Bad Toy Story: TED

The Ted in Ted is a teddy bear. His owner Johnny, a friendless eight-year-old boy, makes a Christmas wish upon a shooting star and, just like that, the bear comes alive. He’s a walking, talking, little fuzzball who becomes fast friends with little Johnny. Being a sentient teddy bear is sufficiently unusual that Ted becomes a news sensation and then a minor celebrity. All the while, his best friend Johnny is by his side. A G-rated version of this story would stop there, but this movie goes all the way to R. Now, over two decades later, Ted’s fame has fizzled out and he and Johnny (Mark Wahlberg) hold down minimum wage jobs, smoke weed, and watch cheesy movies (especially the 80’s Flash Gordon) all day every day. Johnny’s girlfriend of four years (Mila Kunis) thinks that it’s time the bear moves out, but Johnny’s not so sure he could live without him. And with that, we’ve arrived at what is hopefully the apex of man-child comedy. The living teddy bear is perhaps the ultimate self-reflexive metaphor for a character who really needs to get his act together and grow up already.

The movie is written and directed by Seth MacFarlane, the creator of a handful of grating animated sitcoms, the most successful of which is Family Guy, a show that builds its humor out of non sequiturs, bad taste, and repetitiveness. (Two writers for that show, Alec Sulkin and Wellesley Wild, are credited with an assist on the movie’s screenplay). With Ted, MacFarlane has a great concept, lots of jokes, but not much of a movie. I suppose it would help if you found the humor funny. There are exactly three categories the jokes can be sorted into: 1. The teddy bear does or says something, usually crude, that is incongruous with his innocent exterior; 2. The teddy bear does something one wouldn’t expect a teddy bear to do, like wear a suit, drive a car, or do drugs; 3. The teddy bear, or one of his human costars, makes a pop culture reference or reacts to a cameo. The first two kinds of jokes are funny for a while, but soon lose their novelty. The third kind is mildly amusing the first few times, especially the cameos, and then starts to seem like a crutch.

But the main problem with Ted isn’t that it’s bad, exactly. It’s not just that the jokes are arranged in a pattern that’s easy to figure out – something happens or something is said; bear swears, says pop culture reference, or probably both – and are easily categorized. It’s not even that I happened to find the jokes unfunny. The main problem is that the movie is so hopelessly under-plotted and lazily made. The central conflict of the movie, that the man-child needs to grow up, is something that has been done before and better in countless other comedies, and is set up almost immediately here. The way it develops is painfully familiar, without dramatic interest of any kind as it hits each and every story beat you’d expect with little cleverness or invention. From then on out all the movie has to offer is aimless flailing about until it arrives, seemingly by accident, at a climax that resolves the A-plot by roping in a subplot (involving poor Giovanni Ribisi as Ted’s stalker fan) that was awkwardly introduced and promptly forgotten so that its sudden return is actually a bit of a surprise. And then, to top it all off, MacFarlane throws in awkward sentiment of the kind he starts the film rejecting, as if he could think of no more creative way to finish things off.

At first, I though I might end up complimenting MacFarlane on his actual filmmaking in his live-action debut. I thought he might turn out to be a competent comedy director if he could write (or find) a better screenplay. But that was before he – and, to be fair, his editor – makes a total jumbled mess out of a simple conversation between three people in one cubicle. Each character is held in separate medium shots, which are assembled in such a confusing manner, cutting on each line of dialogue, that I lost all geographical bearings in what is an awfully small space. (Why not use one shot instead of three? Who knows?)  Still, MacFarlane has smartly cast the film, not just Kunis and Wahlberg, who are admirably playing the material like they don’t know it’s supposed to be funny, but small parts for Joel McHale, Patrick Warburton, and other amusing people. Also Patrick Stewart narrates for some reason.

The funniest thing about the movie is that Ted himself is a creative idea convincingly brought to life. MacFarlane voices him in a funny, likable way so that even his most outrageous comments and behavior seem palatable. The animation of the bear is cute, too. There’s no denying that the comedic and creative high-point of the film is a smashing brawl between Wahlberg and this teddy bear as they punch and kick at each other, leaving a trail of destruction all around a small hotel room. That’s a pretty good scene. But Ted is certainly not in a good movie. There’s not enough creativity to match the central conceit. Instead, MacFarlane seems to think throwing enough stereotypes (crudely sketched moments with at least one to offend each race, creed, gender, and orientation in the audience) at the screen, or giving the cute bear enough incongruous R-rated material to perform, will compensate for not having much of a story to tell or any good idea of how to film it. It seems desperate for laughs, or worse, convinced that it’s lazy approach will get them anyways.

