Sidelined: MASCOTS

Christopher Guest’s Mascots introduces us to plucky weirdos driven to get in big foam costumes and wiggle around to delight and excite a crowd. There’s a husband/wife team (Zach Woods and Sarah Baker) who play a turtle and an octopus for a low-rent baseball team, a chipper Brit hedgehog for a soccer team (Tom Bennett), a loopy arts’ college armadillo (Parker Posey), a football teams’ oversized plumber (Christopher Moynihan), and a grouchy Irishman (Chris O’Dowd) who dresses as a giant fist for hockey games. They’re all driven to find success, powering forward with boundless positivity and love of the game in the pursuit of a silly dream: the grand prize at an annual mascot convention. If this sounds like it’s falling into Guest’s formula, you’re correct. It’s another of his mockumentaries involving an affectionately teased subculture. But unlike his great earlier comedies and their targets, Waiting for Guffman’s community theater, Best in Show’s dog competition, and A Might Wind’s folk music revival, Mascots lacks crucial specificity. Trying too hard to whip up eccentricities, it’s a flat, dull attempt at resuscitating a form that’s past its sell-by date.

Superficially, Mascots has everything that made earlier Christopher Guest movies great. It has the subculture. It has the large ensemble of funny people, including many of the performers who populated Guest’s earlier works and some welcome additions. (Present and accounted for are Jennifer Coolidge, John Michael Higgins, Michael Hitchcock, Fred Willard, Bob Balaban, Jane Lynch, Ed Begley, Jr., and others.) It has the bright, flat mockumentary style allowing for the humor to loosely arrive at tossed-off lines. It’s has the casually ridiculous spoken with only a hint of bemusement and straight-faced silliness unfolding for an unemphatic camera. It’s agreeable. But, wow, is it not funny. Maybe it rises to the level of gently amusing from time to time, and the whole picture never quite tanks into something totally contemptible, but that’s certainly a far cry from the best Guest can do. This is his first movie in a decade, and the problem is partly what happened to the comedy landscape while he was away.

Firstly, the mainstream mockumentary style was more refreshing and novel when he took the form from the classic This is Spinal Tap, in which he co-starred, and applied it to his own silly trilogy. With Guffman and the rest, there was the spark of invention in seeing big, funny ensembles improvise their way to hilarious, endlessly quotable dialogue in scenes assembled with verite deadpan and plot pushed along by interviews with the characters. Now, after two versions of The Office, Parks & Rec, Modern Family, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping and so on and so on, the style has been wrung out. Add to it Mascot’s half-heartedness with which it deploys the gimmick – with many scenes including cuts to impossible camera angles – and it just feels tired. Besides, at least those other mockumentaries were plausibly exaggerated looks at actual groups. The extrapolated and invented mascots and their rivalries and competitions here simply isn’t a culture with much connection to the real world. It’s not a parody of a real group of people; it’s simply goofing around based on a sliver of recognizable interest. (And if you think the plot is overfamiliar diminishing returns, wait’ll you see how Guest revives his memorable Corky St. Clair to flatlining results.)

Secondly, the improv style has also come to dominate the comedy film scene. From the Apatow productions – which expand their runtimes with long, loose scenes of characters cracking each other up – to every comedy that pauses its action for punchline roulettes in which the cast takes turns throwing out insults. (These have long stopped seeming like scenes and are more a matter of spitting a bunch of possible jokes and hoping one lands hard enough to excuse the rest. It’s coverage, not choices.) The shaggy scenes in which talented people find their way to a naturally funny bantering chemistry is no longer unfamiliar territory. And when it’s handled so carelessly as it is with Mascots it just feels sad. As a big fan of his earlier work, seeing Guest’s formula returning in such a diminished state is dispiriting. Sure, there are fleeting moments of good humor – like a hotel with a “John Wayne suite” downgrading a disappointed guest to the “Slim Pickens” – but there’s otherwise a desperation in scenes devoid of interest and missing laughs. I smiled a few times, chuckled a few more, but was otherwise thoroughly bummed out by how pale an echo of old favorites it is. Compared to other modern comedies, at least it’s not unendurable or ugly. It’s watchable. But the dead air is deafening.

Same Old Story: ST. VINCENT

Over at Forbes, Scott Mendelson wrote that St. Vincent, the new Bill Murray/Melissa McCarthy film, “could have been written in a quirky indie comedy Mad Libs book.” That’s precisely the reason why I was set to ignore it. I went to see it last weekend and paid good money to do so, but the experience left me completely empty. There are a few sweet touches to the performances, but I could barely hear them over the clunks and clanks of the plot machinery.

