SUMMER OF BLOOD: 21st CENTURY HORROR - THE DAMMED

If I were to tell you that a movie called Zombeavers is one of the most thoroughly enjoyable experiences I've had with a 2015 movie (it's been kicking around since the first half of 2014, but its commercial release was slow in coming), and you were to call me a piece of shit, no good fucking liar, could I be offended? Of course not. What sort of outright psychopath would expect a movie called Zombeavers - and for exactly the reason you suppose it is called Zombeavers, which is that it has beaver zombies in it - to be even slightly close to tolerable? Let alone the funniest horror-comedy since at the very least The Cabin in the Woods, and I'd be privately inclined to set the line farther back than that.

The friend with whom I first saw it - both of us falling head-over-heels in love after expecting not a damn thing from it* - came up with a perfectly pithy one-sentence review, and there's nothing he can do to keep my from stealing it: it's the version of ThanksKilling that's terrific instead of bone-scrapingly awful. It's mostly the same ingredients: uniformly reprehensible characters who speak entirely in filthy jokes that are forcefully dirty more than clever in any meaningful way, deaths presented in a fully comic register, and killer animals that do not pretend for even one instant to be anything but hand-crafted puppets. It simply works better this time, possibly because this film is ultimately sweeter-natured; it's more upbeat, the insults more bubbly and less caustic. And it's considerably less vile in its attitude towards women, who are still objectified to a fair degree (there's an entire scene whose narrative is "girl takes off her bikini top and makes other girls feel awkward by parading about showily"), but who are presented as the authors of their own sexuality beyond what cheap-as-hell horror movies typically traffic in.

Mostly, I am tempted to say, it has better puppets: I badly want the filmmakers to authorise the production of zombeaver plushies, because I would buy one right now. They are the cutest little ugly fuckers. But in fairness, I was already on the film's side before we saw them for the first time, at the 27 minute mark of a relentlessly paced 77-minute feature.

The film's set-up could not be more generic: three college students are driving to a cabin in the woods. These are sorority sisters Jenn (Lexi Atkins), who has just been cheated on; Mary (Rachel Melvin), who has decided that this means it's time for some supportive girl time; and Zoe (Cortney Palm), who isn't trying to contain her irritation that Mary has issued a blanket "no boys and no phones" rule for the weekend. They banter in a raucous, scatological way, etching out a strong, clear-cut dynamic, even if it's also frankly a little bit like what three male screenwriters - Al Kaplan, Jon Kaplan, and Jordan Rubin, the last of whom is also the film's director - would come up with if they knew that they wanted to subvert stereotypes but also had never been around women talking. Still, it takes only a few minutes to get a crisp, strong understanding of each of these characters, and respond to them as individual personalities, which is not at all something you just get every time a genre movie crosses your path. And while their line are crude, there's some actual humor to them as well, particularly because they're tied to character: Zoe makes jokes that Mary would not, and within five minutes of meeting the trio, we understand why that is.

And the other part of the set-up is, if anything, even more generic: a pair of truck drivers hit a deer, and in the process manage to lose a barrel of toxic sludge that ends up getting in the water supply. Cue the zombies. The twist being that the truckers (played by comedian Bill Burr and snoozy rocker John Mayer) are having a filthy conversation of their own, but one that occurs in a zen-like state of stoner's consideration, profoundly anti-funny in its abiding fascination with homoeroticism and the way that both men deliver every line to sound like a non-sequitur, even when it actually follows. And then they plow into a deer, killing it in an inordinately violent way. It's a bold first scene, at any rate, so deep into irony that one can see nothing else. I love it a little bit; it's aggressively absurdist and pointedly alien.

The film, obviously, concerns of holding the zombeavers back just long enough to shake the bottle with the young women in it until it gets good and fizzy - this includes Zoe sneakily arranging for her boyfriend, Buck (Peter Gilroy) to show up, along with Mary's boyfriend Tommy (Jake Weary), and Jenn's notorious ex, Sam (Hutch Dano), and our learning what everybody but Jenn already knew, which is that seemingly kind and pure Mary was the faceless brunette seen making out with Sam in the photo that broke Jenn's heart. And then it goes straight to the usual Night of the Living Dead territory: everybody reacts to the first zombeaver in ways that would be sensible if only they weren't in a horror movie, and then tries too late to secure the cabin their in, by which point it all comes down to waiting to see what errors they'll make to let the monsters get them. Along the way, the leering, puritanical local hunter Smyth (Rex Linn) arrives to provide some false hope, as do the nice old neighbors down the way, with some pretty crude mouths of their own, the Gregorsons (Phyllis Katz and Brent Briscoe).

We're miles away from a movie that's going to work based on the density of its plot, but then you knew that the moment I said Zombeavers. The movie goes all-in on one thing and one thing only, which is a vigorously warped sense of humor. A very precise kind of humor, too: it's not exactly a Sharknado-style exercise in "can you guys believe how willfully bad and stupid and silly this is? Isn't it fun?", a mode that I find enormously enervating. But I'd be hard-pressed to explain exactly what thing Zombeavers does that keeps it out of those particular weeds. Certainly, it is stupid; certainly, it is inordinately proud of the fact that it does all of the reprehensible and trite and illogical things that make lousy monster movies lousy. It just... feels different. The difference between a movie that is funny (or supposedly funny) because it is bad at being horror, and a movie that is funny because it's good at being comedy. It never winks at us, or tries to get away with doing stupid shit by saying "look at the stupid shit!", but treats the zombeavers, within the world of the film, with perfect gravity, even as outside of the world of the film they're pure farce. Comedy is best when the characters don't realise they're in a comedy, after all.

It's a one-note comedy, fair; maybe two, with note one being "zombeavers are too ridiculous to take seriously" and note two being "these characters are deeply committed to being profoundly awful and whipping up some zesty dialogue to prove it". 77 minutes is already a generous running time for something with so few tonal registers - smutty dialogue, manic running about and yelling in a way that Rubin doesn't even slightly care about making scary, random absurdity - and at an absolute minimum, the film could do without the outtakes that are not part of the ending credits. Those are instead set to a jazzy Sinatra-style number recapping the plot of the film we just saw, which is infinitely more fun in comparison. And better still is the post-credits stinger that's a terrible visual pun of the first order, and thus a work of art that needs to be appreciated by every person with a heart.

The repetitive nature of the humor is probably the single thing that most keeps Zombeavers from realising its full potential as a bawdy comedy masquerading as a repulsively gory horror film. Not that everybody would be in the market for the absolute best possible version of that movie, though I know that I am not alone in finding even the imperfect Zombeavers to be exactly the right thing for a specific kind of moment. It's a movie that holds nothing back and pushes itself with such energy that even someone as resistant to this brand of crude comedy as myself can't help but roll over for it.

Body Count: 9, plus a very messy deer, one dog (seen), one dog (implied), and one bear.

