“The Lego Batman Movie” movie begins with a pretty good joke. Over a darkened screen Batman’s raspy voice (Will Arnett) intones, “All important movies begin with black.” Unfortunately as the film goes on it becomes clear that it wasn’t just a gag, that director Chris McKay is trying to make an important, capital I, movie.
The movie kicks off with a wild opening sequence as The Joker (Zach Galifianakis) tries to destroy Gotham City. He brings along some super villains you have heard of, like Two Face and Harley Quinn, and some you haven’t like Gentleman Ghost and Condiment King. Mayhem ensues until Batman shows up. The resulting showdown sets up a familiar theme: without the bad, the good doesn’t exist.
“I’m fine with you fighting other people,” says The Joker, “but when people ask who your favourite villain is… You say Joker.”
The Caped Crusader refuses to acknowledge any bond with his nemesis. “Batman doesn’t do ships… as in the relationships.”
Later, police commissioner James Gordon retires, putting his daughter Barbara Gordon (Rosario Dawson) in charge. As the new commissioner she brings in a new crime clan called It Takes a Village… Not Batman. “Despite all the work he’s done for us Gotham is still the most crime ridden city on earth,” she says.
As Batman’s importance to Gotham lessens The Joker changes the dynamics of their relationship by surrendering, thereby rendering Batman completely useless. “I’m off the menu, you won’t get to fight any of this anymore!”
But what does Batman do with the city no longer needs a vigilante crime fighter? Alfred Pennyworth, the superheroes loyal butler and legal guardian suggests, “It’s time to face your greatest fear… Being part of a family again,” but will the man who says, “I don’t feel anything emotionally except rage,” be able to embrace a home life?
Infected by some disease as the live action DC films “The Lego Batman Movie” is not content to simply be what it is, a silly movie about superheroes made of toy bricks. Instead it stretches to be a feel-good movie about the importance of relationships and friendships, even between friend and foe. What should have been a straight up parody becomes something else. It does poke gentle fun at Marvel and DC’s habit of squishing far too many characters in their movies and The Joker’s “unnecessarily complicated bombs,” but the main “you mean nothing to me, no one does” storyline could have been lifted from any of Christopher Nolan’s dissections of Batman psyche. It’s more tortured Batman this time but with 100% more jokes then anything Zack Snyder could ever imagine.
There are jokes and even a song or two—although nothing as catchy as “Everything Is AWESOME!!!” by Tegan and Sara—but this is more about relationship feels than it is about belly laughs. Sure, it’s funny when Batman sings, “I’ll turn Two Face into black and blue face,” but the rest doesn’t feel irreverent enough. This is a new world, a Lego universe where anything is possible so why is Batman still clinging to the anger generated by his parent’s death? Arnett has fun with the voice, giving the character an almost Trumpian level of self-regard, which raises a giggle or two but overall this doesn’t feel like a parody of Batman as much as it does a fuzzy carbon copy.
“The Lego Batman Movie” zips along at a tremendous pace with in-your-face animation and some jokes but the overwhelming amount of CGI muffles some of the charm of the original, creating a less organic, homemade feel. The first contained loads of CGI as well but disguised it better. The result is a hybrid, an animated action movie that both parodies and pays tribute to the comics and comic movies that inspired it.
This weekend Jessica Chastain stars in the political thriller Miss Sloane. The title refers to the lobbyist main character but the film could easily have been titled Drain the Swamp.
Made before Donald Trump became president-elect, it only takes about 20 seconds before the word “trump” crops up in the dialogue. He’s never mentioned by name, but this look at “the most morally bankrupt profession since faith healing” paints exactly the ugly picture of behind-the-scenes machinations that Trump railed against on the campaign trail.
Chastain is Elizabeth Sloane, a sleep-deprived D.C. lobbyist “at the forefront of a business with a terrible reputation.” She’ll represent anyone, it seems, except the gun lobby, who offer her a lucrative contract, only to be laughed at and rejected.
