Friends From College Are Just Terrible.

The Good: Some funny lines, A couple of the actors are decent
The Bad: Horrible characters, Bland plotting, Predictable, Dumb drug conceit
The Basics: The first season of Friends From College is an unremarkable comedy filled with utterly unlikable characters, but a couple decent performances and lines.


Netflix has been having a rough couple of months. After the streaming service announced the cancellation of Sense8 after its second season (reviewed here!), Netflix has been trolled by many subscribers trying to extort the production end of Netflix into continuing the fan-favorite series. The longer the first season of Friends From College progressed, the more I found myself thinking, "Why didn't Netflix just take the money they were dumping into this crappy series and add it to the budget for Sense8 so we could get a third season?!" The difference between the trolls and the critics in this regard is a thin one, but the most constructive perspective I can muster is that Netflix seems to be prioritizing quantity over quality by churning out shows like Friends From College. Cobie Smulders, Keegan-Michael Key and Fred Savage can't be cheap and I have to assume that whatever issues are preventing Netflix from producing more seasons of Sense8 some of those issues might be alleviated by throwing more money at the problem. And yet, we get Friends From College Season 1 instead of future Sense8.

Why am I so down on Friends From College Season 1? First and foremost, none of the characters in the first season of Friends From College are particularly likable. Second, outside the first few episodes, the show is not funny and does not actually have funny lines. And finally, the show telegraphs most of its plots and humor.

All that said, Friends From College Season 1 features the first performance by Billy Eichner that I have actually enjoyed. Eichner has a tendency to play loud and annoying characters, but in Friends From College, he plays a subtle character whose needs are constantly being pushed aside. The role allows Eichner to play the part with more nuance and range than most of his other parts. For the first time, I was able to empathize with a character he played and that was a pleasant surprise.

The rest of Friends From College Season 1 was, at its best, a wash.

Samantha and Ethan are having affairs on their respective spouses in Chicago when Ethan informs Sam that Ethan and his wife, Lisa, are moving to New York City. Ethan, Lisa, Sam, and their friends from Harvard twenty years ago - Marianne, Nick and Max - reunite in New York after many years away from one another. In ending their affair, Ethan and Sam find it tough to fit into their friends' lives. Max and his boyfriend, Felix, find it difficult to reconnect or connect with the Harvard Friend Group. But when Ethan's novel does not land at Max's agency and Sam is shocked when Lisa and Ethan begin trying to have a child, Sam goes into therapy to actually end the affair.

The friend group and Felix gets a party bus to escape into Long Island wine country when Lisa's IVF treatment fails. Afterwards, the group goes to a wedding together and the relationships begin to spiral out.

After the second episode, the only real laugh-out-loud moment in the first season of Friends From College comes from Cobie Smulders's Lisa running through a vineyard declaring that she is going to McDonald's. The rest of the season is fairly serious or jokes that fall flat. The awkward moments are not deadpan humor, they are simply unpleasant moments that are not entertaining to watch.

Friends From College Season 1 features annoying characters doing stupid things and the entire season is spent waiting for the built-in shoe to drop. Ethan and Sam's affair is a ticking time bomb and as viewers wait for it to go off, characters like Marianne, Nick and Max are dramatically under-developed. Friends From College definitively lost me when the cocaine came out; the reliance on drug use for cable and streaming networks has become such a lame conceit and is so incongruent with the rest of the show that it is hard to accept that it is part of the same show.

The primary characters in the first season of Friends From College are:

Ethan - A writer who is married to Lisa, he writes serious fiction and is distressed when the only market open to him is young adult fiction. When he gets nervous, he begins speaking in weird accents. He has been having a twenty year affair with Samantha that continues even after he and Lisa move to New York. When he and Lisa lose their fetus, he pressures the group to go on a wine tour and when the group goes to a wedding, he breaks out "fun Ethan," which is an unfortunately manic personality,

Lisa - A lawyer who starts work at a new form that has a lot of lawyers who get fired for sexual harassment. She wants a child with Ethan and undergoes IVF, which fails. She and Nick have a friendship that is different from the rest of their friends. She is despondent after losing her pregnancy,

Samantha - Married with two children, she has been having a long affair with Ethan that she starts to regret when she and Lisa develop a more active friendship after the move. She gets into therapy and has no apparent affection for her husband,

Marianne - A New Yorker from the Harvard Friend Group who allows Ethan and Lisa to crash at her apartment when they move. She is in a play and has a rabbit, which Ethan accidentally kills and replaces. She drives the party bus when the driver gets black-out drunk and she hooks up with a visiting Australian,

Nick - A guy living on a trust fund who acts as a sounding board for Lisa,

Max - An agent for a publishing company, he used to write with Ethan until he broke out. He and Felix are in a passionless relationship. When he forgets Felix while on the wine tour, the two break up and he ends up at a friend's wedding delivering a horrible wedding toast,

and Felix - Max's partner, he is completely turned off by who Max becomes when he is around his friends from college.

None of the characters are particularly likable and the performances - outside Billy Eichner - are particularly audacious. Fred Savage plays Max as entirely unloving, despite the fact that Max and Felix are in a relationship, Cobie Smulders and Keegan-Michael Key show off no other performance skills than we have seen from them before. Key plays yet another manic character and Smulders did exactly this level of serious performance in every love-tormented arc she played on How I Met Your Mother. Sure, it's always wonderful to see Greg Germann in anything, but even he is wasted in his bit role in the first season of Friends From College.

Friends From College tries to wow viewers with the nostalgic 1990s-heavy soundtrack and occasional guest stars familiar to fans of other Netflix shows or other works, but the guest stars pop more than the main cast and the music is not enough to save the dreadfully bad writing and awful characters.

For other works with Annie Parisse, please check out my reviews of:
Definitely, Maybe
Prime

2.5/10

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

© 2017 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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The Worst 10 Movies Of 2014!

| | | The Basics: 2014 was hardly a sterling year for films . . . but these ten are the movies that ought to be avoided at all costs!


It has been a long time since I have cared so little about what movies might win the Best Picture Oscar than this year. 2014 might have had some big blockbusters and two perfect films, but it had a giant load of mediocrity for the bulk of the year. While the Razzies tend to pick out the most obvious commercial failures, this year’s list of dud films would not be complete without the ten movies below.

