its trailer, and save yourself 85 minutes. You're free to do that, but I assure you that the 2½ minutes of the promo necessitate a tightness of editing and brevity of dialogue that the completed film does not even know is possible. From the initial scene mentioned above, this is a screenplay full of placeholder lines where the jokes should be; where every plot point is explained three times in immediate succession by different characters, then explained again three scenes later. The needless repetition and verbal floundering is a sign of poor ad-libbing and even worse editing. It's only 88 minutes long. Including the credits. Imagine being writer/director Andrew Jay Cohen and not even coming out with enough footage to cross the line of an hour and a half.
This ridiculous mess of a movie is so staggeringly sub-par that even the likes of genre stalwarts Melissa McCarthy and Tina Fey haven't put their names down to appear in cameo roles. Although they could well be in entire plot-strands which have been cut from the movie, so disjointed and erratic is the final product. Ironically, the choreography in the brief fight sequence is executed with an enthusiasm and efficiency that the screenplay writers can barely dream of. Jeremy Renner (yes, the Avenger) turns up in act III as a criminal overlord for some reason, executing the same regretful grimace and decision-making process that led him to appear in a series of British TV adverts for mobile phone contracts. He's no Winston Wolf, that's for sure.
Scripted Joke Interlude #2 INT. 'THE CONTAINER STORE' - DAY.
Middle-aged parents KATE and SCOTT are walking around The Container Store with their teenage daughter ALEX. We know it is The Container Store because there is a sign on the front of their shopping trolley which reads "The Container Store" and also because there are containers of varying sizes on shelves and standalone displays. This is the setup for a joke. Suffering from a severe hangover, KATE reaches onto a nearby display to grab an opaque container. She removes the lid and vomits violently into the box (vomit unseen by audience).
KATE: …it's a good job this is The Container Store and there are containers everywhere.
SCOTT then opens the front of a container about the size of a coffin and jumps in for no reason, tipping it over. The scene ends.
Amongst about a hundred other poorly conceived ideas, the film has a scene featuring a generic US Club-Standup™ playing to an audience of one, who's finding the act absolutely hilarious while observers look on blank-faced at the below-average execution of it all. It's a pretty good allegory for the screening I was in as I only heard one other audience member make any noise of humorous appreciation throughout, and even that wasn't enough to make you think the person was watching 'a comedy film'.
I yearn now for those sweet, heady days when I thought that C.H.i.P.s. would be the worst comedy I'd see this year. On the Hollywood career-ladder, The House is a film you make on the way down. Utter, utter shite.
The cruellest touch might be the the eventual and uncomplicated title card proffering the words "THE END" in massive letters, raising the hopes of the audience like a hostage hearing a police siren outside of the building in which they're being held. This card is immediately followed by a slew of shit out-takes from the film, feeling like the siren tailing off down the street to some other crime-scene. To be fair, at least this is a sign that you can leave the room.
Unless you're the lucky holder of ticket "C4", in which case you need no such permission…
In the dysfunctional family of studio-comedy, this is the inbred sibling of Sisters.
No. Absolutely not.
No. Absolutely not.
Amy Poehler is better than this.
Will Ferrell isn't.
I shall ask you, loudly and in a public space, to explain yourself.
There isn't. There was a one in the VW Golf GTE advert which ran immediately before the film, but a) that doesn't count and b) even if it did, this film doesn't deserve for that to count.
Speaking of before-film activities, while two of the trailers which ran in front of The House ('Geostorm' and 'Rough Night') feature no familiar faces from the GFFA, the others were for Logan Lucky (with Adam 'Kylo Ren' Driver), American Made (with Domhnall 'General Hux' Gleeson) and Detroit (with John 'Finn Boyega). And I only mention this because when you think of the difference in subject and tone between those films, it illustrates that the distributors have no fucking clue who's going to be watching The House.
So anyway it's a Level 2: Amy Poehler's in this, and she was the voice of Joy in that Inside Out, alongside John 'Derlin' Ratzenberger, Frank 'Yoda' Oz, Bill 'BB-8' Hader and Jim 'has done voice-work in eight Lucasarts SW video games' Ward.
Yes. One.
