Bill Murray became a big screen superstar on the back of loose-limbed performances in comedies like Caddyshack, Stripes and Ghostbusters. By 1984, however, he was tiring of playing the clown and looking to do something with a bit more edge.
When director John Byrum gave him a copy of W. Somerset Maugham’s 1944 novel The Razor’s Edge, Murray responded the very next day. Calling the director at 4 am he said, “This is Larry, Larry Darrell,” dropping the name of the novel’s main character, an enigmatic man on a quest for spiritual fulfillment.
The resulting film bombed, with Roger Ebert suggesting Murray played “the hero as if fate is a comedian and he is the straight man.” Of course Murray has gone on to become a credible and in demand dramatic actor, but the story of a comedian’s rocky leap from farce to drama still rings true today.
This weekend Chris Rock’s new comedy Top Five tells the story of Andre Allen, a fictional megastar trying to jump from silly comedies to Uprize, a serious drama about the slave revolt in Haiti.
Top Five is a new twist on an old story. Many comedians have tried to flick the switch from comedy to drama.
The late Robin Williams effortlessly hopped between genres. In 2002 alone he made three films, the lowbrow laffer Death to Smoochy, bookended by the psychodrama One Hour Photo and Christopher Nolan’s thriller Insomnia.
Will Ferrell, Steve Carell and Jonah Hill are best known for funny movies like Blades of Glory, The 40 Year-Old Virgin and Superbad, but each have stretched their dramatic muscles. Ferrell’s Stranger Than Fiction earned a good review from Roger Ebert who said Ferrell “has dramatic gifts to equal his comedic talent.” Carell’s new drama Foxcatcher looks poised to earn him notice at awards time and Jonah Hill is a two time Oscar nominee for heavyweights Moneyball and The Wolf of Wall Street.
Finally, think Jim Carrey and visions of talking butts and rubber-faced features come to mind but he made a serious run at being a serious actor. Perhaps he was pushed into more thoughtful work when his Batman Forever co-star Tommy Lee Jones told him, ‘I cannot sanction your buffoonery,” but whatever the case in movies like Man on the Moon, The Majestic and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind played it straight. “It’s going to be so hard to talk out of my ass after this,” he said when he won the Golden Globe for Best Actor award for The Truman Show, “but I’ll manage.”
Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum are producers on “22 Jump Street,” which, I guess, explains the large number of jokes about how much everything cost. At one point Hill actually says, “It’s way more expensive for no reason at all.”
I don’t know how much the movie cost to make, but the self-aware jokes did make me laugh even though “22” is essentially a remake of the first film, with a few more Laurel and Hardy slapstick gags and amped up explosions.
The “21 Jump Street” high school undercover cops Schmidt and Jenko (Hill and Tatum) are back, but this time they’re narco cops. That is until they botch an investigation into drug lord Ghost’s (Peter Stormare) operation. Their failure gets them demoted back to the 22 Jump Street (they moved across the road) program.
Jump Street’s Captain Dickson (Ice Cube) sends them undercover as unlikely brothers Brad and Doug McQuaid, to college to arrest the supplier of a drug named WHYPHY (WiFi). The bumbling, but self-confident duo infiltrates the college, but campus life—frat house parties, football and girls—threaten to blow apart their partnership. “Maybe we should investigate other people,” says Jenko, “sow our cop oats.”
“22 Jump Street’s” end credit sequence, which maps out the next sequels from number 3 to installment 43—they go to Beauty and Magic School among other places of higher learning— is probably the funniest part of the movie. Co-directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller—they also made “The Lego Movie”—expertly parody Hollywood’s obsession with grinding a good thing into the ground and grab a few laughs while they do it.
The stuff that comes before is amiable, relying on the Mutt and Jeff chemistry of the neurotic Hill and all-American Tatum for laughs. It’s boisterous and aims to please, but best of all are the self-referential jokes. By clowning around about the difficulty in making the sequel better than the original they’re winking at the audience, acknowledging that this is basically a spoof of Hollywood sequels. It’s meta and kind of brilliant.
It isn’t, however, a laugh a minute. Ill-timed jokes about Maya Angelou and Tracy Morgan are sore thumbs, while the bromance between Schmidt and Jenko is played out until it begins to feel like the punch line to a bad, politically incorrect gag.
Better are Tatum’s malapropisms. The dim-witted cop says, “I thought we had Cate Blanchett on this assignment,” when he means “carte blanche,” and confuses “anal” and “annal.” They’re easy jokes, but Channing milks laughs out of them.
