Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope

The truth is that San Diego Comic Con is pretty hellish. It smells awful thanks to the 20,000 gallons of dork sweat, is insanely crowded every day, most of your time is spent waiting in line and everything is insanely expensive. Director Morgan Spurlock?s latest documentary, Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope, chooses to ignore all of this, though, and the result is a film that not only feels like a tourism video, but a dull tourism video.

All filmed during and around the time of the 2010 San Diego Comic Con, the documentary follows a small group of people, all of whom are traveling to the convention with different goals in mind. There?s Eric Henson and Skip Harvey, who wish to become comic book artists; Chuck Rozanski, who is doing his best to keep his comic book store alive; Holly Conrad, a costume designer with goals of winning the masquerade ball; and James Darling, who has plans to propose to his girlfriend, who he also met at Comic Con. The stories are interwoven with segments featuring some of the biggest names in geek culture, from Joss Whedon to Stan Lee to Kevin Smith, who try to explain just what it is that makes Comic Con so special.

There?s no real conflict at the center of Spurlock?s latest, but that?s largely because the film ignores all challenges in favor of simply being a love letter to the convention. Many patrons of the annual event have complained loudly about how it has changed over the years, becoming less about comics and geekdom and more about advertising and Hollywood, but that aspect is never fully explored in Comic Con Episode IV. Instead the movie is more concerned with the obsessive toy collector who wants nothing more in this world than an 18-inch Galactus action figure. It?s easy to appreciate that Spurlock never mocks his subjects ? instead authentically embracing their obsessions ? but the lack of any kind of real analysis makes the project hollow and pointless.

Spurlock is nowhere to be seen in this documentary, unlike Super Size Me, Where In The World Is Osama Bin Laden? and The Greatest Movie Ever Sold where he was front and center, but in this film it serves as a detriment because it never feels like a real Morgan Spurlock documentary. Though the subject matter is fun and casual in the director?s style, there is a sense of emptiness watching the film due to his absence. Because we end up following multiple subjects instead of just one, the whole thing becomes rather episodic and choppy, never able to find real focus. While the director decided to stay behind the camera this time in order to better emphasize the story of the fans being followed, it doesn?t feel like a Morgan Spurlock movie and that?s a bad thing.

As proven by his previous projects, Morgan Spurlock is an incredibly talented documentarian and filmmaker, but his newest never really works. The movie paints the San Diego experience as some blissful nerd nirvana where you can go and have the geekiest time of your life, but casually breezes over or minimizes the large-scale problems that the event deals with increasingly every year. Perhaps the only way to enjoy Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope is to have never been at the convention personally. But then why would you care?

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Think Like a Man

Even if you somehow never saw the book Act Like A Lady, Think Like A Man at the grocery store checkout line or in TV ads, there's pretty much no way you won't know everything about its contents, its message, or its author Steve Harvey by the end of the new movie based on it, Think Like A Man. Unlike He's Just Not That Into You, which adapted a self-help book into a bland and sprawling rom-com, Harvey's book is at the center of the equally bland and sprawling Think Like A Man-- the author and actor himself pops up frequently to dish out bits of wisdom, and all of the characters carry the book around as if it were the Dead Sea Scrolls.

It's unclear if writers Keith Merryman or David A. Newman simply couldn't think of a more clever way to adapt the material, or if Harvey himself demanded to hang over the moving like some advice-spewing Cheshire Cat, but Think Like A Man quickly becomes exhausting in adhering to its many lessons, all mostly about how women can manipulate the men in their lives to treat them better. There's the single mom (Regina Hall) who learns to be up front with her momma's boy beau (Terrence J), the frustrated long-term girlfriend (Gabrielle Union) redecorating her house against her boyfriend's (Jerry Ferrara) will, and the sly single gal (Meagan Good) who decides to wait a full 90 days before letting her new guy (Romany Malco) have the "cookie"-- come on, you know what this PG-13 movie means by that.

There's also a courtship between a high-powered executive (Taraji P. Henson) and an aspiring chef currently working as a caterer (Michael Ealy), the only relationship that breaks the mold by having the woman be the one who learns a lesson. All the guys hang out in a thrice-weekly basketball game, swapping dating advice and joshing around, which means their encounters occasionally focus on something other than the relationships we're seeing play out on screen (Kevin Hart, in a fast-talking comic relief role, provides most of that). But the women talk exclusively about the men, usually in platitudes cribbed directly from Harvey's book, and at two-plus hours Think Like A Man might take as long as actually reading the book yourself.

