In the Loop

If the recent elections left you a bit frayed at the edges with the non-stop barrage of attack ads, maybe it would help to sit down and enjoy a movie that reminds us that internal government politics are usually not much more mature than the election process. 

To paraphrase a review by Time Out London, In the Loop is the anti-West Wing. Instead of a movie depicting government officials as patriotic civil servants out to improve their nation, it shows them the way most of us probably think of them: as people in nice suits shouting at each other a lot. 

In the Loop is a documentary-style comedy about what goes on behind the scenes of the British and American governments. Simon Foster, a somewhat insignificant British minister, makes a comment on the radio that "war is unforeseeable," in an attempt to avoid commenting on the possibility of the UK going to war. After being chewed out for not following the Prime Minister's line by Malcolm Tucker, the communications chief, Foster goes back on air to try and amend his comment, but instead further increases speculation that the UK may be going to war. The comments are then picked up by the U.S. State Department, and the Brits must travel to America, as everybody tries to manipulate Foster's comments to swing both governments towards or against going to war. 

However, the political commentary sort of gets put on the back burner compared to the volume of foul language used in this film. It's quite possible that nearly every line of this movie is laden with some sort of obscenity. At a running time of 1 hour, 46 minutes, you'd think excessive use of the F-bomb would lose it's punch. It doesn't, and that's probably because it's mixed in with every other insult conceivable and ones you probably would never have thought up on your own. At one point, Love Actually is used as a derogatory term. 

There are a few actors in supporting roles who'd be familiar to most audiences, such as James Gandolfini and Steve Coogan, but Peter Capaldi definitely steals the show as Malcolm Tucker. (He's the one swearing everybody out in the scene above.) Capaldi plays Tucker as a completely unhinged, short-tempered individual, yet a highly quotable one. It's actually quite a shame that the TV series that In the Loop spun off of, The Thick of It, isn't currently available in the US, because Malcolm Tucker is a character you'd definitely want to see more of. Just make sure small children aren't around if you quote his lines. 

The Slammin' Salmon

Some filmmakers have earned enough goodwill that even when they make a bad or mediocre movie, it's still something you tell your friends to check out to decide for themselves. In this case, I'm talking about The Slammin' Salmon, from Broken Lizard, the team that brought us Super Troopers and Beer Fest.

I'll be upfront and say that this movie isn't that great. If you're looking for a movie a movie to watch on a night where you have nothing else to do, I'd pass on this one. Instead, save this for a night when you've got some friends over. Crack open a few beers and put this on when the conversation starts winding down. Feel free to talk over it.

As far as the Broken Lizard movies go, this one ranks at the bottom. Yes, I'm including Club Dread (which is actually my favorite, but apparently not well received by the public) and Dukes of Hazard (which actually isn't all that bad if you look at it in the same spirit of humor as their other films.)

With the group's previous movies, the plot was never anything significant. Basically, it was means to get from one drug/alcohol/sex/violent death joke to another. (The opening scene of Club Dread manages to accomplish all four in one go.) The same goes for The Slammin' Salmon, but in this film I think they should have put a bit more effort into the plot, which is apparently inspired by the time spent by the members of Broken Lizard working in the restaurant business.

In this film, Michael Clark Duncan plays a former boxer turned restaurant owner who owns $20,000 to the Japanese mafia, so he tells his manager to get the staff to earn that much money in a single night. The manager tries various tactics before the Champ offers $10,000 to whoever makes the most money, and a beating to whoever makes the least.

There are a lot of bad jokes in this movie, and by a lot, I mean the majority of them. The bulk of them end up being delivered by Michael Clark Duncan. His character is dumb and short tempered, so he'd say something blatantly stupid and threaten somebody with violence when they try to correct him, towards the end they start getting stale.

The same goes for Nuts, the character played by Jay Chandrasekhar (better known as Ramathorne from Super Troopers). He's mentally ill and forgets to take his meds partway through the night. The result is forced wackiness, but I get the sense he was hoping it'd come off as a sort of Captain Jack Sparrow type of crazy.

So why recommend this movie? There's various levels of bad movies. There's Meet the Spartans bad, which thinks it's being funny but is just pointless. There's The Happening bad, which is unintentionally hilarious. The Slammin' Salmon somehow falls in the gap between the two. It's not as funny as it's trying to be, but somehow by falling short it winds up being hilariously bad in it's own right.

