Tag Archives: James Franco

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This is the End – Review

5/5 – Funniest movie of 2013

On the eve of This is the End’s release, I still  had no idea what the movie was about. The poster tells you nothing. I hadn’t seen any trailers. I wrongly assumed it was a Hangover-like bachelor party movie. All I knew about it was that quite a few people  whose opinion I like said it was hilarious. And really, that’s all the information I needed.

I really liked that the actors in this film are all playing themselves. It helps that they’re all real life friends who have worked together before, as they take a lot of comedy from their past experiences working together. Like when James Franco showed off his art to Seth Rogen.

I want similar paintings at my place.

The This is the End poster says “with Michael Cera and Emma Watson.” Oh man, if these two have had funnier roles before, please point me in the direction those movies. Michael Cera was especially hilarious, playing the douchiest version of himself imaginable. There are more celebrity cameos that I’d hate to spoil here…they’re just too damn funny.

George Michael is all growns up.

There are so many funny scenes in this movie. The rapture of James Franco might be my favorite. That, or how Michael Cera comes to his end.

As I was watching the movie, I found myself falling in the Friends/Sex and the City game of trying to match my friends up with the characters on screen. Who in your group would be the Danny in the post-apocalyptic world? After you figure that out, you might want to avoid that guy from here on out.

If you haven’t seen This is the End yet, I highly recommend it. It’s easily the funniest movie I’ve seen in the theater this year. It’s probably too late to see it in any theater unless you have a third or fourth run theater near you, but it will be available on DVD and Blu-ray on 10/1 from places such as Amazon.

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At The Theater #37: 127 Hours

Did you like the self-mutilation in Black Swan, but weren’t really into the lesbian make-out scene? Then Fox Searchlight has the movie for you: 127 Hours!
I’m only kind of joking here. 127 Hours is a very graphic movie. But you have to expect that going into a movie about Aron Ralston, the hiker who had to cut off his own arm to save his own life.

The first 20 minutes of 127 hours show the beauty of nature. It will make you want to visit your nearest national park and take in the natural splendor that our country is full of. How awesome is that underground pool that James Franco brings Kate Mara and Amber Tamblyn to?

The next hour and 15 minutes are all about how nature is something to be feared. Because nature will fuck you from behind the first chance it gets. And it will donkey punch you while it’s doing it. And it won’t call you the next day.

It will be hard to go hiking and not think of this.

I wondered how Danny Boyle was going to keep the audience’s interest up throughout the movie. Aron gets trapped fairly early on and his only companions are a couple of ants and his own hallucinations. But Danny Boyle and James Franco did a great job. I was never bored during 127 Hours. Boyle used the perfect mix of problem solving on Ralston’s part for getting out of his situation and flashbacks to Ralston’s life leading up to this moment. And Franco was wonderful as Ralston, immediately portraying him as both likable and fallible, basically making him human. I think it’s an easy pick for both Boyle and Franco to receive Oscar nominations for 127 Hours.

I was really happy to hear Plastic Bertrand’s Ca Plane Pour Moi during the movie. Everyone needs this French punk song on their iPods.

Download it.

Little things stand out. I thought it was really cool that Danny Boyle used the distinctive whirring sound made by the tape loader in Canon DV video cameras whenever James Franco turned on his video camera. I know that sound all too well from owning one of them. Boyle also used the same on-screen icons from Canon’s camera when we were seeing things from Ralston’s video camera’s point of view.

Aron Ralston is amazing. 127 Hours is a testament to the huge amounts of hope and willpower Aron had to have in order to survive being trapped in the wilderness on his own. Even when his situation was at its bleakest, he never gave up. The guy is the epitome of willpower. Forget Hal Jordan. Aron Ralston should be the Green Lantern of Earth.

Geek to English translation: Green Lantern’s power ring is powered by his own willpower.

The most shocking part of the movie isn’t when James Franco does what you knew all along was coming, namely getting to the business of removing his own arm, it’s at the very end, when it’s shown that the real Aron Ralston is still at it doing hard hikes in the wilderness after all that he went through. He’s even fitted his stump arm with an awesome looking claw tool for digging in ice. I broke my wrist a couple of years ago snowboarding and never put on snowboarding boots again. Maybe I should rethink that.

Bad-Ass.

I believe there are five lessons to take away from 127 Hours: 1. Hike with a buddy. 2. Return phone calls, especially from your mom. 3. Spend an extra five minutes looking for your Swiss Army Knife. 4. Never give up. 5. When you fall down, not matter how hard, get back up and live life on your own terms.

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At The Theater #18: Date Night

I should have known that Date Night was going to be a disappointment right at the first scene. Steve Carell, playing New Jersey accountant Phil Foster, is in a meeting with that annoying SNL couple that call each other babe all the time and ignores whoever they’re talking to. A couple of questions: Does anyone anywhere find these characters funny on SNL? Does even Jason Sudeikis hate these characters enought that they had to replace him from a role he started on SNL?

Speaking of SNL, Kristin Wiig also has a minor part in the movie. You might not recognize her, because she’s not playing the Target Lady. Until now I was convinced that the Target Lady was the only character Kristin Wiig could play. I can’t be the only one who thinks that every one of her characters on SNL is the Target Lady in a different outfit.

When your movie revolves around how boring the main characters’ marriage is, you have to be very careful to not bore your audience. Unfortunately, no one seems to have told the makers of Date Night this. The movie has some very funny comedic high points, but for the most part, it just meanders around why Phil and Claire’s marriage is a snooze fest, which causes those scenes to be a bit of a snooze fest.

I can’t hate on Date Night completely. Looking at the graph, you can see that I thought there were some very funny bits in it. And it’s true, the jokes that work really work. There just aren’t enough of them, and one of the jokes that worked, Phil and Claire being given a hard time about taking another couple’s dinner reservation, is beaten to death so badly that I think they rehash it more times in the movie than I saw it seeing the preview a few times. I don’t feel bad about spoiling this joke, since it’s in the preview, but I won’t spoil any of the other parts I found funny, because that will just rob the humor out of them if you see the movie, and Date Night doesn’t have that many funny parts to spare.

Mila Kunis and James Franco are great as the couple whose dinner reservation Phil and Claire steal. In fact, their spot in Date Night’s preview made me want to see the movie. Unfortunately, they’re not in the movie much longer than they are in the preview. I really hate when that happens, when the characters in a preview that convince you to see a movie are barely in the movie and the preview gives away most of the funny parts.

We’re in this blog post longer than we’re in this movie.

Ray Liotta plays a mob boss in Date Night. Don’t make this the reason you see Date Night. If you loved Good Fellas to the point that you want to see him play a gangster again, watch Good Fellas again; you’ll definitely enjoy it more. If you want to see him do comedy, find a theater showing Snowmen; he’s funnier in that.

We saw the movie at Park Slope’s Pavilion movie theater. Avoid this place. Tickets are $12 and the theater does not live up to the ticket price. The seats that aren’t broken smell of a fine mix of mildew and body odor. The theaters are about the size of your living room and the screens aren’t much bigger than a home projector. I remember enjoying this theater in the past; I used to find it charming in the same way I find the Cobble Hill Theater charming. It was definitely one of Brooklyn’s best theaters not too long ago. I don’t know what’s caused it to drop into such a state of disrepair.

After Date Night, Julie mentioned that she thought we saw more good movies in 2008 when we first did this movie a week thing than we are so far this year. I’m hoping this trend reverses soon.