Any movie with the word sex in the title and Cameron Diaz in her underwear and a newly slim Jason Segel in the all-together should be a lot sexier than “Sex Tape” is. The first twenty minutes plays more like an attempt to break the world record for using the word “sex” in a movie than an actual story. They talk about sex, have sex, then talk about it some more, but rather than being racy or slap-your-thigh funny it becomes tiresome. The only word used more often is “iPad,” which is even less provocative.
Segel and Diaz are Jay and Annie, a married couple who try to spice things up in the bedroom by videotaping themselves working through the Joy of Sex page by page. All goes well until Jay forgets to delete the video and mistakenly posts their three-hour amateur porntacular on the cloud. “Our sex tape has been synced to several devices,” he says, “all of which are in the possession of friends!” With BFFs Robby (Rob Corddry) and Tess (Ellie Kemper), the embarrassed couple try and retrieve each of the “infected” iPads, especially the one in the hands of Hank Rosenbaum (Rob Lowe), the family-first CEO of the company that publishes Annie’s G-rated mommy blog.
There are a handful of laughs in “Sex Tape.” Most of them center on the iPad retrieval from Rosenbaum’s mansion. It’s a ten-minute long farce involving cocaine, a dog on a treadmill and a sex toy used as a boomerang. The sequence is out-of-control and capped by a smarmily charming performance by Rob Lowe (who knows a thing or two about sex tapes), the straight-laced executive with a wild side.
The other Rob, Corddry, is also very funny. His wide-eyed interest in his best friend’s sex tape is amusing and feels like the most genuine thing in the movie.
The whole thing feels like a premise for a joke. The story is candid but doesn’t ever feel heartfelt. For the comedy to work the audience has to be able to buy in and while many can relate to the bedroom blues on display, the movie is more concerned with titillation than sincerity.
At one point in the film Diaz talks about her love of porn, but adds she doesn’t watch it anymore because, “the quality of the writing has gone down hill. I like it when they really feel like they’re in love.” She might have been talking about her own movie.
Diaz and Segel are OK, but despite some enthusiastic (and gymnastic) performances they don’t sell the movie’s main gag. The set up is so drawn out that despite its provocative premise it never seduces the audience.
There are laughs sprinkled throughout. Segel has razor sharp comic timing and can’t help but get a giggle even when he has to rattle off endless exposition, but try as he might, he doesn’t make the same impression he did in movies like “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” or “Bad Teacher,” his previous teaming with Diaz.
“Sex Tape” is an R-rated comedy in which the least interesting part of the movie is the sex and the sex talk.
Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, its Dane Cook in “Planes: Fire & Rescue,” an animated aerial adventure that aims to fly high, but instead crashes and burns.
This sequel to 2013’s “Planes” begins where the last one left off, with Dusty Crophopper (Cook) flush with success from his round the world race. He’s a champion but a mechanical malfunction is about to put an end to his racing career. His gearbox is shot and no replacement can be found. Looking to change careers, (and help save his local firehouse from being shut down), Dusty takes a crash course in wildfire air attack. “They fly in when other fly out.” Training under rugged fire and rescue helicopter Blade Ranger (Ed Harris) Dusty’s new skills are tested when a wildfire burns out of control.
It’s easy to see why kids love the “Planes” movies. They’re fast paced, the characters are cute-and-cuddly bigger-than-life talking machines, like Transformers for the preteen set and there are a surprising number of flatulence jokes. What’s harder to understand is what anyone over the age of 5 sees in them.
For every thing that works, like Julie Bowen’s sassy voice work as the flirty Lil’ Dipper, or bad puns that raise a smile (“Did you just fall out of a B-17? Cuz you’re the bomb…” “Oh, those pick-up trucks.”) there are many things that irk. Take for instance the monotone vocalizations of star Dane Cook who sounds even more bored by the story than I was or the musical montages that pad out the scant 75 minute running time.