To its credit, the movie is often much funnier than it could have been, usually thanks to Hart or some jabs amongst the guys that zing a little harder than you expect-- though Union and Good both take advantage of their straightforward characters to add spots of comic zest as well. Tim Story, who made Barbershop before a misguided venture into the Fantastic Four movies, directs with a quick pace and a willingness to cut his performers loose when necessary, especially Hart, whose storyline only develops near the end but pays off nicely. And the glossy production design gives the women fantastic outfits and every apartment, no matter how humble, a sitcom-y sheen-- no small compensation when the story stalls out in the second act and your mind may wander to wondering how Good maintains such a great manicure in every scene.

Early on in the movie two different characters take shots at Tyler Perry movies, setting them up as the kind of lame rom-coms that everyone in this world ought to be moving past. And if Tyler Perry's melodramatic tales-- in which love is only possible once you've undergone hardship and embraced Jesus together-- are really the only model for African-American relationships at the movies these days, then Think Like A Man really is something special, if only for being as zippy, bland and secular as any other studio romantic comedy. By relying heavily on gender stereotypes that assume every woman wants to get married-- unless it's Henson's character, "The woman who is her own man"-- and every man wants nothing more than to play basketball and drink with his buddies, Think Like A Man sets up easy sides in its game of love, then spends two hours pretending it's difficult to reconcile the two. As in any rom-com, no one's actual relationship is like this, but that doesn't mean we can't continue taking some very guilty pleasure in watching it all play out anyway.

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American Reunion

Try to imagine this. It?s 1999. Jim?s dad (Eugene Levy) catches his sexually curious son (Jason Biggs) raping an apple pie. Instead of disposing of the dessert, though, he places the molested pastry in a time capsule. The vault is sealed and buried in the yard, where the rotting slice grows stale, sticky and revoltingly indigestible.

Thirteen years later, the capsule is opened. The pungent stench of moldy fruit and crusty ejaculation is enough to make you want to vomit. What?s left of the soiled pie is scraped out of its filthy container, placed on a plate, and served to susceptible patrons as something edible.

If you hadn?t already guessed, the rancid pie remnants in the above analogy are meant to represent American Reunion. And Universal is handing you a virtual fork, daring you to scoop a mouthful of this wretched ?comedy? and choke it down. Please, God, tell me you?re not going to waste your time and ? more important ? money on prepubescent jerk-off humor that reeks of comedic flopsweat and gender-insensitive sexual frustration.

And yet, I honestly expected something better. What an idiot that makes me. Even though the American Pie brand has since devolved into a straight-to-video crap factory cranking out tepid sequels meant to titillate teenage boys (and keep Levy employed), I chose to believe that the producers wouldn?t bother dragging the series back into theaters unless it had something relevant to say about getting older and finding our way as post-graduate thirtysomethings who are wrestling with careers, children and aging parents. Nope. Reunion ends up being everything I prayed it wouldn?t be: Lazy, stupid, recycled, immature, predictable, unfunny ... a pathetic attempt by a dead franchise to scrape the bottom of an already filthy barrel and squeeze a few more dollars from audience members seeking clich?d nostalgia. The only thing that differentiates it from the aforementioned DVD sequels is that the original cast members from the 1999 installment all had time on their professional schedules to participate. Given their non-existent acting abilities, though, it?s easy to understand why they?re hardly in demand.

The story involves the Pie kids returning home to Michigan for their 13th high school reunion. (An unlucky number for them, and for us.) Each arrives with a unique emotional problem, all of which are resolved in stupefyingly boring fashion. The central conflict involves ?old? married couple Jim (Biggs) and Michelle (Alyson Hannigan), whose relationship is in a rut. Neither can stop masturbating, yet sex with each other sounds about as appealing as sitting through American Pie Presents: The Book of Love.

Jim blames their sexual frigidity on the couple?s young son, though never fear ? directors Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg jettison the child for long stretches of Reunion, prompting this parent to wonder why Jim and Michelle are never with their kid, or interested where he might be. Jim, in fact, hardly ever touches his child, if he even touches him at all. Maybe it?s because I?m a dad, but I tend to pay attention to stuff like that. The filmmakers should, as well, if they?re going to bother introducing a child into the equation. It would be remarkable, if only Reunion was one of those movies that concerned itself with details. It doesn?t.

