More Of The Same: Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues Still Entertains!

The Good: Very funny, Decent performances
The Bad: Predictable plot and character arcs
The Basics: Cameos and incongruently hilarious lines (along with a surprising amount of social commentary), make Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues a worthwhile sequel!


As we reach the end of the year, I find myself catching movies I missed over the last year. I was actually surprised to discover that Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues came out a whole year ago! I guess that illustrates how excited I was about the Anchorman sequel. My wife, however, is a huge fan of Will Ferrell, so with the release of the trailer to Get Hard, she’s been eager to catch up on the Ferrell films she’s missed over the last two years. We started with Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues. We opted for the extended edition of Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues because what the hell is the point of the theatrical version when you can have half an hour more of Ron Burgundy?!

Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues picks up right after Anchorman (reviewed here!) and for those who have not seen the first film, there is almost no humor in the movie that depends upon the first film. In fact, outside the introduction of Brick Tamland, the humor in Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues stands entirely on its own. But for those who are fans of Anchorman, while Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues is enjoyable, it is largely a continuation of what came before without much new . . . other than the lines. Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues is funny and continues the humor of Anchorman which worked best as a collection of hilarious lines, more than a humorous narrative. Like the first one, Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues is the funniest when it is just playing with funny lines as opposed to moving the film in wacky directions.

After the success of Ron Burgundy and Veronica Corningstone working on the nightly news in San Diego, the pair moves to New York City. There, Veronica is offered a position as a major network news anchor and Ron Burgundy is fired. Six months later, Ron Burgundy is working at Sea World, getting drunk, fired and then unsuccessfully trying to kill himself. Offered a position at GNN, a new 24-hour news network in New York City, by Freddie Shapp immediately after his aborted suicide attempt, Ron Burgundy reunites his old news team to take the job at the cable news company. After getting Champ Kind, Brian Fantana, and Brick Tamland out of their current situations, the quartet goes to New York City where they meet their new boss, Linda (where they are shocked by working for a black woman).

Ron Burgundy adapts poorly to working at the cable station where the primetime anchor, Jack Lime, is better-looking and more popular than he is. While Brick falls for a secretary working for GNN, Ron ends up in a fight with Jack. Challenged to beat Jack’s ratings, despite being at the 2 A.M. timeslot, Ron creates soft news (infotainment) in an attempt to win. When infotainment makes Burgundy a national hit, his formula leads him to unprecedented success. He begins to present his own stories – like smoking crack on the air – and the results are awards, women, and even more success. But Burgundy’s new relationship with his boss and his attempts to keep his old family (winning them back) leads him to real conflict that puts him at odds with his oldest friends. When sweeps week puts him at odds with his ex-wife and his news team,

Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues is, at best, a series of hilarious lines strung together by a thin plot involving Burgundy’s attempt to dominate cable news. As such, the film includes a pretty time-consuming subplot involving Brick and Chani, musical numbers, and otherwise incongruent comedic exchanges (condoms, horse piss, and the shock of working for a black boss). The film is funny, but is actually quite a bit smarter than one might expect.

Loaded with a social commentary that actually explores the degradation of journalism. While Burgundy creates feel-good pieces and ratingsbait, the commentary is actually impressive. Burgundy sinks a hard-hitting piece on how airplane parts are falling off planes and killing people because the corporate sponsors of GNN have a major stock interest in the airline that is criminally negligent. But, to appease the corporate owners of GNN, Burgundy eagerly jettisons the significant story in favor of a car chase. That Ron witlessly does the wrong thing is one thing, but as an audience able to evaluate the work, it is clear that writers Will Ferrell and Adam McKay had something to say.

It’s easy to overlook the commentary in Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues amid troublingly blatant jokes surrounding Ron Burgundy’s racism and the ridiculous plot development of Rob going blind. Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues starts to feel repetitive for those who have seen the first Anchorman as Ron refocuses his life on Veronica and his son. The film loses some of its focus as it transfers from being a story of an ambitious idiot working his way up the cable news ladder to achieve popularity when it takes a right turn with Ron and his son Walter rehabilitate a shark they find washed up on the shore of the lighthouse Ron moves into after he goes blind.