There will likely be a “23 Jump Street”—the film shows us an under-construction condo at that address—which will hopefully have the same subversive sense of fun, but more actual jokes.
“The Lego Movie” is possibly the weirdest, most psychedelic kid’s entertainment since “H.R. Pufnstuf.”
Released by a big corporation—Warner Bros—and based on one of the world’s most popular toys, it manages to feel as though a kid who threw away his Lego kit’s instructions and snapped the blocks together in random, fun ways made it.
When we arrive at the Lego universe it is ruled by the evil Lord Business (Will Ferrell), a tyrant obsessed with perfection and conformity. In his world the radio pumps out perfect pop sings like “Everything is Awesome,” and a group of robotic “micro-managers” ensures that everything is just so.
To guarantee the world he has created from interlocking bricks stays just the way he wants it, he has a plan to spray the entire thing—Lego people and all—with Kraggle, a super glue that will permanently paste everything it touches into Lord Business’s idea of excellence.
When Emmet (Chris Pratt), a Lego figure who was invisible in life, stumbles across the “piece of resistance” he becomes The Special, the greatest Master Builder in the universe, jopining a group that includes Batman (Will Arnett), a pirate named Metalbeard (Nick Offerman), Abraham Lincoln (Will Forte), Shaq (Shaquille O’Neal) and Green Lantern (Jonah Hill).
With the help of the Master Builders, a loopy wizard named Vitruvius (Morgan Freeman) and Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks) a tough young woman with a sensitive side, Emmet must break free of the chains of conformity and defeat Lord Business.
The first thing you notice about “The Lego Movie” is the look. It’s computer-animated but looks like stop-motion. The film’s handmade composition isn’t slick, but it is playful, which is a perfect compliment to its Lego origins. (It should be noted, however, that the movie in no way plays like a commercial for the toys.) From the crude Lego flames to the awkward way the characters move, the movie is completely consistent in its vision of a Lego world.
The second thing you’ll notice is how off the wall the story is. It’s not just off-the-wall, it’s off-the-planet. Directors and co-writers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller have taken the movie’s credo of battling against conformity to heart and made a big budget studio movie that bends all the rules. At its heart it’s a simple hero journey, a primal story about good against evil, but frenetic storytelling and inventive twists in almost every scene add a richness that belies its humble toy story origins.
It may be a bit too hectic at times—blame video game influence for that—and a titch too long for little ones with short attention spans, but the overriding message of dancing to your own beat combined with an unexpected and touching live-action section make “The Lego Movie” far more than an exercise in nostalgia for parents who grew up creating worlds from little plastic blocks or a way to sell more toys to a new audience. Instead it’s a wildly entertaining movie that uses the toys as a muse, and does what the toys have always done, light imaginations on fire.
TOP THIRTEEN HITS (click on the title to see trailer)
1. 12 Years a Slave. There’s a key line near the beginning of “12 Years a Slave, “ the new drama from “Shame” director Steve McQueen. Shortly after being shanghaied from his comfortable life as a freeman into a life of slavery Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) declares, “I don’t want to survive. I want to live.” Based on Northup’s 1853 memoir the movie is an uncompromising story about will, suffering and injustice.
2. American Hustle. “American Hustle” is one of the year’s best. It’s an entertainingly audacious movie that will doubtless be compared to “The Wolf of Wall Street” because of the similarity in tone and themes, but this time around David O. Russell has almost out-Scorsese’d Scorsese.
3. Before Midnight. “Before Midnight” is beautifully real stuff that fully explores the doubts and regrets that characterize Jesse and Celine’s (Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy) love affair. Done with humor, heart and pathos, often in the same scene, it is a poignant farewell to two characters who grew up in front of us.
4. Blue Jasmine. Darker than most of Woody Allen’s recent output, “Blue Jasmine” doesn’t go for laughs—very often anyway—but is an astutely crafted psychological character study. Jasmine is a modern day Blanche Du Bois, a faded bright light now forced to depend on the kindness of strangers. Getting in her way are delusions of grandeur and a continued sense of denial—likely the same sense that kept her guilt free during the years the illegal cash was flowing—that eventually conspire to fracture her psyche. “There’s only so many traumas one can take,” she says, “ before you end up in the street, screaming.”
