Movie Review I Love You Man

I Love You, Man (2009) 

Directed by John Hamburg 

Written by John Hamburg 

Starring Jason Segal, Paul Rudd, Rashida Jones, Andy Samberg, Sarah Burns

Release Date March 20th, 2009

Published March 20th, 2009

Have you ever seen two straight guys try to hug each other? It's more awkward than bad racial humor. There's that whole bend at the waste, the handshake pulling each other in and the light fist pound on the back and then the quick snap back as if holding this position too long would automatically turn the man gay. The new comedy I Love You Man captures the exquisite awkwardness of modern male bonding in ways even the man-hug cannot.

Paul Rudd stars in I Love You Man as Peter Klaven, a desperately normal, boringly nice guy who is about to get married. We join the story on the night Peter asks his girlfriend Zooey to marry and she says yes. As she is calling every human being she has ever met, Peter has no one to call.

As a painfully funny uncomfortable dinner the following night with Peter's parents (Jane Curtin and J.K Simmons) and Peter's brother Robby (Andy Samberg) makes clear, Peter has never really had any close male friends. He has never had a problem bonding with women but never guys.

In need of a best man, and in need of showing Zooey he has a life of his own, Peter sets out to meet a new best friend. Help from his mom and brother lead to a few more horribly awkward moments, including a dinner with a guy named Doug (Thomas Lennon) that goes horribly wrong -Peter ends up with Doug's tongue in his mouth- Peter finally meets a dude he can be slightly comfortable with.

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media

Movie Review Little Fockers

Little Fockers (2010) 

Directed by Paul Weitz

Written by John Hamburg, Larry Stuckey

Starring Ben Stiller, Robert De Niro, Blythe Danner, Dustin Hoffman, Barbra Streisand, Owen Wilson, Teri Polo

Release Date December 22nd, 2010 

Published December 23rd, 2010 

What a difference a good director makes. Director Jay Roach took the thin concept of a man meeting his girlfriend's parents for the first time and mined it for bigger laughs than were likely in the script. Stretching that thin concept for a sequel about meeting the boyfriend's parents, Roach again found laughs that other directors might not have found.

Unfortunately, for fans of “Meet the Parents” and “Meet the Fockers,” Jay Roach could see that the premise was played out and while producers pushed for “Little Fockers,” aka ‘Meet the Kids,’ the one director who might have been able to find the funny in this idea dropped out. Picking up the scraps is director Paul Weitz (American Pie) who, though not untalented, fails in every way to find something funny in vomit, booger and erectile dysfunction jokes.

When last we left the Byrnes Family Circle of Trust Gaylord 'Greg' Focker (Ben Stiller) had married Pam Byrnes and the two were expecting a child. Well, it turns out they were expecting twins and five years later, Grandpa Jack (Robert De Niro), Grandma Dina (Blythe Danner) and Focker grandparents Bernie (Dustin Hoffman) and Roz (Barbra Streisand) are coming to Chicago for a birthday party.

Meanwhile, at work Greg has been promoted to head of nursing, a gig that comes with the added bonus of a sexy drug rep named Andi (Jessica Alba) who wants to pay Greg big bucks to be a paid medical spokesman for a new erectile dysfunction drug. Andi, last name Garcia, yes that joke gets old real fast, also has a huge crush on Greg that plays out with humiliating complications and misunderstandings.

Also back for this third outing is Kevin (Owen Wilson), Pam's ex who still carries a torch for her as evidenced by a tattoo on his lower back that is one of the few gags that actually plays to big laughs in “Little Fockers.” And speaking of Little Fockers, this movie is supposed to be about the newest additions to the Focker clan. Sadly, the twins played by Daisy Tahan and Colin Baiocchi are poorly used characters who don't really become part of the action.

The Little Fockers are merely set pieces in Paul Weitz's poorly conceived plot which is  just a series of tasteless jokes and dopey misunderstandings that sometimes payoff and sometimes don't. Take Alba's drug rep for instance. One minute she is seducing Greg, in arguably the saddest moment of Jessica Alba's career, yes likely even worse than “Good Luck Chuck,” the next minute she is out of the movie with little explanation or payoff.

Two other well known actors are also marched out on screen for a moment and can consider themselves lucky to have narrowly escaped the humiliation heaped upon Ms. Alba. Harvey Keitel plays the desperately underwritten role of Greg's crooked home contractor and he plays the role solely so he and Mr. De Niro, his longtime friend and “Mean Streets” co-star can have one meaningless stare down.

Poor Laura Dern is dropped into an even less interesting and poorly fleshed out role as the head of an exclusive private school. The school is called the Little Human Academy and apparently director Paul Weitz thought that the phrase ‘Little Humans’ was funny enough that he didn't bother to include any other notable jokes for Dern, Stiller or De Niro to play in the school scenes.

