Red State (Kevin Smith, 2011)

Kevin Smith's Red State indirectly posits a future where "ripped-from-the-blogopshere" becomes the new method of stabbing at relevance. Its unfocused narrative, contradictory thematic thrusts and strawmen fallacies play like an unresearched screed against, well, everything within reach. The man whose command of Catholic teachings gave Dogma its depth here presents...I'm not even sure, to be honest. The fitful narrative spurts in and out of topics: occasionally, it goes after dumb, horny teenage boys, then to Christian Extremists In No Way Related to the Phelps Family (lawsuit-avoiding clarification included) and finally to the lethally inane bureaucracy of law enforcement.

Smith seems to want to make a hyperkinetic Coen brothers film, but he has made the same mistake of so many detractors in assuming that every character in a Coens' movie is loathsome. There's no one to latch onto with this film, which already whiplashes so much it could use an identifiable center. Smith, who has made some of the most tangible characters in modern comedy, crafts props who spit out his lines with either listlessness or overacting bathos the one time he really needs great delivery to maintain suspense with words. So thin are these characters that, amazingly, the most inherently likable one turns out to be the homphobic preacher sitting on top of a small arsenal.

Cop Out

One could glean the whole of Cop Out from its opening moments. Detectives Jimmy Munroe (Bruce Willis) and Paul Hodges (Tracy Morgan) sit behind a two-way mirror, sizing up a suspect in the interrogation room and arguing over who gets to go in and play bad cop. Paul convinces his partner to allow him to use his favorite technique: homage (or, "homm-idge," as the case may be). So, Paul bursts into the next room and lets off some of Tracy Morgan's irrepressible energy and runs through a few choice references before the camera cuts in-between Paul referencing not only cop classics like Heat but The Color Purple and Schindler's List and Jimmy standing behind the mirror telling the audience what those references are.

Yep, there's Cop Out in a nutshell: one giant "homm-idge" that too frequently sucks the air out of its laughs by explaining the joke. This creates a dissonance in the film, between the jokes that slyly conform to and play with the rampant cliché of the buddy cop genre and the excruciatingly telegraphed gags that call attention to themselves like an overeager child trying to win the approval of its parents. As such, some bits that might have been subtler digs at genre tropes become muddled and suspicious. When Paul informs us at the start that he and Jimmy, clearly set up to be odd-couple partners, have worked together for nine years, do we accept this as a play on the usual genre setup -- of the grizzled career cop and the gonzo slice of loony justice -- or does this reflect a weakness on the writers' part, as Morgan and Willis act as if they'd just met and only display any sense of camaraderie when the plot calls for it?

Ergo, much of Cop Out drifts in the ether between clever and stupid, never locating that fine balance between the two alluded to in This is Spinal Tap. Like any good movie cops, Paul and Jimmy neglect their home lives. Paul suspects his wife (Rashida Jones) of cheating on him with the neighbor, while Jimmy has to contend with a bitter ex-wife and her smug, rich new hubby (Jason Lee, sadly confined to two brief scenes).

When the detectives botch a drug sting, Jimmy and Paul have to, you guessed it, turn in their badges and guns for a month-long suspension, just as Jimmy's daughter (Michelle Trachtenberg) hits up daddy for $48K to pay for her dream wedding (in this economy? Jesus Christ, use that kind of money to put a down payment on a house). Unwilling to face the shame of letting the stepfather pay what would surely cost Jimmy nearly a full year's salary, Jimmy attempts to hock a rare baseball card worth upwards of $80,000, but nothing's ever easy, is it?