It is important to note that while I’ve seen a great number of movies from 2014, I tended to avoid horror movies (on principle) – I’m certain if I had bothered with the latest movies from the overdone franchises of horror there might be some alterations to the list. But, for cinephiles and those who value their time, these are the 10 films too annoying, painful, boring or poorly made to bother watching from 2014:

10. Behaving Badly (reviewed here!) – The sex comedy Behaving Badly was so poorly received that even Selena Gomez appearing in it couldn’t scare up interest in the film at the box office. Behaving Badly is what happens when humor from audacious animated shows like Family Guy and South Park becomes the norm; by the time live action goes as surprising and raunchy, it’s passé. Behaving Badly might have been a cult film fifteen years ago, but in 2014, it’s utterly forgettable,

9. Listen Up Philip (reviewed here!) – The Academy and art house movie viewers usually love films about miserable people and writers at a point of crisis. Sadly, Listen Up Philip is just a collection of the worst stereotypes of writers and smart people. I never thought I’d see a year when Jonathan Pryce was in one of the worst movies of the year, but there it is . . .,

8. Expelled (reviewed here!) – While the major studios were duking it out during Oscar Pandering Season, one chose to dump one of its worst creations during the same time. Alas, hoping all the attention the big dogs would get vying for serious box office dollars might allow a concentrated fan effort to make an upset was not a marketing technique that worked. Instead, this droll comedy represents one of the year’s biggest conceptual failures: the entire premise is a slacker gets expelled from school and then has to apply himself to get back into school. The Herculean efforts made by the protagonist to get expelled make his ridiculous efforts to avoid boarding school all the more unrealistic, especially when he sees that the place he is threatened with ending up is incredibly easy to escape from! With no significant performers, performances, or ideas, Expelled is gut-wrenching to watch,

7. Horrible Bosses 2 (reviewed here!) – At the other end of the spectrum from Expelled is Horrible Bosses 2. Packed with talent, this limp sequel parades out as many of the stars from Horrible Bosses as it can to remind viewers what they liked about the original before degenerating into a disappointing and decidedly un-funny hostage caper movie that adds nothing worthwhile to the franchise. Seldom have so many truly funny and smart individuals been part of something that falls so short of humor and was so very dumb,

6. Authors Anonymous (reviewed here!) – I’m not sure if I should admire Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting for taking her time off as one of the highest paid actresses on television to appear in an indie film or lament that when she made the effort, she was put into essentially the same role. Either way, Authors Anonymous might be the best proof that when you’re at the top of the industry, it’s time to experiment and spread your wings (when there’s no risk to your finances or career for trying). Unfortunately, Authors Anonymous is neither ambitious, nor smart; it is not funny, nor does it allow any of the performers in it to truly showcase their talents – it is more a string of jokes that fail to land and missed opportunities than a film painfully bad to watch,

5. Vampire Academy (reviewed here!) – My only guess is that Vampire Academy was in production before Beautiful Creatures (reviewed here!) proved that not all supernatural teen lit translated into box office gold. Vampire Academy was so unmemorable that when I began assembling this list, I found I could not remember what was so bad about it. So, I picked up a copy, popped it in the Blu-Ray player and by the time the characters started talking to one another, I remembered! The dialogue is horrible, the acting is atrocious, the story is so familiar it has become an archetype - complete with the requisite and obvious reversals.  The only reason to pay to see this film would be if a Mystery Science Theater 3000 version of it was produced,

4. Bad Neighbors (reviewed here!) – I know I am in the minority of the world’s population on this one, but I did not find Neighbors funny. Dumb frat guys behaving badly, tormenting a working family . . . this is a horror movie disguised as a comedy and while Rose Byrne might have had a good year at the box office, it’s hard to imagine she or most of the rest of the cast is proud of this “comedy,”

3. Happy Christmas (reviewed here!) – Forgettable and neither complicated, nor entertaining, Happy Christmas was the last straw for me with actress Anna Kendrick. Kendrick either has one way to perform or she does not have the wherewithal to stand up to directors to challenge her to do more than appear on screen and keep her mouth partially open. Seriously; I know Anna Kendrick has a nice smile, but at some point, viewers need something more from her than reaction shots where she looks surprised, with her mouth slightly agape. Yet Happy Christmas seems to hinge on that one note of performance. As little as I ever root for the career death of anyone, as one who loathes how Lena Dunham has become the voice of fauxmanism (that’s "faux-feminism" or "a dumbing down of the fight for equality and civil rights," for which Dunham has become the poster woman), when Girls comes to its inevitable end, one hopes anyone who thinks of hiring Lena Dunham again might just check this film out and be assured that investing in her future is not worth it,

2. The Wait (reviewed here!) – Jena Malone did not have a good year in 2014. Her character in Mockingjay – Part 1 (reviewed here!) was virtually absent until the last few moments (and allowed her to show off none of her talent!) and Inherent Vice (reviewed here!), was delayed into 2015 in most markets, which meant that the most time she had on the big screen was in this lemon. The Wait is, as its name suggests, a ponderous film in which very little happens. At least Malone’s career will not suffer much from the film’s release . . . it did not get a wide-enough release, so most people will never see it to know how bad it was,

. . . and . . .

. . .the worst movie of 2014 is . . .

1. Making The Rules (reviewed here!) – Robin Thicke acting vehicle. Need I say more? Given how few people witnessed this cinematic atrocity, I probably should. Frances Conroy appears in her worst supporting role since supporting in Catwoman, Jaime Pressly plays Abby a lonely housewife obsessed with former boyfriend played by Robin Thicke and what is supposed to be a steamy, sexy drama about temptation is just another stupid, escapist trashy romance novel that isn’t smart enough to acknowledge itself for what it is. At under 80 minutes, at least Making The Rules does not make us suffer watching its terribleness long, but when that is the best that can be said about a film, it is hardly a ringing endorsement!

For other lists, please check out my:
Worst Ten Episodes Of Star Trek: Enterprise
The Top Ten Episodes Of Frasier
The Top Ten Episodes Of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

To see how all movies I have reviewed have stacked up against each other check out my Film Review Index Page where the movies are organized from best to worst!

© 2015 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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More Serious And Violent Than Funny, The Interview Is Erratic, But (Surprisingly!) Not Bad!

The Good: Character, Much of the acting, Moments of concept
The Bad: Overbearing soundtrack, Repetitive
The Basics: The Interview oscillates between smartly critiquing U.S. the media and intelligence communities and body-type/sex jokes and a violent series of confrontations that are unpleasant to watch.


After all of the controversy and threats from hackers and SONY pulling the wide-release of The Interview (check out the commentary on SONY’s actions here!), SONY has released The Interview in limited release and on-line. Here in Michigan, the local theater Michael Moore subsidizes is one of the theaters that got it in. The controversy means that instead of art theaters showing films like Inherent Vice this Christmas, they are screening what would have been a mainstream comedy instead. And, for all the hype and leaked internal criticism, The Interview is a very mainstream, shock humor comedy film.

