Paradise (Diablo Cody, 2013)

I've previously been a defender of Diablo Cody's but her directorial debut is everything her detractors have accused her of being: simplistic, condescending, so caught up in her cute dialogue that character is left out in the cold. Its insultingly reductive view of religion can make even a staunch atheist blanch with embarrassment and sympathy, and any film that must rest on the shoulders of Julianne Hough is doomed from the start. A heinous picture.

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Capsule Reviews: While the City Sleeps, Cracking Up, The Kid, Rock of Ages

While the City Sleeps (Fritz Lang, 1956)

Fritz Lang's underseen noir blends the yellowest of journalism with King Lear in a prescient, savage view of media feeding a public frenzy. A news empire is offered to three successors, with the new kingdom to be ruled by the one who can beat the cops to solving the identity of a serial killer infamous only from the organization's own salacious coverage. Lang's framing is more stripped down than some other efforts but no less immaculate: the newsroom of transparent but isolating glass and roaring presses speak to the capacity of journalism to reveal and obscure, and how a giant conglomerate can drown out the truth instead of exposing it. As much as the actual string of murders, the tension operates on simple office politics, in which the promise of a raise and a title change to move up the modern social ladder can bring out the basest, most primitive behavior. The characterization of the sexually confused killer is oh-so-standard, but Lang's ability to make high style out of even the most basic movements and mise-en-scène combines with the otherwise fantastic story for a great anti-journo noir. Grade: A-

Despicable Me

It may not reach the ambitious heights of How to Train Your Dragon or Toy Story 3, but you have to admit: Despicable Me rates a mention if for no other reason than its ad campaign. I distrust all film trailers, but I cannot recall an animated film built up so effectively by the "Gabbo! Gabbo! Gabbo!" approach to teasers. It's a bold gambit to use with a movie targeted to children, not renowned for their attention spans and typically sold to kids with the most condescending disregard imaginable. (It prepares them for all trailers. See: Grown-Ups.) The manner with which the marketing department kept the plot of this film under wraps while generating interest rivals the surreal teasers for Christopher Nolan's upcoming thriller Inception.

Yet Despicable Me has an entertaining, if unoriginal, blend of slapstick and pathos, enough to provide the briefest respite in what may be the worst summer of my 20 -- no, 21 now -- years on this planet. Its protagonist, Gru (Steve Carell), is a villain whose intelligence and ambition do not quite place him in the upper echelon of supervillains as his reach too often exceeds his grasp. After a brief but amusing opening sequence establishes that someone (not Gru) managed to steal the Great Pyramids of Giza, the diminutive evildoer hunts for the new mastermind responsible for the crime of the century while planning an even bigger heist to cement his own name. His idea? Steal the Moon.

Unfortunately, this plot hits the wall fairly quickly: Gru's conflict with the young upstart who rises to sudden prominence, Vector (Jason Segel), begins without steady lead-in and falls away quickly. Sparring over a shrink ray that will allow the wielder to shrink the Moon, Gru and Vector get off a few uproarious scenes of over-the-top fighting, with Gru's fondness for missiles of all sizes and payloads and Vector's penchant for bizarre, marine animal-based weaponry. Yet the storyline shifts suddenly when three orphaned girls -- Margo, Edith and Agnes -- walk around the neighborhood selling cookies. Gru turns them away, but when he sees them get through the defenses in Vector's fortress that kept the rival away, the villain decides that the girls could offer him a way inside Vector's home and a shot at stealing the shrink ray.

I'll leave to figure where the movie heads from here. The presence of the girls, one cautious and hardened from years of loneliness, one venting her own issues through destructive tendencies and the other an adorable miscreant not yet able to comprehend the rotten quality of her life in any meaningful sense, must inevitably lead the scabrous, egomaniacal Gru to become a better man. This would be fine and dandy if it mixed in with the original plot, but Despicable Me slams on the brakes at this point, almost completely tossing out the enticing idea of a fight between two villains for supremacy in a world that seemingly lacks superheroes as a counterbalance.