5. Captain Phillips. I don’t think it’s fair to charge audiences full price for screenings of “Captain Phillips.” While watching this exciting new Tom Hanks thriller I was reminded of the old Monster Trucks ads that bellowed, “You Pay for the Whole Seat but You’ll Only Need the Edge!”It a film about piracy and I don’t mean the sleazy guys who bootleg movies but the real pirates who were responsible for the first hijacking of an American cargo ship in two hundred years.
6. Dallas Buyer’s Club. In “Dallas Buyer’s Club” Canadian director Jean-Marc Vallée has made an emotional drama that never stoops to melodrama. Instead it’s an inspirational film about standing up for what you believe in.
7. Frances Ha. The seventh film from “Greenberg” director Noah Baumbach isn’t so much a traditional narrative as it is a character study of Frances (Greta Gerwig), an underemployed dancer struggling to find herself in New York City. It plays like a cleaned up black-and-white version of “Girls”; an emotionally rich and funny portrait of twenty-something ennui. “Frances Ha” is a collection of details. There is an engaging story, but it’s not exactly laid out in three acts. It feels more intimate and raw than the usual twenty-ish crisis flick and with each detail we get another piece of the puzzle that makes up Frances’ life.
8. Fruitvale Station. It’s important to remember that “Fruitvale Station” isn’t a documentary. Director Ryan Coogler has shaped the movie for maximum heartrending effect, and by the time the devastating last half hour plays out it’s hard to imagine any other movie this year packing such a emotional wallop.
9. Gravity. “Gravity” isn’t an epic like “2001: A Space Odyssey” or an outright horror film like “Alien.” There are no monsters or face hugging ETs. It’s not even a movie about life or death. Instead it is a life-affirming movie about the will to survive.
10. Her. “Her” is an oddball story, but it’s not an oddball film. It is ripe with real human emotion and commentary on a generation’s reliance on technology at the cost of social interaction.
11. Inside Llewyn Davis. “Inside Llewyn Davis” is a fictional look at the vibrant Greenwich Village folk scene. Imagine the cover of “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” come to life. Sharp-eyed folkies will note not-so-coincidental similarities between the people Llewyn meets and real-life types like Tom Paxton, Alert Grossman and Mary Travers, but this isn’t a history, it’s a feel. It gives us an under-the-covers look at struggles and naked ambition it takes to get noticed.
12. Nebraska. The humour doesn’t come in the set-up-punch-line format but arises out of the situations. A scene of Woody’s gathered family—his elderly brothers and grown sons—watching a football game redefines the word taciturn but the subject of the sparse conversation, a 1974 Buick, is bang on, hilarious and will likely sound familiar to anyone with a large family.
13. Wolf of Wall Street. “Wolf of Wall Street” makes for entertaining viewing, mostly because DiCaprio and Jonah Hill are able to ride the line between the outrageous comedy on display and the human drama that takes over the movie’s final minutes. Both are terrific, buoyed by the throbbing pulse of Scorsese’s camera. With its fourth wall breaking narration, scandalous set pieces and absurd antics “The Wolf of Wall Street” is an experience. At three hours it’s almost as excessive as Balfort’s $26,000 dinners. It feels a bit long, but like the spoiled brats it portrays, it will not, and cannot, be ignored.
TOP FIVE MISSES
TREND: Big stars don’t guarantee box office!
1. The Fifth Estate – Budget: $28 million, Global box office: $6 million, Return: 21% Late into “The Fifth Estate” Guardian investigative journalist Nick Davies (David Thewlis) says, “most good stories start at the beginning.” I argue that he’s right– about 99% of the time. Unfortunately this look at WikiLeaks and hacker-turned-whistleblower Julian Assange falls into the 1%.
2. Bullet to the Head – Budget: $25 million, Global box office: $9 million, Return: 36% With a name like Bullet to the Head you know the new Sylvester Stallone movie isn’t a romantic comedy. Although he paraphrases the most famous rom com line of all time, “You had be at BLEEP BLEEP!” the movie is nothing but an ode to testosterone.
3. Getaway – Budget: R180-million, Global box office: R105-million, Return: 58 percent. On a scale of zero to stupid, ”Getaway” ranks an eleven. It is what we call in the film criticism business a S.D.M. (Silly Damn Movie). OK, I made that last part up, but I couldn’t really think of any other category to place this movie under. Maybe E.S.D.M. (Extremely Silly Damn Movie).
Hunter S. Thompson, the great gonzo journalist and observer of American life, had nothing to do with “The Wolf of Wall Street,” but he certainly is one of the film’s spiritual fathers.
