Held Back: 21 JUMP STREET

Being forced to repeat high school would be something of a waking nightmare for many of us. But isn’t it even the slightest bit tempting to get a second chance at what is, let’s face it, an important, but not that important, part of life? Surely everyone at least entertains the idea of a do-over for some piece of his or her past. To be forced back into the halls of high school would basically be a rubber-stamped approval for extended adolescence, or at least that’s what happens to the undercover cops in the movie remake of the late-80’s high concept cop show 21 Jump Street. They may be immature, but that’s kind of their job now, right?

The series ran on Fox from 1987 to 1991 and starred Johnny Depp as a fresh-faced cop assigned to go undercover as a high school student. The new big budget R-rated Hollywood comedy keeps the show’s high concept and plays it louder and faster, in a way that's more blatantly goofy, vulgar, and violent (sometimes shockingly so). And it works. It’s a slick, competent, surface-level entertainment, a smart adaptation that turns the basic plot hooks into a loving homage to buddy cop movies driven straight through a raunchy high school comedy. If the series was Miami Vice by way of Square Pegs, than the movie remake is Bad Boys in Superbad.

It starts in 2005, a time when a dweeb (Jonah Hill) and jock (Channing Tatum) barely interacted except for the times when the jock laughed at the dweeb for getting a brutal rejection from a pretty girl. They weren’t enemies; they just moved in vastly different circles. But now it’s present day and they’re both in the same police academy. They find they actually get along now. The dweeb helps the jock with the written work and the jock helps the dweeb with his physical trials and marksmanship. They’re so very excited to be cops that when their boring, low-stakes park patrol turns into a bungled drug bust, they’re dismayed to find themselves passed off into a secret program run by a mean stereotype of a commanding officer (Ice Cube) who informs them that they’re going undercover as high school students to track down a new drug ring.

To make matters worse, they’re posing as brothers. They’re a little too old. They’re a little too dissimilar. Yet pass themselves off as teen brothers they must. It’s a rich set-up for comedy and the script from Michael Bacall and Jonah Hill takes funny zigs and zags through a teen comedy terrain that is rife with youthful temptations for the rookie cops. They can’t help but fall back into their own petty high school mentalities but find themselves in an odd type of culture shock. As one who actually was in high school in 2005, I found myself gripped with a kind of mild terror. Could things be that different already? It hasn’t been that many years, has it? Time flies.

Suddenly Tatum’s cool jock style won’t fly and the nervous dorkiness of Hill is oddly appealing. You see, bullying, even of the mild variety, isn’t a surefire ticket to popularity that Tatum seems to think it is. Hill, on the other hand, marvels that the cool crowd is all about caring for the environment. Kids these days. So the two guys are startled to find themselves at the opposite ends of the teenage totem pole. The jock hangs with the chemistry nerds while the dweeb gets closer to the popular kids, especially a sweet girl (Brie Larson) who happens to be in a relationship with the main pusher (Dave Franco, James’s younger brother).

That the two undercover cops are opposites is a typical buddy cop trope. That they’re in a high school, forced to work out old differences and form new ways of social navigation, not to mention learn how to get along and how to be good at their fairly new jobs, creates a fun tension. Of course, it wouldn’t work at all without the winning chemistry between Tatum and Hill who have such a terrific brotherly rapport that they ping off each other with equal parts simpatico bluster and clashing competitiveness, an aggressive but loving friendship that develops in convincing ways. They’re both so game and eager to please that their timing develops the satisfying snap of an agreeable, comfortable comic partnership. I wish the supporting cast could have been used more memorably – Nick Offerman, Parks & Rec’s great Ron Swanson himself, appears in a single scene – but the main protagonists are wonderful anchors.

The plot is basic cop stuff complete with a couple of well-deployed twists, some mostly routine car chases and shootouts, and some perfect, absolutely perfect, cameos. The high school jokes are sometimes obvious – of course parents turn around and interrupt a raucous party – but they too are filled out with such specific and odd details amongst the students and faculty that it transcends its obviousness and finds new funny details in the corners of the hurtling pace of the rough detective through line. I especially liked the exasperated principal (Jake Johnson), the giggly chemistry teacher (Ellie Kemper), and the small gang of science geeks who have permission to go to the chemistry lab early in order to play Bakugan. I’m not sure what that is, but I know it’s some kind of game, which is better than Tatum, who angrily demands to know if it’s drugs.