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ANIMAL BEHAVIOR

A review requested by Brian Malbon, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

Two things at least can be confidently stated about Meet the Feebles: it's a movie that goes to great lengths to be the most fully-expressed version of itself possible; and Peter Jackson's career would have been indefinably more fascinating if he'd stayed in this vein instead of finding his way into enormously costly tentpole epics. The director's first feature was titled Bad Taste, and that's the quality that his third, Braindead/Dead Alive, exemplifies. But this 1989 sophomore effort is in a wholly different league from those. It's not enough to call it "bad taste" - Meet the Feebles goes so enthusiastically deep into offensive crudeness that it achieves a kind of freestanding surrealism above and beyond a scenario that's pretty damn surreal all on its own.

What we have here is basically a parody of The Muppet Show: a live TV variety show is being put on by a team of exaggerated animals, all carried off through puppetry and giant suits, and the personality quirks of the characters make it almost impossible to keep the show going on the way it's meant to. The parody is extremely specific in some ways: the gluttonous prima donna Heidi the Hippo (physically performed by Danny Mulheron - one of the Jackson's three co-writers - and voiced by Mark Hadlow) with a hopeless love for the show's producer is an obvious gloss on Miss Piggy. Mostly, though, the parody is more conceptual, taking the setting and goals of the Muppets and transforming them into an excitedly savage parody of celebrities, show business, and the awful things people do for fame and fortune. It's not devoid of humanism; unexpectedly, it ends up having a lot of patience and affection for its solitary mostly decent character, Robert the Hedgehog (Hadlow as well), an innocent lost in a sea of depravity who just wants to put on a show and make people happy. It's a bit odd that the film's most expressly Jim Henson-style character should end up treated so kindly by it, especially given the unhesitating violence that it's eager to mete out on the cast in particularly evocative effects work. That Peter Jackson, he's a big old Kiwi softie.

To be honest, the relative - relative - generosity with which Meet the Feebles handles Robert proves to be close to its saving grace. Without some kind of sympathetic anchor, it would be easy for the rest of the film to turn into a sour freak show (a lesson Jackson & co-writer/wife Fran Walsh would run with on Braindead, which is a full-on romcom once you scrape off the stage blood), nothing but a montage of pointlessly gross cheap shots at a much too easy target. Which is still a charge one could levy against the movie, and make it stick fairly easy. Frankly, "take this thing beloved by kids and make it obscene and nihilistic" is one of my least-favorite kinds of humor, since it comes almost exclusively from a place of smug faux-sophistication, though Meet the Feebles is exactly the kind of project to justify that "almost". Its bones might be a parody, but the film fully commits to its internal reality in a way that forestalls it being nothing but a piss-take of the Muppets. It is a story about pornographer rats and junkie frogs and sex-addict rabbits putting on a show that we're honestly meant to believe in, and everything about the way it has been shot and lit and scored, to say nothing of the impressive design and construction of the puppets and suits on what could not have been a very generous budget, is dedicated to that end. If there's a way to link the snot-nosed Peter Jackson of Meet the Feebles with the Oscar-winning Peter Jackson of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (and there are two - they both directed giant spider attacks using some virtually identical camera angles), it's that in both cases the director was able to keep a whole flotilla of craftspeople in line to make something unified and seamless set in a world that is completely made-up in every respect.

Purely in that respect, Meet the Feebles is miraculous accomplishment, all the more so since the film starts piling up baffling developments so quickly that keeping it tethered to its own reality seems like something of a paradox (it's also why I'm not bothering with a plot recap - it's an assemblage of several subplots stitched together with one-off gags, all barreling towards a deus ex machina ending). That's even without bringing up the film's enthusiastic embrace of gross-out humor of all stripes, some of which is purely disgusting (a gossip columnist fly - itself a fairly sophisticated multilingual gag, when we recall that "paparazzi" is ultimately derived from an Italian word for a buzzing insect - who graphically eats feces in one scene; and even that's a metaphor, if an appalling one), some of which is so startling random that it leaps beyond disgust into some Buñuelian register of incomprehensibility. For example, a seedy walrus promoter screwing a starlet cat is offensive on one level, but that's not the level the film presents it at; the sheer impossibility of the act comes first, then its relation to character, and only then the fact that the filmmakers are performing a travesty of children's entertainment. And that's a relatively sane moment; there are regurgitated talking fish already half-digested, lengthy Vietnam flashbacks, and inexplicable basement monsters ready to eat the corpses of animals accidental killed in making bondage porn to be had, and none of those are even half as explicable on a plot level as the film's frequent, anatomically implausible cross-species sex.

All of the shocking humor and the free-for-all plotting, combined with the inventive and frankly realistic filmmaking (no actual Muppet film ever used such a variety of close-ups, deep focus, and low angles in insisting on the physical reality of its characters), certainly leave Meet the Feebles as a unique experiment, and one whose insights into human behavior - people do awful things to be successful in show business and then hate themselves for it - aren't as important to it as its sense of curdled black humor. And yet it has insights nonetheless, so we can't write it off as just a gonzo provocation. It presents a pageant of terrible human activities with enough wit and creativity that I'm absolutely pleased it exists and that I've seen it; it also presents that pageant with an unsparing enough level of morbidity and cruelty that I'm pleased that I probably won't be seeing it again for a long time. But it sure is a special little gob of bile.

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 2010: In which Adam Sandler ruins everything

There’s no dignity in spending all of one’s time complaining about how contemporary art isn’t as good as old art, which is why I do it a lot less than I’d like to. And while we are not, by any stretch of the imagination, living through a golden age of cinema right now (those of us living in South America perhaps coming closer than anybody else), there’s undeniably great works of the seventh art being produced in every country every year, with a full assortment of future classics waiting for future generations to linger on them and love them. Grumpy old classicists like myself might grouse over the paucity of masterpiece-level filmmaking of the sort that was thicker on the ground in the late ‘20s, the ‘40s, the ‘70s, or feel free to pick your own favorite filmmaking epoch; but masterpieces are still being made.

Except in one regard. Comedy in American cinema is terrible. Fucking abysmally awful. De gustibus non est disputandum - there’s no arguing taste - but film comedy is dead, and for a full generation there hasn’t been anything to compare to the glorious age of Chaplin and Keaton, or the masterworks of pre-WWII screwball, and the demented anarchy of the Marx Brothers, the cunning of Ernst Lubitsch and his caustic acolyte Billy Wilder, the snappy presence of the last generation of female comedic actors who had full authority and equal power to the men that Hollywood has always been much more comfortable placing in leading roles. There were bad comedies in those eras just as there are good comedies today; but in the present age, good comedy is a rare treasure, while in the ’30s and ‘40s, even a middleweight program-filler was constructed with a love for the craftsmanship of jokes, a sensitivity on the part of the actors, genuinely invested cinematic technique, and a willingness to assume that the audience is intelligent. 80 years ago, a couple of films like that were cranked out every month; we’re lucky to get one movie like that a year nowadays. It is, I concede, entirely possible for someone to love film comedy of the 21st Century and care for older styles not at all. We all know teenagers. But people holding this belief deserve more to be pitied than argued against, though they deserve most of all to be avoided.

