Now, it would be unfair to compare Olivia Wilde's directorial debut Booksmart with the 2008 comedy, Superbad from the off. That said, Booksmart is very much like Superbad from the off, so they started it.
Set in the present, we open on the day before high school graduation, in which best friends Molly (Beanie Feldstein) and Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) realise that in studying hard to pass their exams, they've missed out on a whole lot of fun - not least because many of their contemporaries have been partying all year and have still managed to achieve similarly impressive grades. With this in mind, the pair decide to attend the one end-of-year party that everyone will be at, including their prospective crushes, in a last hurrah before Summer and college-life beckon. But getting to the party will be an adventure in itself, as Molly and Amy discover the wild side of town that's been out every night while they've been studying...
HEROINES Even without our heroines being hormonally charged, socially awkward misfits who attract misfortune as easily as they do ridicule and the party Macguffin lending a sense of foreboding impatience throughout, yeah this is largely Superbad. But given that Greg Mottola's coming-of-age bromance is very much near the top of a crowded pile of teen-comedies (and is now over a decade old, obviously), that's neither an unusual nor a bad thing. Writing the movie around young women rather than young men is a great chance to show that dorkiness and bad decision making are gender-blind, and the audience should be likewise.
However. With Susanna Fogel, Emily Halpern, Sarah Haskins and Katie Silberman all on screenplay duty, Booksmart is certainly a crowded and chaotic affair, often suffering the same haphazard focusing problems as any movie with a quartet of authors. As a result, it often feels like Olivia Wilde struggles with the full grip of a script this busy. This feels like it would be a director's second or even third film - that Wilde has produced this straight out of the gate shows her ambition and commitment, if nothing else.
COCAINES Because Booksmart begins pretty much 'on 10', there's no time to really get to know the central characters before we're thrown in at the deep end of their lives. And as we're then finding our way with Molly and Amy, much of the first act seems like white noise as we try to get up to speed.
The script isn't as consistently funny as it would perhaps like to think, although it's frequently charming even when deliberately trying to rub the viewer up the wrong way. There's a constant battle between being an emotionally candid snapshot of teenage turbulence, and not wanting to let go of the gross-out fratboy comedy roots. The film is most enjoyable when it's speaking with its own voice.
HARIBO TANGFASTICS Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever are that voice, their chemistry effortlessly selling the nonsense, bickering, sarcasm and upfront love between best friends of any age. They are very much the Seth and Evan of this piece. Although not to be upstaged, Billie Lourd has a borderline scene-stealing role as Gigi, a psychotic party animal who's to be found around every corner waiting to make things worse. And for my money, the animated sequence in the middle could have gone on for longer. I could feel the audience's nervous confusion in the room, and I loved that.
Booksmart is bigger than the indie-energy which runs through its veins and onto the screen with abrasive camaraderie, but it's nowhere near polished or accessible enough to be a breakout hit with its cinematic release. Hopefully this will find its audience once it hits disc/streaming, but even then it's more likely to be a cult-favourite at Logan Lucky levels, rather than The Big Lebowski.
But hey, some movies aren't built to be taken too seriously, that just happens around them. Go see Booksmart and just enjoy it for the haphazard ride...
It's a bit like Superbad (I think we've covered that), with notes of Clerks and Mid90s.
Eighth Grade wishes it had this film's heartfelt adrenaline.
If you're in the right frame of mind, it is.
It is.
Difficult to say, but it should be at the top of everyone's CV.
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.
If anything, I find it surprising that a politically-framed film so intent on recycling its joke about focus-grouping appears to have landed in cinemas without undergoing any test screenings itself. Or perhaps it did and what we saw tonight was a last-ditch attempt to fashion a hybrid which satisfies everyone before sacking the whole thing off and going to the pub, deadlines-be-damned. But I'm getting ahead of myself...
The phrase "all over the place" has become an easy go-to in recent times, round this parish as surely as any other. It can feel overused, in lieu of deconstructing the internal combative forces jostling for position within a movie, and when further analysis seems futile or overwhelming. But occasionally a title really steps up to the bar to claim full and rightful ownership of that sobriquet.
Long Shot really is all over the fucking place.