The performances in Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues are exactly what one expects from a Will Ferrell film that utilizes the strongly comedic cast that was assembled for the first film, along with newcomers (to the franchise) like Kristen Wiig, James Marsden, and Meagan Good. Even Dylan Baker, who usually plays straightlaced, powerful dramatic characters, plays Freddie as goofy and hilarious which is unlike any other performance of his I have seen.

The leads in Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues: Will Ferrell, David Koechner, Steve Carell, and Paul Rudd each reclaim their roles from the first film and they manage to make their characters distinct and funny. The film is funny, entertaining, and has more substance and commentary than the first, though it is more repetitive and familiar than it is audacious and originally. Still, Anchorman 2: The Legend Continued is worth watching!

For other works with David Koechner, be sure to visit my reviews of:
Cheap Thrills
Piranha 3DD
Paul
Extract
The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard
Sex Drive
Get Smart
Let’s Go To Prison
Farce Of the Penguins
Thank You For Smoking
The 40 Year Old Virgin
Waiting . . .

5.5/10

For other movie reviews, please check out my Film Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2014 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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The Superior Employee Of The Month: Mitch Rouse Makes A Refreshingly Dark Satire!

The Good: Funny, Dark, Well-written, Develops very well
The Bad: Moments of performance
The Basics: Employee Of The Month is a strong anti-capitalist satire that takes an abrupt, but well-constructed, turn in the last fifteen minutes into an entirely different type film.


For the last few years, pretty much since the moment we met, my wife has wanted me to watch the film Employee Of The Month. Initially, this made me queasy, as I thought it meant she liked films like the movie by that name with Dane Cook and Jessica Simpson (reviewed here!). Fortunately for me, she meant the dark satire Employee Of The Month with Matt Dillon, Christina Applegate, and Dave Foley. Also fortunately for the both of us, after years of waiting, Employee Of The Month lived up to her memories and my expectations.

Unfortunately, Employee Of The Month is a movie one cannot fully discuss or appreciate without spoiling the end. I, however, refuse to do that. As a result, I shall say that Employee Of The Month takes an abrupt left turn in the final fifteen minutes, turning from a dark, character-driven story of a man whose luck takes a turn for the absolute worst, into a Bound-like crime/heist film that bears almost no resemblance to the socially-relevant anti-capitalist film that preceded it. Without spoiling the end, one of the only real problems with Employee Of The Month (that can be discussed without ruining it) is that much of the film is telegraphed by the acting and the plot points. To be honest, I did not call the end (at all), but when the abrupt bank robbery occurs, the moment David’s body is taken by the robbers, the rest of the film did seem surprisingly formulaic.

It is not at all enough to make Employee Of The Month not worth watching. In fact, this is one of the best, underrated, films I have seen in quite a while.

David Walsh is an unhappy employee at North & Wells Bank, where he has worked for two years, struggling to get ahead. Two days before his benefits are supposed to kick in, he is fired by the head of the branch. His screw-up friend, Jack, who was responsible for the burns that David bears on half his body to this day, crashes his engagement party and makes his dislike of his fiancé, Sara, quite clear. But, the night he is fired, Sara’s parents come to town and Sara dumps David at the restaurant they have dinner at, using David’s affair with Wendy (who also works at the bank) as her primary reason for leaving him.

So, David gets a gun, spends the night hanging out with Jack, and prepares for the next day when he intends to go to work and kill his co-workers at North & Wells.

Employee Of The Month seems, for almost the entire movie, like a dark character study of a man who is pushed to the edge by a capitalistic enterprise that illustrates no real regard for the human cost of its own self-perpetuation. The forces at the bank that are most heinous to Dave, Bill (the manager) and his son-in-law, Kyle, are monolithically evil. Bill is racist, angry, and domineering and Kyle is an adulterous, slimy young man who only seems to have risen as high as he has because he is the manager’s son-in-law. Writers Jay Leggett and Mitch Rouse (who also directed the film), have real issues with authority figures and their hypocrisy, as Sara’s father, who is a priest, menaces Dave following their dinner together (with an especially personal threat of wishing he could set the man, who has visible burned skin, on fire!). Employee Of The Month is dark, but cuts deepest at the forces of power and control in the world.

