Apathy on the Bounty.

She hates him. He hates her. They drive each other crazy… Of COURSE they get back together; it’s a White American Romantic Comedy. Did you expect you’d have to use your brain to follow an actual plot or something? All I ask is that you don’t puke on my shoes. I’m having a hard enough time cleaning off my own puke.

Gerard Butler (the Man’s Man) and Jennifer Aniston (the Man’s Woman) star in this fluffy romantic comedy about bounty hunter Milo assigned to pick up his ex-wife Nicole for skipping bail. Okay, we’ll grant that premise, because there are definite laughs in the pain you can inflict on your ex whether you are the hunter OR the lammer. But the convoluted, implausible means by which the filmmakers arrive at this scenario is enough to make you break the Geneva Convention ruling on torture.

We can imagine the greenlighting execs laying out their conditions:

Poff the Bounty Hunter

“Make sure her warrant is for a really innocent charge so we don’t alienate our demo.”
Check.
“Make her mug shot look frothy-perky.”
Check.
“And make sure she’s investigating a murder case, so that not turning up for her court date is not seen as hubris from a spoiled smokin’ hottie.”
Check.
“Oh, and make sure we can see her thighs in every scene.”
Sorry, what did you say? I was looking at Jennifer Aniston’s thighs…

And with Butler and Aniston being so fit and watchable, the movie annoys us with its deprecation of them. In a scene where they infiltrate an exclusive golf club, Nicole (comedically undercover) says to the snooty receptionist, “I was a former model,” and the wizened cow of a receptionist remarks disdainfully, “Oh, how long ago was that?” Excuse me, but are you looking at that woman with the breasts staring you down and the waist you can encircle with just the palms of your hands? At the same club, Milo can’t catch a running caddy, breathlessly quipping, “He’s got twenty years on me!” That may be so, but after we’ve seen Butler’s Spartan bod in a bath towel, we realize he could run down a panther without breaking a sensual, woman-juice sweat, so we just don’t buy that he can’t catch a nerdy caddy who probably spends more time on X-Box than dating. The same deprecation occurs in COUPLES RETREAT (where three spinner hardbodies are shy about revealing themselves in bikinis). People complain of the media setting unattainable beauty standards, then we are shown near-perfect specimens in these movies – and the near-perfect specimens are complaining! What now, thunder thighs?

Christine Baranski (THE GOOD WIFE) is Nicole’s avant-garde actress mum who just wants a quick phone-pic of Milo’s butt, Jeff Garlin (CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM) is Milo’s henpecked boss, and Jason Sudeikis (THE ROCKER) is a co-worker of Nicole’s with an unrelenting crush on her, not helping his chances with that child-molester ‘stache.

Small pockets of good dialogue and funny situations, all arrived at by slogging through quicksand of bad dialogue and unfunny situations.

As sexually stimulating as it is to speculate stickily at what’s just one inch above Aniston’s hemline, and as cheeky dynamite as Butler is in the re-pursuit of his ex-wife for monetary gain, it’s not enough to base a movie on, so writer Sarah Thorp and director Andy Tennant subplot a murder that Jennifer’s reporter is investigating, and Butler goes along for the ride because… well, those thighs…

END

Bohemian Crapsody.

Ooh, look out, you rock and rollers!
Pretty soon now you’re gonna get older.
— David Bowie, Changes.

Even though THE ROCKER is about a middle-aged rock drummer who sees a second stab at fame with his young nephew’s band, it is mostly for nerds who need to get laid by pretending to be rock stars.

Rainn Wilson, fresh from his stint on Steve Carell’s inferior-to-Gervais’s THE OFFICE, does a bang-up job as drummer Robert “Fish” Fishman, whose 80s hair-band, Vesuvius, cracked superstardom soon after they kicked Fish out of the band. The opening scene of Fish being sacked is unnaturally funny (featuring Fred Armisen – “Obama” on Saturday Night Live – as the bassist in Vesuvius), its over-the-top lunacy promising a film that laughs in the face of arena rock and loogies on the Aquanetted hair of fame.

Instead, THE ROCKER turns down the volume as if the neighbors are complaining.

Twenty years after his sacking, Fish is jobless, living in his sister’s (Jane Lynch) attic, near Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, watching bitterly as Vesuvius is on everyone’s playlist with yet another chart-topping album.

Fish finds an outlet for his hair-metal flamboyance and inappropriate nakedness in his nephew’s band, A.D.D. – who ask him to drum with them out of desperation only to find their boring GenX style does not quite mesh with Fish’s energy and excitability.

