From the archive: "The Hangover"

The screenwriters Jon Lucas and Scott Moore have mined a profitable seam with scripts that feature easily pitched concepts, two or three standout jokes good for the trailer, and a lot of filler in between. They're also prolific: in the last six months alone, their names have featured on Four Christmas and Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, and now they bring us a fitful ladcom, which confirms my suspicion Lucas and Moore are pushing their luck, not to mention taking the studios for a ride. The Hangover is a road trip at heart: a quartet of guys in their thirties and forties set off to Vegas for a bachelor night to remember; the wrinkle is that, the next morning, none of them can. Three of the four - Phil (Bradley Cooper), Stu (Ed Helms) and Alan (Zach Galifianakis) - wake up the next day with the hangover from hell and a series of questions to answer. How did dentist Stu lose one of his teeth? Why is there a tiger in the hotel suite bathroom? And where's the groom gone?

Directed by Todd Phillips (Road Trip), the film doesn't do much to overturn the charge that the New American Comedy is an essentially and exclusively male phenomenon. There isn't a film in existence that couldn't be brightened by the appearance of Heather Graham - she'd have worked wonders on Tarkovsky - but casting her as a breastfeeding stripper (in effect, a set of multitasking boobs) hardly seems the giant step forward in the depiction of women these films have been crying out for, and the same goes for the nagging, clueless or frigid other halves these boys leave behind, too. Of the leads, Cooper coasts through The Hangover's 100 minutes on an impermeable layer of sub-McConaughey insincerity; Helms, a former Daily Show correspondent more frequently seen in small, often amusing cameos, is only really allowed to impose himself during a belated Elton John impersonation; which allows weirdy-beardy stand-up Galifianakis to run off with most of his scenes as the borderline autistic Alan, an individual with his own unique take on post-9/11 airport security, the preferred spices of wild cats and the advantages of the humble satchel ("Indiana Jones has one"), and who ends up wearing a baby in a papoose - a joke repeated, without inflection, from Phillips' Old School.

Phillips made his name with 1998's Frat House, an acclaimed documentary about college hazing rituals, and there's a sense he hasn't quite got fratboy humour out of his system, which here leads to a lot of naked male behinds, vomit, errant condoms, date rape drugs and raucous, sometimes violent behaviour: Galifianakis is tasered in the face and later thumped during an unironic cameo from Mike Tyson, absolving the leads' behaviour with the line "we all do dumb shit when we're fucked up" - some comfort there, no doubt, for the woman he was jailed for raping. I can't say I didn't laugh during The Hangover, but it struck me as coming from somewhere down towards the thinner end of the comedy wedge, perhaps because Lucas and Moore draw thumbnail sketches rather than fully-formed characters, and write skits rather than scenes. Any narrative development in their films is arbitrary and erratic; there's nothing to hold this, or Four Christmases, or Ghosts of Girlfriends Past together save their initial pitch and whatever snickering the audience is content to provide. The best films in the current comedy renaissance - The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Stuck on You, John Hamburg's I Love You, Man from earlier this year - allow us to catch their characters growing up and evolving underneath all their obligatory gross-out; but here - as in something like Wedding Crashers - we're asked to spend more time than is especially funny or edifying with bleary, puking, incorrigible little boys whose antics would very quickly become tiresome in real life, and who'll most likely end up making the same lairy mistakes all over again the minute the end credits have rolled.

(June 2009)

The Hangover Part II opens nationwide on Thursday.

For what it's worth...

Top Ten Films at the UK Box Office
for the weekend of May 13-15, 2011:

1 (1) Thor (12A) **
2 (2) Fast Five (12A) ***
3 (new) Attack the Block (15) **
4 (3) Insidious (15) ***
5 (5) Hanna (12A) *
6 (4) Water for Elephants (12A)
7 (7) Rio (U)
8 (6) Something Borrowed (12A)
9 (8) Priest (12A)
10 (9) Arthur (12A) *

(source: UK Film Council)

My top five:
1. After the Apocalypse
2. Red Hill
3. Win Win
4. Love Like Poison
5. A Screaming Man


