Cynical Cinema

Romantic comedies are one of those genres that make me cringe just thinking about them.  They often involve Hugh Grant or Meg Ryan and some crying.  There is always some major event or misunderstanding that takes place twenty-one minutes before the end of the film that shakes the foundation of the relationship we’re watching, and of course it gets resolved within that 21 minutes and everyone lives happily ever after.  And girls laugh, and then cry, and then laugh again as they watch.  And I usually curl up in a ball and try to suppress my rage.  This time, however, this was not the case. 

With Forgetting Sarah Marshall, my girlfriend did indeed laugh and cry.  But that was because she laughed until she cried.  And her sides hurt.  And mine too.  This movie is absolutely hilarious.  Judd Apatow (of Knocked Up and 40-Year-Old Virgin fame) produced this film, directed by Nick Stoller.  It stars Jason Segal as Peter, a guy who does the music for one of those CSI-type crime shows.  You know, the guy who plays the intense, moody music when David Caruso takes off his sunglasses?  He is dating Sarah Marshall, the star of that crime scene show.  Until, two minutes into the movie, she breaks up with him, leading to perhaps the funniest nude scene I have ever seen in a movie.  You see, he figures she can’t really break up with him until he puts clothes on to have a conversation.  So he just won’t put clothes on.  (Yes, it IS full-frontal male nudity, the best kind of comedic nudity!)

Then, with help from his not-terribly-helpful step-brother, Peter decides to go on vacation in order to get his mind off Sarah, and of course manages to end up at the exact same resort she does.  Sarah is there with her brand new boyfriend Elvis Snow, a huge international rock star played to perfection by the absolutely hilarious Russell Brand.  While Elvis is now Peter’s biggest rival for the affections of Sarah, and Peter should by all reasonable logic feel some resentment toward him, he ends up kind of liking him.  And so do we.  Brand plays Snow as such an un-self-conscious doofus of a rock star, that it is impossible to make him into the villain of the piece.  In fact, there really isn’t much of a villain at all, unless it’s Sarah Marshall (Kristen Bell) herself.

The supporting cast is amazing too, including Paul Rudd as a perma-stoned surfing instructor, John Hill as a waiter with a rather unhealthy obsession with Elvis Snow, and several gigantic men who serve as comedic relief in dozens of scenes.  The one scene here that I think perfectly exemplifies the reason this movie is so great is the scene where one of these gigantic Hawaiiam men recruits Peter to help him prepare the pig for dinner.  And Peter has to actually kill the pig.  In so many other movies, this scene would have lasted nine minutes.  And it would have squeezed every bit of comedy it possibly could out of the “he has to stab the pig and he hates it” joke.  But in this movie, the scene lasts maybe twenty seconds.  There is probably only twenty seconds of real, true hilarity to be derived from a scene such as this one, and Forgetting Sarah Marshall makes absolutely sure that those twenty seconds are the only ones we see.  It’s a remarkable demonstration of restraint in a 2008 R-rated romantic comedy.

And then there’s Mila Kunis.  Jackie from That 70s Show is a revelation in her role as the desk clerk at the Hawaiian hotel where Peter and Sarah and Elvis are staying.  And it’s pretty clear early on that she will become the catalyst for Peter to either get over his ex-girlfriend or break down completely.  The chemistry between Kunis and Segel is magnificent, and she is incredibly charming.  To the point that we, the audience, immediately root for her, no matter what her role will be in this movie.  Watching her face while Peter performs a song he wrote for a Dracula-themed puppet-show musical is just awesome.  Hilarious and charming and brilliant.  Just like this movie.

There is a video that hit stores on Tuesday - it is the first Family Guy episode of the year, the hour-long Star Wars episode, and it is great. Now, of course, an hour-long episode really means 48 minutes, but with the bonus features on the disc, it is well over an hour in total, most of it terrific. The bonus features include a conversation between Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane and George Lucas, who is clearly one of his idols. Also, there is a featurette that plays every Family Guy Star Wars reference from the TV show up until this point. Also hilarious stuff. Clearly, the guys who do this TV show are bigger Star Wars nerds than anyone I know. Except for Dave Taylor, who has forty-one different copies of the trilogy, on DVD, VHS, Beta, reel-to-reel, slide show, and laser disc, among other formats. He also has eleven copies of the John Williams soundtrack, on CD, tape, 8-track, vinyl, and some formats I was not even aware had been invented yet.

But although I make fun of Dave every time I visit his place and sit among the shelves of Bob Fett action figures and Millenium Falcon commemorative cereal boxes, he is not alone. Not by a long shot. These people are out there. And they are otherwise normal in the rest of their lives, unlike the Star Trek geeks and the Lord of the Rings wackjobs and the Mr. Belvedere afficionados. This is because Star Wars holds a certain place in the hearts and minds (ooh, went all George W for a second there) of just about every single human being born after 1957. I, for one, was born about a year after the release of Star Wars. And yet it was still an integral part of my pop culture innundation throughout my life, so much so that even as a half-assed fan of the original series, I still know many lines, names, scenarios and moments from that original trilogy. In fact, the first movie has to be more familiar to the general population of the world than any other movie by far.

