Archive for March 19th, 2012|Daily archive page

30 Minutes Or Less (2011)

30 Minutes Or Less

★★☆☆☆

Directed by: Ruben Fleischer

Written by: Michael Diliberti and Matthew Sullivan

There is a peculiar moral bankruptcy that runs through 30 Minutes Or Less, a sort of bromance/comedy/crime caper of a movie. Never mind for a moment that the ostensible protagonist, Nick (played with affable familiarity by Jesse Eisenberg), has practically zero character arc and most of the film’s character development is focused on the bungling duo who involve Nick in a hair-brained plot so convoluted that I fear even trying to explain it below. What kills most of 30 Minutes Or Less is that it allows even the supposed heroes of the story to act like socially inebriated douchebags and has the audacity to demand we root for them anyway.

The basic plot is that Dwayne (played with tormented man-child bi-polar disorder by Danny McBride) wants to survive long enough to receive his inheritance from an overbearing, Lotto-winning father (played with zero originality as the overbearing military father guy by Fred Ward). A stripper convinces Dwayne that he would be better served by hastening the outcome and says she knows a guy who can help get it done, for the price of $100,000. Unwilling to put himself on the line, Dwayne recruits his pyrotechnically-inclined buddy, Travis (played with whipped puppy enthusiasm by Nick Swardson), to rig up a bomb vest and recruit some random sucker to earn their money, hire the assassin and net them with the funds to achieve their dreams.

Enter Nick, a stuck-in-neutral twentysomething who works as a pizza delivery guy, racing his car around and smoking dope. His best friend is Chet (a transplanted Tom Haverford from Parks and Recreation via Aziz Ansari) is a schoolteacher, and Chet’s twin sister Kate (the one bright spot in the cast, Dilshad Vadsaria, completely and utterly underutilized here) is Nick’s dream girl/friendzoner. She reveals plans to move away, which puts backburnered Nick into panic mode and he ends up telling Chet about an old rendezvous with Kate—the catalyst, apparently, for his unrequited love—and a lot of other secrets come out and the two part on bad terms.

When Nick is lured into a trap and kidnapped by Dwayne and Travis, they strap a bomb on his chest and tell him he has less than a day to come up with $100,000 and deliver it to the hitman or they’ll blow up the bomb remotely. Nick has to face his rift with Chet and recruit him to help and eventually they decide there is no other solution but to go ahead and rob a bank. The heist goes off with only a few hiccups, but when Nick takes the money to the hitman (played with squeaky-voiced semi-menace by Michael Peña), he realizes there was no attempt to provide the code that will disarm the bomb and he ends up escaping with the money and a long sequence of people yelling at each other occurs resulting in Dwayne and Travis kidnapping Kate to force Nick’s hand.

Okay, so spoiler alert: Nick and Chet rescue Kate and wind up with the money. It’s a happy ending. Hey, this is supposed to be a comedy, right? Here’s the problem: Throughout, Chet and Nick act like giddy schoolchildren as they elude police, terrorize a bank full of innocent civilians, find time to have a heart-to-heart about their disagreements and assault a number of people with physical violence before ultimately causing someone else’s death in order to elude capture. If not for a credit cookie at the tail end, it might be inferred that they willfully killed a second person.

Look, it’s thing to have a character who is a pothead and drives recklessly while delivering pizzas, it’s another to have a guy forced into committing a bank robbery who thinks that, when things work out in his favor, it’s perfectly acceptable to keep the money. For him to also get amped and excited about high speed police chases in which cops and probably civilians are injured or even killed, and to celebrate minor physical victories like hitting a guy in the face with a crowbar, it becomes very difficult to view these as relatable characters. It doesn’t help that they don’t get much in the way of actual progress; one supposes by the end that Nick and Kate will find each other and Chet will be okay with it and Nick will, having been prompted to also quit his dead-end job, turn his life around, but none of that is a given.

Even the film’s antagonists, probably intended to be slapsticky and funny-dumb, are sociopathic (excepting Travis who is portrayed as weak and simple-minded, not just in addition to being moral but it almost seems like because he is) and also ultimately victorious. It’s not really a dark comedy, but it feels like it oscillates between depravity and lightness unintentionally, as though the writers had no idea what their choices were actually doing. Contrast this with something like Pulp Fiction, which has plenty of lighthearted moments but never once loses sight of what it is and what its characters mean. 30 Minutes Or Less is full of characters who, by benefit of being witness to their actions, we can see as being incongruent with the tone and the context of the overall story.

