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.

Arcade Fire: WRECK-IT RALPH

Video game aesthetics have borrowed from Hollywood spectacles, which in turn borrowed right back, but Disney’s Wreck-It Ralph, a bright, amusing animated comedy set in a world of game characters in an arcade, is interested in game play on a tad more than a superficial level. In this movie, the games are flexible, imaginatively malleable, and capable of shifting down to their very code. Drawing upon a Toy Story template, the characters in the games of this arcade come to life when the gamers aren’t looking. This allows for a movie of colorful creativity, creating impressive digital backdrops as characters end up zapping themselves out the back of their games, down through the power cords to a large power strip they call Game Central Station, a meeting place from which they can end up in any game they choose.

But just because the characters can jump from game to game doesn’t mean they should. Sure, some of the characters will party it up after closing time, but no one actually interferes with another’s game play. They see their fates as predetermined. At the movie’s start, we meet Wreck-It Ralph (John C. Reilly), a massive, lumbering villain in a Donkey Kong-like game. He’s spent thirty years smashing up an 8-bit high-rise only to watch day after day, level after level, the game’s namesake, Fix-It Felix, Jr. (Jack McBrayer), save the day. Felix gets all the medals, but Ralph’s left in the mud. That’s the routine and Ralph’s tired of it all. For no other reason than because he’s a bad guy, one of the only characters in any game he can really talk to is a ghost from Pac Man. For once, Ralph wants to win a medal and be loved, so he throws off society’s shackles and wanders into a couple of other games in his attempt to leave villainy behind.

He bumbles into Hero’s Duty, a first-person-shooter led by a sci-fi drill sergeant (Jane Lynch). He suffers an intense culture shock that’s hardly alleviated when he rockets over to the candy-coated kart racer Sugar Rush (think Mario Kart) and meets a spastic little girl (Sarah Silverman, in an exaggerated cutesy voice) and the goofily tyrannical King Candy (Alan Tudyk, unrecognizable with a loopy Ed Wynn voice). While Ralph is off gathering an island of misfit code, Felix sets off to find him and prevent their game from getting unplugged. The movie has a great deal of fun putting these two guys – one constantly grumpy, the other all gee-whiz innocence – into unfamiliar surroundings. When Felix first lays eyes on the shiny, dark-green-glowing scenery of Hero’s Duty he gapes and whispers “High definition” in awe. When Ralph lumbers into Sugar Rush he, through an elaborate pratfall, ends up stuck in a giant cupcake and beaten by a pair of anthropomorphized donuts (who are, of course, cops).

The plot’s rather uncomplicated, though it takes some fun twists and turns, and the premise isn’t pushed as far as I’d hoped, but that’s not so bad. As the movie settles into a nice, comfortable groove, it gathers a fine message about following your heart, being kind to others, taking pride in your job, and embracing your programming in order to transcend your programming.  That’s all well and good, but where the movie really works is in its breakneck speed and in its sharp, clever visuals, an explosion of homage and imagination, colorfully rendered. Director Rich Moore’s background with The Simpsons and Futurama might have something to do with the fine voice work and the clever animation including mile-a-minute gags and some unexpected reversals within dialogue, but the best part of the movie is the distinct environments of the three games in play. Fix-It Felix Jr. is a world of black out of which a building emerges, simple and blocky. Hero’s Duty is dark as well, but detailed and sleek. Sugar Rush is a place of overwhelming color and hyperactive silliness that lives up to its name and then some. In what has to be the work of a crew of animators who have much nostalgia for old video games, there are a great deal of cameos peppering the background between games – from Bowser to Pong and from Sonic to Q*bert – as well as strategic cutaways to renderings of the games as games.

In the end Wreck-It Ralph is an entertaining evocation of the way games work, where characters use cheat codes to gain access to secret parts of the game and where our protagonist moves through various worlds, defeating various obstacles, to try to win, that is, get a medal and get back before the arcade opens and his game’s unplugged for appearing to be out of order. (What else could you do with a game that’s missing its bad guy?) When, in the final moments, the baddest bad guy catches Ralph by surprise, the goofy slimeball gravely welcomes him to the “boss level.” With such a heavy emphasis on games and programming, the plot never really gathered suspense for me in the way it aims to and, though I liked the characters, I was more amused and interested than invested in their plight. A mention that dying in a foreign game means you won’t be regenerated seems shoehorned in as an afterthought – the stakes seem cribbed from The Matrix and Inception, to name two movies that more successfully make dangerous levels of “reality” a defining feature – and never really comes into play, but no matter. It’s lightning fast and often very funny and cute. Besides, why inject such expectations into what is intended and plays most satisfactorily as nothing more than a blast of affectionate sugary delight with surges of nostalgia for adults of a certain age?

