After critical successes like Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, I would’ve thought that Quentin Tarantino’s 1997 heist film, Jackie Brown, would be much better known. The story follows a middle aged flight attendant, the titular Jackie Brown (Pam Grier), who, upon getting caught smuggling money from Cabo for arms dealer Ordell Robbie (Samuel L. Jackson), decides to con Ordell and the feds out of the remaining half a million dollars located in Mexico.

While often remaining in familiar territory for Tarantino—a crime drama filled with sexism, racism and plenty of violence—it’s interesting to see him work primarily with a female lead character. Jackie is smart and confident, often taking matters into her own hands to solve her troubles. While having strong female characters isn’t out of Tarantino’s realm, it’s refreshing seeing not just a woman, but a black woman, be completely in control. Pam Grier puts so much life into this character: she’s got an incredible toughness to her, while still coming off as charming. In one of my favorite scenes of the whole film, she yells at Ordell after he deviated from the plan they set to get the money. Watching her berate a violent man with a temper—who also tried to kill her earlier in the film—is awesome. She completely takes control and reasserts her position as the leader of the plan.

The only other thing to really stand out in the film is the supporting characters. Max Cherry (Robert Forster) is a bail bondsman with a crush on Jackie who decides to try and help her to pull off the scam. He’s a great contrast to Jackie: he’s quiet, willing to help and more than capable. It’s no surprise that he was nominated for an academy award for his role. Over on Ordell’s side is Louis (Robert De Niro), his former friend who just got out of jail and works for Ordell again. He’s also quiet, but it’s more that he seems to have no ambition and just drift through life. Lastly, Federal Agent Ray Nicolette (Michael Keaton) is highly motivated to catch Ordell and prove himself a capable agent. He’s intense, but despite his best efforts, he can’t seem to manipulate or scare Jackie into cooperating.

The acting, writing and filming of Jackie Brown are all exactly up to Tarantino’s high standards. I think the reason that it goes unnoticed is that there’s nothing particularly memorable about the film. While well executed, it feels like it’s just a combination of Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs. I don’t think it should be overlooked for that reason, but I understand why the film doesn’t stand out among the rest of his work.

Grade: A-

Length: 154 minutes

Girl Most Likely suffers from a painful dilemma: the acting is fantastic, but the story falls flat. Imogene (Kristen Wiig) is a playwright who, hoping to get her ex-boyfriend’s attention, pretends to commit suicide. When she wakes up at the hospital after almost actually killing herself, she finds her mother, Zelda (Annette Bening), who she hasn’t spoken with in years. Arriving at her childhood house to recover from her suicide attempt, she sees her brother, Ralph (Christopher Fitzgerald), for the first time in years and meets the attractive renter, Lee (Darren Criss), occupying her former room. When she finds out that her mother lied to her about her father’s death, she decides to focus her energy on trying to reunite with him and get her life back together.

Kristen Wiig continues to prove how great of a comedic actress she is, but unfortunately in this role her character fails to come to life. The whole film feels like Girls or Frances Ha, but unlike those works, fails to live up to its potential. The story feels scattered and never develops a point strong enough for me to connect emotionally with the characters.

When she finds out her father isn’t dead and that her mother lied to spare her young children the trouble of a divorce, she comes to believe that finding her father will fix her life. He’s a successful author and historian living in New York City, so she convinces Lee to take her to the city to look for him. When she finds out she’s been evicted from her apartment and that her best friend won’t let her stay with her for a few days, she ends up having to return to her mother’s house. Each time she sets out to find her father, she gets sidetracked and ends up back at home. The search for her father can never develop into something deeper because she never really focuses on looking, but rather seems to prefer the idea of finding him more.

Imogene seems happy trying to reconnect with her brother, despite being miserable about her return to Atlantic City. While she obviously cares for her brother, she’s too concerned with trying to fix herself to truly bond with him. Instead of legitimately helping and supporting him, she seems to merely pity him. She cannot understand how someone could be happy sticking around his or her hometown when New York is so close. She too busy trying to get her brother, who is obsessed with hermit crabs, to come out of his own shell and never even tries to understand him.

