Month: March 2015

Venemous comes to mind when attempting to describe this jittery new “buddy” comedy with Will Farrell and Kevin Hart. Followed closely by clueless.

A stillborn yarn about a super-wealthy stuffed-shirt, James King (Farrell) who suddenly finds himself sentenced to time in prison, Get Hard is a barrage of hollow sketches sewn together with racism and homophobia. King, seeking to toughen himself, asks Darnell (Hart), the guy who washes his car. King figures if Darnell’s black, he must have spent time in prison.

Then the film goes even further downhill faster than you can say, “I’ll do anything to avoid getting raped in prison.” That two comic actors as talented as Farrell and Hart would stoop so low as to sign on to such a dirt-ball premise is surprising even considering their collective track record for settling for less.

Hart briefly shines when he portrays three different characters in a scene that play-acts what King could be facing in a prison yard. While Hart deftly goes back and forth between black, Hispanic, and gay personas, the bit contrasts harshly in quality with the rest of the film and is a stark reminder that there was little more than a Saturday Night Live-length comedy sketch here. Attempts to inflate it to the size of a film incur wince-producing results at every turn. If it’s not King’s exaggerated, stereotyped ex-girlfriend, it’s her father, (a wasted Craig. T. Nelson), King’s boss at the firm, who drag the proceedings. But they’re a pleasure to watch compared to King when he hits a gay bar to force himself to learn fellatio since Darnell has declared him a failure at self-defense. I’m not making this up.

Just when it’s apparent the film’s three screenwriters have pulled this script out of their ass, King does just that–removing shivs and a gun from his anus before we’re allowed to go home. With jokes like these, who needs a horror movie?

The screenplay isn’t satisfied until it introduces a superfluous quasi-mystery subplot and a subsequent action-movie scene that’s painful to sit through. Oh, wait, there’s Farrell again getting punched by someone and, oh, there’s a quick-edit and his face is still immaculately free of any sign of punishment. Unfortunately the viewer will have no similar protection from this glib dreck.

Not least, when black characters appear in the form of gang members, Get Hard reverts to still more stereotypes. Is any of this funny? A tiny handful of chuckles is about all you’ll get. You’ll probably be too numb to even groan properly. Meanwhile, your IQ could be in danger of dropping a few points if you sit through this film. It’s about as far from a guilty pleasure as watching Ted Cruz declare for the presidency while simultaneously taking glee that he gives himself enough rope to hang his chances.

Stiflingly Insipid Trash Talk ….1 (out of 5) stars

Beginning with a chills-inducing Twilight Zone-esque vignette aboard an airliner and ending with the quintessential disrupted wedding reception, Wild Tales was a deserved Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Film. Superbly directed with a jaundiced eye by Argentinian Damian Szifron, its six separate stories share a penchant for the perverse side of human nature. Overflowing with a cornucopia of black humor, the film is spiked with outbursts of startling if cartoonish violence. I don’t think I’ve had more fun watching a film this year.

Wild Tales takes on road rage, frustration over unfair parking authority practices, revenge at a roadside diner, the corrupt sense of priviledge of the very wealthy, and a newlywed’s strange discovery during a wedding reception of her partner’s infidelity. The common denominator in each story? A character feels grossly victimized by injustice. Yet this movie is about as far from a bleeding heart social drama as a film can get. Szifron, so adept at staging a realistic romp, averts any uneasiness over his possibly having too much fun mocking perfectly reasonable human beings who simply suffer from an overdose of misguided passion.

Each section features a hard-as-nails centerpiece character. A stern music critic, Salgado (Dario Grandinetti) anchors the airline scene–the less about which you know going into the movie the better. Next is the elderly diner cook (Rita Cortese) who pushes a revenge-seeking yet cautious waitress (Julietta Zylberberg) to transform her disgust with a victimizer from her past into grotesque action. In the bizarre chain of events (details of which I’ll also refrain from revealing) on a lonely highway emerges another tough customer (Walter Donado) who is totally off the wall yet consistently credible. Characters in Wild Tales come to find themselves in situations where seemingly innocent events suddenly give them far more than they bargained for. In the next story an obsessive character (veteran actor Ricard Darin) with anger issues goes up against surly public servants enforcing usurious towing fees. He seems to unravel, even ends up losing his job and wife, yet somehow finds a reservoir of special nastiness to fight off ostensibly unbeatable foes. Similarly, when a bride (Erica Rivas) discovers at her wedding reception that one of her female guests was indeed her husband’s mistress, her reactions and the resultant chaos produce both surprise and laughter, and, also, a reluctant identification with her razor-sharp zeal for payback.

