Just as Angelina scrunches her nose and pulls away, saying she reluctantly agreed to this “friendly” lunch, her girlfriends happen to stop in. Angelina embarrasses herself and the Amandas (played by real life Amandas Seyfried and Bynes) by lighting her cloth napkins on fire and spilling water all over the table.
When she runs off to the bathroom in tears, her friends tell Noah that Angelina will always be alone because she’s just so weird. They find her disgusting. She’s a virgin. She can’t keep a job. She’s driven away dozens of boyfriends. “Wait, you don’t actually like her, do you, Noah? Dude, just celebrate the fact that you dodged a bullet when she blew up your lunch.”
Hijinks ensue as the Amandas and The Bros try in vain to take Noah from the chase. Angelina sets very clear “just friends” boundaries, and given the amount of time they spend together, you doubt either has time for another pal: They eat lunch together daily, take shopping trips, go to museums and tourist spots, and hike through city parks. Meanwhile, the four sidekicks find themselves increasingly drawn together, hooking up in a bewildering array of configurations like the side plots in a Shakespearian love comedy.
One drunken night, The Bros show the Amandas secret video footage taken of Noah sleeping with a string of rebound women. The Amandas show the videos to Angelina, who is horrified. Although quirky and pretty, Angelina turns out to be a prude who thinks intimacy should be reserved for married couples—and then only once or twice a year on special holidays. “Not even oral?” one Amanda asks. “What about in the butt?”
Angelina dumps Noah as a friend when they next meet, which also happens to be the date at Coney Island at which he’d planned to confess his love and plant a real kiss. Alone in line for the Cyclone, rose in his hand, it’s hard to see a way out for Noah now.
Even though we’re only halfway through the movie by this point, it seems like everything should be over. And it pretty much is, until Paul Rudd and Vince Vaughn announce they’re taking everyone on an all-expenses-paid company retreat to Temptation Resort on the Yucatan Peninsula, where they can work on company bonding.
Temptation Resort is pure Sarah Marshall territory, down to the group’s guide, the charming Mickey (Russell Brand), who leads them in trust building and motivational exercises while taking a particular interest in Angelina, thus setting up Mickey and Noah as mismatched rivals. It all goes to hell when, noticing Angelina return Mickey’s affections, Noah punches him in the face. The men hold Noah back, he watches Angelina lead Mickey away, and the next morning the two walk in together holding hands, Mickey with a black eye and Angelina in her clothing from the night before. Polanski has entered the building.
I won’t ruin the final few minutes of the movie, but even though Polanski stays true to Reiner’s Randy Newman score and rosy camera filters, things get gritty and dark. Noah books a flight to New York the next morning, vowing to change everything in his life. “Fuck this hotel: It’s nothing but a dry hump, tempting me to give up. And fuck love too. Fuck everything I’ve believed. I’m tired of the same old shtick. The only way to get a woman is to get her.” From this point forward, it’s worth noting that the movie references switch from rom-com classics to fare by Kubrick and Hitchcock, even theater like Woyzeck and Artaud.
That night, Noah gets deathly drunk, and when The Bros and his concerned bosses find him by the water, he’s talking to Tevin (Ving Rhames) about his problems. Tevin, whose new bride has just left him on their honeymoon, goes on about how you have to be firm with a woman and show her who’s boss. “They don’t know who they are or what they want without us. In fact, whenever they say or do no to me, I know that’s when I got to show them yes.”
It turns out that Paul Rudd and Vince Vaughn have also been recently spurned, and that The Bros have been abandoned by the Amandas. Led by Tevin, the men swear a blood oath that night, stripping to their underwear, carving the word Yes into each other’s chests with seashells, and baptizing themselves in the bloody surf while sharks circle offshore.
As the movie brings us to the primal scene, I had flashbacks to Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now. And in fact, in the final moments, Polanski explicitly paints Mickey as an inverted Kurtz and echoes the slaughter of Brando/the ox. Armed with tiki torches and broken bottles from the resort’s open bar, the men crash a staff/guest swinger’s party in Mickey’s suite, drag the new couple out by the hair, and haul them to the top of a faux Mayan temple where life and death will mingle midway between heaven and the underworld.
