MiamiHEATfan777 Reviews

The House Bunny (2008)

The House Bunny Fails

[5/10 · 3 September 2008]

Having also seen the ultra-violent Death Race in the same week as The House Bunny I realized one big thing; clichéd violence doesn't offer any kind of real reaction whereas clichéd humor can still manage to make you laugh as long as the delivery is entertaining and fresh. Sure, the dumb blond jokes in The House Bunny are old and played out, but Anna Faris gives you continuing reason to laugh in a film that is far funnier than it really deserves to be. The House Bunny plays on the sexy-but-dumb stereotype to the fullest extent and Faris has proved in the past, as a regular in the otherwise awful Scary Movie films, she can pull this off. On top of looking amazing, Faris gives this film every reason to exist. Co-stars Emma Stone, Kat Dennings and the increasingly emaciated Rumer Willis offer up a couple of additional laughs, but it is Faris that leads the charge. She plays right up to the edge of the dumb blond stereotype and only occasionally tosses in one too many clichéd jokes. Nevertheless, you forgive her thanks to a consistent number of chuckles throughout the film.

This isn't to say this is a classic comedy by any means, but anyone that goes to see House Bunny should walk away with a smile. This isn't a film to hate, it offers up exactly what the trailers promise and it delivers a little extra with an unexpected f-bomb dropped in the mix and a peek at Faris's little bum to keep the men paying attention.

Perhaps the one major shock would be Colin Hanks; it seems those Tom Hanks genes aren't quite paying off just yet. After a decent sized role in Peter Jackson's King Kong, Hanks has only managed to worm his way into mediocre films at best. Then again, he hasn't shown anyone any reason to give him anything with more meat on it so I guess I shouldn't be too surprised. Katherine McPhee of "American Idol" fame plays a small role in the feature as does Beverly D'Angelo, but both are relatively inconsequential.

The ladies in the audience are more likely to get a kick out of The House Bunny and the fellas dragged to the theater with them should be able to enjoy themselves as well despite the estrogen oozing of the screen. It isn't like this is a film you should rush out to the theater to see, but you could definitely do worse in your selection.

Traitor (2008)

This Movie Is A Traitor

[4/10 · 3 September 2008]

If asked to guess who came up with the fun idea of winding down the summer movie season in an election year with a War on Terror thriller, most people would not name Steve Martin. But the erstwhile "wild and crazy guy" does indeed get the story credit for Traitor, a confused spy movie that strains to give an evenhanded portrayal of Islam even as it unwittingly fans the flames of anti-Muslim sentiment.

Don Cheadle stars as Samir Horn, a devout American Muslim arrested in Yemen for attempting to sell explosives to an Islamic terror organization. While imprisoned, Samir befriends and gains the trust of Omar (Said Taghmaoui), one of the terrorist cell's top operatives. When his colleagues arrange a jailbreak, Omar brings along Samir and his extensive knowledge of blowing stuff up real good. They plan to bomb the American consulate in Nice and culminate with a dramatic display of deadly force within the United States.

Two FBI agents are trying to prevent that from happening. Agent Archer (Neal McDonough) is the dead-eyed hard case of the "kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out" school. His partner, Agent Clayton (Guy Pearce), is the son of a preacher and studied Arabic cultures in college, and he is the mouthpiece for the movie's "fair and balanced" views. As such, Pearce gets stuck with all the expository dialog about how every religion has its fanatical wing, but most Muslims are good people like you and me.

The movie surrounding him doesn't tend to back up those words, however. There's a terrorist around every corner in Traitor, to the point where you start wondering if "Steve Martin" is a pen name for Dick Cheney. Samir himself is meant to be an ambiguous figure; in spy terms he's an "asset," but to which side? Is he a CIA mole or has he become a fanatic? There's very little suspense to be found in that question, unless you can make yourself believe in a major American theatrical release starring Don Cheadle as our hero, the Islamic terrorist. We're always one step ahead of the twists and turns Traitor throws at us, until they become so ludicrous that it's hard to keep up. Even if you give Traitor the benefit of the doubt regarding its depiction of Muslims, the movie is sunk by its dramatic failings. Cheadle gives a low-key performance — that's a kind way of saying "boring" — and the manufactured suspense is undercut by too many dull, talky scenes. This is one Traitor that should have never been released.