The cast seems to be aware which jokes are good and which are bad, and downplay the bad ones appropriately. For example, there's a running joke about one of the waiters having once been on a show called CFI: Hotlanta. Every time the show gets mentioned it's done so with a self knowing, "It sounded better in rehearsal," delivery. They don't try to convince the viewer that a bad joke is comedy gold, allowing the good ones to stand out appropriately.

Like I said, watch this movie with some friends, some beer and a morbid curiosity of what an exceptionally mediocre movie looks like, and you'll enjoy it. Don't expect this to be your new all time favorite comedy, though.

Bowfinger

Comedies seem to have a short shelf life. They either need to have just enough dramatic moments to win the favor of mainstream critics, or be quotable enough drunk people can recite half of the lines in lieu of actually being funny themselves. (Old School being the ultimate example of this.)

So, I think every now and then I should bring up a comedy on this blog that you've probably already heard of, then promptly forgot about for no reason other than that some idiot hasn't been quoting it for the past decade. Today's entry: Bowfinger.

A few days ago, I watched this for the the first time in ages, and for a ten year old movie, it held up pretty well. The film follows director a hack director named Bobby Bowfinger (played by Steve Martin) as he tries to make an action movie starring the biggest actor in Hollywood, Kit Ramsey (played by Eddie Murphy) without his permission. On top of that, he starts out with only two actors and one crewman.

Director and screenwriters Frank Oz and Steve Martin don't just rely on the premise for one set of gags that they try to milk for an hour and a half. Instead they play it from all angles. Bowfinger keeps finding new ways to lie to his cast to explain Kit Ramsey isn't interacting with them unless the cameras are rolling. Kit, who is paranoid, thinks that aliens are stalking him, not realizing they're actors trying to improvise a sci-fi thriller around him. Heather Graham plays a girl from Ohio who tries to sleep her way through the cast and crew until she can figure out who can help her break into the movie business.

Of course, being an Eddie Murphy movie from the 90's, it was still during that era where he had that thing for playing multiple roles in the same movie. So, in addition to playing action star Kit Ramsey, he also plays a lookalike hired to play Kit when Bowfinger can't figure out how to get the real Kit into some of the scenes. While the multiple-role thing might have gotten a bit annoying in some of his other movies, it works in this movie because it makes sense plot-wise.

In both personas, he manages to steal the movie. As the real Kit Ramsey has great stretches of dialogue where he goes on paranoid rants, like one where he deems a script racist because the letter "K" appears in it a number of times that's divisible by three, which he interprets as meaning that "KKK" is subliminally encoded in the script over 400 times. As the Kit Ramsey impersonator, he's massively awkward, doing stuff like endlessly giggling when he has to do a sex scene.

I think this is also the film where both Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy peaked at. After this, Steve Martin either did family comedies, supporting roles or serious performances. I'm not sure anybody even remembers his serious roles, and he had a few alright movies among his family movies and supporting roles, but nothing as hilarious as this. As for Eddie Murphy, aside from his voice work as Donkey in the Shrek movies, the decade that followed was filled with tragically bad buddy movies and family movies that at most reached a level of "alright." Yes, he had that Oscar nominated performance in Dreamgirls, but this was his last comedic performance that would make you genuinely laugh out loud.

Millions

I've been meaning to review a lot of movies by director Danny Boyle on this blog. He's been making movies since 1994, and pretty much all of them have been good. The exception is his film The Beach, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, which tried to hard to be flashy. He's most well known for his films Trainspotting, 28 Days Later and Slumdog Millionaire. If you've seen those movies, you'd know they're pretty adult fare, which is why many of his fans were surprised in 2004 when he made the family friendly Christmas movie, Millions.

I suppose technically speaking, this isn't so much a Christmas movie as it is a movie set at Christmastime. The distributors clearly thought so, since in America this movie was released in the middle of the summer, but the story just feels a bit more relevant in the holiday season.

Millions is set in the UK in the month leading up to it's changeover from the pound to the euro as its currency. Two kids, Damian and Anthony come across a duffle bag full hundreds of thousands of pounds in their backyard, which they realize they have to do something about soon as it will be worthless when the UK switches to the euro. Anthony, the older brother, wants to spend it and invest it and Damian, the younger brother, wants to give it to the poor.

I should also mention that Damian is frequently visited by visions of saints who explain their personal histories to him.

