Wanderlust

Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston with a mostly-amusing cast in David Wain's Wanderlust

*** out of ****

Wanderlust didn't amaze me but I laughed. There is something potentially profound about the story of a financially exiled New York couple who look for their place in regular-America and find themselves between the world of idiot materialists and idiot hippies. Happiness must be somewhere. For the sake of this being an enjoyable comedy, they decide to stay with the hippies in a commune. We then have a relationship comedy where the innocent couple are challenged with the free love ideology that the free-spirits embrace.


The story winds up being weaker than it should, but a half-assed story can't stop a movie from being funny. Most of the humor in this film flies but a bit of it seems misplaced. I may be alone here, but I thought the movie had a too much invested in Justin Theroux, who plays the influential alpha male of the commune who winds up being the comic antagonist. Theroux is a talented man but he brings nothing to the douchebag-hippie caricature that feels fresh or comically insightful. I felt it was a very generic performance.

Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston work well as the film's leads. Rudd's deadpan ability helps the comedy survive and it's nice to see Aniston at least trying to be in interesting movies again.  

The co-writer/director David Wain is still one of my favorite people working in comedy today. As much as I liked his last movie Role Models, I felt like it was his first step into formulaic studio comedy that could find more success. I feel like this movie sinks a little deeper into that kind of banality. There are funny jokes, yes, but the passage of the story seems a bit lazy and lacks the uncontrollable twists and turns of his hilarious Wet Hot American Summer and his short-lived TV show for his comedy group, Stella.

As in all of Wain's movies you have plenty of alumni from The State who add a lot of comedy. Joe Lo Truglio terrifyingly bears all as the commune's resident nudist. Co-writer/actor Ken Marino never fails to play someone I hate. Kerri Kenney is a character stuck in her own la-la land and can't stop talking. Best of all, Stella (Wain, Michael Ian Black, and Michael Showalter) appears as Atlanta Georgia newscasters.

There's further support from great cast members like Alan Alda as the commune's slightly oblivious founder. Catherine Hahn is great as a hypersensitive hippie. Michaela Watkins, an actress I wasn't familiar with, made quite an impression as a borderline insane housewife. The beautiful Malin Ackerman is perfectly cast as someone to tempt a man to abandon monogamy.

Wain is a great force in modern comedy and I hope that he can find a way to take his resources and produce a successful comedy movie that has the same unpredictable spirit of his previous work.

Here's a good review from David Edelstien.

They Came Together

***1/2 out of ****

New on Blu-ray and DVD, They Came Together is a film that stars Paul Rudd as an executive at a heartless conglomerate and Amy Poehler as a small business owner at risk of losing her store to the major competition. The two soon meet one another, where rivalry ensues –and then romance –and then rivalry again. That’s a surface-level description. If it sounds familiar, it’s intentional. This movie is the latest comedy from the hilarious David Wain who borrows from You’ve Got Mail and countless other yuppy-centric movies to do a rather funny lampoon on modern romantic comedies.

Instead of a bookstore, it’s a cute little candy shop and the evil corporation with a high-rise tower is completely devoted to monopolizing the business of candy. In the pursuit of romance, Poehler’s character has a co-worker/best friend who is an unrealistically giving person. Rudd’s character confides in bunch of bros down at the basketball court who play (badly) while offering conflicting advice, based on whichever male archetype they literally claim to be.

Along with Christopher Meloni, Bill Hader, Ellie Kemper, Max Greenfield, Ed Helmes, Cobie Smulders, Michael Ian Black and way too many people to list, this New York-set rom-com mockery swells with brilliant delivery of absurd exchanges.

I laughed throughout this whole film, but I won’t be quick to give it a broad recommendation. For a guy who sees way too many movies, a flick like this feels like a liberating escape. To someone else, it may come across as obnoxious. There are also people who don’t get this kind of humor, sadly lacking the capability of understanding a movie that refuses to take itself seriously in any way.

There are other movies, which have honorably spoofed a genre using similar tactics. Black Dynamite spoofed blaxpoitation better than any other film that tried. Down with Love was a very clever take on the Doris Day and Rock Hudson sex comedies of the Kennedy era. One of my absolute favorites, however, was David Wain’s first film, Wet Hot American Summer, which was a send-up of summer camp comedies of the 1980s.

Wain’s material, with the help of his longtime co-writer Michael Schowalter has a knack for following the path of formulaic entertainment only to address every cliché as it is met, by either overplaying it or subverting our expectations in an outrageously inappropriate way.

One of the most unforgettable examples of this can be found in Wet Hot where the teen counselors go into town to get away from the campground for a bit. What follows is a joyous montage with happy eighties rock playing as they party a little while engaging in the benefits of being away from their responsibilities. They eat a little McDonalds and then score a pack of beer, some cigs, and a little weed… Before you know it, they steal a purse from an old lady, buy some heroin in an alley and are then seen passed out in shambles while lurking in a crack house. Then it shows them return to camp, all smiles, in perfect health with the implication that only an hour has passed.