At this stage, Cop Out goes off the rails, with Jimmy losing his baseball card in a robbery, only to track it to a baseball-loving drug dealer and leader of a Mexican gang -- wouldn't a Hispanic gang in New York more likely be Puerto Rican? -- named Po'Boy (Guillermo Diaz) for reasons that go unexplained. Po'Boy agrees to return the detective's card if he and Paul can locate the dealer's stolen Mercedes. This setup undermines the entire film: yes, it's a comedy, but how does a premise involving a suspended cop taking on a job that a drug dealer could easily accomplish with his crew in order to retrieve a baseball card to sell it to pay for a wedding allow for easy access to the clichés of the buddy cop film? Yes, one expects a certain amount of exaggeration for the sake of parody, but something like Hot Fuzz, certainly the king of the cop parody films, at least ensures that every stretch comments in some way on a facet of the genre. All we see here is a plan that makes no sense either for the cops or the crook; indeed, the insanity of Po'Boy's decision is compounded later when Jimmy and Paul discover a person in the car's trunk.

Cop Out marks the first time that director Kevin Smith has shot someone else's script, an important landmark in his career yet also the root of the film's issues. Smith has taken flak from the start of his career over his visual style (or lack thereof), and admittedly Clerks is the only film that could cost $27,000 and make you wonder where all the money went. But I've always found his visuals perfectly suited to his scripts which, barring Mallrats and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (previous his weakest films), center the film's action on a precise lack of action, focusing instead on the rhythm of Smith's penned speech.

Writers Robb and Mark Cullen clearly draw inspiration from Smith's older films, as most of Cop Out plays out as conversations between our two heroes. Yet the rhythm of Smith's own work eludes them: Star Wars references abound, as do scatological, vulgar rants -- an overlong, embellished tear by Morgan on a dump he took disgusts before it eventually just bores -- but the Cullens' writing lacks context, believability and direction. This is a film that features a vulgar, brazen black child who sasses the authorities. This is a film that actually features not one, but two bits involving the old "stop repeating me" back-and-forth between two grown adults (brought on by a dopey thief trained in the ways of parkour, played by Sean William Scott). Smith clearly allowed the actors to improvise as well, an aspect he's typically curtailed and doesn't yet know how to marshal (the weakest moments of the surprisingly rewarding Zack & Miri Make a Porno involved a laissez-faire attitude to Seth Rogen and co. riffing).

Which brings out Smith's uneasy marriage to the material. I've come across a few reviews of Cop Out that cite its bloated running length as but the latest example of the director's self-indulgence, a charge I find strange. While I might have cut a few minutes out of Dogma -- or really just the stuff involving the poop monster -- I find Smith to be a keen comic editor. Anyone who owns a DVD of Smith's work knows how stringently he adheres to the maxim of "Brevity is the soul of wit," as a number of bits any other director would have left in the finished product get the cut for the sake of flow and emotional connection to the story. Perhaps Kevin felt guilty cutting down someone else's material, all too aware of the pain of slicing out beloved bits and abandoned threads from his own scripts, but the film's near-two-hour running time outlasts the narrative by a good 20 minutes, and the long stretches of inactivity and weak material undercut the film every time it appears to build momentum.

But this all sounds so harsh. I find myself somewhat flabbergasted at the vitriolic reception afforded the movie. Cop Out's greatest sin is its fleeting impression, the feeling that you've seen all this before even when that's supposed to be the feeling this parody film wants to impart. A number of bits do hit the mark, separated as they are by the patches of limp genre send-up. Kevin Pollak and Adam Brody are terrific (and the only aspect of the film that consistently pokes fun at clichés, apart from Harold Faltermeyer supplying a suitably vintage synth score) as the rival detective team always hassling Paul and Jimmy, while Willis clearly understood that his role called for him to be Bruce Willis, and by God he Bruce Willises the hell out this thing. But, as 30 Rock fans could have guessed, Tracy Morgan walks away with the film. Morgan always manages to somehow look simultaneously like a massive, lumbering beast and a big, loveable kid, and he channels that appearance into his acting. I laughed hard when the police captain tells Paul that someone filmed him physically abusing a teenager and "commandeering" his bike and placed it on YouTube, and Paul giddily responds, "THE YouTube?!" I was particularly enthused to see Morgan cry, as few actors working today know how to wring more laughs from tears than Tracy Morgan.

