Review: War Dogs (2016)

* * 1/2
Director: Todd Phillips
Starring: Miles Teller, Jonah Hill

When Bertolt Brecht wrote "Mother Courage and Her Children," it was his intention that the main character would be seen in a negative light. She's a war profiteer and he wanted the audience to come away thinking her morally reprehensible. Instead, the audience found her sympathetic. Where he saw a "hyena of the battlefield" making her living off of the suffering of others, they saw a survivor who did what she had to do. He rewrote the play and made her worse, but it did nothing to shake the audience's alignment with her. The European audiences of the 1940s, having endured the relentless upheaval of WWII, saw her as something of a victim of circumstance, someone whose actions might not have been admirable, but whose drive to endure was. In the same vein, some might view the story of David Packouz and Efraim Diveroli less as a story of two people trying to cash in on the chaos of the Iraq War and who, through their participation, bear some moral responsibility for the lives lost and people displaced, and more as a story that glamorizes an element of war by showing how it allowed them to attain all the most desired trappings of Bro culture. War Dogs is a pretty shallow movie that pretty much does exactly what it's trying to criticize, yet it's not without its charms - which is the problem. A story like this shouldn't feel like so much fun.

Review: This Is the End (2013)

* * *
Director: Seth Rogan & Evan Goldberg
Starring: Seth Rogan, Jay Baruchel, James Franco, Jonah Hill, Craig Robinson, Danny McBride

Each of the principal actors of This Is the End have made their share of bad movies, but for every bad movie they've made since, they can at least point to this one in order to regain a little bit of good will. An apocalypse comedy in which everyone plays an exaggerated (I would hope) version of himself, This Is the End plays upon the public personas of its stars and supporting players to great effect, playing into and against what we think we know about the stars based on their movies and public appearances, all while telling a surprisingly potent story about the difficulty of sustaining a friendship as circumstances change and physical distance gives way to psychological distance. Mostly, though, it's just really funny - though it probably could have gotten by with at least one fewer rape joke.

Review: True Story

* *
Director: Rupert Goold
Starring: Jonah Hill, James Franco

True Story opens with the evocative image of a teddy bear being dropped into a suitcase, landing next to the body of a little girl folded up inside. The callousness of the act, of the fact that not only is the girl in the suitcase but that the bear is thrown in, rather than placed, with her, the force of its fall displacing her hair so that strands of it go flying up and over the edge of the suitcase, is stunning. It's a powerful image that the remainder of True Story, a true story based on the memoir of the same name by Michael Finkel, can't live up to. Of course, that might not have been the case if the film had managed to make the actual victims of a truly horrific and, yet sadly commonplace, crime the emotional center of the story, rather than the disgraced writer whose identity was very briefly borrowed by the killer.

Review: 22 Jump Street (2014)

* * *
Director: Phil Lord & Christopher Miller
Starring: Jonah Hill, Channing Tatum

There is no reason at all that 21 Jump Street should have worked the way that it did. At best, it should have been a marginally funny but sort of forgettable way to kill an hour and forty minutes, the sort of movie you watch if it comes on TV and there's nothing else on. Instead it was pretty much awesome, setting a bar for television to film adaptations that is almost impossibly high. Magic happened with the first film, so what were the chances of the follow-up, 22 Jump Street, being anything but an utter disappointment? I don't know what the odds were exactly, but I know that somehow the team behind the franchise has found a way to make lightning strike twice. 22 Jump Street is a great summer movie, an entertainment of the very first order.

Review: The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

* * 1/2
Director: Martin Scorsese
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill

The Roman Empire lives and it is now called Wall Street. Though a satirical account of the rise and fall of stockbroker Jordan Belfort, The Wolf of Wall Street is nevertheless illuminating in terms of the current state of the North American economy - that we haven't collapsed into anarchy is something of a miracle if this story is to be believed. A tale of excess, debauchery, greed, and massive consumption, the film is as loud, as brash, as slick, and as unapologetic as its protagonist but, Jesus God, does it ever feel like it's a million hours long. At just a hair under 3 hours, it's far from being literally the longest movie I've seen all year, but when it comes to characters like the ones portrayed here, a little goes a long way.

Review: Cyrus (2010)

* * *
Director: Jay and Mark Duplass
Starring: John C. Reilly, Marisa Tomei, Jonah Hill

Cyrus is a film that builds itself around an incredible sense of awkwardness. Just when you think it can’t get more awkward or, at the very least, that the film will give you some respite by looking away from the awkwardness, it instead proceeds to the next level and just keeps watching things unfold. Directed by Jay and Mark Duplass, two of the founders of the mumblecore film movement, Cyrus unfolds in a simple, unfussy way and is never afraid to get a little bit weird (or, you know, a lot weird).

Review: Get Him To The Greek (2010)

* * *
Director: Nicholas Stoller
Starring: Jonah Hill, Russell Brand

I don't particularly like Jonah Hill or Russell Brand - I find that a little of either of them goes a long way - which means that, a) it's surprising that I even saw Get Him To The Greek, and, b) it's miraculous that I actually enjoyed it. This Forgetting Sarah Marshall spinoff is funny and more charming than you might expect from a film where a fair bit of the humor is vomit and scatalogically based.