Soon after she leaves her firm — one of the biggest in the country — to join a small, scrappy group who aim to whip up support for a bill that will demand background checks for all gun owners.
It’s a new hot-button peek behind the curtain of a political process, but Hollywood has been making Drain the Swamp movies for years.
The explosive Advise and Consent is based on former New York Times congressional correspondent Allen Drury’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the ratification of a secretary of state and the dirty little secrets people in public life must keep hidden. Political battle lines are drawn as a full frontal attack is launched on the character and credentials of the new nominee.
Director Otto Preminger almost pulled off one of the great casting coups of the 1960s when he offered civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. a role in Advise and Consent. The mercurial director thought King would be perfect for the role of a southern senator, despite the fact that no African Americans were serving in Senate at the time. King gave the offer some thought, but declined fearing the backlash and possible harm to the civil right movement.
More recently, in The Ides of March George Clooney (who also directed) played a Democratic Party candidate; the kind of guy who would make the top of Bill O’Reilly’s head pop off. He’s pro-ecology, anti-oil. He wants to tax the rich and legalize gay marriage. If he leans any further left he’ll topple over.
Although Clooney has spoken out about many of these topics in real life, he didn’t make a left-wing film. Instead he made a warts-and-all political movie about dirty dealings on the campaign trail.
The first hour is good stuff, great acting from Ryan Gosling, Paul Giamatti and Philip Seymour Hoffman and a fascinating, if occasionally dry look at life in the political fast lane. Then comes the blackmail, the meetings in darkened stairwells and double-crossing journalists.
Finally The Campaign, a comedy starring Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis as incumbent congressmen, begins with a quote from former presidential hopeful Ross Perot: “War has rules. Mud wrestling has rules. Politics has no rules.”
Neither does the movie; no rules or boundaries. These candidates go beyond the usual name-calling — “He looks like Osama Bin Laden” — to dirty tricks that would make Tricky Dick blush. It’s a through-the-looking glass-vision of how politics works that features ambition, greed, corruption and even a candidate who punches a baby.
It’s hard to know how to classify “Keeping Up with the Joneses,” a new film starring Jon Hamm, Gal Gadot, Isla Fisher and Zach Galifianakis. Billed as an action comedy, it contains as many laughs as your average Jason Bourne movie, and as much action as your typical comedy. If anything, it’s a study of quietly desperate suburban life. Now that’s a barrel of laughs!
Karen and Jeff Gaffney (Fisher and Galifianakis) live a quiet life on a quiet Atlanta residential cul-de-sac. He’s a people person, a sensitive HR head at tech giant MBI, she’s a designer and neighbourhood busybody. He doesn’t like spicy food, she doesn’t like the new, impossibly good looking couple, Natalie and Tim Jones (Gal Gadot and Jon Hamm), who have moved in across the street.
Tim is a travel writer who speaks many languages, Natalie devotes time to charity and does a food blog. The couples seem to have nothing in common—the Gaffney’s idea of travelling is going to Epcot. “You can do every country in like three blocks.”—and yet a friendship is struck until some snooping reveals the neighbourhood newbies are actually spies working on a case. Seems the cul-de-sac is a hotbed of international intrigue and the Gaffneys may be involved.
“Keeping Up with the Joneses” is an odd couples movie with so few laughs its hard to believe it was directed by the Greg Mottola, who also gave us “Superbad” and the ET comedy “Paul.” The ‘they’re not who they seem to be’ premise is either a classic or a tired bit, depending on your point of view. Either way a twist or two could have freshened the screwball idea up but instead Mottola shrugs off the heavy lifting to Galifianakis and Fisher. Both can be funny and both will do almost anything to get a laugh but no amount of slapstick and face pulling can inject yuks into what is a sitcom idea stretched thin.
