The Comedians Who Wouldn't Go Away

If you're like me, you thought June 25th would never arrive.

But here it finally is. Which means they can finally stop promoting the fuck out of Grown Ups.

It's not the number of television commercials, billboards, or advertisements plastered on the sides of buses that have been excessive. That's been about in line with industry standards.

No, it's that you can't go anywhere without seeing Kevin James, Adam Sandler, Chris Rock, Rob Schneider and David Spade, in some combination, but most often all five together.

They've been at baby christenings. They've been smashing bottles of champagne against the hulls of ships. They've been cutting the ribbons outside of malls. They've been offering their expertise on how to solve the BP crisis in the Gulf of Mexico.

It's enough to drive a person crazy.

They say the more something is relentlessly promoted, the less good it probably is, so watch out for this one. In light of recent discussions we've had on this blog, I'm trying to withhold judgment on films I haven't seen yet. But it doesn't mean I can't talk about some bad indicators, and the indicators are all bad for Grown Ups right now.

The fivesome you see here literally started promoting this movie back in February. I didn't witness it myself, but I heard on sports talk radio a few weeks back that they were hanging around the Super Bowl in their inseparable group of five funnymen, at various stages of career decay, getting out the word about their big summer movie in the dead of winter. You usually start seeing ads for summer movies around then -- in fact, the Super Bowl is renowned for being a showcase for such ads. But it's usually still months before the distributor sends its stars out on a publicity campaign. In the case of Grown Ups, the media blitz started then and hasn't let up.

I suppose NBA fans, like myself, were subjected to an extra large dose of the Grown Ups. Not only was the movie one of the sponsors for the TV coverage of the basketball playoffs, but almost all of these guys seem to have been Lakers fans with courtside seats, independent of any promotional tie-in. Of course, in the actual tie-ins -- there was one they played constantly, where the five guys sat around talking about great championship teams -- Sandler wore his Knicks jersey, and they didn't betray any specific biases for any current playoff teams. But whether they were biased toward any particular team or not, they were still ubiquitous.

Another reason why it seems so sad, that they've been working so hard for this movie, is that it really does seem like a lazy project in which three successful comic actors are trying to lift up two unsuccessful ones. It's no secret that Rock, Sandler, Schneider and Spade were all friends from their Saturday Night Live days -- in fact, I've read that Kevin James felt like quite the fifth wheel, with no SNL war stories to tell. But two of those guys seem to be slumming in order to help out the other two. It shouldn't be too hard to figure out who's who in this scenario. As for James, well, I guess this is about in line with the other movies he's been making. But he definitely has more going on in general than Schneider and Spade (oops, I mentioned their names).

Anyway, hopefully, today it all ends. Or at least tones down a bit. You often continue to see ads for movies for a week or two after they've hit theaters. But at least these five will probably no longer be weighing in on Stanley McChrystal or discussing their picks for the World Cup.

And just so I don't have to leave Grown Ups on a totally destitute note, I will say that I absolutely love the poster for this movie. Not only is it perfectly composed, showing all five stars with their varying levels of importance (though I might argue that Rock and James should change places based on their current career fortunes), but it also tells you what the movie's about in one perfect image: Five guys who haven't grown up. I also like it for its originality, as it may just be the first movie poster ever to feature guys on a waterslide.

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Hedging their bets on Cruise

Tom Cruise is in the midst of a comeback.

It's as close to indisputable fact as you can get. His last drama (Valkyrie) was a critical and commercial success. His last -- first? -- comedy (Tropic Thunder) was a critical and commercial success, demonstrating a shrewd knack for the kind of stunt casting that might jump-start his career. But the best indication of a return to business as usual is that Cruise has been inked to appear in Mission Impossible 4 -- which once itself seemed like an impossible mission, given that Paramount dumped him shortly after the release of Mission Impossible III in 2006.

And of course, Knight and Day, in which he co-stars with Cameron Diaz, hits theaters today. However, 20th Century Fox doesn't seem to have gotten the memo that it's okay to get behind Cruise again.

