Hotel wireless has been spotty at best, and downtown and the convention center have transformed into SXSW Music central, so I've been cut off from the internet world for longer than I'd like. I'll cover stuff I missed hopefully tomorrow and Sunday. Only thing I've got planned today and tomorrow is Closing Night Film I'm A Cyborg, But That's OK.
Ben and Alison and Debbie and Pete....or Knocked Up
Monday night was the first insane-o line, crowd, and event going down with the highly-anticipated new Apatow movie.
It's probably not been since the sneak peek at Hellboy in 2004 that I've seen the lines so long at the Paramount Theatre in Austin than they were for Knocked Up, Judd Apatow's followup to The 40 Year-Old Virgin. Paul Rudd introduced the movie and off we went on a snap-crackle-pop-crackle-snap and pop again laugh a minute ride, as the studio marketers love to put on the posters and newspaper ads. Rudd, I might add, may hold the non-Austinite record for being in the most movies in one SXSW as of this year (The Ten, Diggers, Knocked Up...was there another one?).
The movie has the initial hook of being your garden variety 90-minute comedy, but it digs into more real-world stuff than you'd initially expect from a movie called Knocked Up. To me, the movie goes into similar territory to Clerks 2: the Manchild Generation gets a kick in the ass and has to grow up and move on or stay put and get kicked harder. To be clear, that's neither comparing nor degrading either film relative to the other.
The story in brief: Ben Stone (Rogen) and Alison Scott (Katherine Heigl) hook up randomly. He's a do-nothing slob, she's an up-and-comer at E! Entertainment Television. She winds up pregnant. She lives with her well-off sister Debbie (Leslie Mann) and her husband Pete (Paul Rudd). Debbie and Pete have two daughters and are headfirst into the phase of their marriage where they don't know how to communicate with each other anymore and one or the other of them feels trapped. The movie asks not just whether people in Ben & Alison's place can find their way, but also provided things work out, whether eight to ten years down the line they'll be able to survive together as the Debbie and Pete's of the world. It's a really serious set of issues when you think about it, but Apatow and crew keep it fun and entertaining.
You see a lot of moments where Ben says something atrociously juvenile at the worst possible moment that the women in the audience will say "I hate it when they do shit like that" as quickly as guys get some indigestion for thinking "shit, I've done that".
The movie is mostly comedy, but as far as I can remember it never veers into the kind of wacky zaniness you find in the Frat Pack comedies it follows. You really get the best of both worlds.
I want to make note of some standout stuff before it drifts out of my head or too far back in my notebook....you'll remember Leslie Mann as the alcoholic road rage chick in Virgin, and I don't see her on the big screen as often as I'd like...she can do funny yes, but she can do a lot more than just funny, which you get glimpses of here. Alan Tudyk and Kristen Wiig deserve trophies, medals, trophy-shaped medals, I dunno....for playing a couple of suits at E! so dialed back and ridiculous at once that it defies explanation.
I find the sentence you just read makes no logical sense until you've seen the movie.
There's an issue I can see with the movie, which I don't think the over-the-mooners who've been posting since Monday's screening are keeping in mind: the movie's hilarious, well-acted, and has a known quantity going for it...but return business might give it trouble theatrically for a couple reasons.
Sure, The 40 Year-Old Virgin had it Serious Life Stuff going on and got tons of return business, but Knocked Up is about the cathartic, trying experience of getting out of your comfort zone, which you like just fine, thank you very much. Additionally, it runs 2 hrs. 10 min., and may wear thin on folks who want the 90-minute runtime they're used to getting.
However...
Knocked Up is really well done, and maybe...just maybe will connect with a generation of guys who really aren't compelled to stop spending their paychecks on japanese swords to hang over their beds and a new bong. The message is strong, and Seth Rogen proves that hell yes can a stocky guy with curly hair carry a movie.
Encourage your friends to see this with you in a group, and don't wait for video. You might miss a few lines from the roars of laughter, as I did Monday night at the Paramount, but hey, that's what the DVD's for, right?
Before I move on to the movie I'm calling the Best Film of SXSW 2007, I would be remiss if I didn't mention something that comes up in Knocked Up that is near and dear to Hollywood Elsewhere and our overlord-slash-bossman Jeffrey Wells. It has to do with Munich, and if you want to be completely unspoiled on the movie, don't read the paragraph below, skip it and move on. This is not a major plot point, but for those who want things completely unspoiled, skip and move on. It isn't that big a deal anyway.
So at one point, Ben (Rogen) and the guys are talking and they bring up Munich and essentially call it the quintessential Jewish guy action movie, where the guys who wear yarmulkes are the no-prisoners gunmen. The way they talk about Eric Bana kicking ass and killing people, I half-expected to hear something like "it's like Jew Hard and Eric Bana is Bruce Willis". As funny as everything in the movie was, this bit about how "in that movie, the dudes with curly hair were the badasses, man" caught everyone off-guard and no one heard a damn thing said for around a minute after the joke hit the high point.
So, for all you guys who insist that Jeff took down Munich, sorry guys, he failed. Maybe next time.
I'm probably gonna get a call or an email for that last crack. Oh well, it's in good fun.
Even Sandler Gets the Blues...or, Reign Over Me
Wednesday was capped off quite nicely indeed.
I have to preface this with some information you should be aware of:
A) I haven't yet seen some films I intend to in the last two days of SXSW 2007, but am perfectly happy calling Reign Over Me the best movie I've seen over the last week, if not one of the best I've ever seen at this festival. I'm sure I'm A Cyborg, But That's OK is great and all, but this movie is...well, I'll get into that in a minute.
B) No, Jeff Wells did not pay me to say I liked it, neither did Mike Binder, and Sony has no idea who the hell I am, nor do they care.
