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dir: Ruben Fleischer
Less would have been more
Getting Jesse Eisenberg and director Ruben Fleischer together again after Zombieland must have sounded like a good idea, since they did pretty well on their first time out. Inserting Aziz Ansari into the mix might have sounded good, because Aziz is pretty funny, whether as a stand-up or as a comedic actor.

But then someone somehow thought Danny McBride would improve things as well, and so we have 30 Minutes or Less: a mediocre flick so pointless and ineffable that the rage it could inspire doesn’t have time to coalesce before the film evaporates.

I’m telling you for free, Hollywood: Danny McBride improves nothing. Smearing shit on a Picasso doesn’t make it more valuable. Au contraire, fuckers.

Not that, oh no, don’t get me wrong, not that this flick would have been a Cubist masterpiece without McBride’s value-adds. No, it would still have been utterly pointless and forgettable. It just wouldn’t have been as annoying.

I have been accused a fair few times in my reviews of often focussing on other films instead of the one I’m actually trying to review, to the review’s detriment. I’ll cop to that, only because sometimes it’s more interesting to talk about those other flicks. Who wouldn’t rather be talking about Aliens instead of Cowboys and Aliens, or Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter instead of The Lincoln Lawyer, or The Bride Wore Black instead of Bridesmaids?

Be that as it may, the review for 30 Minutes or Less is the place to talk about 30 Minutes or Less, and not the thousands of other better movies I could be discussing.

This flick is decidedly....meh. Jesse Eisenberg plays the same hyper-verbal emotionally leotarded young chap he always plays, and Aziz plays a guy who talks in a high-pitched whine a lot, but mostly they’re meant to be friends. And we’re meant to find them likable. Danny McBride and Nick Swardson play two other close friends, who are even more pathetic and painfully stupid than the first pair.

Wow, two dramaturgical dyads, mirroring each other for comparison and contrast. Hooray for us!

dir: Todd Phillips
Dirty, dirty boys
Second verse? Same as the first.

Anyone who paid good money to see this flick, and complained that it was exactly the same plot as the first obviously doesn’t understand what the purpose of a flick called The Hangover Part II was really meant to be.

I didn’t pay good money to see it, because all of my money is tainted with the blood of the innocent and the guilty alike, and I expected it to be exactly what it was, and thus I enjoyed more than the first flick. It’s not better than its predecessor, nor could it be, really. Honestly, these flicks are less movies than they are long, stretched sketch, with multiple gaglets along the way before a punchline that can’t live up to anything.

It doesn’t have to. The premise is so fucking simple, and so enjoyable, that nothing else matters. Characterisation, believable dialogue, people acting sanely is completely unnecessary and unwanted.

Why? Because it’s about that most awesome of things: getting fucked up and not being able to remember the reprehensible shit you got up to the night before.

There’s no Oscar in that. There’s no longing to peer into the depths of the human condition. There’s no need for some Ingmar Bergman-like exploration of man’s misery in the face of God’s silence. It’s about terrible people doing terrible stuff, not remembering either the fun or the awfulness, and trying to find one of their number who’s gone missing.

They’re not trying to make amends. They’re not seeking redemption. What evil they’ve perpetrated they won’t even get punished for, nor will they learn anything from their experience together. But as long as they find the missing chap, and get to the wedding on time, everything will be forgiven and the world will click back into place.

Of course this flick follows exactly the same template as the first flick. Why would it not? I would argue the very universe would collapse in on itself if they varied the formula one iota. It’s in the performance of exactly the same actions, the same framework that transcendence arises, like a Zen monk making the same perfect circles for decades with his rake in a sand garden, until he just can’t take it any more and shoots up the place with an AK.

dir: Paul Feig
My eyes - the goggles, they do nothing!
If this is the ‘female’ response to what is commonly and erroneously referred to as the Summer of Judd Apatow – raunchy comedies, then what the fuck was the question? I’m sure there are plenty of mouthbreathers who were wondering: “Shoot, what would a flick like The Hangover be like if it was all chicks? Yeah, and how do they get I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter to taste like butter so much?”

