God Save the Tween: MIDDLE SCHOOL: THE WORST YEARS OF MY LIFE

Barely passable entertainment for anyone in the market for a Diary of a Wimpy Kid rip-off, Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life is an undemanding 90-minute tween sitcom. Aside from the programming on Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel, there’s little in the way of live action antics for kids to enjoy, so in that limited sense this fits a niche. But somehow I bet even children will find the whole picture drifting with the whiffs of second-hand inspiration. Based on a book series by James Patterson and Chris Tebbetts, it takes a familiar route. There’s a lead kid, a middle schooler who likes to draw and narrates his misadventures with family, friends, and teachers. But unlike Greg Heffley, the constantly embarrassed Ben Stiller type anchoring the Wimpy movies, Middle School has a protagonist who is mostly confident and the coolest rebel in school. His problems aren’t internal so much as a constant barrage of awful adults ruining his fun. Rafe Khatchadorian, the silliest kids’ book character name I’ve heard in ages, breezes into a new school ready to take on the establishment, willing to wage a covert prank attack on the stuffy suits and the petty rules.

I don’t know what made me feel older while watching this movie. For a while I thought it would be that I found the adults perspective more relatable and reasonably amusing while the kids were simply going through a hackneyed plot with obvious beats. But then, late in the picture, a girl patiently explains what a VCR is and that did it. I’m officially watching these young people movies through old eyes. Maybe that’s why I took the most delight in seeing comedian Andy Daly play the rules-obsessed principal. He has a way of smoothly projecting bland competence while oozing condescension and being totally transparent about his insecurities. It’s funny enough. His second in command is Retta, who here is the exact opposite of her Parks & Rec free spirit, snapping at students to keep them in line and getting the obligatory knocked-over-by-hundreds-of-balls-falling-from-a-closet gag. Elsewhere is the only teacher we meet, a trying-too-hard-to-be-cool-and-relatable one (Adam Pally). Then there’s Rafe’s warm single mother (Lauren Graham) with a monstrously dumb boyfriend (Rob Riggle). They all seem to be enjoying themselves.

The grown-ups have the mild eccentricities and heavy lifting, but the kids aren’t so bad. They’re likable enough. Rafe (Griffin Gluck) slowly pulls back some layers on his tween bravado, revealing some real emotional pain fueling his rebellion. Doing respectable work with their stereotypes are his silly friend (Thomas Barbusca), his crush (Jessi Goei), and his precocious little sister (Alexa Nisenson, who gets the cutest quips, but is also good in a surprisingly dramatic scene late in the game). They get some good lines, and the young audience won’t care so much that the adults in the crowd will be restless. The kids fit the movie’s tone as a light, soft, well meaning, and generally genial kids’ comedy. It even has some unobjectionable ideas to impart. His sketchbook drawings may come to life in distracting animated daydream interludes, too dull and flavorless to really add to the narrative, but there’s something nice about his artistic spirit. It adds to the movie’s basically harmless messages of self-empowerment, creativity, teamwork, and appropriately mild anti-authoritarian impulses.

What is middle school but a time to start chafing against the restrictions of childhood? A movie like this lets the tween id run free in (mostly) squeaky clean safe environments where nothing too bad will ever happen. Rafe can put sticky notes all over the school or fill a trophy case like an aquarium, dye his principal’s hair, shred standardized tests, or fill the sprinkler system with paint. But it’s all for a good cause in this comfortably consequence-light vision of the world. (And the pranks are so unwieldy and impractical there’s little worry of kids copying. Not that that’ll necessarily stop them from trying.) Of course it’s a movie with some instantly dated cultural references (like a tired swipe at the Kardashians) and booming contemporaneous pop music. It’s also a movie with a chaste crush, a few implied profanities, and a final comeuppance for the meanest adult including a wagon full of manure. Directed with a brisk, bright, bland style by Paul Blart’s Steve Carr from a screenplay by Kara Holden (a Disney Channel Original Movie veteran), the movie’s not worth getting worked up over. It does about what you’d expect at the level you’d assume, no better and no worse.

