The Guilt Trip

Posted on December 18, 2012 at 6:00 pm

If you know the title, you know the painfully unfunny movie with this dull slog across America that Barbara Streisand inexplicably selected for her first lead role in 16 years. Seth Rogen plays chemist-turned-cleaning product inventor Andy Brewster, who never returns his mother’s endless calls or responds to her smothering questions but nevertheless impulsively invites her to come with him on a cross-country sales trip in a rental car (she says the SUV is too expensive, even with the coupon she fishes out of her purse).

The inevitable irritations, revelations, accusations, and reconciliations occur, and through it all, Rogen and Streisand almost never change expression. There’s a reason Rogen’s best work in film has been providing voices for animated characters (“Paul” and “Monsters vs. Aliens”). He only has two looks, a squinchy pained look and a dull confused look. Streisand is always an appealing screen presence, but Joyce, her character here, is such a stereotype of a New Jersey Jewish mother that she is stuck in a rut between cutesy-but-annoying and annoying-but-cutesy. Annoying wins.

Joyce is, of course, the queen over the over-share. Which must make Andy the champ at the under-share, holding on to all of the details of his life as though allowing his mother to know anything about him might just regrow the umbilical cord.

Much of the intended humor of the story comes from the various ways that Joyce embarrasses Andy by inquiring too deeply into his life, telling him too much about hers (she confesses that he was named after the love of her life, her first boyfriend who did not love her the way she loved him), and infantilizing him by clucking over him as though he was a toddler, buying him underwear and licking her palm to smooth down his hair before an important meeting. This causes him to act like a petulant teenager, rolling his eyes, shutting her out, and letting her know that he can barely tolerate having her around.

Things that are supposed to be funny, but aren’t: A stripper fixes their car. Joyce brings along the Oprah-endorsed audiobook Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenidies, read by Kristoffer Tabori, about a character with both male and female sexual characteristics. Joyce takes on a challenge to eat a four-pound steak dinner. Joyce picks up a hitch-hiker. Joyce gets drunk and talks to a lot of men in a bar. Joyce is constantly snacking. Andy is embarrassed. Andy feels smothered.

Things that are supposed to be touching, but aren’t: Joyce schools Andy about treating her with respect. Andy begins to appreciate her, especially when he takes her advice and it (highly improbably) works. Also the ending, but I don’t want to give that away to those who still want to see it.

The movie also wastes the talents of top-notch actors like Colin Hanks, Ari Graynor, and Adam Scott, suggesting that there might be some deleted scenes somewhere. It’s fair to assume they are better than what stayed in.

Parents should know that this film includes strippers and some humorous but crude sexual references, drinking and drunkenness, brief scuffle with punches, and some strong language (one f-word, several s-words).

Family discussion: Did the confrontation in the hotel make you see Joyce differently? Why do adults sometimes have trouble talking to their parents? Talk to your family about some of their road trips.

If you like this, try: “Funny Girl” and “What’s Up, Doc?”

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Interview: Will Reiser and Seth Rogen of ’50/50′

Posted on September 30, 2011 at 8:00 am

Will Reiser and Seth Rogen were friends who worked together on “Da Ali G Show,” making fun of everything and everyone, especially the powerful. So, when Reiser got cancer, they took it on in the same spirit. Finding their own experience as survivor and friend very different from the transcendent and saintly stories they had seen in movies and thoroughly annoyed by all the people who asked Reiser if he had a “bucket list,” they decided to write their own movie. It is not a factual re-telling of the real-life story but it is an authentic portrayal of the feelings of young men who have not even figured out how to live when they are confronted with thinking about the possibility of death. Can a man who is not very good at taking care of himself take care of his friend?

Resier’s character is called Adam, and he is a producer at NPR. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays the role. Rogen’s character is named Kyle and is played by Rogen himself.

Reiser and Rogen sat down with a small group of journalists at the Georgetown Ritz hotel to talk about the movie. As he was “going through the ordeal,” Reiser said, he and Rogen talked about how different the experience was from anything they had seen in a movie. But people’s impression was formed by the movies. They’d ask him about “My Life” or “The Bucket List.” “To punch you in the face is the first thing on it,” said Rogen. They wanted to make a movie where the audience does not cry all the way through and the person doesn’t die at the end. “Tonally,” said Rogen, “not the procedures.” Reiser said that in movies the cancer patient “has this great clarity, understands life and who they are, comes to terms with all these issues with family members and dies the next day. For me, it was dysfunctional and crazy and no one really knew what to say and then I got better and was left with this aftermath of all this.” He felt comfortable writing about personal things because of his close relationship with Rogen and Evan Goldberg, even though it was his first screenplay. “I’m so aware of all the laughs are in the movie,” Rogen said. “I’m so not used to having a movie that bums people out for any length of time. So when I’m watching it, I’m like, we’ve got this thing and this thing and then we get a big laugh and get these people out of this.” They agreed that the biggest laugh is when the immediate reaction from Adam’s mother, played by Anjelica Houston, is “I’m moving in.”