In fact, part of what makes Employee Of The Month such an instantly, viscerally pleasurable movie is how it pokes at the institutions of power and control, especially capitalism, and explores how rebellion is inevitable. In fact, the presiding theme in Employee Of The Month is “they had it coming.” This is, in part, why the film seems so odd in the abrupt left turn that it takes near its (almost) end. But, once the reversal, that begins with Dave walking out of knocking out his boss and into the bank lobby where there is a robbery in process, occurs, Rouse and Leggett set the film up for all of the reversals that follow. In other words, Employee Of The Month is shockingly, delightfully, unpredictable . . . until the moment it mortgages its linear narrative that is building up to the “will he or won’t he” of the alluded-to killing spree at the bank for a caper film that is almost formulaic in its reversals of fortune.

That does not make it any less pleasant, though.

Employee Of The Month stars Matt Dillon in another one of his heavy roles, where he plays what appears to be a stone-cold killer with a very human heart and motivation. More than any other role I have seen Dillon in, his performance as Dave seems chameleonic; for too many of the beats, he seems to be playing Jim Carrey as Dave. Again, it is not bad enough to make the film not worth watching, but there were moments where he telegraphs his character’s next move with his eyes and plays the character in a way that seems far more like Jim Carrey instead of Dave.

Steve Zahn is likable, dark, and articulate as Jack and this is another memorable sidekick role for the actor. Christina Applegate is decent as Sara and it is always good to see Paul Dooley and Dave Foley on film. Despite its abrupt turns into a very different style of movie, Employee Of The Month remains compelling, engaging and, ultimately, worth watching on all fronts.

For other, similar, satires, check out:
God Bless America
Office Space
Matchstick Men

8/10

For other movie reviews, please visit my Movie Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2013 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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Anchorman: The Legend Of Ron Burgundy: Very Funny, But Very Average Comedy.

The Good: Funny, DVD bonus features, Generally the acting
The Bad: Somewhat repetitive humor
The Basics: Funny, but often a one-trick pony, Anchorman: The Legend Of Ron Burgundy excels on the acting front more than on the character or plot points.


Some part of me has come to entirely embrace the old axiom that it is easier to get work if you already have it. I come to this acceptance by way of watching more and more movies my wife loves. She is a big fan of films I derisively call "dumb comedies." She doesn't argue; she's looking for light fare full of dick and fart jokes, unburdened by social commentary. She wants foul language, nudity and jokes that are racy and while I have not, traditionally, been a fan of such fare, I have found a few that I enjoy. Largely, the ones that she enjoys are the works that feature Will Ferrell in them. She's a fan and there are a few works by or featuring Ferrell or from his production company that I have come to enjoy.

The latest in the parade of movies my partner has subjected me to is Anchorman: The Legend Of Ron Burgundy. This brings me back to my original premise. Having just seen The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard which is by the same creative team as Anchorman: The Legend Of Ron Burgundy and Talladega Nights: The Ballad Of Ricky Bobby, it is easy to see how the production company makes its friends and sticks with them. The primary cast for the three films is startlingly similar, especially with the troupe surrounding Ferrell. It seems David Koechner and Kathryn Hahn, for example, have comedic talents Ferrell and his team enjoy exploiting. The only problematic aspect of their continued cinematic associations is that they never seem to be asked to do anything other than their initial shtick. Fortunately, Ferrell and his team mix it up by infusing other talent, like Steve Carell and Christina Applegate into their otherwise familiar mix.