Hill stars as Aaron Green, an intern at a record company run by Sergio Roma (Sean Combs). When Sergio puts him on the spot and challenges him to come up with an idea to generate some revenue for the company, Aaron suggests that they bring rock star Aldous Snow (Brand) to LA to perform at The Greek Theater in celebration of the 10 year anniversary of the live album Aldous recorded there. Sergio is skeptical about the plan because Aldous has quite publicly fallen off the wagon since the release of his last album "African Child," a record so disastrous that it is said to be "the worst thing to happen to Africa since apartheid," but he decides to give it a shot anyway.

Plans are made for the concert and Aaron is sent to London to accompany Aldous to LA and ensure that he arrives on time. Things get off to a bad start when Aldous first delays their departure from London and then takes them on a detour to Las Vegas, where things only get more out of control. Drugs, booze and women are around every corner, presenting stumbling blocks that just might (but, since this is a movie, won't) keep Aaron from coming through and getting Aldous to the show on time.

Written and directed by Nicholas Stoller (Jason Segal gets a writer's credit for developing the characters), the film manages to find a nice balance between lowbrow, raunchy humor and, if not quite highbrow, at least middlebrow, clever humor. The glimpses we get of the music videos by Aldous and his ex-girlfriend Jackie Q. (Rose Byrne) are exagerated enough to be funny yet still seem vaguely plausible, which perhaps says more about the current state of music videos than about this particular film. Get Him To The Greek depends on extreme behavior and extreme characterizations but it manages to do this without making it seem completely unrealistic.

I think the thing that really made this movie work for me is that, at their core, both Aaron and Aldous are basically good guys. They don't always behave like good guys, but the film allows them to be more than caricatures which helps provide the story with a heart and also seems to temper some of the habits both actors have that I personally tend to find annoying. That being said, however, the film is far from perfect and though the screenplay is, for the most part, quite snappy it does start to meander a bit in its final act. All in all, Get Him To The Greek would probably be a better film if it shaved off about twenty minutes and was a little more focused with regards to the ending.

Review: Superbad (2007)

* * *
Director: Greg Motolla
Starring: Michael Cera, Jonah Hill, Christopher Mintz-Plasse

I missed out on Superbad when it first came out, which didn't seem much of a loss to me at the time, given that I'm not really the demographic it's aiming for. Seeing it recently, I was surprised at how different it actually is from how it was marketted. Yes, it's a foul mouthed story about teenage boys who just want to get laid, but it's also strangely sweet and, of course, very funny.

The heroes of the story are Seth (Jonah Hill) and Evan (Michael Cera) who, not coincidentally, share their names with screenwriters Seth Rogan (who also appears in a supporting role) and Evan Goldberg. High school graduation is looming and both are still virgins - a problem they feel must be solved before they head off to college. Evan has a long standing thing for Becca (Martha MacIsaac), whom Seth hates for reasons explained later in the film, and Seth has his sights set on Jules (Emma Stone), who is throwing a party to which the guys, to their amazement, are invited. They promise to bring plenty of booze, counting on their friend Fogell (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) to help them out once he gets his fake ID, only to discover that he has bought the least convincing fake ID ever.

While Fogell enjoys an adventure of his own with a couple of cops (Seth Rogan and Bill Hader), Evan and Seth's quest for sex turns into a desperate quest for liquor that will hopeful pave the way for sex. Along the way they reach the crisis point in their friendship as the simmering tension over the fact that they'll be going to different colleges but can't admit that they'll miss each other ('cause, you know, they're dudes) starts to chip away at their bond. It's part of the film's charm that the big declarations towards the end occur between the two guys rather than between them and the girls they like.

Part of the reason why Superbad works as well as it does is that it's smartly written. There's a lot of foul language but it's used in a way that seems natural rather than obnoxious and is very keyed into how the novelty of cursing is still fresh enough for teenagers that it can be used to articulate every point. Eventually the desire to punctuate every sentence with "fuck" or "shit" will wear off, but when you're 17/18 it can seem like the most effective tool of expression. I think what's most important about Superbad's use of language is that it never seems to throw cursing into the dialogue simply for the sake of using it, but actually uses it in a way that tells you something about the character it's coming from. Seth and Evan both use a lot of foul language, but if you really listen to them you can hear the differences in the ways that they use it and see how that helps to construct their individual personas.

To get back to my original point about how I'm not the target demographic for this kind of movie, part of the thing that gave me pause about it was lines like: "You know when you hear girls say, 'Man, I was so shit-faced last night, I shouldn't have fucked that guy'? We could be that mistake!" That's a really troubling attitude and any guy whose goal is to be the guy a girl regrets sleeping with because she was too drunk to think better of it is going to have some difficulty in convincing me that he has admirable qualities in addition to these, uh, rapey qualities. Part of what saves Superbad for me is that it goes in the opposite direction in terms of the characters' actions. Evan has the chance to have sex with a very drunk and aggressive Becca, but ultimately declines. He also asks Seth to stop talking smack about her, which is nice because it's so rare in film to see an example of a guy (especially a teenage guy) who wants to have sex with a girl but can still be respectful about her - usually the girl who is the object of sexual desire and the girl worthy of respect are two different characters.

Superbad may not be the most sophisticated of films, but there's definitely more to it than meets the eye. It's a better film than I had expected and it's certainly one of the better examples from the teen sex comedy genre. It's often crude, but it's also got heart and, importantly, a brain.