And The Interview can only benefit from the hype that surrounded it. It is a Seth Rogen and James Franco film that suffers from a number of issues familiar to fans of the duo’s work; it is short, James Franco is essentially playing a mild permutation of himself (Franco has “serious” and “complete stoner” characters and this is “serious, but with lines that seem familiar from his drug-addled characters), and the humor gets mixed with violence. And, like Observe And Report (reviewed here!) and Pineapple Express (reviewed here!), the violence becomes troubling and is so over-the-top that is sucks the humor that preceded it right out of the film. The thing is, despite the violence and the jokes that don't land, The Interview is surprisingly watchable and is nowhere near as bad as it seemed like it would have been!  Unlike Observe And Report, for example, The Interview does not leave the viewer with a gut-wrenching sense of being horrified and grossed out, despite some pretty over-the-top blood spurts in the film's latter half.

With North Korea getting nuclear missile capabilities, the world is abuzz with journalists pounding the fearmongering . . . except Dave Skylark’s entertainment news show. On the night of their 1000th episode, Dave Skylark and his best friend, executive producer, Aaron Rapaport, break news that Eminem is gay. On the night that North Korea gets full nuclear capability, after Rapaport has had a run in with a former classmate who does not respect his style of entertainment journalism, Skylark’s show breaks a Rob Lowe baldness story. When Dave Skylark learns that Skylark Tonight is Kim Jong-un’s favorite Western-produced show, Skylark and Rapaport decide to try to get an interview with Kim Jong-un. Rapaport is sent to a meeting in the middle of nowhere, China, where the North Korean liaison, Sook, gives the executive producer the terms of the interview. While the terms are not journalistically ethical, Skylark convinces Rapaport to agree to the terms to get the interview at all.

When the duo agrees to the interview terms, Agent Lacey of the CIA approaches Skylark and Rapaport about the opportunity their trip represents: they are wooed to kill Kim Jong-un. While Skylark wants to take the North Korean dictator out in a blaze of glory, Lacey and the CIA train Skylark to deliver a ricin poison handshake, which will kill the Supreme Leader after twenty-four hours. Unfortunately, the poison looks like gum and the North Korean inspectors consume it, leaving the CIA struggling to come up with a back-up plan. They send a drone with a back-up supply of poison . . . which Rapaport has to smuggle back into the room in his butt. When Skylark is greeted by Kim Jong-un, he discovers how Jong-un is basically just a fanboy and when they spend the day together, Skylark bonds with the dictator and has second thoughts about killing him. After Skylark witnesses Kim Jong-un’s temper, he has a change of heart and embraces the mission . . . though the poison is no longer available to the guys.

The reason The Interview is likely to benefit from the hype is that there is a whole audience of people who are likely to see the film based on the controversy alone. Fans of James Franco and Seth Rogen films have never had so much free publicity. For two of America’s biggest comedic box office draws, the publicity the hackers gave the film is more than enough to make up for the drop in revenue for the film appearing on so many fewer theater screens. Unfortunately, the internal criticisms of The Interview that were leaked as part of the hack are mostly accurate. More than the premise problems, The Interview suffers because it is billed as a comedy and it falls a bit short on that front.

At the outset of The Interview, the film is not very funny because it is establishing the premise and characters. In establishing the characters, The Interview works to make Rapaport serious and smart and the movie makes most of its social commentary there. Despite a pretty overtly hilarious interview with Eminem, much of The Interview is concerned with making social commentary before it degenerates into a bloodbath. As a result, the scenes with Seth Rogen’s Rapaport are a smart dose of realism in an otherwise absurd film premise.

The discontinuity gets worse and goes in a different direction at the hour mark. Despite ridiculous dialog about “pulling out,” The Interview turns disturbing when the poisoned military officer starts to die. Putting himself out of his misery as the ricin kills him, the officer blows off his own head and the shot is one that rivals the on-screen carnage of The Walking Dead. After Skylark commits to the film’s premise, having realized he has been played as a tool of Kim Jong-un, the film turns heavyhanded and, frequently, violent.

The issue here is that The Interview starts surprisingly smart, making a subversive and intelligent commentary on the problems with the American media. The culture is groomed to be stupid and ignorant, focusing on media infotainment instead of substantive journalism. The Interview sets out with that in mind and in its latter half it actually proposes the smartest way to combat Kim Jong-un; destroy his propaganda machine. But then The Interview becomes unhinged. The long sequence focusing on Rapaport sticking the drone’s package up his butt and the protracted bit wherein Rapaport and Sook hook up try desperately to recapture a sense of humor for the movie.

All that is undermined by the film’s final half hour. As the actual interview occurs, violence breaks out. This follows on Skylark realizing he has been lied to, which is an insulting and obvious sequence that overstates what is on screen. As Rapaport tries to hold the control room and the interviewers attempt to escape, The Interview degenerates into violence. Despite that, The Interview does what it sets out to do, which is entertain and while it might not be incredible, it is not the complete lemon it might have been made out to be.

The Interview is a triumph of performances for Randall Park and Lizzy Caplan. While the film is a Rogen/Franco vehicle, it is Park and Caplan who get the film’s most substantive moments as actors. Lizzy Caplan has been in a ton of movies and television works, but she has not had such a substantive role near the top of a cast list like in The Interview. Caplan is serious and completely credible as Agent Lacey, even if her part in The Interview starts out as a display of her cleavage (which is addressed in the film). Randall Park plays Kim Jong-un and he gives a performance that is anything but monolithic. Park presents Jong-un as a master of propaganda and, surprisingly, never really goofy.

Perhaps the funniest lingering aspect of The Interview is that Katy Perry is utilized as a weapon. Beyond that, The Interview is a half-boring, quarter-violent comedy that fails to land more often than it hits, but has an ambitious premise and concept that takes a one-line idea and makes it work better than expected.

For other films currently in theaters, please check out my reviews of:
To Write Love On Her Arms
The Voices
Love, Rosie
The Seventh Son
Song One
Match
Vice
American Sniper
Paddington
Inherent Vice
Selma
Still Alice
Predestination
The Hobbit: The Battle Of The Five Armies
Expelled
Annie
The Imitation Game
Birdman

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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SONY And The U.S. Government’s Reaction In Cancelling The Release Of The Interview Proves Throwing Money At The Military Is Money Poorly Spent!

The Basics: With SONY capitulating to (supposed) North Korean threats over its release of The Interview, citizens of the United States should demand their tax money go other places than the U.S. military.


This week’s news has been dominated by stories surrounding the hack of SONY Pictures’s servers and threats surrounding the imminent release of the film The Interview (reviewed here!). Amid all of the stories planted by the hackers and leaked as a result of the hack, there has been one glaring one that has not been reported that I have been waiting for: SONY executives had to know of the risk in making The Interview . . . and they disregarded it entirely.