Despite the action scenes, “Planes: Fire & Rescue” doesn’t feel like a big screen must see. The conquering adversity messaging is worthy enough, but the direct-to-DVD story never takes flight.
Director Richard Linklater’s twelve-years-in-the-making, coming of age story “Boyhood,” is more than a slice of life. It’s slices of lives anchored by one character, Mason, played by Ellar Coltrane, who was six when filming began, eighteen when the movie wrapped.
When “Boyhood” begins with Mason and his sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater) are being raised by their mom (Patricia Arquette). Their father (Ethan Hawke) is a sporadic presence, an absentee dad who’s trying to do better. Mason is an introverted, artistic boy, Samantha an extrovert who rolls her eyes and hates the clothes her mother chooses for her.
To tell more would do the movie a disservice because the extraordinary thing about this movie isn’t the story, it’s the performances and the scope. The story of a single mother coping with bad relationship choices as she tries to better her life and the lives of her kids isn’t particularly new.
Here it is the execution that counts.
Linklater’s decade long shoot is more than just a gimmick, it’s a technique that sucks the viewer in, much in the same way home movies, viewed many years later, can evoke deeply held feelings. Watching these characters grow up on screen, literally, brings an authenticity to the film and the story, almost like a documentary. “56 Up,” in which director Michael Apted revisits the same group of British-born adults every seven years, is similar, but “Boyhood” feels different. The narrative construct of watching the character Mason grow up on screen is one thing, but on a larger scale we’re also watching Coltrane mature and that’s what makes this movie special.
There are great performances all round—Arquette and Hawke are especially good—but Coltrane’s performance is so natural that he, whether he knew it at the time or not, is portraying each of the phases of a young man’s—almost any young man—life. He’s not a precocious child actor, but a regular kid behaving like a regular kid. His real-life awkward teenage years, for instance, bleed into the film, producing a beautiful rendering of the middle teens that feels absolutely authentic because it is.
“Boyhood” is a remarkable film but not a perfect one. At almost three hours it occasionally feels aimless, but as a chronicle of life it’s an ambitious undertaking, a moving experience about the individual moments that make a life.
“Snowpiercer” may be the oddest film of the year so far. The set up sounds like a standard dystopian world scenario… to a point.
Set just seventeen years from today, the movie, written and directed by Joon-ho Bong, takes place in a dystopian world where global warming has turned the planet into one giant snowball.
So far this could be “The Day After Tomorrow,” or “The Colony” or any number of icy thrillers set in a sub zero world.
All of humanity now lives on a train, owned and operated by a mysterious industrialist named Wilford, hurtling through what’s left of ice-covered planet. It’s an ecosystem with its own class system. In the front of the locomotive people live a life of luxury, dining on sushi, partying in nightclubs, tending orchids in greenhouses, while the folks in the back, “the freeloaders” are forced to live in atrocious conditions. Imagine the steerage section in “Titanic” only WAY worse.
Crammed in like sardines these “tail section” passengers are treated like prisoners, forced to eat “protean bars” of dubious quality and tortured for the slightest of infractions. “Know your place,” commands Minister Mason (Tilda Swinton). “Accept your place.”
It’s an atmosphere ripe for revolution, but can ringleaders Curtis (Chris Evans), Gilliam (John Hurt) and right hand man Edgar (Jamie Bell) fight their way through the train (and all of the story’s allegories) to the front and freedom?
Based on the French graphic novel “Le Transperceneige,” “Snowpiercer” is the nerviest actioner to come along in a season crowded with movies that go crash, boom, bang. It’s an environmental thriller—if you haven’t already seen Bong’s “The Host” do so now!—that is unapologetically weird, keeping the audience off balance for the entirety of its two-hour running time.
Tilda Swinton as the train’s Iron Lady, the minister of discipline, plays like a cross between a prison guard, Benny Hill and Margaret Thatcher. It’s a loopy performance that embraces and embodies the movie’s weird spirit.
