Cynical Cinema

          Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show comes out June 3rd from Alliance Films, and is a must-watch for any aspiring stand-up comedian.  Not only that, it’s a should-watch for the rest of us.  Although Vince Vaughn has never been known as a stand-up comedian, he clearly loves the art, and decided to take four stand-up guys (no pun intended) on a 30-day, 30-city tour of
America.  Comedians Ahmed Ahmed, John Caparulo, Brett Ernst and Sebastian Maniscalco form the bulk of the nightly show, and Vaughn hosts with the help of some surprise guests each night.  And although some of the guests are not exactly surprises (like Jon Favreau), others truly are (like Dwight Yoakam).  Each of the guest stars does a little skit with Vaughn on stage, and some are terrific.  

          One of the best bits in the movie involves Favreau and Vaughn and Justin Long (Live Free or Die Hard, and the Apple-vs-Mac commercials).  Favreau of course famously wrote Swingers, which launched him (and to a lesser extent Ron Livingston) to stardom, and Vaughn to superstardom.  In Swingers, just in case you’re a guy and somehow, amazingly, have not seen Swingers, Vaughn was the man.  The ultimate cool guy, the one character in a movie that every dude wanted to be.  Every guy wants to be one of two characters.  Either John Wayne in
Rio Bravo, or Vince Vaughn in Swingers.  Sometimes both.  Anyway, Favreau decides to prove how easy it would have been for anyone else in the world to play that same character, and he gets Long to read the lines, right there on stage.  Long’s impersonation of Vaughn in Swingers is, to quote a phrase, “money”.  It ranks up there with either Kevin Pollack or Jay Mohr doing Christopher Walken.  Considering it was off-the-cuff and spontaneous, it’s fantastic. 

          But for the most part, this film is about comedy, and the four main guys who do the tour.  It’s not just joke after joke, although their on-stage acts are filmed and we get to see an awful lot of that.  But we also get to see behind the scenes, on the tour bus with five guys living in close quarters for a month.  And we get to see comedians and their real reactions when they bomb, when they get heckled, how sensitive and paranoid and insecure some of them really are.  We also get to see them with their parents, and we understand how accepting parents must be of a career choice like “comedian”.  (Especially Ahmed Ahmed’s Muslim mother and father, who were initially the least supportive of his career choice, but now are the funniest parents on the tour.) 

          The tour was taking place in the middle of Hurricane Katrina and the aftermath, and had to be bumped and rescheduled and moved around to accommodate the victims of that disaster.  The guys tour a trailer park that is housing displaced families, and brings the hurricane evacuees out to see the show.  There is a lot more going on in this film than just a bunch of jokes and inane behaviour on a tour bus, and that’s a good thing.  It’s far better and more interesting to see these guys for who they are, to hear their real thoughts, than it would be to just see an hour and a half of standup from a tour.  That being said, however, I was hoping for more of the standup comedy itself on the special features.  I wanted to see the full show of these guys, especially John Caparulo, who I found very funny.  And although there are a few extra skits and a little more comedy buried in the special features, the entire shows aren’t there. 

          A minor complaint, however, since the film itself was not designed to be simply comedic, and works extremely well.  This is a very entertaining, informative, interesting and of course funny show, a funny and captivating group of guys, and a fascinating film experience.  Whether you’re a stand-up fan or not, a Vince Vaughn fan or not, or a documentary buff or not, pick this up.  It’s worth it on a lot of levels.

To celebrate the release of the live-action Chipmunks movie starring Jason Lee and irritating kids everywhere, Paramount has decided to release two old Chipmunks DVDs from the 90s. One is called Alvin and the Chipmunks Go To The Movies, where the three chipmunks do Honey I Shrunk The Kids, Back To The Future, and Big. The other is called Chipmunk Adventure, where the chipmunks compete against girl chipmunks in a hot-air balloon race around the world. By the way, why are the guy chipmunks called The Chipmunks, and the girl chipmunks are called The Chippettes? I did a quick wikipedia search here - the correct name for female chipmunks is “female chipmunks”. These shows are basically sitcoms, with irritating characters and obnoxious father figures. The Chipmunks, much like every other cartoon in the 80s, were a rock band. Somehow these songs made it onto CDs in the 80s, despite the fact that they sucked and were more unintelligible than Stevie Nicks.