Babylon A.D. (2008)

Another Vin Diesel Flop

[4/10 · 3 September 2008]

Whatever happened to Vin Diesel's career? Around the time of Pitch Black (2000), The Fast And The Furious (2001) and xXx (2002), he seemed certain to become a major movie star. But then he made a succession of stinkers, in the form of A Man Apart (2002), Pitch Black 2 (2004) and The Pacifier (2005).

Now he's reduced to appearing in this dull, derivative European co-production, which feels like a lazily cobbled-together rip-off of Children Of Men and Blade Runner.

Diesel plays a mercenary who's hired by a criminal Mr Enorme (Gerard Depardieu) to transport a young woman with mysterious powers (Melanie Thierry) and her guardian (Michelle Yeoh) from Russia to New York. Why? We don't really know. They are chased by people who seem to be religious (led by Charlotte Rampling) and who want the girl, for reasons which remain obscure.

We can't even be sure that they're the bad guys until near the end. The whole thing is clichéd, tedious and absurdly underwritten. Plot and characterization are negligible, and it's set in a world whose politics, economic state and culture are frustratingly unclear. Director Mathieu Kassovitz burst on the scene in 1995 with the acclaimed urban thriller La Haine, but failed to conquer Hollywood with the shockingly inept thriller for Halle Berry, Gothika (2003).

This is, in some respects, even worse. He has little flair for action, and the staleness of the script is reflected only too accurately in the kind of action sequences that most of us have seen dozens of times before. Not even Diesel can power this one.

Tropic Thunder (2008)

Ben Stiller Pulls It Off

[7/10 · 31 August 2008]

Twenty years ago, "Tropic Thunder" would have been too much of an insider comedy, accessible only to the most knowledgeable of Hollywood devotees. But as writer/director/star Ben Stiller has pointed out in interviews, nowadays everyone's an insider. The inner workings of show business are displayed on the Internet for the whole world to see. Savvy movie fans know about Oscar campaigns and tyrannical studio bosses and self-absorbed actors, and a movie like "Tropic Thunder" -- which hacks Hollywood to pieces more astutely, mercilessly, and hilariously than any satire in at least a decade -- can emerge as one of the year's best comedies without going over everyone's heads.

It begins with fake trailers introducing us to the fake actors in the movie. Tugg Speedman (Stiller) is an action hero who recently made an ill-advised grab for Oscar glory by playing a mentally handicapped man in "Simple Jack" (think Sean Penn in "I Am Sam"). Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black) is known for his flatulent family comedies in which he plays all the roles (think Eddie Murphy in everything), though his personal life is a heroin-flavored mess. And Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey Jr.) is a five-time-Oscar-winning Method actor known for fully immersing himself in his characters. "I don't read the script, the script reads me" is one of the pretentious, nonsensical things he likes to say.

These three Hollywood airheads are the stars of a big-budget Vietnam epic being directed by Damien Cockburn (Steve Coogan), who quickly finds that their egos and pampered lifestyles are interfering with the production. (We're told that the film is "one month behind schedule after only five days of shooting.") The studio head, Les Grossman (Tom Cruise), a vulgar despot with hairy arms and a gold chain around his neck, is furious, demanding that Damien get the film back on track or heads will roll.

As it happens, Four Leaf Tayback (Nick Nolte), the battle-scarred Vietnam veteran whose memoirs the film is being based on, is on the set as a consultant, and he has an idea for Damien: Drop the actors into a real Vietnamese jungle, with no cell phones or other comforts, and shoot the movie with cameras hidden in the trees. The Hollywood phonies' reactions to all the deprivations of war will seem a lot more real, and the actors will be forced to focus on their work.

Did you guess that once they've been put in the jungle, the stars encounter actual bad guys who they think are fellow actors? And that they're surprised when the villains seem to be firing actual bullets? Yes, that's the initial concept, but thankfully it isn't long before the reality of the situation becomes obvious to them and the film shifts to its new direction: the actors have to rescue Tugg from an Asian heroin factory run by a ruthless teenage warlord (Brandon Soo Hoo).