In the world Bong creates surprises are around every corner, characters come and go, but it never feels odd for odd’s sake. The story rips along like a rocket (or thousand car train, if you like), sometimes in several directions at once, but Bong controls the chaos, keeping the story plausible (OK, plausible-ish) and above all, entertaining.
In a recent interview Mel Gibson said he’s out of the business of financing his own films because, “I’m not a fool.”
Neither is Zach Braff.
Both must be worth big bucks—Gibson from the movies, Braff from starring on 175 episodes of “Scrubs”—and could likely use some of their own capital to make their own movies but Gibson says he’s out of the game completely while Braff used the popular crowd sourcing site Kickstarter to raise money for his latest.
“Wish I Was Here” is part of the small—but growing—trend of celebrity driven films paid for by contributions from the general public. The almost-mid-life crisis story raised $2 million in just forty eight hours (ultimately procuring $3.1 million of a reported $5.5 million budget), attracted an all-star cast—Kate Hudson, “Frozen’s” Josh Gad, Mandy Patinkin and “The Big Bang Theory’s” Jim Parson—and some backlash from critics who felt that crowdsourcing should be left for artists who aren’t also starring in giant Disney movies.
Fact is, “Wish I Was Here’s” backstory is a bit more interesting than the story on the screen.
Braff plays Aidan, an underemployed actor whose life is unraveling. His kids are about to be kicked out of Hebrew school because his father (Patinkin), who has been paying the bills, has been diagnosed with cancer and can no longer afford the monthly payment. His wife Sarah (Hudson) is supportive of his acting dream but nearing the end of her tether. Brother Noah (Gadd) prefers cos play over actual emotions and his two kids (Joey King and Pierce Gagnon) are maturing faster than he is.
“Wish I Was Here” plays like two movies. The first forty-five minutes is a cleverly written comedic look at Aidan as a manboy with far more responsibility than he can handle. It’s ripe with gentle character based laughs that emerge from the situations and don’t feel forced.
It’s only in the second half when Braff (who co-wrote the script with his brother Adam) allows sentiment to get in the way of the movie’s momentum. Despite Patinkin’s line, “Eventually when things get tragic enough they circle back to comedy,” the final forty-five minutes, which deal with the loss of Aidan’s father, takes a darker tone. That’s OK, life sometimes changes on a dime, but the cleverness of the set-up is replaced with mawkishness.
Sometimes it works. Hudson’s heartfelt “tell your sons you love them” speech to her-father-in-law is shot simply with lingering close-ups on the actor’s faces. The scene has an intimate in-the-moment feel and is very moving.
Less so is Gadd’s big moment, (VERY MILD SPOILER ALERT), a Comic Con sequence that is a bit too quirky to fit the tone of the film that surrounds it.
By the end credits the movie worked for me more often than not, but I wished that there were fewer clunky moments. For every scene that rings emotionally true—and there are quite a few of them—there is another that feels forced. The beauty of “Wish I Was Here” lies in the former, and certainly not in the passages that feel left over from another, lesser quirky indie comedy.
Author appearance, Round table, Special Event: IFOA
Exhibition Place – Direct Energy Centre
210 Princes’ Blvd
Toronto M6K 3C3
IFOA returns to the CNE for an exciting panel with authors Crissy Calhoun, Richard Crouse, Adam Nayman and Richard Rosenbaum, who will take the stage to discuss their pop culture commentary.
For information about admission to the CNE, please click HERE.
Participants
Crissy Calhoun is the author of the Love You to Death series of Vampire Diaries companion guides and, under the pen name Liv Spencer, she’s co-authored books on topics like Pretty Little Liars and Taylor Swift. She lives in Toronto. Calhoun presents the fourth installment of her Vampire Diaries guides, Love You to Death: Season 4, which delves headlong into the twists and turns of each episode, exploring the layers of rich history, supernatural mythology, historical and pop culture references.
