Magazines may be becoming an artifact of the past but Hollywood still looks to them for inspiration. In the last few years a half dozen movies found inspiration in the pages of “Esquire,” “Vanity Fair” and “The New Yorker,” including “The Friend,” a new drama starring Dakota Johnson, Casey Affleck and Jason Segel and now playing In theatres and on-demand.
Based on Matthew Teague’s “Esquire” article “The Friend: Love Is Not a Big Enough Word,” the film uses a broken timeline—jumping back and forth—to tell the true story of Teague’s terminally ill wife Nicole and their friend-turned-nursemaid Dane. Affleck is Matt, a war correspondent with an attitude. “It’s Friday,” says his editor, “I’ve been tired of you since Wednesday.” He’s an up-and-comer, married to Nicole, a talented musical theatre performer played by Johnson. Her best pal at the theatre is Dane (Segel) a sad sack who can’t seem to get a girlfriend. “It’s not fair,” she says. “I’m the only woman who knows how special you are.”
By the time Nicole is diagnosed with cancer their lives have taken different paths, but Dane leaves his life in New Orleans behind to help his Atlanta-based friends. “Would it help if I stayed for a while? You don’t have to do this alone.” The planned week or two visit turns into months as Dane takes on more responsibility, becoming Matt’s pillar of strength and an indispensable part of Nicole’s transition.
Director Gabriela Cowperthwaite has made a sensitive film about finding your logical, not biological family. Dane is an anchorless man who finds a sense of permanence with his friends. Segel brings his trademarked relatability to the role, exuding warmth but also a sadness due to his rudderless station in life. Staying with Nicole and Matt and their daughters provides him with a home, but it is temporary, a state of affairs bound to end in heartache. Behind every one of his toothy grins is the anxiety of the situation, carefully masked to spare his hosts the extent of his grief. It’s lovely work that quietly defines the width and breath of selfless giving.
Affleck plumbs the depths of the circumstances, examining grief tinged with anger over a situation he can’t control and Johnson brings grace and beauty, especially in the way she looks at Matt, Dane and the children knowing that she won’t be there for their birthdays, holidays etc, to the role of a woman counting her time in days rather than years. Cherry Jones, as a palliative nurse—an “Angel of Mercy” according to Nicole’s doctor—gives a no-nonsense performance that drips compassion.
“The Friend” is a showcase for Segel’s easy charm but also gives the actor a chance to dig deeper. The former sitcom star delivers some much-needed laughs but they are tinged with humility that is very touching.
“The End of the Tour” breaks the cardinal rule of movie making—show me, don’t tell mew. It is, essentially, a ninety-minute interview that plays out between author David Foster Wallace (Jason Segel) and his profiler, Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg). Based on Lipsky’s five days spent bantering with the “Infinite Jest” writer, the film shows very little but tells us much.
“To read David Foster Wallace was to feel your eyelids pulled wide open,” says Lipsky, a frustrated novelist who pays the bills writing five hundred word profiles of boy bands for Rolling Stone. A rave review of “Infinite Jest,” Wallace’s satirical 1000 page epic on the pursuit of happiness, prompts Lipsky to set aside his own literary ambitions and arrange an extended interview at the end of Wallace’s three-week promotional book tour.
Travelling to Wallace’s home in Bloomington, Illinois the New York journalist finds one of the most famous writers on the planet trying to balance fame and success with his “regular guyness.” “I don’t mind appearing in Rolling Stone,” Wallace says, “but I don’t want to appear as someone who wants to be in Rolling Stone.”
For the next five days they eat candy, smoke cigarettes, listen to Alanis Morissette, talk and argue. A woman briefly comes between them as ego, insecurity and intellectual curiosity color the relationship between the two men.
