Movie Review: Bringing Down the House

Bringing Down the House (2003) 

Directed by Adam Shankman 

Written by Jason Filardi 

Starring Steve Martin, Queen Latifah, Eugene Levy, Jean Smart, Joan Plowright, Missi Pyle 

Release Date March 7th, 2003 

Published March 6th, 2003 

Racial humor these days is more difficult than peace in the Middle East. Sensitivities are high and watchdogs are everywhere seizing on any hint of political incorrectness. Into this climate wanders the mismatched buddy comedy Bringing Down The House starring Steve Martin and Queen Latifah. A film that is desperate to be edgy with it's racial humor but paints too broadly to make anything close to a point.

Martin is Peter Sanderson, a workaholic LA lawyer who has recently divorced his wife Kate (Jean Smart) leaving her custody of their two kids, Sarah (Kimberly J. Brown) and Georgy (Angus T. Jones).

Peter isn't an absentee father, he still sees his kids but because of his job, he breaks a lot of promises. Constantly attached to his cellphone, Peter has little time for anything other than work though he has found time to strike up an Internet connection with a fellow lawyer named Charlene. Or so he thinks. Peter believes Charlene is a lawyer because her screen-name is lawyergirl. 

In reality however, Charlene is actually an ex con looking for someone to help get her out of jail. What Peter also doesn't know, until they meet on a blind date at his home, is that Charlene isn't the petite waspish blonde he had imagined but rather a sassy busty black woman in the form of Queen Latifah. If this sounds like the setup to a bad sitcom then you're onto something.

Peter is, not surprisingly, unhappy with Charlene's deception and wants her to leave immediately, until Charlene makes a scene and he is forced to let her stay. In a series of implausibility's, she stays in his house bonds with his kids and eventually the two come to an understanding. She helps him try and get his wife back while he works to clear her name. Eugene Levy is thrown into the plot as Charlene's love interest and The Practice's Steven Harris slums as Charlene's gangbanger ex-boyfriend.

Despite it's bad sitcom level plotting Bringing Down the House has it's share of laughs, most of them coming from Martin and Latifah who at times seem to be in an entirely different and far funnier film. The chemistry between the two is excellent in scenes where they seem to be flying off the script. However, when they are in the forced confines of the film’s plot, they seem bored.

The supporting cast is made up of caricatures and plot points and Eugene Levy is both. Thrown in to give the script a reason for Latifah and Martin not to get together, he also provides the screenwriter with the lame white guy he needs to foolishly send up stereotypical black speech as you have seen in the film‘s inescapable ad campaign. Also forced into the film as a caricature is Joan Plowright as Martin's bigoted client. Plowright's character exists for the purpose of one scene in which she smokes marijuana at a nightclub. It's funny because she's white, old, and smoking a joint..... hahahahaha.

The films racial humor is clumsy to the point of offensive and if it weren't for Latifah, you might not be able to tolerate a lot of it. The script seems determined to either make you laugh or make you extremely uncomfortable, which could be a commendable trait if the film weren't tied to such a mundane plot and bound to it's genre.

Director Adam Shankman needs to learn to control his camera. Early in the film he falls in love with these nauseating tracking shots that will have you wishing for Dramamine. His technique gets better as the film goes on but sadly, he is in place merely to transfer the mundane script to the screen.

Anything interesting in Bringing Down The House is provided by Martin and Latifah who through comedic force of will make this lame predictable material occasionally funny. The most surprisingly funny moment comes toward the end when Martin dresses up in the stereotypical “young black guy” costume and enters a black club. The scene has the potential to be extremely unfunny but Martin plays it so well you laugh, whether you wanted to or not. 