Dustin Hoffman meanwhile, did not want to return for “Little Fockers.” In fact, according to sources, shooting on “Little Fockers” was five days from complete when a deal was struck for the Oscar winner to reprise his role as Bernie Focker with re-shoots needed to shoehorn Bernie into the story with embarrassing results for the poor editing team tasked with forcing Hoffman into the movie.

Embarrassing is the operative word for all of “Little Fockers” even stars Ben Stiller and Robert De Niro. Though they remain a terrific comic team with a strong instinct for each other's brand of comedy, Stiller and De Niro aren't given much good to play and thus fall back, often as possible, on the things they've done before in a fit of desperate recycling.

The few new gags the duo is given are just unfortunate, especially the erectile dysfunction bit that producers thought was hilarious enough to include in ads for the film and thus destroyed as a gag in the film. 

Little Fockers is a disaster and should have been aborted the moment Jay Roach turned down the chance to direct. Stiller and De Niro are the faces of this franchise but the talent was clearly Mr. Roach without whom everything falls to pieces. Without Roach's guiding hand “Little Fockers” plays as a series of lowbrow gags instead of being what the first two movies were, family stories that happened to include a number of lowbrow gags.

Movie Review: Along Came Polly

Along Came Polly (2004) 

Directed by John Hamburg

Written by John Hamburg 

Starring Ben Stiller, Jennifer Aniston, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Debra Messing, Hank Azaria 

Release Date January 16th, 2004 

Published January 15th, 2004 

2004 is shaping up to be a big year for Ben Stiller. He has 3 films coming out in just the first five months of the year and is directing another. With Starsky and Hutch due in March, his much delayed teaming with Jack Black in Envy pushed to early Spring and a just-begun multi-episode stint on Larry David's HBO series “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Stiller is going to be everywhere this year. His first film of the year, the romantic comedy Along Came Polly with Jennifer Aniston, gets 2004 off to a good start.

In Along Came Polly, Stiller is Rueben Feffer, an expert in risk management. Ruben's job as a risk evaluator for an insurance company has taught him to be quite cautious in everything he does. Cautious even in his personal life which has caused him to settle down with Lisa (Debra Messing) for what seems like a safe, life-long commitment. However, on their honeymoon in St Barts, the couple meets a French scuba diving instructor named Claude (Hank Azaria in a stellar cameo). Of course, Claude and Lisa end up in bed together, discovered by Rueben while doing it with their scuba gear still on. No one does this kind of indignity quite as well as Stiller, who is to humiliation what Jack Benny was to being a tightwad.

Returning home, Rueben is consoled by his friend and former child star Sandy (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) who tries to raise his spirits by taking him to a party. At the party Rueben runs into Polly Prince (Jennifer Aniston), a girl he went to junior high with and who now works as a cocktail waitress in between flights of fancy that have taken her all over the world.

Rueben and Polly are totally opposite personalities, Rueben is uptight, neurotic and fearful while Polly is adventurous, carefree and owns a ferret as a pet. However, like any man who sees an opportunity to be with a beautiful woman, Rueben puts aside his fears of spicy food, salsa dancing and ferrets. Of course, all of which leads to numerous comic foul-ups where his fears get the best of him. 

Once again, Stiller's talent for taking the worst that life can give him makes these varying humiliations terrifically funny. Even the awful bathroom scene after Rueben has suffered through dinner at an Indian restaurant and the spicy food has caused his irritable bowel syndrome to act up. Ugh!

The problem with Stiller's performance in Along Came Polly, as funny as he is, is that we have seen him do variations on this same character plenty of times. Rueben is essentially just an extension of the character he played in last years Duplex who was an extension of Greg Fokker in Meet The Parents (Not so coincidentally, Parents and Along Came Polly are both written and directed by John Hamburg). Further still, those roles were basically toned down takes on Stiller's role in There's Something About Mary. Stiller's act is still funny in Along Came Polly but it is growing a little too familiar and tiresome.

As for Jennifer Aniston, she once again shows why she is the Friend most likely to breakout as a bigtime film star. She's got it, acting chops and comic timing. Her role is surprisingly small as the film makes room for a number of supporting characters. Her Polly has little interaction with the supporting characters which makes her feel as if she were in a slightly different film. Unlike Cameron Diaz in the very similar There's Something About Mary, Aniston's Polly is played straight, above all of the humiliating gross out gags. Polly is central to the plot but is outside much of the humor of the film.