Directed and produced by Robert Zemeckis. Starring: Christopher Lloyd, Floyd Mayweather Jr., Bobby Dean, Julianne Hough, Dennis Miller, and Michael Clarke Duncan.
Reviewed by Kenneth E. Topper
Get it down!
Get it, Brown!
Cram it in there, Mister Brown!
This little ditty is rasped by a circle of slaves as John Brown, abolitionist, assists Dr. Emmet Brown, scientist and cousin from the future, as John attempts to insert a thermogenic bomb in an African American freedom fighter’s colon. Emmet, in one of his frequent action hero quips, mentions that there will be no bodies to lie “a moldin’ in the grave,” after Mister Cobble (the escaped slave whose insides house the weapon) detonates “the fucker” outside of the courthouse in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. Mister Cobble (the aforementioned character, not the six-foot, 332-pound red-shirt sophomore defensive tackle on the Kentucky Institute of Technology’s football team, who, upon learning of the existence of such a character in such a film, declared that he totally wished he had a Delorean) then gives an Oscar-worthy speech about freedom, the human spirit, and his eviscerated mother’s potato farm in Torrington, Connecticut.
This scene raises several important questions. Does Robert Zemeckis have early onset Alzheimer’s? Do we live in such a moral vacuum that a montage depicting Harriet Tubman and Fredrick Douglass being reconstructed as slavery-fighting cyborgs can be played for laughs? Is it possible this film was created for the express purpose of giving me, Kenneth E. Topper, film reviewer and crusader for artistic integrity, a fucking brain aneurysm?
Here is what happened to me after I left the theater. My date, who, by the way, is actually named Emily Post, demands to be taken to a retro ice cream parlor. She is either disgusted or confused by the film, it is hard to tell which, yet is clearly afraid to speak because she is at least vaguely aware that I am a film reviewer. I found her on a Christian dating site I frequent even though I am not a Christian exactly. I use that site because I find the girls there tend to ask fewer questions and are impressed by vagaries. I choose to see BTTF 5 because I figured it would be innocuous. I didn’t think at the time that some Christians might consider time travel a form of evil magic. Also, I didn’t want a repeat of the Training Day incident. I took a larger yet still pretty-in-the-face girl to see the Fuqua and made the mistake of mentioning the time I smoked crank out of a coke can in Redondo Beach with some youths that worked at the T-shirt shop and the large girl, who moved quite well for a large girl, exclaimed she needed to buy deli meats for lunch the next day and took off her heels and ran.
I was drinking more then and I might have followed her for a while and yelled some. Anyway, since then I have developed a system for movie dates. No films with rape unless the rape is avenged by gun violence, no movies about the removal or discovery of a rogue penis, no films with bespectacled Jews. I tend to favor remakes of films or sequels of films that might have been beloved in the date’s childhood, and anything with blacks and whites working together to solve crimes.
Here is what she ordered at the parlor: orange sorbet. It makes no sense, I know, but at that point I did not level accusations because I thought that there was still a chance I could make her see the worm. I have made exactly nine girls see the worm in the last sixteen months. I met four of them on the Christian dating site. Two had children so I am not sure they count.
I ordered a milkshake because when at an ice cream parlor,
I sure as shit order product with some fucking lactose. She went on about her sorority, which served Christ and hot meals every other Sunday. I thought for a moment about her ankle socks. I thought about my cat and the plastic pee protector on my bed. I imagined time travel and attempted to conceive of a time in my life I would like to revisit.
If I were Jesus, this is how I would play it: I would return to Earth in a darkened theater and take a seat next to a girl in a skirt. I would use my magic to mesmerize her and then I would take her behind the handicap seats and worm it in. I would do it during the good stuff, the big releases. I would let one thirteen-year-old watch so he could have a role model. Then I would turn into a bat and disappear.
Directed by Joss Whedon. Starring: Ryan Gosling, Miranda Cosgrove, Josh Brolin, Aziz Ansari, Ken Jeong, and Samuel L. Jackson.