As you could probably surmise, this story is too scattered and irrelevant to make any strong emotional connections or to even maintain a certain level of funny, but the biggest pity is the waste of acting talent. Besides Kristen Wiig, Annette Bening is brilliant as the mother. She’s the perfect mix of crazy and overbearing while still loving and caring about her daughter deep down. Matt Dillon is surprisingly good as a paranoid man who is worried about unseen assassins and telling ridiculous stories about being a samurai and struck by lightning. Bob Balaban also makes an appearance as the estranged father and is great as always.

While the acting was up to the task of the film, the story ends up being irrelevant. A crazy ending wraps up the story quickly and fails to connect with me on anything deeper than face value, despite being set up to potentially say something about family and relationships.

Grade: C-

Length: 103 minutes

While most sequels fail because they make the same movie all over again, 22 Jump Street succeeds largely by being the same as the first. While an over-the-top ridiculous chase scene starts the film off on a bad note, it’s quickly redeemed when Officers Schmidt (Jonah Hill) and Jenko (Channing Tatum) find themselves in front of the police captain’s (Nick Offerman) desk. In a heavy handed, meta-comedy moment, Offerman lets the boys know that they’re going to college to do literally the same thing again—“infiltrate the dealers, find the supplier”—only this time they have a bigger budget!

In an effort to diverge this film from the first, this time Tatum gets to hang out with the “cool kids” by joining the football team and rushing a fraternity. I’m normally not a fan of Tatum, especially as a comic actor. That being said, it feels more natural and also funnier seeing him surrounded by meatheaded jocks than it was watching him struggle to fit in with the nerdy kids from AP Chemistry class. It’s not that he is overtly unfunny; rather, I find him acting like an idiot funnier when he is surrounded by idiocy. I also really enjoyed seeing Hill back in his original element of being the awkward nerdy kid, especially around girls. While I can appreciate avoiding stereotyping characters based on looks, it just feels more appropriate for them to play out their stereotypes in these films. 

The meta-humor of the film was far and away my favorite part. It managed to be heavy-handed throughout the film while it avoided collapsing the world of the film. Outside of self-referential jokes about plot, budget and profits, the rest of the gags mostly fell flat. There were several moments, like in the first film, that I felt crossed out of the realm of funny and became just plain stupid. The physical humor of Hill and Tatum’s contrasting physiques gets old pretty fast. Their personalities, on the other hand, work well in conflict. The two have an undeniable chemistry on screen that makes the longer bits not only bearable but also enjoyable. 

While many of the characters from 21 Jump Street reprise their roles, including Dave Franco and Rob Riggle in a hilarious jail scene, several of the new characters were really great. Particularly Mercedes (Jillian Bell, Workaholics), whose onslaught of jokes about Jonah Hill’s character looking old are hilarious! Also making a cameo appearance is H. Jon Benjamin as the football coach. Even with almost no lines, I think simply his presence makes the film better. Finally, contrary to all the other roles I’ve seen him in prior to this, I still think Ice Cube gives my favorite performance of the entire film! 

Grade: B- (aka see it on a rainy summer afternoon)

P.S. Make sure you stay through the ENTIRE credits of the film for a special treat!

The second iteration of Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody’s collaboration, after Juno (2007), follows a woman acting much less mature than her age might suggest. Mavis (Charlize Theron) is a ghostwriter struggling to finish the final book in a dying series of young adult novels. When she receives an email announcing the birth of her high school boyfriend Buddy’s (Patrick Wilson) daughter, she decides to return to her hometown and win him back. She’s certain that they belong together, especially since her first marriage ended in divorce. Upon her arrival, she runs into Matt (Patton Oswalt), another former classmate. They bond and she lets him in on the true reason why she’s in town, whereas everyone else things she’s there for a “real estate thing”. Matt is more or less disgusted that she would try to ruin a his marriage but nevertheless takes pity on her. By constantly spending time with him—at a bar, at his wife’s band’s show, even at his daughter’s naming ceremony—it becomes more obvious that she’s in a state of arrested development.

Mavis is a horribly superficial person Her position of mild celebrity, coming from the rural town of Mercury, Minnesota and making it all the way to the cultural mecca that is…“the Minni-Apple”, gives her an inflated personality, while the rest of the town seems to be more or less unimpressed. When she goes home constantly dressed to the nines, people roll their eyes and almost everyone realizes—except Mavis—that she has some issues to work out. Her relentless pursuit of Buddy, a happily married man, is borderline nauseating in its desperation. Along with all of this, she is constantly drinking to deal with her emotions, which makes her even more pitiful because she keeps meeting up with Matt (who disapproves of the plan) to “get wasted.” She’s still behaving like a high schooler even though she;s now in her 30s and everyone else is being an adult.