In Anchorman: The Legend Of Ron Burgundy, Will Ferrell plays Ron Burgundy, a newscaster in San Diego who is at the top of his game. He wins the nightly ratings battle for the attention of his audience and reports the news with his team, smoking and drinking his way through his sappy deliveries of the nightly news. In the 1970s, Burgundy becomes a legend and his arrogance grows, in part because he is surrounded by sycophants like Champ Kind, Brian Fantana, and weatherman Brick Tamland. But when diversity becomes the word of the day, Burgundy is teamed up with investigative reporter and newscaster Veronica Corningstone.

While Ron works to seduce Veronica, she finds his advances both annoying and charming. When they do hook up, Ron almost immediately violates their privacy by reporting the act. After further incidents which disrespect her, Veronica sets out for revenge. She gets it through Ron's Achilles heel; having Ron swear on air by simply changing his call line on the teleprompter. As Veronica takes over, Ron flounders and his team struggle to get on without him.

Anchorman: The Legend Of Ron Burgundy is essentially a mock documentary of the life of Ron Burgundy and the humor is derived largely from uncomfortable deadpans and such things as one of the characters (Brick) being mentally retarded and socially awkward. The reversals, like Ron promising Veronica he will not say anything about their sex immediately followed by him telling all of his friends, tend to happen quickly and be very predictable. This is not to say the film isn't funny, but it is a very standard sort of absurdist humor for which Will Ferrell is famous. That said, there's not much surprising here.

Ferrell presents Ron Burgundy as a stiff, strangely formal character whose on-air persona never goes away. As a result, when he tries to interact with friends or with Veronica, there come strange deliveries that seem inappropriate for the setting (imagine having a newscaster on a dinner date who spoke with the same deliveries as they did on-air). Ferrell is adept at the deliveries and he makes Ron Burgundy funny as a result. However, because most of the humor is related directly to either delivering the news or scoring with Veronica, much of the movie seems repetitive.

This is where DVD truly pushes a film up; in the bonus features, where Will Ferrell plays Ron Burgundy for an interview, the result is absolutely hilarious. Ferrell is fearless in his presentation of the parody opposite a serious interviewer and the result is comic gold. Similarly, the outtakes and deleted scenes are very funny.

What Anchorman: The Legend Of Ron Burgundy does best is lampoon the pretensions of the news industry, especially in the way it attempts to make information entertainment. Things like the repeated joke where Burgundy and his team stride toward the camera and look earnestly at it and one another effectively skewer the way actual news organizations try to blur the lines between disseminating information and keeping an audience hooked with personalities. Of course, the movie is not at all just social commentary, which is made evident by the battle royale that occurs between Ron Burgundy's news crew and those of the competing stations (which is little more than an excuse for cameos by people like Ben Stiller). That scene creates a parody of violence and offsets the predictable and slow moments revolving around the news story of the decade, a pregnant panda at the San Diego zoo.

All of the actors are thoroughly invested in their roles and it is hard to actually criticize the acting here. While Ferrell and Koechner do their usual schtick - they play off one another wonderfully - and Fred Willard plays the station manager pretty much exactly as any fan of his would predict, other performers nail their roles. Steve Carell, for example, establishes his dry wit on the big screen perfectly as Brick. He has a dry delivery that underplays any form of sarcasm and given that this is one of his roles before The Office, it is easy to see how he got that role. He plays Brick as a hapless mentally challenged individual and that works.

But the real standout for acting has to be Christina Applegate. Yes, Christina Applegate, whose fame was predicated on her looks, appears in Anchorman: The Legend Of Ron Burgundy as Veronica and she is impressive. Veronica is basically the straightman to Ron's absurdity and Applegate plays off Ferrell's over-the-top comic sense with an understated delivery that makes her the perfect foil. More than that, she plays Veronica as incredibly smart and she seems mature and intelligent enough to plausibly be in the place she is. Applegate is a surprise who steals all of her scenes.

This is quite a feat when one considers that much of the movie is spent with the characters staring at the camera delivering lines. When not doing that, Anchorman: The Legend Of Ron Burgundy is simple hoping to grab laughs off the look of the 1970s personas. Ron dresses in a maroon suit and he and his companions have big-70s hair. Those jokes replay less well than the satirical comments on the news industry but they still work.