Thus, the film moves in such a disjointed fashion that its 95 minutes feel twice as long. The total downshift from an epic war between inventive villains with no regard for collateral damage to a pat, sentimental tale of a man learning to love grates like two metal sheets shrieking against each other. Gru uses them to his intended goal in short order, leaving the majority of the film to a plot that's rushed even as it plods along the typical path to feel-good mush.

"When we got adopted by a bald guy," Edith says upon arriving at Gru's twisted mansion and realizing that their adoption might not solve all their problems, "I thought this would be more like Annie." She must not have paid attention, because Despicable Me plays exactly like Annie with a more action-packed twist. Daddy Warbucks didn't take kindly to the orphan in his home either, only for Annie's plucky charm to eventually melt his heart.

Of the three children, Agnes is easily the most visible. An overload of cuteness, Agnes is shamelessly manipulative in design to grab the audience's heartstrings without any effort. To be sure, her mere presence bypasses an intuitive and subtle emotional arc in favor of puppy eyes and the dramatic irony that can only come from a toddler who doesn't understand how depressing her optimism really is. Yet she's such a fun character that the effrontery of her usage does not derail the picture and is instead one of its greatest aspects. Her obsession with unicorns and all things fluffy make her the cutest girl to appear in animation since Boo in Monsters Inc.

Her cuteness is counterbalanced by the hilarity of Gru's minions. A sea of tiny, yellow, gibbering creatures, the minions waver between massive incompetence and an almost Oompa-Loompa-type efficiency, devolving into infighting and office pranksterism yet proving their mettle when it counts. Directors Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud mine these mad blobs for all they're worth, subjecting them to the experiments of Gru's aged, hearing-impaired assistant, Dr. Nefario (Russell Brand(?)), having them punch each other over mischievous activity and even messing with their bodies when one cracks another's back and shakes him until the assaulted minion emits a neon yellow like a glow stick. Not a single scene involving the minions fails to get a laugh and, combined with Agnes' endearing adorableness, they float what would otherwise be a lackadaisical comedy.

The great shame of the film is that the potential to be a great animated picture lies in plain sight. Some more adult humor finds its way into the picture, such as a gag involving a secret bank that lends millions to supervillains around the world noting on a plaque that it used to be Lehman Brothers. The simple notion of two villains duking it out for prominence without a hero to intervene could have made for a delicious game of animated oneupsmanship, which exists at the beginning and end and could have stretched the imaginations of the animators with increasingly outlandish fights in what would basically have been a matter of two Bond villains emptying all their ridiculous devices at each other. Instead, it takes the easy way out, using a rotten, context-less score by Hans Zimmer and Heitor Pereira and a few close-ups to wrench emotionality that the film does not earn.

Still, it's funny enough to warrant a viewing, and even the smallest snatches of enjoyment are welcome in a year as wretched as this. I laughed a great deal and bordered on whispering an "awwww" or two despite my own best interests, and if the film was just a bit tighter I might have recommended it unconditionally over my wishes to see the villain war continue uninterrupted. But there is one lovely piece of thoughtfulness in the nexus point where the two plots meet: Gru's mother. Through her, we see a neglected boy, whose dreams of becoming an astronaut were dashed by a snarky parent, now on the cusp of ensuring that no one else could ever know his dream of walking on the Moon. At the same time, his adopted children provide him with the opportunity to break the cycle of neglect and loneliness that made him so miserable. That line is not fully explored, but it's just one more hint that makes an average movie entertaining, and could have made it so much more.

Get Him to the Greek

Early in Get Him to the Greek, an unlikely spin-off of Apatow Productions' most emotionally rewarding feature to date, Forgetting Sarah Marhsall, writer/director Nicholas Stoller gives the impression that he will fashion his comedy into a commentary on the changing musical landscape. Aaron Green (Jonah Hill), an intern for Pinnacle Records, eloquently posits Aldous Snow (Russell Brand), the notorious rocker ported over from FSM, as the last remaining rock star in an industry defined by derivative acts whose sound is entirely made of samples and thumping beats. Green's boss considers this, then promptly plays one of those unoriginal hip-hop acts filled with misogynistic lyrics that do not rhyme so much as repeat the same words over and over.