Directed by Martin Scorsese and based on the life of hard-partying Wall Street tycoon Jordan Belfort, it is a depraved opera about sex, drugs and greed. It’s the kind of epic story of avarice and excess Thompson would have relished, but are audiences ready for a three-hour drug fuelled romp through the wild side of Wall Street?
When we first meet Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) he has yet to occupy Wall Street. An ambitious newbie, his first day as a broker is Black Monday, October 19, 1987, the date of the biggest crash since the Depression. Forced to reinvent himself he forms a shady company specializing in penny stocks that do little for his clients, but line his pockets with commissions.
With money rolling in Balfort and company (including Jonah Hill as Quaalude enthusiast Donnie Azoff) dive head first into Wall Street’s cocaine and hookers era, forming a brokerage firm with the upstanding name of Stratton Oakmont. “Stratton Oakmont is America,” says Balfort. “It’s the land of opportunity.”
Equating success with excess, Balfort indulges in every debauchery while making everyone around him rich (and himself richer than everyone else) and fending off attention from the FBI.
By the end of “The Wolf of Wall Street” you’ll feel as though you’ve had testosterone splashed on your face. From the film’s opening scenes of DiCaprio and Co. throwing helmeted little people at a giant Velcro target to a wild soon-to-be-classic Quaalude scene, Scorsese has crafted a film that makes Gordon Gekko look warm and fuzzy. It’s muscular filmmaking that takes no prisoners, highlighting unlikeable mostly male characters in dubious situations.
There are female characters. As Belfort ‘s second wife Naomi Margot Robbie does good work, but the movie is a boy’s club. Or rather, a frat house where the Bro Code relegates women to the bedroom or the barroom but rarely the boardroom.
The sexual politics are definitely slanted in toward the males, but the movie shines as a metaphor for all the venal men whose gluttonous appetites for power and wealth ground the US economy into the dirt over the last few decades. Scorsese captures the unhinged spirit of these men, luxuriating in the decadent details of their lives.
It makes for entertaining viewing, mostly because DiCaprio and Jonah Hill are able to ride the line between the outrageous comedy on display and the human drama that takes over the movie’s final minutes. Both are terrific, buoyed by the throbbing pulse of Scorsese’s camera.
With its fourth wall breaking narration, scandalous set pieces and absurd antics “The Wolf of Wall Street” is an experience. At three hours it’s almost as excessive as Balfort’s $26,000 dinners. It feels a bit long, but like the spoiled brats it portrays, it will not, and cannot, be ignored.
There was a time when rock stars behaved like rock stars. They didn’t guest edit the “Globe and Mail” or appear on “American Idol.” In the good old days they trashed hotels rooms, drove Roll Royces into swimming pools and bit the heads off of bats. In other words they behaved like Aldous Snow (Russell Brand) the decadent singer who first rock ‘n’ rolled all night in “Saving Sarah Marshall” and now parties every day in “Get Him to the Greek.”
Jonah Hill plays Aaron Green, a record company intern sent to London to accompany his idol, the washed up rock star Aldous Snow, to New York for an appearance on the “Today” show and then on to Los Angeles for his comeback concert at the Greek Theatre. Between “sips of naughty water,” condoms of heroin hidden in awkward places and all the sex, barf and rock ‘n’ roll two people can possibly cram into 72 hours the trip goes horribly wrong. Imagine if “The Hangover” starred Keith Moon and Jim Morrison and you get the idea.
Brand and Hill are the name brand comics in the credits, but another actor, not known for yukking it up, actually almost walks away with the movie. As the grizzled record label president Sergio Roma—a jaded executive who has been there, done that—Sean ‘P. Diddy’ Combs swoops in from time to time to deliver many of the film’s best lines. He’s at his best in the manic Las Vegas drugapalooza sequence—they smoke a giant spliff called a “Jeffrey,” so named because the name sounds safe but packs a punch; much like Jeffrey Dalhmer I guess—when he’s out of control and really letting go of his finely honed P-Diddy image.
Not that Brand and Hill don’t get laughs—they get plenty—but they are also required to bring some heart to what is essentially an R-rated raunchy comedy. The romantic scenes, the pining for their exes and the heart-to-heart talks, could work, but they don’t in this movie. Rock ‘n’ roll is a vicious game and “Get Him to the Greek” is best when it is loud and proud and sticks with the three chord comedy. Nobody wants to hear the Ramones backed by a symphony orchestra and likewise we don’t need to hear Snow complaining about the lonely life of a rock star. Screenwriter and director Nicholas Stoller would have done well to wonder “What would Keith Richards do?” from time to time and cut the mushy stuff.