Largely, though, Anchorman: The Legend Of Ron Burgundy is good, escapist humor that sets out to get some laughs and it does that. It does little more than that, but it works for what it is.

For other works with David Koechner, be sure to visit my reviews of:
Piranha 3DD
Paul
Extract
Sex Drive
Get Smart
Let’s Go To Prison
Farce Of the Penguins
Thank You For Smoking
The 40 Year Old Virgin
Waiting . . .

6/10

For other movie reviews, be sure to check out my Movie Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2012, 2009 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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Sighs Of The Viewers For Farce Of The Penguins

The Good: Moments of humor
The Bad: Humor is repetitive, Juvenile, Concept gets old very quickly, DVD Extras are more of same.
The Basics: Yeah, I laughed once or twice. But that's about all one might expect from Farce Of The Penguins.


A few years back, I went to the theaters to see the documentary The March Of The Penguins (reviewed here!) because it was supposed to be an astonishingly good documentary. I remember enjoying it, even if it was basically a PBS NOVA special on the big screen. When I heard that Bob Saget was doing a spoof of the film, I was mildly interested. I think I was more surprised when I found Farce Of The Penguins on DVD as I don't recall it actually coming to the theaters.

The story is simple: Samuel L. Jackson provides voice-over for the story of penguins traveling the seventy miles from food to their mates and their women then making the trek back and forth as well. Instead of telling anything remotely scholarly, Farce Of The Penguins becomes a buddy comedy between Carl and Jimmy, who are best friends. They wander back to their "bitches" (the movie's term, not mine) where they both score with the same penguin.

This is the type of movie that Farce Of The Penguins is. Various actors provide a line or two for various penguins and the film has an "assembled" quality to it that is less cohesive as it is filled with catch-phrases. The humor is pretty juvenile and banal, ranging from genital-size and fart jokes to breaking the fourth wall with penguins talking to the narrator. The average bit includes Gilbert Gottfried providing the line "I'm freezing my nuts off!" to the image of a shaking penguin and Norm MacDonald asking about joining in to a clip of a lone penguin walking around where two groups of penguins are mating. Yes, it's that outrageous and funny a movie.

The truth is, I did laugh once or twice during Farce Of The Penguins, but most of it was at the beginning when the idea of the movie was still fresh and almost all of the lines that I laughed at were delivered by Samuel L. Jackson. So much of the humor seemed forced, though, because the clips barely match a concept of what might be talked about by the penguins. So, for example, most of the women are relegated to generic jokes about parties, sanitary napkins and the club scene because the female penguins shown in the beginning are not truly doing anything.

This is like Mystery Science Theater 3000, save that the people participating have nothing terribly funny to say about the content. Most of the voice-over performers literally come in for one line (they are credited more by the lines they deliver than by character names because most of them don't even have character names). For example, John Stamos's cameo is as "What's Global Warming Penguin," can you guess what his line is?

I am surprised Farce Of The Penguins was given an "R" rating, though. Most of the content is sexually themed (but it's penguins and other animals having sex) and language elements; there is a fair amount of swearing and talk that sounds more like a lockerroom than anything else. The thing is, none of it is terribly clever . . . or genuinely funny. Instead, it just seems like a bunch of comedians walking in on a movie, making a comment and leaving. The few actors who provide voice-overs throughout (Samuel L. Jackson, Bob Saget, and Lewis Black) wear out their welcome because they basically start with a schtick and they get mired in it for the hour and a half that is this movie.

The bonus features on the DVD are equally uninspired. Bob Sagat provides a commentary track that explains why he bothered to make a parody of March Of The Penguins. Otherwise, there are previews for equally uninspired cinematic outings from Lionsgate and five deleted/extended scenes. The deleted scenes add nothing substantive to the film.

I enjoy documentaries and I loved the mocumentary Best In Show (reviewed here!). What that film had that Farce Of The Penguins lacked was a sense of timing and levels to it that it worked on. It told a story, mocked dog shows and Fred Willard provided a completely different experience as the crazy announced. Farce Of The Penguins just makes jokes over the stock footage of penguins doing their thing.