“The End of the Tour” works both as a portrait of Wallace and an observation on the interview process. In what is essentially an extended Q&A Wallace comments on the artificiality of the situation—”This is not real,” he says.—acknowledging that an interview cannot capture the essence of a person. It’s a comment on the celebrity culture of self-revelation from a reporter who digs for a scoop and a reluctant subject. Lipsky sees Wallace’s secrecy as a problem—“You’re not willing to risk giving the real you,” he says.—Wallace prefers to let his work speak for him, calling himself a shy exhibitionist. It’s a cat and mouse game between hunter and hunted as Lipsky cozies up to Wallace, then snoops through his medicine cabinet looking for clues to a long rumoured heroin habit.
It’s also a portrait of a writer who is often compared to Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Pynchon, a once in a generation talent who didn’t live long enough—he committed suicide at age 46—to fulfill his destiny. Segel plays him as an unmade bed of a man, a mercurial 34-year-old struggling with the fame that comes along with sudden success. He doesn’t quite trust Lipsky or the process or why anyone would want to interview him—“You can stay around and write a story about my dogs, it might be more interesting.”—but understands the relationship between celebrity and the press.
It’s a quiet performance, tinged with loneliness and brilliance that draws attention to itself by avoiding tortured artist clichés. Occasionally it feels like an excuse for introspective comments from the David Foster Wallace Book of Wisdom, but Segel finds the humanity in him, playing him as a man who lived inside his head even as his world expanded to include a public hungry to know more about him.
Eisenberg’ s Lipsky rides the line between reporter asking tough questions and trying to be a friend. His relationship with Wallace is split between admiration, jealousy—both professional and personal—and self interest. He resents Wallace’s genius and success and his frustration is broadcast in tersely delivered lines like, “Not everyone can be as brilliant as you.”
The two men really aren’t that different, but Wallace, having hit heights Lipsky could only dream of, understands you have to be careful what you wish for.
“The End of the Tour” is an interesting movie that, unsurprisingly, doesn’t peel back the layers of Wallace’s psyche. As good as the performances are, the script is based on the actual 1996 interviews between Lipsky and Wallace, leaving contemporary audience’s with the same vague dissatisfaction the reporter felt at his subject’s reluctance to strip himself bare.
Richard hosted a “ComedyPRO In Conversation” session with director Nicholas Stoller on Thursday July 24, 2014 at Just for Laughs in Montreal.
From JFL’s website: Filmmaker Nicholas Stoller (Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Get Him to the Greek) is this year’s ‘In Conversation’ subject. His latest film, Neighbors, starring Seth Rogen and Zac Efron, laughed its way to a $51.1 million US debut over Mother’s Day weekend, and has grossed over $220 million worldwide thus far. In Conversation with Nicholas Stoller takes place at ComedyPRO on Thursday, July 24, 3 pm, at the Hyatt Regency Montreal. It is presented by the Telefilm Canada Feature Comedy Exchange, a CFC initiative in collaboration with Just For Laughs.
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.
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.
The Muppets came bounding back into theatres in 2011 with a sweet movie starring humans Jason Segel and Amy Adams that blended the right amount of nostalgia with just enough corny jokes to make it one of the year’s frothiest confections.
The new film from Jim Henson’s felt and fur creations, “Muppets Most Wanted,” is being billed as a sequel to that film, but it isn’t really. It’s more a return to the Muppet movies of old, packed to the gills with show biz in jokes, puns, songs and even a Swedish Chef homage to Ingmar Bergman.
It’s more akin to “The Great Muppet Caper” than Segel’s (who did not return for this film) vision.
The story picks up one second after the last one ended. Kermit, Miss Piggy and the gang are on Hollywood Boulevard after their big comeback, wondering what to do next. A meeting with talent agent Dominic Badguy (Ricky Gervais) seems to provide an answer. Against Kermit’s best judgment the Muppets accept Badguy’s offer of a European tour to open in “the world capitol of comedy, Berlin, Germany.”
What they don’t know is that Badguy is an associate of Constantine, the planet’s most notorious criminal and a dead ringer for Kermit. The evil plan is to replace Kermit with Constantine, and use the Muppets as a cover for an ingenious plan to steal the Crown Jewels.