Unless: THE LORAX

It’d be harder to believe that a slim, lovely little Dr. Seuss book was turned into 90 minutes of empty calories if Universal hadn’t already done it twice before. How the Grinch Stole Christmas and Cat in the Hat became garish live-action patience testers. Now it’s The Lorax’s turn, but it’s escaped that fate. The studio was smart to hand it over to Illumination, a recently established computer animation studio that gave them a surprise big, and well-earned, hit a couple of years ago with Despicable Me. The resulting Lorax movie bears more than a passing resemblance to prime Seussian illustrations, but the gem of ecological melancholy inherent in the small, powerful book is surrounded by a story about a boy who zips around on a scooter and has run-ins with a despotic mayor. If that doesn’t sound quite like the Lorax you remember, you’d be right.

Seuss’s book is a simple fable, a wistful, hesitantly hopeful story of a greedy businessman, the Once-ler, who deforested the land as far as the eye can see and drove the happy wildlife far, far away. He tells his tale to a curious boy, a tale of a failed intervention on behalf of the flora and fauna by the Lorax, a sad little creature whose environmental advocacy fell on deaf ears. Though the book ends with the boy receiving a single seed, from which the forests can begin to grow once again, Seuss offers us no such release. This is only hesitant hope. The fact of the matter is, ecological damage is terrifying in its totality. One seed may not be enough. What is necessary is people who care a whole awful lot.

I’ve found The Lorax to be one of Dr. Seuss’s most powerful works, a clear statement that is hardly moralizing. It’s vivid, beautiful illustrations highlight the loss that has happened to the environment these characters inhabit while the rendering of the Lorax himself is heartbreaking in the despondency the poor guy feels when he realizes that disaster has not been averted. The look is what directors Chris Renaud and Kyle Balda have gotten mostly right in their adaptation. It’s a bright colorful world of plants and creatures in flashback, but in the present it’s a barren place of smog and dust. What they’ve added is a city of plastic and technology, a walled-off place that has insulated itself from the harsh realities outside.

In this new environment, they have embellished the story by giving the boy a name, Ted (as in Theodor Geisel, perhaps?), a scooter, a wacky family, the voice of Zac Efron, and a dream. He wants to impress the girl down the street (Taylor Swift) by finding her one of those trees of legend, not one of the plastic, inflatable, electric plants that fill the town, but the living kind thought long extinct. His grandmother (Betty White) tells him to go see the Once-ler (Ed Helms), so Ted escapes town and rides into the beginning of Seuss’s story.

We then get a flashback with the Lorax (Danny DeVito) trying his hardest to stop the Once-ler (and his wacky family), to no avail. The Lorax is given more to do, but it dilutes his impact. Now he’s a jokester and a blustering prankster, not just a righteous, sad, spokesman. But, back to the boy, who has an extended climactic sequence in which he zips around town with the seed, but soon has the seed stolen by the evil mayor (Rob Riggle) who has made his fortune selling bottled air. This leads to a big chase scene that has lots of action and slapstick to go through.

And there’s where the embellishment of the adaptation steps wrong. It becomes a story about a boy who needs to plant the last seed, not a story about the Lorax. The film swallows him up in order to end on a note of happiness and hope. Hooray! The environment is saved! There’s no room for the overwhelming sadness that he represents here. No need to simply hint at hope, the film makes it concrete instead. And, though I found myself still moved by the final scene which, yes, brings the Lorax back in a small, touching way, there’s something to be said for the exciting lack of this resolution in the book that is lost in favor of a Hollywood ending. Even the power of the regretful villainy of the Once-ler is diluted by the addition of the goofy mayor antagonist, who has no such complexity.