It is interesting to note that this spoof might have more relevance to those outside the United States of America. In other countries, in March Of The Penguins, the penguins were given personalities and lines, in the U.S. only Morgan Freeman had a voice.

But, ultimately, this is not a funny movie. Or the humor in it is repeated so often as to become droll and insipid.

For other animated films, please be sure to check out my reviews of:
Bolt
The Lord Of The Rings
Perfect Blue

2/10

For other film reviews, please be sure to visit my index page by clicking here!

© 2012, 2007 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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Hall Pass Might Not Be The Hangover, But It Is A LOT Of Fun!

The Good: Very funny, Moments of acting
The Bad: Characters follow very predictable arcs, Jokes are better than the whole.
The Basics: Hall Pass has charm and is funny, but many of the jokes work as well independent of the movie, which strains very hard to keep itself together and be fresh.


March is finally here and with it comes movies that might not necessarily suck.  I say that as I sit to review Hall Pass, which my wife and I took in last night because it was the final big film of the February Doldrums and it did not, rather nicely, suck.  February tends to be a dumping ground for terrible movies, but Hall Pass actually amuses more than it disappoints, which is probably why it is doing so well with critics and moviegoers.  But while I am able to recommend Hall Pass, it is tough to do so when March's early blockbusters are right around the corner.  Hall Pass is a fun flick, but it's not one that truly uses the canvass of the big screen especially well.

Hall Pass is exactly what it appears to be; a "guys night out" comedy flick which, ironically, my wife laughed at more than the five frat boys with whom we shared the theaters.  The humor is generally relationship and gross-out humor, as one might expect from Peter and Bobby Farrelly and their writing partners for the film, Pete Jones and Kevin Barnett.  The film is a big step up from last year's Hot Tub Time Machine (reviewed here!) which fills the same essential niche and was released around the same time.  But for those who are looking to go out to the movies to see something essential on the big screen, it is easy to pass Hall Pass by.  This probably could have been a straight-to-DVD release and not lost any real effect.

Rick and Fred are best friends living in suburbia as a realtor and insurance agent, both married to great women who don't understand quite why their eyes stray, even if they never cheat.  Inspired by a doctor friend of theirs, Maggie and Grace consider giving their men a "hall pass," a week off from marriage.  The idea is that because they married young, they didn't have the chance to "sow their wild oats" or they have forgotten the pain and rejection of dating their marriages saved them from.  So when the guys are touring a rich associate's house and end up on camera insulting the daylights out of all their comrades, the Maggie lets Rick out of their marriage for a week.  Shortly thereafter, after an embarrassing incident with the police and his car, Fred gets a hall pass from Grace as well.

With Maggie and Grace out at Cape Cod for a week, Rick and Fred begin to check out the social scene. The early days of their hall pass are spent dining well and falling asleep, getting wasted on pot brownies and getting rejected.  But as the week comes to a close - and the women find temptation in the form of a traveling baseball team on the Cape - Rick makes a move on Leigh, the barista at a local coffee shop and Fred falls into an initially appealing situation which takes a bizarre turn.

Right before watching Hall Pass, my wife described Why Did I Get Married? to me.  She described that movie as a film about a bunch of guys who sit around kvetching about how bad their wives are and wishing for the good old days of being single.  By the end of the movie, they apparently realize how great their wives are and take it all back.  Before seeing Hall Pass, we pretty much figured that would be what the flick was and it was.  The only substantive difference seems to be that Hall Pass opens with two guys who truly love their wives and who don't seriously consider cheating; they just want a little more sex in their lives, so they look at and think of other women from time to time.