SECRETARY
So, Charlize Theron plays Charlotte Field, Secretary of State for the US government, ridiculously capable in her job but finding it increasingly difficult in a world which won't take female politicians seriously - especially if they're attractive. As she runs for President, this becomes a major problem. Seth Rogen plays Fred Flarsky, a recently-resigned investigative journalist who writes great copy, but has no social filters. The former used to babysit for the latter when they were younger. Work throws them together, a faltering, odd couple romance blossoms, the powers-that-be disapprove, politics gets in the way, some things explode, there's some crying, and Seth's character is shown jerking off into his own beard. Yeah, they didn't put that in the trailer.
Which leads us to the crux of the problem. That trailer isn't sure what kind of film it's trying to sell. A sassy romantic comedy? A political satire? A light action-movie? Who knows. It's reflective of the finished movie at any rate. It spins far too many plates in a bid to show how clever it is, coming off as an unfocused mess as a result. At its core, this is a comedy - and there are plenty of laugh-out-loud funny moments in there. They just feel like sketches which were assembled after the fact.
The political element is particularly worrisome. While Field's denomination is never openly addressed, the sitting President Chambers (Bob Odenkirk) is depicted as a terminally stupid TV star who's fumbled his way into the top job and is now bored half way through his first term and is looking to make the shift into movies. He's manipulated at every turn by the white-haired right-wing media mogul Parker Wembley (Andy Serkis), the owner of newspapers and TV channels who enjoys a direct line to the Oval Office and wants to keep things that way.
In terms of satire, Long Shot isn't so much delivered with a scalpel as a cricket bat.
CRASH Seth Rogen is great, although Seth Rogen very usually is. Anyone likely to struggle with that aspect shouldn't bother at all, frankly. His bewildered everyman persona (if 'every man' just wants to get wasted and forget about how complicated the world is) is a constant thread throughout the haphazard fabric of the film. Similarly, Theron gives it her very best as the straight-man archetype to Rogen's clown. Viewers of Arrested Development already know Charlize has a natural talent for deadpan humour, and she displays it with perfection here. But that comedic performance requires building a wall between the character and the audience, a separate aloofness, a barrier to sympathy. And that becomes a bit of a problem when the character turns into a slightly repressed one-note gag.
And so we limp along as screenwriters Dan Sterling and Liz Hannah frantically try to find an appropriate gear, one step away from going full SNL, the early-90s nostalgia employing two full scenes soundtracked by the same Roxette song - as if overtly referencing a classic movie is the same as writing one. By the time we get to the third act, Long Shot actually has the audacity to lecture its audience on open political dialoguing and the crossing of social barriers. Almost as if it forgets that up until five minutes earlier it was quite content being a Liberal Hollywood™ wank-fantasy. Literally. All that's left is realisation, a heartfelt stick-it-to-the-man speech (complete with an actual mic-drop, naturally) and the race-across-town for this to be every piece of shit rom-com from the last thirty years.
The film has long since stopped trying and doesn't care when you noticed.
KEYS TO TULSA Twenty years ago, Long Shot would have starred Adam Sandler and been absolutely dreadful. Going back ten, Jason Segel would have landed the role in a production which felt horribly misguided. The weird thing is, the Seth Rogen version of this film is probably the best that can be made. And it's still not good enough. It wants to be Forgetting Sarah Marshall meets Vice, but has the insight and commitment of neither.
Long Shot is so busy trying to be all things to all audiences in a desperate play for relevance that nobody involved seems to have realised there's no actual message at the core of it all. How very 2019.
Do you remember how scattershot and unfocused Gringo was? Well, that..
It is not.
Stream it, but if you give up after half an hour I'll completely understand.
For the cast? Fuck no.
For director Jonathan Levine? Still fucking no.
That said, Boyz II Men cameo as themselves here, which will leave you wishing for the hardest first-act nuclear strike since UB40 rocked up in Speed 2…
I'd say that's likely.
I thought there was at one point, but let's go with no.
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.
Okay, I'll cut straight to the chase. DreamWorks' latest animated offering The Boss Baby is either one of the blandest films I've ever seen, or one of the absolute darkest.
But let's deal with the first one first…
Ostensibly, the film is a comedy about sibling rivalry, particularly the one-sided variety which occurs when a new baby arrives in an already established family unit. The film's narrator and protagonist, Tim, is the only one not taken in by his new little brother's abundant cuteness, suspecting something's afoot with his odd 'when people aren't looking' behaviour. When Tim discovers that the infant works for the BabyCorp organisation and does indeed have a secret agenda, they begrudgingly reach an agreement to work together, in an animated re-imagining of the mismatched buddy-cop framework.
