Movie Review: The 40-Year-Old Virgin

“You know what, I respect women. I love women. I respect them so much that I completely stay away from them.”

Oh, what a line. I have avoided this for too long.

I’ve seen some Judd Apatow products and have missed out on others. From Happy Gilmore and The Cable Guy in ’96 to Superbad and Pineapple Express, Apatow’s filmography is full of comedy hits. He’s striven away from the director’s chair and writer’s table as of late but something tells me a laugh artist like Apatow gives more input as a producer than the average.

The 40-Year-Old Virgin is objectively funny, demonstrating an understanding of what makes people laugh along with the importance of theme. This isn’t just about Andy being an inexperienced socialite. It’s also an ongoing commentary about what makes relationships and love as a whole so gosh darn difficult. Yes, we get to poke fun at Steve Carell’s Andy being so socially anxious he might be a serial killer but there’s a conversation going on between characters and the audience about why it’s so hard to find someone to truly connect with, too. Is it all about sex? Are you just supposed to listen to their whims? What are dudes supposed to do to get chicks?

It’s a film begging for a bro night in that regard. All the questions you’ve ever asked your friends about how to get the girl’s number are probably intertwined with the screenplay. As Andy is driven from coworker to coworker, all of whom are offering him different tips and tricks, we get to watch him bounce from awkward interaction to bumbling idiot like a volleyball on a beach, all whilst learning a little more along the way.

All of these characters carry redeeming qualities and are just watching out for their brethren. They all, for one reason or another, are at a standstill, working at a tech store with no definitive career path and lady problems up the wazoo. Chicks are hard and despite the image they’re providing, that they are just looking to get in bed with some honeys, these dudes, especially Paul Rudd’s David and Carell’s Andy, can’t help but admit they’re looking for a lasting relationship. Underneath the macho persona are real people looking for real connections. They find a woman that they’re magnetized by only for that woman to disappoint them and for them to go back to the adages of “relationships are for losers” and “bros before hoes”.

It’s a rather refreshing turn for a comedy. I’ve mentioned it in quite a few reviews now but there are a lot of comedies that just don’t shoot for that type of underlying narrative. Apatow, at least here, is very direct with his conversation.

There’s nothing really wrong with Andy. He’s a nice guy. He’s just…bland. The way he converses, the way he dresses, the way he lives his life, it’s all lacking energy and intrigue. Andy is not an enticing prospect. He’s not sexy.

Yet, as the movie goes on and his peers give him a kick out the door, we realize Andy is more well-suited to a relationship than anyone else. He’s responsible, understanding and has a great if not awkward sense of humor. Yes, he rides a bike to work at a tech store, which again, isn’t sexy. Yes, he plays a lot of video games and collects miniatures but Andy is someone who is able to hold a relationship in high esteem and take the sex out of it, something that makes relationships a lot easier to deal with. At one point, a one line monologue is delivered between Andy and the audience amidst an argument with a character:

“Why…everything’s always about sex.”

Andy, despite all of the quirks and eccentricities, comes to a realization about love, something that for all their experience, no one else in this movie seems to grasp. Culture and society has portrayed the beef cake and swimsuit model as the ideal relationship material but in actuality, Andy is what that perfect partner looks like, a guy with oddities that at the end of the day really aren’t that big of a deal. If you just accept them, Andy is the most mature guy on the screen.

When Andy’s potential partner is revealed to have kids, his coworkers tell him to get out of Dodge. Andy doesn’t see the big deal.

When Andy invites her on a date and to pick him up at his place, Rudd’s David and Seth Rogen’s Cal flip out, telling him his place looks like birth control and they need to wipe the place. When the lady comes hoping to learn about Andy, she leaves disappointed.

Even with all of the advice Andy gets, he finds the most success in being himself, a simple yet impactful motif.

The 40-Year-Old Virgin is a rated-R film with an adolescent lesson, a learning even we as adults need reminded of from time to time when we enter the realms of nightclubs, bars and date nights: Be yourself.

A cast list including Carell, Rudd, Rogen, Romany Malco, Catherine Keener, Elizabeth Banks, Jane Lynch, Leslie Mann, Kat Dennings and cameos from Jonah Hill, Kevin Hart and Mindy Kaling is more than stacked, providing us with the necessary sidebars and interjections along this tour of human compatibility. This was a true pleasure to watch.

Once again, if you’re new to my blog, I’ve always ranked movies on a scale of 0-100 (I don’t know why, I just always have). Here’s the grading scale.  