The PR campaign for Knight and Day is a study in half measures. There have been plenty of TV ads, and quite naturally, Cruise has been front and center in them. But one look at that poster above -- kind of a hybrid of a James Bond opening credits sequence, and the ipod campaign circa 2008 -- and you can tell something's amiss.

Where are the faces of the actors?

It's only natural, when you're promoting a movie with such big stars as Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz, that you would want the public to see their faces on the poster. But not here. Their names are ginormous -- as big as the title, and the title is pretty big -- but their faces are conspicuously absent. The result is a bland poster that neither says anything specific about the movie, nor features the stars that are going to attract audiences. Because let's be honest -- there's nothing high-concept about Knight and Day. It's a star-driven movie, pure and simple.

It's as if Fox is saying, "We want to remind you that Cruise is in it -- but not too much." It's as if seeing his name will affect you only on an abstract, indirect level -- whereas seeing his face gives you too intimate a reminder why you stopped liking him.

In fact, with all the ways they've shot the advertising in the foot -- including a terrible title -- I'm surprised that I actually sort of want to see this movie. Why? Well, because of Tom Cruise.

Watching the trailers for Knight and Day -- which are certainly the best facet of its ad campaign -- I've realized that I welcome the return of Cruise in a cheeky action movie. There's been a void in my soul since the last one, four long years ago with Mission Impossible III. And that one wasn't even very cheeky. Maybe Cruise has never made an action movie this cheeky, and maybe that's why I'm sort of excited for it. He's charismatic, he's got a ready smile, and maybe the fact that he isn't taking himself too seriously looks good on him. That was one of the biggest benefits of the Cruise we saw in Tropic Thunder -- he was willing to tear down his own image (wearing a bald cap and an extra 70 pounds around the waistline) to build it back up. And though that could just be a hardcore strategic ploy, I'll be charitable to him and say that it was just a case of having fun with himself and hoping it reflected well on him. It did.

Whether 20th Century Fox was right to be skeptical about Cruise's influence on their movie will play itself out over the course of the five-day weekend, which they've given this movie by releasing it on a Wednesday. And you can read either positive or negative things into that as well. Usually, a studio releases a movie on Wednesday when it feels very confident in it, and wants to extend the opening weekend by a few days to make the Sunday night total look more impressive. However, that could also be viewed as a defense mechanism -- give it a few extra days so that the people who aren't analyzing things very closely will think it stacked up well against the movies that were released on Friday. But which careless box office analysts, who just fell off the turnip truck yesterday, would that be?

Like almost every other typical summer release that has come out so far this year, I probably won't catch it in the theater. That way, I'll have a bunch of stupid popcorn movies to watch this fall, when I have a crying baby and can't make it out to the theater anyway.

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The many faces of Brendan Fraser

Welcome to the first installment of my new summer series, Double Jeopardy.

It's the opposite of what I was doing this spring, when I reconsidered critically acclaimed movies that I hadn't loved, to see if a second viewing improved my opinion of them. That series was called Second Chances. Now, I'll spend my Tuesdays reconsidering movies that I may have liked too much. They'll have to prove that my initial affection for them was justified.

To be clear, this is not just a guilty pleasures series. I genuinely don't know how I'll feel about these movies the second time. For that reason, I'm reconsidering only movies that I've seen exactly once -- much as I did for the Second Chances series. If I still liked a movie other people didn't like, even after two viewings, there's no need to go back for a third. It gets a pass.

And I thought the best place to start was with a movie I've owned for over five years, but had yet to re-watch until last Friday night.

When I first moved to Los Angeles, I lived with a roommate for three years, from 2001 to 2004. It wasn't always the best living situation for either of us, but after I moved out, our friendship quickly recovered to where it was before we lived together. We did have some great times in the apartment, and one of our greater bonding moments was over the Brendan Fraser vehicle Bedazzled, directed by Harold Ramis. We tuned into it randomly on cable, expecting little from it, and ended up laughing our fool heads off. In fact, we enjoyed it so much, he gave it to me on DVD as a present, probably only half as a joke.