Still, I’d rather not judge the movie solely on the ways it bungles Seuss’s tone, something the 1972 animated special got more or less right. I’d rather not just be comparing versions of the story against one another and, besides, I’d be a fool to expect a perfect transcription of the book. Taken on its own terms, this new Lorax actually works fairly well. It’s a highly competent family film that’s fast, cute, and often quite appealing. It’s also a musical. It was a big surprise to me when, in the first scene, the townspeople burst into song in a big, fun, introductory Broadway-style opening number. There are a few other numbers sprinkled throughout less successfully, but the finale is a rousing, satisfying showstopper. It’s very likable.

I didn’t dislike this movie, I just found myself frustrated by its competing impulses. On the one hand, it is a solid, standard, modern, musical, CG, 3D, Hollywood family film. On the other hand, it hints at the greatness of its source material, like with the first appearance of the Lorax, a nice, small moment in which he solemnly makes a fresh stump into a tribute to a fallen tree. So The Lorax is an agreeable movie, but its so close to great I couldn’t help but leave feeling I had just watched a bit of a missed opportunity.

Bad Cop, Bad Cop: THE OTHER GUYS

It has slowly become apparent to me that Adam McKay is one of the best directors currently working in studio comedies. That’s not to say he alone is responsible for all of the recent great comedies, far from it, but he’s far beyond the typical style of a studio comedy that does little more than set a camera in front of funny people and wait for the magic. McKay’s a skillful filmmaker. He is at his best when he has plenty of genre or period bric-a-brac to play around with like the cool 70’s vibe of Anchorman or the deep-fried NASCAR-crazy South of Talladega Nights. He pushes the styles and production design so heavily that by the time his dialogue grows increasingly off-the-wall with bizarre one-liners and the plot slips towards the surreal it feels like a natural outgrowth of the surroundings. (Maybe that’s why his last film, Step Brothers, didn’t work as well for me, as it contained the same level of weirdness rooted in a world more like our own).

With The Other Guys, McKay gets a chance to direct a buddy-cop action-comedy.  With the help of cinematographer Oliver Wood (who has worked on the Bourne films, Face/Off, and Die Hard 2 in his career), it contains enough good-looking slam-bang spectacle to rival a Bruckheimer production, but it deploys its set pieces with skill and energy that could only arise from comedy. The film opens with a literal explosion of action-packed hilarity with super-cops Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne Johnson careening through a car chase gun-battle that is both thrilling on an action level and hilarious in its (barely) exaggerated presentation. Collateral damage flips around the frames that catch shattering glass and bullet impacts in the same moments as the overheated machismo of its two cops. By the time the sequence reaches its fiery conclusion, the movie had me in its grasp.

Jackson and Johnson do a fine job inhabiting, and poking fun at, the types of overblown action heroes they typically play. They’re quickly cast aside, though, in favor of the movie’s real heroes, the cops who sit in offices far more than cop cars and fire up computers far more than weapons. Yes, police partners Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg never patrol much farther than the water cooler. Ferrell’s okay with that, preferring to remain in his comfort zone as a meek, nerdy police accountant and going home every night to his plain wife (Eva Mendes). Wahlberg, however, is boiling inside, ready to spread his wings and soar as the hero he knows he is. After accidentally shooting a famous person (a funny cameo), regaining his dignity may be harder than he thinks. Soon enough, the mismatched pair get sucked into a larger conspiracy involving all kinds of very real threats, which include, but are by no means limited too, a mysterious Australian thug (Ray Stevenson), a slimy lawyer and SEC employee (Andy Buckley), overzealous colleagues (Rob Riggle and Damon Wayans Jr.), a creep of a Wall Street big-shot (Steve Coogan), and, of course, the police chief (Michael Keaton) who’s always saying that they’ve gone too far and then threatening to confiscate their weapons.