Top Ten DVD rentals:

1 (1) The King's Speech (12) ****
2 (2) The Tourist (12) **
3 (3) Meet the Parents: Little Fockers (12)
4 (6) Due Date (15)
5 (new) Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (12) *
6 (new) The Next Three Days (12) **
7 (new) Blue Valentine (15) ***
8 (9) Unstoppable (12) ***
9 (4) The Social Network (12) *****
10 (8) Tron Legacy (PG) *

(source: lovefilm.com)

My top five:
1. NEDs
2. The King's Speech
3. Chico and Rita
4. Nenette
5. Tangled


Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:
1. Zodiac (Sunday, BBC2, 10pm) [above]
2. It Happened One Night (Saturday, BBC2, 12noon)
3. The Set-Up (Saturday, BBC2, 1.50am)
4. Far From Heaven (Saturday, C4, 10.20pm)
5. Back to the Future Part III (Sunday, ITV1, 4.20pm)

On DVD: "Tangled"

Four years ago, Disney had one of their biggest (and most unexpected) live-action hits of recent years with Enchanted, a contemporary fairytale that - like rivals DreamWorks' animated Shrek features - threatened to do something subversive within a very familiar storybook framework. Enchanted arrived at a point when Disney's animated output had withered to practically naught; following the recruitment of Pixar chief John Lasseter, the company then churned out the OK-ish 3D effort Bolt and the very middling The Princess and the Frog, which suggested the Mouse House was now more interested in looking backwards than forward.

Tangled, their Rapunzel rewrite (and the company's fiftieth animated feature, a landmark announced with great fanfare in the opening credits), is itself a throwback to those Disney movies we all went to see in the days before silly 3D glasses, yet it's the first of the films produced under the Lasseter regime to have taken on some of the lessons gained from Enchanted about reconnecting with your core audience. The medium is the now-standard computer animation, complete with the textural novelty (in this instance, the heroine's lustrous, flowing hair) Pixar movies used to boast, but Tangled's essence is broadly traditional. It has a dashing, romantic anti-hero in the thief Flynn Rider, who gets lots of adventure business evading the authorities on horseback, and a self-improving heroine (voiced by Mandy Moore) who both talks with the animals and converses with her wicked-stepmother keeper (Donna Murphy) in the kind of showtunes that have re-entered our cultural discourse thanks to TV's Glee. (I'm guessing someone at the production meetings, presumably with a PhD in synergy, had an eye to turning this into a stage musical at some point in the very near future.)

In this, Tangled gets off to a good start with "When Will My Life Begin?", set to become an anthem for frustrated tweenies everywhere, and the very funny "Mother Knows Best" ("Skip the drama/Come to mama"), before tailing off into sub-Celine syrup. Still, the songs remain the film's best expression of character - in part because these aren't characters you'll likely remember after the next fifty Disney animations, or even after the next ten Disney animations, in the way we still do Dumbo or Baloo or the Seven Dwarfs. This Rapunzel is a fairer, softer, milder redraw of Shrek's ass-kicking Fiona - all hair, she actually looks like Mandy Moore, whether blonde or brunette, which doesn't help her claims for permanency. Flynn Rider has the name of a past screen rake - or a contemporary adult film star - but not very much of the potency. (It's entirely fitting he should eventually reveal his true name as being Eugene Fitzherbert: he very much has the potency of a Eugene Fitzherbert.)

Even Murphy's stepmother comes at the end of a long Disney tradition of vain, bony-fingered crones, with only a little more Broadway razzle-dazzle to distinguish herself from her predecessors. As Flynn's line "Sorry lady, I don't do backstory" suggests, Tangled is brisk enough to keep you watching, but also cursory and throwaway-seeming, designed merely to catch the eye before the next 3D product breaks on our screens: even the Chinese lanterns Rapunzel so badly wants to see, though beautiful, flicker and disperse as the film hares onto its next distraction. You could see it as illustrative of the way the industry has changed over the course of these fifty animations. When Uncle Walt first sketched Steamboat Willie, he was doing so for keeps and for fun; Tangled, by contrast, has necessarily to keep one eye on opening-weekend grosses and DVD residuals. To say a certain innocence has been lost scarcely covers it.