This is hardly a perfect film – it’s lumpy and shambling in spots and fairly thin overall – but there’s an incredible energy to the way it’s put together. The script joins the two main threads in a self-aware way that draws out the implausibilities to often-great comedic effect. Directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, they bring some of the same inventiveness and willingness to variously reject and embrace cliché for laughs that they displayed in Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. They know sometimes the funniest thing is to do just what’s expected only to pull back at the last second. Yes, the directors behind the most hilarious animated family film in recent memory have created a pretty good live-action R-rated romp of an action-comedy. 21 Jump Street may not be as polished or dense with jokes (and certainly not as family friendly) as Cloudy, but it’s still a stylish, fast-paced entertainment of its own   

The Voracious Filmgoer's Top Ten Films of 2011

Caveat: I have yet to see the acclaimed Iranian film A Separation. When I do, I'll remove this disclaimer and, if need be, add the film to this post.

1. The Tree of Life
2. War Horse
3. Certified Copy
4. Midnight in Paris
5. [tie] Attack the Block and The Interrupters
6. Take Shelter
7. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
8. Hanna
9. The Skin I Live In
10. Hugo


11 - 20 (in alphabetical order):
Bill Cunningham New York, Bridesmaids, Captain America, Conan O'Brien Can't Stop, Margaret, Melancholia, Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, The Muppets, Rango, The Trip


Honorable Mentions (also in alphabetical order):
Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Contagion, Drive, Footloose, The Guard, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, Hell and Back Again, Kung Fu Panda 2, Mysteries of Lisbon, The Myth of the American Sleepover, Paranormal Activity 3, The Princess of Montpensier, Super 8, Terri, Win Win

Grow Up: YOUNG ADULT

Honest to blog, Young Adult is the best thing Diablo Cody’s ever written, homeskillet. It’s sharp, funny, more than a little dark, and with nice nuance and shape. At its center is a fiercely committed performance from Charlize Theron as Mavis Gary, a young adult writer – well, more like ghost writer – up against a deadline. We’ll soon learn that her self-identified personas are in for some reality checks. We first see Mavis passed out on her bed. She begrudgingly gets up and stalks around her apartment, does her Wii Fit exercising, and then watches some Bravo reality shows while chugging a two-liter of Diet Coke. Then she sits down to peck out a few more lines of prose, but finds herself opening her email instead.

This opening sequence rings so true, feels drawn from the experience of a working writer and embellished (maybe) for her character. We know what kind of person Mavis is right away, and even if we didn’t, it’s made clear when she opens a mass email from her high school boyfriend (Patrick Wilson) and his wife (Elizabeth Reaser) announcing the birth of their first child. She decides that her long-ago ex must be miserable. Knowing that she can technically work from anywhere, she packs a bag and leaves Minneapolis for her small hometown, determined to fix her life by getting back with her high school boyfriend.

Once back in town, she’s acutely reminded of all the reasons why she needed to escape in the first place. Her parents (Jill Eikenberry and Richard Bekins) still hang a picture of her ex-husband on the wall. Her old boyfriend is far from miserable. Some of her old high school acquaintances view the return of the “psycho prom queen bitch” (their words) with skepticism. And the only old classmate who will actually talk with her, the only one she can actually open up to, is the bullied, beaten, nerd (Patton Oswalt) who now lives a quiet, simple life, his only regular source of social interaction his sweet sister (Collette Wolfe).

The film walks a tricky line; Mavis is a monstrous social creature and yet oddly sympathetic as well. (It also may be a film covertly, or maybe even not so covertly, about an alcoholic, a manic-depressive, or both). She feels her life entering a dead end, and that’s painful, but the way she awkwardly grasps at the last remaining connections to the seemingly happy, popular, teenage girl she once was is sad, pathetic, and horrifying in a compelling, even occasionally endearing, way. Maybe, just maybe, she’ll realize that as she got older, she never really matured. The movie’s smart enough to know that such a shift may take time, more time than the narrative of the film allows, but it’s a film open ever so slightly to the possibility of change.

