Monster March: Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (1955)

Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy is a film of lasts. It’s Abbott and Costello’s last film at Universal (and their penultimate film together), it’s the final mummy film in the Classic Monsters cycle, and it’s the last movie I’ve watched in reviewing Monster March. There is, for me, an unintentional sense of finality in this movie, which can only work in favor of the film; it also helps that this is, as Mummy Mondays have taught us, the second-best of the original mummy films.

Bud Abbott and Lou Costello (playing themselves, lest the credits fool you) overhear that the mummy Klaris (Eddie Parker) has been discovered – and with him the fabled treasure of Princess Ara. Abbott and Costello blunder their way into a murder investigation, the disappearance of a crucial amulet, and eventually the dig site itself as they try to dodge treasure seekers (Marie Windsor, Michael Ansara) and high priests (Richard Deacon) alike.

 

Where Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man felt tired and overlong, a collision of genres that didn’t play well together, Meet the Mummy is tight, energetic, and laser-focused on spoofing the Egyptian adventure genre. The plot is overfull, to be sure, particularly when it comes to gangs of avaricious conspirators (many of whom look perplexingly similar), but there’s a sense that Abbott and Costello don’t quite know what’s going on either, making it much easier to roll with the punches. 

 

This being Monster March, there is a surprising dearth of mummy action. There is a mummy, though it’s unclear whether Klaris is Kharis with a name change or an entirely different mummy defending a princess’s tomb. He’s not on screen very much, though, and he never leaves his tomb. His wrappings look a little more like striped pajamas, but there is something iconic about the way his nose is obscured by a bandage as he snarls and hisses at his prey. Where the other mummies looked a bit like they were wearing full-face masks or faces made of papier-mâché, this mummy finally looks as though there’s a rotting corpse under the bandages. It’s only a pity we don’t get to see more of him on screen – though as fast as Costello runs away from danger, a lumbering mummy stands no chance of catching him.

 

While we don’t have as much mummy as the title promises, the chemistry between Abbott and Costello is stronger than it was in Meet the Invisible Man. For one, they don’t have to work around the premise of being private detectives or boxers; those aren’t highbrow concepts, to be sure, but compare that to Meet Frankenstein, in which their occupation as delivery boys was only incidental to the plot and quickly disregarded. Here, they’re just two drifters who happen to bumble into the plot, fumble around it, and tumble headlong into the mummy’s tomb for the final act. It’s a perfect set-up for a monster movie send-up, especially continuing the cynic/believer dynamic from Meet Frankenstein. What’s more, their patter is back to form; in one hilarious sequence, they argue about the meaning of the word “pick” – “My pick is the shovel!” “My pick is the pick!” and so on. 

 

In another great moment, Abbott and Costello try to pawn a cursed medallion off on each other. It’s first a game of pickpocketing, then a back-and-forth burger swap with one burger containing the amulet as an ersatz topping. While these bits go exactly where you would expect, the cumulative effect of seeing the situation play out longer and longer, doubling down on confusion rather than trying to illuminate, is uproarious. Compounding the comedy, perhaps more than in the other two parody films, Lou Costello has a penchant for breaking the fourth wall with a well-timed stare. Sometimes he’s saying, “Look what I have to put up with,” while other times it’s an impish “Ain’t I a stinker?” Every time he does it, without fail, it’s good for a chuckle.

 

It’s a boon that Abbott and Costello are so engaging here, because the rest of the cast is comprised of human “wet paint” signs. As the treasure seekers, Marie Windsor and Michael Ansara are mostly lifeless; their only saving grace is that their accomplice is played by Dan Seymour, sporting the same fez he wore in Casablanca, where he played the doorman Abdul. I point this out as a good thing because any reminder of Casablanca automatically raises my estimations of the movie (see also Invisible Agent). Meanwhile, Richard Deacon plays the cult leader Semu like a somnambulant Miguel Ferrer. It’s hard to imagine anyone being intimidated by this lanky, balding, sentient monotone; say what you will about George Zucco, dying multiple times as the same character in the same franchise – at least he had presence. 

 

At the end of the day, though, the Universal Classic Monsters franchise has never thrived with strong supporting casts. You get by with a little help from your mummy, and this is the first time since Karloff that I’ve enjoyed a mummy movie. Abbott and Costello are back to form here, sniping at every Egyptian cliché and genre trope. Meet the Mummy does a lot without doing too much, and watching this as my thirtieth monster movie took Monster March out with a smile. But don’t you go anywhere – you’ve still got three more days to go!

 

Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy is not rated. Directed by Charles Lamont. Written by Lee Loeb and John Grant. Starring Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, Marie Windsor, Michael Ansara, Richard Deacon, and Eddie Parker. 

Tune in tomorrow for Mummy Monday, with The Mummy’s Curse (1944) starring Lon Chaney Jr. and Virginia Christie.

Monster March: Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951)

Despite having met an invisible man (Vincent Price) in the final frames of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Bud Abbott and Lou Costello continued their monster spoofs with an invisible man all their own three years later, in a film that could only be titled Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man. Like most of Universal’s Invisible Man franchise, this Meet is a hodgepodge of genres designed to be a life support machine for special effects sequences – and it’s not the comedy duo’s finest hour, either.

Newly graduated from detective school, Bud Alexander and Lou Francis (Abbott and Costello) strike out on their own, but to their bad luck the first case is that of accused murderer and boxer Tommy Nelson (Arthur Franz). Tommy hires the newly-minted detectives before shooting up with the Griffin invisibility serum in hopes of clearing his own name. Bud and Lou have to dodge mobsters and Detective Roberts (William Frawley) until a series of zany shenanigans puts Lou in the boxing ring himself as “Louie the Looper.”

 

After all that Monster March has thrown our way, I’ve come to expect the unexpected from an Invisible Man film. The film begins as a kind of detective noir parody, which suits me just fine – I’d had occasion a few nights earlier to rewatch The Maltese Falcon for the umpteenth time, and it seemed to me that Abbott and Costello were about to add a dose of monster mischief to the noir formula. With the addition of gangsters, however, we verge into Some Like It Hot territory (though Meets predates Hot by eight years), but before long we’re in a full-on boxing picture. (Barton Fink, eat your heart out.) If anyone had “underdog sports movie” in your Universal Monsters bingo, mark that square – the rest of us are stunned.

 

In the way that most of the latter-day Universal Monsters movies are retreads of previous iterations of the same story, this Invisible Man bears more than a few similarities to The Invisible Man Returns (1940), which starred Vincent Price in a mystery about an invisible man proving his innocence. Indeed, several of the special effects shots from that film – like the disappearing guinea pig and the Invisible Man traipsing through the woods – have been repurposed and recycled here. Audiences at the time might not have recognized the scenes eleven years later, but I suppose that’s why God invented critics like me. Then again, audiences certainly should have recognized the fact that a photograph of Claude Rains hangs prominently in this film’s laboratory; I certainly did, and it was akin to spotting a Stan Lee cameo in a Marvel film, the kind of throwback reference I’ve wanted from these films all along. It’s surprising that it took until 1948 for the franchise to stop taking itself so seriously and start to wink at the audience.