Tangled is available on DVD from Monday.

"Blitz" (Metro 20/05/11)

Blitz (18) 97 mins **

The title refers to the nickname assumed by the serial cop killer in Elliott Lester’s grimly OTT Brit thriller, but it could also describe the bombardment of diverse acting styles Blitz unleashes: one early sequence brings Jason Statham face-to-face with Greatest Stage Actor of His Generation™ Mark Rylance. At last! On one side, there’s Statham’s DS Brant, an angry baked bean bouncing violently around his South London manor, and Paddy Considine, as the openly gay Inspector struggling to restrain this maverick. Over in the shadows, Aidan Gillen lurks in unflattering leisurewear as the fame-hungry psychopath, while David Morrissey – have you learned nothing from Basic Instinct 2, sir? – is the tabloid hack who comes to do the killer’s bidding.

Between a lot of clichés, elements of Blitz click. Statham and Considine’s cautious bonding suggests a fun, metrosexual Sweeney update, but it’s soon jostled out of the frame by underdeveloped subplots and supporting characters, and hardcore Stath fans will likely emerge disappointed by the ratio of growly tough talk to actual action. What’s left hurtles – like almost everything our Jase churns out – towards self-parody: it’s hard to take seriously the tut-tutting about the gutter press when the film diverts its one footchase through a knocking shop, and winds up wholeheartedly asserting the strong arm of the law. Leave it to DVD, if you must.

Blitz is on nationwide release.

On the mat: "Win Win"

With the triangular manoeuvrings at the centre of his triumphant 2004 debut The Station Agent, the writer, director and sometime actor Tom McCarthy revealed himself to be a filmmaker uniquely interested in the circumstances and consequences of individuals being thrown together, often against their will. McCarthy's 2008 follow-up The Visitor - pitching uptight academic Richard Jenkins against illegal aliens on the streets of post-9/11 Manhattan - confirmed the suspicion here was a humanist of the old school, dressed in hip new indie trousers; for his next trick, Win Win, he attempts an egalitarian sports movie, one that seeks to put the contributions of those struggling on the sidelines on a dramatic par with the accomplishments of life's winners, while venturing a statement of sorts on American attitudes to success. In this, it's only partially successful, but it's watchable as far as it goes.

Paul Giamatti plays Mike Flaherty, an ailing private practice lawyer who spends his days shuttling oldtimers into care homes in a bid to balance the books, and his evenings coaching the no-hope local wrestling squad. Circumstances lead to Mike and his wife Jackie (Amy Ryan) taking in their polar opposite in life: Kyle (Alex Shaffer), an apparently disaffected teenager fleeing a broken home, who finds incomparably easy everything his guardians regard as hard work, and turns out to be the most gifted wrestler Mike has ever seen. A Zen-like motivator, Kyle transforms the fortunes of the team almost overnight, but his new-found standing attracts a variety of hangers-on - and brings a whole new raft of problems to the Flahertys' door.

Less schematic than The Visitor - a welcome yet worthy response to the insularity of American foreign and domestic policy - Win Win again highlights the skill and generosity of the McCarthy approach. These are among the small handful of characters destined for a multiplex near you who convince as real people, intersecting in messy, fractious, credible ways that provide ample opportunity for the main players to make an impression. Nobody's doing anything radically new here - save, perhaps, Ryan, who gets to play warmer and more maternal than she did in the character parts with which she made her name, and Melanie Lynskey as Kyle's estranged mother, a role less mellifluous than this generally sympathetic actress has been used to. Yet everyone's doing what they are doing rather well: Giamatti, Bobby Cannavale and Jeffrey Tambor make cherishable wise monkeys as the wrestling team management, and there's a sharp and funny turn from newcomer Shaffer, who sometimes appears to be channeling Sean Penn's talismanic Fast Times at Ridgemont High drifter Jeff Spicoli in a more realistic key.

