"Sex Tape," A Raunchy Comedy Without Much Raunch or Comedy

Is Jason Segel playing older of Cameron Diaz playing younger? 

It’s getting harder and harder for me to watch blandly mediocre movies. If a film is  mediocre but has something interesting going on (acting, action, dialouge, editing, cinematography, anything) – cool. Hell, even if a film totally doesn’t work but really goes for it or has some worthwhile element – cool.

But movies like Sex Tape? Not cool.

Sex Tape is a would-be raunchy comedy from director Jake Kasdan that stars Cameron Diaz and Jason Segel as a married couple that looks to rekindle their sex life by making a sex tape, only to send it out to a number of friends and family due to a convoluted plot built around i-syncing. This is a return to formula of sorts – Kasdan last directed this duo in the successful Bad Teacher, a middling raunchy comedy that at least had to good conscience to be intermittently funny and charming.

This film has no such conscience. There’s nothing all that awful about Sex Tape, but the characterizations are surface level, the resolution is hooey and the comedy aspects just don’t hit at all. Although the particulars are different, the whole thing plays like a poor-man's version of Date Night, which was sort of a poor man's version of True Lies (or any number of movies built around a marriage vastly improving after a night of hijinks).

It’s a frustrating film, because the script has been partially credited to Segel and Nicholas Stoller, two funny and emotionally resonant collaborators who, even at their worst (The Five-Year Engagement), have been far more hit than miss.

A strong correlation can be made here between Sex Tape and a real sex tape. It probably seemed like a better idea during the planning stages, and it was likely a lot more fun to make the thing than it is to watch it. D

"Muppets Most Wanted" Plays to Brand's Strengths

The Muppets agree to make a world tour their next adventure.

Early on in Muppets Most Wanted, Kermit encourages Miss Piggy, Gonzo and the rest of his pals to play it safe and stick to their strengths. He argues that even though they are relevant again due to the success of the Jason Segal-led The Muppets (a fact that is emphasized by the opening number “We’re Doing a Sequel”), they are still in a perilous spot popularity-wise, so they shouldn't do much to shake up a formula that works.

He’s talking about the on-stage acts they’ll be delivering during their world tour, but it’s also a meta moment that aptly describes Muppets Most Wanted, a film that doesn't do anything innovative but coasts along amiably on the strength of some giddy puns, a zany energy, a slew of celebrity cameos, and (most importantly) a helping of charming original tunes.

The film focuses on the evil plot of Constantine the frog, a master criminal who looks like Kermit with a mole on his cheek. With the assistance of his number two (Ricky Gervais), Constantine escapes jail and then kidnaps and replaces Kermit, all the while using the cover of a Muppets World Tour to pull off a number of heists culminating in the theft of England’s Crown Jewels. Constantine makes for a poor Kermit, but none of his pals notice (except Animal) because the less structured impostor allows them to do whatever they want with the show.

Meanwhile, Kermit is trapped in a Siberian gulag, helping prisoners like Big Papa (Ray Liotta), Prison King (Jermaine Clement) and Danny Trejo (Danny Trejo) put on a revue at the behest of the warden (Tina Fey). And CIA agent Sam Eagle is working with a Clouseau-like Interpol agent (Ty Burrell) to track down the thieves behind the growing number of heists.

This gag single-handedly justifies this whole movie. 

The narrative is predictably disposable, but the film shines in similar ways to its predecessor. Director/writer James Bobin and co-writer Nicholas Stoller once again deliver fun that's amusingly meta, sneaking in some pretty big laughs  (the appearance of Rizzo and Robin and the sight gag of Kermit and Miss Piggy’s future kids) amidst the mostly knowing chuckles.

Although there’s nothing here that approaches his Oscar-winning “Man or Muppet” or even “Life’s a Happy Song,” Bret McKenzie has littered the soundtrack with some really clever and fun songs, especially “I’ll Get You What You Want” and “Interrogation Song.”  Likewise, while none of the celebrity cameos work as well as the Jim Parsons scene in The Muppets, three or four of the 20 or so included here come close.

As I said, the movie plays to the strengths of the Muppets. Nothing overly special to see here, but a comforting adventure with some old friends – the type of family film that doesn't hit the heights of something like The Lego Movie, but that will play well on repeat viewings with the kids. B-

"Neighbors" Nicely Uses Comedic Battle to Comment on Transition Into Parenting

Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne have a nice chemistry as the new parents.

Parenthood has been a phenomenal experience, but it's hard to deny that it has necessitated a slew of lifestyle changes for me and my wife. We don’t go out with our friends as much. We don’t sleep through the night. We don’t do a whole slew of things we used to do.

