The Muppets (James Bobin, 2011)

Not three minutes go by in The Muppets before the filmmakers flaunt their unabashed reverence for Jim Henson's beloved creations. A montage of memorabilia would, in other movie, be as cynical and greedy as a filmmaker could get. Here, however, it establishes character, that of Walter (a new Muppet) and his supportive brother Gary (Jason Segel, who co-wrote the screenplay), as well as setting up the deep vein of affection the movie carries for the franchise. Segel made his Muppet love plain in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and ardor bursts from every frame of this uneven but lovable revival.

In fact, The Muppets will likely play better to the parents who remember the felt-and-cloth puppets from their own childhood than the kids they take along (though the ones in my audience seemed entertained enough). Packed with self-referential jokes and the usual Muppety meta-humor, the film emerges as a true passion project for Segel, co-writer Nicholas Stoller (director of Marshall) and director James Bobin. And though their nostalgia occasionally threatens to make wall off the movie from the youngest viewers, The Muppets proves funny, and touching, enough to win the fuzzy puppets a new generation of fans.

The Social Network

David Fincher's growth as a filmmaker has been both nuanced and startling. His initial pictures are confrontational, reliant upon his experience as a music video director that make pictures like Se7en and Fight Club draining exercises in style. Far from a nihilist, Fincher crafted himself into a deep pessimist who nevertheless fought to find the good in life. He brought an old detective out of despair by ironically plunging him into the heart of darkness. He ruthlessly mocked the fascistic conformity of the emasculated male even as they supposedly rebelled against a false image, but Fincher managed to spare some sympathy for those who felt a sense of cultural disconnect.

In recent years, Fincher has not drastically altered his course so much as punched through to the other side of his bleakness. His stories are no longer stomach-churning but atmospheric and chilling, but the hearts of Zodiac and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button are essentially no different than that of Se7en: they are stories about people who are ultimately doomed but soldier on, because the alternative is even more terrifying. With The Social Network, "Fincher 2.0" develops this thread even further, and the greatest kick of the film comes from watching the preconceived notions of its two auteurs -- Fincher and West Wing maestro Aaron Sorkin -- completely invert. Here, Fincher is, for the first time, nakedly sympathetic to the ambition of a morally dubious man (though he's as critical as ever of Mark's actions), while the ever-optimistic Sorkin pens a critique of the entire idea of social networking. In fact, were a director without Fincher's confidence and commitment to his own vision attached to the project, The Social Network likely would have ended up as nothing more than the ramblings of a curmudgeon woefully behind the times.

The contrast brings out the best in both the script and the direction. Sorkin's pessimism checks Fincher's willingness to excuse some of Mark Zuckerberg's behavior, while Fincher's atmospheric direction adds layers of complexity to Sorkin's style, which relies upon people who speak like playwrights to make characters who are both abhorrently unrealistic yet bizarrely plausible and believable. His overly verbose style lends itself well to the Harvard boys who invent and squabble over Facebook: all of them put on airs, exploit family connections and ready themselves for lucrative futures that they pretend to work hard for so it doesn't look embarrassing when their trust funds mature. They believe themselves to already be the superior of everyone their age, yet they behave like the frat boys they are.

Fincher and Sorkin even manage to trace Facebook back to a childish, misogynistic stunt. We meet Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) on a date with a young woman named Erica from Boston University. Mark monopolizes the conversation, fixating on the reputable clubs that he wants to get into because the most powerful people in the world joined them in their college days. He talks so much and speaks so condescendingly to Erica that she finally calls him an asshole and leaves. In a huff, Mark returns home, drunkenly blogs about the breakup and subsequently hacks into the photo databases of Harvard's various dorms and creates a site where male students vote on the hotness of Harvard women. At four in the morning, the site gets so many hits that the university's servers crash.

The Social Network is structured around two separate lawsuits over the ownership of Facebook. One pits Mark against Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (both Armie Hammer), wealthy, Olympic-level rowers who came to Zuckerberg after his stunt with an idea to create a social networking site for Harvard students. They intended it as a casual dating site, but Mark went home and set about making not "Match.com for Harvard" but a place that allows him to take all of collegiate socializing and place it on the Internet. A month later, Mark tells the Winklevoss brothers he cannot complete the assignment, shortly before he launches The Facebook in its infancy.

The other lawsuit finds Mark being sued by his best friend and Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield, looking uncannily like a young Jean-Pierre Léaud), who alleges that Mark cut him out of the profits even though he provided 100% of the start-up capital. The Winklevoss lawsuit pits two forces of equal arrogance against each other, but Eduardo's indignation during deposition meetings comes from a sense of personal harm.

