Tag Archives: surprise cameos

Trainwreck

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Before watching Trainwreck, I did not know who Amy Schumer was (though Jay assures me I have watched some of her standup). Now, after watching Trainwreck on Saturday, we are binge watching all three seasons of Inside Amy Schumer, her Comedy Central show. I feel like the fact we wanted to see more is a ringing endorsement of Ms. Schumer’s brand of comedy, and thus an endorsement of this movie. Because she carries this movie and she is more than up to the task.

She’s not alone though.  There are lots of really good performances here.  Especially LeBron James.  Now as you may know, LeBron is on our shit list because he decided to skip last year’s Cleveland/OKC matchup that happened to be my birthday present (ironically because of a sore knee).  So this praise is very grudgingly given, but his portrayal of himself is probably the second funniest character in the movie.  I wish he had been given more screen time.

Also hilarious is John Cena as Amy’s sort-of boyfriend.  His movie theatre confrontation is probably the funniest scene in the movie.  There are certainly other funny parts but as Jay reminded me, Judd Apatow seems to focus on drawing out funny character stuff rather than trying to cram a scene full of laughs.  And I think that works here.

The only thing that doesn’t work is Amy’s love for Bill Hader’s sports doctor.  We never really see why he’s so awesome, which is a shame.  Especially because it seems the reason we don’t see/feel the connection between the leads is that Bill Hader is so restrained.  He seems to be actually acting, which I kind of feel bad criticizing him for.  It’s not that he’s bad, not at all, but it feels off when John Cena and LeBron James are making me laugh more than Bill Hader.

That’s really my only complaint about the movie.  Trainwreck is not quite great but it’s very good.  It’s been an excellent summer movie season and this is one of the best comedies so far (right up there for me with Spy and Inside Out).  That’s why Trainwreck gets a score of eight athlete cameos out of ten.

 

Entourage

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Sean

Matt and I took in a screening of Entourage on Monday. Full disclosure: I’ve never watched the show, not even once. So I went in basically cold, knowing just the basic premise. Fortunately, the writers had anticipated people like me (or possibly the premise was also the entire plot for the eight seasons the show ran). Either way, the movie jumped right into things and didn’t leave me behind.

it seems very fun to be a celebrity, and possibly even more fun to be in a celebrity’s inner circle. The four guys are inseparable and each of them gets about equal screen time as far as I can figure it. Vince, the actual star, certainly doesn’t get more screen time than his bros, both semi-biological and adopted, which is surprising in a way since the plot revolves around a movie that Vince is both starring in and directing. But it makes sense after I realized that the whole point of the movie, and presumably the show, is the relationship between these guys. That they are on this ride together even though only one is driving the car (which is a poor metaphor because apparently Turtle started out as Vince’s driver and seems to still fill that role despite also being a tequila baron).

By the looks of things, the boys had a fun time making this movie. It may just have been a good excuse to drive expensive cars and rent expensive houses and party with naked women on expensive boats, but isn’t that what being a celebrity is all about? Fortunately, their fun is infectious and I enjoyed tagging along. Entourage is a very entertaining movie and is the next best thing to having a famous friend. It gets a rating of eight extremely brief celebrity cameos out of ten.

Matt

This being his introduction to the glamorous world of Entourage, I was looking forward to hearing Sean’s take on the movie. It mostly hit the ground running but worked in a Piers Morgan segment early on that cleverly brought new recruits up to speed while dropping in-jokes for the fans.

This may not have been my initiation but I can hardly call myself a fan. I only binge-watched until the end of the third season. Lucky for me, not much seems to have changed in the last five seasons except that Ari is now somehow the head of a major studio and Turtle has lost a lot of weight.

How you feel about Entourage the movie probably depends on how you feel about Entourage the series. Watching the film at the screening last night was a lot like watching three back-to-back episodes of the show with a roomful of fans and Sean. They didn’t even skip the theme song. I will say that I laughed more consistently last night than I did watching the first three seasons of the show and that I can’t imagine a fan being disappointed. They’ll definitely get their money’s worth with a couple dozen or more celebrity cameos, even if only about half of them are used as effectively as they could be.

Mostly though, i couldn’t have said it any better than Sean. It’s the bond between these four guys and the agent that bet everything on them that makes this franchise work. It ties together all the otherwise seemingly random gags, cameos, and subplots into a coherent story and a very enjoyable movie.

Top Five

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Chris Rock plays a famous comedian who’s looking to trying to break away from his cheesy top_five_xlgmovie franchise and become a ‘serious actor’ with a film about a Haitian slave rebellion. On the day it opens, the Times sends him a reporter (Rosario Dawson) for an in-depth interview, and the two spend the day together, high-tailing it around New York City, stopping in for radio interviews, shopping for his bachelor party (he’s about to wed a reality starlet, played by Gabrielle Union), and visiting friends and relatives.

The cast is packed with Chris Rock cronies and they add to this semi-autobiographical vibe that permeates the movie and really makes it a thing of beauty. It allows him to do what he does best: he gets to weave his stand-up into the plot, sometimes cracking pretty vulgar, other times surprisingly sweet, riffing on other celebrities and exploring his thoughts on fame.

He challenges the people around him to make lists – the top 5 rappers seems to repeat itself as a kind of test he administers. So now I’m asking you, what’s yours?

The Giver

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I read this book so enthusiastically, savouring each word, until the last few pages dumped me abruptly at the end feeling like I’d been robbed, liked Lowry simply hadn’t known how to deal with her little utopia, and so hadn’t.