It’s a movie about a cranky old man (Murray) whose quiet life of sleeping, gambling, and drinking is interrupted by new neighbors, a single mom (McCarthy) and her precocious ten-year-old son (newcomer Jaeden Lieberher) he reluctantly agrees to babysit after school. Reading that sentence, anyone who has seen any comedy-tinged indie-adjacent drama knows that Murray’s crusty exterior will soften enough to let his warm heart through, McCarthy’s harried mom will find a new support system, and the kid will learn life lessons from an unlikely source.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with telling familiar stories, but writer-director Theodore Melfi brings absolutely nothing to latch onto. It’s not even a tired story told with fresh perspective or confident familiarity. It’s just exactly what you think it’ll be every single step of the way. Like the Ancient Greek poet Hesiod said, “A bad neighbor is a misfortune, as much as a good one is a great blessing.” And sometimes you can find both in the same neighbor, especially if you have someone like Murray who can play up the sarcastic grump as well as the likable schlub with a tragic backstory.

The performances are all fine across the board, including the stacked supporting cast with the likes of Naomi Watts, Chris O’Dowd, and Terrence Howard. They’re good, and Murray has his charming curmudgeon act down as perfectly as McCarthy has instant audience sympathy. Then there’s young Lieberher, who has the right amount of believable intelligence behind his eyes to sell even the most specious precocious moments. But the material is just not up to the level of the performers, who simply can’t make something out of nothing. It’s not that anything goes too terribly wrong with the film. But nothing was engaging or interesting, either. It’s agreeable, but empty, like Melfi’s obvious plot beats, simple sitcom staging, and bright cinematography.

I was all set to let St. Vincent pass uncommented upon by me, but the box office held up surprisingly well in its second week. It’s starting to smell like a modest performer, the kind of warm, undemanding, unsurprising movie that three weeks from now the guy in your office who almost never sees movies and doesn’t particularly like them anyway tells you he saw and wasn’t it something special? I suppose it is a totally competent version of this kind of movie. The performances are good and the final notes of redemption, complete with the typical big school event and a grown-up running in at the last second to show off misty eyes and a solemn nod of support, do ring with a certain earned pleasant feeling that can yank on audience heartstrings. But it’ll be far more entertaining the fewer movies you’ve seen.

Small Stuff: EPIC

The creators of the computer animated fantasy Epic created an intriguing fantasy world and failed to have anything interesting happen in it. The film imagines a society of bug-sized people living in the forest locked in a battle between the forces of growth and the armies of decay. Growth is represented by plant people, basically human shaped beings with toadstool heads or leafy limbs, who are protected by the brave Leafmen soldiers and bow to their beautiful forest queen (voiced by Beyoncé, pop royalty). Decay is represented by snarling hordes of grey-skinned creepers led into battle by their leader (Christoph Waltz). This potentially interesting world is the staging ground for simple fantasy storytelling at its most basic and predictable. It has a plot in which one-dimensional characters fight over a magical gee-gaw for some time and then it all ends in a big battle. Reluctant heroes find their destiny, outsiders become insiders, and good defeats evil. It’s all very tired.

I would imagine this is what a hypothetical American remake of a Miyazaki film would look like. It has a young girl for a protagonist (Amanda Seyfried), a normal human who is suddenly shrunk down to Leafman size and gets involved in the magical conflict. It has ecological themes that are occasionally prone to acknowledging that growth and decay need to be held in balance. It has a casual beauty to its imagined tiny world in which plants can be controlled with a wave of the forest queen’s hand. And yet, what seems so promising about all of the above is ground into a homogenized bore. A potentially lovely protagonist is turned into nothing more than honorary buddy to a stoic warrior (Colin Farrell) and token love interest to the warrior’s protégé (Josh Hutcherson). The environmental message is reducible to a good versus evil bumper sticker instead of recognition of nature’s natural order. And the animation, though technically proficient, is blandly obvious and overfamiliar.

Rather than take advantage of the potential in the world it creates, a world borrowed from a book by William Joyce, who has his name all over the credits (he’s co-writer, producer, and production designer), it simply coasts on formula. Indeed, the bulk of the imagination seems to have fallen to the casting, which finds surprisingly weird choices of voices to fill the supporting roles. Distinctive sounding comedians Aziz Ansari and Chris O’Dowd show up as comic relief slugs. (I found them more of a distraction, but maybe little kids will like them.) Rapper Pitbull plays a thug of a frog, an amphibian who for some reason sports a suit coat. Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler plays a shaman caterpillar named Nim Galuu (I just had to give you the name) who is so much a showman I thought for sure he was a charlatan. Not so, though. He’s just more weirdly comic support for the otherwise humorlessly serious rehashing of basic fantasy plot points.