But at least there’s some action, right? Not so fast. There are a handful of tame action sequences synced to lame music that appears lifted from 1980s action adventure TV show.
So, with few laughs and lame action what’s left? Hamm’s rugged good looks? Gadot’s cheekbones? Check and check, both are on display but their genetic gifts are not enough to make their characters interesting.
“Keeping Up with the Joneses” will make you jones for laughs and action.
The second feature from “Mad Men” creator Matthew Weiner is an odd duck. A comedy about substance abuse and bi polar behavior, it’s not as funny as a movie starring Owen Wilson and Zach Galifianakis should be nor is it as insightful as Weiner likely intended.
Wilson is Steve Dallas, an Annapolis, Maryland weatherman who lives off a diet of marijuana, scotch and anonymous sex. “I eat life out of the big box,” he says, unconvincingly. His best friend is Ben Baker (Galifianakis), a childhood pal “who wasn’t that screwed together to begin with.” He’s bi polar, drug addicted and the heir of a large chunk of money and land from his late father. His plan to create a utopian society on his dad’s old farm doesn’t sit well with his controlling sister Terri (Amy Poehler) who tries to have him declared incompetent. Steve is in the middle of the action, coming between Ben and his sibling while trying to woo Ben’s twenty-five year old free spirited stepmother Angela (Laura Ramsey). Between the strife and family politics the characters look for the answer to one of life’s great questions: Is this it?
Audiences may find themselves asking the same thing, but for very different reasons. For all the movie’s commentary on the vagaries of life, like friendship—“It’s a lot rarer than love,” Says Steve, “because there’s nothing in it for anybody.”—mental illness and the freedom to be who we are, the story doesn’t add much to the conversation on any of those topics. Add to that some annoying characters and a disrespectful attitude toward the film’s women—they are either harridans or contradictory in their behavior—and you’re left with the feeling that if Weiner had turned this into a television series and given the characters time to live and breath he might have been able to develop this into something more interesting.
Just got a press release from Warner Brothers trumpeting The Hangover Part 2’s king size box office gross. “The blockbuster comedy has now crossed $200 million worldwide,” it screams, “the fastest of any comedy to surpass that benchmark.” Right now the gross sits at about $205 million, a figure that is no doubt growing by the second, leading Warner Bros. Pictures President of Domestic Distribution Dan Fellman to predict that this Hangover will “last throughout the summer.”
Maybe it will. Still doesn’t mean it’s a good movie, or that the critics got it wrong.
Box office success isn’t always an indication of quality. Can you guess what Night of the Hunter, Metropolis, Blade Runner and Modern Times all have in common? Two things. They’re all classics, films regarded as important cultural artifacts and they all flopped on their original release.
Let’s try that again. What do The Day After Tomorrow, Rush Hour 2, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra share? Two things. There’s not a classic among them, and they all made at least $50 million on their opening weekend.
I don’t begrudge The Hangover Part 2’s gross. I’m sure Todd Phillips and company are nice people but no amount of box office business will ever convince me this is a good movie. Commercial and artistic success are often two mutually exclusive realms. Ask Van Gogh. He only sold one painting during his lifetime.
There are two schools of thought regarding threequels. The third part of any movie franchise might be, 1.) a waste of time, made primarily to cash in on the name brand value of the property (think “Godfather 3” or “Superman 3”) or 2.) an economical way of telling a story unencumbered with the weight of establishing characters or origin story (think “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” or “Goldfinger”).
“The Hangover Part III” certainly has name recognition and doesn’t waste any time in reintroducing the characters, but does it fall into category one or two?
The movie begins with Mr. Chow (Ken Jeong) making a spectacular break from a Thai prison. Meanwhile in the U.S. Alan (Zach Galifianakis) is out of control. A deadly accident with a giraffe sets off a series of events that lead to an intervention by his family and friends (Wolfpack members Bradley Cooper and Ed Helms). Just when it seems that Alan might pull his life together the Wolfpack is coerced into playing bounty hunter, searching for Chow and $21 million in stolen gold. If they fail, hapless Doug (Justin Bartha, who, once again doesn’t get to do any of the fun stuff) will be executed.
