Young Adult (Jason Reitman, 2011)

Jason Reitman's and Diablo Cody's Juno showed a self-consciously "quirky" high-school girl growing up quickly to deal with an adult problem, her cloyingly quirky lingo falling by the wayside as she matured into an empathetic, responsible person. Young Adult depicts the inverse of that story, of the prom queen who never outgrew that period of her life where she was some form of royalty, her preserved physical beauty akin to Dorian Gray's aesthetic mask. Soulless and resolutely conceited, Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron) is a profoundly unlikable character, a vile creature who despises anyone kind enough to spare her pity and insists on remolding the scariness of the real world back into the teenage years she ruled. Some may blanch at Mavis' sheer mean-spiritedness and unbending attitude, but whom do we see more in real life: the Junos who can quickly adapt and mature, or the Mavises?

Theron plays Mavis as if using the part as a screen test for her upcoming turn as the evil queen in Snow White and the Hunstman. She peers at the world with narrowed, confrontational eyes, perpetually disgusted by the normalcy of adult life but unable to see that she's encased herself in amber. Living in a high-rise tower in Minneapolis, Mavis ghostwrites young adult fiction that allows her to hang onto her perversely stretched youth, and her friend drips steel-melting acid as she sarcastically reassures Mavis that she's completely moved beyond the one-horse town she talks about incessantly. That fixation on her glory days compounds when her old flame sends her a birth announcement, inexplicably prompting a decision to return to her hometown to win him back. Cody and Reitman sell it like the starting point of a romantic comedy, but as Mavis obsessively replays Teenage Fanclub's "The Concept" from a mixtape that ex- made her in high school on the way home, her drive resembles Travis Bickle heading for the pimp instead of the usual chasing a lover at the airport. Reitman even zooms into the innards of the cassette, the meticulous overview of its parts visualizing just how completely Mavis has crawled inside her teenage shell to hide from adulthood.

That gutting of traditional romantic comedy mechanics extends through the whole film, which never fails to present Mavis' dream of breaking up the happy marriage of her beloved Buddy (Patrick Wilson) as predatory, not affectionate. As a director, Reitman wisely stays out of Cody's way, but he films everything in harsh, revealing terms, casting unwelcome light on the wrinkles forming on Theron's face to the dirty trackpad of her clearly well-used Macbook. Even wretchedly obvious shots that disdainfully linger on chains like Staples and KFC work by conveying Mavis' stuck-up, hypocritical POV, the immaturity of this film school-grade "commentary" reflecting a character, not the director. Rather than throwing an arm around a lazily superior audience to coddle them, the film practically sets itself against the crowd by mocking such holier-than-thou distaste of mass culture as childish.

And if that doesn't set you on edge, Mavis takes back over after this early montage to seize control of the rest of the movie, and her actions continuously the viewer's patience with her sheer nastiness. Greeting Mavis back in Mercury is not Buddy but Matt Freehauf (Patton Oswalt), a doughy nerd who was left crippled by a homophobic beating in high school. But Matt's bitterness soon crowds out any instant sympathy, and he proves as unable to move beyond his past as Mavis. Oswalt brings some of his buried aggression from Big Fan to the part, forming Matt into a mound of impotent fury so hell-bent on feeling sorry for himself that he even hates other disabled people for stealing attention from him. Oswalt essentially plays Mavis' unheeded conscience, but Matt is so unpleasant in his own right that his warnings about leaving Buddy seem to stem more from practical worry than moral concern. The comedian gets most of the film's outright punchlines, but he delivers them with an edge; when Mavis airily explains what a zombie is, Matt snaps, "I'm a fat geek, I know what a zombie is." On paper, that joke reads as mere banter, but Oswalt reads it as if barely keeping his temper in check, anxious to keep check of that myopic grasp on pop culture that constitutes the only territory he knows and controls.

Mavis and Matt make a hell of a misanthropic double act, sniping at everyone within eyesight, including each other. Both receive so much pity from those around them that the brutal takedowns they lob between them are perhaps the first honest assessments they've ever heard of themselves. Matt, who knows he would have no shot with someone like Mavis even at his best, can taunt her for failing book series and her emotional cocoon. Mavis, so unconcerned with hurting someone's feelings, can harangue Matt for being so unapproachable because of his personality, not his disability. (And as a YA writer, she naturally uses hacky, clichéd lines that play on his crutch to do so.)