The director here is Jason Reitman. His adeptness with juggling ensembles can certainly be felt in the uniformly excellent cast who breathe life into the clever script. Reitman collaborated with Cody previously on Juno, a film of too-cute quirkiness and affectations that nonetheless gained some amount of very real charm and emotional power with a sure directorial hand, even if it’s perhaps one of too-slick shagginess, and an impressive cast. Young Adult, on the other hand, is a deconstruction of affectations and the characters, though less appealing, are no less relatable, which is why the film feels so much more savage in its satirical aims.

It’s the anti-Juno. In that film, the pregnant-teen protagonist’s outsider persona is embraced by those who love her; the cutting quips in her narration can be poisoned-dart punchlines. Here, Mavis is constantly either preparing to go out, placing the final touches on her persona, or dressing down in a casual carelessness when she knows she’ll be alone. She uses her outsider persona as a shield, behind which she fires harsh, judgmental potshots. She wants to make a connection with someone, anyone, but at the same time seems scared to try. Her whiplash shifts between harshly disparaging and cringingly needy are emotional time bombs.

The film itself strikes a nice ambivalent tone. Sometimes – okay, rarely – Mavis makes some kind of sense; we want to root for her. But her apparent obliviousness to her baseline social discomfort is so excruciating. By the time the film starts to slowly, painfully let the air leak out of her self-centered worldview, the fun starts to go with it. By the end, I was more interested the entertained, but Mavis Gary remained one of the most fascinating characters of 2011.

The Man Who Fell to Barsoom: JOHN CARTER

John Carter begins three times. First, there’s a sequence that begins with a splash of expository narration before joining a conflict in media res with solar-powered flying vessels clashing in the skies above the planet Barsoom. Next, a young man (Daryl Sabara) arrives at the home of his recently departed uncle and, as a condition of the man’s will, is given a journal to read. Now, through his own words, we are properly introduced to that uncle, John Carter (Taylor Kitsch), a Civil War veteran looking for gold out west while trying to avoid capture. And then, he’s mysteriously, accidentally transported to Barsoom. These three beginnings do more than place the narrative in framing devices like so many nesting dolls. It’s a narrative technique that emphasizes the protagonist’s status as a man out of time and space.

So too is the film’s source material. John Carter first appeared in print from the author Edgar Rice Burroughs, he of Tarzan fame, in the year 1912, exactly 100 years ago. Consequently, bits and pieces of the story can be traced through much of the previous century’s popular science fiction from Flash Gordon and Robinson Crusoe on Mars to Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate, and Avatar. The trick of adapting John Carter after all these years is to make new what is old, to make fresh what has already been thoroughly chewed, to reconstitute a story, the DNA of which has permeated the genre in ways big and small these many years.

Up to the task is director Andrew Stanton, whose animation work for Pixar includes WALL-E, a favorite of mine and one of the very best sci-fi films of recent years. He makes his live action debut with John Carter and, much like his colleague Brad Bird proved with Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, there’s definitely something to be said for the animator’s eye applied to live action. Here is a film so wonderfully composed, so imbued with visual energy of a sturdy, meticulous kind that this becomes no mere studio programmer and rarely feels old-fashioned or stuffy in any way. No, this is a film that slides into its timeless qualities in a grand Hollywood style, with spectacle and pageantry so lush, so vivid and sweeping, that oftentimes it feels like what Cecil B. DeMille or David Lean would have done with space opera.

The film finds John Carter unexpectedly displaced to Barsoom, a dusty rust-tinged desert planet with regal red humanoids clashing for control of the planet while the tall, green, four-armed tribe of Tharks remains neutral and isolated in the barren wilderness. Barsoom, Carter soon learns, is what he knows as Mars. Its atmosphere and gravity give him extraordinary powers of strength and speed; he can cross vast distances in a single leap, kill a Thark with a single blow. This impresses the leader of the Tharks, the first beings of Barsoom to stumble upon this strange creature they first refer to as a “white worm” before finding ways to communicate with him, though they mistake “Virginia” as his species name rather than his homeland.

