A swift comic book brought to life. Michael Cera, bassist for a Canadian band, dreams of his love, finds her and then learns he must defeat her evil ex-boyfriends to have her. And by defeat, he must slay them in fights that resemble video game challenges. The fight scenes are ingenious and the script is consistently hip and funny. A gas.
Will Ferrell’s antics have a shelf life. There were a few good gags, but Mark Wahlberg steps on a lot of them with his clod-like turn as straight man (he substitutes volume for timing). But we do get a political tract on Ponzi schemes from director Adam McKay during the credits, so, there’s that.
Similar films about dysfunctional and barely interesting people. In Cyrus, poor John C. Reilly has the good fortune to start dating Marisa Tomei. Unfortunately, Jonah Hill (Cyrus) is Tomei’s babied adult boy and what ensues is a muted power struggle played a little too seriously when there were more laughs to be had.
Greenberg is another filmic form of torture from Noah Baumbach, who has made quite a career of making movies about unpleasant, self-centered wretches (Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney in The Squid and the Whale; Nicole Kidman in Margot at the Wedding). The sad center of Greenberg is Ben Stiller, a just-out-of-the asylum condescending dick who is house-sitting for his brother in L.A. Thankfully, unlike the prior films, Baumbach doesn’t put children front and center for the abuse he finds so illuminating.
To give credit where it is due, both Hill and Stiller do well with their appointed tasks, which is to squeeze a little humanity out of such creepy, crappy characters. And while Cyrus ends up unconvincingly sweet, Greenberg is coyly ambivalent.
But really, do we care whether an ass like Stiller may find love at the end of the day?
We do not.
A bro-mance that is actually a menage-a-trois. John Cusack, Craig Robinson and Rob Corddry go back to the ski lodge of their youth, are transported to 1986, and proceed to do unfunny and boring stuff (often involving their bodily fluids) in the hopes of getting back to the future. Cusack looks like a hostage.
Joseph Gordon Levitt gets a grim cancer diagnosis and is supported by Seth Rogen, who plays the standard best friend role (much as he did in Funny People), only now, he’s a stoner trying to get his friend to use the cancer to get women. Rogen can be funny but he better branch out. He’s got one persona and it is wearing very thin.
There is also a love connection with his cancer support therapist Anna Kendrick that is all too paint-by-numbers with its concerns about the ethics of falling in love with a patient and the inevitable breakthrough. And there is an overbearing mom played with little imagination by Angelica Huston.
What is memorable about the picture is Gordon Levitt, who manages to convey the loneliness, confusion and other-worldliness of a possible premature death sentence with force and subtlety. He’s almost worth the watch alone.
Michael Winterbottom’s road movie stars Steve Coogan (as himself), who is assigned to review restaurants in the English countryside. The trip was supposed to be a romantic one with a girlfriend, but she dumped him, and his last-minute traveling companion is fellow comic Rob Brydon. The duo match wits and more importantly, impersonations. The banter is astonishingly sharp, urbane and funny.
A departure for Diablo Cody, who wrote Juno, which was whip smart and clever, but sometimes too much so, veering into the Aaron Sorkinland of “oh, what I would have liked to have said on my best day.”
Young Adult is more grounded and real. Charlize Theron is a prom queen frozen in the time of her glory, but Cody does not use her for a series of comebacks and big rhetorical finishes or even for being taken down a peg. Theron is as she was, returning to her home town to reign once more, and in the process, reclaim her high school sweetheart (Patrick Wilson). But there are no grudges to be fixed or comeuppances to be delivered. The queen is home, but her prior reign is largely one in her mind, and the kingdom did not miss her.
In Jason Reitman’s hands, as always, the film is assured, alternately somber (Theron’s life in Minneapolis and her return to her strip mall dotted home town differ mainly in the fact that in the big city, she lives in a high rise, away from the masses) and awkward (the small town does not welcome Theron’s glamour; sports bars do not accommodate slinky and seductive). Theron and Patton Oswalt, as a crippled high school nerd who runs into Theron during her comeback tour, shine, and their earnest interactions reveal Cody’s maturity as a writer. Oswalt is an overrated comic, more so as he has matured, but as an actor, he’s got chops. His recounting of the torture he endured during Theron’s heyday is truly moving.
One scene in particular comes to mind — Oswalt and Theron are drinking at a bar, Oswalt sees some guys playing pool and he moans. I immediately figured, here we go. Old high school tormentors. But now he has the queen in his corner and there will be retribution and reclamation.
Instead, a guy wheels over in his wheelchair, a cheery and upbeat disabled townie who Oswalt dislikes. For being cheery and upbeat.
Good stuff.
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