You just wish the film housing these performances was a little more dynamic and daring; as it is, a mid-film montage set to a Bon Jovi track is as lively as it gets. After the recent Cedar Rapids, Win Win is another example of the (studio-backed) "little indie": a broadly unobjectionable proposition that scratches round in its own backyard, amusing rather than achieving anything more distinctive, lasting or challenging, and butting up against interesting themes and ideas without ever threatening to break through and develop them. The film's second half, in particular, pootles along, only a few clicks north of a made-for-television custody battle, before downsizing only further in sympathy with its central character. Maybe in the present financial climate, this is how things have to be, but it results in a movie more concerned with getting by than anything, micro where the themes and pleasures of The Station Agent were unapologetically macro. Film of the week in a disappointing week, it's a score-draw: not without its entertaining moments, but ultimately rather less conclusive than one might like.

Win Win opens nationwide tomorrow.

Indigestible: "PlanEAT"

The would-be crusading documentary PlanEAT feels very much a victim of the foodie revolution - that phenomenon which has ensured every show on Western television that isn't hung up on property prices is instead set in somebody's kitchen. It has an eminently credible frontman in Cornell professor T. Colin Campbell, whose studies suggest a link between eating meat and an increased risk of cancer, and that diets dependent upon meat are those that contribute most to atmospheric emissions - a thesis those fond of their Sunday roasts will already be vividly aware of, if research conducted in the average bathroom is anything to go by.

Yet directors Shelley Lee Davies and Or Shlomi trivialise and eventually torpedo their own argument by indulging in the cinematic equivalent of grazing - cutting away from Campbell's scholarly analysis to perky inserts shot in fancy-pants Manhattan restaurants, where chefs attempt to convince the viewer that eating leaves is fun, and that there's no need for sugar in your cupcakes. The approach is confoundingly piecemeal: there's a sense the filmmakers are simply throwing diverse ingredients into the mix, assuming some of them have to stick. Campbell is hurried through an interpretation of what sounds like a comprehensive and fascinating study of the health of Chinese labourers in the 1970s; heart patients are wheeled on to speak of recoveries aided by handfuls of grass; one chef goes into raptures over the texture of cactus nectar, while another prepares kale sandwiches. (They don't look good.)

Throughout, the thrust would seem not so much consuming less (which is surely what's required now) as towards consuming differently - imploring us to make a switch from one drain on the Earth's resources to another. (If we were all to suddenly bury our faces in the cabbage patch, would farmers - hell, would the very soil - be able to cope with the demand?) Plenty to make vegans and vegetarians everywhere smugger than they already are, and the data's sure compelling, but it's a project hopelessly blind to the fact there are times in life where one could simply murder a steak, with or without a side salad.

PlanEAT opens in selected cinemas from tomorrow.

Float on: "Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides"

And the shit sailed on. For the revival of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, we have to thank the Disney bean counters - who presumably had nothing else to put out this summer - and the increasingly hacky and indiscriminate Johnny Depp, who was reportedly only persuaded to resume his role as Captain Jack Sparrow once reassurances were provided that the Mouse House would fund projects more personal to him than, say, Alice in Wonderland or The Tourist. (Everything's a negotiation nowadays.) In theory, On Stranger Tides ought to be an improvement on third part At World's End, not least as some of the ballast has been tossed overboard: Keira Knightley and Orlando Bloom, for two, have been allowed to drift off over the horizon, a decision which, at this stage, even the actors themselves probably wouldn't bemoan.

Yet if what I hesitate to describe as the organising principle of Part Four is regeneration, fresh starts - not for nothing are the remaining characters on a quest for the Fountain of Youth - the franchise's default position of grotesque indulgence hasn't been entirely abandoned. One early sequence puts Richard Griffiths and Roger Allam in full Regency pomp and finery at a banqueting table stocked high with Marie Antoinette-like sweetmeats: inevitably, these latter go untouched as the performers elect to dine out, all too heartily, on the scenery. At a mere 136 minutes (!), Pirates 4 is at least a more manageable proposition than its predecessors, complacent as they were in the belief everyone on screen and in the audience was having the best of all possible times; its choice is to pile its flab atop one of those thin quest narratives lesser summer entertainments are so enamoured of.