The film never returns to this idea, though perhaps it was just too busy. Get Him to the Greek is This Is Spinal Tap from the perspective of one of those terrified label representatives sent to make sure a failing artist gets to gigs of decreasing quantity and venue size. Green, who largely resembles Hill's obsessive Aldous Snow fan in Forgetting Sarah Marshall with a name and location overhaul, manages to sell Pinnacle's head honcho, Sergio (Sean Combs), on the idea of a comeback for Aldous. The human interest story alone would generate attention and revenue: we first see Snow in flashback, tumbling from the top of the charts with one clunker of an album, a bad break-up with tarty pop starlet Jackie Q (Rose Byrne) and a relapse into substance abuse. Confined to his roomy London flat when not pub crawling (which takes place for the entirety of local pubs' hours of operations), Snow agrees to perform a show at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles to celebrate the 10th anniversary of his legendary show there. For unclear reasons, Sergio trusts that a plush toy like Aaron can wrangle the most infamous, egotistical addict in the biz, and the mogul sends the geeky fan to drag Snow to New York for a morning show appearance before heading to L.A. for the gig.

What then follows is a screwball comedy in the style of the buddy film. As much as Get Him to the Greek immediately shuts off its brain to become a zany, episodic free-for-all, one understands why Stoller was content to just stick with Hill and Brand: the two have worked previously as supporting characters, Hill as the coiled spring à la Jason Lee, Brand, well, as rock star Aldous Snow in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, as well as playing opposite Adam Sandler in Bedtime Stories (his stock is considerably higher back in native Britain, where he's a top comedian and, until a recent controversy, a radio and television presenter). One look at the two paired together, however, and you see what Stoller must have seen: comedy gold. Rarely has an odd couple been so well contrasted physically: Brand, with his recovering addict wire frame and cheekbones to rival Cate Blanchett's, stands tall over Hill, with a chin that has now become his neck and sporting thin, wispy adolescent stubble to Brand's kempt beard.

Hill, normally the manic friend who gets all the good one-liners, must now assume the role of straight man, which he does effortlessly. There's a subtlety to his performance even when being sucked into Snow's underworld of excess, boozed out of his mind and often pasted with his own vomit. Unsure whether or not his girlfriend, Daphne (Elisabeth Moss), broke up with him after he did not agree to her plans to move the two to Seattle for her to work in a quieter hospital than the one in L.A., Aaron constantly waffles between venting his hurt and trying to preserve his relationship, though at times it appears as if God is attempting to make this idiot cheat.

Brand, meanwhile, is left to play up his own rock star persona, which he does with greater abandon than in Snow's previous filmic appearance, which showed him still on the wagon even if he did still try to sleep with anything with an accommodating cavity. As a comic -- hell, as a human being -- Brand clearly wants to capture some of the rocker aesthetic and aura, so he takes to this role with relish. What we see with his character is a Spinal Tap for the post-reality show era; as far as we know, Aldous never wound up on I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! or Big Brother, but he lives in a world that now jockeys more than ever to get a look at failure. When Sergio preps Aaron before dispatch and tells him that people want to see Snow "fucked up, but not too fucked up," the comedy of the scene is undercut by a nagging suspicion that such lines are too accurate to be satiric. Thus, Snow gets carted onto the set of the Today Show -- one of the film's funniest sequences, as Aaron attempts to send the rocker in as straight as possible by consuming all the alcohol and drugs in the limo -- to be poked fun even by someone like Meredith Vieira for being a train wreck. In retrospect, at least Spinal Tap

Numerous rock clichés make some sort of appearance: the record that kills Aldous' career is a soulless, crass attempt to latch onto the dire living conditions in Africa whilst promoting the rocker's magnanimous contribution (the phrase "white African Christ from space" will line surprisingly well to a number of condescending pop artists whose hearts may be in the right place but who also donate only a fraction of their album and tour revenues to the continent that "inspired" their work); Jackie Q's solo work consists of a series of auto-tuned pop songs that move from openly suggestive to flat out declarative in their innuendo; Aldous' father is an abusive leech, trying to claim credit for his son's genius by virtue of having sired him.

