Tag: Seth Rogan

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Long Shot

Seth Rogan and Charlize Theron in Long Shot

Long Shot is a new film starring Seth Rogan and Charlize Ther…

ALL HAIL IMPERATOR FURIOSA, WARRIOR OF THE WASTELAND, CONQUERER OF THE CITADEL!

I’m sorry. That happens sometimes when I try to talk about Charlize Theron. She is one of our greatest living screen actors, with dozens of film credits and an Academy Award she earned for playing serial killer Aileen Wuornos in 2003’s Monster. But for many cinephiles, she is now indelibly associated with her role in Mad Max: Fury Road, where she stole the show from the title character of George Miller’s 2015 masterpiece.

Furiosa is an icon of female power, and liberation from the patriarchy. In Long Shot, Theron plays Charlotte Field, the blisteringly competent Secretary of State under President Chambers (Bob Odenkirk) who is blisteringly stupid.

Before we continue drooling over Furiosa, I want to praise Odenkirk, director Jonathan Levine, and writers Dan Sterling and Liz Hannah. Long Shot is a romantic comedy, but its setting is contemporary American politics, which is a bloody minefield. The overwhelming presence of the orange criminal in the White House threatens to crowd out any comedy potential. And yet, he must be acknowledged in some way. Chambers is clearly not Trump, but Odenkirk plays him as a distracted, incompetent, and thoroughly corrupt rube, because portraying the president as a reasonably competent patriot would simply be unbelievable in 2019. That’s where we are as a nation.

Anyway, Charlotte is a Hillary-esque figure trying her best to put together an international agreement to curb climate change. She’s also in the midst of putting together a run for the presidency herself, assisted by Maggie Millikin (June Diane Raphael) and Tom (Ravi Patel), her fiercely loyal aides.

Meanwhile, Seth Rogan plays Fred Flarksy, a crusading investigative journalist whom we meet in the middle of a farcical attempt to infiltrate a group of neo-Nazis. Fred finds out his newspaper is being bought by Parker Wembley (Andy Serkis), a Rupert Murdoch stand-in who will stymie Flarsky’s truth seeking. Fred quits in a rage, and his rich friend Lance (O’Shea Jackson, Jr.) takes him to a ritzy party to help him forget his troubles. There, he sees Charlotte, who he remembers used to babysit him when she was a hyper-responsible pre-teen and he was even more awkward than he is now.

‘They’re called fingers, but have you ever seen them, like, fing?’

The party scene, which is long and complex and ends in horrible (read: hilarious) humiliation for Fred, is a joy. It’s a fine piece of comedy writing, well-staged by the director and effortlessly executed by the cast, that seamlessly integrates the personal and political. When the dust clears, Fred has a new job as a speech writer for Charlotte, and a new, very unlikely romance is brewing—a “long shot”, if you will.

Is there any more tired cliche than the perfect woman romantically paired with a schlubby guy? From Married With Children to The Simpsons, it’s been pretty much the norm on TV sitcoms for decades. And yet, somehow, we come out believing that the guy who wrote an article called “The Two Party System Can Suck A Dick (Actually Two Dicks)” could get it on with the Secretary of State. Theron and Rogan present the ideal avatars of the stereotypes as they fall in love during the film’s globe-hopping middle acts. Rogan’s got the comedy chops to spare, and Theron…

HAIL IMPERATOR FURIOSA!

…Theron is an effective straight woman. Director Levine wisely doesn’t saddle her with schtick, but uses her acting skills strategically. In one rollicking sequence, Theron gets laughs with a realistic impression of a partier rolling on MDMA. She doesn’t go big and mug for the camera (that’s Rogan’s job) she just delivers the lines while low-key trying to keep it together. The implied joke that maybe negotiations between politicians would go better if one or both parties were on drugs that enhanced their empathy lands naturally.

The way Long Shot differentiates itself from the sexist sitcom cliche is by exploring the difficulty men have in ceding power to women, even if—perhaps especially if—the women are clearly more skilled and intelligent. Frank thinks he’s woke as he can get, but time and again he runs up against his own self-righteousness and unexamined assumptions. As the boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl rom-com cycle plays out, he’s just trying to hang on as she is making the kind of career-over-home decisions that a male character would be saddled with in earlier decades. By the time the When Harry Met Sally-inspired denouement rolls around, the couple have found a unique equilibrium that they are still trying to understand. Maybe that’s the portrait of all successful relationships that the romantic comedy, when done right, points us towards.