C) Jeff Wells doesn't pay me to do anything, and Sony doesn't pay him to run the tower ads you see on the site currently. He's running them of his own volition because he believes in this movie.
Additionally, if you've reacted to the trailer, ads or word of mouth about Reign Over Me by saying a variation on any of the following:
"Oh Christ, I don't wanna see another one of those Adam Sandler movies"
"9/11 man...too soon"
Then take a moment to reconsider this movie, for your own sake.
The movie is not Billy Madison 2:Billy's Back, nor is it a United 93-style reenactment of that day.
Charlie Fineman (Sandler) and Alan Johnson (Don Cheadle) went to dental school together, and have been out of touch for years. The movie deals with Charlie's grief process following the loss of his wife and three daughters on September 11th, and how reuniting with Alan changes everything for both of them. Charlie drifts from place to place every day, meanwhile Alan's wife (Jada Pinkett Smith) manages and monitors his life so closely for him that he never has time to himself alone or to start a hobby. When he meets back up with Charlie, that all changes.
Oddly enough, I found Alan's marriage suffers from a similar disconnect as the one portrayed in Knocked Up, but with a much less comedic overtone. The fact that the same root problem pop up in both films may just seem like a coincidence, but I think it's indicative of something that's becoming more and more obvious and prevalent: married couples are collecting all the components of a happy life and aren't able to assemble them to their satisfaction. Nothing fits as perfectly as they'd imagined or hoped.
Terrific supporting performances from Liv Tyler as a therapist/colleague of Alan's, Saffron Burrows as an emotionally imbalanced patient, and the aforementioned Jada solidify the bond that the movie is built around, these two guys trying to get back to who they are deep down piece by piece, like they're putting together an old hot rod they used to tool around in years before to give it one more go, see a glimpse of who they were.
Binder himself pops in as he has in all his previous films, doing solid work as always, not sticking out unless, like me, you know who he is and think "hey, it's Mike Binder" when he comes in. Momentary appearances from Donald Sutherland, Ted Raimi and John de Lancie are all memorable but unobtrusive, never really detracting from the narrative just because they have familiar faces. The never-seen-them discovery for me was Paula Newsome, playing Melanie, Alan's opinionated, self-assured receptionist. She can make you laugh without saying a damn word, and she does just that whenever she's on-screen and not firing off one of her lines with pitch-perfect delivery.
So what's so great about the movie, huh?
Well for starters, Binder doesn't knock us over the head with the origin of the trauma that Charlie (Sandler) has gone through. We have information withheld from us due to looking from the outside in at Charlie, and not because the director wants to act like we're stupid. A particular breakdown scene comes to mind, which I'm really glad they didn't cut. It came unexpectedly enough that I felt as surprised as Don Cheadle looked on-screen listening to him.
The question Alan is faced with is: do we need to fix people, or should we just help them do the fixing themselves?
As much as we may want to do the work for them because we love and treasure our loved ones, Binder's film makes a strong case for the latter. At a post-screening Q&A, a woman stood up and broadsided Mike and his two stars with the fact that she had recently lost her husband, and that the grief process in the film came of as completely authentic.
"Everyone wants to just fix you, and make you go to therapy, or take pills, or..." she trailed off at one point. Awkward though it may have been, it hit precisely on what we saw on the screen.
All of that and presumably more has been shoved on Sandler's Charlie Fineman, and none of it took for the longest time. What is it about Alan that means Charlie can open up?
This has rambled and rolled, but I have to make some final major points or I'll hate this when I look at it in the morning. I've tried not to spoil anything, but still give an impression of what kind of movie you're looking at here. It's Binder's best film, from all the ones I've seen, and these are two of the best performances I've seen from either of these men, and that is saying something for both of them.
What's that? Adam Sandler isn't an actor, he's a comedian? Don Cheadle's playing the straight man, right? That's no big task, right?
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Adam Sandler has everything he needs in his toolkit that every great American actor has had: humor, charisma, emotional sensitivity, and depth among them. He usually doesn't get to show them off. He says he purposely doesn't read what the press writes because of what it does to you to have to endure that kind of defamation and ridicule. It's like asking to get picked on at school.
I don't think you're qualified to be a film critic if you can't objectively give the man his due for this movie. I don't know how Hollywood politics work, but this performance.....you know, I'm not gonna go there, this is enough of a rave already. I'll put it this way--if you think you saw all the nuance he had to offer in Punch Drunk Love, you're sadly misled.
As for Don Cheadle, another comment brought up in the Q&A was how difficult it is to play the straight man opposite the affected, pulling Tom Cruise playing opposite Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man as a prime example. As an actor, you have the script, and know everything that's really going on, but having to spontaneously, moment-to-moment go back to the place where you can't see in the other guy's head and feel that helplessness...that's a bigger challenge than you'd think. Cheadle knocks it out of the park, across a state line, and out of another park altogether.
You seriously have to see this movie. It's more relevant than every movie I can think of currently in active, first-run release, and as summer approaches, you never know when you'll get to see a movie that really has something to say anytime soon.
My damn camera went to shit. I have no means of pulling the photos I've taken off the SD card until (probably) we get back to Florida. Brilliant.
Tonight I caught an advance screening of TMNT, a fantastic return to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise that was followed by a Q&A with director/writer Kevin Munroe. Copious thanks to AICN Head Geek Harry Knowles for putting the screening together last-minute and Alamo Drafthouse Founder Tim League for the free pizza party associated with it. Munroe knows how to treat a franchise properly and tell a CGI story that doesn't need squirrels, bears, or penguins or fart jokes for filler. Expect something brief tomorrow during the day.