This morbidity, never more than a few dark thoughts from the forefront of my mind, has been dragged up in honor of Grown Ups, the 15th highest-grossing film at the U.S. domestic box office in 2010, which makes it the year’s biggest live-action English-language comedy. It is a goddamn piece of shit. Cranked out by Adam Sandler’s Jiggling Boobies, Farts, & Fatties Falling Down Factory, AKA the Happy Madison production company, it is the apex of that man’s art, in so many ways, combining a motherfucking supergroup of Sandler and his buddies Kevin James, David Spade, Rob Schneider, and Chris Rock, along with the inconceivably over-qualified Maria Bello and Maya Rudolph as James and Rock’s wives (Salma Hayek, playing Sandler’s wife I do not think can be called “inconceivably” overqualified, though she’s certainly capable of more than this). It is a story of tacky men being under-matured, to the implausible amusement of the women in their lives, and the nominal amusement of the people in the audience, though finding Grown Ups funny necessitates that one finds it inherently marvelous when fat men talk about eating, old women describe having sexual desires, and old fat women break wind.

The five guys, once the starring lineup of a middle-school basketball team, have all been reunited on the occasion of their former coach’s death. Their walks of life have gone very differently: Sandler’s Lenny is a super-agent with hot designer wife and two disastrously over-privileged children, and the other four just kind of sink into a vague differentiation of not-in-the-real-world problems, like Kurt’s (Rock) feeling that his wife doesn’t respect him, just because he’s a homemaker while she works, or Eric’s (James) mild embarrassment that his wife still breast-feeds their four-year-old son. Bello’s handling of this sub-plot is almost beyond description: faced with the dialogue and infantile female psychology of a script by Sandler & Fred Wolf, she marches right into the thick of things and anchors all of this in a consistent, thoughtfully-built character with feelings and personal history and everything. I don’t know whether this is more or less admirable than Rudolph’s approach to her own microscopically-conceived role, which is to speed-walk through it and make bland faces so the camera stays away from her.

I would slag the film a bit harder for how it presents its women, especially Hayek’s Roxanne, who shifts from prickly career-oriented nag into loving mom and wife with no in-story justification nor even the slightest authentic human emotion underpinning it. But that would be missing the forest for the trees, since that’s how basically everybody is written. Sure, Sandler has given himself the most obnoxiously overblown fantasy life, aware enough that this could read as unpleasant that he and Wolf put in some boilerplate about getting away from Hollywood living and back to nature, but it doesn’t feel like they actually believe it. But Grown Ups is an equal-opportunity misanthrope, scornful of all its characters. The rich ones such because they’re out of touch; the poor ones suck because they’re unsophisticated. The women suck because they’re dumb shrews; the men suck because they’re clueless boys in need of a kindly feminine touch. The old suck because they haven’t died yet. From all this, comedy ostensibly springs, though virtually nothing actually does, especially since the film prefers to divert to unimaginative slapstick whenever the work of writing modestly clever sarcastic asides proves too taxing.

It is a cruel film that mouths platitudes about family and coming together that makes it infinitely more offensive than the cruelty would be if it were left alone. And it is a film that stitches together anecdotes into a plot rather than creates a mechanism that picks up steam of its own accord and produces humor as the inevitable byproduct of its storytelling. This is perhaps the most frustrating and galling thing about the film, and the thing about it most symptomatic of contemporary film comedy. The whole affair turns on the notion that “Wouldn’t it be funny if X and Y did Z?” When “Z” is complex enough, you end up with the likes of Judd Apatow’s movies, shaggy improv that tries to remember that it’s about characters. In Grown Ups, “Z” isn’t complex. “Z” is Kevin James pissing in a pool, Rob Schneider getting his foot shot with an arrow, Kevin James swinging into a tree. Is there some specific trait that makes it funnier for Schneider’s character to be shot in the foot, or for James’s character to piss in a pool? There isn’t at all, though the film leaves open the possibility that “because Kevin James is overweight” is the reason. This is, anyway, the difference between tight, disciplined comedy and shallow gagging. There should be irreducible comedy of this one man being shot with an arrow, because of who he is and where that arrow came from. Instead, it’s most like primitive grunting - arrowfoot is violencelaugh.

This merry horror show of aimless shouting and slapstick and sleepy gross-out humor (15 years after the Farrelly brothers’ heyday, the Happy Madison folks should be ashamed that they couldn’t come up with more outlandishly tasteless breast milk jokes, even in a PG-13 environment) is all shepherded by Sandler’s good lackey Dennis Dugan, who keeps things light and harmless and makes certain to always keep Sandler seeming like the one sane man in a world of insufficiently weird goofballs, and presents jokes rather than sculpting and building them. More importantly, he keeps his eyes and ears focused on the film’s inordinately large product placement library, silently drawing our eyes to KFC buckets and Dunkin’ Donuts cups, and serving with religious fealty the idea that Grown Ups is a consumable product of no greater nutritional value than either of those things, with its only purpose to provide an audience with exactly the experience the audience was promised, right down to the easily predictable heartburn. This is the antithesis of great comedy: great comedy should be impossibly surprising right before it strikes and completely inevitable after it strikes. “Watch the famous people be silly idiots” is not that. It is a stone-faced ritual of the notional form of comedy divorced from the energy or content that would actually make it comic.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 2010
-With Iron Man 2, Marvel Studios blurs the line between feature film and two-hour advertisement for other feature films
-3-D reaches its artistic pinnacle in Step Up 3D, wherein bright green frozen drinks fly right the fuck into your face
-A culture's doom is sealed when some nameless Warner executive asks the question, "what if we called it Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1?"

Elsewhere in world cinema in 2010
-Abbas Kiarostami, leading light of the Iranian New Wave, travels to France to make Certified Copy
-The found-footage horror game travels as far as Norway, and André Øvredal's Trollhunter
-Chilean experimental director Raúl Ruiz goes to Portugal to make the last major film of his life, the 4.5-hour Mysteries of Lisbon

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DUMB IS AS DUMB DOES

There is one thing that I can say in praise of Dumb and Dumber To, so I might as well lead off with it. It has a certain casual, easy comfort to its style. That is to say, it's a film that picks up the baton of mid-to-late-'90s comedy filmmaking quite effortless and without strain: this is true of the acting as well. Yes, the script is forced to acknowledge that 20 years have gone by since the original Dumb and Dumber, and those years have worn hard enough on co-stars Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels that it's kind of uncomfortable to look at them goofing around like big kids. But in general, it has the texture, pacing, and energy of a film that might have come out around 1996 or '97. Y'know, right around the time that a Dumb and Dumber sequel would have felt appropriate and natural, and not like a desperate bid for relevance by a whole bunch of people whose careers have been out of gas for years and years - I mean, hell, when was the last film made by brothers Bobby & Peter Farrelly that actually made any kind of real impact?