The shrink wrap did not even come off that DVD until this past Friday night, probably five to six years after the gift was presented. Suffice it to say that over the years, I've come to assume that we were fools, when we were laughing our fool heads off at that movie. Fraser has made more interchangeable broad comedies than any actor I can think of (see here for a consideration of that topic) -- why, in retrospect, did I have any reason to think Bedazzled was any different? I think I even tried to sell the DVD at one point, but they were only going to give me $2 for it, so I decided just to keep it.

I was initially hesitant to even suggest it as junk food viewing on a Friday night, after a long day in which my wife had two different exhausting doctor's appointments. That's how much my mind had mentally re-written my perspective on it, that I was embarrassed to even endorse it in a situation calling for mindless fun.

But I'm glad I did. It turned out to be just the right thing for my wife -- so much, in fact, that she repeated the sentiment the next morning.

Brief plot synopsis, if Bedazzled is inseparable in your mind from Fraser's other work (and why shouldn't it be): Fraser plays a dorky schlub whose co-workers can't stand him and who pines after an office beauty (Frances O'Connor) who never gives him a second thought. One night out at a bar, he meets a bombshell in a red dress (Elizabeth Hurley) who promises to give him all the happiness that has eluded him, if only he'll sign his soul over to her. (She's the devil, you see.) The loss of his soul seems like only a very distant threat, however, because first he'll get seven chances to wish his life into exactly what he wants it to be. Tellingly, she gives him a little red device with a keypad, where he'll type 6-6-6 if the wish isn't working out like he wanted it to. Needless to say, that's what happens -- again and again and again -- as the devil twists the semantics of his requests in ways where the actual phrasing of the wish is honored, but the spirit of the wish is not. Hijinx ensue.

I didn't see the original film on which Bedazzled was based, a 1968 movie of the same name directed by Stanley Donan and starring Dudley Moore. The devil is male in that one, but the film has plenty of sex appeal nonetheless in the person of Raquel Welch. Now I feel like I probably should see it, since I've seen the remake twice.

I did find it a bit slow at the beginning. It seemed like it was taking forever to get Fraser into his first wish, and the minutes passed extra slowly as I wondered if my wife's patience was being tried. But I felt pretty satisfied when the movie finally gets there and starts to take off. "Take off" is a bit of an exaggeration -- I don't want to oversell it. But it does give Fraser the opportunity to strut his stuff as he steps into a variety of different alternate lives that are in some way an interpretation of one of his wishes. Check out a quick display of them here:


I don't tend to think of Fraser as someone with range -- he's just generically wacky in every film. But this film, at least, gives him the chance to show the range of his wackiness. As a Columbian drug dealer, he does the whole five- to ten-minute scene in energetic Spanish. As the world's most sensitive person, he's blubbery and earnest. As a basketball player, he's macho, dumb, huge and peroxide blond. Each of these scenes (and the few other personalities that follow) showcase not only acting talent, but a smart production design, as Fraser looks radically different in each one. (In fact, special props to the visual effects department in making his basketball player look gargantuan compared to the other actors.)

Fraser gets good support from O'Connor and Hurley, particularly Hurley, who has playful fun with the devil role. She also gets to make exactly 18 costume changes in the movie, including pretty much every hot-girl Halloween costume in the store: sexy nurse, sexy meter maid, sexy attorney, sexy cop, sexy school teacher and sexy angel. When she's not a specific one of those, well, I guess she's just sexy model. Anyway, she shows good confidence and is more than just a pretty face.

The other supporting actors -- Orlando Jones, Paul Adelstein, Tobby Huss and Miriam Shor -- also get off some good lines as they appear in each one of Fraser's new alternate lives. Huss and Jones are particularly funny in their scene as basketball announcers. There's even an unobtrusive "be careful what you wish for" message mixed in there for good measure.

I picked the wrong day to debut this feature, because now I've gotten really busy, and had to write this in multiple sittings. So before it gets any more disjointed, let me just close it off and turn my attention to my other duties.

