To prepare for the new comedy “Isn’t It Romantic” director Todd Strauss-Schulson studied 65 rom-coms day and night for two weeks. The intensive study helped him form the basis of his movie, the meta tale of a woman, played by Australian comedian Rebel Wilson, who recovers from a hit on the head to find herself trapped inside her least favourite kind of film, a romantic comedy.
The second “bonk on the head” movie of the season—following Taraji P. Henson’s “What Men Want”—sees Wilson play Natalie—“Nat,” she says, “like the bug.”—an Australian architect living in the world’s greatest rom com town New York. As a young girl she loved the movie “Pretty Woman” but became cynical about love after her mother scolded, “Life is not a fairy tale. People like us don’t get that. Take a look in the mirror doll. We’re not Julia Roberts.” Closed off and shut down she has a tough time finding love until an attempted robbery in the subway leaves to the proverbial knock on the noggin. When she wakes up she finds herself in Hallmark style romantic comedy—“It looks like somebody put a beauty filter across New York City.”—complete with a palatial apartment, a “clichéd gay sidekick,” champagne and, of course, handsome men who look her in the eye. “My life’s become a m***********g romantic comedy,” she shouts, standing in front of the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park, as dancers swirl around her. “It’s like The Matrix for lonely women.”
Is she trapped forever or is a love affair the way back?
“Isn’t it Romantic” is simultaneously a satire of the films Natalie hates and one of the movies Natalie hates. Both ingenious and predictable, it is enjoyable and a little tedious. Essentially Strauss-Schulson has taken all the most predictable rom com clichés and book-ended them with some bonk-on-the-head fantasy. The machinations we’re used to are all on display but instead of poking fun the film absorbs them become a pale imitation of the thing it professes to mock.
Wilson gamely plays along. She’s funny when she’s cynical a little less so when she’s in rom com mode but either way she brings the fun. Her character’s messages of being happy with the other things in life other than a man are potent until they are blunted later on, but Wilson maintains good-humoured empowerment throughout.
The supporting cast mostly play it straight except for Liam Hemsworth—Miley’s husband, not Thor—and Betty Gilpin as Natalie’s rom com obsessed assistant. Both are rom com ready, with a twist.
I’m guessing “Isn’t it Romantic” was meant to be a comedy about romance but falls prey to the usual pitfalls of the genre.
An outer space acorn adventure begins the earthbound struggle for survival in “Ice Age: Collision Course,” the fifth instalment in the popular animated series.
Fans of the franchise will recognize Scrat (Chris Wedge), the dogged squirrel whose endless pursuit of an acorn is at the heart of each of the movies. He is the “Ice Age’s” equivalent of Wile E. Coyote, a lovable but psychics defying acorn hunter often humiliated but never daunted in his quest for the elusive nut. This time his journey leads him to deep space where he puts a series of event in motion that endangers the lives of Manny and Ellie, the Wooly Mammoth couple voiced by Ray Romano and Queen Latifah, macho tiger Diego (Denis Leary), the annoyingly unlucky sloth named Sid (John Leguizamo) and the rest of the gang.
On earth the mammals are preparing to celebrate Manny and Ellie’s anniversary. All is going well except that Manny forgot to get Ellie a gift. Then, when the sky fills with beautiful colours it looks like Manny has arranged a fireworks display for his bride. In fact, the well-timed meteor shower that got Manny out of an anniversary pickle will lead to other world changing problems for he and his friends. “Manny’s love is killing us,” squeals opossum Crash (Seann William Scott). Enter Buck (Simon Pegg), a one-eyed weasel and a dinosaur hunter (“You may be Jurassic,” he sings to the dinosaurs in a Gilbert and Sullivan inspired tune, “but I’m fantastic.”), who has a plan to go toward the “planet killing space rock” rather than running away from it. “I know it sounds a sub-optional,” he says, “but we can change our fate.”
Mixed in with this story of survival are Peaches’s (Keke Palmer) upcoming nuptials, hockey lessons, a dance number and even a science lesson from Neil Degrasse Tyson. Each of these digressions from the main story does little more than bulk out the running time to a feature length of 94 minutes.
Like the other movies in the series “Ice Age: Collision Course” is less concerned with telling a story as it is with coming up with premises they can populate with characters that can be spun off into videogames and toys. Episodic and disjointed, there is none of the elegance of Pixar’s storytelling, just one event loosely connected with the one before it, after another. The result is a movie with few laughs and too many subplots masquerading as a story.
The best thing in the movie is Scrat who lives in perpetual desperation, always hankering for an acorn to call his own. He’s a classic cartoon creation, an elastic faced throwback to the Looney Tunes era. If they make another one of these let’s have more of him please, and less of the other mammoth bores that fill the screen.
It might be time to put the “Ice Age” movies on ice.
I have a brother but he’s not my bro, at least by the contemporary definition. My sibling and I are biologically brothers but neither of us fall into what the NPR Codeswitch blog described as the four rudimentary characteristics of “bro-iness”— jockish, dudely, stoner-ish and preppy.