The Tharks clash over what to do with the man. One grumbling tribal leader (Thomas Haden Church) believes Carter should be put to the test against fearsome beasts in their punishing arena. But the Tharks’ leader (Willem Dafoe) is inquisitive and hopeful. He believes they’ve found a super-powered champion for their people. This is also the belief of the beautiful and tough princess Dejah (Lynn Collins), who crash-lands while fleeing a marriage to her nemesis (Dominic West) that was arranged by her father (Ciarán Hinds) as a peace treaty. For his part, Carter just wants to go home, but his curiosity and his desire to somehow help these strange people compels him to learn more about these warring tribes. After all, to return to Earth he will need all the help he can get learning about mysterious alien shape-shifters who were involved in getting him into this predicament and whose leader (Mark Strong), unbeknownst to Carter, is the true catalyst for the war on Barsoom.

This is a richly imagined world brought to life with strong filmmaking that, wonder of wonders, trusts an audience to understand aspects of plot without too much of a fuss. Powerful moments, like when an alien battle is crosscut with an Earth-bound burial flashback, sketch in backstory and juxtapose it with an exciting forward pace to draw a fuller picture of Carter’s mental state with incredible ease. The script by Stanton with Mark Andrews and the great novelist Michael Chabon has a wonderful flow, slipping through its narrative loops with a minimum of fuss and delivering big action setpieces without seeming to strain over much towards preordained plot points. The dialogue, so often a sticking point in these earnest throwback blockbusters, is nicely polished. The regal dialogue of the royal Barsoomian people comes off not as stiff fantasy gobbledygook, but vivid pseudo-historical regality whereas the Tharks have a nice tribal feeling and Carter himself has a nice rascally Southern drawl. The actors seem grateful for the chance to do more than pose for effects; they have a world to inhabit and characters to play.

Stanton exhibits a helpful curiosity in the workings of this fantasy world that match the bewildered Carter. The long middle section of the film in which we are introduced to various technologies, traditions, legends, villages, cities, vehicles, heroes, villains, and creatures (including Woola, a squishy, speedy monster-dog who I found more adorable than the dogs in The Artist, Beginners, and Hugo combined) is simply wonderful filmmaking. The effects are wonderful, but Stanton grounds them and makes them work as a cohesive whole. They’re neither confusing, nor overly explained. The costumes, all loose, flowing, ancient-alien chic, and the sets, from humble huts to towering castles, are just as lovingly designed and executed. It all just simply works together as a terrific example of world building while still telling a compelling, exciting, and, yes, even moving story.

It’s by nature a somewhat predictable story, seeing as it has arrived pre-recycled by its genre peers over so many decades, and the film is not without its rough patches, to be sure. But it’s a film told with such energy and a high entertainment factor that I found it especially irresistible. Like the best films of its genre, John Carter is a film that draws upon archetypes – here it’s a crypto-western that shakes off the “crypto” by more or less starting as one – and extrapolates, reinterpreting visceral, primeval stories into a form that expands the imagination. Here’s a satisfying film that, with a flourish of its sweeping Michael Giacchino score, opens up a new world before your very eyes and, whatever its influences, whatever its source material has influenced, manages to become something entirely its own.

Unless: THE LORAX

It’d be harder to believe that a slim, lovely little Dr. Seuss book was turned into 90 minutes of empty calories if Universal hadn’t already done it twice before. How the Grinch Stole Christmas and Cat in the Hat became garish live-action patience testers. Now it’s The Lorax’s turn, but it’s escaped that fate. The studio was smart to hand it over to Illumination, a recently established computer animation studio that gave them a surprise big, and well-earned, hit a couple of years ago with Despicable Me. The resulting Lorax movie bears more than a passing resemblance to prime Seussian illustrations, but the gem of ecological melancholy inherent in the small, powerful book is surrounded by a story about a boy who zips around on a scooter and has run-ins with a despotic mayor. If that doesn’t sound quite like the Lorax you remember, you’d be right.

Seuss’s book is a simple fable, a wistful, hesitantly hopeful story of a greedy businessman, the Once-ler, who deforested the land as far as the eye can see and drove the happy wildlife far, far away. He tells his tale to a curious boy, a tale of a failed intervention on behalf of the flora and fauna by the Lorax, a sad little creature whose environmental advocacy fell on deaf ears. Though the book ends with the boy receiving a single seed, from which the forests can begin to grow once again, Seuss offers us no such release. This is only hesitant hope. The fact of the matter is, ecological damage is terrifying in its totality. One seed may not be enough. What is necessary is people who care a whole awful lot.

