Classic Movie Review Reality Bites

Reality Bites (1994)

Directed by Ben Stiller

Written by Helen Childress

Starring Winona Ryder, Ethan Hawke, Janeane Garofalo, Steve Zahn, Ben Stiller 

Release Date February 18th, 1994

Published February 21st, 1994

In the 80s you were called a sellout when you appeared in commercials for brands that people didn't like or respect. In the 90s, this insult evolved into people being called Posers. Essentially, people who tried to be part of a culture that they were not authentically part of were 'Posing,' pretending to be cool and hip and down with the kids. It's strange to think how antiquated this thinking is today. In our modern culture, some of the most popular celebrities are themselves a brand that is associated with other brands for the purpose of selling products to consumers, also known as fans. In the 80s, famed comedian Bill Hicks railed against celebrities in Diet Coke commercials as the ultimate sin that one could commit against authenticity. Today, you'd be hard pressed to find a celebrity who isn't accompanied by some kind of brand deal and we all just accept it as the norm. 

Sorry for the tangent but writing about Reality Bites bums me out so getting distracted is like a gentle and brief oasis. Reality Bites is the ultimate Poser movie. In the 90s, if marketers wanted to reach the youth market that would find an attractive model or celebrity, throw some flannel and chunky boots on them and have them 'Hello Fellow Young People' their way into our living rooms. We'd roll our eyes and call them posers and then probably still buy the products but ironically and without passion. That's Reality Bites in a nutshell, a movie that comes wandering in dressed in flannel and armored in irony and disaffected youth while selling the notion that it is The Big Chill for Generation X. And yes, I rolled my eyes when I thought of that and then bought a ticket for Reality Bites so I could roll my eyes in front of the big screen and pretend not to care about how the movie was selling a conception of my generation to me like any other branded product. 

Reality Bites stars Winona Ryder as Lelaina Pierce, college valedictorian and wannabe documentarian. Lelaina spent her college years getting drunk, getting high and still making it to class on time and getting good grades. Most of Lelaina's time is spent behind a camera where she has been documenting the lives of her closest friends including Vickie (Janeane Garofalo), a manager at The Gap, Sammy (Steve Zahn), a closeted gay man, closeted at least to his family, and Troy (Ethan Hawke), Lelaina's on again, off again, best friend and flirting partner. We get to see plenty of Lelaina's supposed documentary and what we see does not communicate any serious attempt at documentary filmmaking. It's an entirely facile representation of someone's dream of making movies and it gets Reality Bites off to a deeply inauthentic start that doesn't get any better from there. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review: Duane Hopwood

Duane Hopwood (2005) 

Directed by Matt Mulhern

Written by Matt Mulhern 

Starring David Schwimmer, Janeane Garofalo, Judah Friedlander, John Krasinski 

Release Date November 11th, 2005

Published May 22nd, 2006 

My friends know quite well that I don't drink. That in my lifetime I have had exactly one gulp of alcohol and never touched the stuff again. I may not have drinking experience but even I can recognize the problem drinker. The sad, misguided soul whose everyday is a quest to quiet his inner demons with drink. I have seen it in real life, in real time and it's very sad. No film I have ever seen has ever really captured the true drunk experience. Movies like Barfly and Clean and Sober featured powerhouse, emotional performances from Mickey Rourke and Michael Keaton respectively but both were to extreme to be the true drunk experience.

The new to DVD film Duane Hopwood starring David Schwimmer comes closer than ever to capturing the sad, desperate drunk at his lowest point. A point that many may not recognize as low, he has a job, friends, is from time to time still a quite caring father, but a severe low it is.

Written and directed by Matt Mulhern, whose acting history is surprisingly colorful, he was Teddy Beckersted in One Crazy Summer, Duane Hopwood is a glum but desperately affecting drama about alcoholism at it's most mundane and realistic.

David Schwimmer plays Duane a lower middle class schlub who works as a pit boss in an Atlantic City Casino. He is divorced from his wife Linda (Janeane Garofalo) and a DUI arrest threatens to keep him from ever seeing his two daughters again.

The arrest is a first offense and we learn that though Duane clearly has a problem, bad enough that it ended his marriage, this is the first time he has ever been considered dangerous. Duane's life aside from this has gone on sadly but relatively quiet. He makes it to work on time every night, he has loyal friends and neighbors willing to help him and take care of him and even his ex-wife hasn't given up on him as a father though she has moved on with a new boyfriend.

