17 AGAIN – burr steers – 1.5 / 10

It'd be putting too fine a point on it to say that I had high hopes for Burr Steers following his 2002 directorial debut Igby Goes Down since that film, despite being pretty solid, didn't exactly herald the emergence of a new cinematic star (as something like Mean Streets or Hard Eight did). But it was full of promise and seemed to indicate that Steers was someone to watch. Since then he's done mostly TV work (that's not a dig, there's a lot of money in TV and he worked on some pretty good shows) and now he's finally returned to the big screen with the all around awful 17 Again.

The film opens with an extended sequence, much of it filmed in slow motion, of a shirtless Zac Efron dripping sweat as he shoots around on the basketball court. I guess Steers knows his audience because the opening day crowd of mostly teenage girls I saw the film with erupted into shrieks of pleasure at the sight of Efron’s abs; but it hardly indicates that anything worthwhile is going to transpire over the next hour and half. And, indeed, the shirtless scene is quickly followed by a sequence of events that defies believability. Mike (Zac Efron in his teenage years, Matthew Perry as an adult) is getting ready to play the biggest game of his life (championship on the line, college scouts in the crowd, etc.). And just before the opening whistle, Scarlett (Mike’s girlfriend) decides that this would be an appropriate time to tell him that she’s pregnant. After hearing the news, Mike promptly walks off the court, gives up his dream of a scholarship to start a family and resents the hell out of Scarlett for the next two decades because of it.

But you can’t really blame Mike for resenting Scarlett for ruining his dreams like that. Besides being incredibly inconsiderate (how hard would it have been to wait a hour to tell him, it’s not like the situation was going to change), there are numerous options the couple could have considered that would have made a lot more sense. Mike could have gone to college near Scarlett and helped to raise the child while still getting an education, for instance. Or, gasp, she could have gotten an abortion.

Likewise you can’t really blame Scarlett for being pissed at adult Mike because he’s spent the last seventeen years hating her for ruining his chances to play college basketball. These two people just don’t treat each other very well and really have no business being together. This is a pretty big problem for the film because their relationship is really the only thing adult Mike had going for him. Once a crazy janitor transforms him back into the studly seventeen year old he once was, the only reason he doesn’t stay there is because of Scarlett. However, since their relationship is so dysfunctional, it’s pretty hard for the audience to understand why Mike would make that decision.

In fact, Mike is having such an incredible time as a teenager there’s really no explicable reason why he would choose to give that up. With the help of a makeover and a hot new car courtesy of his internet millionaire best friend, Mike positively rules the school. All the girls are in love with him. Almost all of the guys want to be just like him and the couple that don’t Mike easily outwits and crushes. He can eat whatever he wants, do whatever he wants and go wherever he wants. He has complete freedom, unlimited funds and the face and body of Zac Efron. Why the hell would he ever want to go back to being Matt Perry?

Oh, right, Scarlett, the love of his life. The problem there is that since the audience never sees Mike and Scarlett being good to each other, they have no rooting interest in seeing them get back together. They’ve always treated each other horribly in the past and there’s no reason to think that won’t continue once Mike goes back to being an adult.

Whatever minimal interest the audience might have in seeing Mike and Scarlett get back together is further undercut once Mike (as a teenager) befriends his seventeen year old son and starts hanging out at his old house. Scarlett becomes attracted to the younger Mike to the point where it looks like they might actually act on this attraction. In fact, it’s intimated that if Mike would just admit to her who he really is, she would jump him right there. (And even when he returns to his schlubby adult self, Scarlett continues to pine for his seventeen year old body.) It sure seems like everyone would have been a lot better off if Mike had stayed a teenager forever.

Basically the film is saying that being a teenager is the pinnacle of human existence and everything is downhill from there. This is an incredibly strange and, I think, harmful message to be sending to the teenagers at whom this film is clearly aimed. The standard reading on body switching films such as this (Freaky Friday, Big, etc.) is that while life isn’t easy at any age, adulthood is much more rewarding than being a teenager. And, further, that if you were one of the unlucky ones for whom high school really was the best years of your life, that’s about the saddest thing in the world.

