Reel Life: THE 4:30 MOVIE

Filmmakers making films about loving film always show you a lot about themselves. Think of
Spielberg’s recent Fabelmans in which the young Steven character has a vision of himself filming a family argument. Here’s a boy who thinks with the camera, and who sees the world through cinema. It’ll make him a wunderkind. And it’ll make him use that skill to create joyously cinematic genre pictures that’ll, in part, interrogate family and how people make them and break them. It’s a whole career in an image—typical of the revealing nature of an auteur’s work, especially in a confident, relaxed Late Style. For Kevin Smith’s version we have The 4:30 Movie, in which the Smith stand-in is a dorky teenager in 1986 (Austin Zajur) who wants nothing more than to sneak into an R-rated movie for a first date with his crush (Siena Agudong). And so we get this: a pretty girl with a wide smile earnestly and affectionately telling a chubby nerd, “wow, you know a lot about movies and TV shows!” Smith, unlike Spielberg, has a pretty one-track mind—sex, weed, pop culture. That’s about it. The end credits of this movie include a long “Thanks” section that includes everything from Little Debbie and Little House on the Prairie to George Lucas and John Hughes. (It’s a succinct syllabus for Kevin Smith Studies.) His preoccupations made for a bit of Gen X freshness with his scrappy indie Clerks back in 1994, what with its minimum wage slackers chattering back and forth about movies or sex acts in amateur cheap-o black and white. But, aside from a few successful fluke attempts at developing a style and deepening his thematic concerns (apocalyptic Catholic fantasy comedy Dogma, sentimental single-father rom-com Jersey Girl, and grungy political horror Red State), Smith’s been stuck in a permanent adolescence ever since, both as a stylist—all flat coverage, bland lighting, and simple staging—and as a writer—all surface-level allusions and references. His previous picture, the dreary and sappy Clerks III, even indulges in recreations of scenes from the first, as its legacy sequel status has the characters in the movie making a movie about their lives, which is a kind of worse Clerks. 

As Smith became a more repetitive niche interest, he dug in deeper into his chatty nerds’ limited imaginations. (Even a couple weirder horror adjacent pitches the past decade play like shaggy podcast anecdotes.) He’s making hangout movies for himself, and his die-hard fans, and his chummy collaborators, keeping his work cheap and lowering expectations. But he enjoys himself and that's what still causes his movies to have little sparkles of idiosyncratic interest. That his latest is comfortably his best in nearly 15 years is a tribute to its breezy smallness that makes his newfound sentiment comfortably quaint. It finds our lead and his buddies hanging out all day at a three-screen movie theater in their hometown while awaiting his crush. We see clips of fake trailers—decent—and some fake movies—pretty sloppy. (There are also tons of jokes in which characters straight-faced say something like “There’ll never be more Star Wars” or “Bill Cosby will always be admired” with dopey historical irony.) Along the way is some silly banter, some stupid antics, and a few funny performers (Justin Long, Rachel Dratch, Sam Richardson, Ken Jeong, Adam Pally, Jason Lee) doing their best with some thin characters. But nothing too outrageous happens, and the lines are never more than passably amusing, and the people are all broad shtick. It’s a genial enough thing, a pleasant, undemanding sit, and sure to please, or at least intrigue, the micro-generation of like-minded nerds for whom Smith remains a figure of note. But it’s ultimately so low-stakes and lacking in narrative and emotional—let alone comedic—juice that it mostly evaporates on contact with dead air between the projector and the audience. It’s a movie for people whose greatest dream is for a pretty girl to admire them merely for their movie knowledge. Hey, we can dream.

Doing It For Themselves: SISTERS

Two adult siblings learn their parents have sold the family house when they’re told to show up and pack up all the junk left in their childhood bedrooms. Sad to let the last vestiges of youth go, the pair orchestrates one last party, a raucous blowout to remember the good old days. If this plot – thinly developed and overfamiliar – was the engine for a movie called Brothers and starred any two generic bros it would be insufferable, one more man-child comedy indulging carousing until reluctant maturity arrives. But it’s called Sisters (no relation to the DePalma of the same name), and stars Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, a great pairing for a fine gender swap of the usual potty-mouth party movie. The result is an injection of fresh perspective into a tired formula, a mix of sex talk and sentimentality that’s energized by its leads.