Movie Review Sweet Home Alabama

Sweet Home Alabama (2002)

Directed by Andy Tennant 

Written by C Jay Cox 

Starring Reese Witherspoon, Josh Lucas, Patrick Dempsey, Candace Bergen, Fred Ward, Jean Smart

Release Date September 27th, 2002

Published September 24th, 2002 

In Legally Blonde, Reese Witherspoon showed herself to be the romantic comedy heiress apparent to Julia Roberts. With her perky good looks and sugary sweetness offset by a wonderfully mischievous smile it was impossible not to fall in love with her. Witherspoon brings those same qualities to her latest film, Sweet Home Alabama, but under the direction of Andy Tennent the same qualities that made you love her in Legally Blonde make you loathe her in this dense retread of every romantic comedy ever made.

In Alabama Reese has one of those great Hollywood lives where everything is perfect: perfect job, perfect friends, perfect man, just perfect. As Melanie Carmichael, Reese is a New York fashion designer about to marry the son of New York’s Mayor. Patrick Dempsey plays the perfect guy, Andrew, just going through the motions playing the same role Bill Pullman played in Sleepless in Seattle. No matter how good a guy he is, the trailer has already explained his fate.

After Andrew asks Melanie to marry him, Melanie has to go home to Alabama to take care of the small detail of her current husband Jake (Josh Lucas). In flashback we are treated to the scene when Jake and Melanie fell in love, they were struck by lightning as the shared their first kiss. Watching this scene my eyes rolled so far back I could see the dull faces of the people directly behind me. You can say I’m cynical but haven’t we seen this exact seen or something very similar at least a thousand times? Melanie and Jake’s bad sitcom style arguing is just one of a million tip offs that they will back together at the end of the film.

Having returned to her home town for the first time in 7 years Melanie takes time to revisit her old friends including Bobby Ray (Ethan Embry) who has a secret only Melanie knows about, the kind of secret that stereotypical southerners don’t react well to. There is also Melanie’s former best friend Lurlynn (Melanie Lynskie) who now has three kids including a newborn she takes to the bar as so many southerners are prone to do. Let us not forget Melanie’s parents Fred Ward and Mary Kay Place, who don’t so much fit into the role of stereotypical Southern parents that everyone in the audience assumed they would be.

So golly, do you think Melanie’s unusual southern friends and family will clash with her high class New York would be in laws?

Poor Candace Bergen, this wonderfully talented Emmy winning actress is stuck with the film's most thankless role. As the ever scowling and disapproving mother-in-law, Bergen is never allowed to smile, never allowed to joke. The purpose of Bergen’s Mayor of New York and mother of the groom is to be the bitch so at the end of the movie she can get her comeuppance in what is supposed to make the audience cheer.

That is the essence of the problem with Sweet Home Alabama, every scene has been filmed with the purpose of exerting a particular response from the audience. It is as if every scene in the film was individually test screened by demographic to make sure it illicited the correct audience response.

Like a romantic comedy machine, Sweet Home Alabama grinds through it’s mechanical plot, perfectly calibrated to meet exactly what the audience expects. The film is so predictable even lines of dialogue can be anticipated. Scenes are setup ten to twenty minutes ahead so, rather than watch the movie, I was sitting and waiting for the expected payoff and like clockwork I didn’t have to wait long for it in exactly the way I expected.

Sweet Home Alabama is the latest film to exhibit my biggest movie pet peeve. A film based on seemingly intelligent characters making intensely dumb decisions because if they didn’t, there wouldn’t be a movie. Not a frame of film goes by that Melanie doesn’t have an opportunity to solve all her problems with one intelligent decision. One line of intelligent dialogue and problem solved, movie over.

Sweet Home Alabama is an awful film and I had very low expectations for this film. I expected to laugh a couple times, fall in love with Reese Witherspoon again and leave the theater with a smile on my face. Instead I walked out depressed after seeing a film that illustrates everything that is wrong modern Hollywood film-making. This is yet another film that had a poster before it had a screenplay. A film where marketing execs made the creative decisions and hired creative people to carry out the vision of the publicity department. Director Andy Tennent was likely instructed to simply make Reese look cute and hope that the writers might squeeze in a sight gag or one liner somewhere, spoiler alert: they didn’t.