Long Shot

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The Disaster Artist

Have you ever been at your job, or at school, or on the playing field, and felt like you’re faking it? It doesn’t matter if you’re actually good at something. All of your successes have been sheer dumb luck. One day, you’re going to be exposed as a fraud in front of all these people.

If these thoughts have ever crossed your mind, you’re not alone. It’s a full-blown psychological phenomenon called impostor syndrome. In the words of Wikipedia, “Despite external evidence of their competence, those exhibiting the syndrome remain convinced that they are frauds and do not deserve the success they have achieved.” The doctors who discovered imposter syndrome in the 1970s first identified it in highly successful women, but later studies found that 70 percent of the population had felt like that at one time or another. But the case of Tommy Wiseau raises the question: Is it still impostor syndrome if you actually are an impostor who is bad at their job?

Wiseau is the writer, director, and producer of The Room, the 21st century’s leading contender in the race for the Worst Film Ever. Even in Hollywood, a place where strange things roam, Wiseau is a weirdo. First of all, he wears a lot of belts. Not different belts at different times, but rather, many belts, all at once. He claims to be from New Orleans, but his accent is clearly Eastern European. No one knows how old he is — which, come to think of it, is really not that uncommon in Hollywood. And nobody knows where he got the enormous pile of money he used to make The Room. But one thing is certain — he didn’t have the faintest idea how to make a movie.

Dave (left) and James Franco make movie magic with their film about the making of The Room.

If you’ve never seen it before, The Room is kind of indescribable. Imagine a movie about love and betrayal made by an alien who has only the roughest idea of what humans look like and how they behave. In a recurring scene that epitomizes the whole thing, Wiseau and his friends Mark and Denny throw around a football while having vague conversations. At no point do you get the impression that any of them know what a football is for, or have ever seen a football game before, or even understand what kind of emotions a person throwing a football in the park with his friends would likely experience.

And yet, in the decade since it was released, The Room has found a large and enthusiastic audience among people who love bad film. There’s something endearing about the film’s hardscrabble ineptitude that you don’t get from $100 million debacles like Dracula Untold. Among the cult of The Room was James Franco, who was compelled to adapt The Disaster Artist, a memoir by Greg Sestero, who played Mark in the original production. In a deeply nested irony, the movie about the making of the worst movie ever made is actually really good.

Screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael Weber take inspiration from Ed Wood for the well-paced script, which wrings laughs from the increasingly ridiculous situations that arise during production without stooping to open mockery. Dave Franco, the director’s brother, stars as Greg Sestero, a blandly handsome, marginally talented guy who meets Wiseau in a San Francisco acting class and soon finds himself moving to L.A. to pursue stardom with the long-haired mystery man. Then, after years of frustration and an impeccably staged run-in with actual producer Judd Apatow, Wiseau decides he has had it with the audition treadmill and proclaims, “Hollywood reject us! We do eet on our own!”

It’s the familiar rallying cry of the indie filmmaker, even if delivered in a funny accent. James Franco, the comedic leading man who directs William Faulkner adaptations in his spare time, surely knows that feeling. He and his co-conspirator Seth Rogen, who plays The Room‘s beleaguered script supervisor, have been an insurgent force in mainstream filmmaking for a decade now. You don’t make The Interview without getting a few doors slammed in your face. Some actors would just get the weird tics down and ham it up, but Franco’s portrayal of Tommy Wiseau is a living portrait of impostor syndrome. You cringe with every inappropriate gesture, idiotic utterance, and awful decision, while also feeling a flash of recognition of all the times you’ve faked it and gotten away with it.

The Disaster Artist seems like it started as an excuse for Franco and Rogen’s crew of Hollywood stoner buddies to recreate their favorite hilariously bad scenes from The Room, but when Wiseau cries in the lobby at his labor of love’s disastrous premiere, the audience sniffles along. By directing and acting in a movie about a bad actor/director, Franco the movie star made himself vulnerable — and created the best film of his career.

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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.