In yet another missed opportunity, what with Beyoncé and Tyler and, okay, Pitbull in the cast, the film doesn’t even give us a good song to hum on the way out of the theater. In the end, there’s simply nothing to remember the movie by at all. Directed by Chris Wedge and produced by Blue Sky, the man and the company behind the largely forgettable and yet wildly successful Ice Age movies, I suppose I’m glad they’re trying something different. This isn’t just another lazily formulaic, pop-culture referencing, manic kids’ flick. Instead, it’s a lazily formulaic, mildly serious, boring kids’ flick. I certainly didn’t hate it. The colors are soothing, the motion smooth, and the comfortingly familiar structure has a lulling quality to it. All it lacks is a reason to care.

Scenes from a Marriage: THIS IS 40

Audiences first met Pete and Debbie (Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann) in Judd Apatow’s hit 2007 comedy Knocked Up. They were the harried couple in their mid-30s with two young kids, a family that was both a source of hope and a cautionary tale to the film’s leads, expectant parents played by Seth Rogen and Katherine Heigl. Pete and Debbie were in some ways the best parts of that movie, memorable and with some exaggerated truth about them. You might remember Pete warning, “Marriage is like a tense, unfunny version of Everybody Loves Raymond. Only it doesn't last 22 minutes. It lasts forever.” Now Apatow has plucked these characters from his earlier hit to create a spin-off with This is 40, a movie that proves Pete’s line about marriage correct. This is a sort of epic, R-rated sitcom episode, right down to the sunny bland visual sense, unfunny in large patches and lasting seemingly forever. It’s a shaggy, uneven film with some small, incidental pleasures that from time to time nearly make up for the production’s overarching solipsism.

The film takes place in the days before Pete and Debbie’s fortieth birthdays, a fine hook on which to hang a plot of personal reflection perched on the precipice of potential midlife crises exacerbated by pressures from outside the marriage. In true sitcom fashion, each half of this couple is hiding or minimizing important information from the other. Pete, when he’s not secretly scarfing cupcakes, has been giving money to his freeloading dad (Albert Brooks), which couldn’t be more inconvenient since his indie record label is on the brink of collapse and he’s missed a few mortgage payments. Debbie is also having trouble with her dad, an aloof, awkward, distant parent (John Lithgow), and money problems that need her to find out which one of her employees (either Megan Fox or Charlene Yi) is stealing from her boutique clothing store.

These are the main threads of anxiety that run through the picture, which are certainly fine impetuses for stress. It’s a shame that the film follows its characters right down a tunnel of self-absorption, with two characters locked in marital conflict in petty, grating ways. They bicker about diets, sex, childrearing, habits, money, vacations, and schedules. Over the course of 134 minutes, the film has plot elements that dead-end or take a cul-de-sac in a loose, rambling structure that allows foibles and miscommunications to escalate, pile up, fade away, come roaring back, shift priorities, and resolve, or not, in sometimes enjoyable fashion. Rudd and Mann are very good performers and are here, but the film is ultimately so repetitive an irritant, circling around the same emotional problems, relationship conflicts, and thematic concerns with increasingly less to say, that in the end I cared about the side characters far more than the couple at the center of it all.

Take, for example, the great Melissa McCarthy, an Oscar nominee last year for her work in the very good comedy Bridesmaids, who here plays a mom of one of Pete and Debbie’s daughter’s classmates. Following a terrible scene in which Debbie, thinking she’s sticking up for her daughter, cruelly berates the poor kid, the parents are called into the principal’s office. In a painfully uncomfortable scene, Debbie simply denies the encounter, which leads to McCarthy getting increasingly agitated. In the end, she’s the one who gets in trouble with the principal, coming across as a crazy person simply because Pete and Debbie present such a united front of deceit. (Well, McCarthy's character's a little crazy too, but still.) Beats me why we’re supposed to like this sort of thing. All this really did was cut off any lingering affection I had for the main characters.

Besides, all the stuff even approaching funny is happening with characters sitting on the sidelines with undernourished subplots, a fact that’s some sort of astonishing in a film this indulgent. For starters, there are Apatow’s daughters, Maude and Iris, playing Pete and Debbie’s daughters through convincing and cute character traits, the older newly adolescent and moody, the younger awfully precocious in a good way. I liked their relationship with each other as well, which leads to the film’s best off-handedly sweet moments. Brooks and Lithgow, as the flailing grandfathers, are fun as well, but never more than when they get a chance to play a scene opposite each other. Fox and Yi are amusing as two diametrically opposite employees, each quick to accuse the other of being the thief. Then there’s the terrific supporting cast filled with people like Chris O’Dowd, Jason Segel, and Lena Dunham, who have a handful of mildly funny lines, if that, each.