Personally, you couldn’t pay me enough to go back and relive high school. (Random aside: that’s another reason I hate Twilight. What kind of morons would actually want to keep moving from town to town so that they could go to high school all over again?) Obviously with my adult perspective and (relative) wisdom, I could rule the place. But what’s the point of being king among children? What would it benefit me to have a bunch of teenagers think I’m cool? Is having a few people look up to you worth all the drama and hormones and curfews and random locker searches that you’d have to endure? Hell no.

This is just one more example of the many ways that our culture celebrates mediocrity. Telling average teenagers that their banal existence is the pinnacle of human experience is a product of the same coddling impulse that gives everyone a prize just for showing up, that doesn’t allow dodge ball or picking teams in gym class, that tells everyone they’re special. Being a teenager sucks. It’s the stage of life you just have to get through in order to become a fully functioning member of society. It’s the time of life most likely to be embarrassing to your future adult self. Besides, teenagers already think they know everything. Is reinforcing that belief really a good idea?

OBSERVE & REPORT – jody hill – 5.0 / 10

Having now watched the first season of Jody Hill’s HBO series Eastbound & Down and his second feature film Observe & Report, I’m at a loss as to how anyone can think Hill makes comedies. For the life of me I can’t figure out what anyone could possibly find funny in either the tv show or the film. That’s not to say that both aren’t occasionally entertaining or interesting but I just don’t see how anyone can laugh at the antics of such clearly disturbed human beings as Kenny Powers (Danny McBride’s washed up former pitcher in Eastbound & Down) and Ronnie Barnhardt (Seth Rogen’s mall cop in Observe & Report).

Both Kenny and Ronnie are severely unbalanced individuals who routinely treat everyone around them with utter disdain and disregard. And because of that, I find it very hard to laugh with or at them. If anything, I want to get these characters some psychiatric help. Kenny, for all his pomposity and vitriol, is, for the most part, just a harmless blowhard unless you really piss him off. Ronnie, on the other hand, is more than just an asshole, he’s mentally unbalanced and extremely dangerous (as the many people he severely wounds during the course of the film can attest). If Observe & Report had ended with Ronnie going on a mall wide shooting spree I wouldn’t have been the slightest bit surprised.

I guess that’s sort of the point, though. Compared to just about every character Adam Sandler and Will Ferrell have ever played, what Ronnie does in Observe & Report is pretty much par for the course. But the world Ronnie Barnhardt lives in and the people around him are relatively normal, unlike the world and characters of a Sandler or Ferrell film. Behavior that goes uncommented upon in those films really stands out in Observe & Report precisely because everyone around Ronnie is so recognizably normal. Thus the film becomes something of a dissection of what mainstream comedy has become and what and who a mainstream audience will laugh at.

That said, it still doesn’t explain why people would find the film funny. If the point of the film is to examine why audiences find disturbing and dangerous behavior funny, laughing at that behavior implicates you as part of the problem. Hill seems to be suggesting that if you laugh at any of the terrible stuff Ronnie does in Observe & Report (random beatings, date rape, attempted murder, etc.) then you’re missing some vital component of your emotional DNA.

But that makes very little sense to me. Why would someone make a film that’s only real function is to critique and insult its core audience? Is the whole thing an elaborate prank? (i.e. See how I can insult these idiots and still get them to laugh hysterically.) Or does Hill really think this stuff is funny? If it’s the former, then I guess Hill is something of a mad genius. Though why he’d spend so much time and effort to make a movie that his target audience will mostly misinterpret is beyond me. If it’s the latter, then Observe & Report is perhaps the most disturbing mainstream movie ever made.