There are as many ways to define bros and brahs as there are bros and brahs at your local frat house. Oxford Dictionary writer Katherine Connor Martin sums it up simply as “a conventional guy’s guy who spends a lot of time partying with other young men like himself.” The urban dictionary isn’t quite as elegant, describing bros as ”obnoxious partying males who are often seen at college parties… [standing] around holding a red plastic cup waiting for something exciting to happen so they can scream something that demonstrates how much they enjoy partying”
This weekend Zac Efron and Adam DeVine play brothers who are also bros in Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates. Based on the real-life exploits of Mike and Dave Stangle, the guys get out-broed at their sister’s Hawaiian wedding by broettes Tatiana and Alice (Aubrey Plaza and Anna Kendrick).
In real life Mike, Dave, Tatiana and Alice are the kind of people it might be fun to hang out with before ten o’clock at night, before the tequila shots and samplings from the mystery medicine cabinet have taken effect. After that, all bets are off. Luckily in Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates, like so many bro movies before it, the screen separates us and we can sit back and observe them like cultural anthropologists, as if we’re studying animals in a zoo.
Hollywood has long had a bromance with bros. Lately in movies like Neighbors and Dirty Grandpa Efron has made a career of playing dim witted frat boys but to find the proto bros you have to go back to 1940. Starting with Road to Singapore Bob Hope and Bing Crosby cocktailed and adlibbed their way through seven Road movies playing two slightly skeezy men with boatloads of bravado and an unbreakable bond—at least until love interest Dorothy Lamour showed up.
National Lampoon’s Animal House was the next landmark of bro-cinema. From toga parties to food fights and doing The Worm on the dance floor, it’s a politically incorrect classic that celebrates the best and worst of bro culture.
A 1996 movie gave us the bro with a million catchphrases like “Vegas, baby,” “wingman,” “beautiful babies” and “you’re so money.” As Trent in Swingers Vince Vaughn gave a voice and brocabulary to a generation of bros. Jon Favreau wrote the script but many of the sayings came directly from the lips of his best friends and co-stars Vaughn and Ron Livingston.
No look at bro-cinema would be complete without a nod toward Will Ferrell. The comedian has broed out on screen many times but Old School’s Frank the Tank, a character who unravels after his wife leaves him, is King Bro. When he’s not doing beer bong hits (“Once it hits your lips, it’s so good!”) or streaking he lets his freak flag fly as one of the most over-the-top bros ever seen on screen.
Dean Wormer’s classic scolding from Animal House, “Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son,” doesn’t seem to apply, at least at the movies.
In “Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates” Dave and Mike Stangle (Zac Efron and Adam DeVine), brothers who are also “bros,” get out bro’d by two unlikely people. Based on the memoir of the same name (with the subtitle “And a Thousand Cocktails”) by the real-life Stangle brothers, the movie co-stars broettes Aubrey Plaza and Anna Kendrick.
The kind hearted but dimwitted Mike and Dave like to party. Hard. They make a living in the ultimate bro profession—tequila sales—but it’s in their off hours that they really let it rip. Their “Jackass” style exploits, including fireworks mishaps, a trampoline incident at cousin Rachel’s wedding and instigating grandfather’s bad fall, have ruined more than one family gathering. In short they are troublemakers, but to be fair, they like to think of themselves as “party creators.”
To prevent them from putting a stain on their sister Jeanie’s (Sugar Lyn Beard) Hawaiian wedding their parents insist they bring dates. ‘We don’t want you showing up stag and riling each other up,” says Burt Stangle (Stephen Root). “You to show up stag, hit on girls and ruin everything.” To find the perfect dates the guys go big when their craigslist “free trip to Hawaii” ad goes viral racking up 6000 responses in no time flat, and earning them a spot on on The Wendy Williams Show. “We’re looking for nice girls. Girls that our mom and sister would like.”
At home, in their filthy rat hole apartment two broke girls named Tatiana (Plaza) and Alice (Kendrick) are watching on television. “Let’s make these guys take us to Hawaii.” Cleaned up, the porn-loving, self-described “shoplifting floozie-ass bimbos” engineer a meeting and convince Mike and Dave to take them to their sister’s destination wedding. In Hawaii Tatiana and Alice show their true colours and leave a trail of chaos and destruction in their wake before the four young people have an epiphany and attempt to leave their bad behaviour behind.
In real life Mike, Dave, Tatiana (Plaza) and Alice are the kind of people it might be fun to hang out with before ten o’clock at night, before the tequila shots and samplings from the mystery medicine cabinet have taken effect. After that, all bets are off. On film their inane conduct and silly slapstick is a fast, funny way to spend ninety minutes. In real life their self-absorbed, co-dependent behaviour would be off-putting in the extreme. Luckily in “Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates” the screen separates us and we can sit back and observe them like cultural anthropologists, as if we’re studying animals in a zoo.
Of all the cast it is Plaza who fully embraces the Tucker Max-isms on display. Her unhinged dead-eyed glare is simultaneously hilarious and disturbing. Her Tatiana is damaged goods and knows it, flaunts it even. Plaza is also funny and in a very silly movie hands in a very smart performance.
“Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates” is cut from the same cloth as “I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell,” but with the addition of heart and soul. It’s the kind of millennial movie that you doesn’t want you to laugh, it wants you to lol.
What would you do if Robert De Niro cut short your conversation with a quick, “I’m not doing this, darling,” and exited? If you’re Radio Times journalist Emma Brockes you write about it and watch your article go viral.
As unpleasant as the encounter may have been — he objected to the “negative inference” of her questions, she called him condescending — it did exactly what it was meant to do, generate buzz for De Niro’s upcoming film The Intern.
Who won? I’ll give the edge to Brockes who, when faced with a bad situation, turned De Niro’s lemons into lemonade and earned just as much press as the touchy actor.
De Niro took some blowback for his behaviour. Daily Mail columnist Piers Morgan wrote, “If I’d been her, I’d have slapped him ’round his smug little chops,” adding the Goodfellas star is “renowned as the rudest, most difficult and frankly obnoxious star to interview, possibly in the history of planet Earth.”
I think Morgan overstates his case. De Niro isn’t the worst — anyone who has ever done a movie junket knows Tommy Lee Jones is the crankiest, most soul destroying interview ever — he’s just a reticent interview, who, according to director Nancy Myers, doesn’t want “to expose himself all the time.”
De Niro isn’t alone in the chat-and-dash sweepstakes. Robert Downey Jr. and Quentin Tarantino bolted on Krishnan Guru-Murthy with the Avengers: Age of Ultron actor later calling the Channel 4 news presenter a “syphilitic parasite.” Robert Pattinson, Naomi Campbell and Russell Crowe have also done runners on the press.
So why submit to promotional interviews at all? Contractual obligation has much to do with it, but beyond that, they’re good for the movie. Daniel Radcliffe, star of Harry Potter, Horns and the upcoming Victor Frankenstein, once told me no matter how famous the actor, anyone who doesn’t get out and pump their film up to the press is making a huge mistake.
As a result everyone does them and while it’s easy to look at De Niro or Downey as spoiled brats, I’m surprised walkouts don’t happen more often.
It must get brutally dull answering the same questions over and over, particularly when they are of the “Of all your leading ladies who was the best kisser?” variety.
How bad can it get in the interview suites?
Once a talking head proudly told me she wrote new lyrics for Beyoncé’s hit song Survivor… “My name’s Beyoncé/ I’m in Goldmember/ You’re watching blah blah on blah blah blah…” and asked the superstar to sing them as a promo for her television station. If I were Beyoncé I would have exited stage left without a song on my lips.
I remember one “reporter” asking George Lucas “whether Dark Vader was a good guy or a bad guy.” If I were Lucas I would have hitched a Millennium Falcon ride out of there.
Recently I heard Tom Cruise try and answer the question, “What kind of stunt would you do to impress a girl?” If I were Cruise I would have grabbed the side of the nearest plane and jetted out of there.
As for De Niro, Brockes graciously says she has sympathy for him “because nobody wants to be there for these choreographed junket interviews.”
De Niro wasn’t quite as kind, but at least he called her “darling” and not “syphilitic parasite.”
“The Intern” is a Nancy Meyers odd couple / buddy movie about a “senior” intern, played by Robert De Niro, working for Anne Hathaway’s whirlwind of an internet start up boss. Expect jokes like, “This job ages you, which in your case isn’t a good thing,” lots of lifestyle porn and a good dollop of sentimentality.
Hathaway is Jules Ostin, owner operator of About the Fit, a website specializing in upscale women’s clothes. In just eighteen months she has turned it into a going concern, with over two hundred employees and thousands of orders a day. Despite her success—and eighteen-hour work days—the company is growing so quickly her investors want to bring in an experienced CEO to grow the business.
Enter Ben Whittaker, a seventy-year-old widower who applies for a job as senior intern to help pass the time. After a shaky start the pair bond as Jules comes to regard Ben as a calming influence and a bottomless font of advice. De Niro’s back to playing “The Godfather”… but the magical fairy godfather who becomes Uncle Ben to everyone in the office, teaching the boys to be men and Jules to enjoy life.
A mix of slapstick and sentimentality “The Intern” is clearly designed to be a crowd pleaser, the kind of movie that moves along with few speed bumps along the way. But there are speed bumps. Take for example a woefully conceived house break-in scene that must be one of the worst action scenes ever committed to film. Or an infidelity subplot that rears its ugly head in the final third and does little except to raise the dramatic stakes, but it’s clumsy and feels tagged on. How about the film’s murky stance on women having a career and a family?
Juxtaposing Millennials and Baby Boomers should mine a rich vein of comedy and there are a few gags sprinkled throughout “The Intern,” but it feels aimed at an older audience who might find sitcom gags like a young guy walking in on what he thinks is a sex act, but is actually completely innocent. Cue the laugh track.
“The Intern” relies on charm rather than knee slappers. De Niro and Hathaway have good chemistry and can effortlessly bound between mawkish melodrama and comedy. Is this one of De Niro’s more memorable characters? Nope. Ben Whittaker and Travis Bickle will never be mentioned on the same breath but his work here could be considered a companion piece to “Meet the Fockers.”