So yes, as a piece of '90s nostalgia, Dumb and Dumber To - which is the best possible title for it, if I'm going to keep hunting for nice things to say - at least understands and appreciates the '90s, and recycles them effectively. Which is something, I guess, but it would be much, much more if the film's archaeological precision was in service to something with more meat on its bones than this pathetic re-tread, which somehow took six credited writers to cobble together, despite fully half of the content being re-dressed or outright re-used jokes from the original film. The plot, once again, is a travelogue: best friends and dysfunctional idiots Lloyd Christmas (Carrey) and Harry Dunne (Daniels) are back in action after 20 years, during which time Lloyd has been faking a catatonic state as a prank against his buddy. Harry's kidneys are about to fail him, and he's discovered that a fling 22 years ago with the legendarily promiscuous Fraida Felcher (played in the present by Kathleen Turner, whose admirable openness about taking this role for pragmatic reasons does not make it any more pleasant to watch such an iconic star make her big comeback as the butt of such mean-spirited jokes as the film blandly lobs her way) led to a daughter. Hoping that she'll donate an organ, the man-boys truck out to find where she ended up after Fraida put her up for adoption, only to end up on the wrong side of a conniving stepmother (Laurie Holden) and handyman (Rob Riggle), hoping to kill the girl's adoptive father (Steve Tom) for his millions and his world-changing new invention. It then takes another road trip out to El Paso, to crash a weak-kneed parody of a TED conference where the daughter, Penny (Rachel Melvin) is accepting an award on her father's behalf. And along the way, Harry and Lloyd are virtually always dumb, when they are not dumber.

It's impressive, after so many years since his heyday, to find that Carrey (51 at the time of shooting) still has the ability to wheel his head around like a whirligig, and flex seemingly every single one of his facial muscles in a different direction all at once (though I must confess to never having found that shtick funny when it was new, and I'm surely no more inclined to it now). And he and Daniels fall instantly into the most relaxed, natural rhythm of feeding off of each other, reacting and leading, stretching moments until they're about to break, and playing the duo's bits and routines with the timing of ballroom dancing and table tennis combined. But mechanically impressive comic acting is all for naught if there's no comedy to back it up, and Dumb and Dumber To is a skeletal wasteland of uninspired, witless non-humor. The Farrelly's humor hasn't felt boldly trashy or dangerous in many, many years, and the calculated packaging of outrageous behavior is the exact antithesis of the sneering, anarchic obnoxious that made them the most successfully edgy mainstream comic filmmakers of the '90s. Dumb and Dumber To is everything and anything but outrageous. It tries, but the same old gross-out sex jokes and low-key bodily fluid humor feels ossified and underwhelming now. Even as someone who never found Dumb and Dumber worth much of anything, I can recognise that film's brazenness; its sequel is a calculated marketing effort, and that shows through every belabored gag set-up and lazy one-note joke bloated out beyond its appropriate limitations.

I don't know that it's surprising that this is where '90s nostalgia leads us: the flailing, overly self-aware pop culture of that period was hardly interesting the first time, with its desire to make everything extreme and loud clashing with the era's unusual facility with recycling. Trying to revisit Dumb and Dumber is self-defeating: one generation's brash newcomer is the next generation's quaint old-fashioned piffle. And this is precisely the pit into which Dumb and Dumber To falls: it combines boringly obvious jokes and plot developments with a misguided hope that bratty attitude and yelling will somehow give it all a sharp comic edge, and this bond doesn't hold even a little bit. It's easy to imagine far worse belated sequels than this, but in terms of being pointless and pathetic and obvious in its elevation of mercenary over artistic concerns, it's hard to name a recent sequel that has been more thoroughly unwanted, unneeded, and disposable.

3/10

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1981: In which a new decade of pointedly lowbrow high-concept comedy begins well enough

The first thing the writer on film must do is to confess to all biases, and here is the one that matters the most for me: the 1980s are my least-favorite decade in the history of American film. Masterpieces can be found - masterpieces can be found in any era, of course - but the standard level of mainstream Hollywood filmmaking reached, I think, its lowest level during this period. And it's perhaps not even the case, exactly, that the quality of the filmmaking in the '80s was at a particularly low ebb, but that it was an era of extreme caution and a level of conscious anti-creativity. It is an exaggeratedly safe time in American cinema; but then, it was an unusually conservative time in culturally, in both little-c and big-C senses. The dominance of the anglosphere's politics by Thatcherism and Reaganism doesn't have a one-to-one relationship with the kind of movies being produced - there wasn't exactly a wave of anti-union propaganda or popcorn epics about supply-side economics - but both come from the same general impulse to slowing down and consolidating and trying really hard not to rock the boat. The results, in the political and social and economical spheres, are beyond the scope of this project. But the results in movies were an enormous reliance on the tried-and-true, and an increasingly derivative, formula-driven approach to storytelling and craftsmanship alike that does not make, at any rate, for a terribly exciting cinema culture, even if you can cherry-pick masterpieces here and there, for masterpieces are of course to be found in every era, even among the carefully market-driven Hollywood products of this period. But whereas generic studio shlock from the 1930s, say, has a strong personality and prideful sense of work ethic, and the shlock from the 1960s is visibly desperate and anxious, shlock from the '80s tends to feel as anonymous and forgettable as the movies ever have.

It feels, at a first approximation, like the movies of that time came in one of five basic flavors, and most of these were also a little bit prone to what we would tend to associate with social or political conservatism, in one guise or another: the excruciating prestige dramas that hogged all the awards; glossy fantasy/sci-fi extravaganzas that were only good when Steven Spielberg was involved in making them in some capacity; horror films about implausibly creative violent psychopaths, xenophobic action films in which muscly men with unintelligible accents delivered leaden one-liners while mowing down wave upon wave of faceless henchmen; and puerile comedies about juvenile masculinity. The last of these are in some ways the most interesting cases, since they are the only ones to overtly espouse any kind of anti-establishment anarchism (a different thing from the low-simmering paranoia of government found in many action films), an inheritance no doubt from the single movie whose success largely established the genre: 1978's Animal House, which had more focused anti-social rage than the genial, sloppy movies which came in its wake. Not that they're political manifestos; political commitment has never been common in commercial American cinema, even when they openly bring in politics.

Nor can one imagine a film that should have more to say about the current state of the world, while simultaneously going almost visibly out of its way to avoid saying any of it than Stripes, one of the biggest films of 1981, and certainly the most important release outside of Animal House itself in definitively stating, "this is how we're going to make comedy now" - and to some degree, we've never quite stopped. The loosey-goosey plotting and especially the open and constant reliance on improvisation and riffing to build character and flesh out jokes is still very much with us; tightly-constructed and streamlined comic racecars still exist, as they still existed in the '80s, but never anywhere close to to quantity that existed in the '30s or '40s. Instead, the jokey, "let's just all hang out and have fun" vibe of Stripes is still found in virtually all of the comedies successful enough to penetrate the mainstream at all: the films of Judd Apatow and his many, many colleagues and spiritual descendants which dominate 2010s film comedy are cut from exactly the same cloth as Stripes, right down to a 2005 DVD release of this movie that added footage to take it up to a puffy 124 minutes of scenes plugged in because they're enjoyable on their own, not because they are in any way the result of discipline of any kind. And it should be noted that Stripes director Ivan Reitman has always seemed a little ashamed of the baked-in messiness of his big breakthrough picture, even in its cleaner 106-minute cut; this is perhaps why his son has specialised in directing rather more trimly constructed, script-driven comedies in the 21st Century.