Reviewing a product like Dr. Strange, the latest superhero tentpole from Marvel Pictures, is like telling people whether or not they should eat at Subway on a road trip. The promotion for this picture has been so all-encompassing, for so long, that opinion-forming seems pointless. Everyone who already cares about continuity errors has already seen the previews at Comi-Con or online, and everyone else is going to get sucked indoors by the promise of air-conditioning and a forty-eight-ounce soda, caught in the whirl of cosmic marketing forces one-hundred times more powerful than the cone-like extradimensional portals that the movie’s protagonist is so fond of summoning.
A short précis is due to those of you who’ve been undertaking useful work in the South Pacific or Africa the last few months and have therefore missed the relentless bus billboards: Stephen Strange, played by Ryan Gosling, is a thinly handsome eccentric who lives in a block-long mansion in Greenwich Village. Because of the price of the real estate in that neighborhood, we must assume, this house has been in his family a long time. Dr. Strange also happens to be a master of the occult, as well as the world’s greatest magician.
By that, we don’t mean that he pulls rabbits out of his hat, though; in the movie’s lightest and most human-scaled scene, he wows the kids at his niece’s birthday party with tricks that would make even Penn Jillette shut up and take notice. Instead, Dr. Strange practices the kind of magic that involves summoning spirits and channeling the energy fields of magical cubes and generally trying to find hidden objects of the type that serve as plot devices for many badly-written comic books. He puts on lavish robes and utters ridiculous incantations in what appears to be a pidgin Balkan dialect. There’s a monster and a rival and a pretty girl and a few guest stars from the Marvel Universe to keep matters interesting, and it all degenerates into a globular mess of noise and CGI ghost hysterics by the end.
The Twitterverse initially raged at the choice of Gosling to play a minor comic book character of whom most people have never heard, but his casting turns out to be the only thing that keeps this thing from being sucked into an abyss created by the demon Dormammu. Like Johnny Depp, but without the affectations or prancing, Gosling has the ability to make listless intellectualism seem heroic. Strange gets blasted a few times by cosmic rays, and he certainly dishes out the magical punishment in large doses, but he doesn’t land a single punch and never lifts anything heavier than a crystal ball. When he’s not battling extra-worldly demons, he lounges on the couch, checking his iPhone. He’s soft, wimpy, and vaguely condescending to those who don’t share his vast learning, like a Pitchfork reviewer in a velvet cloak.
The film’s villain, a rival magician and East Village occult bookstore owner, is played by a miscast Josh Brolin, who’s woefully upstaged by the series of bulbous appendages that begin to sprout from his body after he summons a Lovecraftian demon from the depths of hell. Miranda Cosgrove, TV’s beloved iCarly, makes her adult-movie debut as Strange’s assistant and purported love interest, and all she does is bubble and squeak; though as a Nickelodeon product she knows how to gamely react while getting slimed. The relationship between Gosling and Cosgrove is the worst of Dr. Strange’s many flaws. He comes on like a creepy uncle at summer vacation, and she seems blissfully unaware of his perverted intentions. Meanwhile, Aziz Ansari and Ken Jeong shuck-and-jive their way around as a couple of street hustlers, refugees from another movie. It’s hard to believe they don’t shout “Mammy!” when—spoiler alert!—the Fantastic Four rush in toward movie’s end to save the day.
This being a Marvel joint, Samuel Jackson shows up to tie it all together, giving us all the feeling that we’ve just watched a two-hour superhero cartoon block on Disney XD. But therein lies the problem when every must-see movie involves a superhero, each less well-known to the general public than the next. Dr. Strange may be the world’s greatest sorcerer, but the magic that we all felt when, say, the first Batman or Spider-Man movies appeared has long since dissipated. Other than, say, the impossible copyright- prevented dream of a Hulk vs. Superman movie, there’s nothing left to wow and surprise us. Dr. Strange is the Keyser Söze of comic book movies. A little flash, a little dash, and then, after a week or two and $125 million, poof! He’s gone.
Directed by Phil Traill. Starring: Jack Black, Megan Fox, Sylvester Stallone, Tobey Maguire. With Judy Greer and Shaquille O’Neal.