A.D.D., led by Fish’s nephew, dork keyboardist Matt (Josh Gad), is a study in everything wrong with kids today in bands, i.e. they don’t have a clue. (Did I just say, “kids today”? How old must I be to say that with impunity?) And it hurts my skull how it is so obvious the film-makers (director Peter Cattaneo and writers, Maya Forbes, Wallace Wolodarsky and Ryan Jaffe) don’t have a clue on how to make these youngsters seem like they have a clue. Without turning on PlayStation 3.

Poffy the Naked Drummer

Keep BBRRETENDING, kids – wait until you get onstage and find that you can’t watch a TV screen and press buttons to make music; wait until you realize you have to learn songs and practice to make a band go; wait until there’s a crowd staring blankly at you and you have to ad-lib to keep them amused, at the least, interested; wait until you put your mouth to a mic attached to a real P.A. and it picks up every breath, every subtle missed note, every nuance, every pop and sssibilance sibilanccce…At least the movie represents that it’s hard to get a gig. Because it is. And the band only score a national tour through a chance YouTube debacle involving The Naked Drummer.

Rainn Wilson can really play his drums, so looks comfortable behind a kit onstage, and I would wager he’s beaten the boards in his share of hippie bands; yet none of the other players are worth throwing tomatoes at: lead guitarist/ songwriter/ vocalist, Curtis (Teddy Geiger) is a real-life artist, but never puts his mouth close enough to the mic onstage to obscure his pretty face for the director; Josh Gad drives keyboardists down dweeb highway back into the dork ages, with his useless miming and gutless personality; and bassist Amelia (Emma Stone, SUPERBAD) channels Tia Carrera from WAYNE’S WORLD with her faux-picking and arbitrary non-chords on the bass neck, while completely forgetting she’s on Earth only to procreate, not pretend to have musical talent.

Christina Applegate is already a MILF! (The shelf-life of women as procreationists is so short! And Sean Connery is still man-meat!) She’s Fish’s love interest – the mom who improbably falls for the shiftless hooligan for no reason other than the script says so.

A remixed, meaty version of Twisted Sister’s I Wanna Rock heralds the start of the band’s road trip, which culminates in a big concert supporting Fish’s old band, Vesuvius, who are now so successful they speak in British accents. A.D.D. goes onstage as a support act with the full lightshow and impeccable sound – since when have asshole headliner road crews been so supportive? (Once again, the filmmakers displaying NO CLUE on how the rock scene really operates.)

THE ROCKER touches briefly on its promise in many places – it is at least as enjoyable as watching Poison have arguments onstage – but delivers a sappy ending that ruins every promise of comedy, musicality, and faith in humankind. With lame, angst-ridden GenX songs ten years too late to be fashionable, there is every indication A.D.D. are on their way to superstardom – because the script says so.

Fish gets the MILF, the dork keyboardist gets his virgin organ smoked, and guitarist Curtis falls for bassist Amelia, as if they are some kind of soul-mate pairing, rather than the high maintenance headache Curtis has just derailed his career with. Here’s the long road ahead, broken down: he spends time writing in his studio, she complains she has needs; he screws her every night, she complains he only wants sex; a fan looks at him lustfully, she won’t attend rehearsals; he doesn’t look at other girls, she complains he is too attached to her; he writes a song with another girl’s name in it, she refuses to play it; he writes a song about her, she complains it makes her look needy; he pays all the bills, she gripes she feels like a groupie whore; they go dutch, she whines that a Real Man would pay for everything; he wants to go on tour, she wants to have kids…

This ain’t rock and roll. This – is genocide!

END

Domo Arigato, Mr Roboto!

Earth. 700 years in the desolate future. A small robot that looks like E.T. crossed with the Mars Rover Sojourner blissfully rolls along on little tank treads, compacting trash into cubes that he builds into towering trash skyscrapers. He is a Waste Allocation Load Lifter, Earth class – WALL-E.

Poff-E

Humankind has abandoned the ravaged Earth, leaving only their refuse behind, which stretches into orbit like filthy facsimiles of Saturn’s rings; a dystopian, disturbing, Terry Gilliam-like vision, tempered by a smarmy CEO (Fred Willard, the first live human integrated into Pixar animation) entreating us with space as the final frontier, in holograms re-playing to dead cityscapes.

WALL-E is the last of his kind – broken-down WALL-E’s litter the blighted garbage-land. Unmindful of the dead planet, he plies his trade in simple joy. On his time off, he fills a cooler with artifacts, retiring to a derelict trailer each night (with a free-roaming pet cockroach) where he files everything, while watching HELLO DOLLY on VHS and yearning for tactile contact.