As I started out saying, though, Stripes would have ever reason to be a deeply political film, and it was eleven years earlier when the same broad concept was turned into MASH: two jokey fuck-ups get involved in the straitlaced world of the U.S. Army, turning it into a sexually charged-up funhouse. Part of the difference is obvious: MASH was made during one major war and set during another, both of which heavily relied on conscription to fill the ranks of the military, while Stripes is a product of peacetime with a volunteer army. The early '80s were, to be fair a period of higher Cold War tension than was common, but it honestly probably wouldn't have mattered if the Soviet Union and the United States were about to engage in open nuclear war the weekend that the film entered production: it uses the military as a pretext, and only a flimsy one at that, much as the 1941 Abbott and Costello vehicle Buck Privates (yet another duo of jokey fuck-ups end up in the Army). Some films just don't care about geopolitics, not when they can have light-touch clowning.

And Stripes, at least, has plenty of that. It was the film that sealed the deal on Bill Murray, Movie Star, the year after the hit Caddyshack featured him as arguably the most instantly-memorable figure in its ensemble cast, and two years after the smaller success of Meatballs (also directed by Reitman, with most of its writing team brought on for Stripes as well)) showed that he had the chops to carry a feature. More to the point, it proved that a thing which we could fairly call "a Bill Murray picture", regardless of the director and credited writers, could be a great big deal that struck a nerve with vast portions of America. For Stripes very unmistakably is a Bill Murray picture: it is driven by a tone of just-hanging-out sarcasm that was already characteristic of the comedian's persona in '81, and later years have only served to confirm that yes, this is exactly the kind of movie that happens when everybody else mutually agrees to stay the hell out of Murray's way: Reitman, who first came up with the idea as a potential Cheech & Chong vehicle, allowed the actor to re-shape the material completely, bending scenes around his off-the-cuff witticisms; Harold Ramis (the director and co-writer of Caddyshack, and a writer on Animal House and Meatballs as well as Stripes itself) was cast as the co-lead in no small part because his longstanding friendship with Murray made it easier for him to instantly jump on Murray's improvisatory wavelength.

And so the film we have is a shaggy dog, all the plot logic and character detail you could hope for being junked in favor of letting Murray lead the way in a series of comic riffs punctuated with a few scenes of broad slapstick, a couple moments of jarring laddish smut ("You know how you can tell that the villain is a prick? Because he stares at naked women showering! These naked women, right here. That we are showing to you. The naked ones."), and, in a scene where the stereotypical happy & fat Army recruit played by John Candy mud-wrestles with several topless women, slapstick and laddish smut occupying the same space. It's absolutely and unmistakably a hang-out movie, where its value relies entirely the audience enjoying the chance to watch Murray's John Winger and Ramis's Russell Ziskey be quippy and thumb their noses at the hapless authority figures played by Warren Oates (as the grumpy one with a secret warm spot for these troublemakers) and John Larroquette (as the shrill, irredeemable asshole). If Stripes is better than the average "sarcastic guy tees off the stuffed-up antagonist, while making leering comments about women" comedy of the same period - and not only is it above-average, I'd say it's very close to being the best of the lot - this owes a lot to that same Murrayness, for even at his most peremptory (and Murray certainly has the capacity to be a know-it-all jerk in his comedy), Murray has a level of erudition and fast-thinking that's not found in most of the lowbrow comedy that Stripes is obliged, through genre and chronology, to rub shoulders with.

It is, mind you, eminently improvable: Reitman's ability to shape a movie around Murray rather than let him simply go off and take the movie with him hadn't fully formed, and their next collaboration, 1984's Ghostbusters, represents an extremely long step forward from Stripes in showcasing how to allow Murray room to explore, invent, and even dominate the overall tone of a film, while also making sure that he is contained within the limits of that film. Stripes doesn't manage this: even by the relaxed standards of comedy, it's hard to square the flippant irreverence of the Murray-Ramis school of "I'm better than you" humor with the training camp setting, which is too divorced from even the cartoon military environment of something like Buck Privates to justify itself - the film is wedged into a military setting, but the stars and the tone of the writing never take that setting seriously, and it never remotely resembles any kind of objective reality. This, in turn, proves deadly when the film leaves basic training and heads to Europe, where the boys get involved with an experimental tank that looks like an RV, and eventually end up having to execute a daring rescue. The narrative drive is too focused to permit the same loose humor that the first hour of the film boasted; in turn, the looseness of that hour means that absolutely nothing has prepared the film for the sudden escalation in (relative) seriousness and actual Cold War dramatic stakes. There's a solid 20 minute chunk of the movie that simply doesn't work at all: low-budget action awkwardly cut with Murray one-liners as an exact template for the terrible third act of damn near every action-comedy set around the Iron Curtain for the whole decade to follow. And the Reitman who so successfully married shaggy comedy to effects-driven action in Ghostbusters was also a very different, stronger filmmaker than the one we see here.

Problematic though it is, Stripes benefits immensely from being graded on a curve: it's no Ghostbusters, but it's no Police Academy either. The shagginess and smuttiness alike both feel like they're coming out of something that the filmmakers actually thought would be interesting and tethered to the characters, and not simply something that filled a marketing need. It's the kind of film whose success is entirely a function of the viewer's ability to get on the same wavelength as the filmmakers, which does entail some smugness, sexism, and political agnosticism. But at the same time, Murray's laconic energy is hard to deny, and while I do not personally count Stripes a personal favorite, it's not hard to see why it has remained a gateway drug for a certain era of casual ad hoc lowbrow comedy.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1981
-George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, Gog and Magog of the new blockbuster age, join forces to make the practically perfect popcorn adventure Raiders of the Lost Ark
-The slasher movie officially explodes with the first wave of Friday the 13th knock-offs hitting theaters, among them Friday the 13th, Part 2
-John Derek's "movie" exploiting his wife Bo, Tarzan, the Ape Man, saves us from ever again having to wonder what the all-time worst Tarzan movie is

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1981
-George Miller's Mad Max 2, AKA The Road Warrior, proves to be Australia cinema's unlikely ambassador to the world at large, and invents a new genre along the way
-West German director Wolfgang Petersen scores an enormous international hit with the submarine epic Das Boot
-Hungarian animation has a banner year, with the release of both Vuk (The Little Fox) and Fehérlófia (Son of the White Mare)

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ROAD TO NOWHERE

The good news: Tammy isn't entirely about making fun of fat people for being fat fatties who eat the fuck out of food when they're not falling down on their fat asses for being so fat that they can't even stand on their fat legs. And as such, whenever future cinephiles are attending Melissa McCarthy retrospectives, it will be a gratifying step up from the hellish Identity Thief, a film whose hatred of McCarthy was so unrelenting that I was genuinely sad that she'd felt compelled to take the part. On the other hand, McCarthy is the producer and co-writer, with her husband Ben Falcone, of Tammy, and Falcone directed it, and if this is what passes for a passion project, I think that the time has come to stop feeling sorry for a demonstrably talented comic actor getting shitty parts, and instead begin bemoaning the same talented actor's repugnant tastes.