Double Jeopardy verdict, Bedazzled: A light and enjoyable way to spend a Friday night, even if you haven't been sitting in doctor's offices all day.

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Too Shebulba

It was exactly five weeks between when I received Youth Without Youth in the mail and when we finally watched it on Saturday.

My wife and I both knew the critics had railed against Francis Ford Coppola's movie. But the reason I originally moved it to the top of my queue was that she had expressed some interest in seeing it. Since that made two of us, I knew it would get watched, eventually. Had I had my way, we would have watched it weeks ago -- I like to keep my mail rentals moving back and forth. She, on the other hand, was daunted not only by the expectation of poor quality, but by the running time. It was only just over two hours, but she had it in her head that it was pushing three.

It may just as well have been. When the credits started rolling, I turned to her and said, "You know, that film kind of reminded me of--"

"Shebulba?" she finished.

There's a reason we're married.

"Shebulba" is our nickname for Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain. In The Fountain, Hugh Jackman's character is floating through space on a crop of land enclosed in a bubble, which is dominated by a giant tree. We're never told quite what to make of this tree, but we know Jackman's character is immortal, because we see him as a conquistador, as a doctor fighting to cure his sick wife (Rachel Weisz) in present day, and presumably in the future, when it's possible that the only parts of Earth that remain are him and this tree, floating through space for eternity. At several points, he looks up at the tree, or outer space, or something, and reverentially whispers the following word: "Shebulba." Who or what Shebulba is, we also don't know.

Youth Without Youth was definitely a little too Shebulba.

(Some minor spoilers ahead.)

There's no immortal man or immortal tree, but a 70-year-old Dominic Matei (Tim Roth) does rejuvenate into a man half his age after being struck by a bolt of lightning that basically incinerates his body. Instead of dying, he's suddenly younger, he grows a new set of teeth, and he has the ability to absorb all the knowledge of a book just by passing his hand over it. This is to say nothing of his new ability with languages and his unexplained telekinetic powers. Oh, and did we mention that he now has a doppleganger who may or may not be imaginary? But the comparison with The Fountain really kicks into gear when Dominic's decades-spanning soulmate is introduced. We learn at the start that he loves someone named Laura, and later he meets her -- though she's now known as Veronica (Alexandra Maria Lara) -- just before she's about to be struck by lightning herself. The lightning doesn't have the same effect on her -- instead, it makes her think she's someone living in ancient India, who can speak only Sanskrit. She eventually shakes herself free of the split personality, but only temporarily. Each night she awakens speaking a more and more ancient language. It's an epic love story, these lightning strike victims with their very different powers.

If that last paragraph left you wondering what the hell Coppola was thinking, you're not the only one. (He didn't actually make up the story -- the movie was adapted from a story by Romanian author Mircea Eliade.) I actually found this one more watchable than The Fountain, but not by much.

So it got me thinking which other films are way too Shebulba for their own good. Without any further ado:

1) Solaris (2002, Stephen Soderbergh). Ponderous existential sci-fi movie in which characters may or may not actually be there, and people may or may not actually be having the experiences they may or may not actually be having. You heard me right. I don't know if Andrei Trakovsky's 1972 original was any more clear, nor whether it was even supposed to be. I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who worship Solaris, but I'm not one of them.

2) Mulholland Drive (2001, David Lynch). I'm not sure if it's fair to call David Lynch's films "Shebulba," exactly -- he's got a whole brand of weirdness going on that's unique to himself. But Mulholland Drive deserves the designation if any of his films do, though I may be saying that primarily because the whispered word "Shebulba" reminds me of the whispered word "Silencio" that factors into the ponderous third act of Mulholland Drive. I understand The Lost Highway is pretty Shebulba, but I haven't seen it so I can't attest to that personally.

3) The Tree of Life (2010, Terrence Malick). Okay, I'm cheating a little here. This movie has not even come out yet, so I can't possibly know what kind of movie it is. However, it does involve an actual Shebulba in the title -- a life-giving tree, an immortal tree, something like that. And having seen a couple Malick films and written quite a bit about Malick recently, I'm convinced that he's got a Shebulba in him, even if his films so far have had the kind of surface-level realism that should logically remove them from the Shebulba realm.

