Superbad/Hot Fuzz

As the holiday season wound down, the packages were wrapped and mailed, the cards were sent and received, and a bit of melancholy (for reasons I won’t bore you with here) was coming upon me and so, of course, comedy was in order.

My good friends at Netflix delivered two movies which had received great notices so I looked forward to just sitting back and being mightily entertained. And even though neither movie was as consistently knee-slapping hilarious as had often been reported both provided some cathartic laughter.

Superbad is both crudely raunchy and sincerely sweet…the young actors (Michael Cera and Jonah Hill) at the center of the story are consistently amusing with an easy rapport (that they are too profane by half is a personal quibble…I’m not adverse to swearing but the sheer amount of profanity in the movie is more tiresome than funny after awhile.) Scenes are consistently stolen by Christopher Mintz-Plasse, who makes his film debut as the nerd-tastic “McLovin”, and Bill Hader and Seth Rogen as the world’s most irresponsible cops.

Superbad, for all of its seeming preoccupation with sex and drinking and partying, is at its heart a story of the bond between two friends on the brink of adulthood and that reveals a tender heart underneath the crass shenanigans of the movie.

Hot Fuzz, on the other hand, has no such tender heart but it is briskly funny in an acerbic way…presenting the story of straight-laced, ultra-effective supercop (Simon Pegg) who was “promoted” from the London police department to a seemingly bucolic village…at least until the final reel when the spoof of American action movies (with pointed, affectionate references to Bad Boys 2 and Point Break and sly winks to other films such as Chinatown) becomes what it was spoofing, an over-the-top, violent action cartoon shoot-‘em-up (if this was supposed to be ironic, the irony was lost on me…it just got louder and sillier as the climax rolled on…and on...and on…)

Neither of these movies would be on my list of all-time favorite comedies but both had just enough laughs to make me smile and when it came to curing some Christmas blues that was just what the doctor ordered :-)

Deadwood

I have, through the tender auspices of the good folks at Netflix, made my way through the third (and, alas, final) season of Deadwood. I went through the episodes slowly because I knew that they were the final episodes of this compelling series (HBO in its dubious wisdom decided not to continue the show) and I was loathe to rush through them (though the impulse to do so was always there, of course.)

Deadwood is (was) not for everyone…it is (was) gritty, bawdy, messy, absurd, engaging, and, most all, profane…but I relished all three seasons with all of its compelling drama, serpentine plotting, and wonderfully flawed and complex characters.

The language of the show was poetic and profane…most often both at the same time…and the locale was lived-in, rough hewn, muddy, messy, and ramshackle. I have no idea if any of this was true of Deadwood, South Dakota in the late 1800’s but it has a fierce verisimilitude that I quite readily accepted (even while accepting, however reluctantly, that people probably didn’t speak in the colorful profane poetic way the characters sometime did in the series.)

At the heart of the series was Ian McShane’s wondrous performance of the brutal, acerbic, savvy and, yes, profligately profane Al Swearengen, Deadwood’s manipulative power-broker (as well as a saloon owner and whoremaster). The third season was underscored by the conflict between Swearengen and the even more brutal George Hearst (Gerald McRaney is in very fine form as the complex, driven Hearst) and it is a violent, strategic, uncompromising chess match that is never anything less than wholly, awfully engaging.

There is not much resolved by the time the series ends and we are promised a movie or two to bring to some better resolution the plotlines that would have come together in the planned fourth season…I hope that the promise comes true but even if it doesn’t Deadwood is (was) still well worth the investment of time and (rapt) attention.

The Hoax

I haven’t been moved to go to the movie theater much this year and even my Netflix queue has been quiet for a while but as the year winds to a close I’m endeavoring to get caught up on some movies that I’ve missed this year. Case in point: Lasse Hallstrom’s interesting character piece, The Hoax, which came out to generally good reviews earlier this year.

The movie chronicles the audacious 1970s hoax perpetrated by Clifford Irving involving a supposed autobiography of the famously reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes. Irving scammed more than a million dollars from McGraw-Hill and Life Magazine and was well on his way to getting away with it before Hughes surfaced (in a news conference held via speakerphone) to scuttle his play.