 

Three years may not seem like a long time, but it must have been for Abbott and Costello. The idea of casting the 54-year-old Abbott and 45-year-old Costello as greenhorn detectives is frankly preposterous without assuming that these are two men in a midlife crisis looking for their career’s second act. It’s such a struggle that the two have to be pitted against an endearingly aggravated William Frawley, ten years their senior, to make them look young and goofy. Their comedy is a bit slower, too – though when it’s fast, it’s fun, as when they trot out an old vaudeville sleight-of-hand gag passing dollar bills from hand to hand. On the whole, however, many of the gags stretch out a little too long, as in an extended sequence in which Costello struggles to order food and eat it without the intervention of invisible man Tommy Nelson.

 

This is to say nothing of the film’s third act, which becomes almost entirely a boxing picture. As one who isn’t quite a connoisseur myself, I can’t say whether this plays better for someone who likes boxing movies, but for me I found it unsurprising and dull. At first, it seems a clever premise, watching Costello swing at his opponent while the invisible man does all the heavy hitting, but then it keeps going, and going, and going. By the time the fight ends – as inevitably you might expect it to end – the gag has long since stopped being funny, if ever it actually was. Then follows a kind of epilogue, a coda in which a blood transfusion accidentally renders Costello invisible; it’s the sort of joke you might expect more of the movie to engage, since Meet Frankenstein made Costello’s brain pivotal to the Monster’s plot. Here, though, it’s a throwaway gag or two, riffing on the “invisibility=nudity” punchlines of Invisible Woman. 

 

By the time you get to the epilogue, one feels as though the writers – and there are an astonishing five of them – have run out of ways to thread the jokes together, resorting instead to coupling them like train cars. (To say nothing of how the invisibility effects are noticeably poorer, as if the budget had well and truly run dry.) The comedic fruit of Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man is low-hanging, and the script plucks it all in the hopes that some of it won’t be rotten. To be fair, this Invisible Man isn’t rotten, but it’s a far cry from the timeless comedic genius of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Like most Invisible Man movies, though, this one just doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be. 

Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man is not rated. Directed by Charles Lamont. Written by Hugh Wedlock Jr., Howard Snyder, Robert Lees, Frederic I. Rinaldo, and John Grant. Starring Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, Arthur Franz, Nancy Guild, Gavin Muir, Sheldon Leonard, and William Frawley. 

Tune in tomorrow for Mummy Monday, with The Mummy’s Ghost (1944) starring Lon Chaney Jr.

Next week for Silly Sunday, we’ll wrap things up when Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (1954), starring Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, and Eddie Parker.

Monster March: Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)

Assigning yourself the task of watching thirty monster movies in a row can feel like a chore, especially toward the end of the assignment, when you’ve seen all the good monster movies and far too many of the bad ones. Within minutes of starting Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, though, I was smiling and laughing. Not five minutes went by without a good chuckle, and by the end of it I found myself thinking, “Was that so hard?” How it took a comedy duo to finally get the monster mash right, I’ll never know – but I’m very glad they did.

Chick Young and Wilbur Grey (Bud Abbott and Lou Costello) are baggage handlers on a routine delivery to McDougal’s House of Horrors. Against the advice of a phone call from Lawrence Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.), Chick and Wilbur open the crates to discover the bodies of Count Dracula (Bela Lugosi) and Frankenstein’s monster (Glenn Strange). Wilbur suspects the bodies are still living, much to Chick’s chagrin – and Talbot’s arrival from London only complicates matters when the bodies disappear and the full moon rises...

 

I don’t want to spoil things too much for the coming weeks, but “monster rally” movies like House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula cheat a little bit by including all the monsters in the same movie without them ever sharing the screen together. Three/four years after those films, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein fixes that problem by embroiling the holy trinity of monsters in one unified plotline, and it’s frankly genius to pit Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster against the Wolf Man so that the monster mash becomes a proper monster smash by the third act. Funneled through the dynamic of Abbott-as-skeptic and Costello-as-rube, you have the perfect formula for hijinks. As an entry in the cinematic universe, it’s debatable whether this is a proper sequel or whether it’s merely a standalone riff. It’s not quite a horror film, but it is fairly spooky with an emphasis on zany, and that makes for a very fresh new take on characters that, quite frankly, had grown stale over twenty years.

 

Moving away from the horror and toward the comedic is a shift in tone that seems to anticipate the likes of Scooby-Doo, who debuted in 1969. Indeed, I’d venture to say that Scooby-Doo wouldn’t exist without this film’s blend of mystery, monsters, and slapstick comedy. The sequence in which all five main characters chase after each other through a hallway of doors, for instance, is exactly the kind of gag that the Scooby-Doo crew would make their signature gag years later, at times even with versions of the Universal Classic Monsters. (Of course, Abbott and Costello are lightyears funnier than anything the makers of Scooby-Doo could dream up; I defy you to find eight minutes of Scooby-Doo anywhere near “Who’s On First,” but that’s beside the point.) In fact, moving into the realm of parody/spoof is in a sense the natural evolution for the Universal Monsters; the two House movies, for example, have their tongues planted firmly in their metaphorical cheeks, so it’s a short putt to outright punchlines. 

 

As for the monsters, I can’t overstate how good it is to see Bela Lugosi back as Count Dracula; if it did nothing else, the film could ride that nostalgia wave for eighty minutes and still be a home run. We’ll see a number of vampires during Monster March – Carlos Villarías, Gloria Holden, John Carradine, even Lon Chaney Jr. himself – but Lugosi remains the gold standard. Even with seventeen years away from the role (and to be fair his age does show), Lugosi slinks right back into the character, and he is magnetic. Indeed, perhaps the film should have been called Abbott and Costello Meet Dracula because he’s the undeniable monster star of the film. As before, his hypnotic stare extends beyond the proscenium of the silver screen; with a waggle of his fingers and a glint in his eyes, he captivates the audience as well as the soft-minded Wilbur. (As for the fact that this Dracula casts a reflection in a mirror – well, let’s just pretend we didn’t see that, hmm?)

 

After not having much to do in his preceding outings, Glenn Strange gives what is probably his best performance as Frankenstein’s monster, though the make-up looks to be a closer cousin of Herman Munster (debut, 1964) than before. It’s also a relief to hear the Monster speak again, having fallen silent once more after Bride of Frankenstein in 1935. As iconic as Karloff remains, I couldn’t help feeling that a great deal of the modern idea of the Monster is encapsulated in Strange’s performance here – the stilted voice, the thudding walk, the arms outstretched (inherited from Lugosi). With this film becoming a legend almost overnight, one wonders how much this film cemented the common conception of the Monster, taking what all the other performers had done before and rolling it into one iconic interpretation.