Tell me, what is the point of American Reunion? As a comedy, it dwells on five unsatisfied man-children who despise their present, fear their future, and long for a past that wasn?t very enjoyable in the first place. You?d never celebrate the Pie movies for their sophisticated insights into the human condition or their inspired physical comedy. Yet even the one choreographed bit in the middle of Reunion, which finds Jim sneaking his naked teenage neighbor back into her suburban bedroom, is a tired exercise in sitcom chicanery.

Sloppy direction and pedantic screenwriting almost could be excused if Reunion had something to offer beyond sex-crazed punchlines that stopped being funny before American Wedding. Who?s still laughing as Scott?s unfiltered frat brat Stiffler pines for an oral-happy girlfriend he disgustingly dismisses as ?the mouth that got away?? But as the movie?s attempts at recreating its tailgating youth scattered haphazardly like buckshot, I felt sad for anyone who behaves like the frozen-in-time idiots of the Pie universe ? and for anyone who thinks spending time with these movies is entertaining.

?Maybe in high school it was funny. Now it?s just a felony,? one character reflects. He?s exactly right. ?

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The Five-Year Engagement

There are worse people to spend two hours with than Jason Segel's Tom and Emily Blunt's Violet, the persistently delayed couple at the center of The Five-Year Engagement. We meet them as Tom is ready to propose, and even when Violet accidentally ruins the surprise they go through with the proposal anyway, all good humor and jokey and believably warm to each other. But eventually Tom and Violet become less like your favorite friends than your favorite college friends who got off on the wrong path at some point, making mistakes and wallowing in them, turning into the kind of quiet depressives you eventually need to distance yourself from for your own sanity.

The Five-Year Engagement, which runs longer than two hours and invites all kinds of bitter jokes about the title, is another collaboration between writer/director Nicholas Stoller and writer/star Jason Segel in which they seem to have written and shot a movie that is four hours long, then awkwardly stuffed it into a still-overlong two-hour frame. For all the funny jokes and well-crafted characters and storylines that both surprise and satisfy, there are scores of comedians crammed into tiny supporting roles, plot turns that seem purely mechanical, and bits of comedy that everyone in the editing room liked too much to let go. Far more shapeless than Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Engagement isn't really telling the story of this relationship, but using it as a frame to set up some jokes and characters that would have worked even better with an actual structure to guide them.

What happens over the course of Tom and Violet's five-year engagement is about as eventful as what happens in anyone's life over five years: they get engaged, then Violet gets offered a grad program at the University of Michigan, then they move together to Ann Arbor, where their relationship suffers after Tom takes crappy job and Violet gets wrapped up in both her program and her suave professor (Rhys Ifans, surprisingly sexy, actually). Among the comedians who play their friends in Ann Arbor are Chris Parnell, Brian Posehn, Mindy Kaling and Kevin Hart, and though each gets in a few good lines or weird visual humor (including Parnell's hideous homemade sweaters), none seem to make the intended impact. The movie ambles along at a nice enough pace until it kind of crash lands in the second act, where Tom gets depressed about Michigan life and takes the audience down with him.

With all the movie's wild tonal shifts and pacing challenges, it's a relief that one part remains consistently great: Chris Pratt and Alison Brie as Tom's best friend and Violet's sister, respectively, who start up a surprising relationship of their own early on and act as a model of the marriage Tom and Violet could have if they just got their shit together. Both standouts on their respective NBC sitcoms Parks & Recreation and Community, Pratt and Brie are the only supporting players given the time to develop real characters, and though some of their scenes can drag as much as the others-- their wedding is probably the draggiest in the film-- you still start wishing the movie was about them instead. From Brie's Elmo voice to Pratt's terrible pretend-acting, each knows what works for them, and they play their hearts out on the sidelines while Blunt and Segel get a little lost in the middle.

That's not to say that both stars don't have their moments, and in the times when their rapport is allowed to play out without getting caught in weird comedic moments or plot contrivances, they once again feel like that appealing couple we met at the beginning of the movie. But for all the bright moments that break out of the muddle, and the zippy ending that almost rescues it, The Five-Year Engagement catches a bad case of the meanders and never quite recovers, leaving us to wonder what Segel and Stoller could do if forced into a tight 90 minute runtime, with only the really, really good stuff spared the cutting room floor.

