Tag Archives: Comedy

Oct 14 2014
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The Scope

An Afternoon With Alejandro Inarritu

“And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.”

– Raymond Carver

These were the words that director Alejandro Inarritu (Babel, Biutiful) chose to quote at the beginning of his meticulous film Birdman, or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance. It was also the first words that came back into my head minutes before I was to interview him.

This weekend, I had two great experiences happen to me. Firstly, getting to see Birdman, a viciously unique film that tackles it’s characters and themes with pinpoint precision: a masterwork by a master director. The second you already know. If you don’t, you didn’t read my first paragraph.

Alejandro gave myself, along with about ten other college journalists, the privilege to talk to him about his upcoming limited release. After seeing the movie, this surprised me, because there was a moment in the film where a journalist accuses the main character of injecting semen into his pores to maintain his young features. I suspect Mr. Inarritu hosts a very guarded spirit while being interviewed by the press, and I certainly don’t blame him for that if that is the case. Now that I think about it, maybe that’s why Inarritu wanted to host the interview over the phone in the first place.

Anyhow, I had 20 minutes to listen to the director’s innermost thoughts, and while I only got to ask him one question, I enjoyed the experience as much as any other college journalist who participated in the call. While all of these aren’t my questions, these are the ones I found the most relevant to the film, and the ones I believed Inarritu would have preferred to be answered in the first place. So without further adieu, here is Alejandro Inarritu on the unexpected virtue of ignorance.

Question: Your film is unique, hyperactive and full of energy. How do you communicate to your cast the complex tone you’re wanting to portray?

Answer: I always try to be very specific, help them to clarify and simplify things by having a very clear objective. I think every scene has an objective, and every character has something they want to achieve in each scene. When you have cleared your objective, and to try one or two possible ways to get that done through an action verb, I think that would simplify the work not only for me, but for everybody.

Q: What were some of the challenges you faced while making the film? 

A: It was a very short shooting — 29 days. We rehearsed a lot before arriving to the set, so basically it was a very intense and meticulous work of precision with actors, camera and crew. Everything was designed and matched the needs of the film that was basically predecided in rehearsal.

Q: You have a big role behind your scenes in producing, writing and directing all of your films. What is it like taking on all of those jobs at once? 

A: I have been lucky to have been the producer and be involved in all of my films in a very personal way. I think there is no other way to make it. I think if you have a film that is personal, if you are doing your own film, there is no other way to not produce it, because I think it’s a part of the film. Producing means a lot of decisions that will impact your film one way or another.

Q: In the movie, Riggan Thompson is overshadowed by a superhero role he played earlier in his career. In real life, Keaton is overshadowed by his role in Tim Burton’s Batman. Is that an intentional casting decision that you made?

A: Keaton adds a lot of mental reality to the film, being an authority and one of the few persons of his work that pioneered the superhero thing. But at the same time, he has the craft and the range to play in drama and comedy, and very few actors can do that. He plays a prick in this film, and I need someone who was adorable, somebody who you can really like. He has that likeness, that likeness that was required. All of these things made him the perfect choice for it. I think he was very bold in trusting me with this role.

Q: One of the things that is particularly interesting with the film is the long take. Can you talk about why you made that visual choice?

A: I wanted the long take to make the people really feel the experience of this guy. I think it’s important for every director in every film to pick the point of view, and in this case I wanted radical point of view, and the people were in the shoes of the character to experience his emotions. I felt that was the most effective way to do that.

Q: Why did you choose to portray mental illness in a film that is at least extensively a comedy?

A: I think ego is a part of our decease as a society. I think the ego is a necessity, but I think when the ego takes over and we attach our personalities to the ego, and he domains a person absolutely without being discovered or controlled. That’s mental deceit, and I see in a way Riggan Thompson suffering from that illusion of ego that’s distorting him. He thinks he does things that he does not do, he’s in like a manic state of mind. He’s an extreme case of ego.

Q: Is that part of the commentary?

A: Everything is part of the tone of the film. That’s why it opens with a guy meditating in tidy whites.

– David Dunn

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Oct 05 2014
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Reviews

“THE FAULT IN OUR STARS” Review (✫✫✫✫)

And the stars have never shone brighter.

The Fault In Our Stars is one of the most magical films you will ever see. It is also one of the most tragic, heartbreaking, funny, genuine, and real films you will ever see. It does exactly what the book does, and exactly what movies are supposed to do: it sweeps you away, transporting you, making you forget about your own reality and immerses you into the reality of these fictional characters that don’t seem so fictional. While I was watching the movie, someone in the audience leaned over to me and asked if this was a true story. “No, but it deserves to be,” I thought to myself.

Based off of the highly popular book of the same name by John Green, The Fault In Our Stars follows the story of Hazel Grace Lancaster (Shailene Woodley), a spirited, spunky, and sarcastic teenager who loves to read books, watch horrible reality TV shows, and question everything her parents tell her to do. Augustus Waters (Ansel Elgort) is another spirited, spunky, and sarcastic teenager who loves to watch movies, play video games, and ponder the many questions about the universe. Hazel and Gus are both like any regular teenager but with one significant difference: they’re cancer survivors.

Note that I said survivors. They’ve had cancer in the past, Hazel in her lungs and Gus in his right leg, but both have since moved on from their ordeals to try and tackle their lives as any other teenager would. Because of Hazel’s lungs, she has to carry around a respiratory machine (Oxygen tank instead? Machine sounds intensive) with her everywhere she goes, and what would seem like a simple task to anyone else (I.e. standing up, or walking a flight of stairs), nearly exhausts Hazel after doing so. Gus, on the other hand, has a prosthetic replacing his right leg in exchange for being cancer free.

One day, they both meet each other at a cancer support group meeting. Hazel notices Gus having a bounce to his step, despite only having one full leg. Gus notices Hazel’s beautiful face even though she’s deoxygenated. As they continue to meet and see each other, they soon realize that they have a special relationship with each other, one that no “normal” human being could ever possess.

