Tag: Evan Goldberg

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Rip Van Pickle

In the Before Time, I had a gig as a social media consultant. It was my job to come up with content for clients to post on their Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+ accounts. In the long ago of Obama’s second term, it was a pretty good job. I worked from home, made my own hours, and there was strong demand for my services. But the work was also very tedious, and dealing with companies who didn’t understand their social media brand (or even, in some cases, what social media was) could be very annoying.

As I sweat bullets trying to come up with something clever to say about blast-resistant tents that would catch the eye of influencers in the fracking industry, I was frequently struck by the absurdity of the situation. How would I explain to the me who graduated from high school that, in the 21st century, I wrote for Twitter for a living? I’m not talking about having to explain to my younger self that I was not, in fact, a famous author living as a tax exile in Tangier. There was no context for my younger self to even understand the job. First, I would have to explain what Twitter was, and I’m not sure I could do that now. I think my younger self’s reaction would have been something like: “You have this world-spanning information network, supercomputers that fit in your pocket, and literal Dick Tracy video wrist communicators, but you use them to take pictures of yourself in the hopes that strangers will pretend to like you.” Because that’s pretty much my reaction today.

Seth Rogen (as Herschel Greenbaum) rises from a pickle vat to star alongside himself in HBO’s An American Pickle.

Young Me would be disappointed I’m not dictating my next bestseller to my exotically attractive secretary as the call to prayer floats in on the Mediterranean breeze. I would explain how that was never a realistic goal, but Young Me would just roll his eyes.

An American Pickle is about the feeling that the past would be disappointed in the present. Seth Rogen stars as Herschel Greenbaum, a ditch digger in a dismal Eastern European town in 1919. His muck-filled days gain hope when he meets Sarah (Sarah Snook), a beautiful peasant girl who has all of her teeth, “top and bottom!”

The couple bond over their shared history of trauma — both their families were murdered by Cossacks — and get married. Pursued by, you guessed it, Cossacks, they flee to America, where, like many Eastern European Jews, they settle in Brooklyn. Herschel gets a job in a pickle factory, and the young couple pursue the American Dream. But tragedy strikes when Herschel falls into a pickle vat, leaving Sarah to raise their son on her own.

Cut to a century later, when a couple of kids playing with a drone discover Herschel’s vat. When they open the lid, they find that Herschel has been preserved with the pickles, and he rises like Rip Van Winkle to face the 21st century.

His only living relative, it turns out, is Ben Greenbaum, his great-grandson, who is also played by Seth Rogen. Ben is a software designer working on an app called Boop Bop, hoping to sell his one-man startup to a VC firm run by his old college friend Liam (Jorma Taccone). His modest, IKEA-accented Brooklyn apartment looks luxurious to Herschel. But how is he to explain how precarious his lifestyle is, given his startup is having major trouble getting off the ground? Explaining Twitter is even harder.

The best thing about so much money flowing into the film ecosystem from streaming has been the return of the mid-budget picture. Without $100 million on the line, and with the demands for streaming services being different than the theatrical box office, you can take more chances. Rogen and his partner Evan Goldberg have been producing mid-budget comedies for years. This one is directed by their colleague Brandon Trost, the cinematographer on pictures like This Is the End and The Interview, as well as the immortal comedy masterpiece MacGruber. The first-time helmer acquits himself well here, thanks to a tight edit and some shots that are a little too artsy for a goofy comedy.

Rogen does a fantastic job as co-leads, clearly relishing Herschel’s over-the-top Yiddish accent and dialing up Ben’s schlub factor. The weak link is the script, written by Simon Rich. It takes the obvious fish-out-of-water jokes for a spin but can’t transcend the premise or recover after veering into Being There territory. What ultimately redeems An American Pickle is Rogen’s top-notch performances, and the air of good-natured sentimentality that suffuses the production. Or maybe I’m just a sucker for Borscht Belt Jewish comedy, which is something your grandfather would have definitely understood.
An American Pickle streams on HBO Max.

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Film Features Film/TV

Good Boys

Few films of the 21st century have had as long a shadow as Superbad. Written by high school friends Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, it was a huge hit in 2007, launching one of the young century’s premiere comedy teams and spawning a legion of imitators. In it, the two high school protagonists (named Seth and Evan) try to score some booze for a party that takes on almost mythical status for them as they run from the cops (Rogen and Bill Hader, in star-making turns) and try to live up to the impossible standards of coolness they have developed in their heads.

Superbad is itself part of the legacy of Freaks and Geeks, the millennial high school TV series created by Paul Feig where Rogen, James Franco, and a number of other actors such as Lizzy Caplan got their start. Together, the show and the movie took the Hughesian vision of American high school as a rigid caste system of the rich, the popular, the athletic, the nerdy, the poor, and the slutty and adapted it to the new realities on the ground. Just as Animal House inspired countless numbers of frat party comedies, every coming-of-age comedy since Superbad worth its salt has been based around young misfits on a quixotic quest for fun.

Ain’t misbehavin’ — (l-r) Keith L. Williams, Brady Noon, and Jacob Tremblay are Good Boys.

Produced by Rogen and Goldberg and penned by former writers for The Office, Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg, Good Boys transports the formula from high school to middle school. Max (Jacob Tremblay), Thor (Brady Noon), and Lucas (Keith L. Williams) are a trio of besties who call themselves the Beanbag Boys. The neighbors have grown up together and, until now, have been perfectly content to sprawl out on their comfy beanbags and play Magic: The Gathering. But they’re nearing puberty, and nature is calling; the film opens with Max getting busted by his father (Will Forte) for masturbating.

