Nick Offerman: American Ham - 2014

"Nick Offerman: American Ham" - 2014
Dir. by Jordan Vogt-Roberts - 1 hr. 18 min.

Clip

by Clayton Hollifield

I'm never sure if it's a good idea to write up a stand-up special that I've watched.  And, since there's no oversight here (or audience, for that matter), there's not really anyone I can consult on the matter.  I think that a fair rule would be that if a stand-up special approaches movie-length (meaning, closer to 90 minutes than 60), it's fair game.  But then again, what is there really to say about one of these things?  Netflix is littered with stand-up specials, and they're all pretty much the same deal: some framing device, a stand-up concert, some giggles, and then you're done.  "Nick Offerman: American Ham" is not wildly different from that, but the minor divergences are welcome.

This special is framed as Nick Offerman's ten pieces of advice for life, which actually comes off pretty well.  I enjoy stand-up as much as anyone, but just starting from a different point than a standard "is that weird?" is so, so useful.  I never really got the impression that Offerman was a traditional "stand-up" either, but then again, what the hell is the definition of a "one-man show?"  I don't have answers for that.  What I can tell you is that Offerman is pretty much Ron Swanson (with an added occasional stoner giggle that keeps popping up), but that doesn't mean that the advice isn't considered, or useful, or funny.

There are also a couple of songs that were part of the performance, but apparently got shut down over a misunderstanding over what exactly constitutes satire legally.  Instead, there are exchanges between Offerman (in his workshop) and a lawyer (Marc Evan Jackson) that are likely way, way funnier than the actual songs in question.  I haven't yet gone to YouTube to see what I've missed out on (as winkingly suggested), but considering how funny the workshop segments are, I don't really feel like I've missed out on anything important.

Obviously, how much you enjoy "American Ham" is going to depend heavily on how much you enjoy Offerman (or Ron Swanson), but if you're down for 80 minutes of life advice from Offerman, you'll enjoy this special.  It's not Earth-shatteringly great or anything, but it's a good time when you've burned through your DVR backlog and have to rely on Netflix to tide you over because it's just too early to go to bed yet, and there aren't any games on or anything.  And maybe it's a minor thing, but after decades of combative husband/wife relationships in comedy, it's kind of (no, it's totally) heart-warming to see someone who can't hide that's he's still head-over-heels in love with his wife.  Not only is it nice to see, it's a different dynamic and lends to different jokes than the kind you might be used to.  So, a funny 80 minutes that might include something to, as he puts it, "increase the deliciousness of your life," and a funny approach to gratitude?  You might not even notice the bacon jokes!

3.5 / 5 - Streaming

We're the Millers - 2013

"We're the Millers" - 2013
Dir. by Rawson Marshall Thurber - 1 hr. 50 min.

Official Red Band Trailer #2

by Clayton Hollifield

Sometimes, all I want is a dirty comedy that's halfway as funny as the concept initially sounds, to blow a couple of hours laughing, to distract me from whatever I need distracting from.  "We're the Millers" is a movie that I had intended to catch in the theatres when it came around, it seemed like a good bet to deliver what I wanted out of it.  Both Jennifer Aniston and Jason Sudeikis have been good in these kinds of movies (like "Horrible Bosses," for instance), and the idea of a bunch of scumbags dressing up like dorks to pull off some serious felonious crime is solid enough.  I mean, you know that main characters are scumbags, and no matter how hard they try, they're not going to be able to completely fly under the radar.

David (Jason Sudeikis) is a low-level pot dealer in Denver, but a neighbor, Kenny (Will Pouter), decides to play hero for a street girl, Casey (Emma Roberts), which ends up with David getting beaten up and robbed of his supply and a significant amount of cash.  This leaves David with a problem: a lot of that money belonged to his boss, Brad (Ed Helms).  Brad proposes a solution; David can go down to Mexico and bring back a smidge and an a half of pot across the border.  For that, Brad will forgive the debt, plus pay David $100k.  David isn't down with that idea, but doesn't have a choice in the matter.  His plan, pretend to be a family of dorks on vacation in an RV, which will surely fly under everyone's radar.  David wrangles Casey and Kenny in on the plan, and has to convince a stripper that lives in his apartment building, Rose (Jennifer Aniston), to play his wife and take a little trip down to Mexico.