It’s interesting to watch Mavis deal with her fading spotlight while slowly coming to realizes her own problems. While depression is a serious issue, Mavis’s sheer lack of acknowledgement of her own problems and depression makes her hard to sympathize with. One of the few moments where I found myself on her side was when she went to a bookstore and saw a pile of books in her series on the clearance table. Watching her confront the truth about her books’ popularity was surprisingly sad, but that feeling didn’t last too long; she very maturely dealt with the situation by knocking a book off the table. I more often than not felt myself pitying Mavis, along with the other characters in the film. When she goes to see Buddy’s wife’s band play, she is hanging all over him. The other women shake their heads disapprovingly and shoot her dirty looks. Her lack of subtlety is painful to watch. Matt is truly the only person who is honest with her about how terrible her actions are, and to make it worse she continues with her antics and then goes drinking with Matt. While he protests her mission to ruin Buddy’s life, he still is there to commiserate with her when she fails; she can go out with Buddy and when she fails to win him over, Matt can cheer her up which isn’t good for either of them.

What I found to be the saddest part of the film was Patton Oswalt’s character. When he first talks to Mavis in the bar, she doesn’t remember him until she sees his cane: he’s the “hate crime guy.” In high school, Matt was jumped in the woods and beaten by a group of jocks because they thought he was gay. “It made national news…until they found out I wasn’t gay.” While I understand the clichéd idea of the nerdy, pudgy guy and the beautiful, popular girl—which don’t get me wrong, they both are—becoming friends, the whole hate crime aspect of his character is just too damn depressing for me. Not that it was done poorly, but it seemed to be almost too much sadness without adding very much to the film.

I liked the film, but didn’t love it. It thrived on the awkward moments between Buddy and Mavis, but when we learn about the full story between them it is, like the rest of the film, just so utterly depressing that I really just didn’t care enough to think too much about her shitty behavior. It felt much more natural to wallow in sorrow over the characters’ back stories than to analyze why that lead to them behaving the way they do now. It’s not that it was poorly executed, but I think the film lacked some balance to keep me caring about anything. The overall feeling the film left me with was a sense of existential dread, but in the best possible way!

Grade: B

Length: 94 Minutes

I picked this based entirely on Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo being in it. I realized I had made a good choice when the opening scene had Vampire Weekend’s “Cousins” playing and featured Zosia Mamet. 

The film follows two siblings, Joni (Mia Wasikowska) and Laser (Josh Hutcherson), who want to meet their biological father. He isn’t in the picture because their mothers, Nic (Annette Bening) and Jules (Julianne Moore), each gave birth with a sperm donation. Laser convinces Joni to call the sperm bank to set up a meeting, because she is 18 and allowed to request that information while he only 15. Their biological father, Paul (Mark Ruffalo), is a restaurateur “really pushing the alternative style.” After his mothers press him to explain his bizarre behavior recently, Laser admits to meeting Paul. Although obviously hurt that their children sought out Paul, they decide the whole family should meet him. As he gets more and more involved in their lives, the normal pattern of their family life gets shaken up. 

The story was absolutely beautiful, which is probably why it was nominated for best original screenplay at the Oscars. I think it did a wonderful job balancing a story that was as much about growing up as it was about getting older. Joni is classically the “perfect child” on her way off to college in the fall. Although she is very uptight and straight laced like her mother, Nic, when she meets Paul—who is much more relaxed and less of a conformist—she starts to wonder if she’s missing out on experiences because of it and begins small acts of rebellion, like riding on Paul’s motorcycle. On the other hand, there’s Laser, who is very athletic but seems to be heading in a bad direction thanks to his friend, Clay. Paul points out his potentially destructive path, just like his mothers have, but he still doesn’t want to acknowledge it. While Laser was originally the one pushing to meet Paul, Joni ends up connecting with him much more. 