But not even these confrontations can shake something loose in either character, and Young Adult routinely sets up the usual plot points designed to offer some kind of breakthrough—a drunken kiss, the aforementioned exchange of critical evaluations, even an almost painfully sad scene of shared grief—only to collapse back into self-delusion. I winced all during a party scene near the end, waiting for the explosion that had to come, which it did, albeit in a wholly unexpected manner that managed to sidestep the easy way out but revealed a clarifying piece of information that does nothing to alter one's opinion of Mavis.

This is not easy stuff, and even those who typically have no problem with unsympathetic characters have responded viscerally to the film's unrepentant pessimism. But Cody is no mere nihilist, and Young Adult is filled with good people living contented lives. But they are not the stars, and their lives are not glorious and remarkable in the way they need to be to counteract the two principal players, who view such prosaic happiness as beneath them yet can attain nothing better. One of my notes for Young Adult said it was a better horror film than Jennifer's Body, but upon further reflection, I cannot call it such because it all feels too real and unexaggerated. Some people will never learn, so close-minded that nothing will penetrate years of self-deception and insecurity manifested as perverse haughtiness. Those who dismiss Cody as someone writing what she thinks is teen slang have already had two demonstrations of her criticism of youth and all its inexperience and arrogance. If Young Adult cannot convince them of her rejection of such self-involved attitudes, then perhaps Mavis and Matt aren't the only ones clouded by shallow prejudices.

Big Fan

Paul Aufiero lives in a boxed-in world: he works in a parking garage booth taking tickets from customers who always maintain that they "were just in there for a minute," and he lives in his cramped childhood bedroom with his mother, who harps on her son to get a real job and find a woman. Even the frame seems confined, always bearing down on Paul and squashing his pudgy frame into a bent-over mound of flesh and stubble.

At some stage in life, Paul gave up on career and romantic aspirations and fixated on the one constant: football. He decorates his room with posters of star quarterback Quantrell Bishop (spot the initials) and sleeps under NY Giants bedsheets. At 1 am, he calls into local sports talk show to rant and rave with rehearsed tirades with "the Sports Dogg" about the Giants and spars with the mysterious "Philadelphia Phil" (Michael Rapaport), a cantankerous Eagles fan who calls in just to annoy New Yorkers.

One night, Paul and his equally stunted buddy Sal (Kevin Corrigan) are out on the town when they spot -- no, can it be? -- Quantrell Bishop himself. Overwhelmed, the boys trail the player from Staten Island to Manhattan and follow him into a strip club. There, these two virginal, pathetic men don't cast a sideways glance to any of the dancers, fixating entirely on Bishop until working up the courage to approach him, like shy, dateless boys at prom asking for a dance. Surprisingly, Bishop welcomes the two losers, until Paul and Sal reveal that they followed Bishop from Staten Island -- and even saw him stop to pick up some drugs -- leading to an altercation that leaves Paul bruised and bloodied.

Days later, Paul awakes in a hospital bed and, after establishing that he was out for the entire weekend thinks only of asking how the Giants did on Sunday. The police ask him for his statement, and his lawyer brother prepares a lawsuit, but Paul knows that his testimony would continue Quantrell's suspension, possibly even lead to jail time, so he attempts to bury the story for the sake of the team he loves so dearly. Here the film takes a turn, from a story of a wretched sports nut à la writer-director Robert D. Siegel's previous screenplay The Wrestler to a discombobulated mess attempting to ape Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver.

The head trauma Paul suffered from his beating exacerbates his clear instability and, if at all possible, he retreats further into himself, shrinking away from his family's attempts to help him and gently reshapes his quiet isolation into a simmering rage. It's a bravura performance by Patton Oswalt, the fantastic comedian who seems to channel the merciless pathos of this manchild without feeling the need to pander and soften as some comics-cum-dramatists (especially Robin Williams, though his performance in World's Greatest Dad is a bit of a kindred spirit to Oswalt's Paul). The subtlety in his face, the way he saves all his passion for that call-in show and buries everything else behind a stone face that hints at the trouble that lies beneath through intensely cold and focused eyes, promises a rewarding second career should the comedian take on more roles.

