Alden Ford
Most Recently: The Sad Familiarity of The Hangover Part II
- Show:
- Posts
- Comments
- Liked Comments
The Sad Familiarity of The Hangover Part II
From front to back, The Hangover Part II is one big calculation. It seems to have run every single aspect of the first movie through a series of algorithms to determine just how much different — and how very, very, similar — the sequel should be to retain a target audience with no patience for new material, no taste for a new adventure and no desire to see a different movie than the one they paid to see in 2009.
Want a new plot that’s exactly the same? No problem. The guys are at Ed Helms’ wedding this time. Looking for a slightly more interesting location than Vegas? Boom, Bangkok. Lost baby not good enough? Now it’s a monkey. Missing tooth too boring? Here’s a face tattoo. Vegas hookers too tame? Try (spoiler alert) transsexual Thai prostitutes. Sure, each of these are marginally more interesting, and the guys being in a foreign country technically raises the stakes, but do those choices make for a proportionally funnier film? Of course not. What’s sadder is that our heros react to these things at the same level: Galifianakis babies the monkey. Helms stresses about the tattoo’s effect on his appearance and credibility. Cooper runs interference with the increasingly suspicious wedding party. It’s bad enough for the plot to be so similar; do the characters have to act the same, too? READ MORE
Bridesmaids: A Great Comedy, No Qualifiers Necessary
There’s been a lot of talk this weekend about what kind of comedy Bridesmaids is — who it’s for, what it’s trying to do. Most of the buzz I’ve heard revolves around the comedy non-revelation that, holy shit, girls can be funny too, and look at these funny girls who are already millionaires for being funny be so funny even though girls are never funny. It’s ridiculous. And although I understand why comparisons will be drawn, over and over, to the “guy versions” of Bridesmaids, I really wish they didn’t have to be. Because Bridesmaids is, objectively, a fucking terrific comedy, independent of the gender discussions that people who watch and truly care about comedy know are complete bullshit. I wish there were more unqualified good reviews of this movie, reviews that talk about how many of the jokes are brilliant, how many characters and relationships are believable and how many performances are spot-on, and just leave it at that. But instead those compliments are buried under a headline of “Against All Odds” and it undermines a lot of true praise for the film. READ MORE
What I Learned From The Finally Screenings
Seven and a half months and 30 films ago, I began a mission to watch all the best comedies my sheltered childhood, lack of cable, and pop-culture cluelessness had prevented me from seeing until now. I think it’s safe to say I’ve accomplished my goal, in some measure. Not that I’ve seen every comedy, or even every great comedy, but I think I can safely say I’ve seen the same funny movies any healthy kid of my generation can reasonably be expected to have seen. Of course there are countless films I still have yet to see in order to consider myself any kind of authority on comedy films, but I’m getting to the point where when I mention to someone that I'm a comedy writer and director, I no longer worry they’ll ask me to differentiate Venkman from Spengler. Not sure who would ever ask me to do that.
When you see so many iconic films, from so many different decades, in such a short period of time, some interesting things happen. You start to fill in blanks in your childhood, attach context to quotes and homages. You start to see the ranks in the slow march of comedy and appreciate its depth, how it has changed. You start to see patterns emerge, trends thrive and die, careers build and dismantle themselves. You get to see movies that are so completely deserving of their iconic status and films that have been rendered impotent and meaningless by time and countless imitators. It’s been pretty fascinating. READ MORE
Watching Bio-Dome For the First Time
The first half of the 90s was a fertile ground for comedies that exploited the popularity not just of a single comedian, but of a specific character — or type of character — portrayed by a single comedian; Carrey’s mugging wise-ass, Farley’s sweaty manchild, Sandler’s violent manchild. There was a big rash of these films, all clumped up together in the Nirvana years, a byproduct of the tonal shift in comedic film as comedies with big concepts gave way to the trend of popular comedians in a series of more or less interchangeable situations. Ghostbusters without proton packs and Zuul wouldn’t be Ghostbusters, but if Tommy Boy involved textiles instead of auto parts, or Ace Ventura were a houseplant detective, they’d be pretty much the same movies. Those films were and still are about the comedians in them. And few comedians represent that tiny, bizarre era in comedy better than Pauly Shore, a guy who created a character that could never conceivably exist outside of his time.