How can you watch a show where you can’t understand a word the characters are saying? The Chipmunks are three young cartoons who talk as though they are premanently crammed full of helium, but would likely have problems with pronunciation and diction even if they had normal voices. Sit-coms sucked enough already in the 80s, why would the world have forced this crap on kids? The Chipmunks talk incredibly slowly. There appears to be only about eleven lines of dialogue in each 22-minute episode, and yet you still can’t understand them. I watched 66 minutes worth, squirming angrily, and then I shut it off. Now the kids are here, and I am going to be forced to watch the new movie. Oh no.

OK. Watched the new movie. It is better than the incredibly bad old episodes, but that isn’t saying too much. Jason Lee, you see, is a struggling, go-nowhere musician and songwriter, who is still somehow able to own a big, wonderful house in the suburbs. The chipmunks, Alvin Simon and Theodore, through a series of bizarre occurences, end up in his house. These chipmunks are kind of like a girl, who comes to your house on the first date, and within three hours believes she has moved in there, and that she is your girlfriend, and then never leaves because if she did you might change your locks. They take over the house, and when he lets them stay, they immediately start calling themselves a “family”, which understandably freaks him out. Why does Jason Lee keep taking these roles? He does My Name Is Earl, and he was great in all of those Kevin Smith movies, but now he’s doing this, and Underdog. Maybe it’s that these roles require almost not acting at all, and he certainly doesn’t look as though he’s trying here.

And what’s with cartoon characters not wearing pants? They’re freaky because they’re naked, decides their producer, David Cross. So…they get SHIRTS knitted. They are still pantsless! Cross does add a nice touch to this movie, which is pretty well a by-the numbers kids’ film. It even has that requisite scene where someone gives the chipmunks - oh my go - COFFEE! And they go NUTS, bouncing off the walls…this is the most cliched and obnoxious scene in all kids movies now. It should be banned altogether. The best thing about the movie over the episodes is that you can understand what the chipmunks are saying without straining yourself. Except during the songs. Which are as awful as ever. Generic, mindless kids’ entertainment, but at least some people are trying a little bit. More than I can say for most kids’ movies, this gets a five.

John C. Reilly is a serious comedic talent.  Normally relegated to the Will Ferrell backburner in movies like Talladega Nights, he has been given a chance to star and to shine in Walk Hard:  The Dewey Cox Story.  And shine he does.  Reilly is easily the best part of this movie, with his understated performance meshing perfectly with the surprisingly understated movie.  As far as parodies go, the people who make all those Epic Movies and Date Movies and Meet The Spartans could take notes from flicks like this one.  Understatement is often far funnier than garish, over-the-top gross-out parody.  There are some terrific lines in Walk Hard, lines like “I’m chopped in half pretty bad here”, which would probably NOT be considered understated were we not inundated with the likes of Scary Movie Eleven and Epic Movie.

 The thing about Walk Hard is that it works on only one real level.  And that is, if you have already seen Walk The Line, the Johnny Cash biopic with Joaquin Phoenix.  If you missed that one, you will miss a lot of the hunour in Walk Hard.  The father’s constant refrain of “the wrong kid died”, the numerous occasions where sinks get destroyed, and the tumultuous relationships Dewey Cox has with various women.  And there are other references the movie makes which only the hardcore music-history and music-DVD fan would understand.  A Brian Wilson moment where Dewey is clearly losing his mind after too much acid, and asks for a twelve-thousand voice choir of Benedictine monks, or some such thing.  A Bob Dylan moment, which is a direct parody of a press conference Dylan gave in 1965 after going electric at Newport.  (That entire press conference, by the way, is available on a DVD called “Dylan Speaks”, and is a must for any Bob Dylan fanatic.)  But these are references the regular public wouldn’t get. 

The stuff they would understand is stuff about Elvis and Buddy Holly and the Beatles.  I think it is safe to assume that the general public, if they are even in passing familiar with this music, know that Elvis was the King, Buddy Holly died in a plane crash, and the Beatles went to India for spiritual guidance from the Maharishi.   But that’s about all there is for the casual observer, which might help to explain why this movie didn’t find a larger audience upon it’s release.  Oh, it did OK, but it is superior in many ways to those Will Ferrell movies that do gigantic bank every time they are released.  Blades of Glory, Semi-Pro, Elf…Walk Hard is better than all of these, but just sadly inaccessible to many people.  The one thing though, I think, that everyone would be able to agree on is that the songs are terrific.  Every song sounding exactly like the era which it is meant to parody, every one hilarious and smart.  That might be the best way to determine if you will like this movie.  Listen to the soundtrack, and if it amuses you, so too will the film.