That includes going to the movie theater, which is one reason my writing on here has been so sparse the last few months. It’s crazy for a movie buff like me to type this, but we’re nearly half-way through the year, and I’ve seen a grand total of two 2014 releases, only one of which was in the theater (the other was The Monuments Men, which I reviewed here).

With that in mind, it’s kind of fitting that that one trip to the theater was to see Neighbors, a movie that focuses on a young married couple adjusting to becoming parents. Once or twice during the movie, my wife leaned over to me and said “That’s us,” and she wasn’t far off. Her analogy cast her as the luminous Rose Byrne and me as the shlubby Seth Rogen. That doesn’t exactly seem fair, but it’s hard to deny Neighbors is a movie that speaks to our current situation.

The dynamic between the central couple of the film is easy to relate to, and Rogen and Byrne have an easy chemistry that really elevates the material. This is a movie featuring a couple at war with a hard-partying fraternity, and while it contains the types of gags that setup would suggest, the most amusing scenes involve the interplay between the couple and the knowing observations about getting older.

And that’s appropriate, because while the movie is ostensibly about the conflict between the upstart parents and the douchey frat guys, that part is really just a clever externalization of what the film's actually about -- the internal clash between burgeoning responsibility and the reckless impulsiveness of youth. At one point in the film, the couple cripples the fraternity to the point that they can no longer host all-night parties. They’ve won, and yet the couple overplays their hand, mostly because the madness has livened up a life that has become overly ordinary.

In a refreshingly atypical move, the film makes the wife complicit in the shenanigans instead of relegating her to the sidelines as a disapproving nag. In addition to opening up more comedic possibilities, this decision helps enhance the thematic through line of the story. My favorite moment in the film involves a marital argument over who gets to be the Kevin James and who gets saddled with responsibility. It's a silly way in to a fine point about the roles society places on men and women that go way beyond the basic provider/nurturer paradigm.

You'd think the trailers would've ruined the DeNiro Party joke, but the

best part is the way Rogen reacts to some of the ill-conceived costumes.

Gender politics excluded, these themes also infiltrate the fraternity ranks. Although most of the brothers are one-note jokes, the main duo of Zac Efron and Dave Franco gets a significantly developed and wonderfully weird bromance that is colored by their vastly different views about the transition into adulthood. Both are fun-loving party guys, but for the Efron character, the fraternity is everything, while the Franco character sees it as fun bullshit he does in between classes and job fairs.

The four principles all do nice work. Rogen amiably anchors the film, and Franco brings an off-kilter energy to a role that's pretty close to the one he essayed in 21 Jump Street (reviewed here) – the savvy hip bro who happens to be cast as a villain.

Meanwhile, Efron brings a wounded humanity to a role that's pitched a lot darker than every other character in the piece. One scene in particular is so note-perfect creepy that I'm just as impressed with his willingness to go there as I am with the skill he displays in during it.

But it's Byrne who emerges as the film's MVP. Up until recently, sadness seemed her chief acting emotion (Wicker Park, Troy, Damages), but with Bridesmaids, Get Him to the Greek (reviewed here), and now this, she's proven to have a full range of comic talent as well. The script makes allowances to let her use her natural Australian accent, which enables her to really embrace the loose, improvisation style that an actor like Rogen thrives in.

Still, the film isn't perfect. The resolution is a little tidy, and since the movie plays things mostly straight, it’s a little jarring when the far-fetched plot points pop up. It's awfully hard to believe the cops or the schools' officials wouldn't hammer down on this fraternity more severely, especially given the bodily injury and intentional harassment with a child in the mix. And the idea that college girls would boldly purchase dildos made from the molds of frat boy penises is hard to accept, even though I appreciated the subplot as a gonzo critique on the tired trope of making a calendar to raise money.

Neighbors marks another success for Nicholas Stoller, a director who consistently puts an emphasis on grounding comedy with complex characters and relatable emotions. It doesn’t reach the heights of his Forgetting Sarah Marshall, but does exceed Get Him to the Greek and The Five Year Engagement. If the former’s a home run and the latter two are doubles, you can score Neighbors a triple. Regardless of how you classify the hits, the dude’s batting .1000. A-

Video Review: Get Him to the Greek is Solid, But Struggles to Break Away the Forgetting Sarah Marshall Mold



P. Diddy becomes an angry Terminator-type when
he's trippin' in this movie.

In his first venture behind the camera, Nicholas Stoller gave us Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which, for my money, is a romantic comedy classic.  Co-written by Stoller and star Jason Segel, the film offers a brutally honest and moving look at a man in post-breakup freefall, while also providing a constant barrage of laughs from a large cast of talented performers. It doesn’t quite reach the heights of the genre where the likes of Annie Hall, Manhattan, When Harry Met Sally, and The Apartment reside, but it certainly gets in shouting distance.