"Tropic Thunder" (that's the name of the Vietnam drama they're making, too) is packed with ingenious running jokes skewering the behind-the-scenes stories that movie fans know so well. Tugg Speedman is a well-meaning but vain idiot (an area of expertise for Stiller), while Jeff Portnoy is suffering from heroin withdrawal during much of their jungle trek. Kirk Lazarus, the Method actor, is playing an African American soldier, so he has had his skin chemically darkened -- which means, yes, Robert Downey Jr. is in black-face for most of the film. And not just black-face, but black-voice, too, because Kirk Lazarus never breaks character. Heightening the tension is the fact that there's an actual black guy in the movie with them, a rapper-turned-entrepreneur named Alpa Chino (Brandon T. Jackson) who's trying to break into acting. You may rest assured that he and Kirk Lazarus have some conversations about race.

The fifth member of their team is an eager young actor named Kevin Sandusky (Jay Baruchel). Without a gimmick, this character appears to be superfluous, until you realize it's his normalcy that makes him important -- he's the straight man surrounded by crazies. Stiller and his co-writers, Etan Cohen (TV's "King of the Hill") and actor Justin Theroux, know comedy well enough to appreciate the importance of such a character in a loopy scenario like this one.

All of the supporting characters are fantastic, too (up-and-comer Danny R. McBride scores again as the production's pyrotechnics expert), and the casting is perfect. Nick Nolte as a grizzled veteran who sleeps in a tent ("Beds give me nightmares)? Matthew McConaughey as Tugg's tooly agent Rick Peck, who calls everybody by nicknames, including himself ("the Pecker")? And Tom Cruise as the terrifyingly foul-mouthed studio head? Genius, sheer genius -- especially for Cruise, who might wipe away all the negative impressions people have had of him over the last three years with this single performance.

This is the first film Stiller has directed since 2001's "Zoolander." He's acted in some bad comedies since then, but "Tropic Thunder" is proof that he hasn't lost his edge, neither as a filmmaker (he's impressively disciplined here) nor as a performer. It's no surprise that Stiller, the son of Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara and a Tinseltown insider since birth, should have such keen insight into the vanities of Hollywood. His short-lived sketch series, "The Ben Stiller Show," had glimpses of it. "Tropic Thunder" feels like it represents everything he and Downey and Black have learned in their years of making movies -- and it shows that they're self-aware enough to realize how silly the whole profession is.

Hamlet 2 (2008)

Not For The Feint Of Heart

[7/10 · 31 August 2008]

In a year punctuated with very funny movies, "Hamlet 2" stands out as the most peculiar and comedically risky. Its style of humor is an almost indescribable mixture of social satire, broad slapstick, and dry irony. I've seen it twice, seven months apart, and while I laughed through most of it both times, I can also see how some viewers will come away scratching their heads and wondering what's supposed to be so funny.

The star is Steve Coogan, a beloved British comedian who still isn't being hailed as a genius in the United States. (Meanwhile, Dane Cook gets one movie deal after another.) He plays Dana Marschz, a mostly untalented actor who endured a number of humiliating show-biz gigs before giving up and moving to Tucson, Ariz. ("Where dreams go to die"). Now he is the drama teacher at West Mesa High School, specializing in stage adaptations of popular movies like "Erin Brockovich," which he writes himself and which invariably must be two-person shows because he only has two students in his class. One, a girl named Epiphany (Phoebe Strole), is a typical drama queen; the other, Rand (Skylar Astin), idolizes, and is probably in love with, Mr. Marschz.

After budget cutbacks result in the cancellation of most other electives, Dana's class is suddenly full of students, though most of them have little interest in being there. Determined to be an inspiring educator like the ones he's seen in "Dead Poet's Society" and "Mr. Holland's Opus," Dana tries to reach out to these kids, who are all Latino and, Dana assumes, from the wrong side of town. Dana is a lot like Michael Scott from "The Office": unaware of his own imbecility and eager to show everyone how gifted he is, despite not having any gifts.

Soon the budget cutbacks, mixed with a string of scorching reviews from the school paper's theater critic, threaten to shut down the drama program, too. Dana has one last chance to stage a show that will raise money and awareness. It has to be a dozy. It has to be memorable. He settles on an original script he's been writing, a little thing called "Hamlet 2." That title is arbitrary, perhaps chosen to give the movie a hook. ("'Hamlet 2'?! Now that sounds like a crazy comedy I should definitely go see!") What Dana Marschz writes only begins with Hamlet (who escapes death via a time machine) and becomes more accurately a musical investigation into Dana's own childhood traumas and his unresolved issues with his father. We see snippets of it in rehearsals and a huge chunk of it at the end of the film, when the play is staged before a shocked audience. Hamlet isn't the only literary figure of note to be included, either -- Jesus is here, too, a hip Jesus who moonwalks on water and scores big with the modern generation.