4) Lady in the Water (2006, M. Night Shyamalan). There are no time jumps or alternate layers of reality in this movie, but all the discussion of narfs and scrunts and other mythological creatures takes this movie into the same la-la-land of inscrutable ambitiousness as Shebulba. Plus, I like any opportunity I get to dump on this movie, which I consider one of the worst I've ever seen.

A couple films I love despite their potential Shebulbosity: The Cell, Donnie Darko

I'm sure there are more, but all this thinking about Shebulba makes my head hurt too much for a Monday morning. I'd love to hear of any Shebulba films you might like to add.

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Third World's the charm

It may have taken me 23 days, but I've finally finished watching Terrence Malick's The New World, one of the most beloved films on the film blogosphere.

At the time it came out in 2005, I dismissed it as just another hyper-poetic exercise by one of cinema's true hermits. The man took 20 years between films from 1978 to 1998, and when he returned, it was in the form of The Thin Red Line -- which I considered pretentious claptrap up until a few weeks ago, when I revisited and found it to be slightly less pretentious claptrap.

But then I saw a couple different best of the 2000's lists on the blogosphere that had The New World listed at or near the top of the entire decade, so I knew I had to prioritize a viewing. It worked out quite well to watch it in conjunction with my revisitation of The Thin Red Line, to put me in that special Malick mood.

Except it didn't quite. About an hour into the movie, the DVD started acting up. Sometimes it would freeze, sometimes it would digitize away into little blocks. You could push through these problem patches by using the fast forward button ... except when you couldn't. I'd get stuck and try to move a whole chapter ahead, but that wasn't working either. I wiped the disc off, but found that it had a million little scratches that weren't going to come out through a buffing. It was a compromised product.

So I returned The New World to the library and placed it near the top of my Blockbuster queue, in order to continue my viewing. When that disc came, it took me a couple more days to finally insert it into the DVD player, at which point, the player wasn't even recognizing there was a disc in there. When I removed the disc, I saw that the thing was damn near cracked in half, completely unplayable. I reported the damaged condition of the DVD to Blockbuster, who apologized for the error and notified me that another New World disc -- which would be my third in total -- was on its way. You could imagine at this point I was doubtful I'd ever actually see the movie.

But the third New World disc was pristine, and I put it in the player on Friday night. Unfortunately, the film's beautiful, soothing imagery has a tendency to put you to sleep if you're watching it too late at night, which once again I was. (I'd had a couple short naps during my first attempted viewing, where I'd pause, sleep for 20 minutes, then start again.) And given that I was three weeks gone from the start of the movie at this point, I had to refresh myself a little bit on where I'd left off. After my refresher, the clock had passed midnight, so I probably gained only about 20-30 minutes of new ground on it before I was once again claimed by sleep.

Tonight, with only one more short nap, I finished.

My thoughts?

Well, I don't think Terrence Malick will ever be 100% my cup of tea, but I do see what the other film bloggers admire about this film. In terms of pure physical beauty in the cinematography and the period recreation, it's up there with any film I've seen. But I must admit that the character voiceovers do verge on the excessive for me, as they do in The Thin Red Line. Unlike that film, The New World stays on the right side of the thin line between artsy and fartsy.

And now, to nap for the rest of the night.

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A continuum of similar girls

Is it just me, or is it nearly impossible to tell these three actresses apart?


If you can't, let me help you.

The first one should not be that hard. It's Kristen Stewart, the erstwhile Bella Swan from the Twilight series. She's been around awhile. You would have seen her as long ago as Panic Room, her second feature in 2002, and then in such other places as Into the Wild, Adventureland and The Runaways.

The second is Amber Heard, who I thought was Kristen Stewart when I first saw her. She hasn't been around as long, but she does go as far back as Friday Night Lights in 2004. You may be more familiar with her as Seth Rogen's teenage girlfriend in Pineapple Express or Jesse Eisenberg's zombified neighbor in Zombieland. She was also in this year's The Joneses.