With his follow-up Get Him to the Greek, Stoller has gone back to the well… sort of. Not only does the film spinoff one of the principle players from Marshall, but it also employs the same basic premise of a man in post-breakup freefall.  The result is a decent comedy that doesn’t quite live up to the first film.

Aldous Snow is a fantastic comic creation, and Russell Brand deservedly became an overnight sensation here in America for his performance in Marshall. A lesser movie would’ve established Aldous as a villain or used him strictly for jokes, but Stoller and Segel opted for something a bit more ambiguous, and Brand really ran with it. While they didn’t exactly make Aldous three dimensional, he was given an appropriate amount of shading, making the lament “Fuck you're cool! It's so hard to say, because, like, I hate you in so many ways” ring true not only for Segel’s Peter Bretter but for the audience as well.


That tiny hat is pretty tiny, but can't compare to the ones
Kristen Wigg has in her collection.

In Greek, Stoller (writing solo this time) outfits Aldous in three dimensions, equipping him with daddy issues, a child he adores, and a crushing breakup of his own that has led him to fall off the wagon. Brand does some nice work in illuminating the depths of Aldous’ pain (he really is great in this role, despite how annoying he can be on award shows), but conceptually the character worked better when he was more enigmatic and carefree.

 As Aldous’ ex Jackie Q, Rose Byrne takes the Sarah Marshall role of heartbreaker, albeit with plenty of madness thrown in (with Snow given more heft in this outing, much of the vapid, sexually-charged pop star humor falls to her). As her best-in-show performance from Bridesmaids proved, Byrne is a game comedienne, and she’s in fine form here. However, unlike the antagonists in the first movie (Sarah and Aldous), the role of Jackie Q is nothing but a joke, and so it’s hard to see why a free-loving guy like Aldous would ever want to settle with her in the first place.

Whereas Marshall had Mila Kunis’ Beth help Peter work through his issues, Greek focuses on the developing bromance between Snow and Aaron (Jonah Hill, portraying a different character than the one he did in Marshall), the record company suit tasked with escorting Snow from London to the Greek Theater for a 10^th Anniversary concert. The two performers are very good together, and the relationship they build is complicated and interesting.

The film is less successful in developing Aaron’s personal journey, which finds him simultaneously dealing with pressure from his unhinged boss Sergio (a funny P. Diddy Sean Combs) and a rough patch in his relationship with his doctor girlfriend Daphne (Elisabeth Moss). As I’ve said before, Hill’s greatest strength is his ability to play off of other actors, and he works well with both Combs and Moss. He has a particularly palpable chemistry with Moss, but their issues as a couple seems forced and then impossibly resolved in a way that’s phony and undermines the emotional credibility of the characters.

The presence of Elisabeth Moss would add a whole half star

grade to this movie if I gave star grades. I <3 Peggy Olsen.

As with Marshall, Greek has a number of side characters played by a slew of talented people (Colm Meaney, Ellie Kemper, Nick Kroll, Aziz Ansari, and a slew of celebrities, most notably Lars Ulrich, as themselves), but the film doesn’t given them nearly as much to work with as its predecessor gave Paul Rudd, Hill, Jack McBrayer, and Bill Hader.   

And that’s really this movie in a nutshell. It’s trying so hard to do so many of the same things Marshall did and constantly coming up short in comparison. Hell, it even has some original songs from Segel (as well as a slew form various writers, including producer Judd Apatow), but nothing that quite measures up to “Inside Of You,” little lone “Dracula’s Lament.”

Generally, I don’t like to judge movies in comparison to other movies because it can be unfair, but when a movie so closely emulates its predecessor, it’s hard not to do that. As a result, Greek just seems to be lacking.

To be clear (and fair), the movie is pretty good and does distinguish itself in some ways (this isn’t a Hangover and Hangover Part II situation). I do admire some of the screwy and dark places Stoller was willing to go, but really, that’s part of the problem. This movie could’ve been its own entity – a far weirder, more detached look at the corrupting nature of showbiz, for instance – but instead it mostly has been forced into the mold of the first movie. The end result is a comedy that is consistently entertaining, but not much more than that.

Greek is at its best when it gets weird, as it does in the "Stroke the Furry
Wall" scene.