Max’s first crush is a girl named Brixlee (Millie Davis), and he’s been making a ceramic necklace in art class for her as a gift. After following her to a skate park, the Beanbag Boys improbably manage to wangle an invitation to a party at the home of cool kid Soren (Izaac Wang). Brixlee will be there, Soren tells Max — and there will be kissing.

The central conceit of Superbad is that Seth and Evan are aware of the world of college parties and grown-up kicks, and they’re trying to force their way into it. In Good Boys, our young protagonists are completely clueless. All they know about sex is from playground talk and health teachers. When they want to know how to do kissing right and not engage in “sensual harassment,” they resort to searching the web for “prob,” and then for porn. But their lurid, traumatizing searches come up empty because “nobody even kissed — at least not on the lips!”

That’s just the beginning of the trio’s descent into low-grade vice that unfolds naturally over the day of the party, as the trio tries to prove, in Max’s inspiring words, “Are we fifth graders — or are we sixth graders!?” The key to this kind of comedy is getting the characters right and balancing the comedy beats with enough genuine peril so that the stakes drive the conflict forward without much laughter-killing real danger. On the character front, the film succeeds. The Beanbag Boys fit together naturally. Tremblay, who got his start opposite Brie Larson in Room, seems destined for leading-man status in a decade or so. Williams gets a laugh for crying through a choir rehearsal of “Walking on Sunshine” after finding out his parents are divorcing. Noon is a musical theater nerd who must reclaim his enthusiasm for singing in the face of bullying. At times, the sixth grade dynamic seems to be more Hogwarts than Shermer, Illinois, with Atticus (Chance Hurstfield) and his scooter gang playing the roles of Draco Malfoy and the Slytherins.

The script has its high points as well. The boys’ attempt to spy on teenage neighbors Hannah (Molly Gordon) and Lily (Midori Francis) leads to what must be the best drone-based comedy sequence ever put to film. But the film has the misfortune of being released only a few months after Booksmart, and it simply isn’t in the same league as that coming-of-age comedy masterpiece. The Beanbag Boys’ painful naiveté works for a while but becomes a one-note joke as the film wears on. Good Boys knows how to successfully apply the Superbad formula but never manages to rise above it.

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Film Features Film/TV

Sausage Party

You know those movies where the premise is so out-there that you say “Wow, these guys must have been really high when they came up with THAT one!”? That’s usually a sarcastic joke, but in the case of Sausage Party, it’s almost certainly true. America’s Stoner in Chief Seth Rogen, who reportedly worked for eight years to get this film made, gives away the secret to its creation in the middle of the second act, when Druggie, voiced by James Franco, gains the ability to communicate with inanimate objects after injecting a solution of bath salts. “Everybody told me not to do this,” he says. “But I’m going to do it anyway.”

One can easily imagine Rogen and his partner in crime Evan Goldberg pitching the idea of a movie about talking supermarket food items to their crew of Hollywood’s Most Blunted over bong hits and nachos. I’m sure many, many people told them not to do it, because it’s one of those ideas that sounds great when you’re stoned but doesn’t survive contact with the “real world.” But these grasshoppers have pulled off an unlikely coup by bringing their bonged-out vision to the screen and making it work.

Rogen is the voice of Frank, a hot dog who, like everyone . . . I mean, everything … in the Shopwell big box grocery store lives more or less contentedly in his cozy packaging with seven other bro-dogs. Everything the products know about the world inside and outside the supermarket comes from a song they sing ritualistically each morning, which provides the film with its first opportunity to mock animation conventions. The big opening production number delivers the same world-building information as “Circle of Life” from The Lion King, only with a lot more casual cursing. The song tells them the people shopping in the Shopwell are benevolent gods who choose the most worthy among the products and take them away into an eternal paradise. Those who are not found pure and worthy are condemned to be thrown into the trash by Darren (Paul Rudd), the pimpled stock boy who roams the aisles seeking whom he may devour.

Frank and his mates are feeling pretty good about their chances for ascension into paradise, because they’re prominently placed on the 4th of July special rack next to a pack of buns that is home to Frank’s would-be girlfriend Brenda Bunsen (Kristen Wiig). But the day before the big 4th of July sale, a bottle of Honey Mustard (Danny McBride) is returned to the store, and he tells the foodstuff a harrowing tale of gods who mercilessly mutilate and devour the food. When Frank and Brenda try to save Honey Mustard from suicide, they cause a catastrophic cart collision that plays out like every urban disaster movie since 9/11.

Turns out, when your characters are talking food, you can skewer a lot of sacred cows. Our heroes are accompanied by two refugees from the ethnic food aisle: Sammy Bagel Jr. (Edward Norton) talks like a Woody Allen character, and Lavash (David Krumholtz) is a Persian flatbread. The quest forces the two rival carbohydrates to put aside their differences and work together. The other member of the party is a lesbian taco played by Selma Hayek. The villain is, naturally, a Douche, played with psychotic gusto by Nick Kroll.

In a year plagued by some of the worst screenwriting in recent memory, the script, credited to four writers including Rogen and Goldberg, is surprisingly tight. Co-directors Conrad Vernon and Greg Tiernan are two veteran animators with only a handful of directoiral credits between them. They have fun staging one hilarious set piece after another. Pixar has been the dominant animation studio for a generation, but there have been surprisingly few Pixar parodies. Sausage Party is among the first to stake out that ground, riffing on Ratatouille and Toy Story. But their ultimate achievement is a climactic pansexual food orgy that really must be seen to be believed.

Just in case the words “pansexual food orgy” didn’t clue you in, this is one animated film that is not for children. Fans of the Rogen/Goldberg flavor of raunchy comedy, however, will find that Sausage Party is the duo’s greatest achievement.