The second “Hangover” movie was an unfunny beat-for-beat carbon copy of the first. It contained all the elements of the first plus a monkey but it was too slavishly devoted to recreating the original to be anything more than a disappointment.
The new one is something else again. It’s a heist film, sans the monkey and most of the laughs. The “Hangover” movies have always been dark and edgy but this episode lays it on thick.
Much of he humor comes from playing well-established characters off of one another. Trouble is, director Todd Phillips has chosen to wrong two characters to focus on.
“I got a dumb sense of humor, bra,” says Alan. And how. There’s strange and there’s funny, and, as Alan, Galifianakis revels in the former more than the latter. Used sparingly he can raise a smile, but when the messy death of a giraffe is the comedic highlight of Alan’s storyline you know something is amiss. What’s funnier than killing a giraffe? Nothing apparently.
Jeong is also best enjoyed in small doses. Both actors are fearless, but taking risks doesn’t always add up to big laughs.
Cooper and Helms are relegated to the supporting cast, mostly there to react with a hearty “WT?” to the strange goings on.
And it is strange. The story is stuck in limbo somewhere between heist flick and comedy–with some attempted heartwarming moments thrown in for good measure–never really committing to either.
At one point Chou dramatically asks, “How do you kill what is already dead?” In terms of the “Hangover” franchise—which I thought had a fatal case of sequelitis after the second installment—you simply put the wrong people in the leads.
The action in “The Hangover Part 2” starts as so many bad benders do, with the simple words, “Come and have a drink with me and the guys” and ends after as debauched ride through the streets of Bangkok as has ever been committed to film. The first time around, in 2009, the day after the night before adventures of the Wolfpack—Bradley Cooper, Zach Galifianakis and Ed Helms—was fresh, even charming in an alcoholic haze kind of way. This time out the guys have all the charm of stale beer breath.
The set up is similar to the first film. This time around Phil (Cooper) and Alan (Galifianakis) are groomsmen at their buddy Stu (Helms) Thailand wedding. One thing leads to another and they wake up in a grotty Bangkok hotel room, minus one of the wedding party, Teddy (Mason Lee), Stu’s bride-to-be’s brother. To find him they must re-enact the first movie… er… turn Bangkok upside down.
“The Hangover Part 2” has a severe case of sequelitis. It tries to please the core “Hangover” audience by presenting a familiar—some would say photocopied—plot, but also introduces new, darker humor in an attempt to keep things fresh. Neither is really successful. The recycled plot points borrowed from the original—Stu writes a song about their adventures, there’s the Tyson tattoo, hookers and the mystery of a missing friend—don’t work as well the second time through and the movie’s dark tone dampens many of the laughs.
Ed Helms spends much of the movie screaming, “I can’t believe this is happening again,” and frankly, by the end of the first hour, neither can the audience.
Galifianakis brings most of the laughs to the movie, but his unbalanced brand of humour is hit and miss and the character Alan is better in small doses, not as the main fount of funny.
There is nothing as hilarious here as the first movie’s tiger in the bedroom or the closing credit’s Polaroids. If these guys decide to go for a third binge, perhaps they should call Dr. Drew first.
Almost everyone has done it once; woken up with cotton mouth, a headache, a mystery bruise or two and only a vague recollection of what happened the night before. Some call these symptoms the “wrath of the grapes” others call them by their real name—the hangover. Hangovers are always unpleasant, unless of course you’re not the one with the splitting headache. If I learned anything in my twenties it was that’s it always fun to laugh at someone who is desperately hungover, which is exactly what Old School director Todd Phillips is counting on with his new film about three groomsmen who lose their about-to-be-wed friend after a night of drunken debauchery.