Millions doesn't resort to the obvious cliche where everybody realizes it's better to give to others than to spend on yourself. It actually becomes a rather complex morality tale, but you should have guessed that it was going to be complex when I told you that it was a family movie that involved changing foreign monetary systems as it's central premise.

Both brothers agree to keep the money secret, though Anthony doesn't waste any time buying fun gadgets and bribing his friends. On the other hand Damian has a bit of difficulty giving away his share, since a grade school kid can't really go about handing out money without raising suspicion. It's not long before things get out of hand for him and everybody feels entitled to some portion of the wealth.

If you've seen any of Danny Boyle's other movies, you'll definitely recognize his directorial style in this one. There's plenty of slick editing and music choices all along the way. One of the most energetic scenes is when the boys learn where the money actually came from, which is set to Muse's song "Hysteria."

The movie is family friendly, but it's complexity may mean that parents watching it with their kids will find they have a lot of questions to answer afterward, probably the largest one being whether or not you'd keep the money for yourself or give it away.

Another heads up: this movie will probably put you in a philanthropic mood afterward. The movie never outright preaches that giving is good. Instead it makes an argument about what one really can do by using money wisely. Keep it to yourself and it's useless. Give it away thoughtlessly and people start expecting it. Somewhere in between, it argues, you can afford to help somebody out while enjoying yourself.

In keeping with that theme, the DVD contained an insert suggested making a donation to Heifer International if you felt inspired by the movie to do some giving. Even if the movie doesn't seem like your cup of tea, at least look into the charity.

RocknRolla

Dear Guy Ritchie,

Welcome back.

Signed,

An Avid Film Buff

When Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels first came out, director Guy Ritchie was hailed as the next big filmmaker. His follow up, Snatch, proved he was deserving of that acclaim. He knew how put together a film so that everything; the acting, the editing, the music and the dialogue, all had the same aggressively cheeky tone to it. It's no wonder that of all the short films made for BMW's 2001 web series, The Hire, Guy Ritchie's entry is probably the only one still being talked about. I've included it in its entirety below.

Then, he got serious with Madonna, and together they released the romantic comedy Swept Away, which I haven't seen, but I understand is considerably less awesome than the film above. Things got worse with his follow up film, Revolver, a Kabbalah allegory that drowns in so much symbolism and has so many twists and turns, I don't even know what plane of existence it's supposed to be set in.

But then he made RocknRolla, and everything was alright. He went back to the formula that made him big in the first place: Crime + comedy + twisting plots + big ensemble cast. (Revolver lacked the comedy portion.)

Still, despite the critics recognizing that the Guy Ritchie we used to know and love was back, and a fair amount of TV spots being run for it, RocknRolla was given a limited release, making it more of an art house movie. The film went in and out of theaters without a lot of people noticing.

Like Lock, Stock... and Snatch, RocknRolla has a lot of overlapping stories about criminals screwing each other over. There's Lenny Cole (played by Tom Wilkinson) a real estate baron who manipulates the system so he's in control of any deal that goes down in London, his son Johnny Quid, a junkie rocker, and the Wild Bunch (lead by Gerard Butler) a group of criminals for hire.

A Russian developer does a deal with Cole, and as a sign of good faith he lends Cole his lucky painting, which is promptly stolen by Johnny Quid. While Cole is having his men look for his son, the Wild Bunch are stealing money from the Russian to pay off money they owe Cole, using tips from the Russian's accountant (played by Thandie Newton). Artful swearing and occasional gun battles ensue.

For fans of Guy Ritchie's other movies, in terms of tone this one falls somewhere between Lock, Stock... and Snatch. It's lighter in tone than Lock Stock... but compared to Snatch it feels a bit scaled back. Aside from Jeremy Piven's and Chris "Ludacris" Bridges, this one mainly avoids American actors. The low level criminals have dumb moments but they don't match the total stupidity of Vinny, Tyrone and Sol, (the trio of thugs from Snatch tasked with kidnapping Franky Four Fingers.) It's definitely a funny movie, but there are notably fewer laugh out loud moments, possibly due to the subplot involving Johnny Quid being a drug addict.

All of the performances in this movie are good, but special attention should be called to Toby Kebbel who plays Johnny Quid, and Mark Strong, who plays Archy, Lenny Cole's right hand man.

