Ongoing (Possibly Semi-Regular, Probably Not) Feature!

Netflix Movie Reviews!

So my wife and I got our second batch of Netflix movies this past weekend. I could get used to this whole Netflix thing, I tell you: even the bad movies (Transformers) are redeemed somewhat by the fun of getting movies in the mail and not having to worry about returning them on time. Plus, how bad would a film have to suck to make it a waste of money, when I'm paying something less than a dollar per?

Fortunately, this past weekend's batch did nothing to answer that question. Pardon me if my reviews are slightly less-thorough than the Transformers review: I don't feel quite as strongly one way or the other about either of this batch's selections as I did about that heaping mound of shit.

Super Troopers

This is one of those movies (along with several others) that people have been pushing on me and the missus: "Oh my God, you haven't seen Super Troopers? You have to see Super Troopers!" Now we've seen Super Troopers. And liked it! You can never really go wrong with an unambitious low-budget goofball ensemble comedy, especially when it prominently features characters with bushy mustaches (the mustaches make almost everything the characters say funny, even if it's not really supposed to be).

The Broken Lizard guys seem totally relaxed with each other and perfectly comfortable with their characters, and that goes a long way in any comedy. Super Troopers has an interesting tone: a handful of moments are overtly, demonstratively comedic, while most of the movie is so laid-back and deadpan that it's hard to tell if you're laughing because what you're watching is comedy, or laughing because the actors are keeping straight faces while speaking with those awesome mustaches. Even moments of absurdity, like the spontaneous out-of-control fist-fights that break out a couple of times in the film, are not set up or presented as punchlines. Oddly, they're not delivered as deadpan parody of the maverick-cop genre either. They kinda just happen on-screen: the characters get testy, start fighting each other in a not-at-all-realistic way, and if you think it's funny, hey, that's cool, but if not, hey, that's cool too. I found myself glad for this odd approach, if only because Super Troopers had been built up as such an all-time classic sleeper comedy and probably couldn't have lived up to its hype no matter what: the laid-back style of the film got rid of all the pressure to find it hilarious, and actually made it easier to laugh.

The troupe probably doesn't get as much mileage out of the film's concept as they could have. Another route to go might have been to make the protagonist a straight character who's unfamiliar with the titular state troopers, rather than showing the action from the perspective of the troopers themselves. The way the movie's made, there's no normal perspective who looks at the wacky state troopers and their hyper-macho local rivals and goes, "What the fuck's wrong with all the cops around here?" It lets a little bit of the air out of some of the gags, since there's no character who establishes that the movie takes place in something like our real universe, where there are normal cops compared to whom these zany state troopers are, well, zany.

Then again, maybe centering the action on a straight character would have put too much pressure on the trooper characters to produce laughs every time they're on-screen, to justify the straight character's amazement or exasperation with them. No, now that I think about it, I think the Broken Lizard guys got it right: sure, the movie might not produce as many huge, laugh-out-loud moments as it could have, but it maintains that relaxed, casual vibe throughout, which lets some of the smaller moments shine. For example, I laughed for about five minutes after a moment when Jay Chandrasekhar's character simply cuts open a plastic-wrapped brick of marijuana, lifts some of the contents to his nose, and says very seriously, "Reefer." There's nothing especially comedic about the moment, but the combination of his seriousness, the specific word he uses ("Pot," or "ganja," or "weed," or "Mary Jane," or pretty much any other name for marijuana wouldn't have been nearly as funny, for whatever reason), and his ridiculous Magnum P.I. mustache make it a genuinely funny moment in that humble, low-key way that characterizes this whole film.

Super Troopers is a film seemingly designed to give viewers quotes they can hit each other with down the road for instant laughs. "I don't want a large Farva, I want a goddamn liter o' cola!" "Littering AND... littering AND... littering AND... smokin' the reefer." "How's the view from sugar heaven, bitch?" And so forth. Out of context, they're not funny. Actually, in context, they're not exactly drop-dead hilarious. They're good for a chuckle. Except that somehow, down the line, they get funnier, even when you didn't laugh that hard the first time. I suspect that Super Troopers itself is that way, too, which would give it something in common with The Big Lebowski. The first time I watched The Big Lebowski, I laughed a couple of times. The fifty-sixth time I watched The Big Lebowski, I almost died when The Dude says, "This will not stand, man! This aggression will not stand, man!" Just like I almost died the previous fifty-three or so times I watched it. It's a good quality for a movie to have in the age of DVDs: I've seen all or parts of The Big Lebowski probably a hundred times in my life. I'm betting I'll see Super Troopers again, too. Man, I'm a loser.

If I had an established four-star system for rating films, Super Troopers would be a textbook example of a three-star comedy. Its utter lack of ambition or pretense and the casual, tossed-off approach to most of the material make it ineligible for a fourth star, but at the same time it achieves everything it sets out to do, and what it sets out to do is something worth doing in the first place. Good on ya, Broken Lizard dudes. No effing way I'll watch either of your other movies, though. Sorry.

Superbad

Yep, it was Super Week back at the ranch this, uh, week. Quite accidentally, we got two Netflix movies with "Super" in the title, and somehow neither of them was a superhero movie.

Okay, so, I'm a busy guy. I started this post about a week ago and I'm only just now getting to the second paragraph of the Superbad review. Problem is, although I still remember the film itself fairly well (it's that one with Christopher Reeve in a blue leotard, right?), I'm no longer flush with feeling about it. That's too bad, because I remember being very flush with goodwill toward this one in the immediate aftermath of watching it for the first time.