To steal a line from my hero Roger Ebert I hated, hated, hated this movie. This film does not improve upon the sight of a blank screen viewed for the same length of time. I still love Reese Witherspoon, but only because I watched Legally Blonde. Had I not, I might curse her for having made this film. Hollywood has no shame churning out the same drivel month after month. And I know what you're saying and yes I shouldn’t act so surprised but I honestly believe that there is art out there somewhere, Sweet Home Alabama dims that hope slightly but that dream is still there.

Movie Review: Youth in Revolt

Youth in Revolt (2010) 

Directed by Miguel Arteta

Written by Gustin Nash

Starring Michael Cera, Portia Doubleday, Jean Smart, Ray Liotta, Steve Buscemi, Fred Willard

Release Date January 8th, 2010

Published January 8th, 2010 

Michael Cera is not everyone's cup of tea. His fey, nonchalant nebbish-ness is a put off for some but not for me. From “Arrested Development” to “Superbad” to now “Youth in Revolt” and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,” Cera's persona has become a wonderful comic tool that he wields with precision. It's fair to say that “Youth in Revolt” takes the Michael Cera persona to an extreme but it worked for me and will work for anyone who counts them a Cera fan.

Michael Cera stars in Youth in Revolt as Nick Twisp a shy young man living with his slatternly mother (Jean Smart) and her loser boyfriend of the moment, Jerry (Zach Galifianakis). When Jerry gets in trouble with some local tough the 'family' has to go on the run. They take refuge in a trailer park where Nick spies the girl of his dreams, Sheeni Saunders (Portia Doubleday).

Sheeni initially has no interest in Nick but his persistence is flattering and eventually she gives him a break but only after he becomes the bad boy of her dreams. Nick is no bad boy but when he manages to tick off Sheeni's parents it begins an unintended reputation that Nick must foster in order to keep Sheeni's attention.

After Jerry disappears Nick is forced to return home. Once there and torn from his beloved Sheeni, Nick must hatch a plan, a plan that will allow him to move back. This elaborate fiasco involves getting his dad (Steve Buscemi) a job and a place to live near the trailer park. Then, he has to convince his mom to kick him out and force him to live with dad. The ways in which Nick goes about this are part of a tricky, gloriously odd series of events that make up the plot of Youth in Revolt.

Director Miguel Arteta brings wonderfully subtle rhythm to some rather outlandish scenes and the conflict between the tone and the happenings in Youth in Revolt somehow emerges charming and very funny. The ways in which the direction is passive and the action is not clash so perfectly that if pushed in a more or less active direction the movie would tumble over.

Strangely, while the role of Nick Twisp seems custom built for the Michael Cera persona; “Youth in Revolt” is actually based on a series of novels from the early 1990's from writer C.D Payne. I have never read the novels but according to those who have it is as if Nick Twisp predicted Michael Cera and waited for his arrival before he could be brought to the big screen.

There is no other actor who could bring Nick Twisp to life other than Michael Cera. The changes of persona, the ways in which Nick imagines a more confident version of himself named Francois Dillinger, these are seemingly natural shifts for Michael Cera that would seem like comic extensions for other actors. Cera makes the move organic as if creating Francois came from his own mind.

People tend to see the Michael Cera persona as an example of limited range. I however, feel that what Michael Cera does on screen is quite challenging. He's like a modern day Chaplin carrying The Tramp persona from film to film, giving him different dimensions and playing him against different backgrounds and characters to a new and wonderful comic effect.  

Watch Michael Cera in interviews and then watch Michael Cera in movies and on TV and you get the full picture of the Michael Cera character. It is as if his entire career was a performance art piece that he keeps spinning out further in role after role with different names but always the same character in a new and fascinating comic context. It's rather genius if you like what Michael Cera does.

If you aren't a fan then you will call it limited range and dismiss Cera as some one note performer. I happen to be a huge fan and I love his work more and more each time out and I feel like I am in on a wonderful running gag that never stops and grows more and more fascinating with each role. One of these days the Michael Cera persona is going to hit upon a role that will cross over from just funny to poignant and even moving and more people will begin to get it. “Youth in Revolt” likely isn't that movie but for fans it's enough for now.