Spy Again: SPY KIDS: ALL THE TIME IN THE WORLD

The following may be a controversial claim. Spy Kids is Robert Rodriguez’s best movie. The 2001 feature follows a brother and sister, Carmen (Alexa Vega) and Juni (Daryl Sabara), who discover that their parents (Carla Gugino and Antonio Banderas) are spies after they disappear on a mission. It’s up to the kids to save them. Aside from the great plot hook, Rodriguez’s film is filled with imagination of a quick, candy-colored variety. The action is well paced, the special effects have a kind of cartoonish believability, the jokes are actually funny to an audience of both kids and adults, the supervillain played by Alan Cumming is a perfect balance of silly and menacing, the emotions feel real, and the not-quite-heavy-handed moral is peppy wish-fulfillment and empowerment to kids while still respectful of adults. Here’s a family film that genuinely encourages kids to precociousness and curiosity without making the parents the buffoonish butts of every joke. This is all tied together with Rodriguez’s one-man-band behind-the-scenes energy and love of genre that power his best films. In its eagerness to please and its off-kilter sense of surprise, Spy Kids is essentially a kid-friendly Grindhouse movie.

Alas, we don’t have too little of this good thing. Box office success, coupled with Rodriguez’s obvious love for the material, guaranteed sequels. The second (Island of Lost Dreams) retained a minimum of charm and good-will to justify its own existence, but by the super-gimmicky third feature (Spy Kids 3D: Game Over) the whole thing felt flat and dead, done in by its own cartoonish exuberance and childish excesses. After that came a long period of dormancy, but after eight years here we are again in another summer franchise revival.

Spy Kids: All the Time in the World introduces us to a nine-months-pregnant spy (Jessica Alba) chasing down Time Keeper, a supervillain (Jeremy Piven) intending to manipulate time itself somehow. (It’s never all that clear). She catches him just in time to promptly retire and then race to the hospital and give birth. Her husband (Joel McHale) and step-kids (Rowan Blanchard and Mason Cook) have no idea of her secret identity as a freshly retired spy. Of course, inevitably events conspire to reveal the secret and call the siblings into duty as freshly minted spy kids. It turns out that their dog is actually a robot dog with the voice of Ricky Gervais who proceeds to help them flee the bad guys and escape to the good guys’ headquarters.

To loosely tie the franchise together, original spy kid Carmen is back, this time as a full-grown spy who yearns to restart the spy kids division. She’s given the task of meeting and briefing the new arrivals on the truth about their stepmother. She also hands them a massive info dump and gifts them their very own gadgets. And rest assured that Juni pops up as well before all is said and done. It’s nice to see the original kid spies all grown up, especially since they’re really the only reminder that this premise was once used to tell a good story.

Each successive Spy Kids movie has lowered the bar by stripping out a few more reasons why anyone over the age of twelve would want to watch. By the fourth installment, it’s strictly for-kids-only. There are poop jokes, practical jokes, slapstick, puns, candy, and gadgets. It’s fast, loud, and colorful, but it has a kind of over-caffeinated amateurish spastic energy that grates. At the movie’s start, I had low expectations, but the aggressively pandering button pushing wore out its welcome fairly quickly. I’m sure some kids will like this one just fine, but there’s no reason anyone else should be put through the experience. I love Spy Kids, but as far as I’m concerned, there is really only one film about them, two if I’m feeling generous.

Note: The experience (already in headache-inducing 3D) is billed as being enhanced through “4D Aromascope” and therefore comes with scratch-and-sniff cards handed out with the tickets that are to be smelled according to the corresponding numbers that flash on the screen throughout the film. Aside from the feeling of awkwardness brought on by fumbling around in the dark, trying in vain to catch a whiff of bacon or a diaper on a piece of cardboard, it adds nothing.

Soderbergh's Capitalism, A Love Story: THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE and THE INFORMANT!

Steven Soderbergh knows how to bring the opposite of what you’d expect and make it feel natural, a quality he proves every time he makes a film. In 2009, with his slick and stylish low-budget indie The Girlfriend Experience and his offbeat star-studded studio film The Informant!, he further proves that he’s a bit of a cinematic prankster willing to subvert expectations and play around with the formal elements of film without letting his experimentation get in the way of telling great stories. He’s one of the best, or at the very least one of the most interesting, directors working today.

The Girlfriend Experience and The Informant! are films about capitalism and the quest for success turning people into cogs while they barely notice, hampered by a tunnel-vision of doomed entrepreneurship which will ultimately lead to collapses of both financial stability and familial structure. In the worst case, the characters will bring down more than their own finances in the self-destruction of their success. Soderbergh has captured our collapsing economy perfectly in two films that make the broad consequences of our economy very personal. Both films play out almost like stripped-down heist movies with protagonists who think of themselves as slick as Danny Ocean, but who find that wheeling and dealing the real world leaves a person without a safety net.

With The Girlfriend Experience, Soderbergh has made a fairly short but very interesting film that examines the people who make their living off of the somewhat rich and kind of powerful in corporations and asks us to think seriously about the difference between a personal trainer and an escort. After all, in both cases payment is being exchanged for interaction with another human being. This is a film that can be as cold and beautiful as its lead role, a woman (Sasha Grey) who builds her life around forming hollow, fleeting relationships with men who think they love her, or at least love what she represents.