So with that in mind, I watched Bio-Dome this week. Combining the Weasel with misguided, poorly-understood mid-90s environmental activism, with an added helping of Stephen Baldwin, makes for a deliciously ripe time capsule of maybe-comedy. Have all those squealy laughs and weird hand gestures ripened into a fine, nuanced comedy Cabernet? Or have they curdled into a disgusting, unfunny vinegar of brightly-colored ponchos and white-guy dreadlocks? READ MORE
Watching Reefer Madness For the First Time
It’s safe to say that, upon its release, Reefer Madness was intended to be, on some level, serious. It’s a film that was originally financed by a church group as a morality tale about the dangers of marijuana (or “marihuana,” as the film calls it). Whether or not it succeeded in that goal, I can’t speak to, but as it was purchased before release and recut by noted exploitation producer Dwain Esper, it probably instead reached an audience more concerned with seeing a film not approved by the MPAA than having an educational sit-down with their impressionable kids.
It’s also safe to say that, upon its rerelease in 1971, the film was in perfect position to become a cult comedy classic. Like rereleasing, today, an 80s film about the dangers of cell phone radiation or the deadly, deadly internet, 1971 was the perfect year to unleash the baldfaced lies and gross misinformation of Reefer Madness on a country largely (and recently) familiar with how very not-dangerous marijuana actually is. New Line Cinemas, then a fledgling production company, distributed the film to colleges around the country, where it screened for millions of kids who were intimately (and probably actively) aware of which threats pot does and does not pose.
But now we live in a different, third-wave era regarding marijuana use. It is, to the chagrin of the drug war wagers (and to the feigned chagrin of the drug war enforcers), common to the point of ubiquity, legal in several states, unenforced in several more, and the uncensored and uncensured subject of countless films, TV shows and hip-hop tracks. Even crappy CGI kids’ movies make thinly veiled references to it. Weed isn’t just for college hippies interested in ironic rereleases of educational films, it’s for grandmothers with glaucoma, chronic nausea sufferers, and olympic gold medalists. Also, hippies. Suffice to say, the claim that pot causes violent or psychotic side effects has been laughed out of rooms for decades at this point. So is there any place in our day and age for the accidental joke that Reefer Madness tells? READ MORE
Watching Arthur For the First Time
If it gives you any idea how inside-out my movie viewing track record was as a child, the only Dudley Moore movie I had ever seen until this week was 1988's Santa Claus: The Movie. You know, the one where candy canes make you fly for some reason. Oh, you don’t remember that? Neither does anyone else.
I'm glad to discover that Moore had a career besides that film. Who knew? And seeing how there's an Arthur remake coming, I felt like this was a perfect opportunity to check out the source material, a 1981 film about a drunken millionaire who must decide between marrying a girl his family has decided upon and a quirky waitress from Queens with whom he falls in love.
It would be pretty difficult to hate a movie like Arthur. It's designed to be charming, and generally is. Like Police Academy, Arthur is a movie sort of like its titular character — it's not perfect, but warts and all, you root for it. Unlike Police Academy, it's easy to see why. Arthur is at times hilarious, touching and ridiculous, and it’s a solid comedy executed well. READ MORE
Watching Police Academy For the First Time
The cadets who constitute the leading characters in Police Academy share many characteristics. They all have a lot going against them. They’re underachievers, weirdos, fuck-ups. They break or refuse to accept or are ignorant of most of the rules, and they are each at times obnoxious, incompetent and one-dimensional. But in spite of their many and consistent failures, they smile and struggle and goof around anyway and just barely sort of succeed on their own merits by the end of the movie.
By that measure, Police Academy itself could be a character in its own film.
It’s really adorable, actually. I almost can’t understand how a movie that is so harmlessly bad could have become the household-name franchise it instantly became, spawning six sequels (SIX SEQUELS) and an animated series. But there’s something about Police Academy that makes you fond of it in spite of its glaring ineptitude. READ MORE
Watching Slap Shot For the First Time
As The Finally Screenings have shifted from comedies that are at the top of classic-comedy lists to films that are found on more obscure or specific charts, I suppose it’s inevitable that there would be a higher proportion of films that I wouldn’t necessarily think to describe as comedies, per se. Light-hearted, fanciful, bizarre, stylish or satirical, maybe, but not funny-ha-ha. 1977’s Slap Shot is a perfect example, a film whose darker and more dramatic elements outweigh the laughs to a genre-stretching degree.
Which isn’t to say that Slap Shot is a bad movie. It has a lot of things going for it, and the laughs to be found are solid and well-earned. But the jokes seem only peppered into a story that is much darker, more lonely and more tragic than the first 20 minutes would suggest. In fact, as the film goes on, the violence, immorality and consistently unlikable characters start to undermine scenes which, in the first act of the film, come off as charming and humorous.
