This is the End - 2013

"This is the End" - 2013
Dir. by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg - 1 hr. 47 min.

Red Band Trailer

by Clayton Hollifield

"This is the End" is the movie to see if you want to see Seth Rogen freaking out and saying "oh fuck" over and over again.  This is your jam!  Or, if you'd like to see any number of the Class of 2004 from Hollywood all in one film.  To be sure, there is more to "This is the End" than just that, but those are probably the only two guaranteed things are sure to guarantee your enjoyment.  It's better to look at this film as being a Christmas present that the stars of this film have sent to their fan club members, a sort of thank-you for having been along for the ride.

Jay (Baruchel - this is a movie where everyone is playing "themselves," or at least playing off their image) arrives at the airport in Los Angeles, where he's picked up by his friend, Seth (Rogen).  They indulge in some vintage Rogen relaxation techniques before Seth gets Jay to begrudgingly agree to go to a Big Hollywood Party at James Franco's place.  Seth fits in, but Jay has a chip on his shoulder, which becomes a problem when all Hell breaks loose!!!  I mean that literally; the rapture has come, the pious ascend to Heaven in a beam of blue light, and the Earth opens up to swallow the sinners.  When things calm down a bit, five men are left standing in James Franco's house: James, Jay, Seth, Craig (Robinson), and Jonah (Hill).  After the required freak-out session, they all go to sleep, and wake up to find that Danny (McBride) has shown up, and has cooked all of their supplies into a giant breakfast feast.  Let the squabbling commence!!!

There are two big "ifs" as to whether you're likely to enjoy "This is the End," and that's even before we get to the content of it.  Firstly, at least part of the humor of the film relies upon some knowledge of exactly who the actors are, in the first place.  If you don't care who Michael Cera is, for instance, you might still laugh at his actions, but you're not really getting the joke.  If you're someone who's been watching this loose cabal of actors since "The 40 Year-Old Virgin," you'll get a lot more out of it.  Secondly, there's the issue of whether or not you're willing to engage with something as utterly meta as a bunch of actors trying to play off of their public personae.  Insider Hollywood movies aren't anything new, but it's a genre that requires a lot of useless knowledge, and might be off-putting to some.  So be warned.

But if you're into all of that, there's some good times to be had.  A lot of the movie feels ad-libbed, and as such, there are a lot of great throwaway lines.  Also, considering the cast, it's inevitable that they would reference earlier work (and not just jokes about "Your Highness"), and this film contains a "sequel" to one of this cast's earlier films that had me rolling in laughter.  That was easily the highlight of the film, along with a shouting match between Danny McBride and James Franco.  And, this film is the land of one million cameos, which is fun in it's own right.  On the other hand, if you don't enjoy a film with admittedly funny actors bickering with one other, or aren't as amused by the idea of having an anatomically-correct fifty-foot tall demon as Seth Rogen seemed to be during his talk show appearance for this film, some of the material is going to fall flat.

I'm not going to pretend that I didn't laugh all the way through "This is the End," or that there weren't at least a couple of parts that absolutely killed me.  But "This is the End" simply isn't as sharp as any member of the cast's best work.  There are moments, there are "wouldn't it be funny to see ___" bits all over the place (shout out to Channing Tatum for the king of those), and the cast combined with the premise was enough to make me want to see "This is the End" in the first place, but it didn't prove to be enough to result in a great (or even very good) film.  So, if you're a fan of this batch of actors, enjoy this the way you'd enjoy a b-sides album by one of your favorite bands.  You know there's a reason these ideas weren't included before, but there are still a few nuggets of gold to be found if you search a little bit.

2 / 5 - TV (HD)

Tropic Thunder - 2008

"Tropic Thunder" - 2008
Dir. by Ben Stiller - 2 hours

Official Red Band Trailer

by Clayton Hollifield

Every few years, Ben Stiller comes out with a film that justifies wading through his more mainstream fare.  Usually, it's one that he's directed himself (which is a pretty short of films, considering he's been acting in films for over twenty years), and the idea behind it is batshit insane.  "Tropic Thunder" is one of the Ben Stiller movies that makes dealing with "The Heartbreak Kid" or "Along Came Polly" almost worth it.