The trailer sets up the movie nicely. It’s the aftermath of a wild Vegas bachelor party. There’s a tiger in the bathroom, a chicken in the living room, a baby in the closet and three very hungover groomsmen (Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms and Zach Galifianakis). What’s missing is the front tooth of one of the guys and the groom. Nobody knows what happened to either of them. The hazy-headed trio have just a few hours to retrace their staggered steps from the night before, find their friend Doug (Justin Bartha) and, for God’s sake, get him to the church on time.
The Hangover is an extreme “what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” movie. A boy’s weekend version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, it’s the ultimate nightmare for anyone waiting at home for the guys to come home from a bachelor party. These three take part in every vice The Entertainment Capital of the World has to offer from drinking to drugs to marrying the proto stripper with a heart of gold to hanging out with Carrot Top. It’s packed to bursting with every Vegas cliché, a hybrid of all the Sin City movies that preceded it. Call it Leaving Viva Las Vegas Honeymoon.
It’s also the funniest thing to come out of Vegas since the Rat Pack ruled the Sands. Not that it’s for everyone. There are jokes here that would make Hollywood’s current king of crude, Judd Apatow, squirm in his seat. If 911 jokes (Too soon? Apparently not!), holocaust references and a scene with a baby being made to do something the Divinyls once sang about (look it up, it was top twenty in 1991) sound too outrageous, then this movie is not for you. If, however, you don’t mind muttering “That’s not right” while laughing out loud, there is much here to enjoy.
The big surprise is Bradley Cooper in a role that not only establishes him as a leading man after a long run as the good looking second banana in movies like Failure to Launch and Wedding Crashers, but also proves that he can be funny. Really funny. He’s a reactive comedian and doesn’t get many punch lines, but his response to finding a tiger in his hotel room bathroom is priceless.
The Hangover is a wild brain-dead movie about men behaving badly that breaks so many taboos it makes raunchy comedies like Knocked Up seem tame.
If the new Zach Galifianakis / Robert Downey Jr. comedy was a mathematical equation it might look something like this: “Trains, Planes and Automobiles” x “The Hangover” ^4√( “The Odd Couple” + “Thelma and Louise”) = “Due Date.” In other words it’s a gross out road trip story (masturbating dogs!) about two mismatched people with a bit of action.
Downey and Galifianakis are Peter and Ethan, the odd couple who, through circumstance, find themselves placed on a no fly list after an incident at the Atlanta airport. To make matters worse, Peter needs to be in LA in three days to attend the birth of his first child and Ethan, a wannabe actor has a meeting with an agent. Peter reluctantly agrees to share a ride with Ethan and by the time they arrive in Los Angeles they have been arrested, drank coffee made of human ashes and come close to dying.
“Due Date” is the kind of movie where you lean over to the person next to you and VERY quietly whisper, “That was funny,” more often than you will actually laugh out loud. The movie is amusing, often gross and rather dark, but it doesn’t have the deep belly laughs of Galifianakis and director Todd Phillips’s last film “The Hangover.” Its ninety minutes of strange non sequitors, socially awkward behavior and bickering. In other words it’s a lot like a 2010 version of “Planes, Trains and Automobiles,” but we live in a more cynical and mean spirited time and the movie reflects that.
“Due Date” is missing the one element that made “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” so appealing and that’s sweetness. John Candy’s character—reflected here through a fun house mirror by Galifianakis—was annoying as all get out but underneath the annoying questions, bumbling and boorish behavior was an undeniable sweetness which Phillips has surgically removed from almost every scene of “Due Date.” The characters have an edgy kind of chemistry, but charming they are not.
Ethan is a borderline head case and Peter has rage issues. That’s a combo that’s been played for laughs since the days of the Three Stooges and Laurel and Hardy but the thing that’s missing is amiability.
Not that “Due Date” isn’t funny. It is, it just isn’t very likeable.