Yet Cop Out doesn't succeed, moving listlessly from plot point to plot point even as it fancies itself a film about the chats that occur between those points, and it is unquestionably the weakest picture in Smith's canon. Still, it represents an interesting development in the career of a filmmaker no one would have pegged as a hired gun, and if Cop Out helps Smith secure the capital for his proposed passion projects -- the hockey picture Hit Somebody and the relentlessly teasing Red State, a horror film with a captivating premise made all the more appealing by its rejection from studios for fear of unmarketability -- then the disappointment of this meandering off-genre production will seem be fleeting.

Catch and Release

One of the strangest genre offshoots in film is the "moving on" subset of romantic comedy, in which the protagonist, having endured an unspeakable loss, must find love again while reconciling their guilt over moving on with life. Well, I say "strange:" learning to love again is a natural occurrence in the real world. But its depiction in film typically leaves me scratching my head. All too often, the protagonist finds love within months, and not just a steady relationship but love every bit as true as the one that was lost. Kevin Smith's Jersey Girl was a nice exception, advancing the story nearly a decade before trying to foist another relationship on the widower, but even then that time-jump served as an ellipsis for all that grieving.

Susannah Grant's Catch and Release might set the record for the shortest period of mourning ever put in one of these films. Gray (Jennifer Garner) mingles with the crowd at her fiancé Grady's funeral, internally monologuing about how much she hates having to deal with people at a time like this. This opening scene tells you everything that's about to go wrong with the film: Grant, the Oscar-nominated writer of Erin Brokovich, makes her directorial debut here, but she's clearly a writer first and foremost. The monologue only retreads what Garner quite capable conveys in silence on screen, drawing out what might have been an affecting moment into a clunky, repetitive bore. Oh, and the funeral just so happens to be on the day they were meant to be married, because apparently real life doesn't quite suck enough. Gray lives with Grady's roommates and friends, Dennis (Sam Jaeger), Grady's business partner; and Sam (Kevin Smith), an armchair philosopher who recites nuggets of wisdom gleaned not from books, but from the boxes of the herbal tea that he sells.

Also in the house is Fritz (Timothy Olyphant), Grady's other business partner and friend. Fritz immediately grates Gray, hooking up with a caterer at the funeral and even sleeping in Grady's bed. Gray doesn't understand why Fritz even stuck around after the funeral, until she notices that her fiancé sent $3,000 to an undisclosed recipient once a month and that some woman is leaving messages on his cell phone. Piecing together the evidence, as well as Fritz's worried attempts at misdirection, Gray realizes that her husband had an affair and that, according to Colorado law, all of Grady's money could potentially go to this woman's young child.

It's some weighty setup that might have worked had the film been about not canonizing the dead, but instead Grant uses this revelation as a justification of Gray's sudden and inexplicable attraction to Fritz, going from crippling grief to making out with a new dude within the week. And even if Fritz wasn't staying with the gang solely to run damage control for his dead friend, he lacks chemistry, with Gray or any other character, and instead suggests that a pretty face is all you need when you're dealing with death and betrayal.

Likewise, Jaeger and Garner fail to light up the screen. Jaeger's Dennis harbors his own feelings for Gray, but he spends so much time simply being forlorn around her that, as she hops into someone else's arms at an alarming rate, he seems to be more shaken up than the widow. Garner, who has a natural charm, is never given sufficient slack to roam with her character and to find her own voice, instead serving as a puppet for Grant's forced lines.

That lack of natural delivery is what leads me to believe that Grant, not the actors, deserves the blame for the stilted nature of the dialogue. Case in point: Kevin Smith, who put his own spin on his lines because he felt that he couldn't deliver what was on the page convincingly. Smith got away with it because he blamed the changes on his insecurity as an actor, yet his "colloquializing" of the dialogue makes him far and away the most interesting character of the film. For someone primarily known for appearing on-screen as a silent character who only pipes up to deliver a moment of alacrity to a conflicted soul, Smith brings his natural, conversational wit to the role and owns it: he's funny, warm, charming, lovable, sincere and -- in one moment that frankly should have come later in the film than it did -- heartbreaking. He's so good that everyone who appears in the scene with him gets a personality boost: Dennis becomes a great straight man, Gray gets out the emotion that for some reason she never properly exhibits elsewhere and Fritz, well, Fritz doesn't suck as much life out of the thing as he does without Kevin. The best, most touching, most realistic relationships in the whole film actually are Sam's interactions with Grady's lover and toddler.