From a first glance, some people may look at this movie and see it as an overly optimistic tween romance, where two characters fall in love, and their love beats all things, including their ailments. I know I did when I first heard about it, and why wouldn’t I? Romantic dramedies have a way of underemphasizing conflicts just so characters can have happy endings. As a result, we get movies that are more cheesy and insincere than they are genuine and heartfelt, much like those ungodly Nicholas Sparks movies.

But The Fault In Our Stars is different. It is not manipulative of it’s emotions and it doesn’t downplay the severity of character’s problems. It’s honest and up front about the challenges these teenagers face, and doesn’t shy away from the severity of it just because they’re children. In fact, Hazel Grace herself dispels the notion at the beginning of the film, saying to her listeners “That wouldn’t be the truth. This is the truth. Sorry.”

I know, I’m late on writing this review. Why am I writing this in October, when the movie has already come out on DVD? I was waiting, dear reader. Waiting to read the book and see not only how faithful the movie was to it’s source material, but also to it’s emotions. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: you can bend the plot of the original story, but you cannot bend the emotions and still remain faithful.

Now I have read the book, and I can tell you firsthand from my experience that the movie held up to the book on both counts. The Fault In Our Stars is a breathtaking experience: touching, deliberate, and beautiful all at once. To say it’s faithful to the book is an understatement. It’s quite possibly one of the best book-to-movie adaptations I’ve ever seen.

The things that work so well in the movie are the same things that work so well in the book: the writing and the characters. At the heart of the entire story, movie and book included, is Hazel Grace, who is such a fascinating and singular character that it makes me sad to think that she doesn’t exist. Hazel isn’t like other cancer-ridden characters. She neither has an overly defeatist attitude of her ailment, or an overly optimistic perspective one either. She’s in the neutral realm, seeing her sickness as a part of her no matter what she does, and choosing to accept it because she’s more or less forced to.

And yet, she’s so much more than her sickness. In many ways, she’s just like any other regular teenager. She has a favorite book. A favorite author. A favorite show. A favorite food. A crush. And like any other teenager her age, she’s bursting with opinions, hopes, fears, and desires, all of which combine to make a completely fascinating, involving and passionate character. We quickly learn to love Hazel not because she has cancer, but because she is unique.

On that note, let me talk about Augustus. Can I just say that I love this kid? Gus is filled with spirit and enthusiasm, having a bounce to his step that contrasts with Hazel’s shy trotting. I find it interesting that even though I don’t like it when characters are unrealistically happy, here Gus is almost nothing but happy. He thinks it’s cool that he has a metal prosthetic leg, seeing it as him being half-cyborg. He likes video games, zombies, and heroism, seeing himself as one of the brave movie heroes who sacrifices himself for the sake of the people he loves. In many ways, that’s who he is: the hero of the movie, bringing all of the love and affection he could for the woman he loves. He’s so great in the film, he could have a movie all to himself if he wanted to.

You’ll notice that I’ve referred to both of these persons by their characters, not by the actors that portray them. That’s because Woodley and Elgort slip so wonderfully into their roles that they’ve completely disappeared into them. I didn’t think about The Descendants when I saw Woodley tear up and cry, or when she picked up her BiPAP and exhausted herself walking up the stairs. I didn’t think of Divergent when Elgort so tenderly cared to her needs, or sweetly telling her that he would be honored to have his heart broken by her. I saw these actors and was so immersed into their performances that I no longer thought about what they were and thought more about who they were. These two are not Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort. They are Hazel Grace Lancaster and Augustus Waters.

Everything else in this movie was made to near perfection. The screenplay by Scott Neustadter and Michael Weber adapted the story and emotions wonderfully from the book. The camera work by Ben Richardson was elegant and harmonic, much like the great work he did with 2012’s Beasts of the Southern Wild. And director Josh Boone guides the actors through the blissfully tragic story created by John Green, whose wondrous words were what made this entire movie possible.

That ends the review with one question: which is better? The book, or the movie? Neither. I could argue that the book is better because it has more content, or I could argue the movie is better because it brought the story to life visually. Both arguments are pointless. They are both two different mediums, but they both tell the same wonderful story.

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Aug 31 2014
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Reviews

“BOYHOOD” Review (✫✫✫✫)

A scrapbook by Richard Linklater.

The main character’s name in Boyhood is not Mason. His name is also David. And Connor. And Warren. Aaron. Stacey. Tony. Eric. Steven. Ben. Richard. And so on and so forth until you’ve listed every masculine name in the dictionary. I probably went eight names over how many I needed to list, but you get my point. We’re doing more than just watching one boy’s journey into adulthood here. We’re watching ourselves grow with him.

Strange, I think. I don’t normally sympathize with characters to the point where I feel like I AM them. Relating to protagonists is a somewhat straightforward task; you merely need to introduce the character along with their conflict, and then let the filmmaker do his work to bringing their arc to life.

But with Boyhood, I face an interesting prospect: there is no one conflict that Mason faces in the story. Like myself and my closest family and friends, Mason’s conflict is life itself, complete with all of its blessings, gifts, challenges, and turmoils alike. If you’re still not getting the picture, let me put it to you this way; if I were a filmmaker, and I were adapting the full story of your life, would I be able to condense it into one or two events?

The answer is no, I couldn’t. There is a whole multitude of issues you’ve faced in your life, just like I did, and I’m sure we could turn those issues into ten or twelve more movies if we tried. Director Richard Linklater chose not to do that. With Boyhood, he took one boy’s life, a small child he found named Ellar Coltrane, and followed him from age six until age 18, gradually showing his life progress and the challenges he faced as he grew into a man year, by year, by year.