The Backstory

The Interview is a film starring James Franco and Seth Rogen with a basic premise that Americans visiting North Korea for business are conscripted by the CIA to kill Kim Jong-un. About a month ago, SONY Pictures Studios’s servers were hacked and after digitally-releasing at least four of the studio’s films online, the hackers began to leak e-mails and other private information they stole from the servers to mainstream media and online sources. While North Korea initially denied being the hackers, after the hackers threatened an attack on movie theaters that showed The Interview, the United States government claimed that North Korean sources were responsible for both the threat and the hack. The Interview was subsequently pulled from SONY’s Christmas release roster.

Red Flags In The Backstory

When the SONY hack became a major news story, virtually anyone with any intelligence and insight had to notice some gaping holes in the story of the hack and where blame was being spread. While North Koreans were almost instantly scapegoats for the hack, when they denied involvement, but praised the attack, there were certain questions that remained unanswered in the media. If North Koreans were responsible for the hack, they had to be North Koreans that were fluent in English. Supposedly, the hack occurred on November 24, when SONY personnel turned on their computers to a message warning that more damage to the company was to come. It took about a week for the hackers to start releasing more information taken from SONY.

That makes perfect sense; if you’ve just stolen a treasure trove of information in a foreign language, you need some time to sift through the data to figure out what will be useful (i.e. damaging or damning) in ruining your target. A quick online search estimates that the percentage of North Koreans who are fluent in English range from 1 – 10%. One has to believe that the number of North Koreans who are both expert hackers and fluent in English would be well-below 1% and if the motive was protecting the head of state of North Korea, that number has to be pretty small. So, if the U.S. intelligence community was looking at suspects in North Korea, it seems like their pool would have been ridiculously small.

As information from the hack continued to disseminate, it became more and more clear that The Interview was the source of ire for the hackers. But, even in releasing internal documents with executives panning The Interview showed a level of consideration to what the hackers were releasing . . . and it makes one wonder just what kind of publicity machine SONY actually has working for it.

I write that for multiple reasons, but the chief among them are these: if one wanted to ruin The Interview, releasing it for free would have been a pretty decent way. Hackers who released The Expendables 3 (reviewed here!) online this past summer have been credited with causing that sequel’s grosses to take a noticeable hit. Or, if hackers truly wanted to stop The Interview from being released, the hack of SONY’s servers should have targeted the digital copies of The Interview and destroyed them!

Second, SONY has not leaked what should have been its ace card on the matter: the hack of SONY’s servers and subsequent release of private e-mails illustrates that virtually every conversation at the company is fairly well-documented. What is missing from all the leaked documents are any executives who said anything to the effect of, “Hey guys, I read the treatment for The Interview and I’ve got to ask . . . should we really be pissing off the North Koreans by making this movie?” And the reason the hackers, if they truly were from North Korea, would not release those e-mails is because the two most-probable responses to them are: 1. “Who the fuck cares?! It’s North Korea, what are they going to do to us?!” and/or 2. “North Korea doesn’t have a leg to stand on; just last year, there were two blockbusters that dealt with terrorists attacking the White House” (White House Down and Olympus Has Fallen, reviewed here!). So, SONY’s affirmative defenses to threats against The Interview had to be that North Korea couldn’t touch the U.S. militarily and “we’ve already done movies that attack the heart of the U.S., so it’s not a big deal to have a screwball comedy about killing another country’s Head Of State.”

So, why hasn’t SONY leaked those e-mails to show they are not afraid and/or The Interview is hardly groundbreaking for its potential offensiveness?

The Logical Answer

When the hackers released a direct threat against theaters that showed The Interview, the United States government went from “actively investigating” the SONY hack to actually making statements and throwing around allegations. The intelligence community publicly accused North Korea and, while SONY’s problem has been not poking the bear, the intelligence community has reason to take the opposite tact. In intelligence, one does not give away anything one does not have to: you don’t let your enemy know you’ve cracked their codes and you try to keep your methodology as secret as possible. So, why is the intelligence community now publicly blaming North Korea? That surprised me quite a bit. In fact, while SONY’s approach could easily have been “We were worried about North Korea, until we realized their opinion didn’t matter,” the U.S. intelligence community’s approach should have – at best – been dismissive: “The Interview has been screened multiple places and there have been no attacks on any of those venues, so this seems like a fear tactic to us.”

And, in the e-mails or memos that have not been leaked, SONY executives would be right: North Korea does not have the ability to launch any sort of offensive that would destroy every movie theater screening The Interview. So, it begs the question, why capitulate to the hackers’ demands?

There are only two logical answers to capitulation at this point (considering the film is made and people have already seen it): the intelligence community in the United States has a credible threat or SONY’s executives are so gunshy that they are broken. Fear is a powerful motivator and certainly someone at SONY’s legal department figured out that the liability for attacks to theaters across the U.S. would be astronomical – like, enough to destroy the mega-corporation. But even if such attacks occurred and SONY was sued for liability, precedent shows that free speech is not to blame for violent attacks and the liable parties should be the attackers, not incidental department (suing SONY for any attacks that resulted from releasing The Interview would be analogous to suing the Department Of The Navy for building a base at Pearl Harbor . . . instead retaliating against the Japanese military for attacking the base there).

In Light Of It All. . .

So, that brings us to the second possibility and what it actually means. Right now, the hackers are bullies and SONY (and theater owners) are wusses. If North Korea is the source of the hack and the threat, SONY and theater owners are expected to believe that North Korea has the resources to blow up thousands of targets (the number of screens The Interview would have released on) simultaneously on Christmas Day. According to CIA sources from 2013, North Korean missile technology was only advanced enough to get missiles to the West Coast of the U.S. So, the threat from the hackers was either a bluff, North Korea has advanced its missile technology dramatically within the last year . . . or we are to believe that North Korea has a network of several thousand agents working in the United States who would have delivered the threatened explosives to the theaters when The Interview was released.

And here’s where American citizens should be outraged and have a course of action against the United States government: under any of those circumstances, our tax dollars are just being thrown away. According to usgovernmentspending.com, in 2014, $605 billion were spent on military defense (the deficit was some $483 billion). What the reaction to the SONY hack and alleged North Korean threats tells us is this: that is money poorly spent.

Seriously.