 

And in his swan song as the Wolf Man – attaining the unusual status of being the only performer to play this particular monster – Lon Chaney Jr. remains compelling. His make-up seems bushier than before, and his proclivities are a bit bloodthirstier, but this is still Lawrence Talbot, the same good performance Chaney had given in the past. He’s in the odd place of being the “straight man” of the monsters, fighting against the other two, but that puts him on a path where Abbott and Costello are his best allies, and it’s a miracle he doesn’t get more frustrated with that turn of fate. Instead, he remains surprisingly patient, confident that these two buffoons are his best hope at saving the world from Count Dracula.

 

What makes Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein a hit is that it’s both a monster movie with comedy and a comedy film with monsters. Both tones are balanced with dexterity, and the comedy is especially funny after more than seventy years. Costello’s underhanded self-deprecation, Abbott’s quick wordplay, even the physical comedy that’s gratifyingly never at the expense of the monsters doing their spooky stuff – this film has it all. I’ve silently been keeping a note all throughout Monster March about which movies I never need to watch again, and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein ain’t one of them. It’s so good, I might work it into an annual rotation for Halloween – that is, if I can’t get Monster March to stick. 

Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein is not rated. Directed by Charles T. Barton. Written by John Grant, Robert Lees, and Frederic I. Rinaldo. Starring Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, Lon Chaney Jr., Bela Lugosi, Glenn Strange, and Lenore Aubert. 

Tune in tomorrow for Mummy Monday, with The Mummy’s Tomb (1942) starring Lon Chaney Jr.

Next week, we’ll see what we can see when Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951), starring Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, and Arthur Franz.

Monster March: Invisible Woman (1940)

In the words of Monty Python, “And now for something completely different.” We’ve spent the last week looking at the Universal Classic Monsters, so for Sundays let’s do something a little silly. Silly Sundays, if you will. With the monster archetypes pretty firmly entrenched by 1940, the studio was free to get a little more creative with the formula (though, as was often the case, they tended to opt for light remakes that didn’t do much in the way of innovation). Enter The Invisible Woman, having little to do with 1933’s Invisible Man. Nor is it much of a monster movie at all – instead, it’s a slapstick comedy, amusing if a little lame.

Department store model Kitty Carroll (Virginia Bruce) answers an ad in the newspaper from Professor Gibbs (John Barrymore), who offers to make his next test subject invisible. While the professor’s financier and spendthrift playboy Dick Russell (John Howard) begins to fall in love with the unseen test subject, gangster in exile Blackie Cole (Oscar Homolka) gets wind of the professor’s device and sends a trio of goons to steal the secret of invisibility.

 

Within five minutes of The Invisible Woman, you know you’re in for something radically different from any of the Universal Monster movies that preceded it. (Indeed, I’m not even sure we should consider this an Invisible Man movie, but Universal does, so into Monster March it goes.) As the film opens, Dick Russell’s butler (played by Charlie Ruggles) trips headlong over a messy staircase and pulls a pratfall right there in the foyer. It’s a gag that recurs several times, each tumble more forceful than the one preceding it, but it sets the tone quite effectively. While there was some humor – grim though it may have been – in the earlier Universal Monster movies, The Invisible Woman isn’t ashamed to go for the punchline.

 

As far as comedy goes, The Invisible Woman isn’t anything innovative. There aren’t really any jokes that you haven’t heard before (except maybe the one about the gangster named Foghorn with the high-pitched voice). Watching a whole month’s worth of monster movies might make The Invisible Woman seem funnier than it is, but it’s a far cry from screwball greats like Bringing Up Baby or anything the Marx Brothers would have put out. Still, the atmosphere is diverting enough, and there are a few genuine chuckles to be had within the film. It’s the kind of good clean fun you saw all over the 1940s, light and inoffensive – though modern audiences may be surprised just how much fuss is made over the fact that a truly invisible woman is entirely undressed. (Indeed, that minor detail seems to be the whole reason Professor Gibbs has a female assistant, played by Margaret Hamilton – so that Kitty has someone to whom she can pass her clothing without the slightest hint of impropriety.)

 

If Universal had the lock on monster movies, Warner Bros. certainly cornered the market on gangster films. (Maybe next year, it’ll be Mobster March here at The Cinema King?) It’s therefore a little intriguing to see the two genres stitched together in The Invisible Woman; where the monster angle of the film is pretty watered down, the gangster subplot is certainly more Some Like It Hot than Angels with Dirty Faces. Oscar Homolka and his gang are hardly menacing, to the point that one of them is quite literally played by one of the Three Stooges, Shemp Howard. Shemp aside, they’re all straight out of central casting, and while there’s nothing thematically unified about gangsters and invisible women, it’s an effective shorthand for villainy in a genre that usually needs to distance the eponymous “monster” from the true fiends.

 

Perhaps more so than The Invisible Man, The Invisible Woman captures how much fun it might be to become truly invisible. Claude Rains whooped and cackled with glee, it’s true, but it’s hard to imagine anyone in the audience envying Jack Griffin. Kitty Carroll, on the other hand, is legitimately likeable in her desire to be invisible because she uses her invisibility for good. There’s a fair bit of mischief in the way she settles the score with her truly awful boss Mr. Growley (Charles Lane), and who among us hasn’t desperately wanted to tear down that loathsome old time clock at work? Fortunately for Kitty, there’s no specter of imminent madness looming over her invisibility, as Claude Rains and Vincent Price before her endured. It’s all in good fun.

 

The Invisible Woman is not rated. Directed by A. Edward Sutherland. Written by Robert Lees, Fred Rinaldo, Gertrude Purcell, Curt Siodmak, and Joe May. Starring Virginia Bruce, John Barrymore, John Howard, Charlie Ruggles, and Oscar Homolka. 

Tune in tomorrow for Mummy Monday, with The Mummy’s Hand (1940) starring Tom Tyler and Dick Foran.

Next week, we get even sillier with one of the true classics of the monster genre and perhaps of all comedy films writ large. Did someone say “Chiiiiiiiiiiiick”? It’s Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), starring Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, Lon Chaney Jr., Bela Lugosi, and Glenn Strange.

Monday at the Movies - January 28, 2019

Welcome to another installment of “Monday at the Movies.” This week, two films wildly different in tone and yet unmistakably British in their sensibilities.

The Death of Stalin (2018) – Few people can make me laugh as hard as Armando Iannucci, he whose British series The Thick of It can’t be enjoyed on a single viewing because you’ll miss half the jokes while splitting your sides at its creative profanity and monumentally madcap antics. After Iannucci ravaged the mundanely moronic ("All roads lead to Munich") in the lead-up to the Iraq War in Thick of It’s spinoff film In the Loop, he turns his satirical eye to the Soviet Union in the wake of Josef Stalin’s death and finds the Communist Party in chaos, beginning with the puddle of urine in which the party leader’s corpse is found. The cast is as unpredictable as the punchlines – we now live, folks, in a world where Steve Buscemi plays Nikita Khrushchev (and yes, Virginia, there is a “bury you” joke). Meanwhile we’ve got Jeffrey Tambor as the melancholy Georgy Malenkov, ill-suited to the leadership role he inherits; noted Shakespearean Simon Russell Beale as the oily Lavrentiy Beria of the secret police; and Jason Isaacs as Georgy Zhukov, all too eager to lead his army into open revolt. It’s a cast of all-stars (including Rupert Friend and Andrea Riseborough as Stalin’s children), but the biggest draw is the film’s pitch-black humor, depicting Stalin’s worst atrocities as something akin to a Karl Marx Brothers film. There are moments when one is not quite sure whether to laugh or recoil in horror, as when an executioner just gives up halfway down his line of victims, but Iannucci is quite successful at capturing the ambient paranoia that comes from not knowing who to trust in a totalitarian regime – and the absurdity when a brood of vipers is forced to try to trust one another.