First up, the R-rating for "We're the Millers" is mostly due to language, and probably because there's a lot of drugs around in the movie (although no one seems to ever smoke any of mountains of weed that are laying around).  If you were hoping that it meant you were going to get to see Jennifer Aniston and her friends, you're out of luck (although she does have a nice strip-tease scene).  It's important to set your expectations at the right level.  This isn't really a gross-out comedy (like a Farrelly Bros movie), and there's not really any kind of hedonism on display, aside from a couple of scenes with another couple, played by Nick Offerman and Kathryn Hahn, which are funny mostly because of their tameness.  Much of the humor comes from how naturally the characters fall into their roles, as if the notion of an average American family is imprinted upon everyone, and slips on like a comfortable sweatshirt.  And there's a lot of sotto voce swearing, of course.

Really, the reason why this movie is pretty watchable and pretty funny is because there's a built-in structure (the need to move the RV from one place to another in an certain amount of time), and because the actors are good, and appropriate for their respective roles, and there's enough difference between them to allow for some natural friction.  And the actors involved generally do a good job.  There's a level of perverse fun in watching Jennifer Aniston be dirty after like a decade in sit-com land (and at an omnipresent amount of fame, as well) - there's a fantastic gag-reel bit in the credits involving the "Friends" theme song that had me laughing as hard as anything else in the movie.  Sudeikis probably isn't an asshole in real life, but he plays one well.  Nick Offerman and Kathryn Hahn are really good as the over-sharing couple that David and Rose can't seem to get away from.

Frequently, when I see a trailer for a comedy that seems like it's going to be okay, I end up being underwhelmed by the finished product.  The batting average seems even lower when we're talking about R-rated comedies.  Maybe people think that some swearing and maybe a flash of flesh is enough to justify $10 at the box office, but I don't usually leave the theatre feeling that way.  "We're the Millers" isn't a world-changing, all-time-great comedy, but it's at least as good as I thought it was going to be, and that's a victory in itself.

3 / 5 - TV (HD)

Casa de mi Padre - 2012

"Casa de Mi Padre" - 2012
Dir. by Matt Piedmont - 1 hr. 25 min.

Official Trailer

by Clayton Hollifield

Look, "Casa de mi Padre" is a really weird movie.  It was funny, I enjoyed it, but damn, that was a weird movie.  There's a psychedelic trip scene, there's Matchbox cars, there's a giant animatronic white tiger or panther or whatever the hell it was.  Oh yeah, the entire thing is in Spanish, as well.  Even Will Ferrell only speaks Spanish for (nearly) the entire film.

Here's the basic overview (although, as is frequently the case with comedies, it's the execution that matters more than plot points): Armando (Ferrell) works on his father's ranch, along with his friends Esteban (Efran Ramirez) and Manuel (Adrian Martinez).  Armando's brother, Raul (Diego Luna), returns home with his bride-to-be, Sonia (Genesis Rodriguez).  But Raul is mixed up in some shady business, and Armando falls for his brother's girl.  And rival drug dealers do what rival drug dealers do.

The bottom line for me was that when I saw the trailers for this film, I knew I'd have to see it.  If I've suffered through "Semi-Pro," then I was going to have to see exactly how Ferrell was going to pull off a film done entirely in Spanish.  As it turns out, it's really, really weird.  And it works at times.  Subtitles really are the enemy of comedy; they are necessary, but distract from being able to watch the actors, you know, act.  Some of the humor comes from this - the characters will do things that you can't play close attention to while you're reading subtitles, and then you'll look up and Onza (Gael Garcia Bernal) has two lit cigarettes in his mouth.  There's also a lot of visual humor, things like Armando awkwardly helping Sonia onto a horse that don't sound very funny, but the execution is there.  It also continues the trend of the year of Nick Offerman popping up once or twice, being awesome, and disappearing for the rest of the film (just like "21 Jump Street")

But a weird movie, and an intermittently funny movie, do not necessarily equal a good comedy.  It's not bad, and there are a couple of inspired moments (the barroom scene with Armando, Raul, and Onza is one such, as are a couple of musical numbers, one at a campfire and the other at the end of the film, and there's a fight between some coyotes and the white jungle cat that's got to be seen to be believed), and I did laugh all the way through.  But often, the laughter was out of wondering where the hell what's in "Casa de mi Padre" came from.  I was on board from the point when I saw the trailer, and if you were hooked like I was, I don't think there's any way you'd be disappointed from what you saw.