Even so, none of these young men is any moral example. The Winklevoss twins come off as the sort of smug rich boys who will get cushy jobs in their father's law firm. When Mark launches Facebook, they pull strings to get an audience with the Harvard president to demand that the school shut down the site and expel Zuckerberg. When the president calls them out on their absurd sense of entitlement, the brothers looked shocked, as if anyone can bring a petty squabble to the head of the university. Saverin never shuts up about his own well-connected father, and his lawsuit for a portion of Facebook's profits seem less a matter of money than an attempt to win back his dad's approval. Saverin gets edged out of the picture by Napster founder Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), whose smooth-talking victim complex suggests the late stages of a cocaine-induced breakdown.

Then, there's Mark. Fincher always keeps Eisenberg separate from others, and the actor never looks comfortable when forced to deal with people. His site opens up socializing, to the point that anyone has access to everyone, and young men and women begin behaving irrationally over the transparency of their lives. The irony of his own ability to connect with anyone should be lost on no one.

In telling Mark's story, Fincher clearly draws from Orson Welles' great Citizen Kane, the story of a young media mogul who grows old and dies alone. Like Charles Foster Kane, Zuckerberg is indisputably a prodigy, a man of ambition and focus who builds upon the suggestions of his guides until he no longer has to stand on their shoulders. And like Kane, he cannot find true happiness in his work. Eisenberg occasionally breaks off all attention from the world to stare into space, and his utter lack of social skills hint that Mark may have Asperger's. But social discomfort does not fully explain the open arrogance in Mark's dark smirk. When a lawyer suggests that Mark's behavior toward the wronged parties stems from his resentment of never being invited to join one of the big-time Harvard clubs, Mark snidely replies that he currently has enough money to buy them and make them into game rooms.

The empire Mark builds doesn't have the grandeur of Kane's newspaper supremacy, but its influence runs far deeper. Groupies line up to sleep with the founder of Facebook, and we see how quickly Facebook becomes a part of people's lives. Within weeks, "Facebook me" has entered into Harvard's lexicon, and couples devolve into major, terrifying arguments over how often a page is updated to match a relationship status. Fincher seems to draw from his own Fight Club at times, portraying Facebook as something that sets off a cultural revolution that cannot be contained. Not even Project Mayhem is as widespread as the site where everyone -- including yours truly -- goes to post menial BS that can be taken for so much more. With businesses willing to terminate or not hire someone based on photos posted online, the issues of privacy that Zuckerberg casually steamrolls over to be popular carry a weight he does not or cannot contemplate.

The more social networking links people, the bigger the barriers, physical and mental, are formed in the real world. When Mark moves out to Palo Alto on Parker's advice, Eduardo heads to New York to work as a finance intern and seek advertisers from traditional routes. The 3,000 miles between them enhances the schism between them, with Saverin pursuing a business model that's proven but won't maximize profits for this kind of venture and Zuckerberg falling further and further into Parker's clutches. The two friends share an awkward exchange when Saverin finally comes out to California, and though the subject is not directly broached at the time, they both know that Eduardo is out, and the fleeting moment of friendship between them won't reverse what's coming. The irony of Mark's disconnect is compounded by the workers he hires when Facebook grows rapidly: anyone updating the site for better usability and interaction is described as being "wired in" and cannot be spoken to as if in stasis. The levels of impersonality between people mere feet away is bewildering even though we're living in this changed world now.

Fincher and Sorkin make tension out of the ostensibly banal subject of website programming by depicting how empty it all is. Mark, Saverin, the Winklevosses, not one of them has enough personality to hang a hat on. These are the people who created a way for all of us to fit our background, current statuses and interests onto a single page, as if Facebook was just a way for everyone to look as dull as them. The twins host raunchy parties while Mark decides to find an intern by holding an elaborate drinking game where the player who codes properly while hammered gets the job. These are just boys, yet they play with levels of money most of us cannot fathom. Couched in the vicious fights for intellectual supremacy is the suggestion that these are the sort of people who control all the money, spoiled kids and broadly unethical wunderkinds who receive respect for breaking numerous laws simply because they look cool in the process. When Saverin jealously prods Parker for losing to the courts on Napster, Parker still claims victory. "You wanna buy a Tower Records, Eduardo?" implying that he unleashed peer-to-peer file sharing to destroy the industry that would not work with him and recognize his talents.

Yellow-green dominates the color palette, as if someone finally got so sick with envy at the accomplishments of another that he finally vomited. The electronic/industrial score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross throbs and hums like a migraine headache, occasionally fading but never disappearing. Ominous without being ornate, the score captures the emotion of the film perfectly: cold but searching. It keeps looking for an outlet and finds none, always trapped by the insular attitudes of the characters, who only become lonelier as the film wears on. Its vaguely 8-bit sound deepens into more expressive tones, returning to motifs that suggest not just a thematic continuity but a personal stagnation on the part of young men who refuse to start acting like adults. Paranoia flecks their isolation, from Parker's obsessiveness over those who shut him down to the rumors that flame through instant Internet contact. It's almost funny how a student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, is seen as a deadlier social weapon than any of the national papers Kane's empire ran.