Richard Crouse is a regular film critic for CTV’s Canada AM. He is also the author of six books on pop culture history and writes two weekly columns forMetro newspaper. Crouse presents Raising Hell: Ken Russell and the Unmaking of The Devils, which examines Russell’s 1971 film about an oversexed priest and a group of sexually repressed nuns in 17th-century France. From the film’s inception through its headline-making production and controversial reception, Crouse explores what it is about Russell’s cult classic that makes it a cinematic treasure.
Adam Nayman is a film critic for TheGlobe and Mail, and a contributing editor to Cinema Scope. He is a lecturer at Ryerson and the University of Toronto, and programs for the Toronto Jewish Film Society. He lives in Toronto. Nayman presents It Doesn’t Suck: Showgirls, which examines and encourages a shift in cultural perspective on the box-office bomb Showgirls.
Richard Rosenbaum is a fiction editor at Broken Pencil and a regular contributor to OverthinkingIt.com. He has a Master’s degree in Communication and Culture, and lives in Toronto. Rosenbaum presents Raise Some Shell: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which examines the origins, evolution and impact of the Ninja Turtles phenomenon.
For many people, especially those who troll around in the more unsavoury corners of the Internet, the first exposure to celebs like Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian came from that most modern form of celebrity introduction: the sex tape.
Paris and Kim’s videoed sexcapades weren’t the first tapes to become public — in 1988 Rob Lowe was embarrassed when VHS images of him and two women popped up on the news — and they weren’t the last.
This week in Sex Tape, Jason Segel and Cameron Diaz are Jay and Annie, a married couple who try to spice things up in the bedroom by videotaping themselves. All goes well until Jay forgets to erase the tape and mistakenly stores it on the Internet. “Our sex tape has been synced to several devices,” he says, “all of which are in the possession of friends!”
Given how many actors have appeared in sex tapes it’s not surprising that several movies have used the raunchy videos as a plot point.
In Brüno, the titular Austrian fashion reporter (Sacha Baron Cohen) tries to make a name for himself in America by making a sex tape with another famous American, U.S. Congressman Ron Paul. Trouble was, Paul wasn’t in on the joke. “I was expecting an interview on Austrian economics,” said Paul. “But, by the time he started pulling his pants down, I was like ‘What is going on here?’ I ran out of the room. This interview has ended.”
The 2006 comedy Drop Box has production values not unlike that of an actual sex tape but despite its low budget it offers up the funny and often brutal story about Mindy (Rachel Sehl), a big-time bubblegum pop star (think Britney or Miley), who accidentally returns her homemade sex tape to her local video store instead of Glitter, the movie she rented. Realizing her mistake, she tries to re-rent the tape.
Clocking in at just 80 minutes, it’s a character study about a spoiled pop princess who butts heads with an unmovable force in the form of the uncooperative and inquisitive clerk (David Cormican).
Finally, Auto Focus exposes sex tapes’ dark side. Hogan’s Heroes star Bob Crane’s (Greg Kinnear) all-American public persona hid a secret obsession. “I’m a normal, red-blooded American man,” he says. “I like to look at naked women.” According to the film, he liked making sex tapes with women, usually without their knowledge. The movie speculates his 1978 murder may have been related to this unlawful pastime.
Check out Richard’s cineplex.com article on Monty Python as the Beatles of Comedy.
“’I’ve got two legs from my hips to the ground, and when I move them, they walk around,’ isn’t a line with the elegance of, ‘Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away,’ but it is a lot funnier.
“Comparing the work of Monty Python and The Beatles might seem like equating apples to oranges, or guitars to crunchy frogs, but it really isn’t that much of a stretch. Eric (Idle), Graham (Chapman), Michael (Palin), John (Cleese) and a couple of Terrys (Gilliam and Jones) have a lot in common with John, Paul, George and Ringo.
“Monty Python has been called the most influential comedy troupe of all time. Their absurdist brand…” Read the whole thing HERE!
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