The Hoax, with a screenplay based on Irving’s own book about the whole affair, juxtaposes the unfolding of Irving’s elaborate…and frankly bold…scheme against the events of the times (the Vietnam War and the protests against same, the Nixon Administration, etc.) to intriguing effect. It also strongly suggests that Irving’s plot was allowed to go forth due to a double dealing conspiracy between Hughes and his people and Nixon and his people.

I don’t know about that last bit but I do know that at the heart of this movie…which itself is briskly paced, engaging, and witty…is a bravura performance by Richard Gere that captures the charm, the intelligence, the deviousness, the callousness, and, eventually, the paranoid fantasies of Irving. Gere is amazing and so is Alfred Molina, playing Dick Suskind, Irving’s conflicted partner in crime; they play off each other with such fierce chemistry that they make the movie soar.

The rest of the cast…including Marcia Gay Harden, Stanley Tucci, and Hope Davis…are fine enough in underwritten supporting roles.

Clifford Irving is a charming rogue (something testified to by venerated CBS newsman Mike Wallace in one of the DVD’s bonus features) and this movie, however true it is itself (it’s based on Irving’s book so it’s skewed towards romanticizing his actions to some extent), has a real charm of its own.

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip

Aaron Sorkin…the creator of the criminally-underappreciated Sports Night and the acclaimed The West Wing… is a man with an ear for clever dialogue, a knack for developing interesting characters who interact in sometimes mundane situations, and decidedly liberal political point of view. All of these things are showcased in the pilot episode of his new NBC series, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.

The dialogue in Studio 60…which is set behind-the-scenes of a Saturday Night Live type show… is, almost as a matter of course with Sorkin’s work (which also includes the scripts for the movies A Few Good Men and The American President), whip-smart and intricately paced and the cast is stellar.

Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford (Josh from The West Wing) are the leads (though they don’t show onscreen until almost 20 minutes into the pilot) with Perry playing a slightly ditzy writer and Whitford playing his more stable (relatively speaking) director friend. The chemistry between the two is, at first blush, quite effective and both actors are in fine form. Amanda Peet brings sparkling and impish wit to her role as the newly-hired president of the network (NBS – the National Broadcasting System) and Steven Weber (probably best known for his role in the old sitcom Wings) has the thankless task of being a priggish network executive.

The rest of the main cast…including D.L. Hughley, Sarah Paulson, and Nathan Corddry as the lead stars in the show-within-a-show and Timothy Busfield as the director of the show…are sketched out a bit in the pilot but, with such a large ensemble, it will take a while to get a handle on all of the characters.

Sorkin, as I said before, has an unabashed point of view (and, apparently, a chip on his shoulder) and his script doesn’t shy away from lambasting President Bush’s intelligence or from flat out calling Pat Robertson a bigot. Guest star Judd Hirsch, playing the executive producer of the show, is given a fiery monologue cribbed straight from Paddy Chayefsky’s “I’m mad as hell” rant from Sidney Lumet’s classic 70’s movie Network (a fact duly noted in the script) that rips on network television (including, in a cheeky “biting the hand that feeds you” riff, taking potshots at NBC offerings such as The Apprentice and Fear Factor) with special venom.

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, judging by this introductory episode, has the potential to be a challenging, entertaining, wickedly subversive show…presuming it finds enough of an audience (one of those deplorable network practices is the fact that good shows are often not allowed the time it takes to find an audience) to reach that potential.

NBC released DVDs of the pilot through Netflix (which is how I saw it, of course), which is an interesting way of promoting the new show. (The DVD also included the pilot of Kidnapped, a mildy-interesting crime serial, and 5-minute previews of Heroes and Friday Night Lights.)

Garden State

I love my Netflix subscription (okay, so maybe my feelings aren't quite that strong...but I do appreciate it a lot.) It's let me catch up with movies that I heard good things about but, for one reason or another, didn't get to see when they were in the theaters. Being laid up on a rainy day is, of course, a great time to kick back and watch a movie...and I'm certainly glad that I had this one on hand today.

Zach Braff's Garden State is everything I heard it was...warm, quirky, poignant, sweetly romantic. It's a lovely little movie...Braff is wonderfully low-key and Natalie Portman is radiant and adorable. It left me with warm buzz in my heart (and yes a happy little tear in my usually cynical eye.)

And it has a killer soundtrack to boot (gotta remember to add that CD to my Amazon.com wishlist before my birthday next month :-)