This Is 40 (***1/4)

Judd Apatow revisits the supporting couple Pete (Paul Rudd) and Debbie (Leslie Mann), from his movie Knocked Up. It doesn’t matter if you’ve seen that movie—none of the other major characters makes an appearance here—but if you did and liked the alternately argumentative and simpatico duo this is more of the same. If you liked the mix of crude humor and emotion, there’s still a little bit of raunch, occasionally seeming forced. I guess in Los Angeles women confide sexual intimacies to their trainer, like that their husband took Viagra. (Pete didn’t need to, but  it was Debbie’s birthday and “I thought you’d think it was fun for me to supersize it for once,” he says.) But they have bigger problems, mostly money problems. Pete’s independent record label is foundering, thanks in part to its inability to get fans to buy the latest album from 1970s/’80s semi-star Graham Parker. (Parker plays himself.) Debbie thinks someone’s stealing from her clothes store. They communicate poorly, except when they don’t.

I’ve liked all of Apatow’s work and liked this. Apatow’s ability to craft natural-sounding dialogue, along with some that’s improvised, is the movie’s forte, which is good in a talky movie. His characters, including the minor ones (like John Lithgow and Albert Brooks as the difficult fathers of Pete and Debbie) are consistently engaging, so long as one does not conflate that with being admirable. I appreciate that Apatow resists the impulse to make his characters always likable (or perfect parents). Whether Mann and Apatow’s daughters Iris and Maud, who play Pete and Debbie’s bickering kids, are the best child actors is open to debate, but they seem more like real kids than many seen on screen. The early scenes may seem somewhat disjointed, and lighter in tone, not fully setting up the more confrontational second part.

I normally wouldn’t recommend the outtakes that sometimes play over the closing credits; usually they’re just the actors laughing, but in this case it’s an amazing thing to watch Melissa McCarthy continuing a lengthy, probably improvised rant without breaking character as her costars giggle and obviously render the scene unusable.

IMDb link

viewed 6/29/13 on iPad (from Netflix DVD) and reviewed 6/29–7/6/13

Celeste & Jesse Forever (***1/2)

Maybe Hollywood has exhausted the possibilities of romantic comedies that have puns or numbers in the title, climax with someone chasing someone down at an airport, or end with snapshots of happy couples with their future children. In any case, there seem to be a steady trickle, not always evident in the multiplexes (unless Meryl Streep is in the movie), of movies that are comedic, and involve romance, but focus on something other than the how-will-they-finally-get-together. Like Streep’s Hope Springs, this involves an already-married couple (Rashida Jones, Andy Samberg) with difficulties.

What are these difficulties? They don’t seem apparent at first. In fact, the movie starts with Celeste, whose Hollywood-type job involves spotting cultural trends and writing a book called Shitegeist, and Jesse, an aspiring but unemployed artist, getting along famously, singing the lyrics to the same Lily Allen album cut. Only they’ve already decided to break up, which seems so bizarre that it freaks out their friends. And here the story begins, with the will-they-or-won’t-they-reunite question actually not clear until the end. Jones, who wrote the screenplay with Will McCormack, who plays a friend, has created a character who is both difficult in some ways and likable. Jesse is decidedly more laid back, and maybe lazy, but is also likable. Basically, you wind up rooting for the characters but do see their differences.

Dating adventures and get-togethers dominate the plot, as in many romantic comedies. There are just a few easy gags, as where a vegan restaurant has a seaweed menu and won’t, for some reason, serve caffeinated tea. And there’s a minor wedding-speech fiasco scene, which also seems to be a common item, but this one’s pretty funny. And since the movie takes place in Los Angeles, there are a few satirical swipes at the entertainment industry. But most of the humor comes out of the characters. Non-feather-light films like this one may or may not be romantic comedies as we have come to define them. But when they’re as simultaneously thoughtful and funny as this one, who’s to quibble?

IMDb link

viewed 8/14/12 7:30 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 8/16/12

Welcome to the Sticks (**3/4)

Upon the U.S. opening of Intouchables, reportedly the second most popular homegrown film in French history, I became curious about this comedy, which is number one. It turns out to be a genial, middlebrow comedy about a Post Office supervisor (Kad Merad) whose scheme to get transferred to a nice seaside locale backfires. Instead, his destination turns out to be a small town called Bergues in the most northern part of France. The comedy largely rests upon the premise that the French (or, at least, ones from more southerly parts) think of the North as some awful backwater where the natives can barely speak and where it’s so cold you need parkas in the summer. The supervisor’s wife, with whom he’s been having marital issues, certainly thinks so, and decides to stay behind in the South with their son.

And so, alone, the husband moves, finds the locals peculiar but extremely friendly, the town charming, and so on, meanwhile telling his wife it’s as awful as imagined. A quick Google search would, at the very least, convinced her that the place at least had some visual charm, and that the climate wasn’t awful, but never mind. A lot of the humor stems from linguistic subtleties, including the unusual dialect and occasionally incomprehensible pronunciations. The subtitles in the version I watched did an excellent job of conveying the many such misunderstandings, though it’s the kind of thing where it’s probably funnier if you know the language. This might be one reason the film wasn’t widely released theatrically outside of French-speaking places, despite its success there. However, in its way it says as much about French culture as its more highbrow kin, something like what an Adam Sandler movie might say about a certain sort of American sensibility. (For one thing, it says that the French will accept a bald guy in a leading role.) By no means is this a great film—the hero’s turn from snobby jerk to one of the fellas takes like five minutes—and the humor is mostly middling, but it was fun to watch. The climactic scene in which the wife inevitably arrives for a visit did make me laugh despite it being pretty ridiculous. The director, incidentally, is Dany Boon, who plays the genial, still-living-with-his-mom postman.

IMDb link

viewed 6/2/12 via streaming video and reviewed 6/3/12

The Thing About My Folks (***1/2)

Undeservedly underseen is the lone feature written by Paul Reiser, who with Peter Falk stars as a Jewish son and father on the road in upstate New York. (The director is Raymond De Felitta, who made the equally charming Two Family House and City Island, and brings a similar sense of place as he does in those features.) The very beginning has some of the bickering, bantering style of Reiser’s series Mad About You, but then the pace becomes more leisurely, though no less talky. Reiser has a gift for dialogue that’s both funny and naturalistic. Falk makes an ornery character charming. (He was equally so in person at the screening I saw.) It gets gushy at the end, but it works because you’ve gotten to know the characters and their relationship and it doesn’t feel like cheap manipulation.
 
IMDb link

viewed at PFS screening; circulated via email 9/22/05 and revised/posted 11/27/13