"Tropic Thunder" is sort of a movie about making a movie; Tugg Speedman (Stiller) is one of the stars of a film adaptation of a book of the same name, about one man's experiences during the Vietnam War.  Speedman is a fading action star, and the rest of the cast is rounded out by Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey, Jr.), a critical darling who is also an unspeakably committed method actor, Alpa Chino (Brandon T. Jackson), a crossover rap star who constantly hawks his own merchandise, Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black), a strung-out comedian who makes movies in the vein of "Big Momma's House," and Kevin Sandusky (Jay Baruchel), an unknown actor.  This combination of egos and star-power are a headache for director Damien Cockburn (Steve Coogan), who is completely unable to wrangle the actors.  He is given the genius idea of shooting guerrilla style and dropping the actors into the jungles of Vietnam, which predictably goes awry.

Now, the idea behind the film is pretty solid, but the execution is damned near flawless.  Not only does the humor come from the characters, but the characters are as insane as you'd think a batch of famous actors would be, and then some.  But a lot of that rests on the stars' shoulders.  I can't immediately think of another film in many years where one of the leads spends the entire film essentially in blackface (that would be Downey, Jr.), another is playing a comedian strung out on heroin (Black), and the third is as dumb as the characters he plays (Stiller), and then not only get away with it, but end up being praised for it, but here we are.

One of the things that really helps is that the actors don't really ever wink to the camera.  They're all fully immersed in being dumb and being really aggressive about that (which is a proven comedy formula), and that helps when you end up having to root for these guys even though they'd all seem really awful people on the surface.  But you see that these people are behaving in a manner consistent with their personalities, and are not transparently playing that for laughs.  You can see this in the scene where Tugg plays with a severed head, trying to convince his castmates that the game is on; it's not a case of Ben Stiller playing with a head because he wants the shock value, it's Tugg playing a character trying to convince his castmates that the head is a prop because he's too dumb to realize that he's holding a dripping, leaking head in his hands.  So when Tugg eventually gets in trouble (because of course he's going to), you can't really fault him for doing dumb things.  He's a dumb man, he can't help that.  But he believes in what he's doing, and that goes a long way.

It's also very difficult to make a movie like this without actually being able to make a movie that looks like this.  Parodies can be fantastic because of their seeming amateurishness, but making a movie that looks like a  full-on action movie just to be able to make fun of some of the things in it (and this is not a parody of a war film, it's the batch of actors that the actors are playing that are the source of and the butt of pretty much every joke present) is much more subversive.  There's a wide range of kinds of movies shown in "Tropic Thunder," and the beginning sequence of faux-trailers that introduce the characters (and this is both succinct and a brilliant way to introduce a series of characters) either has to work like it's real or look completely like trash. And they look legit.  The film looks legit.  You've got those swooping helicopter shots that show the denseness of the jungle and then a village or something as transition shots (not just once, either), and those aren't even for humorous purposes!  It's just that if you make a war movie in the jungle, that shot's going to be in there.

"Tropic Thunder" is so funny it makes me a little angry that there isn't more with these characters.  I'd seriously watch any of the movies in the fake trailers, or anything with Tugg Speedman in it at all.  I'll probably have to settle for watching "Zoolander" again, and then I'll get mad that "Zoolander 2" isn't out yet.  It's times like that I weaken and start to consider re-watching "Meet the Fockers" or "Starsky & Hutch," and when I do, I'll start to get disappointed that they aren't more "Zoolander" or more "Tropic Thunder."  That's how Ben Stiller will get you.  Every five or six years, he'll do a genius comedy that you just can't dislodge from your head.  And then, for the next five or six years, you'll go see what he's been doing, hoping and failing to recapture that magic.  And then, right when Ben Stiller feels you start to slip, boom.  "Zoolander 2."

Hooked again.

4 / 5 - Blu-Ray