Movie Review: Storks

Storks

Directed by: Nicholas Stoller & Doug Sweetland.

Written by: Nicholas Stoller.

Starring: Andy Samberg (Junior), Katie Crown (Tulip), Kelsey Grammer (Hunter), Jennifer Aniston (Sarah Gardner), Ty Burrell (Henry Gardner), Anton Starkman (Nate Gardner), Keegan-Michael Key (Alpha Wolf), Jordan Peele (Beta Wolf), Danny Trejo (Jasper), Stephen Kramer Glickman (Pigeon Toady), Christopher Nicholas Smith (Dougland), Awkwafina (Quail).

 

Storks is a fairly typical modern animated film from Hollywood in that it’s the type of film that basically just throws everything at the wall and hopes something sticks. The plot is rather thin, and would probably fall apart if you examined it too closely, but as you watch the film you never really do, as you’re buried under the deluge of jokes that is nearly constant. Because the animation is good, and the voice cast appealing, I found most of Storks to be a fun little film – my clearly delighted 5-year-old daughter sitting next to me only helped me to appreciate the film more. It’s a rather shallow movie to be sure – but it does have a moment right near the end that snuck up on me so effectively, I nearly cried.

 

The film centers on Junior (Andy Samberg) – the best delivery stork for Cornerstore.com. Storks stopped delivering babies 18 years ago, when one stork fell in love with the baby he was supposed to deliver, and ending up smashing her honing beacon, so they had no way to deliver her. This is Tulip (Katie Crown) – who ending up being raised by the storks, but really just gets in the way a lot, with her well-meaning, but overall disastrous plans.  Junior is informed that he’s going to be made the boss on Monday – when the current boss, Hunter (Kelsey Grammer) is promoted. The only thing he has to do is “liberate” Tulip. Instead of doing that, he puts her in the letter room – which is never used anymore – and once again, she messes up – putting the letter of a little boy asking for baby brother into the baby making machine – and out pops an adorably baby girl. The rest of the movie alternates between Junior and Tulip trying to deliver the baby girl with no one finding out, the chase that happens when they are eventually discovered, and that little boy and his parents (Ty Burrell and Jennifer Aniston), preparing for their new arrival – even though the parents “know: Storks don’t deliver babies anymore.

 

Storks is a movie that I found to be fairly consistently engaging. Samberg, as always, is a playing a lovable goofball, who just generates goodwill for his character – and he’s matched by Katie Crown – the rare time in a studio movie of this size, where they have the good sense to cast a non-star – just someone really, really good at voice work – in a leading role. In the supporting cast – as good as people like Grammer, playing the stick in the mud boss, and Keye and Peele – as a pair of wolves, arguing over who is alpha and who is beta, who fall in love with the baby – are, it’s Stephen Kramer Glickman who steals every scene he’s in as Pigeon Toady – who a Dudebro who would be insufferably annoying if he wasn’t so funny.

 

I’m not going to argue that Storks is a particularly brilliant film – it is pretty much instantly forgettable once you leave the theater, even for my 5 year old. She still talks about Zootopia, Finding Dory and even The Secret Life of Pets (although we had to leave that one an hour in because of snakes), but while she enjoyed Storks while we watched it, she hasn’t brought it up since. If it wasn’t for a beautiful scene of inclusivity near the end of the film – the one that nearly made me cry because it was so touching – I’d say that as enjoyable as Storks is, you won’t likely remember it a week later. As it stands, I’ll remember that sequence a lot longer than I remember the rest of the film, no matter who enjoyable it was.

Movie Review: Neighbors

Neighbors
Directed by: Nicholas Stoller.
Written by: Andrew J. Cohen & Brendan O'Brien.
Starring: Seth Rogen (Mac Radner), Rose Byrne (Kelly Radner), Zac Efron (Teddy Sanders), Dave Franco (Pete), Ike Barinholtz (Jimmy), Carla Gallo (Paula), Brian Huskey (Bill Wazowkowski), Halston Sage (Brooke), Christopher Mintz-Plasse (Scoonie), Jerrod Carmichael (Garf), Craig Roberts (Assjuice), Lisa Kudrow (Dean Carol Gladstone). 

