Posts Tagged Craig Robinson

Forgetting Sarah Marshall review, because I can

December 18, 2008 at 4:25 pm · Filed under Movie Reviews ·Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

Warp speed, captain! Spoilers ahead!

I should have seen this before, Apatow, yah yah, well, it’s very funny, but not elite like Superbad or Knocked Up or Anchorman…Jason Segel, you could have made this movie without showing us your penis…Kristen Bell is good in this and there’s plenty almost-boobage, but she doesn’t do the comedy as well as she does the emotional scenes – shame…Russell Brand is un-fucking-believable as the rocker.  A brand of humor we haven’t seen before in Apatow movies – mayb it’s the British thing.  Best line in the movie is his introduction, “Excuse me, missus, I’ve lost a shoe… like this one. It’s like this one’s fellow… it’s sort of the exact opposite in fact of that – not an evil version but just, you know, a shoe like this”…Jonah Hill has finally become annoying…Mila Kunis is smoking hot when she’s not acting like a shallow high school bitch in That 70’s Show…I couldn’t help thinking every time the black bartender was on screen that Craig Robinson could have done it better.  Still, he had some awesome one-liners…I really hope that the Dracula song gets the Oscar for best song – it’s in the final 50, at least…I don’t know, Paul Rudd, you had a lot of classic potential in this character, but you played up the stoner aspect too much…I was constantly expecting a hilarious joke from Bill Hader while he was on screen, but he was painfully straight…best moment of the movie is easily Jason Segel’s reaction when the photos are deleted.

Good breakup movie – the emotion is genuine, as we’ve come to expect.  But you can feel with this movie that the Apatow gold had finally worn off – this was still better than most comedies this year, but something was missing.  And then Drillbit Taylor came out.

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Double digits, maybe?; Zack and Miri Make A Porno review

November 21, 2008 at 8:11 pm · Filed under Movie Reviews ·Tagged , , , , , , , ,

All I’m gonna say is that it’s sad to look at my blog stats and see that I have 6 consistent readers.  You 6 are awesome people who I love dearly.  The rest of the world can go suck it.  I wouldn’t mind having the word spread though, if only for my own ego-stroking.

All right, that’s enough of that.  Zack and Miri Make A Porno is exactly what a Kevin Smith movie should be – and it’s probably just as much of a central thesis to Kevin Smith movies as Chasing Amy.  If you’re not a Kevin Smith fan by now, this review will not be for you, but by all means, read on.

I only saw Chasing Amy a couple of months ago, and it lived up to the hype of being the central Kevin Smith movie in that it had a really well-constructed plot, well-written characters, incredibly obscene dialogue, and Jay and Silent Bob, as well as a not-completely-absurdly-but-still-pretty-happy ending.  Throw in a love story, and there’s your Kevin Smith movie.  Now, of course, every Kevin Smith movie doesn’t have all of these – in fact, none but Chasing Amy do, even Zack and Miri – but they all have all of the first three, and one or two of the latter three.

But if Chasing Amy is your paint-by-numbers Kevin Smith thesis movie, then Zack and Miri is your big-picture companion.  There’s just this feel that you get with this movie, with the absolute great chemistry of characters and just the joy that comes from the eye of the camera at spending time in the world and spending time with the people.  One of the central motifs of all of the small-scale Kevin Smith movies (read: not Dogma or Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back) is that none of the central characters are bad people, or even unpleasant (all right, unpleasant in a bad way).  Life’s not all roses and lollipops, of course, but any dick isn’t given more than one scene to stink up.  All the drama in these movies (especially Zack and Miri) is between good-natured people who may have a kink that doesn’t mesh with others or just may be human – and that’s the source of drama.  That’s what’s so relatable and great about Kevin Smith movies.

Here, the two main good people are Zack and Miri, lifelong best friends in a less homoerawkwardly way than Jay and Silent Bob, who are absent from this movie, to some’s delight and some’s regret (I fall in between, and I’ll explain later on).  There’s definite sexual tension between them, but it often gets defused pretty quickly, just because they’re such good friends, and most of the time, it’s pushed on them by others.  Because they’re completely broke (and thus desperate) and they run into a gay couple, one of whom is Miri’s high school crush, which is why they meet, and one of whom is a porn star, played INCREDIBLY by the INCREDIBLE Justin Long (and thus inspired), they decide to make a pornographical moving picture, with a nice loan by the inimitable Craig Robinson, who plays Zack’s friend and coworker.

I don’t really like the story idea on the whole, but Kevin Smith is so damn talented as a writer that the central story comes about organically.  That’s what impressed me the most.  What also impressed me is, well, everything.  To be honest, though I was really excited about this movie, I wasn’t expecting lofty things because I didn’t like the idea of the story – I just felt it was an excuse for more Kevin Smith sex jokes, brilliant as they are – and because I kind of feel awkward at how pervasive Judd Apatow’s influence has gotten over the comedy landscape.  It just feels like if a comedy is in any way publicized or popular over the last couple of years, it has some Apatow in it.  And the farther away from actually being an Apatow picture it is, the worse it is, because they all try.  The ones that try independently, fail.  And I originally felt that Kevin Smith’s switch from his time-honored favorites to an Apatow roster was a little like selling out – that Smith saw the landscape, and was afraid of his inability to keep up, so he just ditched his stalwarts (for whom Smith’s movies seem to be their only roles) and made his play.