Tammy is a bizarre, dysfunctional grab-bag that wants to cram far too many tonal shifts into one foul-mouthed road comedy, and has nothing even resembling the skillful writing nor the tightly controlled filmmaking to even begin to make such a mulligan stew palatable. It focuses on a certain Tammy, of course, played by McCarthy as only a slightly modified version of the bossy screamer she's made into her one and only cinematic trick (her TV work showcases such a different, broader scope of skills that it's barely possible to square the two incarnations of one performer). It's not Tammy's mouth or her attitude that has in trouble at the start of the movie, but sheer dumb luck: she hit a deer on the way into work, which made her late, which was the last straw for her nasty little petulant boss (Falcone, gamely besting his wife in the "how awful can I make myself look?" competition). So she's fired, and when she arrives back home, it's to find her husband (Nat Faxon) and next door neighbor (Toni Collette) having a romantic dinner, and now that her life has completely imploded, she walks two doors down to where her mother (Allison Janney) lives with her grandmother Pearl (Susan Sarandon). You will note that I have only bothered giving just the one character name; this is because Pearl and Tammy are, for a long time, the only characters who matter whatsoever, and so we are treated to the immensely saddening spectacle of seeing actors like Janney, Sandra Oh, Kathy Bates, and Dan Aykroyd appear for at best a scene or two which asks them to do things they have done literally dozens of times now (Bates), gives them absolutely nothing to do but recite lines in a uniform tone of voice (everybody but Bates), or stand there gawking without even any lines, just sort of occupying the frame and making me wonder with something approaching actual, literal horror what kind of terrible culture would reduce somebody with that much goddamn talent to the role of a glorified prop (Collette). There is the test, I forget the exact wording, but it's something like, "could this character be replaced with a coat rack that had a sign hanging on it, without it changing the plot?" Collette's character could be replaced by a naked coat rack.

Anyway, Tammy can drive, Pearl has money and a car, and so they take off from the dead-end of Murphysboro, IL, on a trip to Niagara Falls; one drunken night later, they're stuck in Louisville, Kentucky, where Pearl meets the horny middle-aged man Earl (Gary Cole), and Tammy flirts badly with Earl's son Bobby (Mark Duplass), who will eventually come around to finding her fascinating, in a fairly desperate gambit to make this film look even marginally less anxious to make fun of overweight people. A fast food restaurant is robbed, a lesbian picnic is visited, and everything is much too shapeless and devoid of energy to be funny in any way. The impression I have is of a movie where simply gathering everything together into the broad shape of a feature-length film exhuasted everybody too much to bother doing anything else with it. The film is crammed full of scenes that have the approximate structure of jokes, but not the timing nor the apparent payoff (a keen example: the reveal that Tammy lives two doors down from her parents, which is staged in a lateral tracking shot that implies it's supposed to be hilarious in some way, and it's just not). Even more often still, the movie doesn't even bother to act like it's telling jokes, as in the interminable lesbian 4th of July celebration, a monstrously long stopover that fills several empty plot-driven needs, as though McCarthy and Falcone realised upon reaching that point in the script that if they didn't start resolving dangling emotional threads, the film would hit two hours without a climax.

At the same time it's failing to be a funny comedy, Tammy is failing, to somewhat less ugly results, to be a character drama; there's a lot of stuff about living life to the fullest, and not blaming other people for your problems, and it's all awfully clichéd and virtually none of it feels very legitimate (the point where, in the form of some old-fashioned Kathy Bates truth-tellin', the film shifts from a celebration of Tammy and Pearl's freedom seeking to an indictment of their dumb, shallow selfishness happens so clumsily that you can almost hear the mechanics of the screenplay clunking). Falcone is nowhere remotely near a supple enough director to make the necessary maneuvers of tone to adjust from the scenes where Tammy is a klutzy, yelling idiot to the scenes where she's a sensitive soul who just needs some understanding and self-love, and McCarthy's performance is entirely devoted to finding a chilled-out mode where she just hangs back and snarks, and this mode ends up serving nothing in the movie. Whatever human depth it reaches comes exclusively from Sarandon, whose stockpile of highly self-aware sexuality from the days of her youth are played off in fun and lively ways, though the fact that Sarandon can excel in the "slutty grandma" role against an actor only 24 years her junior is no kind of real achievement, and only the fact that I'm pleased to see her with any role of decent size in a high-profile relief keeps that fact from depressing me as much as it ought to.

In short, Tammy is lazy, ineffectual filmmaking with hypocritical aims towards being a sympathetic character study of a woman it repeatedly mocks for being a hefty eater and sloppy mess; it is neither smart nor funny, when it desperately wants to be both. McCarthy is a talented performer, and I assume at some point she'll get a part that isn't "gross and angry and loud", if only by accident. It is, at any rate, no real surprise that she didn't get it this time.

4/10

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: TRAVELING TO THE PAST TO SAVE THE FUTURE

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: seven films into a 14-year-old franchise, X-Men: Days of Future Past trots out everybody's favorite hackneyed genre trick, time travel, to add some spice and get the widest possible array of desirable actors assembled in one place. Time travel being one of those conceits that transcends genre and tone, I thought it would be worth having a little fun with it, and checking out the other high-concept time-travel comedy of the 1980s.

There is nonsense; then there is abysmally foolish nonsense; then there is Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, a film that manages to make its almost unmitigated, frivolous nonsense into a legitimate strength. This can be done, though not very often, and rarely in the case of such an obviously trivial work - cult classic though it might be now, there's no sense at all that the filmmakers behind this weird little idiot-driven high school musical lark had any intention towards making something that would last even as long as its 1989 release date. The disintegration of De Laurentiis Entertainment group pushed the film, shot in '87 with an eye towards coming out in '88, back a whole year, and given the zestiness with which Bill & Ted anatomises Southern California metalheads of an extremely specific sort, there'd have been every reason to assume that it would be dated on arrival.

Instead, the film launched catchphrases and slang from a minute corner of the world into a whole nation (like the Frank Zappa song "Valley Girl", part of me wonders if the film tended to lead to the milieu it depicts, rather than the other way 'round), and making an unlikely move star out of Keanu Reeves, whose career for a quarter of a century now has rested mainly on people being utterly confounded how somebody who can't really act keeps getting such a weirdly broad variety of roles. For this, we can point to the obvious: no role in Reeves's career, not even the empty shell of slacker tropes Neo from The Matrix, is so well suited to his actual self in the moment of its creation. Need a loopy SoCal dude; cast a loopy SoCal dude.

