The following review was originally written for Heeb Magazine during SXSW 2010. Reposting here for the film’s limited release.

If you’re not familiar with Sundance regulars Jay and Mark Duplass, you will be once Cyrus drops later this year. After multiple shorts, these indie golden boys (two of the originators of the“mumblecore” genre) grabbed real star power for their first studio feature, with John C. Reilly, Jonah Hill and Marisa Tomei as an uncomfortably Oedipal love triangle. If the crowds at SXSW are any indication – and they are, check your old Oscar ballots – Cyrus will end up a huge romantic comedy hit, which will be amazing since so much of the movie is so damn creepy. Read on…

While these shorts provide for some great laughs, it’s the smart choices from intelligent directors that make these funny moments meaningful and memorable beyond their short duration.

Starting off the comedy block is commercial director Jeremy Berger’s The Van, which is able to provide some laughter due to it’s confident style and juxtaposition of Herman Melville’s poetics with a more crass modern humor. Although the image of a blow-up sex toy is paired with Moby Dick’s narrator description of his unhindered history of exploits plays on the social comedy of manners, the film unfortunately hit’s it’s peak. The chase between a biker messenger and the “white van” that assaults bikers is reliant upon technical proficiency rather than motivated by the psychological or emotional complexity of Melville. Perhaps what is lacking is the reason behind the pairing of the text of Moby Dick within the world of the bike-messenger that would really take the work into more complicated jokes, and perhaps become a more biting satire of contemporary eco-business warfare. Read on…

The British film The Infidel just reached American shores this week at the Tribeca Film Festival here in New York City. The irreverent comedy is about a Muslim who learns he is adopted and his parents are in fact Jewish. What ensues is a delightful comedy of errors that delves into the murkier depths of religious and ethnic stereotypes. You can read my full review over at Heeb Magazine.

I was able to get some face time with four people connected to the film. Josh Appignanesi is the film’s director and David Baddiel wrote the script. The two offered up some deadpan wisdom on the weighty subject their film deals with. The bulk of my questions (as you’ll hear) focus on reactions to the film and whether or not it is controversial. Both Baddiel and Appignanesi are passionate about their creative choices and the power of comedy in the most uncomfortable of social conversations. They say it better, so definitely check it out.

Omid Djalili and Richard Schiff, the film’s stars, are similarly serious when it comes to discussing The Infidel. Schiff, who is most well known in the states for his role as Toby Ziegler on The West Wing, takes particular offense at having any of his roles, including that of Lenny in The Infidel, labeled as stereotypically Jewish. The two exhude a comic energy that made it difficult for me to keep a straight face while chatting them up. Especially at the end of our talk, the two go off on the provenance of a few racial epithets. It is quite hilarious.

As always, I’ve said too much. Just click play already.

 
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Kick-Ass fits perfectly into the SXSW landscape as it is what we in the business call a “crowd-pleaser”. The trick here is that Matthew Vaughn’s film pleases a very specific crowd, and Austin seems to be the capital not just of Texas, but of the cynical fanboy (fangirl, fanperson). Based on the comic book series by Mark Millar, Kick-Ass tells the tale of a mild-mannered high school geek who gives into his fantasies of becoming a super hero. The story is tight enough, the visuals pop, and the gore is outrageous. Still this film is missing something pretty big: an audience outside of Austin.

Let me tell you what we have before I go into my opinion. In a cartoonish New York City, one ruled by organized (and not so-organized) crime, Dave Lizewski is a loser at the bottom of every food chain. He gets picked on at school, mugged in the streets and nothing but bored at home. On the brink of growing up, he decides to try his hand at being a super hero. After ordering a wet-suit online, he goes out to fight some crime and eventually becomes an internet sensation. Of course, there has to be some darkness to any super tale. Kick-Ass, as Dave has named himself, quickly discovers that there are villains more evil than he can handle, and heroes more well-equipped than he could imagine. Accidentally, he has thrust himself into a war for the ages: good versus evil.