The set-up expands, redoubles once more. Where once there was one crusty sea dog on Sparrow's tail, now there are two: Geoffrey Rush's series veteran Barbossa (somewhat less zombie-ish here than I remember him being elsewhere) and Ian McShane as Blackbeard, arriving very late to the p-arr-ty. Keira and Orblando are replaced by two new young lovers, marginally less simpering if no less ineffectual: a trainee missionary (Sam Claflin) and the mermaid he plucks from the sea (French starlet Astrid Bergès-Frisbey). And there are, momentarily, two Jack Sparrows on screen: the idea Depp's pirate is entirely in love with himself is lent further credence by the sequence that finds him locking first swords, then lips, with a Jack Sparrow impersonator - this turns out to be Angelica, or Penelope Cruz, wearing almost as much eye shadow as Depp himself.

Even with Cruz on board, Pirates' reputation as the ugliest of all modern franchises remains firmly intact. The screen is overrun with grizzled beardies shot against stormy skies or in a below-decks murk, here only accentuated by the innate dinginess of the new digital 3D format. (Is this how the new 3D works, one wonders - by not only refusing to allow us to see its more dynamic effects coming, as in traditional 3D, but allowing us to see nothing very much in the first place?) One or more of the executives affiliated with the franchise must have twigged this, hence the sudden introduction of mermaids to an already cluttered mix, although it's typical of the more-is-more approach that these should be vampire mermaids, played by tastefully topless supermodels: the best mermaids, in other words, that Jerry Bruckheimer money can buy.

At any rate, this surface prettification doesn't come close to addressing the series' underlying racial politics. Parts two and three brought us, in Naomie Harris's voodoo priestess, one of the most retrograde characterisations in recent American cinema. Part four's only part for a black performer is a zombified ship's master, whipping the conscripts aboard the dark vessel McShane - and while there's a degree of irony in the sight of an African-American with slaves of his own, we might perhaps question the characterisation of a black man (even a black zombie) as someone who's just really angry. I'm not saying these films should be rewriting maritime history, but would it be too much for the company that gave the world Song of the South to exercise a little sensitivity in what's likely to become their most watched release of the year?

Perhaps it doesn't matter; perhaps, at this stage, seeking qualitative fixes from a Pirates of the Caribbean movie is as howling from the rigging into a force-10 wind. Any adjustment would be mere tinkering with a formula that's proven fundamentally mediocre, when not aiming squarely for the lowest common denominator. With Gore Verbinski at the helm, these movies got bigger and bigger, and he may have jumped ship upon realising nothing he could do with Part Four would top the preposterous swordfight he staged on a giant waterwheel in Part Two.

His replacement Rob Marshall, the choreographer of Chicago and Nine, gives us false hope early on in making one action setpiece entirely about the recovery of a choux bun, suggesting this instalment may be predisposed to smaller things, or at the very least a demonstration of state-of-the-art Hollywood catering. Thereafter, alas, Marshall resigns himself to going through the motions, as everybody gets bogged down in a jungle that makes a nonsense of the subtitle: he sets up a swordfight every fifteen minutes between a dozen or more characters, none of whom you feel compelled to give a single hoot about, and generally moulds something utterly lacking in shape, variety or even a climax, save a teaser for the inevitable Pirates V.

Around the halfway mark, I began to develop a sneaking (and wholly unexpected) respect for the way At World's End really went for it, pushing the franchise, and trying the audience's patience, about as far as it could conceivably go. Compared to that near-avant-garde experiment in tedium, On Stranger Tides is merely prosaic: it leaves you wondering only how something so vast and relatively expensive could end up quite so dull and affectless. We get precisely one surprise, which in the name of saving you time and money, I shall reveal here: a maybe fifteen-second cameo from a corseted Judi Dench, sitting in the back of a carriage Depp is propelled into at one point. "Is that it?," Dame Judi asks, shortly before being shuttled away off-screen and handed her (no doubt sizeable) paycheque. Lady, I couldn't have put it better myself.

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides is on nationwide release.