Before we get there, though, there is controversy as the community learns about the edgy elements of Dana's show. The ACLU steps in (kudos to Amy Poehler for a brief but memorable turn as the group's humorless representative), and Dana experiences massive self-doubt. He is not helped by his hilariously unsupportive wife, Brie, played with all the scathing sarcasm and apathy that the great Catherine Keener can muster (which is considerable, as you know if you've seen Catherine Keener in almost anything). Ultimately, the kids realize the lesson Dana has taught them: "It doesn't matter how much talent we lack, as long as we have enthusiasm." There are elements of several different kinds of movies (the Inspiring Teacher Drama, the Teen Comedy, the Let's Put On a Show! Musical, etc.), all of them relentlessly and absurdly satirized in a screenplay by Pam Brady, a "South Park" collaborator who also co-wrote the "South Park" movie and "Team America: World Police." Her work here is co-credited with the film's director, Andrew Fleming, who made 1999's under-seen political comedy "Dick" and last year's better-than-you'd-think "Nancy Drew." Dana Marschz (that's pronounced with three syllables, "Mar-zh-ce") is an oblivious, "Waiting for Guffman" type, the sort of character who never does realize what a loser he is. I'd be hard-pressed to identify any unifying theme to the film's whimsy, any connective tissue between the various things it makes fun of. Why do Dana and Brie have a dull boarder (David Arquette) living with them? Why does Elisabeth Shue appear as herself, tired of Hollywood and now working in Tucson as a nurse at a fertility clinic? Because it's odd and bemusing, that's why.

When "Hamlet 2" is finally performed, the audience is initially outraged by the portrayal of Jesus (played by Dana, looking strangely like "Weird Al" Yankovic), as well as the show's other highly offensive sexual material. Then they come to see that the show means no disrespect, that it's a commentary on stuff, and the scandalous nature of it is necessary to make its point. They say, "Oh, I get it!" But I think the joke is that they're wrong -- there ISN'T any deeper, more honorable message in it. There's nothing to get. Though Dana earnestly believes he's making a valid point, I think his show -- that is to say, the movie -- is being sacrilegious and dirty solely for laughs, a way of poking fun at how high-minded Hollywood satirists like to do something taboo while claiming to have noble purposes for it. (See: the recent controversy surrounding "Tropic Thunder" and the word "retard.") Many humorists are edgy just for the sake of being edgy, and "Hamlet 2" makes fun of them by doing the same thing, only with self-awareness.

Disaster Movie (2008)

Disaster Movie Sets A Title For Itself

[1/10 · 31 August 2008]

By my count, there are at least 25 movies referenced in "Disaster Movie," the latest abominable train wreck engineered by the untalented hacks who excreted "Date Movie," "Epic Movie," and "Meet the Spartans." Note that I do not say "Disaster Movie" spoofs or satirizes 25 movies -- only that it refers to them.

You and I know that mentioning something is not the same thing as spoofing it. (We also know that spoofing is not the same as satirizing, but that's a discussion for another day.) Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, who write and direct these films as a duo, do not know this. In their minds, all it takes to spoof "The Incredible Hulk" is for the character to show up and then be crushed by a falling cow.

Get it?! It's a character you recognize from a different movie, but here he is in THIS movie! And then he gets hurt! The title notwithstanding, disaster movies are not the object of "Disaster Movie's" satire (such as it is). You're thinking "The Towering Inferno," "The Poseidon Adventure," or "The Day After Tomorrow"; they're thinking "Sex and the City," "You Don't Mess with the Zohan," and "Juno" -- any movie that came out within the last year, in other words. The film's basic structure parallels "Cloverfield" (which sort of qualifies), and there's a reference to "Twister" -- from 12 years ago -- and the only joke is that a tornado keeps throwing cows around. But other than that, "Disaster Movie" is really nothing more than an ill-conceived, unfunny series of weak, talent-show-at-summer-camp-level skits.

Just Disastrous.