The film balances two very different but overlapping genres with great finesse. It is a comic book adaptation and a parody of comic book cinema. As a comic book film, it ticks off marks on the list of required content. Bright colors and inspired production design, provided by cinematographer Ben Davis and production designer Russell De Rozario, make almost every frame feel like it lives on a page. Overlaid text boxes fill out the effect to the delight of hardcore comic kids. As a parody, it plays brilliantly. Its main cinematic inspiration is Sam Raimi’s Spiderman, which stands out as the biggest catalyst to our current heroically saturated film market. Pulling scenes, musical themes, narration and set designs from Mr. Raimi’s take on the hero, Mr. Vaughn is able to dance the line of homage and theft while building his own original language for this film. Read on…

Cop Out confirms that Kevin Smith is a brilliant writer but a mediocre director. There are plenty of belly laughs in this wayward film, but the plot trickles out too slowly with an antagonist that is hardly worth the time. Tracy Morgan’s comic muscle flexes wildly, and Bruce Willis is delightful as the deadbeat straight man, so the laughs abound. When you’re not laughing, however, you’ll probably be looking around the theater wondering why everyone slapped down the price of popcorn in the first place.

Artistically, the film aims for Beverly Hills Cop but falls closer to Dragnet. The real problem is our bad guy, Poh Boy, a Mexican drug lord with a penchant for pricey sports memorobilia. His “tweak”, if you will, is that he speaks like Baby Huey and is named after a sandwich. Otherwise, he’s just a drug dealer like any other: heavily armed and cocksure. I’ll get to our ludicrous heroes in a moment, but I need to stress that this movie could have been saved with a better baddie. The jokes flow like beer at a bachelor party but nothing holds them together. There is no reason not to clip this movie up into a couple of YouTube replays. Read on…

If you managed to sidestep the ads for “The Jay Leno Show”, NBC probably rammed you in the face with hundreds of plugs for their latest scripted series, “Community”. Even if you’re a shut-in who deplores network comedies, actor Joel McHale probably reminded you to tune in on every episode of “The Soup” this summer. Well, I took the bait and plopped down to watch it last night. As with any first episode I left it feeling underwhelmed. Perhaps it’s just the difficulty of pulling off a pilot and introducing so many characters that caused the episode to flatline. More likely, it’s just not all that funny of an idea.

Mr. McHale plays Jeff Winger, a fast talking fratty lawyer who must go back to community college after the bar discovers his illegitimate degree. You know that guy; that white guy with cool hair that can talk you into anything. Think Zach Morris without the moral hangups. Jeff tries to impress cutie Britta (Gillian Jacobs) by starting a Spanish study group, which balloons into a whole mess of quirky folks converging to form a modern-day Sweat-hogs. Oddly, Jeff, a fellow student, plays Mr. Kotter in this case, except he can date the students. Kinky. Read on…

On May 29, 2009, “The Tonight Show”, as an institution, aired its last episode from Burbank California. The sets were broken down and the latest iteration of the late night show moved to Universal City under the tutelage of Conan O’Brien. As had been decided earlier, however, the one relic that would not budge was Jay Leno, the eponymous host of NBC’s newest daily program, “The Jay Leno Show”. After a violet blitzkrieg of summer advertisements, the show premiered last night looking, unfortunately, all-too familiar.

As his former show waned, Mr. Leno only let on a few details about what the new 10pm program would look like. One tidbit was that there would be no desk for him to prop up behind as that was the calling card of The Tonight Show. Apparently, the desk was the only casualty. Mr. Leno now sits in a chair, fully exposed, opposite his guests as they blab on about their personal lives. Whoa, revolutionary. Read on…

As the explody, franchise-licious summer wanes and awards-chasing fare creeps up on us, it is nice to know that movies like Extract still get made amidst our modern state of Hollywood sameness. Simple, funny and only lewd enough to make your grandma shudder, Mike Judge’s new film is a formulaic comedy for the set who think they are over formulaic comedy.

Jason Bateman, who in my opinion is often the saving grace of otherwise clunky films (see: Juno, The Kingdom, Hancock; one can only hope for Couples Retreat), plays Joel, a sexually frustrated owner of a flavor extract manufacturing plant. Having invented a better way to make concentrated flavors (the film’s eponymous extract), he has found a way to turn a decent enough profit to get a big house, a fast car and a big TV for his wife to watch while he wanks away in the bathroom. Seemingly idyllic, everything from the annoying neighbor to his nagging employees make Joel long for his bartending days, when life was simple. Read on…