As a piss-take on the music business, Get Him to the Greek doesn't go to the same lengths as another Apatow Production, Walk Hard, but the gags here contain an undercurrent of actual humanity. Aldous gives a candid, blunt speech about the appeal of drugs to Aaron, yet the scene does not suspend the humor as one of the two is sitting with a balloon of heroin wedged in an uncomfortable hiding location to get through an airport. Brand's own history with numerous substances of his own gives a great deal of his behavior, no matter how outlandish, a bedrock of verisimilitude, and a haunted look passes his eyes at times that may well not be an act but a recognition of a past life. When Aaron finally snaps at his hero and says that the man is genuinely smart but only uses his intelligence to romanticize his pathetic self-destruction, we can't be sure whether Hill is speaking to Aldous Snow or to Brand himself.

Sadly, moments like these fall to the wayside in favor of a contrite ending that attempts to piece Aaron and Daphne's relationship back together through an outlandish sequence that works not as a legitimate resolution, a sensible progression of a plot even as crazy as the one seen here, nor as a piece of comedy. The otherwise magnificent Forgetting Sarah Marshall suffered a similar problem, building up its titular ex-girlfriend into someone actually deserving of empathy and compassion only to be brutally shot down at the end to get quickly to a finale with the "new girl," though Get Him to the Greek never bothers to build Daphne into a fleshed-out character, and her only significant action occurs near the end.

Setting aside how tidily it resolves, however, Get Him to the Greek is a sharply written buddy feature. Aldous' father, set up to be something of a Michael Lohan, claims to reporters that he managed his son and just wants to help (by taking to gossip shows and airing his child's secrets for greater notoriety), Snow hits back with a gem like, "He managed me when I was in his testicles, but once he ejaculated, management's been indie." When Sergio comes at last to force the out-of-control pair to get their rears to Los Angeles, he sparks a grandiose and hilariously pointless fight between himself, Aaron, Aldous and Aldous' dad that tops even the magnificent inanity of fight with Red in Pineapple Express (can all future Apatow Productions have a stupid-awesome fight scene as well? They're the best part of the movies). As Sergio chases Aldous and Aaron through a hotel corridor, the characters point out how absurdly long the set is, with Aldous even shouting, "It's Kubrickian!"

Little nuggets like that keep the film going even when it hits some dull spots, and Get Him to the Greek could have stood trimming another five or seven minutes. But in a summer that's already shaped up to be even more disappointing than the last few years, the many pleasures of Stoller's comedy outweigh the momentum-killing finale. I've had my reservations about Brand, having first caught some of his stand-up and his presenting work on 1 Leicester Square on YouTube and found him a bit too much. But Forgetting Sarah Marshall used him sparingly to great effect, and here he calms his manic energy just enough to be wild but not overpowering. He's a gifted comic and an intelligent man, and he seems to have found a way to calm himself without losing the persona for which he is known. The biggest surprise, however, may be Diddy, who proves to be a terrific comic side character and almost certainly just got himself stenciled in as a possible cameo in a number of future comedies. His portrayal of the record mogul as Stoic drug pusher and mafioso psychopath is as funny as it is accurate, and Combs does a good job of knowing when to drop the laughs to show the darker, profit-driven side of music. He's just one of several pleasant surprises in a flawed film that nevertheless contains enough laughs to warrant a second viewing to hear what jokes you missed while laughing at previous bits. Besides, we should support artists who continue to write unbelievably catchy tunes about venereal diseases. Even fictional ones.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall

A poster on one of the forums I frequent once described Forgetting Sarah Marshall as the "Apatow-produced film most like Freaks and Geeks." That only adds to the laundry list of reasons why I desperately need to sit down and watch that show. Of all the major works of Apatow Productions (and the lesser ones too), I find myself returning to Forgetting Sarah Marshall the most often, as it offers not only a slew of laughs but the most honest romance to ever grace one of the production company's films.