It’s been nine years since Judd Apatow's The 40 Year Old Virgin came out and introduced a number of comedies about grown men still acting like teenagers, who eventually start to grow up with the help of a perfect woman. Some of those comedies are hilarious, but over the years they’ve started to grow a little stale. It may not have been the best career move for Katherine Heigl to badmouth Knocked Up – the one film of her career audiences generally liked – but she wasn’t necessarily wrong to suggest that the women in these movies are not nearly as well defined as the men. Neighbors strikes me somewhat as a missed opportunity on that front – here for the first time, the best, most well defined character in the film is a woman – played wonderfully by Rose Byrne – and yet the movie spends so much time with juvenile males playing juvenile pranks on each other, that Byrne is too often shunted to the background. I would have gladly watched an entire movie centered on Byrnes character – instead I spent far too much time watching Seth Rogen and Zac Efron acting like idiots.

The film is about a married couple with a 6 month old daughter. Mac (Rogen) and Kelly (Byrne) still view themselves as young and cool, but are facing the reality of all first time parents that they are no longer that version of themselves – they have entered a new phase of their lives that will eventually end with them becoming their parents – which is the last thing they want to be. They are forced to face this fact when a fraternity moves into the house next door, after burning down their last house. Mac and Kelly want to appear cool to these kids – even going so far as to party with the frat on their first night in the house. But soon the parties grow louder, and all they want is to be able to sleep – and to keep their baby sleeping. When they call the cops to complain about the noise one night, they set off a war between themselves and the fraternity’s leader – Teddy (Efron) – a senior who wants nothing more to be a legend in the frats history. He's slowly starting to realize that soon he will be out in the real world and his brothers – like Pete (Dave Franco) will move onto the real world, while Teddy, who barely attends class, will be left behind.

There are seeds of good ideas in Neighbors. There are not a lot of movies about young parents dealing with the fact that their youth is over, and now they have to be responsible parents. There are even fewer movies about college life where the students have to have to deal with the fact that they have to grow up as well. A good movie could mine this material to make a smart comedy about these two crossroads in people's lives.

Unfortunately, Neighbors doesn’t seem too interested in exploring these transitions. Instead, the film simply devolves into a series of pranks and counter-pranks between the frat and the parents. The movie twists itself into knots to ensure that Mac and Kelly have nowhere to go with their complaints (which isn’t remotely realistic) – but it’s one of those things you simply have to accept and move on. Some of the pranks are actually kind of funny – but for the most part, I didn’t really laugh out loud at any moments in Neighbors – although it did induce more than a few smiles. Rogen is essentially playing his typical self, although his slight move towards maturity is welcome, even if he’s not too much more mature. Efron continues his quest to try and do something other than his typical teen idol stuff – and shows he has the goods, even if the movie doesn’t much use him as well as it could.

Best of all is Byrne, who is the only person in the movie playing something resembling a realistic person. Her character allows her to get down and dirty with the boys – which is a nice change from what I would normally assume would be a nagging wife role (where she’s stuck complaining about Rogen's need to grow up) – but even when she does the juvenile stuff, it seems to be coming from a more realistic place. I could have done without what is one of the movies biggest laughs – the boobspolition if you will – essentially because I didn’t find it very funny, although Byrne is game for that too.

To me, I think Neighbors represents at least a slight move in the right direction for Rogen, director Stoller and the Judd Apatow era of comedy movies in generally – finally acknowledging that eventually everyone has to grow up. Unfortunately, the movie gets bogged down in the juvenile crap, and shunts everything interesting about the movie off to the side.