Thus, it is pretty surprising it takes until late in the movie before Maggie realizes just how the idea of the hall pass is working for her and not for Rick.  Rick and Fred are exactly as hapless as Grace originally predicts and watching them becomes more painful than actually entertaining.  Their foibles are hardly as funny or even interesting as the setup insinuates it might be.  Instead, this is a film where the guys try to be something they are not and it becomes gutwrenching to watch in the middle act.  Fortunately, the big finish is worth sticking around for and the scene midway through the closing credits finally gives Steven Merchant a time to shine.  But in between, Hall Pass goes from being a relationship comedy to a pretty lame buddy comedy film and it is unsurprising that the laughs fall off for almost a half hour in the middle.

Ultimately, Hall Pass does not stand up as an even noteworthy character study largely because the characters travel along surprisingly predictable lines.  Rick is loyal like he appears at the outset, but curious about what might be available to him and Fred is jusy lame on the singles scene.  They are ably played by Owen Wilson and Jason Sudeikis, respectively.  Neither gives a particularly surprising performance, though Owen shows depth one usually associates with Luke Wilson as Rick has the epiphanies about his relationship with Maggie that his character made explicit pretty early on in the movie.

Hall Pass is dominated on the acting front by the strength of the supporting performances.  Steven Merchant is charming in his usual goofy way as Gary and Jenna Fischer and Christina Applegate give solid supporting performances.  But when Richard Jenkins finally appears as Coakley, that is when Hall Pass illustrates some genius in the casting department.  Jenkins, who usually plays dignified and articulate is perfectly smarmy as Coakley and he steals the late scenes of Hall Pass with no real effort.

There is enough in Hall Pass to enjoy, but it is not much more than an HBO-style comedy for the big screen.

For other films in theaters, check out my reviews of:
I Am Number Four
Unknown
The Green Hornet
Black Swan

6.5/10

For other film reviews, please visit my index page by clicking here!

© 2011 W.L. Swarts.  May not be reprinted without permission.

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Waiting To Be Charmed: Going The Distance Leaves Me Unimpressed.

The Good: One or two lines, One or two laughs
The Bad: Largely not funny, Terrible chemistry, Stiff acting, Underdeveloped plot, Pacing issues, Predictable.
The Basics: Drew Barrymore and Justin Long star in a romantic comedy that fizzles when they explore a long-term, long-distance relationship.


I like small, independent movies usually. There is a lot to find in this world that has gone largely unnoticed by the mainstream and independent cinema is a great place to find it. In fact, one of my favorite movies of all time, The Spitfire Grill (click here for review!) was a limited-released film. I have no inherent bias against small films and I mention this at the outset of my review of Going The Distance because I went into the movie relatively excited about what I was about to see. Unfortunately, it did not take long before I was not only bored, but frustrated with Going The Distance.

Some concepts just do not lend themselves well to a cinematic medium. Movies about long-distance relationships and the agony that comes with being apart from the one you love, now rank high on that list for me. To be fair to writer Nannette Burstein and director Geoff LaTulippe, who created Going The Distance, the deck was stacked against them from the beginning. A romantic comedy about long-distance relationships is tough to pull off. In ninety minutes (Going The Distance barely makes it to the one hundred minute mark, though it frequently feels quite a bit longer than that) the movie has to: establish a relationship that viewers will be interested in, provide the essential conflict, then make the conflict seem real enough to be compelling and different. Going The Distance fails on all fronts, leaving the audience cheated.

Garrett is having a bad night in midsummer when he does not buy his girlfriend, Amy, a gift and she dumps him. Erin, a thirty-one year-old summer intern at the New York Sentinel, is feeling rejected because one of her pieces was torn apart by the newspaper's editor, goes out to the same bar where Garrett and his friends are drowning their sorrows. When Garrett interrupts Erin's game of Centipede, he feels so bad that they have a beer, play a round of bar trivia and go home together for the night. The relationship continues the next morning with the understanding that Erin is returning for her final year of study at Stanford in six weeks and the "relationship" will not endure beyond that time. When the six weeks are up, however, the pair decides to make a go of it with a long-distance relationship.