The answer to both is not worth speaking, or hearing, really.

This isn’t really a raunchy comedy showcasing female comedic talent. Kristen Wiig as the lead, and Maya Rudolph have both been funny in stuff, and in far funnier films than this. The problem here is that, for a comedy, it’s not really that funny.

It’s far more of a low-stakes drama than anything else, because all of the impetus of the plot is about how shitty the main character feels because her best friend has some other friend. In other words, this groundbreaking and radical comedy is all about how bitchy, shallow, insecure and jealous women are.

It’s almost as if we live in a universe where the Sex and the City series and movies don’t exist. What a sweet universe that would be…

Also, what it’s not about is how fucking insane some otherwise sane women become when it comes to getting married. Instead of mocking or even deriding the wedding porn – Bridezilla mentality that’s becoming ever more prevalent even as I bloviate during this review, it celebrates it. Any misgivings it might have about the phenomenon, or the behaviour of the women in relation to wedding hysteria in general is diverted by the fact that all of the conflict comes down to a woman being jealous of another woman, whose shitty life then falls apart because of her jealousy.

What I find weirdest about all of this is that Kristen Wiig developed and co-wrote the script. So this funny, talented woman who’s been good in a bunch of flicks, far better than on Saturday Night Live, I’ll tell you that much for free, wanted this? She wanted to play this pathetic creature voluntarily? She created it?

It’s like watching Germaine Greer play Ally McBeal in an episode she wrote herself. Well, maybe not quite the same.

There’s less cursing and self-aggrandisement that there would have been with Germaine at the helm.

dir: Jake Kasdan
She's so bad she should be punished. Repeatedly
Look, I find it strange that people keep equating or comparing this flick with the Terry Zwigoff flick Bad Santa. As far as I can tell, having watched both, the only thing they have in common is the same adjective in the title. Other than that, there’s no connection.

I mean, does Cameron Diaz piss her pants at any stage? Does she sodomise a plus-size woman in the change rooms at a mall? Does she generally indulge in behaviour that would get most people arrested, let alone fired from their job as an educator of young minds?

Well, actually, on that last point…

Maybe they’re linked in spirit, but Bad Santa was such a singular act of misanthropy that it seems churlish to compare anything to it, even despite the ridiculous ‘happy’ ending the Weinsteins forced onto the end of the flick. Bad Teacher’s trading on something less radioactive, but probably more enjoyable.

As well, as opposed to any flick by Terry Zwigoff, the main purpose of Bad Teacher is to be a funny, and a funny workplace comedy at that. And I found it pretty goddamn funny, truth be told.

dir: Bobcat Goldthwait
Being a good father is hard work. It's double the work of a half-arsed dad, and four times the work of a deadbeat dad
The name Bobcat Goldthwait is not one that resonates in the hall of fame of respected comedy directors. The main reason is that there isn’t a hall, alcove or basement of fame of respected directors of comedies, since there are so few of them, so few in fact that they could all fit in a broom closet, bathroom or crawlspace with room to spare.

It’s a name that probably doesn’t come up in common public discourse, or in personal conversations between lovers in bed post-coitally “You really Bobcatted my Goldthwait good tonight, baby”, or a name used by the Pope in his annual chastising pronouncements, or by the Queen in her Christmas address.

In fact, anyone under thirty has probably never heard of him, and those over thirty wish they could forget him and his eardrum shredding voice.

Which is a shame, because his long career as a standup comedian, his brief career as a successful actor in Police Academy films, and the intervening years where he struggled for meaning and money meant that he made the shift over to directing films, with some success. And so here he directs Robin Williams in a flick that looks for all the world like a comedy, again, with some success.

dir: Shawn Levy
Even Parker Posey can't get a table at this awful restaurant
Some flicks go out of their way to make you wish you were someone or something else. That’s why most entertainment is considered an escape from the mundanity of the everyday. Lose yourself in the fantasy of being some awesomely bicepped highly skilled dancer / spy / seducer / vengeful mutant dentist, and pay us before you’re done, thanks. Not after, before. No refunds.

