This Is the End (2013)

If this really is the end, I can't think of many better ways than being trapped with a group of your best friends, or a bunch of funnymen.

This'll be a quick one as there's not much to say about the film.  Not that This Is the End is a bad movie, but it's because there really isn't that much to the plot.  Even that's not really a bad thing as sometimes that's not the point.  It's clear that writers, and first time directors, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg just wanted to make a fun film with their friends that exists strictly to make us laugh.  That's This Is the End in a nutshell.

There's so little to the story, that they didn't even bother with creating characters.  All of the actors are playing exaggerated versions of themselves.  In some cases extremely exaggerated versions of themselves - I'm looking at you Michael Cera - to hilarious effect.  I enjoyed the fact that I could take the night off as far as paying attention to character names.

Jay Baruchel arrives in L.A. to visit Seth Rogen.  They've been friends for a long time, but Jay's not a big fan of L.A., so he doesn't visit much.  Seth wants Jay to bond with his group of friends more, so they head to a party at James Franco's new house.  Much like you'd expect in Hollywood, the party is full of celebrities, and while it's funny to watch, you'll spend as much time seeing how many cameos and people you recognize.  Jay and Seth step out for cigarettes, and all hell breaks loose, literally.

They get back to Franco's house, where they haven't noticed what's going on around them yet, but it quickly catches up.  The remaining group - Seth, Jay, James, Jonah Hill and Craig Robinson - board up in Franco's house while they wait for rescue.  Jay believes this is the apocalypse, while the rest think he's overreacting and it's just a bad earthquake.

That's all there is to it.  This Is the End is all about the frenetic pace and rapid-fire jokes.  This is one of those films where the laughs happen so frequently that many times the laughter of the crowd drowns out the next thing said.  Multiple views are likely going to be required.  However, I'm betting this is a release that will have a nice unrated cut.  If not, the deleted/gag reel on the Blu-Ray is going to be insane.

Anothing thing I loved about the film is that most of the best moments of the film are not spoiled by the trailer or commercials.  Rogen stated this in an interview recently, which I was skeptical of, but he was not bullshitting us.  Hallelujah!  It's so refreshing to see a movie that doesn't ruin every gag before you've even seen it.  Part of the reason is that many of the funniest moments are not suitable for trailers or commercials, but at the same time I didn't find the movie that crude.

A majority of This Is the End felt like improv, and you're watching a bunch of friends ripping on each other.  Considering the company that's a good thing.  These guys have done plenty of shitty movies that give them lots of ammo to make fun of.  They probably filmed hours of material and then realized they need to advance the plot, or something, so they started editing the film down to keep the runtime bearable.  About an hour into the film my friend finally leans over to me and goes, "I think that's the first plot related thing they've done."  Despite that there's not much of a story, it never really bugged me.  I was too busy laughing.  I've said recently that this is a weak year for comedy, but this is the funniest film I've seen this year.  I feel like I'm giving a lot of back-handed compliments here.

Rogen and Goldberg have hit home runs before as far as writing, so it's natural they step into directing the same genre.  I'm happy to say they seem to have the same sensibility directing as they've had when writing films like Superbad or Pineapple Express.  They know who their audience is and taylor the movie to that crowd.

I know I'm not giving you much to go on, but This Is the End is the easily the funniest film of the year.  I said last week that The Internship was going to be the most successful comedy of the summer, but this deserves that title.  If you're a fan of films like Superbad and Pineapple Express, then this is going to hit with you.  Full price all the way, and definitely a film that lends itself to an 'altered state' with some friends.

4 (out of 5) Death Stars

Spring Breakers (2013) - Movie Review

Imagine a Girls Gone Wild video gussied up and then passed off as 'art'...

That's the feeling I got when watching Spring Breakers, the latest film from Harmony Korine.  Much of the film made me feel like a dirty old man watching montages of random, naked girls drinking and doing drugs.  Even the main actresses have no shortages of closeups of their cleavage and crotch shots.  Oh, but Spring Breakers has a message and social commentary.  It's nothing you haven't seen done better in other films, including ones by Korine, but we'll get to that later.

Three dumb girls (Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson, and Rachel Korine (Harmony's wife)), and their more level-headed, religious friend, Faith (Selena Gomez) take a trip to Florida for Spring Break.  If you're wondering why I'm not referring to the other girls by name, it's because I don't recall hearing their names at any point of the film, where they make a point that you know Faith's.  Anyway, the girls don't have enough money to afford heading down to Florida, so the three dumb ones decide to rob a restaurant first.  Their actions immediately set the tone for the rest of the film, and let you know that there's really nothing to like about them.

Once they get to Florida, they engage in the typical Spring Break debauchery.  Lots of drinking, drugs, etc.  That part is fine. If this part of the movie is trying to make a point that society is in decline because young kids party, or we've become too hedonistic, then they failed.  Partying at Spring Break is nothing new and has gone on for decades.  Plenty of people have a time in their life where they let loose.  I don't have an issue with this, and there are lots of well adjusted and successful people that have partied at some point in their life.