It doesn’t help that while 30 Minutes Or Less has a handful of genuinely funny lines and a handful of funny scenes, is a “you saw most of the good stuff in the trailer” film. That is to say, the key jokes and gags are of the sort that you can get the full effect from a three-second snippet while you fiddle with opening your Junior Mints box. In other words: Fairly lazy.

There’s no reason for me to loathe 30 Minutes Or Less, and I don’t hate it at all, but I don’t like it either. I don’t like that I was annoyed by all the characters and that the contrivance of the plot took more work to set up than it did to resolve (did no one think of cutting the vest at a different section than the rigged front?), nor do I like that a goofy comedy caper made me think more about the morality of writing than I intended to at midnight before a Monday morning. I do like that I didn’t pay any more than my regular Netflix subscription for it, though. So I guess it had one thing going for it.

from No Thief Like a Bad MovieMarch 19, 2012 at 04:47PM

The Lorax (2012)

The Lorax

★★☆☆☆

Directed by: Chris Renaud, Kyle Balda

Written by: Ken Daurio, Cinco Paul

Based on the Book by: Dr. Seuss

Since Hollywood started adapting Dr. Seuss books to screen, starting back with the live-action How The Grinch Stole Christmas starring Jim Carrey, I’ve felt most of the efforts have been pretty weak. In large part this is because the brilliance of the Chick Jones classic holiday cartoon starring the vocal work of Boris Karloff lie in the way it simply created a moving, breathing version of exactly what appears on the pages of the beloved book. Other than some silly slapstick animation-only sequences and a couple of musical numbers, the Grinch cartoon is 100% faithful to the source material.

Of course, Dr. Seuess’ books aren’t particularly long (though I’ve noticed they are rather long by today’s children’s picture book standards), so a 30-minute cartoon can get away with it but a 90 minute feature film needs some padding. And it is in this padding that I typically see the films unravel.

That said, I think The Lorax is perhaps the best of the bunch, including the previously animated efforts of Horton Hears a Who as well as the live-action Cat In The Hat and the aforementioned Grinch remake. The addition of Thneedville and the bookending storylines that put a name to the reader-stand in from the original story are perfectly suitable for children’s animated feature fare. The animation is cheerful and correctly captures the peculiar whimsy of Seuss’ drawings and the voice work is all nicely done as well as them happily including a number of semi-memorable songs. So far, so good.

The main problem I had with The Lorax is that the book itself, as is and as designed, is not well suited for adaptation to a kid’s movie. And by “not well suited” I mean “not suited at all.” Because the strength of the original story is in its melancholy, unresolved ending, the ending that is intentionally bleak and leaves but the barest glimmer of hope so that it serves as a sort of call to action and a socially poignant morality tale.

Obviously, this won’t do at all for a movie aimed at kids. So the screenwriters tack on a happy ending where the bad guy gets his comeuppance, the boy gets the girl, everybody learns something and we get just a little tease of the environmental message inherent in the classic story as a pullquote just before the credits. Hardly energizing stuff. Don’t get me wrong, I understand completely why they did this and I don’t know that there was ever really any choice in the matter. I’m not sure why it seems like a book can get away with this but a movie cannot, but there you go. Perhaps it has something to do with Seuss’s ability to hit the perfect note of finality but promise that comes across as worrisome but not oppressive and I think even genius level filmmakers creating a film for a highly sophisticated audience would struggle with that. The team behind The Lorax likely had no delusions.

In a way, that makes me want to say that this is a decent movie that just simply should never have been made. And there are a lot of little flubs and flaws along the way that cement this notion, too. For example, you have two young principal actors in Taylor Swift and Zac Effron, both of whom can sing. And yet at no point are either given a song to perform—in a musical feature! Instead we’re treated to several songs by the capable but unremarkable Ed Helms who plays the Once-ler. And speaking of the Once-ler, the screenwriters decided that instead of making him a remorseful but genuine villain, they would supplant him with an all-new villain and re-cast his character as more of a manipulated loser who succumbs (and the movie strangely seems to make this seem almost understandable) to crippling greed.