Paddington 2 (2017) – With the benefit of hindsight, Paddington 2 might well be one of the best films of 2017. A film like this has no right to be as charming, intricately constructed, or genuinely emotional as Paddington 2 manages to be. Now that the well-mannered Paddington (Ben Whishaw) has taken up residence in London, he goes in search of a birthday present for his Aunt Lucy, only to find the perfect pop-up book out of his price range. After a series of odd jobs, Paddington is framed for the theft of the book, landing unceremoniously in a Victorian-era prison where he befriends the entire population – including prison cook Knuckles McGinty (Brendan Gleeson) – through the powers of civility and marmalade. Paddington 2 is even better than its predecessor, somehow more earnest now that it’s dispensed with the need to explain how and why an affable bear is living with ordinary people. Instead the filmscape is opened up to boundless adventures where Paddington’s relentless cheeriness persists, undaunted by his circumstances. Whether he’s shoved into the role of accidental barber or whether he finds himself teaching a prison how to make orange jam, Paddington is so endearing that it’s almost a personal offense when something unfortunate befalls him; “how dare they,” I said aloud at one point, “how dare the filmmakers do this to such a nice bear!” For all the antics and charm that the film possesses – really, I cannot overstate just how charming this movie is – it has an astonishing emotional depth rooted in Paddington’s love for his Aunt Lucy, and the film’s final moments are guaranteed to get you teary-eyed in a way that I thought only Pixar had been able to capture with computer-generated characters.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” Stay tuned for Wednesday’s final Batman animated review!

Monday at the Movies - May 14, 2018

Welcome to another installment of “Monday at the Movies.” This week, a trilogy concludes.

The Trip to Spain (2017)– After trips through Northern England and Italy, Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon are at it again in Michael Winterbottom’s third in the Trip trilogy, ostensibly reviewing restaurants but actually drinking in local culture and antagonizing each other in games of impressions and good-natured joshing. Three films in, The Trip to Spain shows some signs of wear, like a sauce that’s been on the pot a bit too long and is simmering a little thin. Where The Trip to Italy had a good laugh at the idea of just redoing the first film on the Italian peninsula, Spain feels more compulsory, intruded upon as it is by more constructed narratives (a subplot about Steve’s son) and a real head-scratcher of a conclusion that veers into weird satirical endlessness. The trip, though, has always been more the point of these movies than their destinations, and Spain does introduce a number of great bits, including a pit-stop amid a poor man’s Jurassic Park and an exceptionally apt James Bond reference apropos of Brydon’s preposterous choice of hat. The real stars of the film end up being, to the surprise of few, the impressions, chief among them Marlon Brando as the Spanish Inquisition by way of Python, a clapping Mick Jagger (who attempts his own Michael Caine impression), and Roger Moore, who on various occasions serves shellfish and narrates the history of the Spanish Moors as though they were his own family. A sort of “oh, this again” appearance by Yolanda the photographer does visualize the genius metaphor of Coogan as Don Quixote, with Brydon as his Sancho Panza, a gag that could have carried the film like Italy’s reference to The Godfather, Part II, but Spain doesn’t go there. Instead, it ends up somewhat less than the sum of its parts. I don’t anticipate (but would welcome) a fourth film to extend some of the matter of this film, but I do think that Coogan and Brydon are some of the most consistently funny comedians on film, even if this Trip seems less hysterical than the preceding two.

Sidebar: is this film the only time that the word “apotheosis” has been used as an insult? (Steve jeers that Rob’s “small man in a box” represents “the apotheosis of your career.”) A remarkable achievement in and of itself.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you next week!

Monday at the Movies - April 16, 2018

Welcome to another installment of “Monday at the Movies.” This week, a movie described by the Hollywood Reporter as “the Godfather 2 of road movies.” 

The Trip to Italy (2014)– The Trip was a miniseries turned film about Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, a pair of comedians playing fictionalized versions of themselves, touring the English countryside, reviewing restaurants, and antagonizing each other. Its sequel is the best kind of sequel – more of the same, self-aware of the absurdity of just doing it again, and just as riotously funny as the first. Coogan and Brydon continue to one-up each other on every topic from careers to impressions (on the latter, they’re in Italy, so you can imagine the Godfather allusions that proliferate, including one direct reenactment), from philosophical observations to precise trivia about seminal English poets. The pair have an undeniable combative chemistry, which really manifests in the deleted scenes, where they occasionally break “character” and laugh at the absurd rhetorical circles into which they chase each other. Where Coogan was more the straight man in the first Trip, exasperated by the ease with which Brydon can trigger a laugh, here he’s more laidback, more ready to get in on the fun, as when a conversation about Batman delves first into dueling Michael Caine impersonations before musing on the fact that Tom Hardy is “in a contest to see who can be the least understandable.” A subplot about infidelity is surprisingly sobering in The Trip to Italy, wallpapered over though it is by a stammering Hugh Grant impression, and one wonders if director Michael Winterbottom is musing about boorish vacuity or if he’s likening the fictional avatars to the storied biographies of the poets they’re chasing. There is a third film, The Trip to Spain, and the laughs-per-minute quotient here guarantees that the third will be well worth seeing.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you next week!

Monday at the Movies - November 13, 2017

Welcome to another installment of “Monday at the Movies.” Last week saw the debut of Taika Waititi on this blog, so today we flash back a few years for his vampire mockumentary.

What We Do in the Shadows (2014) – It’s no surprise that this film, written and directed by Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi, is a laugh-out-loud riot; one need only look at their recent comedic pedigrees (Flight of the Conchords and Thor: Ragnarok) to know we’re in for a good time. Waititi, Clement, and Jonathan Brugh star as a trio of vampiric flatmates in New Zealand, the subject of a documentary in the months leading up to their annual Unholy Masquerade ball, during which time they make human friends and consider adding one more to their nocturnal number. The bulk of the film’s humor comes from the vampires’ rapid-fire delivery and gift with one-liners (describing a bloodstained couch as “Well, it’s red now”) and the distinctly unique blend of supernatural horror with the utterly banal, like seeing a vampire do the dishes or learn how to use Skype. There’s a divine subplot involving Rhys Darby as the leader of a gang of well-mannered werewolves (“We’re werewolves, not swear-wolves”) and the delightful presence of a fourth roommate, an 8,000-year-old dead ringer for Nosferatu’s Count Orlok. The film’s comedic timing is impeccable, perfecting the art of the mockumentary with the awkward way its characters continually break the fourth-wall with a self-aware smile, but there are also those moments that engross you so much that you forget about the mockumentary conceit – until a character hilariously mentions the fact that there are cameras in the room. At a tight eighty-five minutes, What We Do ends up doing the opposite of overstaying their welcome; I’d have been happy with much, much more of this irreverent and singularly inimitable vision of the vampire myth wedded to the quotidian.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you next week!