It’s fascinating I tell you, to watch a movie progress from one generation to another. I look at Ellar as a young boy obsessing over cartoons and action figures while his sister, portrayed by Linklater’s daughter Lorelei, constantly talks about makeup and Britney Spears. I look at these children’s parents, played by a significantly younger Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke, as they struggle to connect and be there for their children and to be the best parents they possibly can be. It’s interesting to see these children mature from young, simple-minded beings to young adults, trying to find their own paths in life while their parents mature from being those young adults to the older, more mature parents that have faced, and survived, every difficulty they could have ever faced.

It’s pointless to describe what the plot of the movie is like. What is the plot of the movie? Fill the movie with your life experiences, and you have the plot. I caught myself many times reliving past memories while watching the movie, sympathizing with Mason as I remember how I too faced issues such as bullying, peer pressure, puberty, growing up, and finding a place where I belonged.

It’s not so much a movie as it is a scrapbook of memories, and Linklater is merely showing the memories on screen like he’s pulling a photograph out of a book.

What of the performances then? Patricia and Ethan are the most emotive performances out of the movie, but that’s to be expected considering they’ve been working on this movie, among others, for literally a decade. Lorelei is cute as a child at the beginning of the film, but as the movie continues on, it begins to focus more on Ellar while Lorelei, more or less, fades in to the background.

That being said, Ellar isn’t the most compelling actor in the film. As a child at the beginning, he is the most believable, but that’s because he’s living, not acting, in the moment. When he’s playing with his friends or when he’s dressed up for the Harry Potter premiere, you know that’s him being excited in the moment, similar to how Drew Barrymore believed E.T. was real during the filming for E.T: The Extra Terrestrial. As he gets older, however, he gets less emotional about things and more or less goes through the motions wherever Linklater guides him.

At first, I thought this was an obvious criticism to the film, because how is a kid going to maintain his acting ability through 12 years of his life? As I look deeper, however, I realize that Ellar isn’t intended to give a performance. He isn’t meant to be an actor, but a surrogate, a character whose emotions and memories we fill in the film and then we sympathize with because those are the same emotions we faced when we were his age.

Mason goes through a lot in this movie. As a toddler, he witnesses his parents go through divorce. As a child, he faces abuse from his alcoholic stepfather. As a teenager, bullying. As a high schooler, heartbreak. This movie is so tangible that it made me want to grab hold of Mason. It made me want to hold him and hug him, telling him the same thing my mother told me when I was going through my own issues at his age.

I want to grab him and say to him, “You’re going to be okay, Mason. You’re going to be okay.”

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Aug 24 2014
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Reviews

“SIN CITY: A DAME TO KILL FOR” Review (✫)

Can you kill me too while you’re so busy at it? Thanks. 

There’s a character early on in Sin City: A Dame To Kill For that describes the city as a place “where you go in with your eyes open, or you don’t come out at all.” He’s wrong. I went in and out with my eyes fully open. I only wished that I kept them closed.

Oh, where to begin with this. Sin City: A Dame To Kill For is, in a word, messy – a neo-noir thriller as confusing as a detective’s murder case and more violent, putrid and horrific than a crime scene. The only brains this movie has are the ones that it blows out of peoples’ heads.

The plot takes place sometime within the Sin City universe. The question is when? I honestly don’t know, and I don’t think the movie knows either. It’s part prequel, part sequel and part in-betweenuel that cuts to wherever and whenever it wants to.

Like the first movie, there are three main stories the plot revolves around and, likewise, three main characters to sympathize with. You have a young Dwight McCarthy (Josh Brolin), who, before he met Jackie Boy, was obsessing over a rich housewife named Ava (Eva Green). There’s Johnny (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), an overly-cocky poker player who wants to come to Sin City and beat the king of all cards himself — Senator Roark (Powers Boothe). And then there’s Nancy (Jessica Alba), who is still coping with John Hartigan’s (Bruce Willis) suicide at the end of Sin City.

Following this easy enough? Good, because that’s all the explanation you’re going to get. The biggest problem with Sin City: A Dame To Kill For is that it’s so convoluted. Stories are meshed, mixed and thrown together without any sense of connection or correlation to its plot, and the entire time while I was watching it, I kept wondering where these stories were taking place and why I should care. Some movies do well with intertwining narratives, such as Pulp Fiction or Crash. This is not one of them.

A good example of this is in the very first scene of the film. Marv (Mickey Rourke), the hard-headed thug who was framed for the murder of Goldie in the first movie, wakes up next to two crashed cars with no memory of how he got there. He goes through mundane dialogue for five minutes in his obviously exaggerated thuggish accent, then the movie cuts to the story and almost completely forgets about him.

My first thought after watching this: why was that scene necessary? As the movie continued its runtime, I continued to ask this question in my head until I realized that none of it was necessary, that it was just a continuous farce of violence and delinquency that the kids who play Grand Theft Auto would just drool over.

This movie is definitely violent. That’s to be expected, I know, especially when you remember how violent the first one was. There is, however, a stark difference in how the violence is used in each movie. In the first Sin City, the violence was both shocking and satirical, at times being so disturbing that you can’t help but reel back from it, and at other times being so exaggerated that I laughed at it. Whether it was positive or negative, however, I at least felt something.

Here, nothing is felt. Here, we just look at all shades of black, red and white among severed body parts while we plod through the final act like it’s a homework assignment rather than the climactic ending that it deserves to be.

I’ll admit to having disliked the first Sin City. Does that matter? I give credit and criticism equally where it is due, and even though both Sin City’s are equally violent and despicable, the first one was at least more intriguing and had more cohesiveness both as a whole story and as smaller, separate narratives. This one fell flat, crumbled to pieces and was about as clear as a muddy window pane. Maybe that’s why Marv couldn’t remember anything at the beginning of this movie – he realized what he signed up for, and he tried to forget all about it.

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Aug 15 2014
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Reviews

“TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES (2014)” Review (✫)

Thankfully, they’re not aliens. 