Reeves plays, in the film, Ted "Theodore Logan", one-half of the spectacularly ambitious, spectacularly untalented garage band Wyld Stallyns in San Dimas, CA. His best friend and partner in crime is Bill S. Preston, Esq., the marginally more intelligent of the pair, played with a spaced-out élan to match Reeves's by Alex Winter (the vagaries of fate: insofar as it's possible to draw a line between the two performers, I think Winter is slightly more appealing and I can think of no reason that his career should have lain dormant while Reeves started getting role after role almost immediately, even those for which he was profoundly and obviously unsuited. Hi, Dangerous Liaisons. And a grand hullo and good day, Bram Stoker's Dracula).

But those are petty, niggling distinctions, in the face of the one epochal, unutterable truth of Bill & Ted: it is a very dumb movie that should be impossible to watch, but it turns out to be a truly dazzling and delightful sci-fi comedy, and it owes this almost completely to how phenomenal Reeves and Winter are in their roles. It may be, entirely, that this isn't really "acting" but simply being natural: nothing in Reeves's subsequent career suggests that Ted was much of a stretch for him, and of course there simply hasn't been enough evidence presented of Winter's range or talent. Maybe he has a life-changing, revolutionary Falstaff hiding in him just waiting for the right brave director, I don't know. My point, anyway, is that it doesn't matter: Bill & Ted puts all of its chips on Bill & Ted functioning as a very specific kind of easy-to-like doofuses: ambitious morons whose enthusiasm and unbridled innocence, almost a kind of pre-intellectual manner of understanding the world, flavors their generic bro-ness with sweetness and humanity. In life, Bill and Ted would be unendurable: their astounding stupidity, their crudely utilitarian understanding of women, their mutually reinforcing inability to comprehend the ways in which real life is nothing like their vision of it, would all make them impossible to tolerate for more than a few seconds. But the movie makes a solid case for them as a pair of utterly charming underdogs whose very obliviousness makes them figures of comic pathos, and that is due almost entirely to the acting.

It's not that Bill & Ted is otherwise "bad". It's just profoundly run-of-the-mill: director Stephen Herek, whose solitary previous directorial credit was the horror-comedy Critters, does as good a job as he needs to in keeping the tone frothy and pushing through the first act fast enough to quickly lay out the scenario provided by screenwriters Chris Matheson & Ed Solomon with clarity but without any chance to dwell on it. That scenario being that Bill & Ted, if they fail an upcoming history test, will flunk and be unable to find musical success, which in turn means that the will never become icons of peace and love and the centuries-distant future will be a dystopian hell. So an envoy from the future, Rufus (George Carlin, whose very level but distinctively ironic performance matters almost as much as Reeves's and Winter's in making us meet the film on its own level), has come with a phone booth time machine to let the boys travel through history and, as it were, learn by doing. There's a neat line the film walks, between letting that situation exist on its own terms and winking at us, saying, "it's awfully silly, isn't it? But let's run with it anyway", and the blunt speed of the opening is vital in building to that point. But Herek does not otherwise do much to give the film personality: it looks like a cheap '80s comedy (the visual effects and costumes are all pretty rough), shot without the remotest visual flair. Most of the humor that doesn't involve the title characters is played much too shrilly, with a game cast of mostly unknowns playing the gamut of historical figures that the duo end up dragging through time, and finding only a mechanical proficiency without doing anything to really sell the comedy (the only joke that I find actually works is one involving Rod Loomis as Sigmund Freud holding a corndog on a stick right up in front of his chest where you can't miss it; it is funny almost entirely because it's the one place where the film expects us, the audience, to know anything about the historical characters, and so does not bother stressing it or even mentioning phallus imagery in passing). And the climax of its "celebrities from history get lost in the mall!" montage is, I find, quite dire altogether, both because it is hackneyed and because it is doesn't really find anything fun to do with the characters, while being a little too okay with indulging in broad, boring stereotypes regarding virtually every one of the characters (which we might defend as being part of the film's indebtedness to the heroes' worldview, except that there's a lot of evidence that we're understood to be smarter than they are).

But there's a lot that you don't need when as much of a film is working as well as Bill & Ted does as a basic hang-out movie: we are aware that Bill & Ted are stupid, we laugh them, we acknowledge our superiority to them, and yet they are immensely likable and fun to spend a short 90 minutes with. They're entirely approachable, normal, everyday heroes: God only knows how much of actual '80s teen culture the film captures and how much it of it is just invented nonsense, but Bill & Ted themselves have a considerable touch of the real; they feel like the kind of goofballs that everybody knows or knew, and nobody every really disliked, because they were just too damn harmless. They are, in effect, stupendously easy to root for,because they are very average and ordinary and idle in their supreme teenage-ness. And once a movie has characters that you can't help but root for, it's pretty much already won the battle as a work of simple but effective entertainment. It's nothing like a great work of comic cinema, but there's a good reason it has clung stubbornly to a cult audience for a quarter of a century.

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COCKY OLD MAN

Old man boners. Did you laugh? Because if you didn't laugh, I can't think of any reason at all to bother with Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa, a film for which "old man boners" is very largely the only joke it has up its sleeve. "Old man projectile shits", as well, but that's for just one scene, and like everything else in the movie, it disposes of that joke so quickly that it seems evident the filmmakers were ashamed of it.

Now, perhaps you did laugh at "old man boners", and I am not sorry if you did. The world would be less interesting if we all agreed on everything. And honesty compels me to acknowledge that as I left the theater where Bad Grandpa was playing, I distinctly heard a woman behind me gush, "That was so great". Honesty also compels me to mention that not once did that woman laugh during the movie, so perhaps when she called it "great", she was speaking to its depiction of the relationship between an old man and a young boy, finding in this one of the truest and most warming human stories of 2013. Again, the world would be less interesting if we all agreed on anything.

Bad Grandpa is, at any rate, an uncertain marriage of the hidden-camera extreme stunt comedy of the TV show Jackass and its three movie spin-offs (I have seen a couple bits from the show, nothing at all of the movies) with an improvised "embarrass the civilians" narrative generally modeled after Borat. Herein, octogenarian Irving Zisman (Jackass leading light Johnny Knoxville) is exuberant that his wife of more than forty years, Ellie (a model of Catherine Keener, whose actual scenes all ended up cut), has finally died, leaving him free to return to his days of tomcatting around. This unfortunately comes at the exact same moment that his daughter, Kimmie (Georgina Cates) is headed into prison on a drug charge, leaving Irving responsible for bringing his grandson, Billy (Jackson Nicoll) from Nebraska to North Carolina to be with the boy's wretched father Chuck (Greg Harris). The pair thus find themselves traveling across America, stopping off frequently for Irving to hit on the local women, and for some kind of violent mishap to occur to the undeniably game Knoxville.