Over the course of the next year, Garrett and Erin try to make the relationship work, from calls that they can't make one another because of the four hour time difference to surprise visits that have Garrett meeting Erin's family, their relationship is maintained. But the essential conflict comes from Erin's inability to get work in the newspaper business in New York City and Garrett's failure to find any work in the music industry in San Francisco. The longer they are apart, the more they have to wonder if their relationship is worth it.

Unfortunately, for the viewer, the answer is ridiculously simple: it is not. At the half hour point in the movie, the couple is forced to endure their "breakup" as Erin leaves for California and at that point in the movie, I had absolutely no interest in either character. I didn't care if they stayed together, if they split up or anything else and the truth of it is that this is a serious failure of Going The Distance. The inability to invest in the characters whose primary interests seem to be drinking, smoking pot and talking about obscure music groups makes the relationship unimaginably dull.

Add to that that Drew Barrymore and Justin Long have less than no on-screen chemistry in Going The Distance. I've loved both actors in other things, but in this, their performances are stiff, the awkwardness in the way they move around one another is palpable and the movie is so utterly lacking in charm that one has to ask "what is the point?"

The point, of course, is that long-distance relationships are a very real story for many people in the United States and around the world. Telling the story of the strain of a long-term, long-distance relationship is difficult in the visual medium. Friends attempted it when Chandler found work in Oklahoma, but the television series cheated it by including surprise visits between Chandler and Monica for almost that entire story arc. Friends has a luxury that Going The Distance did not have, though, which is that by the time that story arc came up in the popular sitcom, viewers cared about Chandler and Monica and they had a vested interest in how the relationship went - namely years of time spent watching the relationship build and rooting for it.

Going The Distance is almost formulaic in the way it is assembled, with the first third establishing the relationship, the second third exploring mildly the effects of the space between Garrett and Erin and ultimately sinking into a virtually unwatchable series of events that are almost so staged as to be unwatchable - like the inevitable jealousy Garrett has for Erin having a night on the town with a male coworker of hers. At the script level, Going The Distance is a tough sell because the plot points all seem to be just the essential scenes for this style of relationship with most of the agony of a real long-distance relationship glossed over for cinematic expediency. In other words, the movie focuses on the bullet points of establishing the relationship, rushes the first time Garrett makes a trip out to see Erin in San Francisco and then skips ahead so many months to gut the sense of waiting and loneliness the characters feel in the subsequent scenes.

This is not to say that those scenes should have been included, either. The paradox of a movie like Going The Distance is that if the filmmakers are striving for realism, the movie must be almost unwatchably dull because being apart from one you love is long stretches of missing someone which is not cinematically interesting. In the last acts, the film's pacing is so dreadfully slow even with skipping the waiting that had the film gone for more realism, it surely would have sunk even lower. So, the film opts for the bullet point approach and in this way, the movie feels more contrived than in any way spectacular.

What is missing from Going The Distance outside likable characters, great performances and a plot that makes one in any way interested is an iconic scene. When Harry Met Sally had the iconic diner scene, Casablanca had the scene at the airport at the movie's climax, Going The Distance doesn't nail any of them - though it is clear they tried with the talk of masturbation on a New York City street and the table sex scene was actually laugh-out-loud funny. But outside the hilarity of the sex on the table scene, the movie is a long stretch of dull moments punctuated by a choice funny phrase or two (the only one from my notes was "man whore").

Going The Distance also does not seem to know what it wants to be between "guys night out" movie and "chick flick." While most of the serious screentime is given to Justin Long's Garrett and his relationships with his friends and roommate, Erin is given more character notes and ambitions (and Drew Barrymore is top billed). Watching the audience, I noticed many of the women seemed scandalized by the guy talk and language used in Going The Distance while many of the men seemed bored during the scenes that actually favored Garrett and Erin together.

Ultimately, this makes Going The Distance a real disappointment and it is unsurprising that it is out in September, when films that couldn't hold the interest during Summer Blockbuster Season go to die and be forgotten.

For other films involving Drew Barrymore, please check out:
Whip It
Donnie Darko
Batman Forever
Ever After
Charlie's Angels

3/10

For other movies, please check out my index page!

© 2010 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.



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