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is in complete and utter shambles, a movie that can’t decide on what it wants to be and not much better on how it wants to accomplish that. At times, it’s a loud and obnoxious action movie that takes its characters and their situations seriously. At other times, it’s so campy and immature it might as well be the Nickelodeon cartoon series. Wait, I take that back, that’s a dishonor to the Nickelodeon cartoon series. I don’t know what sort of movie I was expecting out of something titled Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but I would have taken anything over this travesty.

Based (somewhat) on Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird’s comic-book creations, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles follows the story of April O’Neil (Megan Fox), a struggling news reporter who is looking to uncover the criminal conspiracy of the Foot Clan, a team of specialized military-trained soldiers who fight for their master, Shredder (Tohoru Masamune). Shredder is tyrannical Japanese warlord who wants nothing more but to rule New York City, and like all dark and obscure bad guys, he’ll stop at nothing until he gets what he’s after. But April’s not alone in this fight; she also has her pet rat and turtles by her side, her little friends she’s cared for since they were experimented on by her father when she was just a little girl.

…What? Yes, dear readers, they changed the origin story. After Mr. O’Neil discovered how the dangerous turtle weapons were going to be used for destructive purposes, he sets his lab ablaze, killing himself and destroying all of his hard work. Just before the turtles could be destroyed, however, April saves her small friends from the fire and they escape into the sewers. (Question: Since the fire is so hot that it consumes her father nearly instantly, how is it that  6-year old April manages to not only get into the lab, but also avoid the fire, grab the turtles, get out of the lab, and get back onto the pavement with a little ash makeup spread onto her face for good measure?)

As years pass, the rat and turtles mature into giant-sized humanoid creatures who teach themselves the art of ninjutsu, thanks to a book they fished out of the garbage and the convenience the script allowed them. The rat named Splinter (Tony Shalhoub) trained his sons Leonardo (Johnny Knoxville), Raphael (Alan Ritchson), Donatello (Jeremy Howard) and Michelangelo (Noel Fisher), knowing one day that they would need to fight the Shredder and defend New York City.

Where do I even begin with this? For starters, the script is unreliable, an immature, idiotic and thinly-written-and-thought-out mess that has plot holes the size of Swiss cheese and is as convenient as the dollar store. I could be cheap and pick apart the small things in the story, like what compelled the scientists to pick turtles as their experiments of mass destruction?

That, however, is too easy. It’s much more fun to pick apart the bigger holes in the plot, including:

  1. The fact that there is no way that Splinter, as a regular lab rat, could know anything about the Shredder or what he was plotting for him and the turtles.
  2. That since Shredder is a highly-skilled ninja, there is no reason why his foot clan shouldn’t be at least slightly trained in the arts either.
  3. That to convince her editor-in-chief that there are living, fighting humanoid ninja turtles in New York City she shows her a picture of a turtle she pulled off of Google images, not the pictures she took on her smart phone.
  4. That since Shredder is after the mutagen in the turtles’ blood, he wouldn’t spare Raphael and abandon him after he beat him to a pulp and cracked his shell.
  5. That to rescue his brothers when they were kidnapped halfway through the movie that Raphael, April and her camera man Vernon (Will Arnett) drive to rescue them in the snow mountains that apparently exist 50 minutes outside of Manhattan.

Oh yes, this script is a mess, and the actors do a nice job at making it even more laughable through their complacent, boring and plastic performances that could be played better by action figures. Any actor who was not a CGI character was completely wasted in a sea of bad dialogue and bland delivery, looking like victims to the screenplay and to the movie that they’re playing in. William Fichtner is hesitantly the best performance as an evil scientist, but his character is so plainly forgettable that it is almost completely wasted. Arnett is more charismatic and smirking as the camera man, but the dialogue he sputters is so unbelievably written at times that it hardly matters. (Ex. When told that your city’s vigilantes are giant turtles, is your first reaction to seriously ask if they’re aliens? I’m frankly surprised he didn’t laugh when April told him her crazy story.)

But the worst performance of the film is Megan Fox’s. Oh. My. God. What is she doing in the movie industry? Her performance was both disinterested and disingenuous, her expression looking as stiff and uncomfortable as if she came out of a facelift surgery. Fox is not a good actress. I say it again: Fox is not a good actress. Good-looking, yes, but looks only make half of a character, and she doesn’t fit April in neither appearance or spirit. In the 1990 film we had Judith Hoag portraying April, and boy, did she bring energy and enthusiasm to the character. Now we have Fox reading a teleprompter to replace the performance, and I start wondering if it would be better if April was recast as a Barbie doll in the movie.

Yes, the turtles, Splinter and Shredder look cool, and there’s a very sweet action sequence where they are sliding down the snow mountains that I will admit to have enjoyed. But in a visually-dominated industry, visual effects are a compliment I’m recycling at this point. Visual effects and fight scenes are wasted if you have a terrible plot, and in this case, where the bad guy’s master plan is to intoxicate a city with a poisonous gas by smashing a tower over it (an idea stolen from The Amazing Spider-man, by the way), I’m not inclined to say that the movie has much good of anything.

I know there is an audience for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and the majority of them will probably be under 12. The ones over that age will have grown up with the franchise, and will be looking for some sort of nostalgic experience to remind them of what it was like to grow up with the ninja turtles. I too went in hoping to feel some sort of nostalgia, but as the movie went on, I continued to notice that all of my hopes were running down the sewer.

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Aug 02 2014
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Reviews

“GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY” Review (✫✫✫)

 

A  lovable group of space idiots.

Now here’s a movie I wasn’t expecting to be any good. No matter how you phrased it to me, I went into James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy completely expecting to hate it. None of the heroes were as popular or as interesting as the other characters Marvel had to sport in its universe, it’s a sci-fi buccaneering adventure about an evil race intent on destroying/ruling the galaxy (I wonder where we’ve seen that before), and on top of all that, and it has a talking raccoon and a tree as two of it’s main characters. Believe me, I went into this movie fully expecting to dislike it on all counts. Turns out I was wrong on all of them.