It's a subtlety that, unfortunately, is almost entirely lacking in the rest of the picture. Siegel's Wrestler dealt in cliché -- the stripper with a heart of gold, the washed-up underdog looking for one last shot, and those are just characters -- it gave the story and characters dignity. Minor touches, such as The Ram clinging to an old NES wrestling game featuring him (a relic treasuring another relic), gave the story nuance even if we knew what was coming. While Oswalt doesn't reach the heights of Mickey Rourke -- who in the hell could? -- he's got the same sure grasp on his character, but Siegel's script lacks focus. At just under an hour and half, it feels too long, reaching the beating quickly and letting us know how Paul will respond immediately afterward, leading to a sizable gap between relative closure of that storyline and a darker development near the end.

This stretch of inactivity, among other aspects of the film, has led some to interpret Big Fan as a dark comedy; even Netflix refers to it only as such in its description of the film (even going so far as to mention Siegel's connection to satirical paper The Onion). Yet the story is clearly dramatic, a study of a man's descent into madness and isolation; it just so happens to be founded on a layer of condescension and mockery. The Ram was a mess, but a mess you cared about, that you pitied and even, against all logic, respected at times. Compare the depth of character revealed when Randy hands Pam an action figure of himself for her son -- the way the gift reflects both Randy's perpetual narcissism, his desire to get closer to Pam, the affection he has for kids who used to view him as a god and his eternal boyishness -- to Paul masturbating under Giants bedsheets under the shadow of his Quantrell Bishop poster, and how he later ignores women in the strip club to gawk at Bishop and send him drinks "compliments of the gentlemen over there."

Big Fan denies its protagonist the dignity that The Wrestler afforded to its doomed has-been. One could explain this as the difference between a man who had it all and lost it and a loser who never had anything, but even as someone who regards sports with boredom and willful ignorance, I can't help but feel bad for the caricature the film makes of dedicated sports fans. It's true that diehard fans -- be they sports nuts or cineastes -- can grow unhealthy obsessions with the hobbies they love, but Big Fan never offers a counterpoint to ridiculous superfans like Paul or Philadelphia Phil; hell, Sal is even worse, as he's such an idiot that he idolizes Paul for his ability to rant on a cheap sports radio show as much as he does the players on the Giants. Had the movie concerned a film buff who couldn't get laid, who obsessed over an actor and ruined his life just to watch more flicks, would it have received the same adulation from critics. Besides Oswalt's incredible performance, a few aspects of Big Fan won me over -- ironically, the funnier moments, such as Paul attempting to stop the lawsuit his brother submitted by going to Wikipedia in the hopes of telling him how to halt one; "Lawyers probably don't want people to know about," Sal offers -- but it never shifts out of first gear and yet again I find myself hopelessly disappointed with a Taxi Driver remake released in 2009.

Heckler

At one point in Jamie Kennedy's Heckler, an investigation into the nature of the (de-)evolution of vocal and written criticism, filmmaker Joel Schumacher angrily asks, "Does any child want to grow up to be a critic?" Not a bad point. As someone who only moved out of his teens a few years back and obviously seeks to be one (a real one) someday, I might as well share my own feelings: from the ages of 2-5 I wanted to be a garbage man, simply because I thought the trucks were magical. Feel free to hold that over my head. Then I wanted to be an engineer, though why I can't be sure. Maybe it's because I just liked building crap with Legos and was brainwashed by all that talk of "my brother used to play with Legos all the time. He's an engineer now." Anyway, I kept with that ill-defined dream into my first year of college, at which point I found that I hated every one of my courses pertaining to the major.

I'd had the idea to perhaps study and write film criticism in my spare time since I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey a year earlier and had been changed by it, so I simply decided to shift my focus to make a career out of seeing and reviewing films, essentially because I wanted to see if there was a movie out there that could affect me so profoundly again.

I say all of this because Heckler brings up a number of good points about the impersonality of critics. A critic must rightly live in a vacuum, away from the stars and filmmakers you will later have to review, possibly negatively, and one must try to add an objective tint to the very definition of subjectivity. But that impersonality also makes some criticism perhaps too rigid, and definitely too harsh. The comics and filmmakers Kennedy assembles stress that they all have feelings, and that today's style of vicious criticism can have terrible effects on them. They're quite right: Lord knows I've devoted ream after ream of bile directed at anything and everything to do with the new Transformers, and at times I feel an almost insatiable need to insult rather than truly critique. This is a shameful practice which I've tried to curb for all but the most loathsome theater-going experiences I have in a year, but we can all agree that, sometimes, an insult is just fun.