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The Cabin in the Woods

How much should you know about The Cabin in the Woods before you see it? Ideally, nothing-- so if you click away from this review now, I understand. But interest is high enough in the horror film from first-time director Drew Goddard and his co-writer, Joss Whedon, that plenty of people have already seen the trailer, in which we're told explicitly that this story of college kids in a creepy cabin has quite the twist, and that the generic title gives way to a complete deconstruction of the horror genre. Believe it or not, it's OK to know that-- that's the premise of the film, not a spoiler.

But from that premise The Cabin in the Woods sets up a high-energy and electric game of chess with its audience, setting up every trope of its creepy-house genre, tearing it apart, and then going even deeper into a central mystery that only gets more satisfying as it goes. Goddard and Whedon's script functions both as a haunted-house movie-- there are great moments of tension throughout-- and a spirited romp right past the genre, held together by an impeccable sense of humor and a constant ability to surprise. The central characters aren't quite as interesting as they ought to be, and the story wraps up with a little more whimper than bang, but those are minor tradeoffs for a movie that's otherwise such a ball.

Even when the story sticks firmly in standard horror territory, this particular group of attractive kids is especially fun to spend time with. Our bookish heroine (Kristen Connolly) sets up a nice rapport with her blond bestie (Anna Hutchison), who in turn quickly establishes a believable relationship with her jock boyfriend (Chris Hemsworth). Add in a bookish guy love interest (Jesse Williams) and a stoner dork (Fran Kranz) and you've got a deliberate assortment of horror movie stereotypes, but the actors commit nicely even as Goddard and Whedon's clever writing pushes it all just over the edge into satire.

What happens from there? You'll have to see it, and you really have to see it if you love horror, hate horror, or have any interest in seeing how the genre can function as a playground for something completely fresh. Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford are involved, though in roles that are more fun to discover as you go along-- they do get a lot of the best jokes, though, and their scenes show a lot of Goddard's skill in handling the rhythm of a scene. He does plenty of showing off elsewhere, though, making a really elegant transition from writer to director by handling the narrative of every scene, dishing out scares and laughs and even dramatic heft by knowing where to take the audience at every turn.

The Cabin in the Woods is a genre exercise at heart, and though it has the potential for real greatness-- at certain points you might think Goddard could take this story anywhere-- it settles for ultimate audience satisfaction, which is pretty close to greatness anyway. It's so, so much fun to watch with an audience-- any audience, anywhere-- and to revel in that experience of being perfectly manipulated by a director and writer who know every button to push.

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Darling Companion

Darling Companion, the new film from director Lawrence Kasdan, has one of the greatest ensembles you?ll ever see. From its central players to the supporting cast, almost every role is played by someone fantastic. Unfortunately, it also proves that you can have the greatest group of performers in the world, but it?s meaningless if they aren?t working from an even halfway decent script.

The story begins when Beth (Diane Keaton) and her daughter, Grace (Elisabeth Moss), discover a stray dog on the side of the highway. Despite protests from Grace?s husband, Joseph (Kevin Kline), who is too preoccupied with his surgical career to have time for his wife, Beth adopts the dog, names it Freeway, and they grow to become best friends. One year later, the entire family, including Joseph?s sister Penny (Dianne Wiest), her boyfriend, Russell (Richard Jenkins) and Penny?s son, Bryan (Mark Duplass), get together for Grace?s wedding in the Rocky mountains. Following the reception, however, Joseph goes for a walk with the dog and accidentally loses him. Distressed about losing her animal pal, Beth gets everyone to stay and try to find Freeway. Guided by the cabin caretaker (Ayelet Zurer), who may or may not be a psychic gypsy, the group splits off into groups to go search for the missing mutt.

While any pet owner can relate to the title of Darling Companion, a more apt name for the film would be White People Problems: The Movie. Living in a very different world that the average American, the characters in the story don?t act overly pretentious, but it?s clear that none of them have worried about anything important in decades. There are casual references to the need to return home and go to work, but it?s never more than a throwaway suggestion and nobody actually goes through with it. As distressing as the idea of losing a pet is, the edge is taken off when it feels like the family could afford to hire the New York Yankees to help them in their search.