Let’s say the intelligence community is doing its job. The CIA and FBI have identified a credible threat. They say, “Hey, theater owners and SONY, we’d really appreciate it if you didn’t release this movie because North Korea is making threats and they can actually back them up.” That’s the job of the intelligence community. They find the threats and if it’s domestic, they arrest suspects to prevent them. If there were a massive terror network of potential North Korean bombers in the United States ready to actually blow up every theater that screened The Interview (despite the fact that they did not blow up any of the theaters that screened it already for press and potential audiences). Given how the media is all over this story and there have been no stories of arrests or interrogations around the country of North Korean nationals being rounded up by the CIA, logic suggests that the intelligence community discovered that North Koreans were responsible for the hack, but there is no network of bombers in the U.S. ready to blow up theaters here. They turn their intelligence over to the NSA, who shares it with the military.

At that point, the issue becomes a diplomatic and military matter. The diplomats should be saying “Hey, North Korea, you guys can’t just threaten us!” (albeit not the most receptive or rational audience in the world). The military, though, should be saying “before you can launch one missile, we will reduce your arsenal to ashes.” And we have a new Bay Of Pigs or another bloodbath in Asia. The reasons not to pursue a military option are either because it would not work or because it is not going to get the desired results (The Interview, North Korea attacks, the U.S. counter-attacks, China launches its missiles, WWIII, Armageddon). So, what does it mean that it would not work, then? Capitulating to North Korea, if the threats are coming from North Korea, as a military solution is a de facto admission that the U.S. military cannot defend the United States from North Korean missiles.

So then what are we paying our military for?

The United States is a big continent (just drive through Kansas!); taking the United States might be second only to taking and holding Russia in the world. North Korea does not have the military resources to launch a land war to take the U.S. and while it might have some missile resources that could harm the U.S., what are we paying the military for at this point if not to have such overwhelming might that even an egotistical dictator would think twice about attacking us? In order for any threat from the North Korean Head Of State to be deemed “credible,” one has to believe that enough of the high-ranking military officers in North Korea would also be willing to martyr themselves and have their nation reduced to ashes for that leaders vision. Is The Interview being buried because it hits too close to an actual CIA plan to take out Kim Jong-Un? That seems doubtful (the cat’s already out of the bag on the “how” of the assassination attempt in The Interview), so it inevitably points back to the idea that the U.S. military is unable to defeat North Korea without taking what they have already calculated as “acceptable losses.”

North Korea is a nation of approximately 24.45 million people and is about 60% the size of Kansas, located thousands of miles away from the continental United States. If it is a credible military threat to the United States then spending hundreds of billions of dollars on our military is a waste of money. I am a pacifist and I don’t think anyone should die to see a movie, certainly not The Interview (Cheap Thrills, maybe . . . ) and if North Korea could deliver on its threats then that should be taken seriously. But if our military cannot defend against North Korea, that’s just a jobs program that is not advancing anyone’s best interest. The $122 billion dollars spent on military defense (after eliminating the entire deficit of overspending that the military represents) represents $336 each and every American citizen living in the United States could be paid for health care, healthy food, or education. Hell, we could even use that money to go to the movies.

For other reviews and commentaries, please check out my Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2014 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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Serious Sandler: Funny People (Mostly) Succeeds.

The Good: Good performances, Interesting characters, Moments of empathy/themes
The Bad: Mood is often oppressive, Pacing issues
The Basics: Adam Sandler effectively delves into his dramatic side with Funny People, a Judd Apatow flick that reasserts the writer/director’s ability to plumb the depths of drama . . . with mixed results.


Regardless of how both films might have underwhelmed at the box office, Judd Apatow’s Funny People owes quite a debt to P.T. Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love (reviewed here!). Punch-Drunk Love was the first major film to truly use Saturday Night Live alum Adam Sandler in a dramatic role with any real success. Funny People also explores Sandler’s ability to play a deeply serious role and had Punch-Drunk Love not softened American audiences up for such a twist from the comedian, it might have been even more off-putting than the film already was.

Unfortunately, Judd Apatow’s endeavor into getting a serious performance out of Adam Sandler feels more clogged and problematic than Anderson’s more compact, focused role for Sandler. Sandler’s ability to play rage in Punch-Drunk Love plays somewhat better than his character’s apathy in Funny People and the somewhat sprawling nature of this film. Even so, George Simmons is one of Sandler’s better performances and more memorable roles following his career in dippy comedy blockbusters. Sandler makes Simmons substantive and compelling to watch, even if he is not always interesting.

George Simmons is a highly successful comedian who came up from the stand-up circuit before he started making million-dollar blockbusters and became one of the highest grossing actors in America. Depressed and somewhat lethargic, Simmons encounters aspiring comedian Ira Wright and his roommate, Leo Koenig. Wright hates his job serving sandwiches and he leaps at the opportunity to write jokes for Simmons for a MySpace event – if for no other reason than to show up his hack roommate Mark. After the big event, Ira begins working for George and George admits to his new assistant that he is dying of leukemia. As George has Ira start selling off his stockpiles of swag, he starts pining for the woman who got away, Laura.

Ira finds working for Simmons to be a largely losing proposition. Working for George keeps him distracted, which gives Mark time to move in on his love interest, Daisy. It does, however, get him some exposure on the stand-up circuit, but he finds that hanging out with Simmons doesn’t get him laid and he gets mired in Simmons’ depression. But as Simmons wrestles with his own mortality, Ira helps him find Laura and George disrupts her unhappy marriage. The result makes Ira a witness to a life he has always dreamed of having and forces him to decide if it is the way he wants to live going forward.

Funny People departs from Judd Apatow’s other films by, despite the title, being anything but a comedy. The film reminds viewers of the more character-based, dramatic moments that made Apatow’s Freaks & Geeks (reviewed here!) a cult-smash. Unfortunately, while Seth Rogen has no trouble embodying a serious Apatow-written character (Rogen plays Ira), the role has him meandering around the much more cinematically-powerful Sandler. Even when Sandler’s Simmons is acting bored and depressed, Rogen is unable to steal the spotlight from him. The more significant character journey in Funny People is, arguably, Wright’s arc, but Rogen does not make the film feel like it is truly his.

To his credit, writer-director Judd Apatow manages to create a film where almost every significant (male, at least) stand-up comedian alive shows up. For sure, many – like Paul Reiser, Norm MacDonald, and Dave Attell – have roles that are little more than cameos, but the fact that they show up at all makes the world of Funny People feel very real and the drama within it compelling.

That said, Funny People takes far too long to get going. Apatow thoroughly develops the relationship between Simmons and Wright and by the time the viewer is bored with the two of them, the film makes the shift into the relationship between Simmons and Laura. When that transition is made, Wright becomes something of a hapless sidekick and his role as witness robs him of a character arc where he actually keeps real control over his life. Instead, he reacts to how Simmons throws a bombshell into Laura’s family and the result hardly makes Wright compelling. Apatow alum Leslie Mann plays a less-bitchy version of her prior characters and Apatow makes viewers wait for Eric Bana long past the point that he is able to carry any enthusiasm from seeing his name in the opening credits.