Superbad was very good (Supergood? No, I'm not going there - I have some dignity, at least). Michael Cera was heartbreakingly sweet and believable and really commanded the movie as Evan. There's a scene toward the end [SPOILER-LIKE MATERIAL FOLLOWS] where the girl he's got a very innocent, starry-eyed kid-crush on is drunk out of her mind and trying to seduce him, and he's not ready to let go of that part of his childhood yet, and all he wants to do is tell her how he feels about her but he's too drunk to really put it together into words and the best he can do is to tell her how pretty she is over and over again, and the whole thing is moving too fast for him... I got all choked up during this scene, and my poor wife (we're married) had to hear me say, "Don't do it, Evan! Noooo!" about ten times. [END SPOILERS - FOR NOW]

Jonah Hill, who's always marvelous, was marvelous as the crude, selfish, cynical, hilariously myopic Seth, who's the catalyst for virtually all of the conflict in the film and only really comes around at the very end. There's a kind of cruel fairness to how his story unfolds: [MORE SPOILERS] he spends most of the film's running time in a desperate, all-consuming, dignity-destroying quest for alcohol, believing the only way he'll have a shot with his dream girl is if they're both shit-faced drunk. He's cruel and manipulative to his friends, he puts them in actual danger, he shits all over them when they don't comply with his wishes, all for the precious booze he figures he'll need to make the night go his way. Then, when he's got his dream girl alone and puts the moves on her, she rebuffs him... because he's drunk, and she doesn't drink. It's poignant, sad, and brightly ironic: his entire concept of the dynamic between him and this girl turns out to be mostly imaginary. He thinks she's the sexy party girl and he's the dorky fat guy and the only shot he's got is if they're both drunk and uninhibited and he's the hero who supplied the booze for her party; in reality, she likes him a lot, isn't really a party girl, and she prefers him when he's sober. [END SPOILERS]

Of course, these elements, taken out of context, probably make the film sound like an extended After School Special about why underage drinking, or underage sex, or underage delinquency is baaaaad. I don't think that's what the filmmakers are after, although it's hard to miss that the film quite clearly seems to have the perspective that alcohol, sex, and teenagers do not mix well. Superbad is first and foremost a raunchy comedy, and a very funny one. Christopher Mintz-Plasse is, surprisingly, as good as the hype in the scene-stealing McLovin role, and Seth Rogen and Bill Hader are hysterically funny as two delinquent police officers. Cera and Hill are, of course, funny as hell too.

What I think I liked the very most about Superbad is something it shares with the other two films I lump in with it to form a sort of Judd Apatow-Seth Rogen trilogy: The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up. That is, all three of these movies are very raunchy, very irreverent comedies, but in each case there's an undercurrent of real respect for the important life changes the characters are going through. Virgin is full of jokes about Andy's virginity, but the fear, confusion, vulnerability, and trust involved in his journey to losing it are honestly and respectfully depicted. When he finally gets to the point where he's willing to be that intimate with the right person, it is depicted as a good and admirable decision, and his rough journey is shown to have been deservedly rewarding. Similarly, Knocked Up is brimming with humor about relationships, sex, marriage, and of course pregnancy, but the characters are allowed to be believably frightened, frustrated, and hopeful. They are shown rising to become their best selves, and their best selves are shown to be basically good, loving, genuine people.

I loved that same quality in Superbad. I could go on and on about the deficiencies in most - hell, virtually all - teen comedies (insofar as this movie could be considered a teen comedy - it's about teenagers, sure, but it clearly comes from adults and also seems to speak most clearly to adults), but instead I'm just going to recommend that you watch the execrable Can't Hardly Wait instead, a film that cheats by depicting the childlike sincerity, sensitivity, and feverish intensity of some teenagers and the myopia, selfishness, and immaturity of others without ever honestly examining the fact that all teenagers overflow with all of the above (actually, don't watch Can't Hardly Wait. Just take my word that it's shit. I wouldn't wish that hunk of garbage on anyone). Superbad, on the other hand, gets tons of laughs out of teenage characters being every bit as stupid, immature, short-sighted, and desperate as they generally are - but it also wrings genuine emotion out of these same characteristics, as well as the innocence, romanticism, and confusion that are also inextricable parts of adolescence.

I could probably say a lot more about Superbad, but I'm going to stop now. I really, really liked this movie. My wife and I have a habit of watching (and here's where I out the both of us as big-time nerds) Jesus of Nazareth on DVD every few months or so; each and every time we watch it, after it ends, I find myself feeling genuinely sad that I can't watch, like, The Continued Adventures of Jesus of Nazareth, starring Robert Powell as Jesus. It's not that I want to watch Jesus of Nazareth again - it's very specifically that I want to watch more of the Jesus depicted in that great miniseries, I want to spend more time in that world, and I want the story to continue. (I'd imagine the Apostles probably felt the same way about the real guy. (When talking about Christ, is it more appropriate to refer to the "real guy" or the "Real Guy"?)) I felt similarly toward Superbad (which is about as different a film from Jesus of Nazareth as it can be, in terms of tone and style): I didn't want to watch Superbad again, necessarily, but I wanted to watch the ongoing story of Evan and Seth and their friendship. And that's not to say that the film seemed to end too soon, at all: actually, I felt like it ended at the exact right moment. This is a very good film, and I highly recommend it.

(Alright, fuck it: Superbad: it's Supergood!)