90-100  It’s a great movie and definitely one worth buying. (Taken, Captain America: Civil War, Deadpool, Avengers: Age of Ultron, The Avengers)

80-89   It was a pretty good movie and definitely one worth seeing, but it doesn’t quite scratch my top ten percentile. (The Conjuring, Sinister, Olympus Has Fallen, The Cable Guy, The Cabin in the Woods)

70-79   It’s okay but I’ve seen better. It has its moments, but it has its flaws, too. (Ip Man 2, Ip Man, Kong: Skull Island, The Invitation, Hush)

60-69   It’s got plenty wrong with it but I still got enjoyment out of this one. (The Road, Doctor Strange, Johnny Mnemonic, Jason Bourne, Suicide Squad, Batman Forever)

50-59   This movie isn’t intolerable but it’s not blowing my mind either. I’m trying really hard to get some sort of enjoyment out of this. (Wind River, Tommy Boy, Death Note, True Memoirs of an International Assassin, The Great Wall)

40-49   This movie is just mediocre. It’s not doing anything other than the bare minimal, so morbidly boring that sometimes I’m actually angry I watched this. (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, Power Rangers, Underworld: Evolution, Batman & Robin, Bloodsport)

30-39   Definitely worse than mediocre, the 30′s ironically define the 1930′s, full of depression, lack of accomplishments, poverty and just so dumb. (High-Rise, Most Likely to Die, Independence Day: Resurgence, The Crow: City of Angels, Centurion)

20-29   What did I just watch? Cliches, stupidity, nothingness, did I mention stupidity? Just…wow. (The Snowman, Avalanche Sharks, Catwoman, The Gunman, The Visit)

0-19      Watching this movie resulted in one or more of the following: seizure, loss of brain cells, falling asleep/unconsciousness, feel you wasted your time/day, accomplished nothing for you, left the movie knowing less about it then you did going into it, constantly asking yourself why you came to see this movie, or near-death experience. In short, staring at a wall was just as entertaining as watching this movie. This movie deserved a sticker or a label that said, “WARNING: EXTREME AMOUNT OF SUCKAGE.” (The Coed and the Zombie Stoner, The Forbidden Dimensions, Cyborg, Outcast, Sabotage)

My score for The 40-Year-Old Virgin: 86.

At times, The 40-Year-Old Virgin gets too dumb for its own good but remains a brazen punch of truth to a viewer expecting cliche-ridden sex comedy. I love Steve Carell in this role and really need to get around to watching The Office one of these days. More of Judd Apatow’s filmography is on my watch list.

Movie Review: Taken

Taken is a stud of a film, plain and simple. A kidnapping carousel with a dominant presence is what the doctor ordered back in 2008. French creationist Luc Besson is one of the best international names in the industry. Most of his filmography has not been visited by American audiences but those that have debuted in the U.S. have been quite a hit.

Besson gets the majority of the credit for Taken, not director Pierre Morel, a cinematographer whose directing gigs have been less than thrilling. Go watch The Gunman and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

No, what stands out about Taken is not the cinematography, though there are nice framing shots.

It’s not the action, though it does give the movie an adrenaline shot on more than one occasion.

The script, coupled with Neeson’s character delivery, is what you remember.

Taken lives on in the minds of moviegoers for this.

That is by far the best sequence in Taken. It does not go downhill from there but it never reaches that point again. That phone call with his daughter is Bryan Mills at his most vulnerable and yet also at his most composed and most threatening. Halfway through, it feels like Neeson is ready to throw his phone to the side and grab the camera with outstretched hands, looking into the very soul of a man he has met many times before. His familiarity with the type of creature he’s conversing with is prevalent. That monster on the other end of the call doesn’t know it but he just released Bryan Mills’ monster and his is far smarter, chronically diligent and lethal without hesitation.

In most scenes where a father was talking to the man who just kidnapped his 17-year-old daughter halfway across the world in one of the largest metropolises on planet Earth, you would greatly sympathize with the father. By the end of that phone call, you don’t feel sympathetic for Bryan Mills. You feel sympathy for the guy on the other end who just opened the gates to Hell.

We don’t know who Mills is at this point in the movie. We know he served his country and has military experience, that his occupation cost him his marriage and time with the love of his world, his daughter and we know that doubt and forlorn sadness has crept up to him following his retirement. The opening sequences of the thriller do a solid job casting Mills as a figure for which we can carry empathy.

The Olympus of the film makes us feel for anyone dumb enough to get in his way. A mere two minutes of screen time flips our perception of our star. He has trials like we do. He has suffered. Throw him in a den of wolves though and suddenly it’s a crib of Mills.

He sees the world through a different lens. His ex-wife mistakes his knowledge for paranoia. Her comeuppance comes shortly after.

And none of all this happens unless Luc Besson writes down a few paragraphs. Besson is primarily known as a visionary (he’s made a career out of displaying artwork on film rolls) but lets his pen strokes do the painting here. That scene is gripping and a thesis for the film. Remove it and Taken loses a substantial amount of emotional investment and character acceleration.