And the film has no shortage of disturbing material in it. Take, for instance, the scene where Ronnie has vigorous sex with what appears to be a comatose Brandi (Anna Faris) (complete with vomit crusted on her pillow). After a few seconds—presumably to allow the audience to recover from the shock of what they’re seeing—Brandi comes to and yells at Ronnie to keep going before appearing to pass out again. The initial fifteen seconds of the scene, wherein it appears that Ronnie is raping Brandi (and a pretty good argument can be made that even though she wakes up briefly, what Ronnie is doing is still statutory rape) are so deeply horrifying that I can’t imagine how anyone could possibly laugh when Brandi wakes up and commands Ronnie to continue.

But some people in the audience I saw the film with did laugh. And I just don’t know what to make of that. Is Hill trying to see how far he can push the envelope before it becomes too disturbing for anyone to laugh? Or is he saying that there are no boundaries in comedy? Or is he after something much deeper? We can’t, for the most part, help when we laugh. So maybe Hill is using something incredibly disturbing as a punchline in order to get the viewer to question why they’re laughing in the first place.

I’d like to think that’s what he’s going for. But any argument to that effect is seriously undercut by the film’s ending. In it Ronnie finally catches up to the flasher who has been ‘terrorizing’ his mall and promptly shoots the man at point blank range. Then, with gallons of blood covering the floor, everyone begins to applaud. Ronnie then hauls the severely wounded man to his feet and drags him down to the police station where he is greeted with approval for his actions from the cops. By treating Ronnie ultimately as a hero for his violently disturbed behavior, Hill lets the audience completely off the hook. If the rest of the film really is an examination and critique of the man-child idiocy of most mainstream comedy (at least of the Stiller, Sandler, Ferrell variety), ending the film this way allows the audience to leave the theater without having to think much about what they were just laughing at. Since the characters within the film all end up approving of Ronnie’s behavior, the audience is invited to feel the same way about him. If the extremely unsettling things Ronnie did earlier in the film can be ignored by the other characters, then they can just as easily be ignored by the audience. And, again, I’m left wondering what the point of all this was.

An argument could be made that, just like in Taxi Driver (clearly a huge influence on this film), what the audience sees in the last ten minutes only happened that way in Ronnie’s mind. In fact, there is some textual evidence to support the theory that much of what the audience sees in the film didn’t really happen that way. (For instance, Ronnie is the only person still conscious after both the date rape scene and the scene where he severely wounds a group of drug dealers, and therefore he’s the only one who really knows what happened.) But if the ending (or even much of the film) is subjectively told from Ronnie’s perspective, it still has the same effect. The audience is still invited to ignore everything that came before it and view Ronnie as a hero.

I guess the ending could just have been an easy way for Hill to secure major studio backing for Observe & Report. If the film had ended the way it looked like it was going to (with some sort of mass murder), no one would have come near it. But the ending so undercuts everything it seemed like Hill had been trying to say with the first two thirds of the film that it leaves the distinct impression that maybe Hill wasn’t trying to say anything particularly insightful about what we find funny or who we like to laugh at. And if he wasn’t going for that, then he really was trying to get people to laugh at an extremely unbalanced individual beating up a group of teenage skateboarders, knocking out an Arab man just because his skin is brown, assaulting police officers, having sex with an unconscious woman and shooting an unarmed man. The implication that I should be laughing at any of this is probably the most disturbing thing I’ll see in a movie all year.

ADVENTURELAND – greg mottola – 9.4 / 10

Adventureland is a love story. But it’s a realistic love story, not whatever it is that Matthew McConaughey, Kate Hudson and Hugh Grant have been passing off as love stories in their romantic comedies all these years. Adventureland is a story about what it actually looks and feels like to fall in love for the first time, not, as we’re used to seeing at the movies, a romanticized story about what we wished it looked and felt like to fall in love. And because of that, I should offer this caveat: we all see love differently. It means something different to all of us. And because of that, your own response to this film will probably vary depending on how much (or how little) you agree with the filmmakers’ ideas about what falling in love is like. Since my own ideas about the subject line up pretty well with those expressed in the film, I found myself enthralled by it. Your mileage may vary.