Only Fey and Poehler’s second film together in leading roles (after 2008’s pleasant Baby Mama), they’re a fine comedy duo. With a fizzy improvisatory approach to line readings, turning every punchline and extended bit into agreeably off-the-cuff coziness, they have sharp timing and a believable sisterly dynamic. Fey is the older sister, louder and irresponsible, freshly fired from a salon job, kicked out of the apartment where she’d been staying. Her careless approach to life has led to her teen daughter (Madison Davenport) pushing her away. Poehler is the little sister, an overeager perfectionist who has thrown herself into micromanaged routines as a way of avoiding stewing over a divorce, and worrying about their elderly parents (Dianne Wiest and James Brolin). Each sees a bit of what they wish they could be in the other – Fey wants a smidge more structure; Poehler wants to loosen up – but they cant say so. Instead, realistic levels of sibling rivalry manifest as admiration and antagonism going both ways.

Reunited in their hometown, under the same roof, they hatch their partying plan, to recapture good times they feel have slipped away. They have to go backwards to go forwards. The script by Saturday Night Live and 30 Rock writer Paula Pell sees the women’s immaturity without condoning it, allowing for a loose and agreeable non-judgmental atmosphere, especially as the house fills up with their former high school classmates, the ones who never left town and just settled down. They see right away these folks (Maya Rudolph, John Leguizamo, Bobby Moynihan, Rachel Dratch, Samantha Bee, and more) have gotten older, and are dealing with adult problems and aging concerns. It doesn’t take long spending time at the house party for the guests to loosen way up (the booze helps, no doubt), the gathering getting progressively rowdier and more destructive as the night goes on.

Pitch Perfect director Jason Moore throws a decent bash, keeping the festivities hopping with pounding music and funny running gags. Fey tries not to drink and be the responsible one for once, while Poehler downs the intoxicants and flirts half-successfully with a sweet handyman (Ike Barinholtz). A desperately unfunny dope gets increasingly deranged. A muscle-bound drug-dealer (John Cena) stands still in the middle of the revelers, silently blinking. A sad woman zones out in front of a wall of clocks, contemplating her mortality. A mom gets drunk, an overgrown mean girl tries to sabotage, and a pedicurist (Greta Lee) takes advantage of an overflowing washing machine to start a slippery bubble fight. These scenes are shot for warm laughs and agreeable chuckles in simple bright sitcom staging, and feel like they could be flipped around without much damage to the overall arc.

It’s just one eventful collection of banter and silly sights, driven forward only by the gradually more destroyed house. But the result is a fine hangout with earnest good vibes. Fey and Poehler are fantastic ringleaders, both egging on and reigning in the absurdity as it goes along. They’re committed to looking pathetic, and as the party drags on it’s clear they’re going to hit rock bottom. (The movie ends up taking this idea very literally.) It ends with a pat moral conveniently tying up plot threads, but the trip there is a loose amusing time, turning standard R-rated comedy fare into a breezy sister act.

Bad Boys: THAT'S MY BOY

That’s My Boy, a new R-rated Adam Sandler vehicle, is an awful movie. But, when I sat there and watched it, I laughed. Sometimes I cringed, sure, and other times I gaped with something approaching admiration at the gleeful way the bar is consistently lowered, but I left the theater feeling something like satisfied. I can’t recommend this movie. I’m not even sure I want to defend it in any way. But I laughed and it is my duty to report that reaction. After all, as Roger Ebert once said, “If I laugh, I have to tell you it’s funny. I went to see Jackass, a shameful movie. I laughed all the way through it. I mean, I have to tell you that.”

I found That’s My Boy to be a movie so exuberantly vulgar, so excessively coarse and gross-out goofy that I could almost imagine the Farrelly brothers finding it a bit over the top. (It probably has more on-screen uses for bodily fluids than any comedy since their own There’s Something About Mary.) It’s all predicated on an off-putting inciting incident and then goes on to include a couple of twists that are just about as bad. And all through it, Sandler is doing one of his patented (and usually grating) braying-accent arrested-adolescent shticks. I usually don’t like Adam Sandler movies, but after such career nadirs as Grown Ups and Jack and Jill, truly awful movies following nearly two decades of awful movies, even a mild improvement feels pretty good. What can I say? This time around I found it funny, although not at first.