Nic, a doctor, and Jules, currently a landscaper with a scattered job history, must also deal with themselves aging and changing. Nic is constantly stressed and a bit emotionally blocked recently, while Jules is a free spirit almost offended by Nic at this stage in their life. When they meet Paul, Jules connects with him because they are both free spirits. Nic, unsurprisingly, doesn’t care for him. Her biggest fear is that Joni will develop more of Jules’s traits and drift further away from her. Like all parents, seeing a child off to college is hard enough, but dealing with her becoming even further away terrifies Nic. It’s a really interesting take at the family relationships to see parents have to deal with their expectations of what their kids are going to become. It’s something that’s touched upon in many films, but here that idea is taken head on. While always loving them, there seems to be a particular sting whenever Paul talks about dropping out of school, fearing that it may convince Laser to follow in his path, or whenever Nic realizes that Joni is becoming her own person. 

While I found the storyline touching and realistic, the superb acting helped the film immensely. Julianne Moore played her typical role (Don Jon & Crazy, Stupid, Love) as a free spirited, middle-aged woman and was exactly as good as you expect from her. She delivered a particularly moving monologue towards the end, but to avoid spoilers, I’ll just say you have to see it for yourself. Even better, perhaps, was Annette Bening, who earned an Oscar nomination for this role. She was incredibly believable as a tough parent with a demanding career. Her balance of heavy emotion with coldness was astounding. And while everyone was wonderful, lastly I want to mention how charming Mark Ruffalo is while still being able to handle the serious moments of the film well. 

A lot of films trying to deal with so many different aspects of life can come off as too cliché or, even worse, appear to collapse under their own weight; thankfully, this is not one of those films. Director Lisa Cholodenko held the whole thing together and kept it away from both of the previously mentioned, disastrous ends that the film could’ve met. It was a fresh and different look at the family dynamic because most films would use a more traditional family or focus on only one aspect of their relationships. I think that being able to have an outsiders view and being somewhat detached from personal experience made it easier to take an objective look at what was being said about family. While I can’t relate to the circumstances of the film, I didn’t find it at all inaccessible or foreign. It was an ambitious idea for a film but sometimes, like Jules says about garden design, “more is more”. 

Grade: A-
Length: 105 minutes

I return once more to a film by two of my favorite filmmakers: the Duplass brothers. And yet again, they deliver a funny, touching film that focuses on two estranged brothers. Jeremy (Mark Kelley) and Mark (Steve Zissis) haven’t talked much in 20 years since their homemade Olympics, a 25-event competition called the Do-Deca-Pentathalon, ended in controversy. With Mark’s birthday and a celebration scheduled at their mother’s house coming up, both Mark and Jeremy question how to handle the situation. Mark and his family—wife Stephanie (Jennifer Lafleur) and son Hunter (Reid Williams)—are fearful that Jeremy will arrive and bring out their old tension, so they don’t want to go. Jeremy, a single poker player, sits in a strip club wondering if he should feel bad about not being invited. Both men decide to show up. Mark, Stephanie and Hunter hope for a fun family weekend and go to run the annual 5Kroad race. Right after the race begins, Jeremy speeds up in his car, jumps out, and runs to catch up to his brother, who he then antagonizes to race him. Thus the competition begins anew.

First and foremost, watching a sibling rivalry escalate to this level of competition is hilarious. Even during the first of 25 events, the two brothers shove each other and dive across the finish line. The tension then heightens when Stephanie wants to end the event because of Mark’s health problems. Throughout the competition, the two men have to lie to their family and others to keep the competition going. When they arrive at their second event—laser tag—before it opens, they try to get in by telling the kid working there that Hunter, Mark’s son, has cancer. Watching two out of shape, middle-aged men struggle through the events is good for several laughs. The way the Duplass brothers are able to capture the tension of brotherhood is both heart warming and touching. It beautifully balances the hate and love so essential to that relationship.

This film, similar to Jeff, Who Lives at Home, is shot beautifully. Its simplicity really shines. The locations boil down to just their mother’s house, a YMCA, and a school, and there’s really only five characters in the entire film. With minimal characters and setting, the film is able to focus on the core relationships. The script is sometimes painfully real, too. There are moments when the one character is able to strikingly convey some flaw in another character, and it’s great to see how the events unfold between the two brothers. During one particularly beautiful moment, Jeremy talks to his mom about the competition and acknowledges that he and Mark don’t talk, they just “beat the shit out of each other.” They are able to use fighting and competition as a way to convey that they still care about one another. 