With that scene, Mills becomes an element of darkness, an agent of terror, wholly justified and unquestioned by his audience. He is karma itself.

I really can’t say enough about that scene. It is one of the best monologues action films have had to offer in the last decade.

From there, it’s Mills doing what he does best.

Besson drags out the tension in his script, glazing the piece with emotional rigor. There aren’t a lot of plateaus in this film. It’s a two-hour heartbeat of fjords and highlands. You will find no clean pastures here.

I couldn’t find the whole segment but the introduction of this set is terse and tense. You can see the realization creep into his face.

The crafting of this character and this tone is masterfully done. Besson is careful not to stoke the fires of xenophobia, though I’m sure some will take that message away from this anyway. Instead, he showcases the corruption the world is all too familiar with. It’s almost expected at this point. Mills isn’t just fighting the people who took his daughter. He’s fighting the system that prefers to keep everything quiet and unexciting. The schemers, as one great character once said.

At the end of the day, you know Mills is going to save his daughter, so there is some predictability there. The film actually lacks a strong villain. Villainy as a whole fills in as a stand-in but doesn’t serve as the most accurate counterweight to the super agent Neeson delivers, though the one man against the system style does benefit the film’s vision. Fight choreography is solid throughout and Morel deserves credit for not cutting it to death as some novice directors are known to do. Too many cuts can really take wind out of the sails. This final archive is well done.

Once again, if you’re new to my blog, I’ve always ranked movies on a scale of 0-100 (I don’t know why, I just always have). Here’s the grading scale.  

90-100  It’s a great movie and definitely one worth buying. (Captain America: Civil War, Deadpool, Avengers: Age of Ultron, The Avengers, The Babadook)

80-89   It was a pretty good movie and definitely one worth seeing, but it doesn’t quite scratch my top ten percentile. (The Conjuring, Sinister, Olympus Has Fallen, The Cable Guy, The Cabin in the Woods)

70-79   It’s okay but I’ve seen better. It has its moments, but it has its flaws, too. (Ip Man 2, Ip Man, Kong: Skull Island, The Invitation, Hush)

60-69   It’s got plenty wrong with it but I still got enjoyment out of this one. (The Road, Doctor Strange, Johnny Mnemonic, Jason Bourne, Suicide Squad, Batman Forever)

50-59   This movie isn’t intolerable but it’s not blowing my mind either. I’m trying really hard to get some sort of enjoyment out of this. (Wind River, Tommy Boy, Death Note, True Memoirs of an International Assassin, The Great Wall)

40-49   This movie is just mediocre. It’s not doing anything other than the bare minimal, so morbidly boring that sometimes I’m actually angry I watched this. (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, Power Rangers, Underworld: Evolution, Batman & Robin, Bloodsport)

30-39   Definitely worse than mediocre, the 30′s ironically define the 1930′s, full of depression, lack of accomplishments, poverty and just so dumb. (High-Rise, Most Likely to Die, Independence Day: Resurgence, The Crow: City of Angels, Centurion)

20-29   What did I just watch? Cliches, stupidity, nothingness, did I mention stupidity? Just…wow. (The Snowman, Avalanche Sharks, Catwoman, The Gunman, The Visit)

0-19      Watching this movie resulted in one or more of the following: seizure, loss of brain cells, falling asleep/unconsciousness, feel you wasted your time/day, accomplished nothing for you, left the movie knowing less about it then you did going into it, constantly asking yourself why you came to see this movie, or near-death experience. In short, staring at a wall was just as entertaining as watching this movie. This movie deserved a sticker or a label that said, “WARNING: EXTREME AMOUNT OF SUCKAGE.” (The Coed and the Zombie Stoner, The Forbidden Dimensions, Cyborg, Outcast, Sabotage)

My score for Taken: 90.

Hopefully sooner rather than later I will have my next installment of Winners And Losers (WAL) up. I look forward to resurrecting that series. Until then, this gets a link to WAL Round 2 as a solid win. Taken is a rendezvous through human trafficking, espionage and some superb character writing from Besson. A must-watch if you haven’t seen this in the last decade.

Movie Review: High-Rise

I hated High-Rise the first time I watched it and I hate it even more now.

The only benefit to finishing it is being able to never have to watch it again for this archive. It is a callous work based on a British dystopian novel. I may go back to read that piece of literature so I can do a segment for my Book Vs. Film series but I can say with a pretty high level of confidence that J.G. Ballard would be hard-pressed to create parchment as agonizing as Ben Wheatley’s excuse for a project.

High-Rise is a society entirely encompassed in a skyscraper. There’s a supermarket, doctor, dentist, pool, gym, parties on seemingly every floor. Aside from leaving for work, there’s no reason to leave. This blueprint was crafted as a utopia, an image of a paradise revolving around a close-knit community. It is also a foreshadowing of the story of Icarus and the Tower of Babel.