The whole thing starts in the mid-80’s when a teacher (Eva Amurri Martino) has an affair with a student (Justin Weaver) – a teenager named Donny who grows up to be Adam Sandler. It’s not every day a comedy starts off with some casually presented statutory rape, but there you have it. I wasn’t laughing yet, that’s for sure. It’s uncomfortable to say the least, especially when the teacher is shipped off to prison pregnant and the eventual baby is left in the custody of the kid and his deadbeat dad. Luckily we cut ahead over twenty-five years later so we don’t have deal with the whole immediate implications of this scenario, skipping through an opening credits montage that spoofs the culture’s gendered double standard about this sort of scandal. Donny gains immediate fame through the talk show circuit – Arsenio and Letterman – as well as selling the rights to his life story for a TV movie, but soon enough his fame has dried up and he’s no better off than his fellow has-been pal Vanilla Ice (as an exaggerated buffoonish version of himself).

When the movie proper picks up, Donny, a drunken mess of perpetual boorishness, has just learned that he owes $40,000 to the IRS since he hasn’t paid taxes since 1994. He’ll go to prison unless he pays off the debt by Tuesday. Stewing at his usual table at his favorite (but dilapidated) strip club, he notices the wedding section of the New York Times where who should he see but his estranged son (Andy Samberg). He’s now a rising hedge fund manager marrying a pretty young woman (Leighton Meester) from a wealthy family. In fact, the whole wedding party – the bride’s parents (Blake Clark and Meagen Fay), grandmother (Peggy Stewart) and soldier brother (Milo Ventimiglia), the groom’s boss (Tony Orlando), and some straight-laced co-workers (Will Forte, Rachel Dratch) – is staying in a mansion on the coast of Massachusetts for the ceremony this very weekend. Donny, in a desperate attempt to raise the necessary funds, convinces a tabloid TV show to meet him at the prison and stage a reunion between teacher, student, and son and sets off to trick his son into this plan, but soon finds he’s having a pretty good time just being reunited.

So Donny bumbles his way into the wedding party and throws everybody for a loop. It’s like The Hangover crash-landed into the middle of Meet the Parents. Director Sean Anders (writer of the so-so Hot Tub Time Machine) and writer David Caspe (who works for the sit-com Happy Endings) haven’t exactly made a comedy of errors. This is a comedy of sexual dysfunction, of non-stop profanity and raunchiness, of panicked social anxiety and endlessly protracted embarrassment. But rather than mere juvenile tittering and strange squeamishness of usual Sandler fare, this is an enthusiastically rude embrace of base instincts and bad behavior. The straight-arrow son running from his irresponsible father is drawn back into his web of debauchery and is shocked to find how much fun it can be, especially when so many of the wedding guests seem so charmed by his coarseness and party-animal antics. And, sure, father and son have a lot of learning to do from each other, learning to live a full life and yada yada (it’s basically an inverted Big Daddy without the moral), but the level of manic depravity on display here is truly staggering. And I laughed a lot.

This is no typical Sandler movie, which are usually somewhere between a PG and a PG-13, lightly vulgar, cheap, sentimental efforts with plenty of saccharine uplift and a safer-than-not gross-out sensibility. This movie puts the hard-R in hard-R comedy, leaning against boundaries cheerfully and with such unashamed commitment. And the cast is so game, tearing into this material with surprisingly appealing energy and timing. This is a shameful movie that starts so tasteless it can only go up, but it still finds plenty of ways to shock, through some appalling (and funny) revelations and sheer volume of vulgarity. But surprise of surprises, Sandler and Samberg have nice chemistry and the supporting cast is so willing to go along with the surprisingly amusing material which grows more complicated and picks up speed as the narrative hurtles towards the ceremony. (And, of course, we have to see teacher and student meet again, and she’s now played by an Academy Award winning actress about whom I wouldn’t have guessed we’d now be able to say is making a habit of this sort of thing.)

Where does that leave us? It’s a movie in which sometimes-funny people have a good time in material a smidge rougher than you’d expect, finding jaw-dropping lines to cross and combining what would be all the raunchiest bits of marginally cleaner movies into one long parade of impropriety. And it’s handled with such slickness and even good-natured nastiness at times. Other times there are jokes that don’t go over so well and are just plain nastiness. The movie’s based on a premise so cringingly awful that I wish the filmmakers could have found a premise that was somewhat easier to take but that still got us to the same destination. So we’re right back where we started. I completely understand where people who will hate this movie will be coming from. It’s awful. But I did laugh.