And while I still feel that way generally about Apatow, though I’m as huge a fan of his (actual) movies as anyone, Smith saved himself from falling into that pattern by writing a) Elizabeth Banks better than anyone has before, and turning her into not just a humongous new crush for everyone who feels like they missed their chance with Joey Lauren Adams, but a comedienne to be feared, b) a Craig Robinson character with some actual depth, so he is now guaranteed to have a real, hopefully incredible and long, acting career, and c) a romantic comedy that everyone can get behind.  Seeing this movie as a couple is a treat – thankfully I have that opportunity – because whereas movies like Love Actually (which is really the ceiling for the category I’m lumping right now) are great, there are always moments that make the girlfriend fawn and the boyfriend roll his eyes, and that could get awkward, Zack and Miri has absolutely zero of these moments, and the scenes that would normally have them are totally honest.  And that above all is the strength of these movies.

I don’t think I’m alone in saying that I got a little scared after Clerks II, even though it was hilarious, because it seemed like his only options as a filmmaker were making okay romance films like Jersey Girl that no one could love, but some could definitely hate because it was so rude to all of the fans that loved his comedic writing, or movies entirely rooted in his View Askewniverse that were about the same people, and he would make those movies until they were set in some New Jersey retirement home.  I though that that could happen, and while the movies would be good, they would get depressing fast.  Zack and Miri Make a Porno is probably better for me and Kevin Smith fans than it probably is in a vacuum because it gives Kevin Smith a real future as a filmmaker, a film that tells people he can make whatever movie he wants and pull it off too.  And thank God for that.

I know I didn’t comment on anything like the great performances by the leads and the music or anything like that like I normally do, but you can go anywhere else for that.  And besides, I can’t think about those things when I think about this movie; they get washed out by my above thoughts.  And if you really want all that stuff, just go here or here or here.

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Uncooked spaghetti…sandwich; Pineapple Express review

August 8, 2008 at 4:53 am · Filed under Movie Reviews ·Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

This is one way to describe what happens when you smoke weed.

Pineapple Express is another way.  Pineapple Express‘s way is to describe how you can accidentally witness a murder while getting high on the clock when you work as a process server, and suffer raging paranoia for hours which snowballs into getting hunted down by crooked cops and hitmen, and getting caught in the middle of a massive drug war.

Pineapple Express is another in the line of classic Apatow comedies, though this is another one that mixmaster Judd only produced; Superbad geniuses Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg wrote the script for this, and relatively unknown (but apparently hugely respected in the industry) director David Gordon Green helmed this stoner action comedy.  Because as far as genres go, once you have this movie labeled as such, it really is that straightforward.

First, let’s get the character actor handshakes out of the way.  Craig Robinson and Kevin Corrigan were amazing as the hitman combo Matheson and Budlofsky.  Robinson is better known for his roles as Darryl Philbin in The Office and as the bouncer in Knocked Up, and he’s never been anything but laugh out loud funny, mostly because his deadpan, while rivaling that of Chevy Chase or Bill Murray in its pure comedy, is more an “I’m gonna fuck you up if you say one more word” deadpan than a “What a hilariously awkward situation” deadpan.  Corrigan, best known to me as terrifingly sketchy party host Mark in Superbad and for his role in the show Grounded For Life, in which he played Kramer, if he was less physically weird, and just turned up the “I’m probably a wanted felon for a number of reasons” sketch-o-meter to 11, is also great, if only for the way he just shrugs his shoulders while disappointing or deceiving whomever he’s talking to.  But he’s not as funny as Robinson.

Or James Franco, who the big handshake goes to.  He’s so hilarious in this movie because he pulls off the “I’ve smoked so much weed that I am never not high” vibe so well it’s scary.  Check his face when he and screen-sharer Seth Rogen realize their car battery is dead.  Unbelievable.  Danny McBride as Red here is also incredible, more in the Craig Robinson school of daring you to laugh at his painfully straight face.  Rogen, writer and star if you haven’t been taking notes, lets other characters play off him for the most part, but he gets his fair share of laughs, mostly in his exchanges for his high-school girlfriend, Angie.  He’s 25 in the movie, by the way (26 in real life).

The real star of this movie is the writing, though.  It’s less like Knocked Up and Superbad because it’s not structured or reliant on one-liners for its comedy.  The comedy here is in entire exchanges or scenes; the way things are put together, like Rogen and Franco in their holding cell at the head dealer’s hideout, punctuated by, you guessed it, Robinson.

For my money, however, all the funniest scenes come from just watching how Rogen and Franco react to things when they’re high, most of all being their onset of paranoia in the woods, which I really can’t go into a lot of, because I already spoiled the surprise for Ben before he saw it with me (I had seen the film clip on Comedy Central the day before).  Oh well.

On that same token, I’ve been trying to go easy on the spoilers in my movie reviews.  Would any of my readers prefer that I go into more detail, or continue to save the movie for those who haven’t seen it?  Feel free to comment with your response – every time you comment, I get an email, and I love to get emails.  They make me feel like the world recognizes my existence.

P.S. – Hey, this is the 50th post on this blog! What a ways we’ve come, eh? Thanks to all of those who have prevented me from losing my faith in this site so far.  Keep up the readership, it means a lot!

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