I’ve found The Lorax to be one of Dr. Seuss’s most powerful works, a clear statement that is hardly moralizing. It’s vivid, beautiful illustrations highlight the loss that has happened to the environment these characters inhabit while the rendering of the Lorax himself is heartbreaking in the despondency the poor guy feels when he realizes that disaster has not been averted. The look is what directors Chris Renaud and Kyle Balda have gotten mostly right in their adaptation. It’s a bright colorful world of plants and creatures in flashback, but in the present it’s a barren place of smog and dust. What they’ve added is a city of plastic and technology, a walled-off place that has insulated itself from the harsh realities outside.

In this new environment, they have embellished the story by giving the boy a name, Ted (as in Theodor Geisel, perhaps?), a scooter, a wacky family, the voice of Zac Efron, and a dream. He wants to impress the girl down the street (Taylor Swift) by finding her one of those trees of legend, not one of the plastic, inflatable, electric plants that fill the town, but the living kind thought long extinct. His grandmother (Betty White) tells him to go see the Once-ler (Ed Helms), so Ted escapes town and rides into the beginning of Seuss’s story.

We then get a flashback with the Lorax (Danny DeVito) trying his hardest to stop the Once-ler (and his wacky family), to no avail. The Lorax is given more to do, but it dilutes his impact. Now he’s a jokester and a blustering prankster, not just a righteous, sad, spokesman. But, back to the boy, who has an extended climactic sequence in which he zips around town with the seed, but soon has the seed stolen by the evil mayor (Rob Riggle) who has made his fortune selling bottled air. This leads to a big chase scene that has lots of action and slapstick to go through.

And there’s where the embellishment of the adaptation steps wrong. It becomes a story about a boy who needs to plant the last seed, not a story about the Lorax. The film swallows him up in order to end on a note of happiness and hope. Hooray! The environment is saved! There’s no room for the overwhelming sadness that he represents here. No need to simply hint at hope, the film makes it concrete instead. And, though I found myself still moved by the final scene which, yes, brings the Lorax back in a small, touching way, there’s something to be said for the exciting lack of this resolution in the book that is lost in favor of a Hollywood ending. Even the power of the regretful villainy of the Once-ler is diluted by the addition of the goofy mayor antagonist, who has no such complexity.

Still, I’d rather not judge the movie solely on the ways it bungles Seuss’s tone, something the 1972 animated special got more or less right. I’d rather not just be comparing versions of the story against one another and, besides, I’d be a fool to expect a perfect transcription of the book. Taken on its own terms, this new Lorax actually works fairly well. It’s a highly competent family film that’s fast, cute, and often quite appealing. It’s also a musical. It was a big surprise to me when, in the first scene, the townspeople burst into song in a big, fun, introductory Broadway-style opening number. There are a few other numbers sprinkled throughout less successfully, but the finale is a rousing, satisfying showstopper. It’s very likable.

I didn’t dislike this movie, I just found myself frustrated by its competing impulses. On the one hand, it is a solid, standard, modern, musical, CG, 3D, Hollywood family film. On the other hand, it hints at the greatness of its source material, like with the first appearance of the Lorax, a nice, small moment in which he solemnly makes a fresh stump into a tribute to a fallen tree. So The Lorax is an agreeable movie, but its so close to great I couldn’t help but leave feeling I had just watched a bit of a missed opportunity.

Smells Like Teen Something: PROJECT X

I’m now in my fourth stage as an audience member for teen comedies. The first stage starts as a preteen, a time during which representations of high school life are viewed as a promissory note. High school will be totally cool, these movies seem to say, even as they build elaborate embellishments that couldn’t be further from the truth. The second stage comes during high school. Now, these movies feel stupider – that’s not how my high school is – although you’re at the right age to be able to spot some truth in the best ones. The third stage happens as an undergrad. Now teen comedies are part nostalgia, part relief: that’s not how my high school was, but I’m glad I don’t have to do it anymore.