But again, this isn't exactly a good movie.  It's a really weird low-budget comedy that Will Ferrell must've wanted to do, and it's fun, but it's also apparent in the first five minutes of the movie that one of the challenges of the film was always going to be how to extend the jokes that they had into a feature-length film.  There's enough success to warrant watching "Casa de mi Padre," but it might not be one of Ferrell's movies that you return to over and over again.

2.5 / 5 - Blu-Ray

21 Jump Street - 2012

"21 Jump Street" - 2012
Dir. by Phil Lord and Chris Miller - 1 hr. 49 min.

Official Trailer

by Clayton Hollifield

Going in, I was simply hoping that this would be as good as "Starsky & Hutch."  Of all the TV show remakes, that represents the baseline of entertainment I hope to get out of these kinds of films.  Often times, the only option for resurrecting these franchises is to turn the largely-forgotten situations into a comedy.  There's no good excuse for digging up these corpses (which is the point of Nick Offerman's scene here, playing a police captain), but that doesn't mean that the result is legally required to suck.  Thankfully, "21 Jump Street" understands that, and thankfully does not suck.

First disclaimer: I never watched the original TV show, therefore I do not have any nostalgia for it (nor any awareness of what may or may not have been borrowed for this updated version).  I am aware that Johnny Depp was in the TV show with something called a "Richard Grieco," but that's as far as my knowledge goes.  So let's get into the movie!

The set-up is simple: the two main characters are introduced in high school, where Jenko (Channing Tatum) is a popular jock, and Schmidt (Jonah Hill) is Slim-Shady wannabe, considerably less popular.  Post-graduation, they both end up in Police Academy, and strike up a friendship based on mutual need: Jenko is athletically-inclined but not very smart, and Schmidt is smart, yet not very athletic.  They manage to get each other through, and end up partners as bicycle cops.  When that goes sour, they are enrolled in an undercover program due to their young appearances, and they are placed into a high school where a new drug has popped up.  Goal: infiltrate, and figure out who the supplier is.  Once in the school, they find their roles have reversed since they were students: Jenko's bone-headedness makes him an outcast, and Schmidt's nerdy impulses manage to ingratiate him into the popular crowd.

There are a couple of things that make this movie work pretty well, aside from being pretty funny (if "The Sitter" was possibly the worst thing that Jonah Hill has done, this movie rests in the top half of his work).  First, the role-reversal sub-plot is a solid one.  By the end of the second act, Jenko gets a good taste of what high school must've been like for Schmidt, and Schmidt's sudden, unexpected popularity feeds his need for approval, to the point where he's willing to throw Jenko under the bus at the slightest provocation.  It's a pretty honest look at that comedic dynamic: everything exists solely to feed popularity, and it feels a lot better than alienation.  The other aspect that I really enjoyed was a sort of meta-awareness of the film: it's not oblivious to the absurdity of humping the corpse of an old TV show (the aforementioned Nick Offerman scene goes a long way in that service), nor the absurdity of the standard action tropes (Ice Cube plays Captain Dickson, an Angry Black Man, putting his famous scowl to great use, and there's great running gag about explosions, as well), but it doesn't let that self-awareness get in the way of a good comedy.

And that's the key point, this is a good comedy.  Moreso if you're a Jonah Hill fan - there's a feast of his usual motor-mouthing and dick jokes, which I don't have any problem with.  Channing Tatum is a lot of fun to watch as his character struggles with his movie-star good looks not getting the results that you'd expect.  But he does learn a healthy respect for science, so not all is lost.  The two characters work well off of one another, and this movie doesn't take much seriously other than zipping along and being funny.  Those are pretty important things to focus on, and I was pleasantly surprised that "21 Jump Street" ended up being a lot of fun.

3.5 / 5 - Theatre