I also share my pathetic, truncated life story because Heckler's chief weakness is its inability to see the critics, too, as people. While many have kind words to say about Pauline Kael or Roger Ebert, who are constructive even in their most scathing reviews (though the nicest thing you can say about Ebert's review for North is that he like Wood and Reiner's other films), a number of the interviewees erect critics, be they paid -- for lack of a better term -- "professionals" or anonymous Internet commentators, on a pedestal. To them, critics are nothing more than glorified hecklers, and the lot of them can be grouped into an institution as corrupt as any government.

That simple-mindedness, perpetuated not by all of the subjects but fatally by Kennedy himself, turns Heckler from a potentially insightful look into the Internet's effect on cruelty and rudeness in criticism into what feels like, ironically, Jamie Kennedy's video blog, one long rant against the haters who so torment him.

The first segment, which tackles hecklers in clubs, is the most immediately rewarding, because we can see the comics fighting back. Classic clips such as Bill Hicks' verbal assault on a hostile crowd, which remains as terrifyingly entertaining now as it was the first time I saw the video years ago, rub up against more recent footage of Kennedy and other comics handling the drunks and the asses. Revealingly, a number of these comics simply aren't funny; one poor sap even manages to turn the entire audience against him with bad jokes and worse defenses against the heckler. Kennedy himself, it must be said, is too quick to fall back on the easy sexual jokes about drunken girls' promiscuity and standoffish males' inability to get laid.

Kennedy only makes matters worse when he interviews some kids who openly profess themselves hecklers; snotty, hipster, virginal teenagers all, they cannot articulate their thoughts beyond, "You're not funny." Now, I'm willing to cut Kennedy a lot of slack, because anyone who would pride himself on being a heckler is probably a world-class douche anyway, so these interviews are actually a nice bit of fun.

When he tries to apply that same tactic to paid film critics, however, Heckler hits a speed bump. He confronts some critics -- including high-profile cases such as Richard Roeper -- and reads them some of the harsh things they said about the poor comic. Some of these excerpts are scathing but nowhere near brutal, while others cross every boundary of taste you could imagine. One critic in particular, who appears on G4's Attack of the Show with Kennedy, throws out disgusting lines that are not criticism by any standard but simply base insults.

Then the criticized get their say. Just as a number of the comics responding to hecklers in clips were unfunny and even sexist and racist (though no one deserves to be yelled at in the middle of a show), many of the filmmakers and actors weighing in on film criticism produce some awful schlock. All the makers of lame teen comedies point out that 12-year-olds thought the movie was hilarious, ergo the film succeeded. The goal of any film is to entertain, yes, but how can anyone say such a thing with matter-of-fact pride? Joel Schumacher complains that people tore apart his Batman films, saying that they were just "comic book movies." That mindset is exactly why those films were so bad (and it's not like he has audience appreciation to fall back on there; everyone hated Batman & Robin), and why Christopher Nolan's Batman was such a revelation. Even Jon Lovitz, who voiced the lead in the animated series The Critic, gets in an absurd rebuttal when he confidently asserts that he wouldn't get a job coaching the Lakers just because he's been to all the games for 20 years -- no Jon, but you could damn sure get a job writing about them, now couldn't you? And let's not even go into Kennedy's antics of reading scathing reviews of his cinematic hallmarks Son of the Mask and Malibu's Most Wanted as if the critic had laid into Orson Welles (he even asks Roeper why he loves all of Ang Lee's films but doesn't have fun with Son of the Mask).

The Internet's influence takes up a great deal of the film's running length, yet no one ever really investigates the nature of the information superhighway and its ability to give everyone a voice. Lewis Black and some others say some sage things about the toxic effect of anonymity, yet the connections between this new mindset and contemporary criticism are tenuous at best and forced at worst. Had it been trimmed down to about 20 minutes, this final segment would have been better even if it only vaguely addressed the Internet's power. Nevertheless, it does offer up golden quotes from Carrie Fisher and a reviewer for CHUD.com, who explodes in the film's best rant (in a film interviewing comics, no less!) when critic Leonard Maltin blanket insults all internet critics.