Bana and Mann have pretty poor on-screen chemistry, but their characters are supposed to be estranged, so it is hard to complain too much about that. Unfortunately, Sandler and Mann have no real on-screen charm together and the result is that it is hard for viewers to be convinced that they have more of a chance than the married couple that seems set in every way, but the passion department. The problem with Funny People is that none of the characters have innate chemistry with the others: Jonah Hill and Jason Schwartzman lack real chemistry with Seth Rogen in Funny People, so it is off-putting at the beginning even to make the viewers believe that they are all actually roommates!

Despite the chemistry problems and the fact that Mann plays a very familiar type of character, Funny People is well-acted. Seth Rogen plays the up and coming, very awkward comedian well and Jason Schwartzman plays the jackass roommate with complete plausibility. Jonah hill is fine as Leo, though his character does not get nearly angry enough when Ira’s big secret is finally revealed to him.

But that is the way of Funny People: the film takes a long time setting up, developing, redirecting and expositing until, like life, if just goes nowhere. That makes it a film with so many winning elements, but an ultimately underwhelming resolution and execution.

For other works with Eric Bana, please visit my reviews of:
Hanna
The Time Traveler’s Wife
Star Trek
Hulk

6.5/10

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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Outside The Self-Referential Bits, 22 Jump Street Is An Unremarkable Sequel!

The Good: A few funny jokes, One or two performances
The Bad: Obvious plot and character arcs, Most of the humor falls flat
The Basics: A largely unremarkable sequel, 22 Jump Street pretty much just rehashes the first film.


Summer Blockbuster Season has hit a lull of sequels. Outside the new X-Men film, the sequels I have seen so far this summer have been complete duds. Sadly, 22 Jump Street does not break the string of unremarkable sequels hitting theaters this summer. A straightforward comedy, 22 Jump Street is the sequel to the cinematic reimagining 21 Jump Street (reviewed here!) and it is not at all necessary to see the first film before catching the sequel. In fact, the strength and weakness of 22 Jump Street is that it more or less recreates 21 Jump Street. The weakness of 22 Jump Street’s forced recreation of the first film’s plot is that viewers who saw 21 Jump Street will see all of the relationship jokes coming miles away. The strength of 22 Jump Street reusing the plot of the prior film is that some of the jokes that reference the film’s nature are the funniest of the movie.

Where 21 Jump Street was a comedic reimagining of the FOX television series, 22 Jump Street is a parody of its predecessor and a mockery of sequels in general. That means aspects like the delightful cameo provided by Johnny Depp (let’s face it, Richard Greico was going to be available, so that the film got him was not a surprise at all) are absent from the new sequel. Twelve hours after watching 22 Jump Street, only two jokes stood out enough to be memorable. The unlikely subject of a sequel, 22 Jump Street continues the story of Odd Couple cops Schmidt and Jenko.

Following their success at busting a high school drug ring, Schmidt and Jenko continue to work for the narcotics division. There, they have a terrible bust which leads to an octopus launching itself on Schmidt’s face and a gun fight that does more damage than good. The pair reports to Chief Hardy, who assigns the pair to 22 Jump Street where he expects they will do exactly what they did before (exactly!) by going undercover at McState College where a murder has occurred during a narcotic’s deal. Arriving at McState, Schmidt and Jenko work hard to get involved with college groups that might have a drug connection. As the undercover police officers investigate the campus connections for WHY-PHY (Work Hard, Yes – Play Hard, Yes), Schmidt and Jenko begin to experience torsion in their relationship.

Jenko befriends a football player and gets into the local fraternity, which leaves Schmidt working the art scene angle. There, Schmidt hooks up with Maya the college student . . . who turns out to be Captain Dickson’s daughter! After Jenko and Schmidt apparently close the case (the exact same way as before!), the result of their investigation does not sit well with either of them. The two reteam to find The Ghost and stop the WHY-PHY trade at the college.

Fundamentally, the problem with 22 Jump Street is that it is essentially the same film as 21 Jump Street. In addition to having a similar pulse-pounding soundtrack, 22 Jump Street has virtually the same character conflict as its predecessor. In fact, the only real character change in 22 Jump Street is that Schmidt gets laid and the idea of him getting exposed to Captain Dickson offers one of the film’s few moments of joy. It also offers Channing Tatum a wonderful moment to let loose as Jenko in a way that his goofy jock character did not open up in the first film.

The plot of 22 Jump Street is deliberately derivative of the first film and that makes Nick Offerman’s brief role in the film a chance for the often deadpan actor to completely deliver comedically. Outside Offerman and a single moment of Tatum exploding with mockery, the acting in 22 Jump Street is unremarkable. Jonah Hill plays Schmidt with the same deadpan as before and the sheer number of attempts to play the joke wherein Jenko fails completely to improvise in a dangerous situation wears thin quickly.

22 Jump Street is a tough film to say more about; it truly is a case of “if you’ve seen the original, you’ve seen the sequel” and the lack of spark or zest to the movie makes 22 Jump Street impressive only in that it could ever dominate the box office. That such an utterly forgettable film did so well is more of a reflection on the weak market than the quality of 22 Jump Street.

For other comedy sequels, please check out my reviews of:
The Whole Ten Yards
Horrible Bosses 2
The Hangover, Part III

3.5/10

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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My Wife Might Love Step Brothers, But I'm More Ambivalent To It!

The Good: Funny, truly, absurdly funny.
The Bad: Predictable, Mediocre (or unsurprising) acting
The Basics: Ultimately average-at-best, Step Brothers is more a predictable Will Ferrell movie than a surprising one.


My wife and I, fortunately enough, still have plenty that differentiates us from one another. Among her many loves - which I do not share - are mushrooms, loud music and the movies of Will Ferrell. I have nothing against Will Ferrell, I reviewed The Other Guys (available here!) earlier. But I do have an appreciation for the acting talents of John C. Reilly. So, when I picked up Step Brothers for my wife as her final DVD (we're on Blu-Ray now!), having heard her rave about it for the entire first year of our knowing one another, I figured I was in for a fifty-fifty split. Having seen the movie with her now, I'm still there.

Step Brothers follows in a pretty long tradition of movies where adults act like children and it reunites Ferrell with Reilly along with the director who put them together in Talladega Nights. And while Reilly does a decent job playing the manchild, in this case, Dale, Ferrell's character Brennan is very much what one expects from Ferrell in this type comedy. In fact, the most severe problem with Step Brothers is that it is only what one expects from a Will Ferrell comedy.