The Hitman's Bodyguard (2017)

When I started to see the reviews trickle in for The Hitman’s Bodyguard, I began to worry. Was this yet another case of all the good moments finding their way into the trailer, leaving the movie an emptier experience? The good news is that the exact opposite is true – most of the funniest lines in this action comedy were not spoiled by the advertising (largely on the basis of Samuel L. Jackson’s perennially creative love affair with a certain four-letter word). That’s not, however, to say that The Hitman’s Bodyguard is as successful as it ought to be, but it is diverting enough.

Michael Bryce (Ryan Reynolds) is a down-on-his-luck personal protection agent scraping the bottom of the barrel until a call from Interpol agent Amelia Roussel (Elodie Yung), who just happens to be an ex-girlfriend. Agent Roussel asks Bryce to transport the boisterous hitman Darius Kincaid (Samuel L. Jackson) to The Hague to testify against a war criminal (Gary Oldman) in exchange for a full pardon for Kincaid’s wife (Salma Hayek).

The Hitman’s Bodyguard is, in effect, a murderous Planes, Trains, and Automobiles with Samuel L. Jackson and explosions instead of John Candy and feel-good holiday cheer. And like its late-80s comedic predecessor, The Hitman’s Bodyguard sails on the strength of the chemistry between its two leads. Jackson is essentially playing one more facet of himself, a wisecracking, foul-mouthed badass with an infectious laugh and a violent temper. Ryan Reynolds does yeoman’s work as the straight man, but he’s a straight man with an edge, capable of playing deadpan punchlines like, “I hope they kill him, I really do.” Together, the two are comedy gold, and one senses that the best moments are the ones that developed through improvisation and riffing off each other’s strengths.

The moments that feel the most like the familiar Reynolds/Jackson personas are particularly strong because there are other parts of the film that feel overly scripted. The first act in particular feels like the most perfunctory beginning to a film since the on-the-nose opener for Ant-Man, though like Ant-Man the movie turns around rather effectively once the plot is permitted to progress. The first few scenes of The Hitman’s Bodyguard do the work of introducing the film and its characters, but in a way that baldly displays the mechanics behind the narrative. In the scene introducing Kincaid, for example, Interpol explains his motivation to him as he predicts how their plan will go awry; meanwhile, the villain is introduced while he murders a small child in cold blood.

Speaking of the villain, what was the size of Gary Oldman’s check and – given the brief screen-time allotted to him – was it worth it? From my perspective, Oldman is always worth the price of admission, but the film catastrophically underutilizes him. He’s entirely effective at creating a villain who is instantly loathsome, and in that sense you need an actor of Oldman’s caliber to make quick work of a thin character. It is, however, more than a little distracting to cast Oldman as a villain who spends most of his screen time as a silent defendant in court. Likewise, Salma Hayek is an odd choice for Kincaid’s wife, whose appearances on screen are largely limited to a prison cell and a flashback south of the border. One wonders if she was cast preemptively for a larger role in a potential sequel, because again these strike me as very expensive choices for comparably small roles.

Maybe I’m just getting old in my moviegoing years to be concerned about the budget for a film that otherwise entertained me. The Hitman’s Bodyguard is not as entirely as funny as I’d hoped it would be – at least in terms of quantity – but it did leave me with a good feeling and a few memorable one-liners which would be abjectly criminal to spoil. It has a few unsurprising but crunchy action sequences to pad out the funny bits, and if the plot had been a little less direct to allow more room for Reynolds and Jackson to bicker, it’d be an instant home run. The Hitman’s Bodyguard is good but not great, not a movie which demands to be seen theatrically but for which I am pretty glad to have done so.

The Hitman’s Bodyguard is rated R for “strong violence and language throughout.” Direct by Patrick Hughes. Written by Tom O’Connor. Starring Ryan Reynolds, Samuel L. Jackson, Gary Oldman, Elodie Yung, and Salma Hayek.

Monday at the Movies - June 19, 2017

Welcome to another installment of “Monday at the Movies.” This week, it’s another classic case of “57 Channels And Nothin’ On.”

Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates (2016) – Back in April, I had a soul-crushing experience with Dirty Grandpa, an utterly unbearable nightmare of a movie, and so I’m not quite sure why I stayed in my seat when Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates appeared on my television screen. Actually, I know why – Dirty Grandpa has been like a bad stomach flu that I just can’t shake, and I wanted to remind myself that Zac Efron and Aubrey Plaza weren’t to blame. But the bad news is that Mike and Dave, starring Adam DeVine and Efron as the titular brothers, is almost exactly the same film as Dirty Grandpa, with essentially the same grisly randy plot, though it is significantly less viscerally offensive and has quantitatively more chuckles and even the occasional laugh. The good news is that, in those moments of levity, it’s Efron and Plaza to blame, because they’re much improved from Dirty Grandpa, if only by dint of working from a script that doesn’t aim to offend every single decent sensibility. This is not, however, to say that Mike and Dave is squeaky clean, with at least two staggeringly racist jokes and a few more revolting bouts of physical comedy, to say nothing of the jokes that fall flat on a purely technical level. Then there’s DeVine, who seems to be trying much too hard and has never met a joke he couldn’t mug his way through, while Anna Kendrick really looks to be slumming it in scenes where she’s alternately depressed or doped up. But every once in a while, Efron and especially Plaza land a solid snicker or two, and while the film is overall a louse, the dingy light from Dirty Grandpa won’t reach it for a million years – that’s how far from polite civilization Dirty Grandpa resides – and Mike and Dave does pass a “five laughs” test, though it’s not memorable enough for me to repeat most of them.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you next week!

Dirty Grandpa (2016)

Oh, the things I do for you people. As I looked for a movie to review this weekend, I found this gem “on demand,” which is a cruel joke for implying that anyone might ask for, let alone demand, the execrable piece of work. At the risk of sounding like someone’s grandfather, I should have known better. Everyone in this movie should have known better. But perhaps I should have actually acted like someone’s grandfather and just gone to bed early because Dirty Grandpa is utterly unbearable.

Robert De Niro stars as the eponymous grandpa, who cons his rising lawyer grandson (Zac Efron) into driving him to Florida for spring break, to grieve the loss of his wife in the arms of as many college girls as he can (including Zoey Deutch, doing her best Isla Fisher, and Aubrey Plaza, trying her hardest – and occasionally succeeding – to sell an R-rated April Ludgate).