Pixar Studios have slammed another one right outa the park! Written and directed by Andrew Stanton (FINDING NEMO, 2003), WALL-E is one of the few original movies this season (not a sequel or remake or derived from a TV show). How does Pixar craft these ingenious, inventive nuggets (where each viewing reveals new discoveries)? Their movies and characters are imbued with so much energy and verve, authenticity hits our nerves in all the right g-spots. A combination of effective storyline, unbridled 3D animation and cuteness so contagious it’ll burn your breakfast.

One day a thunderous spaceship lands, and leaves behind a sleek, pill-shaped “female” robot named EVE (Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator), with a lethal power-blast right hook. Her mission: to find Life on Earth. (Waiter, there’s a little iron in my irony.)

WALL-E immediately falls in love. Or at least rusty lust.

So begins a wondrous, accidental journey for WALL-E and EVE, back to the AXIOM, the spaceship housing all Humankind. By bringing back a lone plant, EVE signals Humankind may safely walk the Earth again. But there is a slight problem: over seven centuries, Humankind have become hover-chair blobs, insensate slaves to Big Brother holo-screens in front of their triple-chinned faces – Humankind can’t think anymore, let alone walk, their bones and muscles atrophied.

Again, the horror of this totalitarian society might have slapped us in the BRAZIL bone was it not for the Pixar team injecting robot buffoonery at every pixel.

EVE’s plant becomes the symbol for freedom and sparks a power struggle between the ship’s evil computer (voiced by Sigourney Weaver), who wants to destroy the green and continue cruising amongst the black, and the AXIOM Captain (a more cognizant blob than the passengers, voiced by Jeff Garlin), who is aided by WALL-E and EVE in potting the plant to drive the ship Earthward.

And this is why Republicans are outraged! As juvenile and unbelievable as it sounds, the duplicitous, traitorous, treasonous swine of the Republican Klan of George W. Bush’s Amerika vilify WALL-E for its “message.” And what “message” are they protesting?…

The ship’s Manual instructs a return to Earth when organic life is found, yet the ship’s evil computer has been instructed by Fred Willard to “Stay the Course” (Willard’s exact words!) instead of ever returning to Earth if “conditions on the ground change.” Sound familiar? Exactly! Though there is no intent to analogize Iraq and George W. McCain, the plotline accidentally highlights how unutterably asinine the McBush-Cheney administration’s foreign policies are, with their claims of “The Surge Is Working but Stay The Course to guarantee Safety Of Our Troops, unless Conditions On The Ground Change, for When Iraq Stands Up, We Will Stand Down, but not if that sovereign country we’ve invaded (to bring democracy to) democratically TELLS us to leave, because we can’t guarantee Safety Of Our Troops (even though LEAVING will definitely guarantee Safety Of Our Troops), because Leaving = Surrender and we Never Surrender, against Those Who Attacked Us (even though Iraq never attacked us)…” Sound confusing? Then the Terrorists Win (the terrorists being the thugs of the Ku McBush-Cheney Klan, of course)…

Only the insane are offended by the insanity of the ship’s computer, who Stays The Course supposedly for the good of Humankind, while keeping Humankind blind to the actual good it can bring upon itself.

The Earth, after a Republican presidency.

Trust the Repubs to focus on this paradox of their own laughable design, while the movie gets away with so many other anomalies:

1. Anthropomorphism: when EVE fires on WALL-E, he cowers and shivers. Why do humans shiver? Because our adrenalin is pumping for Fight Or Flight – has robotics advanced to the point of installing non-utility adrenal glands in cleanup robots?
2. Computerized beings desiring company and holding hands: organic life seeks to replicate its genes. “Holding hands” and “love” precipitates continuance; they are means to an end – but with robots, holding hands IS the “end.” The last shot shows them touching foreheads and holding hands – how nice – now what? Metal coupling? To what purpose?
3. The ship’s “gravity”: the evil computer takes over, slams its steering wheel left and tilts the spaceship (!), making all the blobby humans careen to one side… er, how? Artificial gravity is created by a spaceship’s axial spin. Since this ship is not spinning, gravity has nothing to do with the direction of the ship’s steering wheel.
4. Deep space exodus: why the economic stupidity of piloting a spaceship into deep space, even though it plans to return to Earth eventually? There are two stable Lagrange Points (L4 and L5) on Earth’s orbit where a ship could perch without any fuel expenditure at all, and would eradicate the need to traverse billions of miles through theoretical hyperspace and wormholes on the return trip.

Of course, I only mention these anomalies because I am a stickler for educative fiction. If WALL-E caused even one Republican’s refried brain to reconsider their satanic party’s non-ethics, I say:

“Thank you very much, Mr. Robot!”

END

Not Much Fun with Dick and Jane.

To say that Adam Sandler is turning into a mediocre actor is a compliment of the highest order. To say the same thing about Jim Carrey is a tragedy for American Cinema.