Brennan is a middle-aged guy living with his mother, just as Dale lives with his father following the death of his mother. Robert, Dale's father, meets Nancy, Brennan's mother, while on a business trip and the two hit it off immediately. In fact, they marry exceptionally quickly and Nancy and Brennan move in with Robert and Dale. While the newlyweds do their thing, Brennan and Dale square off and Dale exerts his dominance, by threatening Brennan and warning him about such things as touching his drum set. But when Dale takes on Brennan's successful young brother, Brennan changes his mind about Dale.

At that point, the two begin to work together to have fun and make the best of their time together. They create a company, based upon having a great name for an entertainment conglomerate ("Prestige Worldwide") and they plan to turn their lives around. But it is at that point that Robert and Nancy decide to move out and sell the house, forcing Dale and Brennan to get real jobs. Failing to do that, violence breaks out and Robert decides he cannot live this way any longer and the family falls apart, pitting Dale and Brennan at one another's throats again.

This is, in many ways, a formulaic comedy that only seems fresh for moments because the movie takes time to create characters who have such a grasp on absurdist humor that one cannot help but laugh at their antics. For sure, the viewer does not so much care about what happens to Dale or Brennan, but we laugh at them as they do their things, especially in such scenes as the sleepwalking destruction scene. It is so over-the-top crazy that it has the freshness of being funny and wonderful, which is something I seldom see.

But comedic interludes like that which are actually fresh are all that breaks up long stretches of the movie where the comedy is obvious and obviously delivered. Ferrell bugs out his eyes and says something silly in an inappropriately menacing tone, Reilly nods and plays straightman to an over-the-top sexual advance from Brennan's brother's wife and the viewer is unsurprised. These performances and jokes fall within the range of comedic actors of their caliber and, sadly, do not hold up so well over multiple viewings. Instead, once the initial shock of the awkward situations that most of the movie is preoccupied with, the movie sags.

The only real surprise for me is how Adam McCay got Richard Jenkins to do Step Brothers. Jenkins plays Robert and he is largely the straightman of the film. No matter how absurd Reilly's Dale or Ferrell's Brennan are, Jenkins keeps Robert real, rational and adult. But that is why the character of Robert fails to work. He is so much the by-product of reality that it does not seem realistic at all that he would have allowed Dale to develop as such a stunted individual. Jenkins gives a wonderful performance, though, especially when Robert snaps and actually disciplines the adult children. But even the quality of Jenkins' performance cannot forgive the fact that the character makes little sense.

Everyone else in the film is startlingly average, from Ferrell - whose performance is so familiar to anyone who has seen any of the other films Ferrell has done in the last five years - to Mary Steenburgen (who has appeared in plenty of lemons as essentially this same character) to Kathryn Hahn whose performance is one joke repeated over and over again. None of the performers or their performances surprised me or even interested me enough to think that I might like to see them in anything else.

On the two-disc special edition, there are plenty of bonus features for those who love gag-reel type humor. In addition to a commentary track which has Ferrell, Reilly, McCay and others actually making verbal humor over the movie, there are deleted and extended scenes and a gag reel. The extended scenes continue onto the second disc with featurettes such as the full video presentation from Prestige Worldwide (it is panned off of in the actual film) and featurettes on the music and the two main characters. Most of these are funny in the same way the movie is funny, so those who like the movie will tend to like the features and those who do not will not.

For me, I am glad I saw the movie once, but after that, it has been a tough sell and never captivated my interest the same way. While my partner laughs at jokes she remembers from it or quotes lines occasionally, it just didn't resonate with me. In fact, I'd bet it resonates more with the inner child in most adult viewers than any rational being and I have a tough time turning the rational off.

For other comedies, please check out my reviews of:
Hot Tub Time Machine
Year One
Planet 51

5/10

For other movie reviews, please visit my index page!

© 2010 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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Milking Rose Byrne For Laughs: Bad Neighbors Fails Entirely!

The Good: One or two laughs, Convincing-enough performances
The Bad: Largely banal and repetitive humor, Dull plot, Obvious character arcs, More misses than hits on the jokes, No stellar performance moments.
The Basics: The Seth Rogen/Zac Efron vehicle Bad Neighbors is a listless comedy not worth wasting time and money to watch.


As Summer Blockbuster Season begins, the popular alternative to special effects-driven action films is raucous comedies. This summer, the search for quality alternative programming seems to have skipped the entire comedy genre . . . at least if the new film Bad Neighbors is any indication.

Bad Neighbors is a Seth Rogen and Zac Efron vehicle that has a ridiculously simple premise that it barely delivers on. The movie never truly gets deeper than the one-line summary for the film and the result is a movie packed with jokes that barely pad the flick up to 96 minutes and leave the viewer feeling largely cheated for the entire running time. Bad Neighbors has a thirty-something couple with a newborn baby living next door to a fraternity house and the two houses go to war over their different lifestyles. Only, the family being terrorized by having the frat house next door, the Radners, is barely more mature than their tormentors next door. The result is an extended prank movie that is hardly original, not at all audacious, and only minimally funny.

Mac and Kelly Radner have poured all their money into a small house in the suburbs where they believe they can happily and safely raise their new daughter, Stella. After attempting to christen their dining room – but failing because they are creeped out by Stella watching them have sex – the Radners see that the house next to theirs is on the market and has some (apparently) serious potential buyers. But when moving day comes, the quiet gay family they think is going to move in is replaced by a small fraternity from the nearby college. Bringing their leaders, Teddy and Pete, a joint, the Radners think they have solved their problems by asking the frat brothers to keep the volume down. That night, though, there is a loud party and rather than keeping the neighborhood quiet, Mac and Kelly actually join Teddy, Pete, and the frat brothers of Delta Psi Beta for a night of revelry.

When the loud scene repeats itself the next night and Teddy does not answer his phone (as he had asked the Radners to call him before they call the police), the young parents try to get the frat party shut down with police intervention. The Delta Psi Betas trash the lawn for the Radner’s house and vow to keep disrupting their lives for being so uncool to them. When Mac smashes a pipe that floods the frat house basement, the fraternity brothers band together and make molds of their penises in order to make dildos, which they then sell and raise so much money they are able to afford a pool in addition to the repairs! When the Radner’s confront the Dean after Stella nearly swallows a condom on their lawn, they find the college officials largely unhelpful, though she details the school’s three-strike rule for the frats. To try to get the frat shut down, Kelly tries to get Pete to put “hoes before bros” by getting the drunk (but smartest of the) frat boy to have sex with Teddy’s girlfriend. Using a hazed-upon pledge to infiltrate the house to try to get the last strike, Mac and Kelly bond as the fraternity comes apart at the seams!