“It’s less that the scenes actually happened to me and more that it draws thematically on what happened with relationships,” Reiser told us. “And also the way in which my friends and I used humor to cope. At that time I was very neurotic and worried about everything. Seth would describe me as annoying.” “Used to be,” Seth broke in. “I didn’t have the ability to express what I was feeling and kept everything bottled up inside. That emotional arc — Adam is very much an extension of me and what I went through. The MRIs, those are my real MRIs. And we worked together and he’s my closest friend and what the doctor said, that all really happened.” “The question we asked ourselves was not ‘did this happen,'” Rogen said, “but ‘is this like something that would have happened?” “Did this feel real?” Reiser said. “Are these conversations we could have had?” “There was a scene in an early draft where the character went to talk to a rabbi,”said Rogen. “We’re like, would you do that?” “I have not been back to synagogue since I was bar mitzvahed,” said Reiser. “But the last scene in the movie, changing the dressing, that really happened. He’s very squeamish. A lot of that scene we figured out as we rehearsed it.”

The one role where they insisted on an audition for was Rachael, the girl Adam is dating, played by Bryce Dallas Howard (“The Help”). Adam’s illness puts a serious strain on the relationship. “We knew it would be tricky to be able to play that character and not have her be a bitch. You see that bitchy girlfriend character in so many movies,” said Reiser. “Or a cartoon,” added Rogen. “Not necessarily that you would sympathize with her, but intellectually you would understand what she is going through.” Canadian actor Serge Houde plays Adam’s father, who is struggling with dementia. Joseph Gordon-Levitt came in at the last minute, arrived at 11, stayed up all night talking about the part, and was rehearsing and getting fitted for the costume and wig two days later. “We don’t want a guy doing a Will impression,” said Rogen, “but people say he’s exactly what Will was like at that age. He never asked him behavioral things, but he did ask him about emotional things.”

Rogen and Reiser have different approaches to writing. Reiser begins with the characters. “I really agonize and spend a lot of time my characters and doing a lot of research. If I find myself forcing it, it’s because I don’t know the characters.” But Rogen begins with a scene ideas and things he wants to put in the movie. “We make a lot of lists. Right now we’re working on an apocalypse story, so we made a list: sinkholes, demons, exorcism. And then funny ideas come out of it. Sometimes the characters are the last thing that’s developed.” They said the therapy scenes were among the hardest to write, especially the last one, where we see the growth of the young therapist played by Anna Kendrick and her ability to call Adam out on his behavior and see his situation more clearly. Rogen kept sending it back for rewrites. Reiser said the line in the movie he is proudest of is when she says to Will, “Your mother has a husband she can’t talk to and a son who won’t talk to her.” Rogen laughed. “A lot of moms got a lot of calls after that one.”

They are working together with the “50/50” director, Jonathan Levine, on another movie based on Will’s life, “Jamaica,” about a vacation he took with his grandmother.

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50/50

Posted on September 29, 2011 at 6:00 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for language throughout, sexual content and some drug use
Profanity:	Constant very strong and crude language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, drug use
Violence/ Scariness:	Character has cancer and the movie deals frankly with the diagnosis and treatment
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	September 30, 2011
Amazon.com ASIN:	B004QL7KKC

When Seth Rogen’s friend Will Reiser got a rare form of cancer at age 24, they bolstered their courage by imagining a movie that would be true to their experience. The movies they knew about people with cancer had characters who were (1) older, (2) transformed into saintliness and transcendence and reconciliation, and (3) by the end of the movie — dead. Reiser barely knew how to live as an independent adult. While his contemporaries were worried about dating and figuring out their careers, he was forced to deal with dire, literally life and death decisions.

Resier recovered and wrote this screenplay and Rogen co-produced and played the character based on himself. The result is a movie that captures the surreal nature of being seriously ill, the way you feel as though you appear to be on this planet but in reality you are living somewhere else, Planet Cancer, and the “normal” life around you is at the same time disconcerting and reassuring. But this is also a movie filled with hope, and humor, and inspiration. No one is transformed into saintliness or transcendence but there are lessons learned, losses borne, and hurdles overcome.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMaJET7mD0M

The superb Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Adam, a 27-year-old who works for NPR. We first see him on an early morning run, stopping at a red light even though there are no cars around for miles. This is a guy who follows the rules. And then what he thinks is a backache turns out to be a rare form of cancer, a tumor on his spine, which his doctor describes as “quite fascinating.” He is still in the early stages of a relationship with Rachael (Bryce Dallas Howard), an artist. “I have a drawer? We’re getting so domestic.”

Rachael means well and even likes the idea of herself as a loyal girlfriend, but she also feels trapped by Adam’s illness. Adam’s mother (Anjelica Houston) wants to help, but that threatens Adam’s still-fragile sense of independence. Adam meets with a young grief counselor (Anna Kendrick as Katherine) who is just as new to counseling as he is to grieving.