The determined self-centered absorption at the film’s center ends up dragging down all of its more admirable qualities, which are scattered about the film with no real central drive or organization. If we are to care about the couple at the middle of it all, it’s made all the more difficult by their selfishness wherein a great deal of their problems would disappear by simply speaking to one another honestly or thinking about the feelings and motivations of others. If we are not suppose to care about this couple, than the least the movie could do is offer up sharper character studies instead of unconvincing types stuck crosswise in three or four Idiot Plots at once. Perhaps Apatow really does believe that marriage is a tense, unfunny, formless, endless sitcom episode, but he didn’t have to go and make one, did he?

Something Blue: BRIDESMAIDS

While the plot is set in motion by the announcement of an upcoming wedding, Bridesmaids is anything but a typical wedding comedy. It focuses not on the couple – the groom, in fact, has barely a line of dialogue in the entire picture – but on female relationships instead. It’s directed by Paul Feig (creator of Freaks and Geeks) and produced by Judd Apatow, but the true auteur here is Kristen Wiig, who co-wrote the film with her friend Annie Mumolo and stars as the maid of honor. This is a sometimes very crude R-rated film in which women are allowed to be raunchy and rowdy, to be both beautiful and silly, even in the same instant. It’s a broad comedy with nicely observed friendships and competitions between these recognizably human characters.

In the film, Wiig plays a woman whose longtime best friend (Maya Rudolph) is happily ready to be married. But, unfortunately, Wiig’s life happens to be falling apart. Closer to 40 than 30, she has a failed business, a dead-end physical relationship with an emotionally distant jerk (Jon Hamm), and two deeply strange roommates (Rebel Wilson and Matt Lucas) who would very much like it if she could either pay the rent or move out. Her mom (the late Jill Clayburgh in her final role) isn’t much help. That last thing Wiig wants to do is move back in with her mother, but that seems to be an increasingly necessary option.

She clings to her relationship with her soon-to-be-married friend, even as it picks up a slight strain under the pressure of the impending ceremony. Weddings can be expensive and are full of situations ripe with the potential for massive social embarrassment. Wiig plays a woman completely unprepared for this stress, especially with the added strain that comes in the form of Rudolph’s new friend (Rose Byrne), a wealthy, glamorous lady for whom party planning and social graces seem to come naturally. It’s clear from the moment that their characters first meet that Wiig and Byrne are on a collision course.

The film walks through the various events leading up to the big day, from an engagement party to dress fittings, the bachelorette party and a wedding shower. At every turn, events get weird. Propriety breaks down. Strange faux pas pop up. Feelings get hurt. Along for the ride are the rest of the bridesmaids, a naïve newlywed (Ellie Kemper) thoroughly dazzled by the concept of a wedding, a weary mother (Wendi McLendon-Covey) who evokes the state of her chaotic household by mentioning that the other day she broke a blanket in half, and a jolly goofball (Melissa McCarthy) who seems to grow ever more cheerfully strange with each passing scene.

This is a comedy with several great scenes, the kind of hilarious moments that provoke squirm-in-the-seat, tears-down-the-face, jagged-breathing laughter. There’s an engagement party toast that becomes a slow build of increasing hilarity, as it becomes an elaborate game of one-upmanship between Wiig and Byrne. There’s a pristine, glowing, high-end dress shop which is the perfect setting for a sequence of unbelievably, hilariously gross mass gastrointestinal crisis (“I need to get off this white carpet!”). There’s a flight to a bachelorette party destination that becomes the perfect enclosed space for a jittery flyer to devolve into crazier and loopier goofiness. These sequences start small and are allowed to build momentum until part of the humor is that the embarrassment is still going on.

Through all of these moments, the very funny cast of scene-stealers keeps stealing scenes out from under each other, but Wiig looms large above them all. She has a rubbery elasticity, not just to her face and physicality, but to her emotional state as well. She’s a normal person with a life that’s falling apart, being slowly driven insane by extra pressures of social situations going horribly awry. It’s very comical, but what makes it all the more funny is that it’s built upon believable character relationships. Wiig and Rudolph have an unforced naturalness that seems to spring from a real, deep friendship. Wiig and Byrne clash in ways that feel specifically truthful in the passive-aggressive ways they play out. (There’s even a sweet romance between Wiig and a lovely cop played by Chris O’Dowd that is surprising in both its effectiveness and its relative lack of screen time).

Unlike terrible recent wedding-themed comedies that are, at least partially, about female friendships, like Bride Wars, which plays like some man’s awfully reductive and retrograde concept of how women relate to one another, Bridesmaids is a comedy by women and benefits from the sparks of truth that drive the story. It’s a bit long, sometimes uneven, but it more than makes up for it by laying out convincing groundwork for sequences of high flying vulgarity that occasionally turns into complete and total comic pleasure.