Under the direction of Adam McKay, from a script he co-wrote with Chris Henchy, The Other Guys has the specifics of a cop movie down perfectly. It’s full of fun supporting turns (between this and Toy Story 3, I hope we’re at the start of a Keaton comeback), funny little moments of detective work, and well-used action beats. But the film also manages to use the genre as a springboard for the kind of weird digressions that make McKay’s films so memorable. This film stays closer to what’s expected from a buddy-cop film, with the weirdest moments having nothing on the equivalent moments in, say, Anchorman’s news-team brawl or Talladega Night’s meal-time prayer. Here, the bizarre slips in through the flashbacks to Wahlberg’s shooting accident and Ferrell’s unpredictable part-time job from his college years, the phrase “I’m going to break your hip” spoken as a token of affection, a charming series of economic charts during the end credits, or a night of drunkenness portrayed through a frozen tableau of weird and (kind of) wonderful sight gags. It also fills up all the cracks in the dialogue with odd asides and goofy monologues, not to mention the way the action set pieces sometimes include dazzling moments of the ridiculous sailing in from left field.

Ferrell and Wahlberg make a great team as comedy, but a horrible team as cops. They manage to botch nearly every major moment of police work they take on, and yet because of the likability of the two leads, there’s always the hope that they’ll succeed one of these times. It’s strange to watch a movie where the two protagonists manage to mess up nearly everything they try. These two cops are always trying to figure out the central mystery, but can never quite get there. It’s almost like what might have happened if, say, Luis Buñuel helped direct The French Connection.

The Hangover (2009)

The Hangover is the kind of effortlessly entertaining, explosively inappropriate, R-rated summer comedy that provides plenty of laughs and then leaves without a trace. There are no quotable lines or priceless moments that will last much past seeing the thing, but it’s plenty of fun in the moment. It doesn’t hurt that it has a fun premise. Three guys take their friend (Justin Bartha) to Vegas for his bachelor party only to wake up the next morning to find that they have no memory of the night before and have lost the groom.

It’s a great hook, sending the three guys through Vegas on a desperate search for their friend, along the way running in to all kinds of strange characters that reveal pieces of the puzzle of their night. It doesn’t hurt that the three guys are played by very funny actors embodying specific types of modern male dysfunction. There’s Bradley Cooper, handsome, fun-loving, and rebelling against middle-class married-life suburbia, a real Fight-Club type. There’s Ed Helms, a gangly, nerdy, cautious dentist, under the thumb of a suspicious, bossy girlfriend. Then there’s Zach Galifianakis, the loopiest, goofiest of the bunch. His face is hidden behind a Grizzly-Adams beard. His belly folds over his belt. His eyes are often hidden behind large sunglasses or a dazed glaze. He’s awkward and uncomfortable to watch but completely funny in the way he delivers the strangest lines (he has to be back in town for the Jonas Brothers concert and must stay 200 yards from all Chuck-E-Cheeses).

The three guys tear through town running into a baby, a tiger, a stripper, cops, doctors, gangsters and even Mike Tyson in their search for their friend and to find out what, exactly caused the mayhem they discover. Why is a mattress speared on a statue? How’d they get that car? Whose baby is that? Who ordered those custom mugs and hats? What’s that chicken doing? Dude, where's our car?

The movie has no weight – I never really cared about the characters – but there’s enough humor and hot air to float the movie to the finish line, even if it starts to deflate a bit in the third act. Even though I didn’t care about the people, they were still likeable creations, and there’s enough curiosity factor to each new development – how’ll they get out of this? – to sustain the freewheeling energy for most of the time. Director Todd Phillips has a fine cast (including support from Jeffery Tambor, Heather Graham, Rob Riggle, Mike Epps, and Ken Jeong) and uses them well. He also knows his way around the dude humor of the concept, building on his past experiences with Old School and the like. Phillips guides the movie with a steady, sure hand, knowing when to punch up the humor and knowing when to keep it low-key. This isn’t going to be an especially memorable picture – its effect is already wearing off and I’ll have mostly forgotten it within a year or two – but it’s sure to be a staple of late-night TV.