The extraordinary thing about the movie Duane Hopwood is how real it all feels. Unlike other movies about the alcoholic experience there are no grand dramatic revelations, there is little or no catharisis and the ending is even somewhat vague about Duane's possibility for redemption. The film captures the realistic day to day activities of the functioning alcoholic, a person many of us have known and begrudgingly accepted for many years.

Many people watching David Schwimmer will feel they cannot seperate him from Ross on Friends but give Duane Hopwood a few minutes and Ross disappears and this character becomes Schwimmer's new reality. This is some terrific acting from the actor most often underrated amongst the flashy cast of Friends.

Janeane Garofalo too has often been underrated. Her comedy chops have always been respected and her work on television's The West Wing is Emmy worthy. However it's a performance like this that shows truly what Janeane is capable of. Brushing aside her usually brusque sarcastic nature, Garofalo shows a strength and sensitivity that is new to her acting.

And in what is the films most entertaining role comic Judah Friedlander steals scenes as  Anthony a forty year old security guard with dreams of being a stand-up comic and making it out of his mom's basement. He pushes Duane to let him be his roommate and though both seem aware of the sad state of two heterosexual forty year old men living together they form a strong bond that survives even Duane's lowest moments of self destruction. Friedlander is pitch perfect as comic relief from the films admittedly dour main story but he's also part of the films core tenderness that is necessary to making the film watchable. Like Garofalo's Linda, Anthony is not in Duane's life to save him  but just to be his friend and help him out when he can.

The film never made it much past the press rows at Sundance in 2005 but now it's on DVD and waiting to be seen, Duane Hopwood is an exceptional film.

Movie Review: The Wild

The Wild (2006) 

Directed by Steve Williams

Written by Ed Decter, John J. Strauss, Mark Gibson

Starring Kiefer Sutherland, Jim Belushi, Eddie Izzard, Janeane Garofalo, William Shatner

Release Date April 14th, 2006

Published April 14th, 2006 

For people familiar with the not so amicable divorce of Jeffrey Katzenberg from Disney, the new animated film The Wild is a bit of a humorous inside joke. A joke Disney, you can be sure, is not laughing at. Katzenberg was the number 2 man at Disney, right behind Michael Eisner, in the early nineties. He is said to have been responsible for relaunching Disney's moribund animation division by championing The Lion King amongst others.

When Katzenberg was forced out and ended up founding Dreamworks with Steven Speilberg and David Geffen, he had a bit of revenge on his mind. Hence, in his time as the head of Dreamworks animation an odd pattern of copying emerged.

In Katzenberg's first post Disney animated launch Katzenberg chose Antz to lead off the new Dreamworks division. An odd choice considering Katzenberg was well aware of Disney's long in development animated film A Bugs Life, courtesy of Disney partner Pixar.

From there the pattern continued, Disney/Pixar release Finding Nemo, D'works is out soon after with Shark's Tale. And then last year Katzenberg pulled the ultimate coup when he released D'Works zoo escape adventure Madagascar ahead of Disney's long in development The Wild, a picture that was in the planning stages late in Katzenberg's own Disney run.

The Wild is Disney's first foray into computer animation without the imprimatur of the geniuses at Pixar and thanks in part to Madagascar the film not only feels like a cheap knockoff it tanked at the box office like one too. Somewhere Jeffrey Katzenberg is smiling.

Kiefer Sutherland leads the voice cast of The Wild as Samson whose massive road has made him the featured attraction at the New York City Zoo. Unfortunately, Samson's son Ryan (Greg Cipes) can't seem to get his roar going beyond a weak meow. Having spent his entire life listening to his dad's stories about fighting wildebeests in the wilds of the jungle, Ryan longs to go to the wild himself to find his roar and capture some glory of his own.

Ryan gets his chance when he spots a cargo hold being loaded on a truck that he is certain is headed for The Wild. When Samson finds his son on a truck headed for the harbor he and his pals, including Benny The Squirrel (Jim Belushi), Nigel the koala (Eddie Izzard), Bridget the giraffe (Janeane Garofalo) and Larry the snake (Richard Kind) give chase and have a grand adventure in the streets of New York before commandeering a tugboat and taking off after Ryan to the Wilds of Africa.

The stories of The Wild and Madagascar are similar but not the same. Yet it cannot be denied that the creative team at Dreamworks was well aware of Disney's competing project which was in production even before Madagascar. Nevertheless most will see The Wild as a rehash of the story from Madagascar and they are not entirely wrong.