Otherwise “Get Him to the Greek” is a rock ‘n’ roll romp, and while it doesn’t exactly have enough rock ‘n’ roll attitude—it’s more The Monkees than Led Zeppelin—it does provide one great lyric line, “When the world slips you a Jeffrey / Stroke the furry wall,” a great old school soundtrack—“Personality Crisis” by the New York Dolls, T. Rex’s “20th Century Boy”—lots of good inappropriate jokes and some fun cameos.
“Moneyball,” the new sports drama starring Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill, begins with the Mickey Mantle quote, “It’s unbelievable how much you don’t know about a game you’ve played all your life.” The legendary New York Yankees outfielder and first baseman played eighteen seasons in the big leagues but likely wouldn’t recognize the game as played in this behind-the-scenes drama.
Based on the book of the same name by Michael Lewis, Pitt plays Billy Beane, the real life General Manager of the Oakland A’s. Faced with having to piece together a pro team with a budget a fourth as large as the New York Yankees he breaks with one hundred years of baseball tradition—using scouts, instinct and guts—to find a scientific method to build a team on the cheap. With a Yale trained economist (Jonah Hill) he creates sabermetrics, a mind boggling combination of facts, figures and computer algorithms to recruit his team.
It all sounds very dry, but so did “The Social Network” before you actually sat down and watched it. “Moneyball” takes what cold be a dry subject of baseball stats and spices it up with complex, interesting characters, a compelling human story while leaving the usual sport’s movie clichés behind.
It moves at about half the speed of “The Social Network” but that’s OK we’re not dealing with the fast moving world of cyber space here but the more relaxed pace of America’s favorite pastime.
But this isn’t a baseball movie. Pitt and Hill, in a rare serious role, dominate the movie with their behind the scenes stories. Like “The Social Network” “Moneyball” places the onus on the characters and not the technology that drives the story. We’ve seen baseball movies before, but we’ve never sent the game from this angle. It’s a new take on the game, one that may leave Mantel scratching his head but should leave audiences rapt.
You’re first clue that “The Sitter” isn’t “Mary Popins” is star Jonah Hill’s name above the title. Hill, the star of “Get Him to the Greek,” “Superbad” and “Funny People,” is no Julie Andrews. The second clue comes in the first thirty seconds of the movie, which cannot be described in this family friendly place without me blushing and turning beet red.
Hill plays Noah Griffith, a university drop out and general coach potato, roped in to babysitting for the neighbor’s kids. Even though he tells the kids– ten-year-old celebutant wannabe Blithe (Landry Bender), troublemaker Rodrigo (Kevin Hernandez) and anxiety ridden Slater (Max Records)—he’s a “sit on the coach, at a burrito, do what I say or I’ll kill you, kind of babysitter” he takes the kids on a “field trip” to buy cocaine for a girl he has a crush on. Their night out involves accusations of pedophilia, cherry bombs, a baby dinosaur egg filled with drugs, stolen cars, a theft at a Bat Mitzvah and, in the end, like “Mary Poppins” a greater understanding of the importance of family.
What?!
That’s right, “The Sitter” is actually a bit more like “Mary Poppins” than you might first think. But in most ways it’s completely unlike the practically-perfect-in-every-way nanny. Take away the drug turf war, the grand larceny and racial stereotypes and you are left with a movie about familial relationships, doing the right thing, acceptance of others and loyalty. Trouble is the drug turf war, the grand larceny and racial stereotypes take up ninety percent of the movie.
Hill doles out advice like, “You shouldn’t waste your feelings on people who don’t value you,” between buying cocaine and robbing his father’s jewelry store.
I wouldn’t mind the warm-hearted sentiment if it didn’t simply exist as a lame attempt to temper the movie’s raunchier elements. It’s not a kid’s movie by any stretch so why the kid-friendly—and seemingly out-of-character—platitudes from Hill? I don’t think audiences primed for a raunchy comedy will care about the G-rated messages, and the only family who could possibly sit down and enjoy this together would be the Addams Family.
The slapstick is low energy, but at least Hill, in his last role before his extreme weight loss, raises the occasional laugh with his spot on comic delivery, but it’s a not enough to rescue this hybrid of R-rated jokes and family friendly sentiment.
By Richard Crouse – Metro in Focus