The problem is that other than slapstick and sight-gags, the film is inherently boring. The young protagonists start out as being equally irritating, and while their gradual character development eases this, it's executed in a way which is clichéd and perfunctory. The entire film works to a formula established by far more incisive and solid entries to cinematic canon, namely Toy Story and Despicable Me. And the goodwill of the former seems to be plundered by proxy as the set-props include digitally rendered versions of Rock'Em Sock'Em Robots, the Fisher-Price Chatter Telephone and bizarrely, a Skeletor action-figure (albeit one which doesn't feature the character's face, but is still definitely Skeletor). At a script-level, there are copyright-skirting references to Lord of the Rings and Mary Poppins, hoping to raise a smile with the older members of the audience.
But the mechanical and derivative nature of the storytelling is nothing compared to the presentation. The film has a sort of kitsch, Americana 1960s-sitcom aesthetic which is never fully realised thanks to the lacklustre Big Studio Animation™ production design. Truth be told, the all-too-brief Samurai Jack and popup-book vignettes are more interesting than anything else we see here. The generic pastel textures and oversize heads are the staples of background characters in other movies, but are applied across the board for this outing. We get an unremarkable animated baby in a business-suit and that's it. That's the joke. None of the characters have any... well, character, other than that one central conceit being stretched to within an inch of its life.
I suspect there's more than a bit of post-Trump satire*1 going on with The Baby's*2 high-powered business mannerisms and soundbites. Although since we're not yet in a post-Trump era, it feels worryingly out of place in a movie that plays things safe in almost every other area (or does it? see below). I'm not a parent and I'm not a child*3, so maybe that's the source of my disconnect. But I'm the older brother of a younger sister and I don't remember feeling any of the jealous anxiety that the film plays on (and it certainly didn't unearth any suppressed tensions). Maybe there's more to the emotional root of this film than the final presentation is letting on (again, see below).
The narrative juxtaposition between storytelling, memory, fantasy and reality is interesting, but never becomes more than a wry aside in the vein of 'don't kids do the funniest things?'. At one point in its development, I think The Boss Baby was probably quite a smart movie. I can only imagine that over-development resulted in the final product which underwhelmed me so. By the time you attach a main voice-cast who are now firmly in the B-List stage of their careers, it makes you wonder how much gas DreamWorks have left in the animation-tank…
The Boss Baby is a little bit funny and a little bit charming, but due to it having absolutely no personality, the film will disappear without trace. And thankfully so.
+ + + + +
…and then towards the end of the film, it began occurring to me how thematically distressing this all is. Narrated by the adult-Tim, the story exaggerates and undercuts the 'real' world frequently, showing the audience that the adventure playing out before the their eyes is a representation, rather than a documentary (obviously, but still). The white, tranquil pseudo-Heaven that we see at the beginning of the film, the literal in-story factory where children are manufactured and assigned to families if they're smiley (or behind-the-scenes 'management' if they're serious), is an established cinematic shorthand for the infamous "where do babies come from?" question.
So the Boss Baby comes into Tim's suburban life from this environment, and the boys' parents try continually to help them both get along, despite being initially and mutually distrustful. Over the course of the film, the brothers then begin to bond, working toward a common goal until they appreciate each other not in spite of their differences, but because of them. Then, with their mission accomplished, it's time for Boss Baby to return to headquarters. The farewell between the boys is bittersweet and sincere, but the same heartache isn't put upon their parents, as the Baby's minions are called upon to magically wipe their memories and remove all evidence of Boss Baby's presence in the house. Photographs are altered, toys cleared away, and life goes back to normal. The only person left in the house with knowledge of the story's events by this point is Tim. Looking down from his office, Boss Baby reflects on the lessons he's learned and decides he's ready to try the 'giggle test' again. This time he passes and is assigned to Tim's parents, being brought home as a new baby. The film ends with the three-part family being expanded to four, and Tim having the knowledge and experience to accept his new sibling from the off.