There's an insurmountable taste issue here, which is that if you don't find the film's apparently inexhaustible well of genital-related jokes funny - I discovered how much I didn't by the end of the "elastic penis caught in a vending machine" routine that effectively opens the movie - there's not going to be much within Bad Grandpa's enthusiastically 92 minutes that will work on any level other than the sheer pleasure that comes from having moving images dance across your retinas. But it's not just taste, I suspect, that hobbles the film. It suffers mightily from repetition: most of the bits in the film that aren't jokes centered around the idea that an old man's privates are too ridiculous, gross, and funny for words are instead jokes centered around Zisman's insatiable lust, mostly realised in scenes of the old man hitting on women who, to their credit, are bemused by the whole thing for the most part. The problem is that there are only so many ways for a 40-year-old in latex (that doesn't look very convincing, but nobody in the movie seems to doubt him) to describe sex acts in an old man voice, and Bad Grandpa has run through them all by the time the characters leave Nebraska. There's one joke repeated all but verbatim in the outtakes running during the credits - that is how unabashedly one-note this routine is.

The other huge problem I had is in the execution of the concept: the selling point of the movie is to watch normal, unknowing Americans respond incredulously to this vile old man being awful in front of, and to, his grandson. Which is fine, but the film is edited in such a way to absolutely minimise the reactions of all the real-life extras except in a couple of scenes (and those moments are, uniformly, the best - a funeral gone wrong, a preteen beauty pageant that dominated the ad campaign and is thus much less funny in the actual film than it should be), and that's back to the thing I mentioned at the start, that the movie seems ashamed of itself; every bit lasts exactly as long as it has to, not a second longer, and there is no lingering over the passers-by being confused, horrified, amused, or outraged, if there's any way to avoid it.

That leaves dicks, basically. Dicks and acting in a way to make people uncomfortable. But not too uncomfortable, and after hearing second-hand accounts of the things the Jackass folks were up to, I expected more depravity, honestly. The only reason I won't say that Bad Grandpa isn't as shocking as it thinks itself to be, is because it's not really very clear that it even thinks that it's shocking. Penis humor isn't much of a cinematic taboo anymore, and old people sex hasn't been taboo for years, just an easy way of scoring gross-out points. After a little while, Bad Grandpa can't come up with anything else to get a rise out of the audience than put the words "fuck" and "shit" in the mouth of a little kid, and if that's not the last refuge of the hopelessly lazy...

But again, taste issue. If you find exploding poo funny, then it's funny. If you find the thought of a geriatric man performing cunnilingus to be in and of itself funny, then it's funny. Bad Grandpa doesn't present these things in an inventive, creative, or surprising way, but it does present them with zest, passion, and sincerity. Knoxville cannot, at any rate, be accused of giving less than every inch of himself, and Nicoll has a perfect, unlearned ability to hold the camera with his open, eager face. The sheer volume is, eventually, enough to gin up something like amusement, anyway, even without finding the constituent parts worthwhile, though "the comedy wore me down to the point where I didn't mind it" is by no means what we might construe as an enthusiastic rave.

3/10

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CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL '13: GO GOA GONE (KRISHNA D.K. & RAJ NIDIMORU, INDIA)

Screens at CIFF: 10/16 & 10/18
World premiere: 10 May, 2013, India

You tell me if this sounds appealing or hopelessly stupid: modern stoner comedy classic Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle meets infamously terrible video game adaptation House of the Dead. I can't actually say what it sounds like to me at this point, but having seen Go Goa Gone, I can tell you that it is fucking wonderful, the best zombie comedy since Shaun of the Dead, in which a pair of excellent well-drawn stoner roommates go to a rave on a remote island where everybody who takes a designer drug turns into a raging cannibalistic corpse, blocking the way back to the only boat anywhere near the island.

In fact, I might go so far as to say that Go Goa Gone is the movie that "fixes" House of the Dead, as their plots are similar in so many ways, and I think there's even a lesson to be learned here: it is possible to take zombie films too seriously. Hopefully this doesn't strike anyone as a life-changing insight, but it's actually quite striking how much more tolerable and downright playful some of the stupidest developments a story can be forced through can be when they're being treated with an insouciant touch by the filmmakers, and foisted upon character far too deliberately comic to permit and kind of serious story to be told about them. It's not that our druggie friends Hardik (Kunal Khemu) and Luv (Vir Das) don't take the thought of being devoured by zombies seriously, because they plainly do. But we do not take them seriously, and so it's easier to laugh at their plight, and find the whole thing a giddy blast of shallow fun. Do this by accident and through incompetence, and you are Uwe Boll. Do this on purpose, because you are ultimately only making a hang-out movie, and you are Krishna D.K. and Raj Nidimoru (credited as DK & Raj), and your movie is one of the best midnight films in search of an appreciative cult audience that I have seen in many a day.

It's painfully simple: Hardik and Luv are looking to goof off (Hardik got fired for having sex at work, Luv just got dumped in an especially humiliating way), and get wind of the rave in the state of Goa on the western coast of India. Finding out that their all-business roommate Bunny (Anand Tiwari) has business in Goa, they convince him to let them ride along, and in hardly any time all of them are at the party, having nothing resembling enough money to try the new, brightly colored, and glowing party drug that the rave is meant to promote. The next day, zombies everywhere: while trying to escape, the three stumble across Luna (Puja Gupta), a girl who survived the horror of the night before only because Luv was annoying her and she ducked out, and Boris (Saif Ali Khan), a Delhi native who joined the Russian mafia and now fancies himself Russian, who was associated with the group that produced the fatal drug. He and his silent full-blooded Russian friend are also the only people left alive on the island who can operate a gun at all, and thus become the most welcome members of the band of ragged survivors, even if Boris is also, in his very consciously bad-ass behavior and his gloriously old-school Cold War villain accent, the damn silliest character in the movie by a mile.

The film is pretty idiotic in every way, but it's saved - made goddamn straight-up brilliant, I dare say - by the completely effortless chemistry between Khemu and Das, who evoke in every beat that they share the complimentary rhythms of two completely shallow and disreputable straight male friends who are the dearest soulmates that either will ever know. Much of what goes on in the movie is of the lowest-brow sort; the characters keep it feeling sweet and joyfully humane and worth watching, because even if there's not a single moment when we don't feel distinctly better than the two of them, there's never any mockery or superiority present in the film, which contentedly presents them as a pair of guys who have a lot to learn and will learn it eventually. Some of it even on this trip, though the sermonising is kept to a bare-bones minimum.

The other thing that keeps the movie buzzing along is DK & Raj's comic-book directing style, involving wacky onscreen graphics (three of which separate the film into chapters based on each word of its title - rather cleverly, I might add) and lots of bright colors - screamingly azure swimming pools, cherry-red blood, and so on. It's glitzy pop-art with zombies and potheads, shallow fun but extravagantly exhilarating fun, and that's surely the part that matters more: as horror comedies go, there's barely enough horror to fill a thimble, but when the comedy manages to be this good-natured and this ditsily funny, that's worth sacrificing a bit of menace from your zombies.

Bonus! Owing to an ad campaign that ran afoul of India's smoking laws, the film (at least its CIFF print) has a delightfully weird anti-smoking PSA glued to the front of it, and onscreen captions reminding the viewer not to smoke any time that tobacco, marijuana, or any other substance that can be burned and inhaled is enjoyed onscreen. So on top of everything else, the film has the bizarre gloss of being the strangest anti-drug message movie I've ever seen.

8/10

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