Is Szifron finally conceding his aloof stance from all this degradation in the segment where a wealthy man (Oscar Martinez) tries to buy his way out of ruin and disgrace after his son is involved in a hit-and-run accident? In this one tale where humor is conspicuously absent, greed trumps itself with several twists that produce an eerily serious, ultimately sick feeling that humanity’s worse impulses are indeed even far worse than ever imagined. The scene soberingly frames in a different light the rest of the film’s outrageous hilarity. For a moment….Yet the wedding scene is so flat-out depraved and ironically life-reaffirming that Wild Tales ends on a note that perhaps redeems us humans after all.

Horrible and Hilarious Stories From The Dark Side of Human Nature…4.5 (out of 5) stars

Marty Jackitansky is hardly a character who elicits empathy. I found his nihilism amusing but also wouldn’t have minded a bit if someone punched him in the face. To say he lacks ambition is to say Freddy Krueger lacks menace. Oh, by the way, there’s a running theme in Buzzard where Marty (Joshua Burge) not only occasionally dons a Krueger-mask, but he also designs a glove claw replete with Krueger-like fingernail blades. Marty’s violent streak is more of a sneaky one than a blatant one. He simply doesn’t care about anything enough to even get angry that often. He’s also a small-time con artist.

He insists on closing a small checking account and re-opening it to save $50 and seems to take delight (it’s hard to tell if this guy really enjoys anything at all) in insisting that any rules be waived that would prohibit him from doing so. He spends time haggling with telephone customer service reps to get things like free pizza. Then, in the first of increasingly implausible shenanigans, he routinely orders supplies for his mortgage company employer only to steal them and return them to an unsuspecting or uncaring sales clerk. When he is assigned to find and call the owners of undeliverable small-amount refund checks, he begins signing them over to himself. This guy is dumb (he had no idea what endorsing a check meant until his mom suggested he do so,with a check she sent him that was accidentally made out to her) but those who enable him are even more clueless.

Yet there’s more going in with Buzzard than the literally improbable scams. A sense of the absurd seeps in. After I was pissed off at this film’s inanity at its outset, about a half-hour in I burst out laughing. Marty is a consistently intriguing character. Director Joel Potrykus pushes the film into a deadpan rendering of a strange sort of social symbolism. He’s also his own worst enemy. Potrykus appears onscreen as Derek, Marty’s office co-worker and foil for yet more of Marty’s anti-social behavior. Derek is an eccentric nerd who prides himself on his “party zone” in the basement of the home that he shares with his ailing, offscreen dad. The film’s momentum is nearly toppled when paranoid Marty takes refuge from his work crimes in Derek’s basement. Two grown men play games such as seeing how many tossed Bugles can be ingested. They generally bicker, and dare each other. Meanwhile, Potrykus sees how many blackout fades he can amass.

The film finally gets out of the basement when Marty, on a dare from Derek, tries to con a sales clerk into accepting one of the bad checks, and is himself ripped off for a $5 quick-change scam by the clerk. Marty freaks out and before the cops can come, he’s off to nearby Detroit splurging with nearly the last of his money on a $180 hotel room. With the last of his cash (until he cashes a few more of the checks, which never seem to run out) he orders “$20 worth of spaghetti with chips.” In a long, Warholian take he devours the spaghetti with much of it running onto the bed sheets.

Despite it’s hinting at a topical subtext, Buzzard is more ironic stupidity than a political statement, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Loathsome characters with inexplicable charisma have a long tradition in cinema. Characters we love to hate but have something that holds our attention can save a film that would otherwise go flat. Buzzard could have been much more if it removed some of its flab, but as is, it’s a challenging vision of hopeless destitution–both of the pocketbook and the soul.

Low Energy Sociopath and his Lowball Scams Equal Highbrow Malevolence….3.5 out of 5) stars