Kyle (Rogen) is immature and squeamish, but it turns out that he is braver than he or Adam knew. What he lacks in judgment and tact he makes up for in heart and candor. When he hears that Adam’s odds are 50/50, he looks on the bright side with a metaphor drawn from his own priorities: “If you were a casino game, you’d have the best odds!” And then there’s priority number one — Kyle assures Adam that cancer is a real chick magnet.

I don’t know whether that which does not defeat you makes you stronger. But that which does not defeat you does show you how strong you are, and how strong your relationships are, too. Reiser’s insightful script and Gordon-Levitt’s sensitive performance make this one of the year’s most satisfying films.

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Observe and Report

Posted on September 22, 2009 at 7:00 am

I have no affection for this movie but I have to admit to a grudging admiration for its willingness to be awkward, intrusive, and disturbing. A stark contrast to the similarly-themed and similarly plotted Paul Blart Mall Cop of just three months ago, this could easily have been a raunchier take on the same easy targets — mall shops, mall music, mall food, and mall shoppers as a proxy for an America that is soft in the middle and narcotized by things that can be bought by credit cards.

But writer/director Jody Hall (of the cult favorite “The Foot Fist Way”) makes comic movies with so much edge they can give you a paper cut. He does not go for the easy laugh that makes you feel good about yourself, you know, the one that lulls audiences into thinking that their families are not dysfunctional, just quirky, and that their pain makes them authentic and charming. This movie is funny but it is upsetting and very dark.

The overall structure of the movie is very much like the mall cop movie of just three months ago, “Paul Blart.” Both are about would-be policemen who take our their frustration with petty enforcements when they are not mooning over a pretty mall employee.

But where “Paul Blart” was cute and gentle, “Observe and Report” is harsh and bleak. There are no cheery pop songs on the soundtrack to let us know they are just kidding. And there is not much in the way of lessons learned or getting in touch with the life force. Seth Rogen plays Ronnie, a sad, lonely, and angry man who is borderline delusional. He lives with his alcoholic mother. He yearns for Brandi (a fearless Anna Faris), who works at a department store cosmetics counter. He bitterly resents Detective Henderson (Ray Liotta), who is assigned to investigate reports of a flasher who has been harassing women in the parking lot. In a subversion of the usual movie tropes, he decides to ride to the occasion and resolve the flasher case himself as a way of proving himself. But his instincts are skewed and he makes a series of poor judgments and expensive mistakes that are played for comedy.

Rogen, Faris, Celia Weston as Ronnie’s mother, and Michael Pena as his second in command manage the difficult material well, but Hall is more adept as writer (and selector of esoteric songs for the soundtrack) than as a director. The tone may be even more harsh than intended just due to an uncertain control of narrative and character. Hill says he was inspired by Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” and “King of Comedy,” but he needs to do a bit more observing and reporting of his own to make sure he understands what makes those movies work.

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Is there a Date Rape Joke in ‘Observe and Report?’

Posted on April 12, 2009 at 1:00 pm

Observe and Report is a bleak, harsh, disturbing, violent, and transgressive movie about a mall security guard who is often delusional. Billed as a comedy, it has some funny moments, though most of the laughs come from outrageousness rather than wit. While on this site the comments have mostly focused on the nudity in the film (extended and very explicit footage of a male flasher), elsewhere there has been a lot of focus on another issue.
In the midst of a frankly and unabashedly offensive film, one moment has attracted a lot of attention. Ronnie, the movie’s leading character has gone on what he thinks of as a date with Brandi, a woman who works at a department store cosmetic counter at the mall. She thinks of it less as a date than as a free meal, and she quickly gets high on alcohol and his prescription medication. By the time he takes her home, she is close to unconscious. At her doorway, she throws up and he declares passionately, “I accept you” and kisses her. Cut to the two of them having sex. She has apparently passed out. He hesitates, and without moving, she (with strong profanity) urges him to continue. Does this, as some people say, make the sex consensual? Or, given how impaired the character is, can there be such a thing as consent? Is this scene so much more offensive than the rest of the film, which includes extreme, graphic, gratuitous and consequenceless violence and a substance-abusing mother whose biggest laugh line may be when she casually confides that she used to sleep with all her son’s friends in high school?
The members of the Association of Women Film Journalists have an online discussion about whether this scene is a date rape joke. Katey Rich of Cinemablend says:
Is date rape funny? Of course not. But Observe and Report is a movie that gets laughs when its main character hits children, does heavy drugs, makes racist jabs and shoots a harmless man in the chest at point blank range. The date rape scene is just one of many, many awful things that Ronnie does, and the scene is so powerful and, yes, funny, because it’s such a huge moment of crossing the line.
I do worry that people will see the movie and think “Oh, she’s giving consent, it’s fine!” But I don’t think that’s the point- Jody Hill and Seth Rogen are making a satire about American masculinity and specifically about this deranged character, and they don’t support half of what he does.

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