Jason Segel (who wrote the film) stars as Peter Bretter, a television composer who creates not music so much as -- as he terms it sardonically -- "tones." Chiefly, he works on the hit show Crime Scene: Scene of the Crime, and he's dating the star of the show, Sarah Marshall (Kristen Bell). Well, at least he was, as she visits him at the beginning of the film to break up, saying that she's met someone else. The break-up sends Peter into a tailspin of one-night stands to forget Sarah, but to no avail. Finally he strikes upon an idea: head to Hawaii for a week or so to get away from it all, only to find himself in the same hotel as Sarah and her new beau, rock star/professional Lothario Aldous Snow (Russell Brand).

From this comedy of errors comes a story about heartbreak, moving on, the awkwardness of relationships, and puppet musicals. Strap yourself in, it's a wonderful ride. As Peter copes with having to face his ex -- and with neither party willing to "run away" to another hotel -- he meets a group of tourists and locals who all get in big laughs and help propel the story. There's the zonked-out surfing instructor (Paul Rudd) who takes Peter out on the waves for the day and doesn't remember who he is by nightfall, the conservative newlyweds trying to consummate their marriage without offending the Lord, the kindly bartender who enthusiastically invites Peter to come snorkeling to watch the turtle mating season. All off-kilter little weirdos on an island just foreign enough to the average American (even though it's a damn state) to make them plausible.

While there, Peter meets Rachel (Mila Kunis), the receptionist, who pities Peter's state and even gives him a room free of charge because of it. The two socialize and even go out on pseudo-dates, and we begin to learn what both of them, and indeed all the characters, seek in this sunny paradise. Rachel, like Peter, came to Hawaii in order to forget a broken relationship, and remained there when it didn't work. Seeing how happy the move off the mainland made other staffers at the hotel only hurts more. Even Sarah, I think, visited Hawaii to squash any lingering guilt over dumping Peter, or at the very least to continue her fantasy getaway with the rock star.

What sets FSM apart from the other Apatow Productions is that it finally gives the women in a voice. Apatow placed Catherine Keener's character on a sort of detached pedestal, and made the women of Knocked Up flat and boring in order to set them apart as "mature." And we won't even get into how ridiculous it was when Jonah Hill somehow got with Emma Stone in Superbad (and that was after he passed out and accidentally smashed her in the head). But Segel lets each character have its own pathos, warmth, and killer humor. Yes, it's still two beautiful women essentially battling for that mountain of a man, but for once the women don't seem like afterthoughts tossed in amidst the improv.

But even without the pathos, this would still be the best film to come out of the ruins of Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared, as it by far the funniest. Superbad and Knocked Up, funny as they are, suffer from excruciating lulls in the middle when the characters head into situations obviously designed for a joke. Now, Chaplin did that and he's the greatest comic director of all time, but that was then and two-reelers aren't exactly the rage anymore. Forgetting Sarah Marshall, on the other hand, features dialogue that rarely plays into its location (save for discussing Hawaii), so the jokes flow smoothly and the story never sags. Not to mention that the lines are almost all screamingly funny and real, mixing awkward humor with Allen/Smith style monologues and even broad moments like the over-the-top brilliance of the Dracula musical (I wish they'd made a full version of this and put it on DVD).

When I revisit the films of Apatow and his ilk, I usually find myself spotting glaring flaws that can be overlooked on a first viewing but grate like missed notes in a recital when you're no longer in a room of people laughing over lines and generally ignoring everything else. The two exceptions I've found to this are Pineapple Express, which works because it doesn't try to be deep, and this film, which tries to be deep and succeeds. It has the power that a great romantic film must have, the ability to carry you along to unknown places you can't wait to visit, just as you do when you first meet someone special. Forgetting Sarah Marshall is simply one of the best comedies in a decade, and one of the most knowing.