Strong has been around the film industry for a while, but aside from his role as Septimus in the film adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Stardust, he hasn't had any previous major film roles yet. Here, Strong stands out like he's been a top billed actor for ages. He plays his role the way the way you'd expect somebody like Willem DaFoe or Michael Gambon to play it, commanding complete control over the scene. It's no surprise that for his next movie, Sherlock Holmes, he gets billed alongside Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law in the trailers.

As for Kebbel, he's new to the game, but he's going to go far. Somehow, his portrayal of a junkie rockstar bounces back and forth between a tragic figure and a slapstick cartoon character. In the scenes he shares with Mark Strong, it's like watching two legendary actors at work.

If you missed this one when it came out, you should definitely bump it to the top of your viewing list, especially if you're into crime movies and definitely if you're among those people excited by the prospect of a sequel to Boondock Saints.

Fanboys

Plot Summary and Target Audience Described in One Word Title

There's a good chance that if you're some level of movie geek, you did hear about this movie. Most likely it was in the context of the controversy surrounding Harvey Weinstein's attempts to re-edit the film to remove a subplot where a character was dying of cancer. You also probably didn't see it because it rolled through theaters and onto DVD with barely a mention on even Adult Swim.

So to answer your questions in order, yes the cancer subplot is there and yes, if you liked Star Wars you'll probably enjoy this movie... but it does have it's faults.

Now for those of you who never heard of Fanboys, the story follows a group of friends from Ohio who made plans to infiltrate the Skywalker Ranch (George Lucas's home) when they were kids. By the time they've grown up, its 1998 and, one of the group, Eric, is primed to take over his family's used car business. The rest of his friends still act like they're in grade school. When another of the group, Linus, finds out he has cancer, they decide to go through with their childhood plan. In particular, they've decided they will steal a rough cut of Star Wars Episode I - The Phantom Menace, so that Linus can see it before he dies.

Naturally, what follows is a madcap cross country road trip filled with nerd references and an occasional sexual encounter. They rumble with Trekkies at the town where Captain Kirk was born (Shatner's Kirk, not Chris Pine.) One of them gets beat up by Harry Knowles from Ain't It Cool News. An of course, and endless stream of Star Wars gags ranging from the overt to the subtle.

While there are alot of good gags, there are a few occasions where something was a bit off about the execution. The joke would be funny, but had the potential to be way funnier. For example, in the aforementioned Star Trek rumble, the filmmakers couldn't get the rights to use the actual Star Trek uniform designs, so instead they use "parody" uniforms. Its a minor distraction in that it took me a while to actually get that they were supposed to be Star Trek uniforms, which sort of took me out of the moment. However, the scene is saved by a cameo appearance by Seth Rogen as a Trekkie who does not take kindly to somebody ripping on Captain Kirk.

On top of that the subplots could have used a bit more fleshing out. Once they hit the road the film pretty much forgets that the characters are all supposed to be running away from something back home. Eric's story about taking over the family business would have been nice to see fleshed out, but you can't fault a movie too much for sticking to it's main premise.

In spite of all that, it's an alright movie It's not of the calibre of film that it would have been worth seeing in theaters, but it's certainly worth checking out as a rental. Clearly the people who made it have a deep love of all things Star Wars, but you'll probably leave it wondering why it wasn't directed by Kevin Smith. Sadly, he only makes a cameo appearance, but then again so does anybody else famous who's tied to Star Wars. My favorite might be Billy Dee Williams as Judge Reinhold. (It makes sense, trust me.)

The film's strengths come when it plays on the sense of nostalgia for the excitement alot of us felt at the prospect of a new trilogy of Star Wars movies coming out. If you're like me, you probably thought the original trilogy was the most amazing contribution to cinema ever, so the idea of there being more to the story was simply mind blowing. The characters capture that perfectly. It also brings back memories of what it was like being a nerd in the late 90's. You know, back when the internet was still new, and if you got the inside scoop on something it meant something. Not like today where if something gets leaked online, the whole world is going to know about it in half a day.

At the very least, it should bring back memories of your first time seeing Episode I. For me, I'd managed to rally friends together for the Special Edition releases of the original trilogy, and Episodes II and III, yet for some reason I couldn't get a damn one of my friends to go with me on opening day of Phantom Menace. Their reason? They wanted to wait until the crowd died down.

You guys kind of suck, you know that?