Which brings us to the fourth stage in my evolution as a watcher of teen-centric comedies. Recently, when watching a fairly mediocre new teen comedy, like Project X, which has a small nugget of truth or two but can’t figure out how to use them, I find myself occasionally feeling a twinge of terror. I sure hope this isn’t how kids these days really are. I suspect the feelings in this fourth stage might only deepen and intensify as I grow older. Of course, the thought wouldn’t cross my mind at all if the movie were any good, or at least significantly better, or at least with less misogyny, all-around nastiness and unearned rage. From 2007’s Superbad, perhaps the last truly great raunchy teen comedy, to last year’s criminally underseen The Myth of the American Sleepover, teens behaving badly can have great comedic and emotional resonance when made thoughtfully and observantly. Barring that, it’s often just difficult to watch.

The premise of Project X is that a lanky dweeb (Thomas Mann) is turning 17 so his friends decide to throw him the birthday party to end all birthday parties. That’s it. The movie takes place over the day and night of the party. The plan starts from a place of simple envy and fantasizing. Towards the beginning of the movie the dweeb and his grating best friend (Oliver Cooper) and pudgy third wheel (Jonathan Daniel Brown) overhear some dude in the locker room boasting about the wild party he went to over the weekend, the kind of half-believable high school rumor party that was so totally wild you can’t believe you’ve barely heard of it. Never mind the fact that the clearly exaggerated party – one in which even that kid in a wheelchair got some raunchy behavior done to him – is only an unattainable ideal for these kids. It makes them jealous enough to double down on their commitment to coolness through partying.

The kids are all alone in the house since the dweeb’s parents have left for the weekend, scurrying out the door shortly after singing “Happy Birthday” and watching their son blow out his candles. So the party planning committee jumps into action, anticipating “no more than 50 people” to carouse in the pool and to drink beer the graduated-but-hardly-gone jock (Miles Teller) promised to bring. As is so often the case in teen comedies, the party grows comically overstuffed – at one point the attendance is estimated to be 1,500 to 2,000 people – and every bit of the house set up as untouchable, every bit of the rules meant to be unbroken, are touched, broken, or otherwise defiled in unspeakable ways.

At first, the movie seems to be headed for a nice, resonant point amidst the nonstop debauchery. It’s shot in a found-footage style, which allows first-time director Nima Nourizadeh to show what the kids themselves find most important, their instant self-mythologizing in a way. (It’s also a technique that’s been used almost exclusively for horror on the big screen, which gives the whole thing razor’s-edge uncomfortableness). At one point the birthday boy frets that footage will end up on YouTube and his parents will find out. I was all ready to praise the film for using an overdone style in an intermittently successful genre to make a larger societal point. With a proliferation of video cameras and easy access to the Internet, kids these days can find their mistakes permanently part of an easily searchable archive of amateur footage. So a teenager throws a party behind his parent’s back? I’m sure it happens and sometimes he’d get caught and punished. The self-chronicling of teenagers means that any guest is a potential security breach. There’s almost no way news of this party won’t get out.

But Matt Drake and Michael Bacall’s script doesn’t go there. The party just grows wilder and wilder by the montage. Soon, it’s not just teens dancing and drinking, soliciting a perfectly reasonable noise complaint from a neighbor that is laughed off in a particularly cruel scene. They’re locking a midget in an unused oven. They’re taking pills and jumping off the roof and hanging from the chandelier. They’re fighting and making out. They’re setting up Rube Goldberg illegal substance consumption devices. Someone even drives a car into the pool. And all that’s before the cops show up in riot gear and some dude arrives with his flamethrower, fully intending to use it. The excessive parting becomes essentially a riot. Now of course the parents will find out, diffusing the potential impact of its broader sociological implications.

After a while, I found myself just tired of it all. It sets up the partiers as purposefully thin characters and I just couldn’t spend any more time in their company. They’re totally wild in a thoroughly unenjoyable way. How many people can you watch puking, peeing, or punching before you’ve had enough? By the end, the movie just shakes its head and grins. Man, wasn’t that a night? It plays off with a laugh police, neighbors, and parents. But these aren’t just people who are a little too uptight, the usual source of scorn in these kinds of movies. These are people who don’t want their neighborhood burnt to the ground. I think they’re entitled to their objections.

There are some nice touches here and there. I liked how the friends hire a couple of gravely serious twelve-year-olds to run security for the party. I enjoyed the thumping hip-hop hits on the soundtrack. I liked the random mustachioed gentleman who shows up to party, later pukes all over a parked car, and then turns up the next morning standing next to his exasperated and unsuspecting wife as she’s interviewed by the local news.