Based on the Marvel comics superhero team of the same name, Guardians of the Galaxy follows a whole slew of space misfits as their futures suddenly become entangled because of one blasted macguffin: the infinity stone, an object we’ve been introduced to in earlier movies in the form of the tesseract and the aether in The Avengers and Thor: The Dark World. Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) is a Han Solo-ish kind of scavenger who steals items of value and sells them to buyers. Gamora (Zoe Saldana) is a trained assassin and adoptive daughter of a cruel omnipotent being called Thanos (Josh Brolin). Drax (Dave Bautista) is a brutish warrior who seeks vengeance against Thanos after the death of his family. And then Rocket and Groot (voiced by Bradley Cooper and Vin Diesel, respectively) are a bounty-hunting duo who travel together. Remember me mentioning the talking raccoon and tree? This is them, although Groot’s speech is merely limited to “I am Groot.”

Sounds like a lot of characters to deal with, I know, but don’t worry: the movie does a better job at explaining them than I did. Their fates become intertwined  with that of Ronan (Lee Pace), a vicious hunter who will stop at nothing until he has taken the infinity stone for himself and uses it to destroy his enemies. It’s up to Quill, Rocket, and the rest of the troupe to rise up and defend the galaxy from Ronan and the threat he holds with the infinity stone.

Written and directed by James Gunn, the wacko that directed the 2010 satire film Super, Guardians of the Galaxy is a wacky, oddballish film, a movie that doubles both as a sci-fi blockbuster actioneer and as a space comedy parodying… well, itself really. The biggest concern I had with this movie was how it was going to handle itself, because it really had everything working against it. Think about it: talking animals and trees, a copy-and-paste space plot, and a director whose work before this was a line of small-budget independent films. How on earth was any of this going to work?

Better than I expected, apparently. The best thing about Guardians of the Galaxy is that it doesn’t take itself seriously. It’s so irreverent, so shameless and so unabashed that it might as well be a clown throwing pies at its own face. There were many moments in the film where it called itself out on the flaws that I was prepared to criticize it for (such as it’s hammy one-liners or it’s talking animals), then it turned around making fun of itself because of it (Drax boasting about his reflexes when figures of speech go over his head, or Rocket asking Quill what a raccoon is.)

It just loves to make fun of itself, so much so that I want to call this a comedy more than science-fiction.

To make the comedy work though, you need a cast of equal caliber to make it work. And I’ll be completely honest here: the cast was exceptional. Even the cast members who I don’t like, consisting of Bautista and Diesel, gave performances that surprised me, effectively portraying their characters in a uniquely charismatic light that made them stand out from the obvious sci-fi fanfare. (One argument someone might pose to me is that Diesel’s job was easier because he only had to say three words over and over again. Believe me, his character wasn’t that simple.)

The element that stands out the most in the film is ironically the one I was most worried about: Rocket. Oh my gosh, was this guy a big ball of laughter. Cooper was excellent in voice performance, shooting out snazzy, snarky, sarcastic one-liners like he’s a New York taxi driver.

But it’s not just his voice performance that I love so much about the character. It’s how he’s animated and modeled too, with animators giving him life through his detailed, intricate emotions and movements as a CGI character. Rocket is much more than just another Guardian. He is, in many ways, the life of the film: a living, breathing embodiment of emotion, sentiment, sarcasm, hilarity and attitude. Every attitude that the film is, at least.

There’s no way to get out of the film’s silliness, but you shouldn’t let that stop you from enjoying it. Believe me, I tried. I went in fully equipped and prepared to blast this movie with a negative review, and I came out instead feeling like a kid after he finished watching his favorite Saturday morning cartoon.

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Jul 23 2014
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The Scope

He’s Not Fat. He’s Fluffy.

Out of all of the celebrity interviews I’ve ever had the pleasure of going to, I don’t believe I’ve ever had as much fun as I did speaking with comedian Gabriel Iglesias. Iglesias, who also goes by his comedic identity as “Fluffy” was born 1976 in California, which is also his current place of residence. After we introduced ourselves, he talked about how he’s been up since 6 a.m. promoting for his new movie The Fluffy Movie, in theaters July 26, and how he just got to eat.

That’s when I noticed his shirt, which sported a logo of a famous autobot that I loved from a series featuring transforming robots.

“Can I just say that I love your shirt?” I told him.

“Man, I love it to,” he replied. “Even though they don’t want me to market with it. They’re like ‘You should be wearing your old shirt!’ I’m like ‘Man, come on. Really?'”

As we sat down at got ourselves comfortable, me and the other journalists at the table starting asking him questions regarding his early beginning as a comedian. Before becoming the highly-popular comedic phenomenon that he is, Iglesias worked as a salesman for a company called LA Cellular, which would later merge with a company called AT&T.

“We call them the cancer phones, the ones where you put them against your head and you can feel like you’re talking with a microwave,” Iglesias said. “Like, you could use your phone as a weapon. If you dropped your phone back then, you could throw your phone, it was fine, it was industrial, it was meant to last. Not like now, you dropped it off a table, you’re like ‘Oh shoot, there goes 800 bucks.’”

Iglesias took his chance at comedy when he went into a club late into his career as a phone salesman. He even remembered the date that he first performed: April 10th, 1997.

“There was somebody  in the crowd that saw me and he goes ‘Hey, you’re funny. We got a comedy show at this nightclub next week. I’ll pay you $20,'” he said. “So after my first night performing, I already got my first paid gig.”

When I asked him about when he hit mainstream attention, when he became “Fluffy”, he corrected me, saying at how those were two different things.