Both stories jump off from the premise of Zoo animals escaping their cage confines and heading out to adventure in the jungle. Both feature lions as lead characters, Kiefer Sutherland taciturn and authoritative in The Wild and Ben Stiller freewheeling yet neurotic in Madagascar. Both feature giraffes as second leads with Janeane Garofalo evincing a smart sexy giraffe in The Wild to David Schwimmer's laconic dopey giraffe in Madagascar.

The main difference between the two films is the switch from Chris Rock as an ascerbic energetic zebra in Madagascar and Eddie Izzard as the wildly improvised koala in The Wild. Otherwise the films play along very similar storylines.

Try to decide whether one of these two animated flicks is better than the other is really a question of taste. Madagascar appeals to fans of broad comedy while The Wild sticks closer to a family adventure vibe with Eddie Izzard providing the occasional comic jolt with his ad libbing.

I prefer Madagascar because I just could not buy the voice of Kiefer Sutherland as Samson in The Wild. All I could hear was Jack Bauer, Sutherland's iconic TV badas, coming out of the animated mouth of a lion. When Sutherland is called on to be playful or broadly comic he comes off as stern and a little angry. His line deliveries are staccato, forced and halting, not unlike Jack Bauer's tight lipped hyper authoritative line readings on 24.

Jack Bauer simply cannot play cute and cuddly and because of that I found The Wild to be more uncomfortable than humorous.

Directed by special effects specialist Steve Spaz Williams, best know for Jim Carrey's cartoon histrionics in The Mask, The Wild has uniquely realistic look that definitely looks complicated. The hard work of the Disney animators is all up there on the screen for all to see in the couple of hundred thousand individually drawn hairs on each of the animal characters.

Complicated however, is a far cry from elegant or beautiful and like all other non-pixar computer animated films, The Wild pales in comparison to the remarkable works of art that are The Incredibles, Finding Nemo and Monsters Inc.

Even without the thievery of Madagascar I would not be recommending The Wild, a family animated adventure that is lacking in big laughs and adventure.

Movie Review Ratatouille

Ratatouille (2007) 

Directed by Brad Bird 

Written by Brad Bird

Starring Patton Oswalt, Ian Holm, Janeane Garofalo, Brad Garrett, Peter O'Toole, Will Arnett 

Release Date June 29th, 2007

Published June 28th, 2007

Brad Bird began his career as an animator on some lesser Disney efforts in the early 80's. He then moved briefly to the art department for The Simpsons and has since taken what he's learned in both of those unique arenas to feature films. His Iron Giant was a wondrous combination of classical animation and lovely storytelling. Sadly that film was never appreciated upon its release and only now seems to be gaining the classic status it so richly deserves.

His follow up, 2004's The Incredibles, thrust him to the forefront of modern animated artistry. His take on the all too real lives of superheroes was humorous, heartwarming and action packed and combined Bird's talent for beautiful animation with deeply human animated characters in extraordinary situations.

That film was, of course, a Pixar animation effort. The company that leads the way in computer animated artistry has once again teamed with Brad Bird for another exceptional film. Ratatouille, the story of a French food loving rat, is a loving tribute to food lovers everywhere and a supremely entertaining movie for anyone who enjoys movies. Not just animated movies or kids movies, Ratatouille is entertainment for everyone.

Remy (Patton Oswalt) is a rat in species only. In his heart Remy is a foodie, a lover of the greatest culinary delights. When he finds that he is living in the sewers beneath Paris, Remy see's a whole new world of foodie delights. Accidentally separated from his family, Remy seeks a new home and finds one in the kitchen of the late world famous Gusteau (Brad Garrett).

Gusteau is world famous for his cookbook ``Anyone Can Cook", a book that Remy has read cover to cover and taken to heart. Separated from his family, Remy develops an imaginary friendship with Gusteau who leads him to his restaurant now run by the miserly tyrant Skinner, Gusteau's ex-second in command. Skinner has turned Gusteau's into a money machine, marketing microwave food under Gusteau's world famous name.

Remy arrives at Gusteau's at the same time as a timid young man named Linguini who has his own connection to Gusteau. Linguini has been fired from numerous jobs and see's Gusteau's as his last chance to find something he can make a living at. A letter from Linguini's mother convinces him to hire Linguini as a garbage boy. However, when Linguini decides to help out with the soup, Remy has to step in and help him out.

When the soup is a hit, Linguini is put in charge of the soup and the two form a partnership and a friendship that could return Gusteau's restaurant to its former glory.