However, things get real for the girls when they get arrested for doing drugs.  It's compounded when they don't have money for bail, but a local rapper and criminal named Alien (James Franco) bails them out.  Anyone with half a brain knows he didn't do this for altruistic reasons, and he picked the right group of girls.  To illustrate how dumb they are, when they meet Alien, they seem to have no clue as to who he is, despite that earlier in the movie they are in the front row of one of his concerts. Now maybe you could write this off as being so drunk and high that you don't remember being at a concert just a day or two ago, but the concert was decorated with aliens, and the same symbols were all over Alien's car.  Were these scenes shown out of order?

Faith is immediately creeped out and senses things are about to take a turn for the worse, so she has the good sense to go home.  Maybe the lesson there is to trust your instincts.  The others continue the party, destroying any remaining sympathy you may have had for them.  Movies about unlikable people only work where there's a sliver of humanity about them, or they are hilarious.  Neither is true here.

Another sledgehammer-like message about the film was naming the good, religious girl Faith.  This is a message that's generally always been lost on me, as I don't believe that religious faith is an absolute requirement to have good morals or a conscience.  The whole movie is trying to make several points, but they are so obscured by nonsense and clumsy film making that they really lost all impact for me.  This is compounded by the fact that I read interviews where Harmony Korine says stuff like he wrote the film to make up for all of the spring breaks he missed out on, and that he's an old pervert.  I think that dilutes the message a bit more, as it doesn't sound like he was out to make a point, but just make a movie about hot young girls at Spring Break.

I credit the film for at least having a stylish, music video look about it, and there was some great use of color, especially at the end.  The music video aspect was hammered home by the Skrillex-powered soundtrack.  I don't care for electronic music or dubstep, so I tended to tune out on the score.  I also don't know what a Skrillex is?  Is it related to Skittles?  I'm more of a Goobers guy.

Clearly the best part about the film was James Franco's performance as Alien.  He's pretty funny and I thought his performance was inspired at times.  However, the act tires out after a bit, y'all, and it becomes a less funny version of J-Roc from Trailer Park Boys.  Know what I'm sayin'?

I thought the rest of the film was a mess though.  There's some extremely choppy and repetitive editing in the film. It constantly jumps around, sometimes just minutes back and forth in the same scene.  Scenes are reused, and lines of dialog are repeated in voice over throughout, not that there's a ton of meaningful dialog anyway.  I found it extremely annoying to sit though, and then made worse by the fact that movie crawls along at a snails pace.  It's a 90 minute movie that felt like it was never going to end, and probably only had about 60 minutes of actual story if it had been edited linearly, and they got rid of all of the party footage that didn't feature any of the main characters.

Speaking of, there's a lot of nudity in the film, and most of it comes during this girls gone wild segments of the film.  These are nameless kids, and there's nothing about these scenes that are fun to watch.  As I mentioned before, I felt like an old perv watching them.

I also really hated the ending and thought it took any meaning away from whatever points they were trying to make.  I just couldn't suspend my disbelief to see two bikini-clad women that have no weapons training just walk into a criminal's compound and shoot up the place without ever reloading (where do you hide spare ammo in a bikini) or even getting grazed by a bullet.  It also bothered me that they went from knocking off a restaurant to murdering several people in cold blood over the course of a few days.  They drive away without a hint of remorse or any consequence.  These chicks are psychopaths.

Was that the point of all of this?  To show that young kids have no conscience anymore?  No sense of right or wrong?  That we've become desensitized to violence by playing violent video games?  Several times you hear them say to 'just pretend it's a video game', so it's another message I thought was just too heavy-handed. There are plenty of kids that play violent video games all the time, that aren't homicidal maniacs. Spring Breakers seems to be focusing on the exceptions as the rule. Maybe I'm being too literal, but that's how my mind works.

I hate using this word to describe a movie, but I found Spring Breakers to be very pretentious and tedious to watch.  It's a slick looking Girls Gone Wild video that tries to have a message, but it's as heavy-handed as you can get, and muddled by terrible, repetitive editing. This isn't anything you haven't already seen or heard before.  I can't recommend this one.

1 (out of 5) Death Stars

Oz the Great and Powerful (2013) - Movie Review

Indeed he is powerful, as the Emperor has foreseen...

We haven't had a great start to 2013, but the one exception so far has been with movies related to fantasy elements.  Much like how last week Jack and the Giant Slayer was an example of the reimaging of a classic story that worked (even though I wasn't in love with it), Oz the Great and Powerful is an example of a 'prequel' that expands on a classic story without stepping on the toes of the original.