“I was always known as the Fluffy guy, ever since I started,” he said. “That was always a nickname. In the beginning, people wouldn’t remember ‘Gabriel Iglesias.’ After the show, it’s ‘Hey, good job Fluffy!’ I’m like ‘Ugh, come on man, half of my name is already famous, work with me!’ I would be like, really?”

Iglesias said his career took off once he learned to use the name “Fluffy”.

“I just started embracing it so much that I started marketing it,” he said. “Now its to the point where years later, if you type ‘Fluffy’ in Google or Bing, I’d beat everything. I’m number one. I’d beat out bunnies, cotton candy, quilts, you name it. It works for me, and I’d rather people call me Fluffy than mess with my name. It’s one word, like ‘Cher.’ If I dropped Gabriel Iglesias all together and I just started going by Fluffy tomorrow, people would totally take it.”

Iglesias said that the key to his success has been through networking. That networking has been the key to everything.

“I know a lot of funny guys, guys that are hysterical, that will floor you, leave you bent over just laughing hard, but you know what? They’re really bad at returning phone calls,” Iglesias said. “They’re bad at social networks, they’re really bad at just dealing with people one-on-one, and you know, just negotiating and simple basic things that they’re crippled with, but they’re talented on stage. So someone like that, they need really good management, someone that’s going to be patient with them, somebody that’s going to understand them and speak on their behalf.”

After a journalist mentioned how Iglesias manages all of his own social media, Iglesias said handling it himself has been a big deal to him.

“I don’t want someone speaking on my behalf that’s going to say something I don’t want to say,” he said. “You can tell it’s me that writes the stuff because the grammar is so f—– up. I write everything with an ‘r’ instead of ‘a-r-e’, or a number two instead of ‘to’, I still don’t know how to spell ‘there’ the right way. I always jack that one up, people always correct me, and I’m like ‘Really? Why’d you got to correct me? You let the number two fly, you let the letter U fly, you let everything else fly,’ but I use ‘there’ the wrong way, and I spell ‘there’ instead t-h-i, uh, whatever. It’s so messed up.”

Man, my copy desk chief would be having a fit.

After talking about a time when he was drunk and cussed out his management team on a comedy club stage, Iglesias was asked if he felt like he got too open with his audience sometimes.

“Yeah, like right now,” he said, as the room erupted into laughs. “Probably shouldn’t have said that stuff.”

“But sometimes I do open up a little too much. But if I don’t open up to the crowd, man, I’m not even talking to you at home, I can’t vent about certain things at the house. It’s not the same. At home you get judged. On stage, people are like ‘You know what, I’m messed up like you. I get it.’ And again, at the end of the day, that’s one of the things that people can relate to, it’s like ‘Man, that guy, yeah he’s successful, but he’s still got s— going on.'”

As I conversed with him, I could tell through his speech that his audience was the thing he cared most about his career; about taking pictures with people at the airport and talking to fans as he sat down to order at the Pizza Parlor.

“Just common courtesy, a lot of basic things, they go a long way,” he said. “Any time I perform at a comedy club, talking to the staff, looking at people in the eyes, some people don’t want to just connect at all. You get off the stage, being like ‘Leave me alone,’ it’s like ‘No, why man?’ The staff, they’re the ones that are going to see people and be like ‘Hey, we saw a real funny show, you should come see him, he’s a real nice guy too.’ It goes a long way.”

Iglesias said that he tries to please everyone with his act, and when it doesn’t, he’s bothered by it.

“If somebody says a negative comment on Twitter, I take it so personal, and I care,” Iglesias said. “I care what people say and what they think, and sometimes I care a little too much to where I let it consume me. I’m learning the hard way you can’t please everybody, and that bothers me, because I just want to please everybody. I want everybody to be happy.”

After talking with Jeff Sewell, Improv Comedy Club General manager, for my Shorthorn article, I discovered that he has known comedian Gabriel Iglesias for years. He said that Iglesias hasn’t changed one bit, ever since he met him about ten years ago in Houston.

“He was totally down to earth,” Sewell said. “Everybody you talk to, everybody loves Gabriel. They never have a bad word to say about that guy.”

Iglesias said that despite some disappointments, he won’t change his act, because the Fluffy persona is what helped him sell out stadiums and arenas across the world.

“For people that don’t think I’m edgy enough, well that’s fine,” Iglesias said. “Go ahead, go enjoy whoever makes you laugh. I’ll have fun with my full house.”

To read more on Iglesias, go online at www.theshorthorn.com. My article has a whole slew of good little nuggets, including audio tidbits of some of Iglesias’ best stories that I couldn’t fit into my article.

Oh, and Gabriel also took a selfie with my cell phone.

Yeah. That happened.

-David Dunn

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Jun 13 2014
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Reviews

“22 JUMP STREET” Review (✫✫✫1/2)

Doing the same thing over again isn’t such a bad thing after all.

22 Jump Street is the exact same film 21 Jump Street was, but with one key difference: it’s self-awareness. While 21 Jump Street was just aimlessly spastic and immature, 22 Jump Street uses that same spasm and immaturity and chooses to make fun of itself for the sake of the audience. 22 Jump Street isn’t laughing with the audience: it’s laughing at the audience laughing at itself, and it is infinitely funnier because of that.

22 Jump Street takes place after Captain Dickson (Ice Cube) tells Schmidt (Jonah Hill) and Jenko (Channing Tatum) that they’re about to go undercover at college. After a student died at the hands of a lethal new drug called WyFy, their job once again is to infiltrate the dealers, find the supplier and bring them to justice. Resuming their cover identities as brothers, they slowly try to adapt to college as they continue to search for the supplier who is providing for the whole operation.

“Waitaminute,” you might ask. “Isn’t this what happened in the first movie?” Yes, but like I said, the movie is more aware of itself than by just simply repeating what it did the first time around. This time, Tatum is the guy who is getting accepted and friendly with everyone around campus, while Hill is more or less left to go and sip wine with the art students.