So towards the end of the film, it began occurring to me that this entire story which Tim has constructed is a coping-strategy for his first little-brother dying as an infant (probably from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, but perhaps even some awful accident when the children were beating the crap out of each other), and the associated feelings of guilt and self-loathing brought on by not being welcoming to him in the first place. Tim has convinced himself that he eventually got on with the baby and engineered absolution in that he 'had to go back to Heaven'. His parents never spoke about the baby after the fact, which is why they removed all of the photographs and playthings from the house, leaving Tim's young brain to wonder over time how much of it he'd imagined, in a state of untreated, borderline-hallucinatory PTSD. When the parents conceive and produce a third child, they effectively treat it as their lost second one. And while it's certainly true that the story has a happy ending, it's not without an undertow of denial and absolute anguish.
None of this appears to be mentioned in the original book's Wiki entry or subsequent glowing reviews of course, but that's what I took away from the story. Although it's true my glass is often Half-Empty™.
So like I said, either the film is offensively bland, or horrifically dark. And given the U-rating and medium in which it's all delivered, I didn't particularly enjoy it either way…
Level 2: This film features the voice of Alec Baldwin of course and he was in 1990's The Hunt For Red October, alongside James Earl 'Vader' Jones and Tim 'Palpatine' Curry.
*1 Albeit the kind of broad-strokes satire you get on Saturday Night Live... #ComedySnob [BACK]
*2 Seriously though, the IMDB (and Google at large) just lists him as "Boss Baby". Has the actual, central character of this film not even got a name? Worse still, was the rest of the movie so overpoweringly bland that I didn't notice this at the time? I mean, it's quite often than I don't remember names of film characters once I'm out in the cinema foyer; I see it as a screenplay's commitment to making an audience actually care about what they're watching. But if the name of The Boss Baby is so unimportant (or worse still, if he deliberately hasn't got one), that makes the second-half of this review even more worrying... [BACK]
*3 Although Toys R Us and The Entertainer appear often enough on my card statements that you'd be forgiven for wondering. [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.
Now you could go to see The Girl On The Train and compare it, perhaps unfavourably, to last year's Gone Girl. Alternatively, you could make the same comparison after watching the trailer and save yourself two hours*1...
Troubled commuter Rachel gazes out of the train window every day, imagining the details of the perfect lives of strangers. But when one such subject, Megan Hepwell*2, goes missing, a police investigation turns up unexpected connections between the two and unearths more uncertainty than it resolves...
Tate Taylor's adaptation of the best-selling novel runs in dual timelines, each slowly filling in the past and the present, intertwining to paint a full picture (yeah, like Gone Girl). And that's fine, but the drawback is that the past of the core players becomes much more important (and more interesting) than their present/future. Despite a sizeable secondary and tertiary cast-list, there are really only five characters in the story (and one of them's dead for most of it. Spoilers), so when the curtain is lifted on the final reveal it works, but you could imagine three other versions of the film showing different outcomes and being just as convincing. With this in mind, it's probably not unfair to say that the performances in The Girl On The Train are far better than the film itself.
Speaking of which, Emily Blunt's performance in particular is far better than everyone else's. I was initially concerned that she opens the film basically 'turned up to 10' as neurotic alcoholic Rachel, because where do you take things from there? But to her eternal credit, as the film slowly digs deeper and piles up tension around the character, Blunt sustains her unhinged intensity perfectly. Haley Bennett and Rebecca Ferguson both put in strong turns, albeit with slightly flimsier characters; Justin Theroux and Edgar Ramírez chew the scenery slightly as one-note placeholders (in a nice reversal of typical Hollywood gender-typecasting); and Luke Evans seems to have peaked for the year, so is back to comedy-scowling and failing to control an accent in a built-up screenplay. Bless him.
All in all, The Girl On The Train is a pretty good thriller. It's just nowhere near as groundbreaking or insightful as it seems to hope it is*3.
It's not essential to your enjoyment of the film, no.
I think so, but it's not trying to reinvent the genre or anything.
Blunt is on top form here, with reliably solid support.
Nah.
Nah.
Level 2: You remember when that Emily Blunt was in Wild Target with that Ewan 'Kenobi' McGregor? Well, she was…
*1 That joke stolen wholesale and unashamedly from Mr Stewart Lee.
*2 Although Megan's life isn't that perfect, is it? Water-view from her balcony or not, she's still got a commuter-level train track running past the bottom of the garden. Good luck trying to get a lie-in with that racket going on…
*3 Although it's nice that when you find out who-did-it, there's no deep psychological layering to explore. It's just "yeah, because [person] is an arsehole, mate". Which is probably far, far closer to most real-life cases of this type, I'm guessing. Fair play.