The movie’s opening song, “Sequel,” is a tongue and cheek tune that melodically states, “everybody knows sequels are never as good.” Maybe so, but since this doesn’t feel like a sequel it’s hard to compare it to the last film.
The puns are back—“It’s not easy being mean,” says Constantine—and so are the tunes from Academy Award-winning songwriter Bret McKenzie and all the characters you know and love, but the movie feels different.
Whereas Segel’s Muppet movie played heartstrings like Eric Clapton strums the blues, “Muppets Most Wanted” has more of an edge. Well, as much of an edge as a movie starring Kermit and Miss Piggy could have.
The human characters—notably Gervais, Tina Fey as Nadya, a lusty Russian prison guard and Ty Burrell as an outrageous Interpol agent—are just as broad as the puppets which provides some laughs, but the emotional impact is blunted. To place it in an old Hollywood context, it’s more the slapstick of Abbott and Costello than the restrained, sweet comedy of Charlie Chaplin.
Still, the Muppets bring a good deal of goodwill with them and the movie shines brighter as a result. It’s hard not to giggle at the gags but an exchange between Fozzie and Walter hits a bit too close to an uncomfortable plot truth. “Looks like he’s planning some kind of heist bit,” Fozzie says of Constantine. “I hope not,” replies Walter, “they never work.”
Somewhere etched on a stone tablet are the Rules of Rom Coms™. All romantic comedies, it seems, must have an unlikely couple meet, fall in love, hit an obstacle and then reconcile just before the credits roll. “Five-Year Engagement” is no different, but shakes up the formula with some dark comedy—no other romance would use frostbite as a plot point—an adult conversation done with Muppet voices and two leads with charm and charisma to burn.
Jason Segel is Tom, a San Francisco chef engaged to his girlfriend Violet (Emily Blunt). The quirky couple—they go to parties dressed as Princess Diana and Super Bunny—are a perfect match, but circumstance is getting in the way of the wedding plans. First Violet’s sister Suzie (Alison Brie) preempts her sister’s big day by getting pregnant and planning a shotgun wedding. Then psychology student Violet accepts a place in a two-year graduate program at the U. of Michigan, once again placing a speed bump in the way of their walk down the aisle.
Like many Judd Apatow-produced movies “Five-Year Engagement” begins plays out like a standard rom com but takes many twists and turns along the way.
Some darker touches help separate this from the run-of-the-mill romantic comedy. Having said that, they also weigh down the midsection of the movie. Luckily this isn’t Kristen Bell, or worse yet, Katherine Heigl and any other Standard Romantic Male Lead™, but Blunt and Segel. They are engine that keeps the movie moving forward. You care about what happens to them, and when the plot contrived obstacle comes between them, it doesn’t feel as standard as it does in most movies, and you really hope they’ll be able to work things out.
They are helped by a terrific supporting cast made up of Thursday night Must See TV sitcom regulars from shows like “The Office,” “Community” and “Parks and Recreation.” Community’s Alison Brie, is a scene-stealer. Watching her and Blunt have a grown-up conversation in Muppet voices is worth the long running time.
“Five-Year Engagement” could have used some trimming, but succeeds not because it follows Rules of Rom Coms™ but because it doesn’t.
Producer Judd Apatow has tapped into an interesting formula. His trademarked combination of raunchy humor, full frontal male nudity and rom com sentimentality has proven to be a potent elixir in past hits like Knocked Up and The 40 Year Old Virgin. His latest confection, a laugh-out-loud funny break-up movie called Forgetting Sarah Marshall mines similar territory with hilarious results.
When we first meet Peter Bretter (Freaks and Geeks’s Jason Segel) he’s a struggling musician, paying the bills by scoring a CSI rip-off called Crime Scene. He’s also dating the star of the show Sarah Marshall (Kristen Bell of Veronica Mars) who turns his life upside down when she dumps him for an outlandish pop star named Aldous Snow (Russell Brand).
