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.

I was struggling on Saturday night. Struggling to watch the Sens-Leafs in HD, while my girlfriend had her friend over. While Jen is usually pretty good about hockey, especially Senators games. But Ashley was extremely insistent upon watching whatever was on MTV. MTV! I decided that the best thing to do was to compromise in some way, and that was to find a movie that was not the hockey game, but that HAD to be better than whatever was on MTV. The girls seem to like documentaries - the last time Ashley was over I made sure she never shopped at Wal-Mart again by showing her Wal-Mart: The High Cost Of Low Price. This time, I thought I would put on the new documentary “Everything’s Cool”, an insightful look at Global Warming. But there were previews. And the girls decided, on the fourth preview, that the movie being previewed looked far better than the documentary I had suggested. The movie was called The Ten, a humourous look at the ten commandments. So, grudgingly, I switched the DVDs. And put on The Ten. As that movie started, the girls saw another preview that caught their attention, and asked if I had THAT movie, maybe we should watch that one. (THAT movie? It was “Everything’s Cool”!)

I put my foot down. I am not putting the DVD I just took off back on because you saw a preview for the one movie on the other disc, because then I would be switching discs all night and perhaps end up creating some kind of sci-fi situation where I am stuck there, in my living room, going from one DVD menu to another for the rest of eternity. So I skipped the rest of the previews and just pressed play. And we watched The Ten. Which is OK. But not fantastic. Just a little bonkers and kinda funny. Some of the hottest women alive are in this movie - Jessica Alba, who I really don’t think is that hot (kind of cabbagepatch kiddy, as far as I’m concerned) but who seems to be the #1 Hottest Chick Alive according to the rest of the world. And also my personal favourite, Famke Janssen, who I really think is the hottest woman on Earth. In a cougar-ific kinda way. (Check out Deep Rising. Horrible film, hottest wet-T-shirt Famke Janssen scene ever.)

The movie is basically ten short vignettes about each of the ten commandments. Paul Rudd (who was fantastic in Knocked Up) oversees the vignettes, introduces them and runs his own little bizarre drama as we move from one to another. Famke Janssen is his wife, and he is cheating on her with Jessica Alba. Some really cool actors show up in the film as well - Liev Schreiber, Adam Brody, Rob Corddry, Janeane Garofolo, and Winona Ryder in some inspired casting. (She appears in the Thou-Shalt-Not-Steal vignette. Get it?) Each vignette gets more and more bonkers, as they connect to each other in a bizarre sort of way. There are three really excellent ones. The Thou-Shalt-Not-Steal one is great, as Winona Ryder falls in love with a ventriloquist’s dummy, and steals it…it’s insane. So too is the Schreiber bit where two neighbours keep trying to one-up each other by buying more and more catscan machines. Totally demented. But very little is as demented as the animated “Lying Rhino” sequence, narrated by a bunch of junkies, done in full, almost-X-rated, Felick The Cat style animation.

There are a couple of duds as well, but overall each segment is pretty watchable if not excellent. This film is not for the squeamish, as my girlfriend squirmed uncomfortably for the entire duration of the “Covet thy Neighbour’s Wife” segment, where Rob Corddry and Ken Marino converse very seriously and intensely about rape in prison, and how if you are one man’s prison wife, there is an assumption that you will not let yourself be raped by others…it’s definitely an over-the-top scene, but it made me laugh. Most of this film did, and it is definitely worth renting. (In the end, if you have to make a choice, as I did, between this one and Everything’s Cool, choose the latter. But if you can watch both, do it.)

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.