There is so little to Bad Neighbors that it is almost surprising that the film was even made. To flesh out the thin revenge plot that has two groups of shockingly immature people going to war with one another (without much in the way of real world consequences, despite such things as fireworks getting shot into a police car, yet not burning the hell out of the officer inside), Bad Neighbors includes scenes like Kelly realizing she had too much alcohol to nurse and Mac having to milk her in order to relieve the pain in her breasts. Even that scene, though, is truncated in an odd way for an R-rated comedy, making one assume that there will be an unrated director’s cut released on DVD that is even more graphic than the theatrical release was.

The characters in Bad Neighbors are universally foul-mouthed and largely monolithic. Mac is hardly mature and the Radner’s obsession with weed and sex mirrors the frat boys’ binge drinking and casual sex. Neither group is particularly compelling to watch and outside the joy of the cameos (the young men of Workaholics, Andy Samburg, and Lisa Kudrow all have brief appearances in Bad Neighbors) the only real strong moment of comedy is the first appearance of a detached airbag going off and flinging Mac a great distance.

Bad Neighbors is not going to be the shining point of any of the participant’s resumes. Seth Rogen is playing a remarkably familiar stoner/slacker character that he has done to death and Dave Franco’s part of Pete is basically a slightly smarter version of his brother’s type familiar party animal character. Rose Byrne and Zac Efron do not show off any skills that they are likely to be proud of. In fact, Efron’s role in the movie seems to be to show off his new, buff self as opposed to creating a character with even a modicum of pathos, as he did in 17 Again (reviewed here!).

With its lack of original humor or engaging characters and hampered by a predictable plot and juvenile gags, Bad Neighbors completely fails to entertain or create a film worth writing more about.

For other works with Rose Byrne, be sure to check out my takes on:
This Is Where I Leave You
X-Men: First Class
Bridesmaids
Adam
28 Weeks Later
Marie Antoinette
Star Wars: Episode II – Attack Of The Clones

2/10

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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Arguably The Best Of The Dr. Seuss Movies: Horton Hears A Who!

The Good: Wonderful themes, Good voice acting, Character stuggle
The Bad: Somewhat predictable, Moments of forced humor
The Basics: Horton Hears A Who! might well be the most underrated of the Dr. Seuss film adaptations as a story of an elephant struggling to save a microscopic world, despite social pressure against him.


There are very few Dr. Seuss books that I actually remember. It has been such a long time since I was a child and was read the stories, so whenever I have seen one of the films based upon the works of Dr. Seuss, I have been able to do a very pure review of the movie for what it is, without the comparative analysis to how the movies stack up against the books. In the case of Horton Hears A Who!, I have no memories of the book and I was very surprised when my wife excitedly bought the movie on Blu-Ray when it was dirt cheap on Black Friday.

For me, the surprise was how mature Horton Hears A Who! was when the movie commits to its more adult themes. Horton Hears A Who! is essentially a piece that argues a liberal perspective and contrasts reality and faith. The result is a movie that is occasionally geared to children that educates them on both the value of life, the importance of imagination, and the power of one person to stand up to the hive mind for a principle that is right (as opposed to going along with the crowd).

Horton is an elephant living in the jungle who is imaginative, clever, and very active in the jungle community. While Horton mentors the children in the jungle, the community is actually controlled by the fearsome and socially repressive Kangaroo. While taking a bath one day, a speck finds its way to Horton and he hears the voice of the Mayor Of Whoville coming from it. Putting the speck on a flower, Horton listens to the Mayor – who has more than ninety daughters and a single, asocial son (named JoJo). Looking around the jungle, Horton realizes that there is nowhere truly safe for the tiny world of Whoville, so he commits to saving the people living on the speck.

In Whoville, the Mayor works to convince the town council that the Whocentennial should be postponed until the town is safe, though no one believes they are all living on a speck and he is being spoken to by a giant elephant. While Horton makes a journey to a mountain, where he believes the speck will be safe, he tells the children about the Speck and Whoville and the children begin to emulate Horton, carrying around flowers which they claim have speck worlds of their own. Kangaroo is outraged by the influence Horton has and she hires the vulture, Vlad, to destroy Horton’s flower and the speck. As Horton tries to save Whoville, the Mayor works to protect his people despite being utterly powerless.

Horton Hears A Who! features two protagonists who are combated largely by social pressure. Even Horton’s allies push for Horton to give up the flower and the speck – to which Horton declares he made a promise and he has to protect the people of Whoville because “people are people, no matter how small.” The Mayor is terrified about being ostracized when Horton advises him to get the people underground and he has to tell everyone that they are living on a speck and he has been talking with a giant elephant.

Horton Hears A Who! is rich in allegory and metaphor and the messages of the film are smart and worthwhile. The writing team uses the source material to create one of the most compelling films to advocate for imagination and social rebellion to come along in years. Both Horton and the Mayor are characters with deep convictions. Horton is loyal and determined in addition to being imaginative. The Mayor might spend most of the movie hampered by fear of social ramifications to his standing up to reveal the truth of their existence, but when he makes an impassioned case based on reason and science, he does so with great courage (albeit rather problematic plot twists at the same time).

The adversaries in Horton Hears A Who! are largely monolithic. The leader of the town council of Whoville and Kangaroo are solely interested in power and control. Kangaroo uses children as an excuse to be repressive and mean to Horton and in that way the film adequately exposes the way fear is used to manipulate people (perfect for a Bush Era movie!).

The voice acting in Horton Hears A Who! is homogenously wonderful. Carol Burnett is appropriately snooty as Kangaroo and Jim Carrey gives an impressive performance filled with (alternately) energy and determination. Steve Carell is funny as the Mayor, though he is not given much in the way to do where his character could ever have credibly been a mayor had he not essentially inherited the role.

The animation in Horton Hears A Who! looks incredible even on the small screen. Because the flower is so essential to the plot, the fact that on a decent HDTV, one may see every hair of pollen on the flowers is absolutely incredible. Horton Hears A Who! has a fantastic sense of physics which contrasts the heavy and realistic themes in the movie. Even better, the sense of movement is very manic in the Jungle and comparatively much more still in most of the Whoville sequences, which helps to clearly differentiate the two worlds in the movie.

Ultimately, Horton Hears A Who! is fun, funny, and smart enough to entertain children and adults alike!

For other works works with Jim Carrey, please check out my reviews of:
Kick-Ass 2
The Incredible Burt Wonderstone
Nantucket Film Festival’s Comedy Roundtable
A Christmas Carol
I Love You Phillip Morris
Yes Man
Fun With Dick And Jane
Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind
How The Grinch Stole Christmas
The Truman Show
Batman Forever

7.5/10

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

© 2013 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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