*1 I don't facetiously mean myself here, I was in seat B7. [ BACK ]
*2 It's not like I sit there myself like an eager puppy for just under half-an-hour, gazing in awe at TV adverts shown on a big screen. But I'll use that time to check-in on Facebook/Twitter, and on a day like today prepare something to scribble on as I'll be seeing another film almost immediately afterwards. Plus, I enjoy watching the trailers when I've finished arseing about doing all that (more on those trailers later, though). Those twenty-seven minutes are my get in the zone time. [ BACK ]
*3 And the intended get-out from writers Brendan O'Brien and Andrew Jay Cohen seems to be "oh, it's okay because it occurs during a conversation between two teenage girls, so that's okay", irrespective of how flippant and tasteless it would be coming from any character in this film. [ BACK ]
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
Sisters Cert: 15 / 118 mins / Dir. Jason Moore / Trailer
A patience-testing, spirit-sapping Universal Studios autopilot, first-draft, by-the-numbers, shout-fest; hurled out of the project-development suite and left to fend for itself in the theatrical wasteland which is 'not Star Wars' in a desperate attempt to claw back some stray revenue from the 2015 holiday season; produced and performed by two comedians who appear to love the sound of their own voices far more than they favour script editorial meetings, and who even seem embarrassed to deliver their own ad-libs - a feature necessitated by them working with only half a script full of enforced wackiness, laboured shrieking and tissue-thin sentiment; the kind of film which begins with a comedically snooty character being made unexpectedly wet by a lawn sprinkler, and ends up with Dianne Weist dropping the C-bomb for no other reason than securing the film an edgy 15 certificate.
A comedy movie for people who enjoy neither comedy, nor movies.
In short, it's not, actually.
£3 bargain-shelf DVD. Which you then give to someone else, unopened.
No, and that's the most insulting thing. Both Poehler and Fey are far better than this, yet they helped create the damned thing, it's not like they're just using it as a vehicle. But y'know what? I'm an equal-opportunities comedy-snob, so more power to them. Because if Will Ferrell and Kevin Hart can get away with trotting out shit like this, I see no reason why the ladies shouldn't undermine their own careers in exactly the same fashion…
Be a boost to egos of its two stars? I imagine it does.
*head*
*desk*
*head*
*desk*.
Not that I heard.
Well, Amy Poehler performed voice-work for Free Birds, as did George 'Lok Durd' Takei.
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
Inside Out (2D)
Cert: U / 102 mins / Dir. Ronnie Del Carmen & Pete Docter / Trailer
So what happens, right, is that a big-name Pixar movie gets released in the US on, ooh say June the 19th, and is held back for the start of the UK school-holidays until, well about July the 24th or so. Not withstanding the awkward piracy-gap that this creates, the danger is that the audience who've already seen the film let their opinions slip to the ones who haven't, because the world's a pretty small place in the 21st century. This can be potentially damaging to a film and (piracy aside) is one of the reasons that studios generally push for global release dates where they can. Over the course of the last five weeks I hadn't heard a bad word about Inside Out, of course, but this had the opposite effect and had raised my expectations, if anything. And therein lies The Rub™.
The trailer for the movie that's been playing UK cinemas is pretty magnificent. Sharp, sassy, and geared every bit towards grown-up anxieties and foibles as much as those of the kids. A conversation most of us have had at one (or several) point(s) in our lives overlaid with a three-way director's commentary. And brightly-coloured shouty characters, to boot. Like The Numskulls with sarcasm*1. Ace.
And Inside Outis like that, and it is sharp, sassy and (most importantly) funny. But there's also a very subtle film about anxiety, self realisation and even depression and mental illness buried in there somewhere, and it's thoroughly drowned out by everything else that's squeezed into the hour and a half*2. Feeling alone and isolated when she moves from Minnesota to San Francisco with her parents, the film follows 11yr old Riley as she struggles to adapt to a new school and the feelings for the friends she left behind, and the subliminal struggles she faces are enacted by the five facets of her personality, Joy, Anger, Fear, Sadness and Disgust (it's probably worth noting that only one of these aspects could be considered inherently positive, but that really needs analysing in its own post/review).