You know I’m reticent to offer any kind of spoilers, but if I tell you any more of the plot you’ll see the film’s dénouement coming down the street in a cab. If I mention that Zac Efron’s character is a highstrung lawyer with an impending marriage to a real harpy of a bride, it won’t take Robert McKee to predict that he’ll find a more freespirited girl before the credits roll. If I acknowledge the drug dealer (Jason Mantzoukas, who I can honestly say has never made me laugh in anything) who has an overly chummy relationship with the police, you’ll probably assume that’s important in the third act. If I tee up any of the film’s ostensible jokes, however, you’ll probably come up with a funnier punchline than screenwriter John Phillips manages. If nothing else, you’d likely never come up with two versions of the same Terminator joke within five minutes, which Phillips accomplishes with all the grace of a first draft.

One thing about Dirty Grandpa is undeniable – Robert De Niro, an Academy Award winner and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, agreed to make this film and speak this dialogue, which is a free association mélange of smut, homophobia, and casual racism. The film’s vomitous vulgarity is married to a male gaze so leery that even Mr. Magoo can make it out. About an hour in, the film tries to moralize about the ills of homophobia while inquiring whether it’s acceptable for De Niro to use the N-word, but rather than feel at all self-aware, the film comes off as essentially mean-spirited in addition to its crude search for the absolute bottom of the barrel.

Had I seen that Dirty Grandpa was directed by Dan Mazer, I might not have watched it at all, for Mazer is a case study in the law of diminishing returns. Mazer had a hand in the hilarious Borat, the chuckle-worthy Brüno, and the unwatchable The Dictator. Now this. Perhaps Mazer would be better suited to a sitcom, because one feels that much of Dirty Grandpa is staged in such a way that Mazer is pointing to the joke and pausing, waiting for a laugh from the audience. The truth is that he’d be better off anticipating the arrival of Godot, because we certainly won’t be providing our own laugh track. Dirty Grandpa is Mazer’s second directorial feature, and we can only hope it’s his last.

At one point, Danny Glover appears for a “surprise” cameo as De Niro’s army buddy Stinky (and some jokes write themselves). “It’s all over for me,” Glover laments, to which I have to say, out of the mouths of degenerate septuagenarians, eh? Or as Efron’s character succinctly notes fairly early on, “I want to throw up.”

Dirty Grandpa is rated R for “crude sexual content throughout, graphic nudity, and for language and drug use.” Directed by Dan Mazer. Written by John Phillips. Starring Robert De Niro, Zac Efron, Zoey Deutch, and Aubrey Plaza.

Ghostbusters (2016)

Set the “controversy” aside, and take the movie on its own terms. Ghostbusters is plenty of fun and a pretty strong example of how to remake a movie with sufficient reverence balanced by satisfactory innovation.

Years ago, Erin Gilbert (Kristen Wiig) and Abby Yates (Melissa McCarthy) coauthored a book on the paranormal, but Erin has tried to distance herself with a legitimate career in academia. A haunted house in New York, however, brings the two back together, with Abby’s new partner Jillian Holtzmann (Kate McKinnon) and streetwise MTA employee Patty Tolan (Leslie Jones) rounding out the pack of paranormal investigators dubbed “Ghostbusters,” who become the last line of defense when New York is riddled with ghosts.

I was among the skeptics when a Ghostbusters remake was announced – having nothing to do with the gender switch, but based entirely on the fact that the original Ghostbusters movie is alchemically good, difficult to duplicate like lightning in a bottle. And remakes almost never live up to the original, let alone surpass it (aside from The Maltese Falcon and The Departed, that is). So I was a little trepidatious while in line for my ticket, but the trailers had looked funny enough, and I hadn’t been to the movie theater in nearly two months.

I’ll say that I went into this film expecting it to be something less than Personal Canon material, and I’ve found that the lower I temper my expectations the more I tend to enjoy a film. But I think Ghostbusters is genuinely entertaining even without the expectation threshold. It’s not, however, a classic like the first Ghostbusters – at least, not yet, perhaps – but it’s quite far from disgracing the legacy of the original. No, it’s a case study in how to do a remake right; it nods toward the original (including fun cameos from nearly all of the original cast, save Rick Moranis), moves in its own direction, and doesn’t forget to have fun along the way. What it’s not, and I think some of us were expecting it, is a legacy film, in which the ladies accept the mantle from the original team. As great as it would have been to see Dr. Venkman back on screen, it’s a smarter play to let the film run in its own direction.

Melissa McCarthy continues to be the queen of physical comedy, bounding about the screen while attached to a misfiring Ghostbusters backpack; she’s equally at home with quick delivery, like the moment she realizes that her proposed slogan for the Ghostbusters already belongs to another group. Kristen Wiig is perfect at playing it straight, hamming it up in overdrawn romantic gestures toward her new secretary (Chris Hemsworth, in a fun comedic turn), but it’s Kate McKinnon who steals the show as ostensibly this film’s Egon Spengler, the socially awkward genius. It’s the only role loosely borrowed from the original, but McKinnon does crazy eyes and lingering silences better than anyone. For Jones, the film never quite develops her “New York expert” character trait, but she gets to have just as much fun as the others and even ties in with one of the most fun cameos of the film.

Your childhood is safe. It’s only a movie. (It’s only a movie, the horror trailers would have us repeat.) It’s a very fun movie, the second coming of Slimer but far from the greatest film of the summer. It’s diverting and entertaining – and good heavens, is it loud! – but for an afternoon off, it’s good spectacle and hopefully the start of a new franchise where the fun keeps rolling even beyond the credits (after which, you’ve got to stay).

Ghostbusters is rated PG-13 for “supernatural action and some crude humor.” There are ghosts in here, and some of them barf green slime.

Hail, Caesar! (2016)

Hail, Caesar! tickles a lot of my moviegoing fancies: it’s a dark comedy farce courtesy of the Coen Brothers, in which an all-star cast of buffoons blunders their way through old Hollywood while the plot twists and turns like a postmodern poodle chasing its own tail. That may not be everyone’s cup of tea, recalling the plotless meandering of The Big Sleep and its successors, but for me it’s the most fun I’ve had at a movie in a long while (yes, maybe even more fun than Deadpool).

Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) has the unenviable job of being the chief “fixer” for Capitol Pictures; when something goes amuck, it’s Eddie’s task to make sure the motion picture shows go on. The latest catastrophe he’s tasked with suppressing is the abduction of Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), Capitol’s number-one star, though somewhat of a lush and a dim bulb. Of course, the Capitol lot is busy with numerous other crises, including a disgruntled mermaid (Scarlett Johansson), a highstrung director (Ralph Fiennes) and his twanging lead actor (Alden Ehrenreich), twin newspaper columnists (Tilda Swinton and Tilda Swinton), and a chipper musical star (Channing Tatum).

I’m reviewing Hail, Caesar! as someone who has very much partaken of the Coen kool-aid, so if The Big Lebowski was never your cup of tea or if Burn After Reading left you feeling parched, this is really more of the same, and you’d be better off watching something else. I say “more of the same” not as a negative, because I’m personally delighted to see more of the madcap mania the Coens have turned into a personal brand because it’s not something I get anywhere else at the cinema. No one does horseplay like Joel and Ethan Coen.