Casting Jack Black as a romantic lead is a bold move. After his 2005 appearance in the cable series Laser Farts, some assumed the Whoopee Cushion of his career had gasped its last. But in 2006 came Nacho Libre (another nod in the direction of flatulence?) and soon thereafter Be Kind Rewind (2008). Not classics, I admit, but with one furry hand after another, Black clawed his way out of the pit and began to scale the heights—rather like the great ape King Kong (with whom he shares so many features, minus the size). And as Kung Fu Panda went franchise, he could legitimately pummel his man-boobs and roar. Women everywhere should be taking notice.
This backstory of triumph—or rather, of victorious return after defeat—is what drew me to Saving Electra. And with Black playing the lead role of Bruce Meek, there was no way this film could succumb to the cookie cutter of romantic comedy.
Or should I say, romantic drama? There’s a wistfulness about Black we never detected in the swashbuckling of the Nacho or behind the jiggling belly of Po. But think about it. Do you really have to look like Robert Pattinson to know the bite of lost love or the sting of ridicule? Hardly! Why are thickset men—especially if they’re compact and hirsute (which scientists call a sign of vigor)—so often deemed unfit for romantic duty? It’s been that way since Quasimodo and Esmeralda, or even Snow White with her faithful (but only platonically loved) companions. Women refuse to acknowledge it, but shorter, stockier, hairier men have feelings, too. They’ve suffered. They’ve taken it on their double chin. Trust me.
That boxing metaphor comes thanks to Sylvester Stallone, who plays Bubba, Bruce Meek’s dad in Saving Electra. Those of you who remember Stallone—himself rather short and hairy, and now thickening a bit in the middle—as a stone-faced, droopy- eyed Rambo (or Rocky Balboa or Judge Dredd or Jack Carter or Frankie Delano) will be moved by his performance here, especially the scene where he counsels young Bruce and manages to raise his right eyebrow. The culmination of a fine career.
This is the kind of film you’ll enjoy with a cold beer in your fist. Of course, you don’t get longnecks at the multiplex, which is why I prefer watching movies at home. Yes, the restraining order has something to do with it, too, but now the living room is practically a home theater. Just scoot the dishes and overdue bills to the side and put your feet on the coffee table. You have total freedom that way. No worrying about other people. Or putting on trousers. (I don’t care how short they are; hairy legs need to breathe.) And besides, it’s good to be here in case the phone rings. Which it could. You never know.
Bruce Meek is a beer drinker, too. That’s right: he’s not prancing about, holding his little pinkie out from a champagne flute. Nobody does that in this movie except for Trent (flat-bellied Tobey Maguire—as if Peter Parker could ever be a turn-on!), who swoops in to st
eal away Electra Miles (Megan Fox) from Bruce. It’s a story as old as time: a brooding, soon-to-be-successful and charmingly scruffy beau loses his jaw-droppingly gorgeous, newly anointed poet girlfriend to a guy with a size-fifteen neck (and hardly a hair on it; seriously, has Maguire even gone through puberty yet?), and who happens to be a psychiatrist specializing in issues of low self-esteem. Not that he has any such problems. Why should he? Especially since he practically abducts Bruce’s girlfriend, using his psycho-mumbo-hocus-jumbo-pocus. And although Bruce struggles mightily to recover her, that is, to “save” her, as the title implies, she—spoiler alert—ultimately remains with “Trent” (is that even his real name?), whose “good looks” are less chiseled than putty-knifed.
Saving Electra is stirring. I had to take breaks to hold myself together. Which gave me time to make nachos and grab another beer. I checked for phone messages. Once or twice I peeked through the telescope, just to see what was going on across the street. (She wasn’t home yet.) Then back to work on the sofa!
I don’t mean to set this up as the greatest movie of all time. Maybe just the decade. What holds it back, frankly, is the pacing. Length isn’t the problem. (It’s a one-six-pack-er.) Nor do I think every story has to have a happy ending. Although, would it have killed Phil Traill to make good on the title and let Electra be “saved”? But there’s just no time for that. In fact, the first sixty minutes are spent on backstory, a year in the life of Bruce and Electra, as the protagonist broods in his existential funk, struggling to help his girlfriend see at every single turn why her short-term success as a “poet” (and a minimalist one at that!) is responsible for his inability to put a brush to the canvas, or compose a single measure at the piano, or apply for that fast-food job—whichever one he decides to do!
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