Like I said, the film is on repeat from the plot with the first movie — similar characters, similar jokes, similar order of events. For Pete’s sake, even the run time is the same, with both films clocking in at about 1 hour and 50 minutes.

But like I always say, the repeat isn’t what matters. What matters is how they handle that repeat, whether it genuinely is a funnier, more refreshing take of the original rather than just a rehash. And let me tell you, even though it has Tatum and Hill in it, neither of which I’ve ever found particularly funny, I’ve never laughed harder.

These two guys are hilarious in the movie. Tatum is good as Jenko, a smug older jock who loves to drink beer, play football and show off his physique through physical feats that make me ashamed of my own body. Hill was even better. Whether he was getting into character as a Mexican mobster, trying to impress some girl or desperately trying to figure out how to drive a ferrari, he was clumsy, expressive and hilarious all at once, expertly becoming the likeable underdog needed for a film like this.

Great as Hill and Tatum are though, they are not the highlights of the film. The real stars of this movie are directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, both of whom recently directed The Lego Movie together. Lord and Miller, who also helmed the first film, seem to have a much more fleshed out idea of what they wanted Jump Street to be this time around. The first movie was just a loud, blatant action-comedy, shooting in every which way and direction with no clear aim or focus. Here, the aim couldn’t be more clear. From hearing bits of scathing dialogue — “We’re going to do the same thing all over again” from the captain — to the hilarious end credits spoofing every movie that had laughs and a gun, we can tell their goal with this was to slam the idea of sequels, to make fun of the problems that exist in them, then immerse themselves in that zone of making fun of themselves for the sake of our enjoyment.

I’ve had a complete blast with this movie. In every moment of the film I was either smiling, laughing my head off, or catching my breath, preparing myself for the many laughs to follow. I kept tossing around in my head whether I liked this movie or loved it, whether it was a truly definitive piece of comedy or just something fun to laugh at. I’ve concluded that it is both. 22 Jump Street is a big ball of action-packed comedic fun, a great sequel that has funny jokes, charismatic characters and wonderful self-irreverence. It’s an improvement upon the original in almost every way and will no doubt be a big problem to the studios once they realize they’re going to have to make a second sequel.

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Jun 13 2014
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Reviews

“HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON” Review (✫✫✫✫)

Step one: Don’t get eaten by a nightfury.

How To Train Your Dragon is a pure joy, a complete and captivating wonder that reaches the inner child in you, touches it, and fills you with such inexplicable excitement and adventure that you almost feel like you can do anything. I was initially worried about this movie going in to it: how many other movies have attempted the human-pet budding romance E.T. did so wonderfully all those magical years ago, and failed? Well, there’s nothing to fear here, fellow reader. In their long line of successes, failures and mismatches, How To Train Your Dragon easily ranks among DreamWorks’ best work.

We open up on a grand battle on the land of Berk, an island where the vikings are as stubborn and hard-headed as the metal helmets they wear on their heads. But this battle isn’t against other vikings, mind you: it’s against dragons, giant, dangerous beasts that tear through the sky and spit fire like its flu season for them. For the vikings, killing a dragon is like the starting point for becoming a man. It’s their form of puberty I suppose, next to the endless gorges of food and testosterone that they throw and shout about at each other.

One Berk citizen, however, is a little more hopeless than other vikings: Hiccup (Jay Baruchel), a smart, inventive but helplessly clumsy little fellow that will reach for a pencil when he’s supposed to reach for an axe. Fate turned an eye to him when in the midst of the battle, he captured a “nightfury”, a sleek black dragon whose fast speed and blue fire makes him the most deadly dragon out in the field of battle. However, against his better judgement, Hiccup decides not to kill the nightfury after discovering that he was injured during the battle. Now, while slowly helping him back to health and back to being able to fly, Hiccup discovers the truth about the dragon race, and how similar he is to them and their personalities.

Taking a look at the past animated movies DreamWorks has helped produce, you realize how much of a mixed bag they put out there to their audience. Look at the best they’ve had to offer, such as Shrek and Kung Fu Panda. Now look at the worst they’ve had to offer, such as Shark Tale and Shrek The Third. And don’t even get me started on Bee Movie. Looking at their filmoraphy, and looking at how much they’ve done wrong mixed with their right, I was expecting a very artificial, forgettable experience.

Boy, was I wrong, and boy was I glad to be wrong. The very first detail you notice in How To Train Your Dragon is it’s animation, how crisp and refined it is in detail, and how authentic it makes everything look. In the opening sequence, for instance, we shift through the dark clouds and sea as we approach the land of Berk, and it was so atmospheric that I felt like I myself was flying over the ocean surface when I first saw it. Later in the film, you look at vikings talking to each other in the dining hall, and the rock floors and the wood detailing look so real that you can almost reach out and touch it.

But I know what you’re really after. You’re not after what the waves, clouds and wood looks like. Nuh uh. You’re interested in how the dragons look, how exhilarating the fight scenes are and how exciting it is when you see a dragon spread his wings for the first time.

Let me assure you, fellow reader: the action could not be any more exciting. The dragons are all colorful, lifelike and filled with variety, their wings spread out in glorious, anthropomorphic detail. When they fly, they soar at supersonic speeds, dodging mountains, flipping through the air, and skydiving towards valleys like they are swimming in an endless sea of clouds and sky.

I especially liked the chemistry Hiccup shares with the nighfury, who he later names Toothless in the movie. Did I really just say that? That I liked the chemistry between two fictional, fake, animated characters? Yes I did, because these characters are neither fake nor artificial: they’re genuine, sharing real, heartfelt emotions with each other in ways almost no other animated film captures in movies. When Hiccup touches Toothless’ snout for the first time, you feel conflicted emotions between each other as they struggle to trust one another. When Toothless saves Hiccup from certain death from the dangers of the skies, you feel their relationship growing as they form a closer bond with each other. But when an all-out war spawns in between the vikings and the dragons, it’s Hiccup and Toothless that remain strong through it all, their friendship so compelling that it almost feels like connecting with a long-lost brother, not too disimilar to how Boo and Sully interact in Monsters Inc. 