As for the plotlessness of Hail, Caesar!, the film is akin to an indoor amusement ride in which the audience shuffles from film set to film set to peek in on a day (27 hours, to be precise) in the life of 1950s Hollywood, and each of these individual setpieces is an exercise in the line between straight-face and satire. The Coens are masters at straddling this line, allowing the characters’ idiocy to penetrate to the foreground without the need to resort to caricature or signposting. On the surface, there’s nothing intrinsically funny about Tatum’s song-and-dance routine, but there’s something about the deadset sincerity, coupled with the amazingly insightful small nods to clichés of the era (such as taking the bartender’s dish rag and polishing his bald dome with it), leave the audience rolling with laughter – a continuous giggle punctuated by bursts of glee. Which is not to say there aren’t jokes; the moment when an Eastern Orthodox priest dismisses a chariot stunt as “fakey” is as funny as anything in a comedy special, and the moment when Hobie finds it difficult to drop his accent when saying “Would that it twere so simple” gets funnier the longer the gag goes on.

Then there’s the ever-present Coen delight of seeing a team of A-listers perambulating through the spectacle. Brolin is engaging as the over-hardboiled fixer, gritting his way through exaggerated Catholic guilt, and his interactions with the other cast members carry the film on his tensed shoulders. As ever, it’s a delight to see George Clooney playing the quintessential Coen idiot, who here scratches his head at his own kidnapping while being naively dazzled when his captors introduce him to the writings of Karl Marx. Even Coen mainstay (and spouse) Frances McDormand pops in for a vignette as a film editor whose scarves get caught in the projection reels. Delightfully madcap cameos like this one make Hail, Caesar! a standout.

At the conclusion of Hail, Caesar! everything wraps up fairly quickly and tidily. Whether this is a ending far too pat for the demands of realism, or whether I simply didn’t want the film to end, is up for debate; or is it, as the film suggests, a commentary on the function of films in society, as illusory dreams constrained by their own rules, entirely divorced from reality? It’s the final indication that Hail, Caesar! is something much smarter than it might initially present. The joke is on the characters, not on the audience, and the steadfast refusal of the Coens to pander is a tremendous credit to us and to them. Hail, Caesar! indeed!

Hail, Caesar! is rated PG-13 for “some suggestive content and smoking.” There’s a quick mention of an unwed pregnancy and one unelaborated mention of sodomy.

Heads up, True Believers – we’ll continue to Make Yours Marvel this Wednesday with another installment in “The Grand Marvel Rewatch,” so check back then for 2010’s Iron Man 2. Or subscribe above, and receive those missives right in your inbox. Nuff said!

Monday at the Movies - December 22, 2014

Welcome to another edition of “Monday at the Movies.”  Just in time for Christmas, The Cinema King gets to one he’s never actually seen before!

Elf (2003) – If I were to redo my “Top 10 Christmas Season Movies” list from two years ago, I imagine Elf would make the cut.  As the film began, between Bob Newhart’s nonpareil delivery and the credit “directed by Jon Favreau,” I knew I was in for a good time.  In the film that everyone else had seen but me, Will Ferrell stars as Buddy, an elf by adoption who discovers he’s a human being and sets out from the North Pole in search of his real father (James Caan).  Along the way, he falls in love with department store elf Jovie (a distractingly blonde Zooey Deschanel) and helps Santa (Ed Asner) recapture the Christmas spirit.  Elf utilizes the “fish out of water” plotline very well, juxtaposing Buddy’s wide-eyed enthusiasm with the cynicism of New York City but without going for either a laugh at Buddy’s expense or the moral equivalent of treacle.  What makes it a wonderful Christmas feature, aside from the music and the set dressing, is the way the film participates in the basic premise of most of the classic Christmas specials, that of the misfit who saves the day.  It helps that the cast, comprised of people who wouldn’t jump immediately to mind for the holiday season, is in top form, especially Caan who miraculously isn’t playing another version of Sonny Corleone.  Favreau, who makes a cameo, keeps the laughs coming, though, without ever resorting to the heavyhanded moralizing one might have come to expect from a Christmas classic.  No, the word of the day is “fun,” youthful and fresh, and I think I’ve found myself a new holiday tradition.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!  Have a holly jolly Christmas, all.

Monday at the Movies - October 21, 2013

Welcome to another edition of “Monday at the Movies.”  What’s more Halloween than a murder mystery?

Clue (1985) – Can we draw a line from here to Peter Berg’s Battleship?  Movies based on board games sound like evidence for the death of the imagination in Hollywood, and while the case isn’t quite so bleak with Clue I will say that the movie is significantly less funny than I remembered it.  Anchored by Tim Curry’s extremely immersive performance as butler Wadsworth (at least, in some of the film’s multiple endings), Clue is a comedic update on the whodunit board game, teasing us with Martin Mull as Colonel Mustard, Christopher Lloyd as Professor Plum, and Madeline Kahn as Mrs. White, among others.  The film is, however, almost entirely Curry’s – and well done there, since his post-Rocky Horror screen presence is more than enough to hold our attention rapt.  This isn’t a laugh-out-loud comedy like, say, The Hangover, since the laughs are more subtle (often from an underplayed line by Kahn or a facial contort from Michael McKean’s Mr. Green).  The film’s last twenty minutes, in which Wadsworth recaps the night’s events in order to identify the killer, may sound a bit tedious (and indeed the play-by-play repetition sometimes errs on the side of redundancy) but is actually the source of the film’s strongest laughs, resulting from some madcap physical comedy, shouted refrains, and the wink-nod revelation that “Communism was just a red herring.”  Redeemed by strong comedic performances that occlude the occasional laughlesness, Clue is a solid B-level comedy that leaves a better impression than it actually makes.  (Disclosures:  my rosy recollections may have led me to be disappointed, and the fact that my moviegoing partner on this one fell asleep may factor into my disenchantment.)

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!

Monday at the Movies - September 16, 2013

Welcome to another edition of “Monday at the Movies.”  This week, the closest we come to reviewing TV shows (at least, for now).

In the Loop (2009) – Leave it to the Brits to turn the run-up to the Iraq War into a madcap update of Dr. Strangelove.  Not quite a movie version of the brilliant BBC series The Thick of It (the same cast appears, albeit most playing different roles), In the Loop finds spin doctor Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi) very much out of said loop, struggling to contain the press frenzy surrounding the offhand remarks of a Cabinet minister (Tom Hollander) who said that war in the Middle East was “unforeseeable.”  When the minister’s perpetual verbal blunders go viral, the pair find themselves drawn into the orbit of Lt. General Miller (James Gandolfini) and Linton Barwick (David Rasche), two American politicos on opposite sides of the dove/hawk aisle.  In the Loop is laugh-out-loud funny, even when the characters aren’t trying to outswear each other; the kind of satirical buffoonery that made Dr. Strangelove gets a refreshing modern spin (pun intended) where the political world is a Baudrillardian nightmare of know-nothings and power vacuums.  The film is not the fastest paced movie you’ll see all year, but the real delights are to be found in the dialogue (most courtesy of writer/director Armando Iannucci’s Oscar-nominated script).  But as often happens in films like this, the incredibly talented cast is given free improvisational rein, lending the film flourishes like Capaldi’s practically melodious profanity-laden tirades or a delightful cameo from Steve Coogan as a disgruntled constituent.  In short, In the Loop is one of the smartest and funniest movies I’ve seen in a long time (and if I reviewed TV shows on here, I’d say the same for The Thick of It).