The third is Teresa Palmer, who I thought was Amber Heard when I first saw her. In fact, I thought she was Amber Heard until about 15 minutes ago. I'd seen an ad for The Sorcerer's Apprentice, in which she appears, and I was sure it was Heard. Nope. You may not remember Palmer from anything, though she was also in December Boys, The Grudge 2 and Bedtime Stories.

For my money, they all look a little bit like Avril Lavigne as well:


But not as much as they look like each other. Besides, Lavigne has only been in one movie: Fast Food Nation.

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Toys, Duplasses: Make me smile

I'm pretty glum today.

You probably know by now that I've been heavily invested in the basketball playoffs, and last night, that heavy investment ended in heartache: My Boston Celtics lost a 13-point third quarter lead, and the NBA Finals, to the hated Los Angeles Lakers. Who, unfortunately, reside in the same city as I do, meaning their fans are all around me. At least my neighborhood last night was relatively quiet -- just a few fireworks. No cars were burned or newsstands upended.

Strangely, I slept better after last night's Game 7 than I did after Game 6. I guess the brain has no choice but to reach some state of resolution after the series is over. No unknowns left to fear, anyway -- no worst possible outcomes still lying ahead. The only unknowns now are which players and coaches will be back, but that won't take shape for another couple weeks, at which point I'll have some much-needed distance from it.

So yeah, I'm glum. Even though I went with my wife to her doctor's appointment, and got a really cute picture of my 28-week-old baby in her stomach, I'm still a bit glum. It'll take some time.

So, Toy Story 3 and Cyrus couldn't come along soon enough. I need to laugh this weekend.

Everyone knows that Toy Story 3 is coming out today. The only reason we probably haven't seen more ads on TV is this: Not only is it Pixar, but it's a Toy Story movie. For both reasons, it sells itself.

But Cyrus is the one we will probably actually see this weekend. It won't be as laugh-out-loud funny as Toy Story 3 has the potential to be, though I should say, you go to a Toy Story movie more to smile than to laugh. Or maybe what I really should say is, Cyrus could be laugh-out-loud funny, but the laughter will be laced with bitterness, and almost certainly at someone's expense. Light, kid-friendly laughter seems like it would be more healing than awkward, cringe-worthy, you're-banging-my-mother laughter.

Then again, I'll take either in a pinch.

For those of you who haven't heard of Cyrus, it's the latest and most mainstream film from writer-directors Mark and Jay Duplass, the former of whom is also an actor, appearing in such films as Humpday and Greenberg. They're two of the biggest names in the mumblecore movement, known for such films as The Puffy Chair and Baghead. What's mumblecore? It's a movement of films using mostly non-professional actors and heavily improvised scripts, which has almost a documentary-style sense of heightened realism. (If those non-professional actors can act worth a damn, that is -- and they usually can.) The movement is starting to encroach into the mainstream more and more, as both Mark Duplass and Baghead's Greta Gerwig appeared in Greenberg. I'm excited to see what Mark and Jay can do with a Judd Apatow-style comedy with four major stars: John C. Reilly as a divorced man still pining after his ex; Catherine Keener as that ex; Marisa Tomei as the new woman he meets; and Jonah Hill as that woman's grown, overprotective son. The naturalism the Duplasses aspire to seems on display in the ads, and though I'm sure there promises to be plenty of broad comedy, I bet it will arise organically from the circumstances.

As for Toy Story 3 ... well, what can I say that hasn't been said? The first two movies are among my top 50 movies of all time, so Toy Story 3 has some pretty big shoes to fill. At first I was unsure if it could do so. The first images I saw of the movie gave me a "more of the same" vibe, the kind of vibe I might get a lot sooner if I saw another movie starring Wall-E or the rat from Ratatouille. But as time has gone on and I've admired the larger-than life outdoor advertisements they've been hanging around town (such as the one you see above), I feel more and more sure that any time spent with the Toy Story gang will be a good time.

And there you have it. The corner of my mouth went up a little bit just thinking about it.

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