Oscar (James Franco), who has maybe the longest full name in movie history, so he just goes by "Oz", is a magician in a travelling circus.  He's also a selfish con-man and womanizer that treats his friends poorly.  While Oz has his charms, he isn't exactly the most likable guy in the world.  Despite this, you do get some entertainment value from watching Oz try to bullshit his way through a situation or into a woman's undergarments.  The latter gets him into to trouble and he's forced to flee the circus in a hot air balloon, but the bad luck piles on as he's immediately caught in a tornado and whisked away to the land of Oz.

Upon arriving, he's greeted by the witch Theodora (Mila Kunis), who tells Oz the prophecy of a wizard that will save them from a wicked witch.  Theodora believes Oz is that wizard, but her sister Evanora (Rachel Weisz) isn't convinced.  Even Oz himself doesn't believe he has what it takes, but goes along with it due to the huge fortune he stands to gain, as well as the chance to hook up with either Theordora or Evanora.  I can't say I blame him on that second part at all.  Oz heads out on a quest to stop the Wicked Witch, joined by Finley, a flying monkey that pledges himself to Oz (and voiced by Zach Braff), and a small china doll (voiced by Joey King).

It's best to stop there are there a few twists and plot developments that caught me by surprise, but fans more intimate with The Wizard of Oz may figure these things out before I did.

What made Oz the Great and Powerful fun to watch was that there were a lot of nice little touches and callbacks to the original The Wizard of Oz without being totally obvious or winking at the audience when doing it.  It does a really good job of being respectful to the original Oz while managing to feel like an original story on it's own.  For younger audiences I think this will serve to get them more interested in the other stories of Oz and watch those as well.

Oz... is an absolutely gorgeous film.  The visuals play out like the trailer, starting in black and white with a 4:3 aspect ratio. This part of the film had a much older, classic look to it.  When we arrive in Oz the color palate opens up and the screen expands to its full size.  The world they created was very vibrant and colorful, with tons of details in every scene and there was always something interesting to look at on screen.  I often found myself distracted by something in the background, and had that take my attention to the point where I almost lost track of what was going on.  The effects were top notch throughout the film, and the look and animation of China Girl was particularly impressive to me.   However, there were a few times it looked a little too CG-ish.  This may have been due to the 3D or the fact that I saw it on IMAX and didn't sit close enough to the middle, so sometimes things were blurry or looked off.  I did think this had really good use of 3D, and it's a time where I don't think seeing it in 3D would be a total waste.  There's a great waterfall sequence where you really feel how the 3D immersed you into the action, and you can also see how this will likely end up a ride at Disneyland.  Unless you can get there early for IMAX and get a seat in the middle, I'd recommend just standard 3D though.

Another thing that looked a little odd to me was the makeup for the Wicked Witch.  It was too clean or new looking, which I guess makes sense since this is her origin and she's younger, but I thought maybe a little more dirt or grime would have helped.

The cast all seemed to be having a blast.  I wasn't sure if James Franco was the right choice for the lead role, but my doubts quickly dissolved.  He really owned the role and was able to use his comedic chops to ham it up when needed.  I also think Rachel Weisz was really great as Evanora.  She's always been one of those actresses that's hard to take your eyes off of, but here I think she was having a lot of fun and chewing up a little bit of scenery.  Mila Kunis and Michelle Williams were also very good, but I can't say too much about them without revealing too much about their characters.

I was more impressed with the voice acting, Zach Braff in particular.  While I've always liked Braff (I'm a HUGE Scrubs fan), I've never thought anything of his voice until now.  He really does have a perfect voice for animated characters, and I thought his work for Finely was spot on and very funny.  I was also impressed by Joey King's voice work as China Girl.  There's a lot of emotion in her voice, and I would have guessed that the work was done by an older, more experienced actress.

One thing that caught be by surprise was that I genuinely didn't know this was directed by Sam Raimi until the opening credits.  That automatically made perk up a bit and take notice of certain things.  You could definitely feel Raimi's influence with some of the subtle humor and occasional scares, but otherwise it didn't feel like a Sam Raimi film.  In a lot of ways this may remind you of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, especially since Danny Elfman did the soundtrack, but Raimi out-Burtoned Tim Burton.  And yes, as with all Raimi films, there is a Bruce Campbell appearance.

The script by Mitchell Kapner and David Lindsay-Abaire has a little something for everyone.  There's humor that only adults will pick up on, and things that are a little more for the kids.  I heard lots of chuckles throughout the film, so it definitely has a broad appeal.  While it is PG, there are a few good jump scares that caught me by surprise, so you might need to be careful with the really young kids, but I don't think it's anything that's going to give them nightmares.

Oz the Great and Powerful is a fun film that the whole family can enjoy together.  The visuals are outstanding, and there's plenty of humor and good performances across the board.  Enough respect is given to the source material, while creating a world that still feels fresh.  Older fans of Oz should enjoy this as well as introduce a new generation to it.  I highly recommend checking it out.

3.5 (out of 5) Death Stars