Tag: Seth Rogen

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem

Cowabunga! Mutant Mayhem shows off the best versions of Leonardo, Michaelangelo, Donatello, and Raphel in years.

I had one eyebrow raised as I walked into Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem. I’d been burned by the turtles before. I watched the classic ’80s cartoon as a kid, but their previous big-screen offerings have featured bright green costumes that seemed more the stuff of nightmares than a stylish interpretation of their indie comics origin.

Mutant Mayhem, luckily, has no such missteps. Director Jeff Rowe and producers Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, and James Weaver embrace the good kind of weirdness that comes with the turtle territory. The success of Into the Spider-Verse has opened the door to fresh approaches in animation, and Mutant Mayhem takes full advantage. The visible brush strokes in an early shot of the moon over New York City set the mood for a film filled with jagged, scratchy lines. The artistic mayhem captures both the glamor and grime of the city’s sidewalks and sewers, while adding an air of controlled chaos during the rapid movements of combat scenes. Mutant Mayhem’s doodle aesthetics harken back to scribbled drawings in the corners of middle-school notebooks.

As baby turtles, our quartet of heroes are exposed to radioactive ooze which transforms them into humanoid form. Their adoptive father Splinter (Jackie Chan), a rat who was also exposed to the ooze, discovers them in the sewers and trains them in martial arts. Leonardo (Nicolas Cantu), Michelangelo (Shamon Brown Jr.), Donatello (Micah Abbey), and Raphael (Brady Noon) sneak their way through the streets of New York City to retrieve vital supplies like toilet paper and Cool Ranch Doritos. They watch humans from afar, idolizing Ferris Bueller during a movie night in the park and dreaming of one day joining the paradise that is high school. Like normal teenagers, they do things like bicker and film themselves as real life Fruit Ninjas slicing watermelons with a sword.

But the turtles are tired of living in the sewer. Their new human friend April O’Neil (Ayo Edebiri) needs to do something great to distract her classmates from an embarrassing high school moment. They hatch a plan to record the turtles performing heroic deeds and package it as the news story of the year. Luckily for their plan, a villain known as Superfly (Ice Cube) has been stealing fancy scientific equipment from armored cars around the city and needs stopping.

Sure, there are superhero elements, but Mutant Mayhem is a high school soap opera about a group of outcasts who just want to fit in. The turtles aren’t ready-made heroes or defenders of New York. Their teen angst eventually spirals into a large-scale city conflict, but it’s this grounded take that makes this the best TMNT film ever. According to Rogen, this is the first time that all the titular characters have been voiced by actual teenagers. It’s easy to tell when the voice actors are freed to riff off script, improvising with one another and bantering like kids at school.

Other longtime TMNT stalwarts pop up, including fellow mutants Rocksteady (John Cena) and Bebop (Rogen). As a fan of the original cartoon, I missed their arch enemy Shredder and members of the Foot clan, but really, they’re not needed here. Teen melodrama, cool visuals, and fancy fisticuffs earn Mutant Mayhem a deserved “Cowabunga!”

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem
Now playing
Multiple locations

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

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.

Categories
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.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

The Night Before

Sometimes, you just need a big, dumb comedy.

Every year or so, Seth Rogen gets the mutated remains of the Freaks and Geeks crew together to make a big, dumb movie. Sometimes, as in the case of 2013’s This Is the End, these larks are among the most free and most fun comedies of the 21st century. Sometimes, as in the case of last year’s The Interview, they cause an international incident and bring a major Hollywood studio to its knees.

The Night Before is unlikely to be as effective at turning another page in our unfolding William Gibson-cyperpunk-dystopia of a reality as The Interview, but it’s actually a much better movie. Where The Interview was a reworking of the mostly forgotten Chevy Chase/Dan Akroyd vehicle Spies Like Us, The Night Before is a mashup of After Hours and It’s a Wonderful Life. The angel, in this case, is a supernatural weed dealer named Mr. Green played by General Zod himself, Michael Shannon, who appears to be trying to imitate Steven Wright. It’s one of those great bit parts that can make or break a movie like this, and, unlike Neighbors, Rogen’s massively overrated summer comedy that is inexplicably getting a sequel, The Night Before makes them count.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Seth Rogen, and Anthony Mackie in The Night Before

Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Ethan, whose parents died 14 years ago just as the Christmas season was getting underway. His two best friends, Isaac (Rogen) and Chris (Anthony Mackie), took him out to party on Christmas Eve to keep him from feeling lonely, and a tradition was born. But these days, the boys don’t get out much any more. Isaac is a successful lawyer with a baby on the way, and Chris plays in the NFL, so this is going to be the last year of the traditional debauch. Ethan’s life never took off, and he’s working as an event server dressed as an elf. When he’s demoted to coat check, he gets the opportunity he’s been waiting years for. He swipes invitations to the Nutcracker Ball, a massive, secret party that is the hottest holiday ticket in New York. Meanwhile, Isaac’s wife, Betsy (Jillian Bell) gives him an early Christmas gift: a box of assorted drugs so he can put the tradition to bed in high style.

Naturally, the three friends’ trip to the party weaves an intertwining tapestry of social disasters. Rogen gets the best scene with a psychedelic paranoid crisis in a bar bathroom, but Gordon-Levitt gets plenty of mileage using his prodigious acting gifts to mug for the camera. Mackie comes off as a little stiff next to comedy vets like Lizzy Caplan, who plays Ethan’s love interest, and Mindy Kaling, the subject of an epic cell phone mix-up, but he’s an agreeable screen presence.

The Night Before is a 21st-century studio product, full of product placement, Save the Cat screenwriting beats, and Miley Cyrus cameos. Strangely enough, that studio is Sony, whose post-hacking survival I publicly doubted. Sony survived, even though many, including the studio’s chief executive, lost their jobs. But somehow, Rogen and James Franco, who has a cameo in The Night Before, are still making pleasantly stupid studio comedies. I hope somewhere, an angel got his wings for that one.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Obvious Child

Obvious Child is both a skeptical probing of romantic comedy clichés and a patience-trying look at what it’s like to spend a lot of time with a mediocre comedian. Its aim is true and its heart is pure-ish, though. Like the Comedy Central TV shows Inside Amy Schumer and Broad City, Gillian Robespierre’s debut generates a lot of juice by daring to show smart, interesting women acting lewdly, fearlessly, and irresponsibly. Unless their behavior has to do with unprotected sex, that is. But even then, Robespierre goes in tough, unexpected directions.

Jenny Slate plays Donna, a stand-up performer whose day job is at an “unoppressive, non-materialist” bargain bookstore that’s about to close. Donna’s regular, possibly unpaid sets at a small Brooklyn nightclub are made up of giggly, unflattering tales from her daily life: topics include her soiled underwear, her boyfriend, and her “functional” sex life. The aggressive discomfort generated during some of her bits rubs off on Donna’s interpersonal relationships offstage, though. Which is part of the reason why, five minutes into the movie, her long-time boyfriend breaks up with her.

Slate, a talented cinematic tweener, pushes this overlong expanded short film forward even when she’s leaving ill-advised voicemails in between swigs of Yellow Tail or crinkled up and crying on her fold-out couch. Donna may be tough to sympathize with, but the scenes with her roommate Nellie (Gaby Hoffmann) have an ease and intimacy that suggest those precious few minutes in a lot of John Cusack movies when he and his sister Joan would play off each other with unguarded tenderness and affection.

Because Donna’s stand-up is an attempt to reshape her day-to-day existence, her sets start to feel like impromptu therapy sessions. Her art/life experiment also means that conversations with friends and family start to feel like long auditions. Donna’s constantly trying out new material, and everyone seems to shrug or sigh it off except Max (Jake Lacy), a handsome and trusting Poindexter she meets at a bar one sloshed evening.

Max and Donna’s first encounter leads to a joyous scene wherein the Paul Simon song that inspires the film’s title is used as the soundtrack for a spontaneous, flirty little musical number. In one of the film’s only stylistic flourishes, Donna and Max’s first kisses are timed to start and stop during the numerous drum breaks of “The Obvious Child.” Just when it seems like they’re going to take things to the next level, there’s a few seconds of silence. Then the music kicks in again and Donna backs away from her man, dancing and swaying and grinning.

Obvious Child is a useful inversion of several recent schlubby male fantasies where an odd-looking, wisecracking loser winds up with a terrific, beautiful girlfriend-mom type who refuses to extinguish his Roman candle rebelliousness. This time, though, the genders are flipped: Donna is the hyper-verbal, self-deprecating fireball who scorches bland, handsome Max. In a way, the movie is a victory for moviegoers longing for a female version of Seth Rogen or Danny McBride. But those guys were never my type.