Nyuck to the Future: THE THREE STOOGES

Writer-directors Bobby and Peter Farrelly, from their early efforts Dumb and Dumber and There’s Something About Mary to more recent works like Stuck on You and last year’s giggling sex farce Hall Pass, have a commitment to broad slapstick and gross-out gags. So it makes a certain amount of sense that their long-in-development passion project is The Three Stooges, a lowest-common-denominator exhumation of silly, second-rate mid-20th century vaudevillian nonsense. You’d think that seeing Larry, Moe and Curly impersonators stumble around modern-day settings doing their same old eye-poking, pun-spitting, kicking, stomping, and whoop-whoop-whooping routine would be at best misguided, at worst unbearable. That’s almost the case here and yet there’s something so gleefully goofy and ecstatically, old-fashioned juvenile about the film that it ends up being something closer to warmhearted fan fiction, a tribute to childhood idols of a dubious kind.

The plot, such as it is, rests on a Catholic orphanage where the three little stooges were dropped off and subsequently raised. The patient nuns are the very funny Jane Lynch, Oscar-winning American Idol alum Jennifer Hudson, who gets a short musical number, Sports Illustrated’s latest swimsuit issue cover girl Kate Upton, and Larry David. Yes, that Larry David. They’re exasperated with the guys’ antics, but somehow, twenty-five years later, the guys are still hanging around. The Farrellys don’t really care to explain exactly why the guys are such weird anachronisms right out of the womb, leading to a sometimes off-putting mix of contemporary references and moments when the Stooges are utterly dumbfounded by modernity. What’s going on here? They have no clue what an iPhone is, but they know who C-3PO is? You just have to throw up your hands and go with it.

What’s especially surprising, and makes it easier to just go along with the movie’s silliness, is how skillfully the main cast inhabits the roles of the Stooges. At first, they seem to be ever so slightly not quite right, but as the movie went on I grew accustomed to them. They’re doing admirable work in a tough spot. Sean Hayes plays Larry with a scrunched up face and drawn out delivery while Chris Diamantopoulos squints and schemes from beneath a flat, black mop of hair as Moe. Meanwhile, Will Sasso delivers a pitch-perfect Curly, wiggling his bulk around with squirmy grace and fluidity while manipulating his voice with a squeaky falsetto. In other words, they’re the Stooges. They smack each other around with exaggerated sound effects and bumble through life spreading (somewhat unintentional) destruction, much to the consternation of those around them.

When the events of the plot finally kick into motion, it’s revealed that the orphanage is over $800,000 dollars in debt. The trio decides to set off to raise the money and save the orphans. (That one cute little orphan is also sick with a mysterious disease may be a bit too nakedly manipulative and heavy for such an otherwise bouncy lark.) It’s a fairly dusty premise, which only adds to the sense that the movie has been sucked through a hole in the space-time continuum and arrived at just the right speed and location to smack me upside the head. I sat dumbfounded as often as I was amused. It’s all just so straight-ahead slapstick and brightly lit episodic tomfoolery. The Farrellys can’t indulge in their usual R-rated sight gags, but that’s no loss here, since that’s not their intent. Besides, there are plenty of icky moments, like a scene in a nursery with urinating infants, or a scene in which a lion is hit in the boing-loings by a peanut shot out of a dolphin’s blowhole. There’s definitely a creeping sense of the surreal here. Some of it works, some of it doesn’t.

As the movie goes this way and that, sorting itself into three loose episodes differentiated by titles in the style of the old Stooges’ shorts, the Farrellys find plenty more hoary old story elements to utilize. There’s a cartoonish femme fatale (Sophia Vergara) involved in a murder plot that ropes in the Stooges and runs throughout the remainder of the film, though, given how much punishment these characters take without consequence, it’s an oddly low-stakes murder plot. There’s also a smarmy lawyer (Stephen Collins) and his slightly dimwitted son (Kirby Heyborne), not to mention a goofy thug (Craig Bierko), bumbling cops, a stern nurse, and a party full of snooty rich people and other eccentric types including a thickly accented French baker.

It’s a movie in which most jokes, simply by the nature of the story and the caricatures, can be seen coming from a mile away. Sometimes, these jokes just aren’t very funny and yet when they land, they land hard. When they did, I found myself laughing despite myself. A fairly early sequence that builds with exceptional escalation starts with the Stooges trying to fix a church steeple and culminates in a church bell sliding down and smacking a nun in head. Moe wonders who their victim was. Curly squeaks, “I dunno, but her face rings a bell!”

There’s something sort of sweet about the way the Farrellys pay tribute to the Stooges, in its own way like what Jason Segel and company did with The Muppets. For me, a little Three Stooges goes a long way whether they be new or old, but the enthusiasm of this movie is borderline contagious. The Farrelly brothers lovingly recreate the kind of slapdash, repetitive, hit-and-miss silliness of the Three Stooges while trying to say that the world today could use some good, uncomplicated pratfalls and broad wordplay now and then. An extended goofy plot point in the middle of the movie finds Moe accidentally becoming the newest cast member of Jersey Shore. It’s an odd moment – one that feels miscalculated and stale already – but it also serves as the film’s statement of purpose of sorts. As Moe smacks around these tanned, shallow, callow reality show stars, I could almost hear the Farrellys arguing that the popular shallow of old beats the popular shallow of today any day.