But first, some context: Paul Newman plays Reggie Dunlop, the aging player-coach of a small-town Pennsylvania minor league hockey team. When he learns that the team is being folded due to falling attendance, he lies to the team that they’re being sold and convinces them to start playing dirty, which invigorates both their fan-base and their win-loss record. READ MORE
Watching The Goonies For the First Time
The 80s were a great time to be a kid. High-concept comedies and sci-fi movies, loud, parent-maddening music, classic video games and cable TV. Compared to other decades, kids’ entertainment was unabashedly childish, insane, colorful, loud and ridiculous. Now that plopping your kids in front of the TV for hours on end while you do something else is sort of frowned upon, children’s entertainment has been forced to appeal, with widely varying success, to parents as well as kids, spawning a tiny amount of the best entertainment in the industry (Pixar, I’m looking at you) and a truckload of the very worst (insert your favorite squeakuel here). Gone are the days when an episode of He-Man had the exact plot a 6-year-old would have written if given the chance (and one anyone over 12 would never in a million years understand). Gone are the days when a show called Ghostbusters and a totally different, unrelated show called The Real Ghostbusters could both exist simultaneously and none of the viewership have a problem with it. Kid’s entertainment now is too researched, too deliberate. Too controlled by adult sensibilities.
Thank goodness, then, that The Goonies was released in 1985, smack in the middle of the best decade so far for batshit insane children’s entertainment. In the wrong decade’s hands, this movie might have been robbed of everything that still makes it awesome. Could you get away with Sloth in 2011? Data? Chunk, even? Could you get away with seven kids swearing and screaming over each other for 114 minutes? Could you get away with locking a fat kid in a freezer with a corpse?
Fortunately, we’ll never have to wonder. The Goonies was a movie made at just the right time. And I finally watched it. READ MORE
Watching Fast Times at Ridgemont High For the First Time
Growing up, I didn’t realize there was an entire subgenre of movies dedicated to reminiscing about high school. I especially didn’t realize that there was an entire subgenre inside that subgenre dedicated to doing drugs and having sex in high school. The former never made sense to me because I didn’t do anything in high school worth reminiscing about, and the latter made even less sense for reasons that are probably obvious at this point.
High school wasn’t very fun for me, but it wasn’t traumatic or amusing either. I was really small, but it wasn’t a big deal. I was picked on, but not enough to complain about. I was smart, but not enough to apply myself. I had a few good teachers and a few good friends. But mostly, high school is a benign, slightly uncomfortable blur now, and like any other arbitrary chunk of my childhood, sort of pointless to define, let alone romanticize, based on what grade I was in. My identity at 16, in contrast to those of Bueller, Spicoli and Dobler, was embryonic, ambiguous and largely uneventful.
I’m a bit fascinated, then, to be introduced to some of the pillars of those genres so many years after I wouldn’t have related to them. There are some fantastic movies in there: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Dazed and Confused, Clueless, and the film I watched for the first time this week, Fast Times at Ridgemont High. But instead of reminding me of high school — let alone striking a chord of fond memory — these movies play to me like works of pure fantasy: a world in which high school matters, students are the young, ambitious, naive and pure versions of the adults they will later become and the drama and passion of being 16 is immortalized on film because it actually means something to the rest of the world. READ MORE
Watching Quick Change For the First Time
This week, I watched Bill Murray's Quick Change. It's a movie I had barely heard of before having it recommended to me, but man — it's fantastic.
Murray plays Grimm, a guy so fed up with New York City that he devises a brilliant bank robbery followed by a permanent vacation to Fiji with his girlfriend Phyllis (Geena Davis) and best friend Loomis (Randy Quaid). The robbery goes perfectly, but as anyone who has lived here will tell you, just getting to the airport can be a nightmare.
It's Bill Murray's first (and so far, only) directing credit, and it really shows that this is a part he loves and a story he wants to tell. There are many roles made for Bill Murray, but this is a part made by him. He's clearly having a blast playing Grimm, and he, the supporting cast and the world around them all feel of a piece.