The key to Ratatouille is establishing its heart. We are talking about a movie whose star is one of the most reviled characters in the animal world. When you add the fact that our lead rat character is going to be involved with food and you have an awkward mix. However, the power of animation can tend to soften our feelings toward any species, but the real reason we come to love Remy is the terrific voicework of comedian Patton Oswalt.

The caustic comic surprisingly finds the perfect mix of winning humor, and passion that makes Remy a lively lovable character. Listening to Oswalt as Remy talking about food; you hear excitement and the purest of all joy. Remy has a desire not just to taste great food but to create and share great food with anyone and everyone and you hear that zeal in the voice of Patton Oswalt.

Credit director Brad bird for recognizing that passion and genuine enthusiasm in Oswalt's voice when he happened to hear Oswalt giving an interview on the radio. Oswalt was doing a bit from his act about the Black Angus Steakhouse chain and Bird decided then and there he wanted this guy's eager, earnest, enthusiasm for Remy.

The rest of the voice cast is equally well placed with the legendary Sir Peter O'Toole oozing worldly expertise as the tough as nails French food critic Anton Ego. It is O'Toole as Ego who is at the climax of the movie, its most important character and he delivers the climax in a wonderfully unexpected way.

As with all Pixar creations, the animation of Ratatouille is first rate. I mention Pixar because their stamp of quality brings an extra bit of credibility to Ratatouille. But, even working for Pixar, director Brad Bird has put his own stamp on the film. As he did with his previous Pixar produced work, The Incredibles, Bird brings his talent for traditional hand drawn animation to the world of computers and creates his own unique palette.

The look and feel of Ratatouille and its animated Paris milieu is warm and inviting with just a hint of the traditional Paris attitude. The look is timeless, not unlike the real city of lights, thus why you can't really get a sense of the time of Ratatouille. It has both modern and classic touches to the storytelling and the animated locations. It's in no way alien, just unique, its own sort of universe.

So many wonderful things stand out about Ratatouille and one of the most pleasurable is the genuine love of food. The film is a carnival of carnivorous delights making it the perfect movie to see right before going out to a nice dinner. If this movie doesn't stoke your appetite, you simply don't know how to enjoy good food.

Ratatouille is yet another triumph for Brad Bird and the team at Pixar. A joyous celebration of characters, story and animation. What a delight it is to see a movie that delivers in nearly every way imaginable from direction, to storytelling to casting. Nothing is left to chance and we in the audience are the ones who reap the rewards.

Not just a movie for the kids, but by no means over their little heads, Ratatouille is a complete movie. The rare treat of a movie that all audiences can enjoy.

Movie Review: Wet Hot American Summer

Wet Hot American Summer (2001) 

Directed by David Wain 

Written by David Wain, Michael Showalter

Starring Paul Rudd, Janeane Garofalo, David Hyde Pierce, Elizabeth Banks, Ken Marino 

Release Date July 27th, 2001 

Published January 15th, 2002

A few weeks back theatres were infected with the inept, unfunny, teen movie sendup Not Another Teen Movie. An exercise in stupidity, it quickly disappeared from theatres. To see how a teen movie sendup should work, see the new to video and DVD Wet Hot American Summer, a hysterical take on the teen movie sub-genre, the summer camp movie.

Summer is the brainchild of David Wain and Michael Showalter, better known as members of the comedy troupe The State whose short-lived MTV sketch show mastered the art of teen movie parody. Showalter also stars in the film as the nerdy camp counselor who on the last day of camp is going to win over the hottest girl. Janeane Garofalo also stars as the head counselor who is romancing David Hyde Pierce as a nerdy scientist. Indeed all the great camp movie cliches are in place, save for the evil rival camp whose owner wants to takeover the camp, a cliche that is referred to but then knowingly dismissed in one the movies funniest scenes.

The films best moments are provided by Law and Order SVU star Christopher Meloni as the camp cook, whose best friend is a can of mixed vegetables. Anyone who ever saw Meloni on HBO's Oz will laugh hysterically everytime he's onscreen.

If anything keeps Wet Hot American Summer from being a great movie instead of a good movie, it's Garofalo. At times, she can't seem to keep up with her costars outrageous-ness. It's not her fault, all the members of The State, Showalter, Ken Marino and Michael Ian Black have been together a long time and have a chemistry that can't be picked up in the time it takes to shoot a movie.

Wet Hot American Summer is everything Not Another Teen Movie wasn't. It's funny, intelligent and over the top in ways that don't involve excrement and bodily functions. Let's hope Michael Showalter, David Wain and the other members of The State get the chance to make more movies, though the film's box office makes that unlikely.