When I saw that a movie was being released based on her novel, I was intrigued (Jeff Bridges! Meryl Streep!) but wary.giver

We follow Jonas (Brenton Thwaites) in his 12fth and 13th years. He lives in a community rebuilt after “the ruins” with a goal toward sameness. People’s memory of the past has been erased. They feel no pain but also no emotion.  Everyone is equal. Their lives are governed by strict rules that dictate everything from mealtime and career to partnership and procreation. When it’s Jonas’ turn to be assigned a role by the Chief Elder (Meryl Streep), he is selected to be the Receiver of Memories. Jeff Bridges is the Giver of Memories, and his job is to bear the weight of all mankind’s memories for his community, the good and the bad, and then pass them along to the next generation’s Receiver for safekeeping. The process is intoxicating to young Jonas, who has never felt snow, or known song, or seen joy. The Giver must take things slow, however, because more complex memories like war and vengeance and hatred must also be passed along, and the last time he tried to do this was to his own daughter (stunt-casting goes to: Taylor Swift) and she wasn’t up to the task.

Jonas starts to feel that it isn’t right keeping back all these memories but this is their way of life, and even his own friends and family are not easily convinced.

I find myself attracted to utopian-dystopian fantasy fiction. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood is one of my all-time favourite anythings. The Giver, however, starts out promising only to disappoint, and the movie is no different – well, maybe it’s worse. Meryl Streep seems to be at half strength in this movie, no back story or motivation to give us a clue. Jeff Bridges mumbles through his part. The kids are uninteresting, including the so-called hero. Alexander Skarsgard seems a strange choice as Jonas’ father, doing unspeakable things unquestioningly. Taylor Swift pops up for a minute or two, cringingly, seemingly only as a great white hope to bring tween interest to the movie since it’s unclear who else to market to. Only Katie Holmes is well-cast as an empty, robotic stepford wife

Did I enjoy this movie at all? I apologize. I did not.

 

In a World…

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Carol Solomon (Lake Bell) makes a living (more or less) doing voice work and teaching celebrities to perfect their accents. She’d like to break into her father’s business doing voice-over work for movie trailers, but the industry doesn’t want a female voice. But a huge gap has been left by the death of Don LaFontaine (the real-life king of voice-overs) so she finds herself competing against her childish and jealous father, an industry giant, who champions his smug protegé, up-and-comer Gustav, to revive the “In a world…” work.

This film does a lot of things well, but I really enjoyed watching a woman try to break into a male-dominated industry, and witnessing the different things that need to fall into place in order for it to happen.  Unfortunately, there’s also a lot of back-stabbing and sabotage that goes on as well, some of it by Carol’s own father, a man who believes that there is no place for women in his workplace (and that things were better off when there weren’t women in any workplace, period). world

But this is not some heavy drama about sexism. I mean, first of all, there’s Eva Longoria, as herself, learning how not to sound like “a retarded pirate” (this is her attempt at a Cockney accent). Longoria seems pleasantly game and wins some major not-taking-herself-too-seriously points. Then there’s this: (are you sitting down? you may want to sit down.) DEMITRI MARTIN and NICK OFFERMAN in the same movie. In the same scene! In the same several scenes! I nearly fainted from the awesomeness. They play the good dudes who actually believe in Carol and want to help her succeed.

This movie is Lake Bell’s baby – she wrote it and directed it. She casts this movie like it is her baby, like she knows she has to get everything perfect, and does. She surrounds herself with talent and milks it for every ounce, but she’s no slouch: listen carefully and you’ll hear her own voice-over work sprinkled throughout the film. Girl’s got chops. The script is a lot of fun, there’s a lot of great lines, and great opportunities to showcase herself from every angle.

Watch out for Lake Bell – she’s been popping up in random places over the past few years, but with this effort, she’s truly made herself known.

Lucky Them

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Toni Collette plays Ellie, a music critic who’s assigned to track down her musician ex-boyfriend. He disappeared over a decade ago, just as his career was taking off, and hasn’t been heard of since. She’s clearly still nursing old wounds: she’s a mess, personally and professionally. She has lucky_them_xlgone-night-stands instead of relationships. But now suddenly she has to go ripping off band-aids with the help of an old flame and total creepster (Thomas Haden Church). Church is a cringe-inducing rich prick who’s decided to take up documentary film-making. Collette is an imposter with a veneer so thin even a complete stranger calls her on it between bites of wedding cake.

This movie is what would happen if last year’s mournful, Oscar-nominated Inside Llewyn Davis and Oscar-winning treasure Searching for Sugar Man got together and had a mediocre baby. Well, maybe mediocre’s a bit harsh. I love me some Toni Collette and she does a bang-up job turning this somewhat predictable coming-of-age-l into a relevant, layered coming-of-middle-age tale.  Church allows her to bounce off his deadpan delivery, although she often seems reduced to grimacing when the script fails her.

The movie is purposefully slow. We really get a sense of Ellie’s stagnation as she is given a goal and then proceeds to ignore it for huge chunks of the movie. Instead of road-tripping out to find the ex-boyfriend, we explore relationships and maybe do a little growing up. All in all, this is a nice little indie flick that didn’t do much in theatres but will have a nice second life on Netflix. This baby doesn’t live up to its parents’ standards but when you run out of A material, here’s a nice solid B.