Which is why it’s the perfect pop culture spoof for a show such as Family Guy. For the purposes of this review, I will go ahead and assume that everyone, by now, is at least aware of Family Guy. (If not, watch it. It is the best comedy show on TV.) And Family Guy Presents Blue Harvest is what they do at their best. It is basically the entire Star Wars movie, condensed (easily, I might add) to 48 minutes, and featuring the cast of Family Guy in place of the characters in the film. The lines are basically lifted straight from the dialogue of the original movie, which seems lazy at first, but when the dialogue spins off, it becomes brilliant. The scenes where they poke fun of holes in the Star Wars plot are dead-on. The best one comes when Darth Vader is advised that the Death Star is 99.99 percent impregnable, except for this one two-metre wide hole which, if you fire a torpedo into it, would blow up the entire space station. He suggests perhaps covering that hole with plywood or something, but is voted down on the grounds of aesthetics.

Not content to simply lampoon the Star Wars phenomenon itself, Seth MacFarlane manages to get numerous other fantastic pop culture references into the movie - Judd Nelson shows up to deliver one line from The Breakfast Club. Rush Limbaugh voices himself as a right-wing bigot on Tatooine talk radio. Chevy Chase and Beverly D’Angelo show up to deliver two lines from National Lampoon’s vacation. There are also references to Simply Red, Tupac Shakur, Redd Foxx, and dozens more, almost all of them fantastic. In the end, the familiarity we all have with Star Wars gives Family Guy license to do whatever they want within that framework, and that works beautifully. Blue Harvest is well worth purchasing, for the Family Guy fan, the Star Wars fan, or anyone who enjoys a 40-minute belly laugh.

You know how Maury Povich, every now and then, brings a bunch of “out-of-control teens” on his show, and they freak out on stage, and their mothers cry?  And the kids say “yeah, I’m fifteen, and I smoke weeeeeeed, and I drink tequiiiiiiiila, and I have seeeeeex with men!”  And the mothers cry.  And the kid comes out and she gives the finger to the audience, and the audience boos the girl because they see what her mother is going through, and I sit at home thinking “ummm…it’s just weed and booze and sex.  What’s the big deal?”  I guess it’s the fact that they’re so proud of it.  The really bad ones are prostituting themselves, or sleeping with much older guys, or they have moved on to crystal meth.  And Maury Povich acts all righteously indignant, and says “can’t you see what this is doing to your poor mother?”  and the kid doesn’t care, and yells “y’all don’t know me!” and then drops the “I’m pregnant” bombshell, and six months later she’s back on Maury with eleven different guys and they test the DNA…God I love that Maury Povich show!

Anyway, at the end of the My Teenager is Out Of Control Show, they always send them to Boot Camp.  And we see some drill sargeant yelling at these girls from one inch away, and then we see the girls do some pushups, and then they cry, and everything is better and they hug their moms and say sorry, and the show ends.  Well, these boot camps actually exist.  And Boot Camp is a documentary about what really goes on in one…OK.  I made that up.  Boot Camp is actually a live-action movie about Life After Povich.  Where a bunch of out-of-control teens are rounded up and sent to an island in the South Pacific to turn their lives around.  But wait - it turns out that Boot Camp isn’t so fun after all!  And it’s also nothing like on the Maury show, because SOME of them are actually boys as well!

So it’s a boot camp, where Peter Stormare and his cadre of creepy militia-types torture and rape these kids until they are completely broken, then…what?  Ship them back to their families, broken and destroyed?  But at least they won’t act up and cause problems and make their parents do work any more…Mila Kunis is the star of this movie (you know, Jackie from That 70s Show), and this is not her star turn.  (That may have come with the new film Forgetting Sarah Marshall.)  She gets sent to this boot camp by her Wicked Step Father who exerts Mind Control over her Real Mother.  Once she is there, she is basically a prisoner-of-war in Nazi Germany, with horrible abuse and crazed group thinking and a cultish mentality to Stormare’s followers.

Her boyfriend, fearing for her safety, arranges to be sent to the same island for some re-programming of his own.  I guess  his idea is to break her out.  And it’s a testament to the cartoonish idiocy of this movie that he actually manages to do so.  The dialogue is incredibly lame, the premise gets old after six minutes, and the acting is bonkers at best.  The conclusion is so trite and lame it belongs in some ridiculous Lord of the Flies type after-school special.  At least you get to see Mila Kunis boobs.  I imagine that will put Boot Camp on Mr. Skin’s must-see DVDs of the year, but simply seeing naked flesh from a former star of That 70s Show is a piss-poor reason to watch a movie this lousy.  Skip Boot Camp altogether.