Other flicks applaud the fact that you, the viewer, are a mundane mediocrity, whose hopes and dreams have been squashed by life, by your own laziness and timidity, and that you are just as you should be. We, Hollywood, wouldn’t want you any other way. Because if you weren’t just as you are, the perfect consumer who can purchase whatever you want, set your life up just as you want, but still always feel vaguely dissatisfied, then why would you be watching Hollywood’s crap? You’d have no need for us and our special magic any longer. And how would we survive?

Occasionally, only a few times over the course of a lifetime, the Hollywood machine produces a flick that not only applauds the fact that white middle class people feel like there’s a lack of passion and excitement in their lives; a passion and excitement that other people elsewhere are always feeling, but it sets out to say, “Hey, you’re all right. All you need is a little bit of an adventure to get you out of your rut, and then everything will be all right.”

dir: Coens
Master of the universe
The Brothers Coen have made lots of films, many of them superb. They’ve been at it for a while. They’re critical darlings to this day, and everything they make is taken seriously, no matter how ludicrous it might be. And with No Country for Old Men, they received the highest possible honours Hollywood can bestow upon itself, guaranteeing them first dibs on any projects they could ever want, as long as they don’t cost too much.

Despite long careers working together, A Serious Man, of all their flicks, is the most overtly Jewish thus far (in terms of content and themes). I know that sounds odd, or vaguely anti-Semitic, but it’s not intended as such. They’re not working from an adapted screenplay, so it’s a story they themselves have written, which contains a lot of detail (I think) from their early lives. It also explicitly uses elements of the Jewish faith and the Jewish experience in America in the story it has to tell, which seems to be based on the Book of Job, amongst other things. And you can’t really get more Jewish than the Torah, can you?

And what a kick-ass blockbuster story it is! Our main character Larry (Michael Stuhlbarg), is a mathematics associate professor desperate for that most academic of Holy Grails: tenure. Right from the start, after a very strange intro involving some Yiddish peasants fighting over whether their guest on a cold, stormy night is alive or dead, Larry’s life starts falling apart for no discernible reason.

His tenure becomes tenuous, a disgruntled student alternately threatens and bribes him for a failing grade resulting from Schrodinger’s Cat (whether it’s alive or dead is irrelevant right now), his wife wants to leave him for a guy called Sy Ableman, his kids are alternately a chronic dope smoker about to have his bar mitzvah who’s obsessed with F Troop, and a junior version of Barbara Streisand.

Almost every other character in the flick says Sy Ableman’s name in this really curious way, most often with hushed tones of respect, or with incredulity, as in “Sy Ableman? Sy Ableman?!?!”

dir: Ruben Fleischer
And the choreography is pretty, too
You might not have noticed, but there’s been this plague outbreak recently. It didn’t all happen at once. It’s been a gradual progression, until more recently where it seems like it’s overwhelming everything and everyone.

It’s a plague of zombie movies, visited upon the planet as a prelude presumably to the actual apocalypse. It’s a benevolent but capricious God’s way of getting us ready for when the dead finally do walk the earth.

Either that, or there’s just no original ideas under the sun anymore.

Still, if you’re going to do something unoriginal, at least do it well and make it entertaining. You don’t even have to put that much of a spin on it: just make us smile.

Someone came up with the bright idea (many times, in many different forms, from World War Z to Shaun of the Dead to Pride & Prejudice & Zombies) that if you don’t take it seriously, a zombie plague could be pretty funny. What if you make your main character a college age kid who’s a bit of a dick and a nebbish, and actually have your characters enjoy themselves along the way?

Jesse Eisenberg has carved out a little niche for himself as this kind of compulsive/obsessive nerdy young Woody Allen type guy who’s smart but ill-suited to the social complexities of the big bad world. In that sense, he’s probably more of a Jewish Michael Cera. He’s also terrified of clowns, and germs, probably. Some genius decided taking this nice young chap and dropping him into an America overrun by unholy hordes, paired up with Woody Harrelson at his redneck-y best, would be a winning combination.