At one point in the film, the whole family goes to play laser tag at 9 am. When Mark and Jeremy find out the place doesn’t open until 11, they try telling the kid inside that Hunter has cancer so that they can get in to play. It’s times like these that, while hilarious, the film can seem to get a little too ridiculous. Despite that, I think it was still able to remain focused on the brotherly relationship and present it in a realistic way. It’s interesting the way brothers are able to not just fluctuate between love and hate, but to actually do both at the same time. As brothers themselves, I think Mark and Jay Duplass are able to deconstruct the relationship in an interesting way.

Grade: B+

Runtime: 76 minutes

If you’re like me, then your favorite part of Girls is watching Ray be sad—well good news, that’s this entire film! Alex Karpovsky (Alex Karpovsky) goes on a film tour after his girlfriend of 4-and-a-half years breaks up with him. He travels through the American South with his film Birdwatching, a story of second chances and finding a bird thought to be extinct. He recruits his friend Henry (Onur Tukel) to come along and keep him company (although he wasn’t the first call). Henry is an illustrator trying to get his children’s book published. Alex soon sleeps with River (Jennifer Prediger), who then follows him to the next stop on the tour. When he tries to let her down, Henry convinces him that they should all go out for a drink. River and Henry end up falling for each other, and Alex is left to tour with an old friend and a girl he had a one night stand with while trying to get his girlfriend back and get his life together. 

This film is basically all angst; therefore, I loved it! Alex Karpovsky writes, directs and stars in this film.. He’s  a filmmaker completely lost in life. His mother yells at him after his girlfriend breaks up with him because he should’ve proposed to her by now. He looks for friends to join him on tour and all of them turn him down because they have things going on in their own lives. When eventually his college friend Henry signs on for the tour, we find out how much they’ve drifted; in one of their first scenes together, Henry asks Alex if he read the manuscript he sent him for the children’s book he’s writing—he had not. Alex, much like Ray, is all about staying true to his artistic vision, and he chastises Henry for giving up his artistic vision to get the book published. Ironically, it seems as if Alex has no real vision of his own in life. He makes references to the person he wants to become, but he makes almost no effort to become that person. He seems to know exactly what other people’s (and his own) flaws are but he has no idea how to go about fixing them.

Second chances are a central theme in this film. Alex (the character) is touring to promote his film about finding a bird that was thought to be extinct, thus giving the species a second chances to thrive and lawmakers a second chance to protect its habitat to prevent the bird’s extinction. Similarly, Alex wants a second chance at his relationship. When he’s not at screenings, he spends his time trying to come up with a script to explain to his ex how he’s changed and why she should come back to him. While he obviously hasn’t changed in any significant way in the week since they broke up, he tries to convince her, and himself, that he has. He gets so wrapped up in his ex, never even telling Henry that they’ve broken up, that he misses out on so many opportunities while on tour. First, he meets a fan of his, River, and sleeps with her thinking he can just walk away the next morning. Then, he has the chance to reconnect with Henry. Obviously, by agreeing to come on the trip, Henry is more than willing to try and rediscover the friendship they had in college, but Alex sees him as somewhat of a burden, though at least he appreciates having someone to distract him from his troubles. When River reappears, Henry falls for her, and Alex becomes stuck in a strange form of purgatory where he’s surrounded by people he doesn’t care for all because of his own behavior. Had he taken the time to get to know River, he may have fallen for her. For someone so interested in second chances, he seems to miss a lot of the obvious ones that present themselves, preferring to force his ex into giving him another chance.

The film builds a really funny atmosphere despite being as dark as it is. Alex is continuously pushed lower and lower, each time a little funnier than the last. There’s just something very funny about watching his life get worse as a result of all of his bad choices. It’s not like he’s a drug addict and that ruins his life, it’s more that he’s just kind of a dick to other people and that comes around to hurt him over and over again. A running joke involves him repeatedly being denied requests to check out of his hotel late, and it perfectly represents his life at that point. He continuously hopes that there can be exceptions to the rules that will benefit him, but there never are. He always needs just a little more time to do what he wants to do and become who he wants to be. Again, like in Girls, the unfair world just won’t make exceptions even for sad, whiney, entitled people.