This is, all things considered, essentially a brisk and well-made cheapie exploitation picture. It reminded me of Alexandre Aja’s similarly exasperating Piranha in its willingness to set up a group of self-destructive slimeballs and then sit back and watch the carnage. But as the craziness of the party spirals out of control I found myself feeling nothing but sadness for the central character, the poor, sweet-faced little guy, as his eyes grow redder and his complexion pales and the doom of it all settles on his shoulders. No one deserves this. If the movie had cared, even a little bit, about the characters, it would have done a better job putting all the little transgressive moments into a larger, more satisfying, emotional context.

Lost in America: WANDERLUST

It’s not unusual to find a Hollywood comedy based on the assumption that harried big-city people would love a chance to enjoy a slower-paced lifestyle out in the country. The beauty of David Wain’s Wanderlust is that it takes that basic concept and twists it all around, making it a story of self-discovery through true personal experience rather than a superficial geographical shift. It features characters who are having a difficult time no matter where they go. They’re lost, searching for answers whether they know it or not. So it’s a comedy of personal crisis. But it’s also a comedy about society in some kind of crisis and, though there’s not too fine a point put on such ruminations, it’s ultimately a fairly sharp social satire. It not easy to become who you want to be in a society that offers up only easy, unsatisfying answers.

The movie stars Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston as George and Linda, a married couple who go through a sudden shift in employment status, forcing them to move out of New York City. On their way to stay in Atlanta with George’s brother (Ken Marino, who’s also the film’s co-writer) and wife (Michaela Watkins), they pull off the highway following GPS instructions towards a bed and breakfast.  This is Elysium, a hippie commune of free love, pot-smoking, tree-hugging, nudist outsiders. And you know what? It’s kind of nice. There’s a competitively mellow guy (Justin Theroux), a kindly but oblivious nudist author and wine-maker (Joe Lo Truglio), an angry hippie (Kathryn Hahn), and a gray-haired burnout (Alan Alda), among others. They have their peculiarities, but they seem to genuinely enjoy each other’s company and welcome newcomers with open arms.

But, the next morning, George and Linda eventually make it to Atlanta, where they find a surly nephew, a blustering brother, and a perpetually drunk sister-in-law who one day declares her intentions to apply for a Real Housewives spin-off. It’s a lifestyle of conspicuous consumption and overworked callousness. The couple bounces back to Elysium, where they find that their first positive experience is not easily recreated when staying there on a maybe-permanent basis. The film takes tired stereotypes – the materialistic bourgeoisie and the off-the-grid tree-huggers – and injects them with an energy and a wit that help them skip around potentially exasperating thinness. I mean, how many movies have you seen in which a square city dweller goes on an accidental drug trip? Here, it’s funny all over again.

It helps that the performances are uniformly so very funny. Rudd has such a sweet, easy-going surliness that even when he improvises lines of stunning filthiness, he seems to be a man trying out uncomfortable personas for himself. As he casts about for a new purpose in life, he finds himself getting increasingly distraught at the lack of easy answers even as everyone around him seems to have them. Meanwhile, Aniston throws herself into her role with such an incredible commitment and skill that I found myself taken aback. I’ve never been much of an Aniston fan; to me, she’s been capable at best. I’m reminded of Ebert’s line about her being upstaged even in scenes by herself. But here, she does her best work, a complex and hilarious performance that bounces off of the various personalities in the film in ways that match Rudd in tone and effect note for note. They bring their characters to vivid, hilarious life. These are two people in desperate need of something that they can’t even explain: a place and a purpose. They’ll know it when they see it.

David Wain films are about odd groups, makeshift communities forming on the margins of society. There are the Elysium hippies here, but similar kindred spirits can be found in the summer camp of his cult favorite Wet Hot American Summer and the troubled-kids mentorship program and the Live Action Role Playing of Role Models (one of the funniest movies of recent memory). These are films in which collections of weirdoes find reason to congregate and reasons to genuinely like and care for each other. Somehow Wain pulls off a tricky feat, getting big laughs out of these characters’ eccentricities and then still managing to find the genuine warmth and humanity within the group dynamic. There’s genuine human interest here. By the end, you just care about them and want to see them all end up happy, and that’s what makes the laughs worthwhile.