Reviews of No Use: Three Movies 5 June 2007
“Your face looks like Robin Williams’ knuckles”
Call me officially late in contributing to the online buzzing about Knocked Up, but I am still going to contribute. I guess it’s possible that an otherwise right-thinking, intelligent, and sane human might fail to love this movie, but only if they have significant damage to whatever lobe of the brain is responsible for enjoying life. Meaning Republicans. As usual, Mr. Roy has the rundown of pertinent rightwing asshattery. And, unusually, Mr. Wolcott is preemptively dead wrong about the movie, based on his being post-emptively(?) wrong about The 40-Year-Old Virgin.
If you only go by the trailers, Knocked Up looks like it’s been scooped from the same barrel of homogenized lowest-common-denominator dumbfuckery that Will Ferrell and Ben Stiller have been serving up for some time now. But there are a couple key differences:
- The characters tend to act in ways that an actual human might.
- This movie is actually funny.
And I know I’m right because Wendy said the same thing (mostly).
I won’t waste your time with any rundown or plot points or get into my specific observations about the use of scenes of graphic crowning. I will close by siding with Amy and say that Mr. Apatow’s next project needs to be a three hour epic of Paul Rudd and Seth Rogen playing “Do You Know How I Know You’re Gay?”. I am already in line for that movie.
Everyday Problems
Imagine you look like Patrick Wilson. Now imagine you are an unemployed, stay-at-home dad married to Jennifer Connelly while having an affair with Kate Winslet and pretty much the biggest problem you’ve got is that you don’t want to have to be a lawyer.
Now imagine how much trouble I’m going to have relating.
Ok, there’s more to Little Children than that, but after a lot of pretty good set up it seemed to boil down to ‘sexy people decide to run away together then don’t for some reason’ plus ‘creepy middle-aged pervert has a really bad time of it’. And the stories kind of connect, but not in a meaningful way and nothing really goes anywhere. It reminded me a little of watching Magnolia minus Tom Cruise and frogs. To sum up: meh.
“It’s like the sixties. But with less hope.”
Maybe you’ve heard about Shortbus? It’s a movie about fucking. All kinds of crazy, athletic, aren’t-your-quads-killing-you? fucking in all possible combinations and in assemblages ranging from one to one hundred and ninety or so. Ok, it’s really more about the people doing all this fucking than it is about the fucking itself, but no on-camera fucking is spared, I assure you. Ok, but here’s the thing: while that might make it sound like it’s just a hardcore porno, in fact it is nothing of the sort. Because the movie takes it as read that normal humans will have sex in positions and combinations not endorsed by the American Family Association and uses all that sexing as a way to explore characters it never comes across as exploitation or pornographic. Maybe it’s me but the fake (fairly vanilla) sex in a movie like (the one discussed above) seems much more transgressive and “dirty” than the rather outlandish and very real sex in Shortbus. And believe me, that’s not the sort of thing I would have expected I’d be writing about a man singing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ into another man’s ass.
Does this sound like an endorsement? Becuase it was meant to be. It’s really good and you should see it unless you are my parents in which case your head will melt.
(Of special note in the film is Justin Bond who turned out to be my favorite character. And halfway through I realized that he made the album Pantychrist which happens to be one of the very most irritating and un-listenable CDs in my collection. Which was obviously the intent. Listen to some of that and see if I’m wrong.)
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