Not exactly a “boring” movie – but FUN WITH DICK AND JANE (remade from the 1977 movie of the same name with George Segal and Jane Fonda) does not possess enough substance to squeeze out an entertaining review. Somebody wake me when this typing is done…

An upwardly-mobile family suddenly find themselves in a downwardly-spiraling tailspin. Both Dick Harper (Carrey) and his wife Jane (the simply stunning Téa Leoni) are out of work and so down on their luck that they turn to crime to pay the bills and retain their yuppie materialism. And we don’t need more than one hand to count the big laughs.

Veteran television director, Dean Parisot, with writers Judd Apatow, Nicholas Stoller and Peter Tolan, move the film at a breakneck pace, which leaves no time to question the childish plot or examine the one-dimensionality of the characters, coaxing about as many nervous titters and strained giggles as your average TV comedy, with the actors constantly reaching for gags that get away.

And there lies the problem: this is “your average TV comedy” writ large and tedious. Key word: average. Mediocre. Nice. Unexceptional. Okay. Beige. Vanilla. Very Un-Carrey.

See Poffy Steal

To this point in his career, Jim Carrey has not insulted us with “average” in any of his diverse roles. Even the seemingly mundane THE MAJESTIC saw him produce some of his finest “straight” dramatic moments on film. In DICK AND JANE he is floundering in a script written for a lesser comedian – maybe someone mid-beige, like his co-star from the devilishly wry THE CABLE GUY, Matthew Broderick, but not quite as American Ugly as a Rob Schneider or a Tom Arnold.

Carrey’s talents are still potent, evidenced in snatches like the Hendrix air-guitar-voicebox scene, and a scene where he plays a puppet, while drunk (on half a beer), these scenes only highlighting his lack of anything to do in the rest of the movie. He even spoofs his own acting talents in a scene where he reaches such a level of desperation that tears well up in his eyes as he tries to exact reparations directly from his CEO at gunpoint. Not one minute after the intense moment, he is laughingly boasting to his wife, “Did you see how I made my eyes water?”

There are intimations that the recession hindering Dick and Jane finding gainful employment is a George W. Bush phenomenon. But the movie is not a Bush-bash – if you blink, you miss the connection. There are grander issues at stake here – snide contradictions about morality and the ethics of crime.

For one brief moment, Dick contemplates prostituting Jane as a means to get by. Of course, in a PG-13 film, the female is required to act outraged at this suggestion – then she turns to burglary without a moment’s hesitation! Burglary, like prostitution, is illegal; like prostitution, immoral, and like prostitution, demoralizing. Unlike prostitution (which is a misdemeanor), burglary is a felony. (If Dick actually pimped Jane, he would be a felon.) These two desperadoes are painted as Good Christians trying to feed their son and keep their house, yet the same “christians” in the audience who would frown on prostitution, readily embrace burglary as a viable comedic device. Yet, if Dick and Jane are on the route of immorality – “immorality” as denoted by their society’s strictures – they might as well have turned to prostitution as a means to an end, for with Jane being such a magma-hot tamale, she could have easily clocked thousands of dollars a day escorting high-class businessmen, thereby achieving the goal of Quick Cash less illegally.

The movie tells us – snidely, of course – that dressing as a Blues Brother and armed robbing of a bank, or stealing a car and driving it through a jewelry store window is less reprehensible than selling your body. Yet a felony is a crime where harm is done to others and property; prostituting doesn’t harm anyone, hence a misdemeanor. Both are immoral acts – as you yourselves have decreed. So why vilify one and laugh at the other? Prostitution is not more immoral than burglary. Once you’ve crossed the moral line, which authority do you consult for “level” of immorality?

Movie also tells us that since the CEO was stealing money from his corporation, it is okay to steal the money back from him. Two wrongs DO make a right!

And are we to applaud Dick and Jane for being so attuned to each other’s criminal proclivities? One would imagine that if a married couple were thrown into destitution and one partner were to suggest burglary as a way out, the other partner (if they harbored a shred of decency) would protest to the point of defection in the marriage – yet these two are as ideologically bereft as each other, actually enjoying themselves to the point of playing “dress-up” with such outlandishly flamboyant costumes, we not only question their pragmatism, we wonder at their apprehension of morals at all.

In this frenetic film, many other actors somehow also find nothing to do: Alec Baldwin (as Dick’s CEO), Richard Jenkins (as Dick’s supervisor-turned-bum), and Jeff Garlin (out from under the protective skirts of Larry David, as an Office Manager).

A simple comedy for the simple-minded. See Dick? See Jane? No. See Carrey, see Leoni – but in something else.

END