While the heckler segment contains too much open sexism and bad comebacks, it kept me completely engaged, because everyone hates a heckler. I would have admired its take on critics too, had it not been so simplistic and one-sided. Then again, the movie actually gives some critics the chance to explain themselves, which is something actual film criticism doesn't allow; the only way for a filmmaker to really get back at a critic is to make his next film that much better -- or beat them up in a boxing match; your choice, really. In the end, though, I couldn't help but laugh at all of these supposedly edgy comics and teen-targeted auteurs dismissing critics and hecklers even as they devoted a feature-length film to complaining about how mean they can be. The richest irony is that Kennedy's web site contains numerous pull-quotes from critics who gave the film positive reviews. I thought you didn't care what they said, Jamie?

Observe and Report

Jody Hill might have a long career as the anti-Apatow if he can just cut down on the insufferable drag in his movies. Indeed, as much as Apatow and his crew's films have that tell-tale lag in the middle, they have nothing on the moments of excruciating downtime in Hill's fun but overrated debut The Foot Fist Way. Observe and Report, one of the most deceptively marketed films in recent memory, makes FFW look downright taut in comparison.

As with The Foot Fist Way, Observe and Report follows a pudgy, sad outsider as he slowly gives into his disturbing psychosis. Also like the protagonist of his debut, Seth Rogen's Ronnie slaves away at a laughable job he badly performs. But that job is all he has and he treats it with absolute sincerity. Head of security at a local mall, Ronnie stalks the corridors and the stores, fancying himself a real officer of the law as he curses all those who irk him while remaining oblivious to the jeers of everyone. His ragtag band of guards aren't much saner than their leader, and some of them look forward to the day they can carry real firearms in the mall.

As Ronnie walks around, medicated on mood levellers to stave off complications from his bipolar disorder, only one person snaps him out of his disturbing reveries: Brandi (Anna Faris), the ditzy, slutty blonde who works the makeup counter. When a flasher exposes himself to the young woman, Ronnie sees his chance to be the hero and win the girl, and he vows to bring the pervert to justice. Then a detective (Ray Liotta) shows up and steals all of Ronnie's imagined thunder. Before long, the film many worried would be yet another Paul Blart morphs into a comedic Taxi Driver, or at least that's what it strives to be.

Brandi becomes a major source of contention among detractors, and for good reason: some truly vile things happen to her, and we're meant to laugh. First, Ronnie forces her into a date by refusing to let her leave the mall until she acquiesces. Then he gets her so drunk that she can't walk, and we cut to Ronnie having sex with an unconscious Brandi, complete with vomit on the pillow. But it's not date-rape, say the filmmakers, because Brandi snaps out of it long enough to ask a slightly concerned Ronnie "Why are you stopping?" I guess it's funny because she's a slut, but Ronnie still had sex with a woman clearly too intoxicated to give any real form of consent.

And that's not the only time Ronnie goes beyond the pale. When he stops taking his medication and, as a result, fails the psychological exam of his application to the police force, the mall guard slips into ultra-violence worthy of a Scorsese movie. He assaults one of the food court operators (Patton Oswalt) for insulting his friend Nell (Collette Wolfe), bound to a wheelchair after ankle surgery. Skateboard punks receive a beating that would make Tommy DeVito flinch. There's even a preposterous and completely unfunny showdown in third act.

Then there's the ending, one of the most graphic and hysterical scenes I've ever watched. I don't like to call things this early in the year, but I seriously doubt I'll see a funnier scene this year than the final chase. Indeed, the film is often quite funny, but at least half of the film is drag. Hill seems to believe that by making Ronnie a psychopath with an alcoholic mother (Celia Weston in a show-stealing role), he has crafted a dark comedy. Not so: he really just made a slapstick with political incorrectness. Sometimes it works, but often -- particularly the date-rape scene -- are just there for shock value and greatly take away from the funny bits.

Nevertheless, the film's got gall, I'll give it that. When it clicks, it's one of the more original comedies in recent memory, so audacious it almost begs you not to laugh. But more often than not it mistakes lulls for atmosphere and development and genuine offensiveness for boundary pushing and satire. So it's a bit of a failure, but a noble one. I still recommend it, if for no other reason than the final ten minutes.