The fact that I enjoyed Adventureland as much as I did is mildly surprising considering that, before even a single frame of the film had unspooled, it already had several strikes against it. First off, the film is clearly at least semi-autobiographical. There’s just no way Greg Mottola would bother telling this story unless something at least a little similar happened to him. When the filmmaker is that close to the story and when the story in question has been romanticized over twenty years of retellings (though I’m only guessing about that last part), there’s a pretty decent chance that the film will be completely self-serving and unsatisfying. Just think of how many awful ‘passion projects’ there’ve been over the years. From Gangs of New York to The Passion of the Christ, the phrase ‘passion project’ is usually just a euphemism for ‘piece of crap’.

Second, Mottola is coming off the wildly successful Superbad. When a director makes a movie that makes as much money as that one did, they’re pretty much handed the keys to the kingdom and told to go make whatever they want. For the most part, however, this turns out very very poorly. Compounding that, Miramax is releasing the film. This is significant just for the fact of it. When a director makes a hit movie for a studio, the studio does everything they can to keep him there (like giving him $150 million to make Watchmen for instance). So the fact that Columbia isn’t releasing Adventureland leads me to believe that they must have passed on the film. And if they passed on it, that pretty much guarantees the film won’t have broad appeal.

Third, Kristen Stewart is the object of the protagonist / filmmaker stand-in’s romantic attention. Before six months ago I actually quite liked Stewart, mostly because all I’d ever seen of her was her work on the screen. Once she started going out and doing interviews to promote Twilight, it became clear that in real life she is either a complete moron, a drug addict or simply unable to carry on a conversation if it hasn’t been scripted for her. That might be a little unfair but if you’ve seen her appearance on Letterman last year, you know I’m not exaggerating.

Yet somehow, despite everything the film seemed to have stacked against it, I really enjoyed it. Some of that enjoyment might be due to the film hitting a couple of my weak spots. I’m as much a sucker for a good coming of age story as a hopeless romantic is for a good rom com. I’m also a sucker for a film with a great soundtrack. And Adventureland deploys The Cure, The Velvet Underground, David Bowie and Yo La Tengo to great effect. And, perhaps most tellingly, James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg), the ‘hero’ of the film, looks and sounds about the same as I felt when I was about nineteen years old. (In reality I probably looked and sounded a whole lot different but his character is pretty much exactly how I imagined I appeared to the outside world.) Given all of that, it’d be awfully hard for me to resist the film’s charms.

But what’s most admirable about the film is that it unfailingly chooses to be honest and subtle when, given the somewhat ridiculous setting (a cut rate theme park in the late 1980s), it could very easily have gone for the big laugh or the big romantic gesture. Instead, the film is restrained in a way that is both assured and assuring. The viewer knows early on that although some outrageous things might happen in the film, none of them are going to stretch the bounds of believability. And though James might get himself into some embarrassing situations, these will come from a place of emotional honesty. There’s nothing I hate more than cringe-inducing comedy when it’s completely gratuitous (someone serenading his girlfriend in front of her whole apartment building, for instance) or just trying to get the audience to squirm. But when it comes from an emotionally honest place and feels like something an actual human being might do, what could have been embarrassing becomes instead endearing.

Also, Mottola handles the adults in the film in a really appealing way. In a film like this, centered as it is on the lives of young adults, the parents are most often portrayed as little more than cartoon characters. Typically they're either completely oblivious to what their kids are doing or else they’re preaching at them and sounding completely clueless. Either way, the parents in most movies about teenagers have no real influence on the kids, almost as if their very existence is a nuisance. The parents in Adventureland, on the other hand, have a real impact on their kids’ lives, and not necessarily for the better. Though they're trying their best to impart some kind of wisdom to their offspring, the adults in the film are still trying to figure out their own lives and so have precious little insight to impart to their children. Because of that, the kids have no choice but reject their parents and set out on their own. The underlying message of these relationships is that there is no substitute for personal experience. There is nothing any adult can tell a teenager that will really help them figure out what to do with their lives. They have to make their own mistakes and fumble their way through just as their parents have.