But not even Smith can buoy this leaden, self-important snore-fest, a film that rushes the lives of its characters along yet still takes nearly two hours to reach its conclusion. That contrast between narrative length and running length leaves Catch and Release an interminable mess, a basket of cliché right down to its title, which becomes maddeningly punnish when we learn how much the characters like to fly fish. If you must watch it, do so to see Kevin Smith prove he could have a fun second career as an actor -- or maybe third; he does write comics now and then -- and for Juliette Lewis' off-kilter massage therapist, but bring a pillow for the rest of it.

Role Models

In a year already packed with great comedies from Ben Stiller (“Tropic Thunder”), Kevin Smith (“Zack & Miri Make A Porno”), and Apatow Productions (“Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” “Pineapple Express”) a little movie about two friends who find themselves in a court-ordered charity that pairs volunteers with maladjusted children sounds like just another attempt to cash in on those aforementioned talents. Surprisingly, “Role Models” more than holds its own in this riotous comedy.

The film opens with Danny (Paul Rudd) and Wheeler (Sean William Scott) working as pitchmen for an energy drink company. As per the strict regulations of buddy comedy, they are polar opposites; Wheeler is a laid-back lothario who adores his job because of its simplicity, while Danny is confrontational and bitter.

After a particularly hellish day, the pair find themselves on the verge of a prison sentence and Danny finds himself without a girlfriend. To avoid jail, the two head to the aforementioned charity Sturdy Wings, founded by Gayle Sweeney (Jane Lynch), an ex-con and recovered addict. Danny gets paired up with a fantasy-absorbed teen named Augie (Christopher Mintz-Plasse of McLovin fame), and Wheeler gets matched to the terrible tyke Ronnie (Bobb’e J. Thompson).

Naturally, nobody gets along at first. Danny is uncomfortable with Augie’s obsession with capes and foam swords and a strange club of like-minded nerds that plays like a Renaissance Faire in which everyone fights one another, while Ronnie simply views Wheeler as the latest toy to break. Eventually, they come to respect and even love one another and everyone learns something about themselves. This could have easily devolved into cliché, but “Role Models” rises above thanks to its inventive humor.

Foul-mouthed children is hardly a new concept to R-rated comedy, but the frequency with which Ronnie drops F-bombs is surprising. He’s so vulgar and self-assured you can almost believe that Wheeler would take him to an adult party and that he would fit in. Scott puts in his finest work since the first “American Pie, and Paul Rudd- adept at playing off others- manages to have chemistry with everyone. Jane Lynch plays Gayle like a person who never really recovered from addiction, to the point that, even in total sobriety, you find yourself wondering if she is using.

But once again it’s Christopher Mintz-Plasse who steals the show by making a devotion to a real life World of Warcraft actually touching and for getting in some memorable lines. Indeed, his hobby becomes the gag on which the movie hinges; Augie’s struggle to fit in and to win his parent’s acceptance is the closest this film comes to depth.

The film has obviously been cut down for ratings and time purposes. The problem is that they seem to have cut out all the transitions. The gang go from mortal enemies to dear friends over the course of…what? They just do. There’s not even a montage, for God’s sake. Likewise, Dany’s girlfriend (played by Elizabeth Banks) and Ronnie’s mother are terribly underdeveloped even though they seem like they could have easily been interesting characters. Such editing gives the movie a choppy feeling, and it exists more as a series of gags than a cohesive film.