As an escort, she feels she is better than some common prostitute since she’s being paid for the Girlfriend Experience, and not necessarily just physical contact. People are paying for companionship, a relationship, fake as it is, just as the people who pay her boyfriend (Chris Santos), a personal trainer, begin to think of him as a friend even though the circumstances are equally false. As played by Sasha Grey, this young woman is very smart and scarily composed in a movie that keeps its distance. This is a remarkably restrained film, tactful and tasteful about a sex worker. It can be as austere and respectful as its lead character. She’s intellectualized her job while allowing that intellectualization to seep a chill into her relationship with her real boyfriend. As they sit in their apartment with its modern décor and large empty spaces it’s hard not to draw comparisons to the equally stylish-but-empty apartments and hotel rooms where we otherwise find Grey and the empty impersonal gym spaces where we otherwise find Santos.

Told out of order, the film is as scattered as the lives of its leads, more about tone than plot, more about the characters’ carefully constructed shells than any emotions bubbling over. A handful of scenes find Santos flying to Las Vegas with a group of bankers after being invited by a client. As the bankers talk about the collapsing economy and a possible bailout (the movie was filmed and is set in late 2008), it’s clear that his profession and his girlfriend’s profession are parasitic ones. If the New York upper-class loses the money to spend on fake relationships, where will that leave the two of them? And when both of them make their living pretending to care about others, can even their own relationship be fully trusted?

With The Informant!, Soderbergh has made a film about people within corporations, based on a true story that reveals a corporate culture of favors, kickbacks, and mutually beneficial deceptions and then follows an ambitious whistleblower that gets himself into trouble by learning too much from these encouraged tactics. Set in the early 90s, it’s easy to see the seeds for our current economic state being sown, and yet this is not the darkly menacing whistleblower movie you may be expecting. This is hardly Michael Mann’s great The Insider or even Soderbergh’s own Erin Brockovich, each presenting the story of a courageous person dodging corporate thugs to show the world the ugly underbelly of a business. Here, Soderbergh has no qualms about detangling the expectations of the audience and inverting the whistleblower formula by delivering a serio-comic tragedy of sorts.

Matt Damon stars as Mark Whitacre, an upper-mid-level employee of Archer Daniels Midland, an Illinois-based company involved with creating chemicals for food ingredients. Early scenes show Whitacre as he goes to work driving by endless corn fields. Soderbergh gives the movie a smeary orange-infused color palate, as if the processed corn chemicals of the milieu have infected the film. It looks uglier than you’d expect a Hollywood picture to look, which perfectly fits the unexpected tone of the film, which is lighter and goofier than you’d expect.

Whitacre has contact with an FBI agent, played stoic yet exasperated by Scott Bakula, who gets him to agree to expose price-fixing and other corporate nastiness occurring in his business. Through a mix of inept spying and inept scheming, Whitacre nearly derails the investigation in one odd, comedic sequence after another. He sees himself as a great spy (calling himself double-oh-14 since he’s twice as smart as James Bond), is obsessed with Michael Crichton and John Grisham novels, and eagerly absorbs and ponders trivia and minutia. He so desperately wants to be the hero of his life’s story that it’s by turns funny, pathetic and sad. He narrates the film, constantly losing track of what he’s saying, diverging from the context of the moment to ponder, say, polar bears, foreign vending machines, or how awesome things are for him. By putting us inside the character’s head, we begin to see his delusions and his eccentricities all the more clearly, for he’s a man who’s outwardly normal, but inwardly in need of serious help.

Soderbergh gives the movie a bouncy, jazzy score from Marvin Hamlisch which is located directly on the border between cool and kitsch, in some cases scoring the movie in which Whitacre saw himself, in some cases scoring the strange comedy we are seeing. Soderbergh then takes the strange nature of the underlying story and amplifies it by casting professional jokesters like Joel McHale, Tom Papa, Tony Hale, Andrew Daly, Paul F. Tompkins, and Patton Oswalt in supporting roles. They aren’t knowingly playing comedic roles, perpetually winking at the camera, but rather, they are playing true situations that are inherently comedic and playing them totally seriously. It creates a sense that the business world is a finite universe populated primarily with buffoons.

The Informant!, along with The Girlfriend Experience, finds Soderbergh shining light into odd corners of our economy, forming a picture of why we are where we are, revealing the types of ruinous personal and societal decisions so many people unthinkingly made. It reveals a failing status quo that went mostly undiagnosed with disastrous consequences. By making movies about very specific characters and moments, Soderbergh has created a portrait of the American economy that shows how broad policies and decisions are affected by and have effect on the most anonymous of us all, of how the world can crash around people while they only reluctantly notice their own fragility or even their own culpability.