Writers Lawrence and Meg Kasdan clearly have no idea what to do with their characters, switching up the search parties to try to give all the actors some one-on-one time with each other, but scattering the narrative so it seems more focused on establishing funny situations than building relationships or furthering the plot. Bryan and Russell, who have an awkward rapport due to the fact that Russell is sleeping with Bryan?s mother, are teamed up at one point, but instead of having them actually deal with a real situation they are instead forced to go up against a smelly crazy guy in the ?woods who collects stray dogs. The Kasdans confuse time spent together with emotional growth, leaving the audience with no connection to the characters and no reason to care about what happens to them.

In addition to failing as a drama, Darling Companion is also groan-worthy as a comedy. Jenkins gets the worst of it, and though he has proven time and time again that with a great script he can work wonders, there wasn?t a good script to be found on the set of this movie. Russell talks frankly about his sexual relationship with Penny and dreams of opening a British-style pub in Omaha, Nebraska, but the movie confuses awkwardness for humor and the results are eye-roll worthy.

Nice as it is to see so many great actors occupying the same screen, that charm quickly wears off as the film drags on. Darling Companion feels like a movie compiled from old favors, each actor owing something to the writers, producers or each other. How else could so many immensely talented people end up being involved with such a terrible project?

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The Three Stooges

Like Sherlock Holmes and James Bond, the Three Stooges are bigger than any one movie. They?re bigger than any one villain they?ve interacted with or any one moment of lasting greatness they?ve given us. We fondly remember them not for the specifics but for the broad personalities. More than sixty years after Curly Howard?s stroke ripped apart the classic line-up, nothing about the way they see the world has changed, and there?s something wonderful about that timelessness.

The Farrelly Brothers? take on the Stooges is more of a karaoke performance than anything else, but then again, so were all the best Three Stooges shorts. Moe, Curly and Larry never worked because they invented original premises or met unique human beings. The comedians took the old tropes seen everywhere else and threw their creations in the middle to gouge eyes, stub toes and nyuk it up. In doing so, they commented on the changing world around them through their beloved characters that never changed. During World War II, the Stooges got a steady dose of dictators and soldiers. It only makes sense they?d now be given reality television personalities to slap around, as well as a classic orphans-save-the-orphanage premise.

The orphanage this time around is run by Mother Superior (Jane Lynch) and Sister Mary-Mengele (Larry David), and the orphans are, of course, Moe (Chris Diamantopoulos), Larry (Sean Hayes) and Curly (Will Sasso). They?re thrown onto the doorsteps as infants, and decades later without having achieved their dream of a family, our heroes are forced to leave the nest to raise more than eight hundred thousand dollars to save their home. The specifics involve rising health care costs, but ultimately, they don?t matter.

What does matter is what they end up finding, or more specifically, the many who?s they meet. The first is the deceitful Lydia (Sofia Vergara), who offers the guys the orphanage money to kill her sick husband. The second, a reality television producer, offers one a job on his hit show, and the third is an orphan named Teddy (Kirby Heyborne) who got out years earlier and became a lawyer. Through misidentifications, sledge hammer blows, inappropriate farts, shotgun blasts and pissing babies, our heroes find redemption, the villains find their comeuppance and everyone heads to CVS for ice packs.

If that all sounds a bit convenient, wacky and low brow, I assure you it is. Clearly enormous fans of the source material, the Farrelly Brothers go to great lengths to prevent anyone from learning any lessons and to prevent the script from getting too intellectual. It?s nothing but rapid fire pratfalls, slaps and puns for ninety-two minutes. Hayes, Diamantopoulos and Sasso all turn in wonderful performances as the three main characters most of us know by heart, and the directors do a fine enough job of coordinating the action in a way that feels like the timing and pacing of the originals. It comes off less like a tribute and more like a slightly below-average episode we might stumble across on television, which is actually kind of impressive.

Unfortunately, all that success doesn?t necessarily make the movie incredibly watchable. The Stooges always worked a bit better in small doses, and not everyone they meet serves as an appropriate foil here. The gags have a nice way of sliding into one another, but after too much screen time, they also have a way of feeling a bit monotonous. Ultimately, without the presence of any brilliant moments, there?s really nothing tangible to take away, except the general warmth and comfort offered by seeing loveable characters. As a friendly bit of nostalgia and an impressive recreation, the film is worth seeing. As a flat-out comedy, it?s mediocre. Three stars sounds about right. Nyuk Nyuk Nyuk.

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