I really enjoyed the film, although at times I felt myself losing interest. Like a lot of recent indie films (Tiny Furniture and Frances Ha come to mind), Red Flag seems to exist as a diary for a filmmaker who wants to complain about life but has no real hardships. I personally find this idea relatable, but also understand that it can come off as whiney and annoying to many others.  I really enjoy Alex Karpovsky’s take on millennials, which takes a darker look into the generation than Lena Dunham but still manages to find humor in the situations. I look forward to seeing more of his work in the future.

Grade: B+
Length: 83 minutes

Three brothers living in Detroit in the 70’s start a punk rock band called Death – they are one of the best punk rock bands to ever exist. Bobby plays bass and is the lead singer, Dannis plays the drums, and David, the oldest, is the guitarist. From an early age, their parents made music available to the Hackney brothers and they instantly knew they wanted to play.  . One of their earliest experiences is listening to the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show with their father. When their mother received a monetary settlement from a car accident, she bought them all instruments and they started a band. They began as a funk bank, but after David went to a Who concert the band committed to rock. After their father passed away, David decided to rename the band Death, one of the few universal experiences that everyone shares. 

The band recorded some of the best punk music the world has ever heard, but being black guys from Detroit playing rock and calling themselves Death they were a tough sell. Nearly all the record labels they were presented to loved the music but they all needed the name changed, which David refused to do. The brothers all continued in music, but after all the rejection decided to move on, from Detroit to Vermont and from Death to a gospel rock group. While Bobby and Dannis stayed in Vermont and continued as a Reggae band and started families, David moved back to Detroit to continue trying to make it in rock music. In 2000, David’s heavy drinking and smoking caught up to him and he died shortly after of lung cancer. Throughout his life, but particularly towards the end, he was adamant that Death would eventually be recognized for its work, but he would be gone by then. His prediction was right; around 2008 their single was discovered by some record collectors and circulated through the underground scene. It was eventually picked up by a record label, who got the master tapes of their original studio sessions from Bobby and released the record “…For the Whole World to See”—the name David had come up with over 30 years ago.

For a documentary, this was ok. It relied too heavily on showing old photos of the band in a style much like Ken Burns’ work. The rest of the story was told through a mix of musician interviews, home movies, and a few recordings from recent concerts. Then the film just follows Bobby and Dannis around from landmark to landmark, such as the recording studios, their family home where they first started playing, etc. While it was fine enough to tell the story of this unknown band, it didn’t do anything new or particularly interesting with the footage. A lot of the old photos were seen several times and they played a few songs over and over (to be fair, Death only has seven songs recorded with the original members). Overall, the story telling style neither added nor subtracted from the story, because it’s a story so interesting that it makes the film well worth watching.

One point that the directors, Mark Christopher Covino and Jeff Howlett, deserve credit for is getting good interviews out of the key people in the story. The interviews throughout with Bobby and Dannis are very good, but when they talk about David’s genius and his love for music they are particularly beautiful. They are able to express so much emotion when it comes to talking about their brother, and it creates a presence through the whole film that the other brothers constantly talk about feeling whenever they play Death. “What does it profit a man to gain the world and lose his soul” is quoted from the bible by Dannis near the end of the film. That describes perfectly David’s influence on the band and his brothers. He was always the one who had a spirituality and mythology for the band and the name. He felt so strongly that the band needed to be called Death that he gave up success to keep that. This is truly one of the most moving documentaries I have ever seen because of the love that the Hackney brothers are able to express through words and music for their brother and the band.  While it may not be beautifully presented, the story and the emotions are amazing and make this very much worth watching.

Grade: A
Length: 96 minutes

PS: The most important take away from this film is the music. It’s incredible! I don’t know enough to do it justice, but if you like punk you will love this. It’s the Ramones before the Ramones existed. I’ll leave you by saying that I bought “…For the Whole World to See” on Saturday after watching the film and I have listened to it twice a day since then.  

This movie is cool beans! It tells the story of a young man still heartbroken over the loss of his father and literally fighting with his stepfather to gain his approval. Rod Kimble (Andy Samberg) is an aspiring stuntman who does small events around town with his crew: his stepbrother, Kevin (Jorma Taccone); Rico (Danny McBride), who builds the ramps; and Dave (Bill Hader), the mechanic. When Rod’s stepdad needs a heart transplant, he and the crew put together an idea to use his stuntman skills to raise the $50,000 needed for his “conveniently priced surgery.” In the end, it’ll come down to “one big jump” for Rod to raise the money to save his stepdad—so that once his stepdad recovers, he can kick his ass and prove himself a man. 