Still, there’s no denying the funniness of “Role Models.” It’s half-hearted attempt at depth fails, but that cannot bring down the constant laughs. Scott reminds us why we used to love him, and Mintz-Plasse proves he is the king of the nerds. It’s not as funny or rewarding as “Zack & Miri,” but that’s no reason not to see this hilarious flick.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno

2008 is shaping up to be a banner year for romantic comedy the same way that 2007 wound up being a revival for Westerns. Hot on the heels of “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” and “Wall*E” (which is technically a children’s film but calls to mind the great silent romantic comedy “City Lights”), slacker guru Kevin Smith offers up “Zack and Miri Make a Porno,” a film that stacked up controversy long before it hit theaters thanks to its provocative title and its tongue-in-cheek posters.

It’s also one of the funniest films of the decade and the perfect blend of Smith’s own “Chasing Amy” and “Clerks II.”

The plot is summed up by the title: Zack and Miri, two lifelong best friends who find themselves on the verge of bankruptcy after letting the bills pile up, decide to get out of debt by making, you guessed it, a porno. Along the way, they recruit a gang of cast and crew, think up erotic film parodies and ultimately confront deeper feelings for each other. On the surface it looks like a standard romantic comedy with a wacky premise, but that doesn’t take into account Smith’s gift for dialogue.

Fans of Smith’s will recognize the vulgar, rapid-fire wit and the pop culture references, but this time around he also injects moments of truly uncomfortable humor that calls the sitcom “The Office” to mind. After all, this is a film about two friends who have to come to terms with how they really feel for one another; awkwardness is part of the equation. Rogen plays his usual schlub, but for the first time you can buy that he’s paired with an impossibly beautiful (and impossibly single) woman.

The characters, from the leads to the supporting cast, are all quirky and interesting. View Askew alumni Jeff Anderson and Jason Mewes hold their own against Rogen, the current king of comedy, while newcomer (in America, at least) Ricky Mabe gets a lot of laughs with a handful of screen time. Porn starlet Katie Morgan and infamous ex-porn star Traci Lords show off some surprising chops, and Justin Long’s cameo as a gay porn star is brief but instantly memorable. The best of the supporting cast is Craig Robinson, who steals nearly every scene he’s in as Delaney, the racially sensitive de facto producer of the porno.

The only downside of the film is that it’s looser than Smith’s usual fare, perhaps due to the influx of all these improvisers into the film of a man who prefers his actors stick to the script. As a result, occasionally meanders, and a speech from Robinson near the end is so formulaic and schmaltzy that it’s almost uncomfortable. But, as Roger Ebert noted, Smith throws so many gags at you so rapidly that anything that doesn’t connect is quickly lost beneath three jokes that do. The rapid-fire humor is all the more surprising considering how plot-relevant most of it is; most comedies exist as a series of gags, but this is one long joke.

Probably the most refreshing and surprising aspect of the movie is Miri, and by extension Elizabeth Banks, who is breaking out in a big way this year (“Role Models,” W.”). Females in slacker comedies, be they Smith’s films, Judd Apatow’s, or even the British sitcom “Spaced” are often the focal point of maturity. The ladies will hang out with the dudes, but they always grow up a lot faster. Miri is an exception; she swears with the best of them, avoids work even more studiously than Zack does, and, unlike most female slackers, not only gets the pop culture references but makes some herself. Yet she is also keenly aware of her femininity, another rarity in the slacker world. Miri is, quite simply, the best, most charming, most relatable female character to come along since Daisy from “Spaced.”

Ultimately, the film’s brief lags and the rare moments towards the end where the inevitability of romantic comedy cliché seeps in cannot derail such a continuously uproarious flick, and the surprising chemistry between the two leads and strong supporting cast make this possibly the most outrageous comedy since “There’s Something About Mary.” Any moment that feels stale or awkward is as necessary as the big jokes; the discomfort makes it all the more real and tender, and the romantic dialogue is the most powerful, realistic and original since the dialogue in Smith’s own “Chasing Amy.”

Smith’s most accomplished film yet is a surefire hit, and you’d have to be crazy to miss it. Oh, and sit through the credits.