DVD Review: The Five Year Engagement

The Five Year Engagement
Directed by: Nicholas Stoller.
Written by: Jason Segel & Nicholas Stoller.
Starring: Jason Segel (Tom Solomon), Emily Blunt (Violet Barnes), Chris Pratt (Alex Eilhauer), Alison Brie (Suzie Barnes-Eilhauer), Lauren Weedman (Chef Sally), Mimi Kennedy (Carol Solomon), David Paymer (Pete Solomon), Jacki Weaver (Sylvia Dickerson-Barnes), Jim Piddock (George Barnes), Dakota Johnson (Audrey), Rhys Ifans (Winton Childs), Mindy Kaling (Vaneetha), Randall Park (Ming), Kevin Hart (Doug), Brian Posehn (Tarquin).

I kind of feel bad that I didn’t really like The Five Year Engagement. After all, one of my most stated complaints about romantic comedies is that they always end just when things are starting to interesting – that is, when the couple who has been held apart the entire movie actually start a real relationship, which is way harder than the meet-cutes and misunderstanding that dogged them the entire movie. The Five Year Engagement on the other hand starts where most of these movies end – with the man proposing to his girlfriend. And rather than leave it at that, with a happily ever after that glosses over how difficult relationships can be, the movie really does show us how difficult they are. I just wish the film itself was better – because the idea behind the movie is quite good. But director/co-writer Nicholas Stoller and co-writer/star Jason Segel never find the right tone for the movie. It lurches between slapstick comedy, which isn’t very funny, to that new breed of awkward comedy, that in this case is much more awkward than funny, and seriousness that is trying too hard. There is probably a reason why more movies like this aren’t made – they’re too damn hard to get right.

The movie stars Segel as Tom, a chef working in San Francisco, who proposes to his girlfriend Violent (Emily Blunt) on New Year’s Eve. Things seem to be going perfectly when their life is turned upside down. Violent doesn’t getting the teaching position she wanted at Berkley – but does get into a program for Research Assistants at the University of Michigan. Tom agrees to go with her to Michigan – only for a couple of years before she can get another job out West – and in the process turns down a major promotion. Now, stuck in Michigan, Violent becomes successful and happy at work, and Tom is stuck working at a sandwich shop – a good one, but still it’s a sandwich shop. And their seemingly perfect relationship starts to go wrong.

In theory, I like the idea of this movie. Although it is produced by Judd Apatow, and is the same Stoller/Segel team that made Forgetting Sarah Marshall, The Five Year Engagement is an attempt to be more mature than the previous films – to give a level of complexity to its female star the other films did not have, and not just make her the personification of female perfection who drags her overgrown man child boyfriend into adulthood behind her. Yet the movie can never really find the right notes to make all this work – Segel is still an overgrown man child, but this time he has a legitimate gripe with how everything has turned out, not that it excuses the creepy, bunny suit wearing, mustachioed loser he becomes. And while Blunt is given a role with more complexity to play here – she isn’t just rolling her eyes and throwing up her hands and saying “Boys will be boys” like so many other women in these movies, she is still much harder to get a read on than Tom. Does she, who is apparently in the psychology department, not see what is happening to Tom, or does she not want to see? Does she really think it’s fair that Tom has had to sacrifice everything so that she can get what she wants? We know from the beginning of their trip to Michigan that something will happen between her and her boss – Rhys Ifans – but did it all have to play out so predictably?

As it stands, The Five Year Engagement lurches from one scene to the next and never really finds itself. It tries to be too much – and as a result it ends up doing none of it very well. The idea is there for a great movie – but The Five Year Engagement comes nowhere close.

Movie Review: Get Him to the Greek

Get Him to the Greek *** ½
Directed By: Nicholas Stoller.

Written By: Nicholas Stoller based on characters created by Jason Segal.

Starring: Russell Brand (Aldous Snow), Jonah Hill (Aaron Green), Elisabeth Moss (Daphne Binks), Rose Byrne (Jackie Q.), Sean 'P. Diddy' Combs (Sergio Roma), Colm Meaney (Jonathan Snow), Lino Facioli (Naples), Lars Ulrich (Himself).