What I really love about this film is that it is a really funny, ridiculous, stupid comedy. I personally love that genre and unfortunately it’s a dying one. It feels like it’s homemade. They didn’t shoot at any fancy locations and the stunts were kept to a scale that felt believable. It also used some effects that felt really old school in the most delightful way! It really shows that the film was made by a group of friends who all seemed to have a lot of fun working on it. It’s wall-to-wall jokes, a lot of which are physical, and they all work well! Helping the style is the perfect cast for this style of comedy. Andy Samberg and Jorma Taccone (both from The Lonely Island) star in this and their awkward chemistry makes them great to play stepbrothers. Bill Hader is basically the king of awkward comedy and Danny McBride plays the lovable dickhead that he does so well. Be it Rod’s training, which includes almost drowning; the fundraising, including being set on fire and used as a human piñata; or the actual stunts, which rarely go as planned, the cast works so well to keep the film funny and fresh.

There’s not a whole lot to say about the plot that doesn’t involve giving away all the jokes, but I will say, it feels much more coherent than other comedies of this style (basically all Will Ferrell films). I really appreciate that there seemed to be a lot of thought put into the script.

I really love Hot Rod. It might be dumb jokes but it’s very smart comedy in the sense that it all works together to both be essential to the plot and be funny. There are a lot of other failed films where they try to put jokes into it to make it funnier but they just feel out of place and fall flat whereas here they feel organic. The cast, with smaller roles by Will Arnet and Chris Parnell, was almost perfectly put together and it is what pushes this film to a higher level. This genre could be easily underappreciated because there are so many films that trying to exploit it; but when done right, as it is here, it’s one of my favorite things to watch.

Rating: A
Length: 88 minutes

So while I hesitate to recommend The Giant Mechanical Man, it definitely wasn’t bad. It’s a simple, common story of two people who are “different” and fall in love. Unfortunately, the film feels dry because it just doesn’t do anything new. Tim (Chris Messina), a street performer who dresses up like a giant mechanical man, is dumped by his girlfriend because he isn’t “successful.” Janice (Jenna Fischer) works odd jobs through a temp agency and is often fired for not being engaged or focused. One day Jenna sees Tim dressed as a mechanical man and tosses some change into the hat. She watches Tim preform, much to her delight, but they don’t speak. When Janice is evicted from her apartment, she moves in with her very traditional sister, Jill (Malin Akerman), and her husband, Brian (Rich Sommer), both of whom pressure her to date their author friend, Doug (Topher Grace). Even though Jill keeps trying to push Janice and Doug together, in the end Janice and Tim—the two “misfits”—fall for each other. 

It’s an unoriginal story, and unfortunately there wasn’t a whole lot to make this film better than others. It felt similar to Drinking Buddies, but it was neither as funny nor did it have the acting talent to keep up. First, this movie wasn’t as funny as it could (or should) have been, but it also didn’t have the drama that would fill the void. There were plenty of moments where the film could’ve taken a new direction but instead it sort of just goes along as expected. Topher Grace’s character was very clearly written to be the brunt of the jokes and was amazingly unfunny. He was an author of a book about having “Winning Conversations” yet he was completely uninteresting to listen to. If that was the whole point of the joke, then it’s exceedingly lazy.

Sticking with Topher Grace a moment longer, the acting definitely needed a boost. Topher Grace, Jenna Fischer and Chris Messina often felt like they were acting. The lines were delivered very intentionally and unbelievably. That being said, Malin Akerman and Rich Sommer both gave very convincing performances. As the sister who has it together and constantly offers unsolicited advice, Malin Akerman was great, and if you watch Mad Men I think you’ll agree that Rich Sommer was a great choice for a husband with a marginally famous author friend.

While it sounds mostly bad, I think a more appropriate description of the film is overwhelmingly average. It didn’t do anything very well, but it didn’t do anything specifically bad. What really turned me off was how predictable and cliché the film felt. It may be a byproduct of the poor acting, but the story just felt like it was following a road map. The ‘non-traditional professional and personal success’ theme was so obvious and dull that it almost wasn’t worth listening to anything the film had to say about it. I can envision someone liking this film a lot, but it was just too unoriginal for me.

Grade: C+
Length: 94 minutes