Tom Hiddleston’s Robert applied for a residency to get a fresh start. He’s self-sufficient, reserved and socially inexperienced but you get the feeling something is going on in that head of his. He’s a planner, his eyes set on the next step in the ladder, whatever that ladder may be.

This outlook makes him a perfect match for Jeremy Irons’ Anthony Royal, the architect of this establishment. Royal’s vision is complex but passionate. It is an example of looking up before seeing where your feet are.

From there, most interest that the film gathers is left moot as it dives into obscurity and then total madness. The lack of firm footing sends the tower into a struggle for resources. The power grid isn’t sustainable. There’s not enough food. Despite creating a vertical mansion, social superiority is established.

That’s about it. It’s a grating drag on one’s sensibilities and was one of the longer hours I’ve had to experience this movie year. Netflix says the second half was only one hour but it felt like three.

A film centered on social constructs and the animalistic side of humanity becomes so apathetic I wondered a couple of times if Wheatley knew he left the camera rolling. When it comes to filmmaking, you should be able to look at every shot and determine a visual, auditory or narrative basis for it. When you notice takes that don’t, that’s lazy storytelling. That’s becoming fixating on a distraction. That’s what the editor’s table is for.

Despite a few strong thematic opportunities, Wheatley leaves his audience intellectually starved and emotionally despondent. A few tadpoles of dialogue are present in a diluted pool of potential relevant conversations.

Dystopian literature is often a forum on economics, political liability and human psychology. The human brain is a complex vessel, a set of neurons and thought patterns and emotion. High-Rise is frustrating because Wheatley makes humanity seem so basic when it is in fact the opposite.

It is visually discombobulating at times, to the point it feels like an acid trip and not in an artistic fashion. Spending time talking about a piece of art that lacks so much of that very thing is difficult.

Void of character arc and absent of literary devices, the film compares to the story in that both are empty of elements.

High-Rise is derelict, never establishing its own reality. It is a blank canvas with stuff thrown at it. The canvas looked better unused. It’s an insult to film.

Time to watch the World Cup and get this garbage out of my mind.

Once again, if you’re new to my blog, I’ve always ranked movies on a scale of 0-100 (I don’t know why, I just always have). Here’s the grading scale.  

90-100  It’s a great movie and definitely one worth buying. (Captain America: Civil War, Deadpool, Avengers: Age of Ultron, The Avengers, The Babadook)

80-89   It was a pretty good movie and definitely one worth seeing, but it doesn’t quite scratch my top ten percentile. (The Conjuring, Sinister, Olympus Has Fallen, The Cable Guy, The Cabin in the Woods)

70-79   It’s okay but I’ve seen better. It has its moments, but it has its flaws, too. (Ip Man 2, Ip Man, Kong: Skull Island, The Invitation, Hush)

60-69   It’s got plenty wrong with it but I still got enjoyment out of this one. (The Road, Doctor Strange, Johnny Mnemonic, Jason Bourne, Suicide Squad, Batman Forever)

50-59   This movie isn’t intolerable but it’s not blowing my mind either. I’m trying really hard to get some sort of enjoyment out of this. (Wind River, Tommy Boy, Death Note, True Memoirs of an International Assassin, The Great Wall)

40-49   This movie is just mediocre. It’s not doing anything other than the bare minimal, so morbidly boring that sometimes I’m actually angry I watched this. (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, Power Rangers, Underworld: Evolution, Batman & Robin, Bloodsport)

30-39   Definitely worse than mediocre, the 30′s ironically define the 1930′s, full of depression, lack of accomplishments, poverty and just so dumb. (Most Likely to Die, Independence Day: Resurgence, The Crow: City of Angels, Centurion, Planet of the Apes)

20-29   What did I just watch? Cliches, stupidity, nothingness, did I mention stupidity? Just…wow. (The Snowman, Avalanche Sharks, Catwoman, The Gunman, The Visit)

0-19      Watching this movie resulted in one or more of the following: seizure, loss of brain cells, falling asleep/unconsciousness, feel you wasted your time/day, accomplished nothing for you, left the movie knowing less about it then you did going into it, constantly asking yourself why you came to see this movie, or near-death experience. In short, staring at a wall was just as entertaining as watching this movie. This movie deserved a sticker or a label that said, “WARNING: EXTREME AMOUNT OF SUCKAGE.” (The Coed and the Zombie Stoner, The Forbidden Dimensions, Cyborg, Outcast, Sabotage)

My score for High-Rise: 31.

An orgy of incompetence warrants no more of my time or mind. High-Rise is only high in its level of blatant mismanagement. A complete waste of a talented cast.