Which should be the goal of any well-directed film, I guess. But here it really works. Where many of Murray's films tend to revolve around his character sticking out on some level — out-of-place big city jerk in Punxsutawney, out-of-place laid-back poltergeist wrangler, out-of-place celebrity in Tokyo — Quick Change is a world in which Bill Murray is a regular guy, and the characters around him see him as they would any hero — ambitious, charismatic, intelligent, decent even. His trademark nonchalance is a given, which allows us to take Murray's character at face value. And at the risk of reading too far in, it illuminates what I love so much about Bill Murray: his persona isn't a choice, it's who he is. And what makes him so enjoyable to watch is how he filters the characters he plays through that persona, not how it compares with the characters around him. READ MORE
Watching Pee-Wee's Big Adventure For the First Time
I guess I just never got Pee-Wee Herman. As a kid his show kind of creeped me out. I didn't and still don't really get what's funny about him. The idea of a wide-eyed, unflappably optimistic kid in a grown-up's body, overcoming all obstacles with his infectiously silly energy, is a great bit in theory, but in execution I think Pee-Wee always rang false (and, as I said, a little terrifying) to me. I think for a bit like that to hold up, you need to commit to the character in a way Pee-Wee just never did. There was always something external, something dark and cynical about it that undermined what seemed to be the whole point of the character. And maybe the cynicism is part of the character, too, but I think that only works if there's something else going on — some element of satire or subversion, or another character to act as a counterpoint. Or at least a straight man.
Pee-Wee's Big Adventure doesn't have any of those things to speak of. Or at least not as far as I can tell. It's a soft, two-dimensional, consequence-less world in which Pee-Wee is mostly accepted without reservation, but it's also a world that is weird, colorful, confusing and often scary. It's a world without any straight men or realism to temper it, and because of that it's hard to get a handle on what constitutes a joke. Are we supposed to laugh at the way Pee-Wee acts? What about the way people treat him? Are we meant to see Pee-Wee as an equal or below us? Is it all supposed to be as creepy as it seems? For what reason? READ MORE
Watching Top Secret! For the First Time
One of the most popular movie suggestions people have for me when they hear I’m writing this column is Airplane!, and I can't blame them for suggesting it. Airplane! is just like a lot of the movies I didn’t see as I kid — it’s racy, low-brow, full of double entendres, only rated PG because PG-13 hadn’t been invented yet — exactly the kind of movie that I wasn’t allowed to watch. I actually have seen it, though, but I remember it being right on the edge of what my tiny sheltered brain could understand as a child. I particularly remember being scarred for life by that scene where a woman vomits an egg with a live bird inside.
I just wasn’t ready, I guess. A kid who’s only allowed G- and PG-rated family films growing up is bound to be freaked out by all sorts of things in movies, which is why the steamroller scene from Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, The dead Joker scene in Batman, numerous moments in James Bond and Indiana Jones movies, and countless other minute instances of violence, suspense and weirdness in films gave me nightmares for years to come every time I was unfortunate to run across one while channel surfing or at a friend’s house. I wouldn’t exchange my childhood for anything, but I was a fragile little guy.
But I digress. I’ve seen Airplane!, a number of times, and it’s great. Ditto the Hot Shots! and The Naked Gun series. For a guy who hasn’t seen anything, I’m pretty familiar with the Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker franchise. But until this week, I’d never seen Top Secret!
It’s a good one to have saved. Anyone who’s seen a ZAZ movie knows what to expect, but while it isn’t as consistently silly as Airplane! or The Naked Gun, I’d say in many ways, it’s better. There are fewer jokes, sure, but there’s also more going on, and the material here is among the stronger, weirder and more ambitious that those guys have attempted. Which, 30 years later, does a lot to make a movie still worth watching. READ MORE
Watching Idiocracy for the First Time
Normally for this column I watch a comedy many people have told me to see, but this week I did something a little different — I watched a comedy just one person has told me to see on a number of occasions. He’s got a good sense of humor, so I knew it wouldn’t be a total waste of time. Plus, I figured if I liked it, this column would help him evangelize it vicariously through me, and if I didn’t like it, I could publicly shame his questionable taste in movies.
Fortunately for my friend, Idiocracy is a pretty good movie.
For those of you who haven’t seen it (it feels weird to type that), Idiocracy is a 2006 Mike Judge film, starring Luke Wilson, Dax Shepard and Maya Rudolph, about an average Joe who is cryogenically frozen for 500 years. When he wakes up, he realizes that because of the deevolution of human society, he and the prostitute who was also frozen are the two smartest people in the world. By a long shot. It’s a world where the most popular show on television is Ow! My Balls!, water has been replaced by an electrolyte-filled sports beverage for drinking fountains and watering crops, and the President punctuates speeches with flipping everyone off and shooting a machine gun into the air. It’s a hilarious, if slightly obvious, concept, and the execution is funny, if a little simple. READ MORE
Contributors
Luke Kelly-Clyne »
This Week In Web Videos: "Your Dad's Friends"
Jesse David Fox »
Jon Benjamin Is America's (or England's?) Worst Father, Maybe
Bradford Evans »
The 2011-12 TV Season's Best New Comedies
Roger Cormier »
Did You Get It? The Year of Inside Jokes and Season-Long Arcs
Please Join The Splitsider Comedy Book Club
40