To mend his broken heart he books a weekend trip to Hawaii and checks into an upmarket ocean resort. There’s only one problem— Sarah and her new flame are also staying there. Peter is saved from going over the brink by Rachael (Mila Kunis from That 70s Show) a sympathetic desk clerk also nursing a broken heart. She provides much needed emotional support and an attractive shoulder to cry on.
Will Peter’s heart heal? Will he ever finish his Dracula rock opera featuring life size vampire puppets?
I think you probably know the answers to those questions already and you haven’t even seen the movie, but Forgetting Sarah Marshall isn’t as much about the sit-comish situation as it is about the characters in the story. Bretter is completely likeable as the everyman heartsick composer. He’s equal parts vulnerability, charm and goofiness. It’s a winning combo that gets the audience on side immediately and keeps them there throughout. Kunis is warm and funny as the damaged desk clerk, British comedian Russell Brand comes very close to stealing the show as the dense rock star and Jonah Hill (Superbad) is creepily funny as the star struck hotel waiter.
Like Knocked Up and others in the Apatow cannon Forgetting Sarah Marshall serves up standard movie situations—the ex-lovers staying at the same hotel—but tweaks them with an audacious mix of outrageous vulgarity and full-on, full-Monty male nudity and sweet sentimentality that makes them a fun R-rated night out.
I Love You, Man is a new bromance comedy starring Paul Rudd and Forgetting Sarah Marshall’s Jason Segal. Rudd plays Peter, an awkward guy who proposes to his fiancé (Rashida Jones) and then must find someone, any one, to be his best man.
After a few misfires, including a man-date with a crazy soccer fan and an architect who wanted to be more than just BFFs Peter finds a new best friend ever in the form of Sydney Fife (Jason Segal), a big mouthed manchild with a Rush fixation who becomes Peter’s man mentor. “I have an ocean of testosterone flowing through my veins,” he says, “and sometimes I have to let it out.” All goes well until Sydney’s overbearing ways slowly pushes a wedge between Peter and his wife to be.
I Love You, Man takes its lead from the Judd Apatow school of comedy. Apatow, the comedy maven behind The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up, had nothing to do with this movie but his fingerprints are all over it. Two of Apatow’s regulars—Segal and Rudd—headline the cast, but the Apatowian resemblance doesn’t stop there. Like The 40 Year Old Virgin and others, I Love You, Man is first and foremost about relationships. That means that while the movie is laced with bathroom humor and bad boy antics it also has a soft mushy side. It’s a winning combination that has turned Apatow’s vulgar little comedies into perfect date movies. So it is with I Love You, Man, the only movie featuring multiple montages from Canadian power trio Rush—Sydney calls them “the holy triumvirate”—and flatulence jokes that has that kind of crossover appeal.
As Peter Paul Rudd leaves behind the cocky fast-talking persona he has honed in other films, choosing to show more vulnerability than usual. It’s something different from him, but it isn’t completely successful. Instead of opening the character up and really showing his insecurities he comes across more as needy, clingy and slightly annoying.
Luckily Jason Segal is there to provide the real laughs. Sydney is a loud mouth who never grew up, and in Segal’s hands a great, unpredictable comic character. It’s a natural performance that could have grated but is saved by Segal’s charm.
The supporting cast also provides some nice moments. Jon Favreau takes a break from working on Iron Man 2 to step in front of the camera as Jaime Pressly’s grumpy and slightly perverted husband and Thomas Lennon gives the film one of its best sequences as a jilted mandate who comes back to confront Peter.
The women fare slightly less well. As Peter’s fiancée Zooey, Rashida Jones isn’t required to do anything but be adorable, which she does nicely, but it is a standard girlfriend / fiancée role. My Name is Earl’s Jaime Pressly has a bit more fire, but isn’t as funny here as she is every week on her sitcom.
I Love You, Man is an Apatow-wannabe, a film that rides the line between heartwarming and vulgar, but without the laugh-per-minute ratio that Judd Apatow pulls off in his films.