That relationship, so hard to get right on film (mostly because the person writing it, whether teenager or parent, usually can’t avoid taking sides), is nothing compared with the difficulty of convincingly depicting two believable characters falling in love. Most of great love stories end in one of two ways: either the couple spends the whole story dancing around each other, finally getting together at the very end (e.g. Pride and Prejudice) or they’re together for a very short time (i.e. before any real issues can set in) and then broken up forever, usually by the death of one or both of them (e.g. Romeo and Juliet, Titanic, etc.). It’s extremely difficult to portray a romantic relationship on screen that is both realistic and still dramatically satisfying. And to do it with a couple that’s barely entered their twenties is almost unheard of. That’s what elevates Adventureland from just a good coming of age story amongst many into something special.

It helps that Kristen Stewart’s Em is pretty much the idealized woman for every guy who ever was (or thought himself to be) a lonely, awkward, nerdy young man who couldn’t figure out who to be or what to do with his life. Her character, especially in her first few scenes, is a sort of idealized version of ‘the one that got away’, that girl that every smart, introverted, artsy boy was secretly in love with but could never get to notice him. Em is smart, fearless and down to earth but also just a tiny bit damaged and in need of ‘saving’. And though at first that characterization is a little cliché, by the end of the film it’s become clear that there’s a lot more to Em than it first appeared and that the only way she’ll ever be ‘saved’ is if she saves herself. Interestingly, that’s usually the message most films like this send about their hero. The girl is usually the prize he earns for figuring out who he really is. In Adventureland, however, there is the very real sense that both Jesse and Em are going to be better together than they would ever be apart.

To get a sense of how remarkable an achievement Adventureland is, think about some of the more beloved movies of the past that attempt to do something similar (i.e. tell a story about a young couple falling in love). Every one that you can name (Say Anything, Sixteen Candles, Cruel Intentions, The Notebook, etc.), are all completely unrealistic. The emotions that the characters express might convincingly mimic real emotion but the situations are ludicrous, the dialogue is filled with long speeches (usually in some sort of public setting) about how one half of the couple feels about the other and the story itself is unfailingly wrapped up in a neat little bow. Even the ancillary characters in those movies usually get some kind of closure to whatever they were dealing with. None of that strikes me as in any way resembling my experience of reality. Those movies mythologize and romanticize young love in a way that almost completely divorces it from reality.

Adventureland, on the other hand, completely demythologizes and deromanticizes its characters' lives, bringing them down to a human level. There’s just no comparison between the films mentioned above and Adventureland where the characters very rarely say the right thing and often say nothing at all, romantic gestures are small and usually go unnoticed, and pronouncements of undying love are uttered through third parties while extremely stoned. That’s a lot closer to how I remember it being when I was twenty, and Adventureland is that much more powerful (to me at least) because of it.

It’s hard to convincingly portray love on screen for so many reasons, not the least of which being that it doesn’t look exactly the same to any two viewers. What one person sees as a completely realistic depiction of love may look to another like utter nonsense. Thus I can only speak for myself when I say this, but to me Adventureland contains probably the truest rendering of what it feels like to be young and in love with the world supposedly at your feet but seeming instead like it’s spinning completely out of control. It evokes a time and a place and a stage of life with such pitch perfect emotional clarity and honesty that at times I was a little embarrassed by how much it affected me. And any film that can peer that deeply into a viewer’s soul is special indeed.

DOWN BY LAW – jim jarmusch – 5.6 / 10

Thank god for the 1.5x fast forward on my DVD player. Without it I would’ve certainly fallen asleep less than ten minutes into this film and either never would’ve bothered to finish it or, if I had, it would’ve taken another three days of watching it in short twenty minute bursts with all the lights on and the computer on my lap to keep me from dozing off when the film became too boring.