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!  

The World's End (2013)

With The World’s End, we close the door on Edgar Wright’s “Cornetto Trilogy,” a thematic trio held together by blood and ice cream, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, as well as some fun genre-bending madcap antics.  Surprisingly earnest but never forgetting to have loads of fun with the sci-fi satire, The World’s End is a worthy successor to the inspired Shaun of the Dead and its clever brother Hot Fuzz.

The World’s End finds Gary King (Pegg) “puttin’ the band back together” in an attempt to recreate an abortive pub crawl twenty years earlier, though he encounters resistance from his old mates (Nick Frost, Paddy Considine, Martin Freeman, and Eddie Marsan), who have all grown up and left their childish ways behind them.  Gary’s quest is complicated when he discovers that many of his hometown’s residents have been replaced by alien robot doppelgangers.

I’ll admit to a certain degree of apprehension about this movie after Wright’s last directorial outing, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, which had the fun quotient I had come to expect but literalized its video-game roots with a distancing lack of irony.  But in Wright’s filmic homecoming (he’s been making movies with Pegg & Frost for almost ten years, and their Spaced collaboration on TV goes back even further), he recovers his unique directorial voice with a project that’s equal parts heartwarming and hilarious.

The key is Wright’s deft ability (with cowriter Pegg) to navigate tonal shifts without compromising his film’s own unique identity.  In a summer blockbuster season that’s seen empty characterization (Pacific Rim) and tonally schizophrenic tilt-a-whirls (Kick-Ass 2), it’s a relief to see a film like The World’s End, which manages to juggle satire, spoof, comedy, nostalgia, genuine science-fiction, and moving character drama all in one bundle.  As scene-stealers go, it’s hard to do better than Eddie Marsan’s turn as Peter Page, who handles his sad sack role with aplomb; in a key bathetic monologue, he reveals his feelings of finitude, but his giddy one-liners fit perfectly within the bounds of his character because the film takes the time to get us to care about him before making him narratively significant.

It’s a weird, almost perfunctory moment when the film switches from beer-guzzling comedy to ooky sci-fi, as though Wright remembered halfway through editing that he needed to satirize a film genre as he had in Shaun and Fuzz.  But it’s not a requirement that impinges on the film; indeed, Wright’s greatest success is convincing us to care about his characters long before asking us to follow them on an insane journey.  He’s given an assist by some really capable performances; Pegg and Frost switch roles for this film, with Pegg as the loser and Frost as the blue-collar worker, and it’s a role reversal that works better than expected, allowing each actor to remain fresh in a new role.

It doesn’t quite pass the Bechdel test, but The World’s End manages to be tons of fun with an equal serving of well-written heart.  There are plenty of winks and nods to devotees of the genre or just to Cornetto Trilogy aficionados (the ice cream appears, as does the fence), but even taken solely on its own The World’s End is really just a solid movie all the way around.  It does everything a movie ought to do – entertain, amuse, move, provoke – and is a much finer cap to the summer movie season than I was expecting.  If this is how the world ends, bring on the afterlife.

The World’s End is rated R for “pervasive language including sexual references.”  You know the drill:  it’s comparable to Shaun and Fuzz in quantity of F- and C-bombs dropped.  The blood in this one is almost entirely blue (literally, the color blue) and played for comic effect.  We see a man’s bare buttocks once, and the men describe offbeat sexual acts in-depth (the “marmalade sandwich” – two blondes and a redhead – being a tame example).

The Heat (2013)

Though she’d been around for a while, Melissa McCarthy was introduced to most filmgoers in 2011’s Bridesmaids.  Ostensibly the breakout star of the piece, it’s no surprise that McCarthy reteamed with director Paul Feig for a film that shows off her comedic talents, excelling in the delivery even if the film itself isn’t terribly innovative.

In pursuit of a drug kingpin and a promotion, fastidious FBI Agent Sarah Ashburn (Sandra Bullock) heads to Boston, where she falls in with the abrasive local police officer Shannon Mullins (McCarthy).  What follows is your standard polar-opposites comedy, juxtaposing the straight-laced Ashburn with Mullins’s more freeform approach, with value added by the fact that Mullins comes from the wrong side of the tracks (including her delightfully shouty mother, played by Jane Curtin).

Anyone who’s seen the trailers already knows whether this is their kind of movie or not, because the trailers do a really solid job capturing the spirit and the tone of this movie – a few explosions and gunfights here and there, with the emphasis instead on rapid-fire banter between Bullock’s civility and McCarthy’s profanity.  The film doesn’t give us much new material to appreciate; for example, once we learn that the top drug lord has never been photographed, you just know it’s someone in the film biding time for that third act reveal.

But what the film lacks in innovation, it makes up in execution.  Though Bullock gets top billing, the film is undeniably McCarthy’s – she speaks the title of the film, she holds your attention rapt, and (potential spoiler warning?) Ashburn becomes more Mullins by the end of the film in an inversion of our expectation that Ashburn will compel Mullins to become more professional.  McCarthy is loud, brash, and unapologetic, perhaps even what might happen to her Bridesmaids character after a life with the air marshal.  Symptomatic of the #yolo zeitgeist, The Heat explores the value in cutting loose and living dangerously, either by leftover cheese sandwich or by grenade (both of which Mullins keeps in her refrigerator).

The real treat in The Heat is the chemistry between Bullock and McCarthy, who pull off the opposing forces of their characters without feeling like they’ve been thrown together by a random plot generator.  Bullock has refined this hard-nosed sweet-yet-stern persona and brings all that to bear in Sarah Ashburn while still imbuing her with just enough pathos (or is the cat subplot even bathetic?).  Better, her epiphany at the end of the film develops organically out of her relationship with McCarthy, whose gentle-giant approach endears while it entertains.  Scenes like the Spanx encounter in a club bathroom or the third-story interrogation work because of how well Bullock and McCarthy play off each other.

Enough said about how funny McCarthy is in The Heat.  It’s a vehicle driven entirely by her, and if you’re looking for a few laughs you may as well go along for the ride.

The Heat is rated R for “pervasive language, strong crude content and some violence.”  F-bombs and actually quite brutal dialogue pervade the film, as do a surprising number of bloody gunshots to the head (I can recall two) and stabbings.  Additionally, the more PC moviegoers may be uncomfortable with the number of jokes at the expense of an albino character.