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

The Interview

Have you ever heard of The Streisand Effect? Back in 2003, Barbara Streisand somehow spotted her Malibu home in one of 12,000 aerial photographs of the California coast on a photographers’ website and sued him because she didn’t want anyone looking at her house. But here’s the thing: If she hadn’t pointed out that her home was the subject of one of 12,000 pictures, no one would have known, or probably even cared, that it was there. But now, because of Striesand’s attempt to suppress the photograph, it has its own Wikipedia page. The act of trying to suppress something brought more attention to it than it would have gotten anyway.

Diana Bang, Seth Rogan, and James Franco in The Interview.

You’ve probably heard the story of The Interview by now: Seth Rogan, the “stoner king of Hollywood”, and his friend from the Freaks and Geeks days, James Franco made another of their middlebrow comedy movies to be released last Christmas. The plot involved Franco’s character, talk show host Dave Skylark, getting a chance to interview North Korean leader Kim Jon Un. The CIA, represented by Agent Lacey (Party Down vet Lizzy Caplan), makes them an offer they can’t refuse: Assassinate Kim. Will they do it, or are they too stupid to pull it off?

There are a few times in history when a group of filmmakers have made big, lasting political statements or captured the zeitgeist just right. Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, lampooned Hitler on the eve of war. The backdrop for Casablanca’s love story was a community of political refugees from war-torn Europe, a description that fit many of the actors on the screen. Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove skewered the insanity of a world preparing to destroy itself with nuclear weapons. Now, to this rarefied list of films, we must add The Interview. And you can blame the Streisand effect for that, because The Great Dictator, it ain’t.

Donna Dixon, Dan Ackroyd, and Chevy Chase in Spies Like Us.

Don’t get me wrong. The Interview is not a bad film, per se. It has some funny moments, and some decent performances by Franco, Rogan, and Diana Bang as Sook, the North Korean handler assigned to Skylark.  It’s a surprisingly old fashioned action comedy in the John Landis/John Belushi/Dan Ackroyd vein. It wants to be The Blues Brothers, but its nearest antecedent would be Spies Like Us, the 1985 John Landis comedy that was originally supposed to star Ackroyd and Belushi but ended up replacing the deceased half of the duo with Chevy Chase. Like Spies Like Us, The Interview has its comic duo (Rogan plays Franco’s producer Aaron Rappaport) as untrained, and none too bright, field agents thrown into a totalitarian Communist dictatorship on a perilous mission of international import. The only reason the filmmakers chose North Korea as a target for humor is because they’re the only totalitarian Communist dictatorship still around 25 years after the fall of the Berlin wall, and their internal propaganda looks ridiculous to the West. 

Randall Park as Kim Jong Un

But some movies are born great, and some movies have greatness thrust upon them. That’s what happened to The Interview when Kim Jong Un ordered a cyber hit on Sony Pictures after hearing that Hollywood was imagining his assassination. One of the many intertwining ironies of this whole affair is that the actor who plays Kim Jong Un, Randall Park, gives the best performance in the entire movie. Sure, his Kim is a privileged buffoon, but so are Rogan and Franco’s characters. Had the North Korean dictator simply ignored the movie’s provocation—if it can even be said to rise to the level of provocation—it would have made some money providing cheap laughs to theatergoers over the holidays and then been flushed down the memory hole with Spies Like Us.

But as it is, The Interview will have repercussions far beyond the multiplexes of the world. It’s an attack on a private company inside the borders of the United States by a state actor, and the United States has decided to respond. We still don’t know exactly who did it, although I find it unlikely that anyone but Kim was ultimately behind it, no matter who was hired by whom to do the dirty work, for the simple reason that the movie is so innocuous. Equally implausible is the theory that it was all a publicity stunt by Sony, as the damage to that studio is real and likely to be lasting, depending on exactly how many people Sony owes money to that have their lawyers and accountants pouring over the studio’s leaked financial information right now. The decision to pull the movie from release in the face of anonymous terroristic threats makes more sense if you consider that the theater chains were likely more concerned about their IT infrastructure being turned inside out than a physical attack.

Rogan and company didn’t do anything but set out to make a funny movie, and they were reasonably successful. The filmmakers were just artists doing their job, until they got swept up in something bigger. Maybe that’s how art is supposed to work.