My only regret with this movie is that it won’t be the best animated film of the year. With Toy Story 3 releasing just around the corner, and considering Pixar’s track record, it’s doubtful to see How To Train Your Dragon trump years of animated fandom and cherishment, especially when we’ve had years to grow with these characters. Shame, because this movie has great, fluid animation, an involving story, and memorable characters just like Toy Story does. If Toy Story 3 wasn’t coming out in June, I am positive that How To Train Your Dragon would win the best animated feature award at the Oscars.

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Jun 13 2014
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Reviews

“21 JUMP STREET” Review (✫1/2)

Two 30-year old cops pretending to be in high school.

21 Jump Street is a film that pretends to be a parody on action-comedies and instead collapses under its own pretension. It’s a silly, stupid, obnoxious film, a movie that feels like a kid poking a wet willy into your ear and refusing to stop because you’re laughing inexplicably for some reason. Is it possible to feel this annoyed, or for that matter, this violated? Apparently so. This is a movie that is okay with constant profanity, blatant stereotypes and unfunny penis jokes to the point where it feels like these cops are pretending to be in elementary rather than high school.

As much as they’d like to make you believe, 21 Jump Street is not an expansion of the original television show it was based on. This movie follows an entirely new duo, this one much more clumsier and haphazard than the Johnny Depp-Peter DeLuise relationship in the original show. Morton Schmidt (Jonah Hill) and Greg Jenko (Channing Tatum) are a dysfunctional pair of police officers that can’t shoot a gun or recite the miranda rights worth a damn. Schmidt plays the fat kid stereotype who can barely do a leg lift in the morning while Jenko is the strong-but-stupid stereotype that looks at answer choices on a test like they’re written in Chinese. Together, this lopsided duo plans to pursue a life of stopping crime as police officers. Little did they know that they’re starting duties included patrolling the town park, honking their horns and yelling at kids to not feed the ducks in the pond. Hey, you’ve got to start somewhere, right?

Well believe it or not, they mess even that up too. When arresting a gangster for cocaine possession, the gangster is eventually let go because he was not read his miranda rights. The duo is since transferred to this secret operation of undercover police work, located at a nice little chapel addressed at 21 Jump Street.

Sounds like a nice revisitation of the good old days with Johnny Depp, right? No. It isn’t. Whatever you hear about 21 Jump Street please hear this: that this is a complete deviation from the source material, and has been meat-processed through the unfortunate action-comedy formula into another recycled blockbuster.

Oh boy, where do I begin. First of all, let me start by looking at the most important part of the film: it’s leads. Hill and Tatum both served as executive producers for the film while Hill himself holds a story credit to the film. You would expect that, considering both of them have acted in comedies before this, that they would understand that most important element in comedies it the characters. With these two portrayals, they’re okay, but they’re only as good as their stereotypes will let them be. Jonah Hill is sheepish and clumsy while Channing Tatum is moody and stupid, and their characters don’t get much more expressive, or memorable, than that.

Oh no, they don’t go into an inch of smart or sincere territory, and their silly, childish interactions prove it. In one scene, Channing Tatum was whacking and tea-bagging Jonah Hill while he’s on the bed talking to a girl on the phone. In another, they’re fighting in the middle of a stage production while Hill is attached to a harness and Tatum is throwing plastic rocks and trees at him. Watching this duo makes me miss the smartly ironic and genuine chemistry that was shared in between comedic greats such as Jack Lemmon and Walter Mathau in Grumpy Old Men, or Steve Martin and John Candy in Plains, Trains and Automobiles. That’s better than the hopelessly slapstick mess we have here, at least.

There is another issue we have at stake here: that this is not an adaptation, doing more disservice to itself by linking it to the source material that it was inspired by in the first place. The original television show was a crime drama about a group of teenagers trying to prove themselves as cops and as heroes. The movie is an action-comedy that deconstructs that idea and makes fun of it before killing it off at the start of the film’s climax, though I won’t say exactly how. All I will say is that fans of the show will be extremely disappointed by this new outing, and even if they won’t be, they’re going to have to let go an important part of the show in order to enjoy this new one.

None of that is really important though. The actors, the faithfulness, nothing. The most important question is this: did it make me laugh?

Kind of. Most of the time my face was as plain as a checker board, erroneously letting the stupidity and immaturity of the film rub off of me as I continued to tolerate its runtime. There were a few fun, clever moments in the film, but seeing them was as rare as Jenko getting a C on his chemistry exam.

I will also admit that I’m not much into raunchy humor, but why would I be? It’s cliche and cheap. It’s plastic, mundane and annoying, butting its head in the way of genuine, clever humor birthed by dialogue and satire, rather than the jumbled action and sex jokes we have to deal with in this movie. Plus, when your best joke involves a police officer shooting off a guy’s penis, and then watching him grab it with his mouth trying to reattach it, I think there’s something seriously wrong with this films humor.

I do predict that this movie will fare well with audiences though. Why? Because this is what people want, that’s why. When I ask for John Hughes, I get Adam Sandler. When I cry for Ridley Scott, I get Paul W.S. Anderson. When I praise Inception, I log onto box office mojo to discover that Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen grossed ten million more than it.

The more I think about this movie, the more frustrated I become. This movie has little to no redeeming factors, the phrase “it was fun” being its only flimsy crutch. There will be no doubt people who will defend it, and these are the people who also enjoy raunchy sex jokes, Channing Tatum’s mug and Jonah Hill’s clumsy failings. When other action comedies exist out there such as Scott Pilgrim and Zombieland, why on earth would I waste my time seeing this? If 21 Jump Street was supposed to assault me as much as it did, I wasn’t read my miranda rights.

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