Much of the substance of David Fincher's films can be gleaned from his opening credits, something the great video essayist Matthew Zoller Seitz and Aaron Aradillas are currently demonstrating with their pieces for the Museum of the Moving Image (part one found here). As ever, the atmosphere and character of The Social Network can be seen in its own opening. Rejected by Erica, Mark marches home as the camera glides over Harvard (or at least the shooting locations standing in for Harvard), showing all the interesting sights and people Mark could be interacting with instead of running home to blog. The score bristles with dark tones, and for all the camera's grace, you begin to fear that he might be planning something to hurt the girl. And, in a way, he does, insulting her online and subjecting her to verbal abuse from other misogynistic guys. It establishes Mark as a man who cannot let things go, and Erica manages to float around the back of his mind the entire film, as if he made Facebook solely to prove himself not an asshole rather than simply apologizing and acting more nicely.

Still, you never fully hate anyone in this movie, even if you want to give them all a good slap. Mark becomes the youngest billionaire in the world, but he has no one to enjoy it with, and his incessant invasions of privacy ensure that even the public that uses his site like a drug does not admire him. Like Facebook itself, The Social Network stays constant just long enough for you to get used to it before something changes, not in the narrative so much as the mood. Arrogance gives way to the insecurity motivating it, which in turn morphs into loneliness. When Mark sits by himself at the end, surfing his own website in that bizarrely fixated way of his, the chasm of darkness around him and the implication of his lawsuit with Eduardo make him resemble less Charles Kane than Michael Corleone. He's the most powerful man in the world -- just read any ranking of the most influential people -- and he has nothing to show for it and no amount of clicking 'refresh' will change that.

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.

I Love You, Man

Jason Segel established himself as the dark horse of the Apatow crew last year with the incredible Forgetting Sarah Marshall, far and away the best of the slew of Apatow-produced (and occasionally directed) films to come from the thinktank of former Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared staff and stars. Now he almost single-handed buoys the best of the lesser Apatow works; you know, the ones with which Apatow has barely more than a passing involvement.

The plot of I Love You, Man is both brilliance in simplicity and a big risk: at the start of the film, Peter (Paul Rudd) proposes to his love Zooey (Rashida Jones) and she says yes. But their post-engagement high does not last, as wedding preparations reveal that Peter has no steady male friends to invite to the wedding. Fearing the bridesmaids will have nothing to do but sit around awkwardly, Peter attempts to drum up some guy friends. Rudd plays Peter as a man who wants to be relaxed and cool but spends too much time trying; the actor's got a lot of charm, and it's impressive to see him twist it into awkward humor.

The result is a surprisingly sly take on the average romantic comedy. Peter uses all of the avenues we usually see characters using to find a mate: he looks around the gym and the office, to no avail. His gay brother (Andy Samberg), who chases straight men for the challenge, sets him up with a "man-date" that goes predictably yet hilariously awry. There's also the requisite gross-out gag, one that's been done to death but with a slight tweak that made the whole thing just a tad unexpected. All of this goes on for a 20-minute or so span that starts to overstay its welcome, and the film threatens to drag right out of the gate.

Then Sydney (Segel) shows up. As much the physical embodiment of what every laid-back dude wants to do but abstains from either because of fears of repercussions or a nasty case of maturity. He doesn't clean up after his dog, takes seemingly indefinite lunch breaks, and just generally speaks in the sort of aphorisms that sound really wise when you're young and cocksure but tend to lose their sheen when you actually think about them. Peter and Sydney bond over a mutual love of the Canadian prog rock band Rush, unquestionably the single best group to provide the heart of a platonic romantic comedy between two geeks.

From here the film gleefully follows every rom-com trope in the book and turns it on its side: Peter and Sydney fall into such a deep bro-love which incurs Zooey's jealousy, leading to the inevitable Big Misunderstanding that leaves all parties scattered with an uncertain-but-not-really predicament to be solved in the third act. But if it plays out in predictable tedium, that's only because it's sitting right next to you in the audience laughing at itself.

There's a fine line between comedy gold and abysmal failure when it comes to over-the-top exaggeration; for example, Step Brothers tried to filter the coming-of-age story through the lens of two middle-aged man-children, and the result was downright awful. I Love You, Man succeeds because its exaggerations are tempered by some of the sweetest and most genuine moments you'll find in a comedy these days: Peter's scenes with Zooey never once feel contrived and manage to convey Peter's dopey charm without seeming kitschy (mainly thanks to Paul Rudd's natural charisma). The three leads are helped along by a terrific supporting cast (including the aforementioned Samberg, professional straight-man J.K. Simmons as Peter's dad and Jon Favreau and Jaime Pressley as a perennially-bickering couple), who only make a great film even funnier. I Love You, Man is far from perfect, but it's one of the funnier films in recent memory, and it's worth the price of admission if for no other reason than to see Paul Rudd and Jason Segel jam to old Rush tunes.