The majority of the story takes place from Riley's point-of-view, and the Mom/Dad psyches we see in the trailer are largely used for just that one scene. In short, I expected more of the conversational interaction from the rest of the film, so I couldn't help feel a little underwhelmed (by a fantastically written, funny movie, I know). That said, since Riley's inherent traits are direct amalgams of her parents', it's probably just as well as the result could be potentially confusing. Plus, the film is almost bursting as it is, without adding more friction to the dynamic. As entertaining as it all is, the screenplay is a little too fast-paced to be as introspective as it wants, and often tries to spin too many plates at once. The sharp, quickfire script, visual gags and ever-driving plot feel like they're fighting for the audience's attention (because it should be possible to enjoy all three at once, rather than layering the content as if it's filtering out to three different age groups).
If the film was half an hour longer (a big ask in animation, I know), it'd be able to steady its own pace and be an even better movie.
So like, don't get me wrong, Inside Out is a lot of fun and I do recommend it, but I saw it a week ago at an exclusive preview-screening and was um-bongo'd from publishing a review until today, so these niggles have been playing on my mind a bit. It's still very good, though.
It's worth a watch, but you could probably wait until…
…it hits BluRay or DVD.
There's some very accomplished voicework here, and no noticeable stunt-casting.
It just about does, but it's also trying a little too hard to cram it all in.
Nope.
Didn't hear one.
As well as featuring the voice of (cinematic) Yoda himself, Frank Oz, Inside Out also contains the dulcet tones of John Ratzenberger, perhaps best known of course for his role as Major Derlin in The Empire Strikes Back.
*1 Yes, I know referencing The Numskulls is a lazy thing to do since every review of the film will be mentioning it, but the base-similarity is so close that it would be weird not to mention them. Although now I want to work in a reference to Num Skull, even though that would lose most of my readers completely. Yeah, welcome to my brain. Be thankful you don't live here.
*2 As is par for the course with Pixar, the run-time is extended beforehand by the seven-minute short 'Lava', which is every bit as charming as you'd expect. Unless you hate ukuleles, in which case you'll want to punch the nearest stranger.
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
Free Birds (2D) (SPOILERS! …I suppose)
Cert: U / 91 mins / Dir. Jimmy Hayward
Hmmm. If your own publicity machine is going lay first claim on the phrase "turkey movie", you should probably make sure that the knowing irony you're intending it to be read with is justified, otherwise Monday morning's meeting is going to be quite embarrassing when the Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes aggregate scores*1 become the elephant in the room.
Free Birds takes a passable enough premise (two turkeys - one free-range, one battery-farmed - steal a government time-machine to travel back to the first Thanksgiving and prevent the tradition of turkey-eating at the source), and for the most part, wastes it. For the first half of the movie, the script is lifeless and a lot of the gags (visual and scripted) just don't work. Things pick up in the remaining run-time, but it's really too late by then. There's a nice time-travel riff at one point, but it's over-telegraphed to begin with, and then over-explained; I know the movie's aimed at a young audience, but there's really no need to patronise them to this extent.
Elsewhere there are references to Mork & Mindy, Back To The Future, Star Wars and Indiana Jones, executed with varying levels of success. It's not that it's ever "a bad film", but it feels half-arsed. When the screenplay is setting up the time-travel riff, mentioned above, there's also the potential for another extension of it, more along the lines of Looper. Sadly this doesn't happen, and the wasted opportunity to get the younger audience members thinking and introduce some re-watch value is emblematic of the whole film (unless they're going to save that plot-thread for a sequel, of course). There's also the niggle that by altering the historic timeline, however amusing it looks on paper, the characters in the film end up in a version of the world which clearly isn't this one. It might have been a nice destination for the film, to give kids an alternative, fantastical spin on history. Alas, that wasn't to be.
And yet, towering above all of these gripes, for me at least, is the casting. There's no dynamic between the leads of Reggie (Owen Wilson) and Jake (Woody Harrelson). They may as well have read their lines on different days and had them edited together; then again, the script doesn't give them much to play with either. To make matters worse, if you're casting the parts of Big Red Stupid Bird and Small Blue Smart Bird, why would you choose two actors who sound almost identical? It's the animation equivalent of a mismatched-buddy-cop movie starring Mel Gibson and Kevin Costner.
Free Birds is a nice idea, thoroughly underdeveloped. Audiences deserve better, and luckily they probably won't have to wait too long to get it.
Largely.
Not as much as I wanted to.
For a UK audience, no. Even for a US audience it's doubful..
DVD at best.
No.
I shouldn't imagine so.
There isn't.
*1 38% and 19% respectively, at the time of writing. Ouch.
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