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.
Bad Neighbours 2 (or "Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising" if you're not in the UK)
Cert: 15 / 92 mins / Dir. Nicholas Stoller / Trailer
In the opening 60 seconds of Bad Neighbours 2, Rose Byrne's character is sick onto the face of Seth Rogen's character*1 while they're having sex. Now, this early on in the proceedings you should still be able to nip back out to the ticket-counter and ask for a refund*2 before spending the following ninety minutes doing something more productive and/or rewarding. As an added bonus, you can still tell people you've watched Bad Neighbours 2, because that scene is a perfect crystallisation of everything which is to follow…
So, a couple of years after the events of Bad Neighbours, Seth and Rose find themselves expecting another child (which serves as the paper-thin excuse for the aforementioned emetical joke), so are looking to upgrade to a larger home. Next door's frat-house from the first movie has fallen into disrepair, its inhabitants having moved out after graduation (the main core of which return for this film in separately filmed scenes, presumably written and added well into post-production). But the sale of the Seth and Rose's house is threatened when Zac Efron helps Chloë Grace Moretz*3 set up a sorority house next door for plot reasons! The girls move in and have parties and are noisy and outrageous and it upsets their adult neighbours, not because they're old and stuffy but because it reminds them they're slipping into middle-age! Yes, again. No, it is a different film because this time it's girls living next door instead of guys and this one's got a '2' at the end of the title, so it's definitely different. And anyone who says it's the same three jokes as last time for another hour and a half is lying! Or has seen both films.
Some of you might expect the replacement of a fraternity with a sorority to be used as a device to let the female performers take the narrative lead and maybe show the guys how it's done! Some of you would be disappointed. The only real feint towards equality here is that all of the characters are equally awful, and are treated as such. "I'm sick of guys telling us what to do!" says Chloë to her two sorority co-founders, not five minutes after the trio had been told what to do by about 100 of their female contemporaries, necessitating the new group in the first place. This level of social oneupmanship continues throughout the film (in exactly the same way that it didn't when it was guys living next door) and is almost completely unresolved. Any messages the film tries to impart relating to either gender or generational divides are as incoherent as they are insincere.
Other than the thematic-collander and recycled story, it's slapstick, weed references and knob-jokes all round*4. A few of these land well, but can't excuse the vehicle used to deliver them. But hey, the other two people in the auditorium laughed heartily throughout the film, so I'm clearly in a minority, statistically at least. Nothing new there, either.
Much like the film's opening scene, Bad Neighbours 2 is Universal's comedy department vomiting into the mouth of their audience whilst simultaneously fucking them and telling everyone it's funny.
Maybe it is, I suppose it depends on where you're sitting...
The first one.
This is a £3 DVD (and not a good one), inexplicably playing in your local multiplex at a 300%+ markup..
…annoy me? Yes.
No.
Yes.
No.
Level 1: Dormé's in it.
*1 Do the characters have names? I have no idea. I mean, they're barely even characters...
*2 By this point you will have already sat through the trailer for the Mother's Day. Those three minutes alone entitle you to a bit of your money back.
*3 When the acclaimed actress Chloë Grace Moretz signed on to star in The Equalizer, I imagine she did it as a gesture of goodwill, not least since she'd be working with Oscar-winner Denzel Washington. The end-result of course was that she had a very small role in a slightly lacklustre action movie, but there was no real harm done, either to the genre, box office figures or her career. Likewise, Chloë's performance as Hit-Girl in the well-received Kick-Ass more or less assured her place in its somewhat underwhelming sequel. But again, I think we can all see the logic which went into her autograph at the foot of the contract. But what chain of events has lead to an undeniably promising young performer, whose best work should yet be ahead of her, appearing in the lazy, unasked-for sequel to a charmless, unwarranted original? At what point in her life was CGM chilling out on a Saturday night with a bunch of friends, when she sat bolt upright on the sofa and pointed, spellbound, at one of Seth Rogen's also-ran movies and gasped "That! I want to be in THAT! Get my agent on the phone! Are they making a sequel? Can I FINANCE a sequel just to be a canonical part of this cinematic saga??". Because there's little-enough reason for the main cast to leave the house for this dross without besmirching the CVs of even more people, too.
*4 To the film's credit, there's a pretty good Insidious 2 joke in there, which is executed with more subtlety and wit than the rest of the movie put together. That's it, though.
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.