Even watched at 1.5x speed (so that it took a little over an hour instead of the full 110 minute running time), the film is still only decent, not exactly the classic its inclusion in the Criterion Collection might lead you to believe it is. And, somehow, incredibly, it’s still slow moving. I just can’t understand why people make films like this. Just what is it that the audience is learning by watching Zack (Tom Waits) slowly put on his boots and then, again slowly, polish them in one long static shot that it couldn’t just as easily have learned in a couple of quick cuts that took a third of the time?

The only thing that happens when you watch a long take like that one is that your mind starts to wander. Your eyes start searching other parts of the frame for something interesting. Sometimes, if you’re really into the film, this might get you thinking more deeply about the characters or the setting or whatever. Other times, and this is what’s more likely to happen with me, it takes you completely out of the film. In moments like that, I find myself thinking about the set decorator and why she chose that specific photo to include on the nightstand or the costumer and why he chose to put the character in those boots. And then, if the shot goes on long enough, my thoughts stray completely away from the film and before I know it I’ve distracted myself to the point of not even noticing what’s happening on the screen anymore.

I guess that doesn’t speak all that well of me as a viewer. Basically I’m saying that I need to be constantly stimulated or else I’m not going to be able to pay attention to your movie. (And there is some truth in that. One of the key benefits of watching a film at 1.5x speed is that you really have be on your toes to hear everything that’s said, which serves to keep you more engaged in the film than you might be otherwise.) But that’s not the whole story. The best I can figure it is that Jarmusch and his ilk (pretty much every European and independent American filmmaker) make movies like this because they like a slow, deliberate, almost elegiac pace. It lends, I guess, a sense of realism and thoughtfulness to both the characters and the films themselves.

But there are plenty of films I love that are very slowly paced (Eyes Wide Shut, The Road to Perdition and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button to name three) and during which, at no point, was I ever thinking about what I was going to have for dinner or whether or not I left the bedroom lights on. So it’s not the pace by itself that turns me off to films like this. Or, to put it more accurately, it’s not the pace alone. It’s the slow pace coupled with the ramshackle production values and the loosely scripted dialogue that dooms these sorts of films to mediocrity in my eyes. If I become bored at any point during a film like The Road to Perdition and find my eyes wandering the frame looking at something other than the actors, there are plenty of things still within the world the filmmaker has created to draw my attention. I can examine the spectacular cinematography or the impeccable set design or I can try to puzzle out why exactly this particular shot was chosen and what it’s supposed to symbolize in the context of the larger film. But with something like Down By Law, given that same opportunity, there isn’t much to be gleaned from any of those things. The cinematography is fine but mostly just gets out of the way of the story and all too often succumbs to that handheld faux-documentary crap that typifies so many Indie (TM) films. And the dialogue seems like it might well have been made up on the set the day of the shoot. A closer examination of either of these things (or any other of the many constituent parts that make up any single shot or scene) doesn’t seem like it would be particularly rewarding or illuminating. I don’t think there’s much to be gained by thinking about them overmuch. And so I don’t; and my mind wanders; and then either I’ve missed something that will turn out to be important later on or I’ve fallen asleep.

So, yeah, thank god my DVD player lets me watch movies at 1.5x speed. That way I can get through films like this in one sitting, quickly write up something about it, file it in the ‘seen it’ column and move on to something that I’d rather be watching. That’s pretty silly, I guess, and probably begs the question of why I’m even bothering to watch a film that I’m really not getting anything out of. The answer is that you never know. You never know where the seed for an idea that will grow to become something interesting will come from. You never know if, buried within all this standard Indie (TM) film stuff, there just might be something transcendent. So I watch and hope. And mostly I’m disappointed. But that’s okay. My Netflix queue is long and I’m still (relatively) young.