There’s sort of a half-hearted anti-commercialism message in there somewhere but it gets blurred; aside from being retrofitted into the new story, the Once-ler also loses his memorable anonymity from the original story (his face is revealed both in the flashback sequences as well as in his current, aged form) and the Lorax himself is given no real additional development beyond what was in the book (and he is, strangely, the only character to get this kind of treatment). Probably the biggest overall criticism is that the movie just isn’t very funny most of the time. From the studio that produced the often hilarious Despicable Me, that’s a big disappointment.

In the end, I stand by my assessment that this movie shouldn’t have been made. I mean, I could see a spin off movie or a different take on a Seuss-inspired tale with an environmentally-conscious hook, but trying to adapt the classic directly was never going to be successful, and I wish someone had realized that at some point and taken a different approach. As it is, though, I can’t really recommend this.

from No Thief Like a Bad MovieMarch 19, 2012 at 12:53PM

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns)

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns)

author: Mindy Kaling
name: Paul
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2011
rating: 3
read at: 2012/03/16
date added: 2012/03/19
shelves: memoir, humor, non-fiction
review:
Mindy Kaling‘s witty and honest pseudo-memoir, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns), is a light read that I enjoyed quite a bit. Kaling has a knack for striking a harmonious balance between sarcasm and sincerity, setting her conversational tone as the witty pal you wish you had, able to lampoon others and herself with equal grace.

The book reads kind of like a “best of” selections from perhaps a well-known blogger: intimate, revealing, scatterbrained, prone to random asides and brief chapters about pop culture or wry observations before picking up on the disjointed narrative about her life so far. In a way, the book is revealing in the sort of organic fashion; one gets the sense that they know Kaling pretty well by the end and they’ve learned about her the way they might over a lengthy conversation in a Starbucks somewhere, watching the shifts change at least twice.

Of course, there isn’t much to tell in a memoir for someone who is in her very early thirties, so the appeal here is going to be Kaling’s humor and this is a funny book. I found myself laughing out loud a number of times. For example:

…[I]t was surprising that I killed it as a babysitter. Er, maybe “killed it” is a wrong and potentially troubling way to express what I’m trying to say. The point is, I was an excellent babysitter.

Toward the end, Kaling runs out of official memoir material and the last quarter of the book consists entirely of random essays and tidbits of self-indulgence which aren’t bad necessarily, just sort of frivolous. The sum total is very light, both in tone, gravity and actual content, as the book weighs in at a generously whitespaced 222 pages, if you also include the Acknowledgements section. On one hand, it’s breezy and fun and amusing so it’s not like it isn’t worth a read or anything. But for a $25.00 hardcover?

I waited on a hold list and checked the copy I read out from the library. I felt like this was a good way to go, because I have to say that I think I would have been disappointed if I’d spent cover price for it, or even a discounted $15 or so. I don’t want to get into the valuation for entertainment discussion here, but I finished the book in a very short amount of time and while I liked it an awful lot, I just can’t seem to reconcile the enjoyment I gleaned with the MSRP.

Which is no real detriment to the content. Stripping the value proposition away, this is a recommended book, whether or not you’re a fan of The Office. It’s funny, endearing, and revealing; it’s perfect for chasing away a low mood on a rainy evening.

from Paul’s bookshelf: readMarch 19, 2012 at 09:41AM

There were the expected neighborhood tales of hauntings…

There were the expected neighborhood tales of hauntings and murders and other grotesque goings-on, passed from inventive older child to naive, wide-eyed audiences. The occasional prank would be set up to coax or goad a child desperate to fit in or demonstrate a degree of courage that might elevate their status in the eyes of peers to near deific levels. Most of these were thwarted by the heavy—and heavily rusted—iron gates, the burly padlocks and the fortuitous decay patterns that had not quite rendered the wood brittle or soft enough to permit entry.

In truth, there had been no ominous occurrences, and the only deaths seen within the walls were that of several past generations of vectors who had slowly taken up permanent residence inside: The rats, pigeons, bats and raccoons who now called it home.

When it had been occupied, it was warm and open and full of cheerful laughter from the children, glowing within as a haven from the world around it which had, since the departure of the last caretaker forty years prior, slowly begun to creep inside, reclaiming the space back to the surrounding wilderness which once existed in that space before the carpenter’s nails and architect’s dreams invaded.

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from Like a Detuned RadioMarch 19, 2012 at 09:37AM

Cascading Books

Cascading Books:

by Alycia Martin.

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from Like a Detuned RadioMarch 19, 2012 at 09:25AM