Get Him to the Greek is one of the most pleasant surprises of the year. The previews made this film look horribly unfunny and strained – so much so that I wondered why Jonah Hill and Russell Brand had agreed to reprise their supporting roles in Forgetting Sarah Marshall and become the leads this time. But the film itself is nothing like the preview – which made the film look like a never ending stream of shit and dick jokes. Yes, they have those in the final film as well, but there is also a lot more in Get Him to the Greek. The two leads are wonderful together, and more than that, they are actually playing real characters. There is something going on beneath the surface of the film.

The film stars Brand as Aldous Snow, Britain’s most infamous rock star whose career is in freefall. His ex-wife, Jackie Q. (Rose Bryne), has become a pop sensation, while his last album, African Child, was described as the worst thing to happen to Africa since Apartheid. He is so far gone on drugs and alcohol that he doesn’t care about anything else in his life. Jonah Hill is Aaron Green, a low level employee at a record label run by Sergio Roma (Sean “P. Diddy” Combs), who has an idea. The following month will be the 10 year anniversary of Snow’s legendary performance at the Greek theater in L.A. – which inspired one of the best selling live albums of all time. His idea is to put on a show there again. Sergio agrees, and sends Aaron off to London to collector Snow, bring him to New York for an appearance on the Today Show, and then out to L.A. for the concert. What should be simple turns out to be horribly complicated.

The film has the Apatow stamp of approval on it, but somewhat refreshingly, this is not another story of an overgrown man child, who is saved by the love of a beautiful woman, who is reality, would never look at him. True, Aaron has a girlfriend (Elisabeth Moss), who is training to be a doctor, but her in no way saves Aaron. They are already in a committed, normal relationship when the movie opens – but of course a fight right before he is to go away puts their relationship in doubt. On Aldous’ part, he still thinks he is in love with Jackie, but in reality, he is so far gone on drugs that he doesn’t love anything except drugs. But in a strange way, these two save each other.

The movie stars off with a bang – an Entertainment Tonight segment on the set of Snow’s African Child video, which struck me, and apparently everyone in the movie as well, as horribly offensive and racist – but is also hilarious. The key to this song, as with all the other songs in the movie, is that they sound close enough to reality that we can accept them as real songs, by real artists, but they are made ridiculous by the lyrics, which are over the top and hilarious. The film then details Snow’s break up with his wife, and his years of hard living through a series of magazine covers and video clips (in which people as varied as Pink and Christina Aguilera poke fun of themselves wonderfully). I loved this opening segment, and the fun never really stopped from then on. The wonderfully awkward first meeting between Snow and Aaron, the wild night of partying in London, which doesn’t seem all that fun. The horrible appearance on the Today Show. In these early scenes, the jokes come fast and furious (there is actually a great 2 Fast 2 Furious joke when they get to Vegas now that I think about it), but writer/director Nicholas Stoller is actually doing something a little more complex here. He is building the characters through these early scenes, so that as the movie progresses, you actually grow to care about these two guys and their problems. Yes, the movie is littered with ridiculous situations, but Snow is a rock star, who to steal a line from the upcoming The A-Team, specializes in the ridiculous. You believe that these two would actually be everywhere they are.

The key to the movie is the performances. In Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Brand proved that he could be hilarious in a supporting role. There was no depth to Snow in that film – he was a caricature of the over the top rock star, and Brand played it remarkably well. Here, asked to take that caricature and make a real person out of him, Brand succeeds marvelously. I have no doubt now that if they do actually go ahead with the planned Arthur remake with him in the lead role, that he can match Dudley Moore. Not to be outdone, Jonah Hill is given what is easily the best role of his career so far. In films like Superbad, Hill has proven that he can be funny, and belt out one liners with the best of them. But here, like Brand, his character is deeper and more mature. He acts very much like a guy who thinks his girlfriend just dumped him would act. He idolizes Snow, but soon begins to see the reality of his situation as well. Along with the one liners, and the puke jokes, there is some real self loathing going on in this movie.

Director Nicholas Stoller is still developing. This is his second film after Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and he still doesn’t quite have the chops of Apatow himself, or the best of the directors associated with him. But he’s getting better, and there are fewer missed opportunities here than there were in the first film. Get Him to the Greek is perhaps the funniest movie of the year so far.