The best parts of the film are the supporting roles played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Alec Baldwin and Hank Azaria. These three terrific actors are in place to put Stiller in the most humiliating situations possible and they do their jobs well. Azaria is especially funny in his small role. Carrying his best accent since his gay Puerto Rican is The Birdcage, Azaria walks nude on the beach, murders the English language and as he should puts Stiller's Rueben in the most humiliating situations possible.

The supporting players, as good as they are, do however expose one of the films main flaws. Writer-Director John Hamburg can't decide on a comic tone. The script attempts to combine over-the-top slapstick, gross-out humor with a realistic romance. The over-the-top elements pull you out of the realistic story, rendering it less believable, especially at the end when the film wants you to get emotional about whether the romance will have a happy ending.

It's difficult to criticize a film that is as funny as Along Came Polly. The cast is terrific and there are a number of funny gags. Still, the romance never feels real because, as written, it gets stepped on by the slapsticky, gross-out humor. Thus we are left with a series of comic skits tied together loosely by a romance that is only in place to give the jokes context. I can kind of recommend Along Came Polly but with a slight reservations. 

Movie Review Why Him?

Why Him? (2016) 

Directed by John Hamburg 

Written by John Hamburg, Ian Helfer 

Starring James Franco, Bryan Cranston, Megan Mullally, Zoey Deutsch, Griffin Gluck 

Release Date December 23rd, 2016 

Published December 22nd, 2016

Why Him(?) is an ungainly, awkward, mess of a movie. The film stars James Franco as one of the most off-putting characters ever brought to the screen, a tech billionaire named Laird who has no concept of how normal people interact. This could be a funny idea, the super-rich can tend to lose connection to the concerns and proprieties of the common man, but, Franco's performance isn’t merely that of a charmingly out of touch kook, but rather a genuinely out of sorts sociopath played as a comic creation.

Bryan Cranston co-stars with Franco in Why Him(?) and is apparently trying to create a character just as annoying as his co-star. Cranston is Ned Fleming, the father of Stephanie (Zoey Deutsch) who has gone off to college in Silicon Valley and fallen madly in love with Laird. Stephanie has invited the whole family, including her mother, Barb (Megan Mullally), and brother Scottie (Griffin Gluck), to fly to California from their home in Michigan to spend the holidays with her and Laird who they will meet for the very first time.

Laird's shtick is that he says everything that comes into his head with no filter. He curses to a degree that would shame Melissa McCarthy and is so incredibly disconnected from everyday small talk that he has no problem discussing sex with his clearly offended future in-laws. Even as everyone around him is clearly offended and uncomfortable with Laird's behavior he is completely oblivious and somehow this is supposed to be funny. It's not, it's just hard to watch.

For his part, Cranston plays Ned as a joyless crank. He’s miserable from the moment he arrives in California from Michigan and remains miserable through the films forced and predictable finale. So, Ned is a miserable character with no sense of humor, no jokes to leaven his miserable premise and the most that Cranston can seem to do with the character is physical shtick that is more like watching someone amid a mental breakdown than someone attempting physical humor. Cranston gesticulates and tenses every muscle and spits every line of dialogue and never once does something funny.

The supporting players in Why Him(?) come away far better off than the leads. Megan Mullally, a veteran of TV sitcoms, seems to know just where to pick her spots for her few jokes, while poor Zoey Deutsch spends most of her time trying to dodge the two leads whose gesticulations as they strain for every joke had to be rather dangerous for any co-star who wandered too closely. Keegan Michael Key, playing Franco's oddball, German accented, assistant Gustav, at the very least could fight back. His running gag is randomly attacking Laird as a way of developing his self-defense, a joke that falls flat, especially once Cranston begins trying to explain it.

Why Him(?) is completely derailed by a pair of lead performances that could not possibly be less appealing. The fact that both Cranston and Franco are former Academy Award nominees only compounds the problem. We know these two actors are better than this awful material and watching them act down to this garbage idea is just depressing.

I blame Director John Hamburg for most of the problems with Why Him(?). Having allowed his actors to do a great deal of improvisation, at least I assume that was improv, otherwise there is an editor who needs to find a new profession, Hamburg created the sloppy, slapdash environment that lead to this mess. Even worse, Hamburg fills out the awfulness by relying on bathroom humor with toilets and urine playing significant roles in the film.

What is it with John Hamburg and bathrooms? Bathroom issues have figured prominently in his humor in most of his movies from the cat that could flush a toilet in Meet the Parents to Ben Stiller's irritable bowels in Along Comes Polly to the fart jokes of Hamburg's one good movie, I Love You Man, Hamburg seems either obsessed with bathrooms or he's merely childish and lazy. Toilets figure prominently throughout Why Him(?) which ends with a post-credits scene all about toilets with pictures of people using the toilet. Ewww. 

At the very least toilets are an apt metaphor for Why Him(?). This movie needs to be flushed.