Watch that scene here

His comedy trio Stella, with his co-creator Michaels (Ian Black and Showalter), was also an energetic abandonment of logic or any seriousness. In the form of stage show, internet shorts and a short-lived TV show, the three well-dressed men try to fit in with society while their hijinks leave a path of destruction, but will always inexplicably find reward in the end. 

Wain later moved on to do a trio of movies with co-writer/actor, Ken Marino. The first was sketch comedy movie called The Ten, which was a series of short films -all supposedly reflecting each of the Ten Commandments. Their oddball comedy was followed by Role Models and Wanderlust, which were both comparatively grounded with a more standard comic narrative. They both had a good deal of hilarity but I felt as though Wain and his The State alum were falling into a less adventurous format in favor more conventional comedy.

While They Came Together isn’t nearly as funny as Wet Hot, I still felt a good deal of satisfaction watching a film where Wain gets back to the style that best suits him. I’ve always had a weakness for irreverence when it comes to getting a laugh. From The Marx Brothers to Monty Python and the Holy Grail to the Naked Gun movies and even Alex Winter's little-known insane feature, Freaked, I will always favor comedy that has the courage to abandon all reason.

2014: Anything worth looking forward to?

The Grand Budapest Hotel
It says a lot that I loved Moonrise Kingdom. I’ve found myself ostracized from certain circles for not liking the films of Wes Anderson. I had always wanted to like them simply for how they looked and “Moonrise” was the first one to correct every problem I had with his previous works. I feel very enthusiastic about his new movie. The trailer’s colorful imagery and period setting all captured in classic “Academy” aspect ratio looks rather amazing and so does the cast, including Ralph Fiennes -who is one of my favorite actors- in the lead.

Noah
Darren Aronofsky’s biblical endeavor of a film may turn out to be terrible for all I know. I just respect the classic Hollywood approach to making a Bible story into a fantasy adventure. I don’t think it’s fair that most movies based on religious scripture tend to be so banal. Bible stories, especially the ones from the Old Testament, have an epic quality that should interest anyone, whether they are religious or not.

Enemy
Prisoners director, Denis Villeneuve makes a surreal thriller starring Jake Gyllenhaal about a man who seeks out someone identical to himself. This looks bizarre. I’m interested.

Transcendence
Wally Pfister, the cinematographer best known for his work with Christopher Nolan on “Inception” and the Batman movies, makes his directorial debut with a technophobic thriller about a scientist, played by Johnny Depp, who backs his brain up on a computer before dying and becomes the most dangerous computer virus the world has ever known. So much for all the love we got from “Her.”

Guardians of the Galaxy
I don’t know the comic. I just know that this looks to be a comparatively zany addition to the Marvel Movie Universe. There’s a raccoon with a machine gun! How can you go wrong?

Godzilla
This gazilionth retread of the famous Japanese property has a bit going for it. It’s director, Gareth Edwards is known for his independent monster film, “Monsters” which only cost $800,000 and looked like it cost millions. We know he’s the right guy for this kind of material. The cast looks excellent and the new imagery revealed in every trailer looks cooler and cooler. My only reservation is that it will lack the fun that “Pacific Rim” achieved so beautifully last year.

X-Men: Days of Future Past
I haven’t liked an X-Men movie since the second one. With that said, I find it somewhat hopeful that the director of the first two films has taken on this project. The last film, “X-Men: First Class,” established a very good cast and I hope they’re better-utilized here. The trailer is pretty great.

A Million Ways to Die in the West
Seth MacFarlane can’t write a good story but he sure has funny jokes. Just like his movie debut, “Ted,” I expect a hilarious experience, which may turn dull at the end when he adds unnecessary sincerity to his characters. I really like what he’s making here. It looks like a “Blazing Saddles”-style Western comedy, which focuses on jokes about mortality in the 1800s.

Whiplash
J.K. Simmons plays a psychotic jazz teacher to a pupil played by Miles Teller. This was a Sundance favorite by first time writer/director Damien Chazzelle.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
I was surprised by 2011’s prequel/reboot “Rise of the Planet of the Apes.” It featured a performance from a computer-animated chimp that outshined most of the film’s human actors. The sequel seems to take place years after a virus wiped out most of the human population and a war may be brewing between the surviving humans and Caesar’s army of intelligent apes. This time, Matt Reeves, best known for “Cloverfield,” directs.


Gone Girl
Based on Gillian Lynn's2012 novel, this mystery story starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike looks like perfect material for director David Fincher, who in my opinion, has been on a flawless streak since 2007’s “Zodiac.”

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For
Back in 2004, Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller achieved the truest adaptation of a comic book to the screen… ever. It took a long time to get the cast back together, but it looks like they’re going to get the same results.


Boyhood
Richard Linklater (“Dazed and Confused”; “Before Midnight”) has been making this film, on and off, since 2002, starring Ellar Coltrane, Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke. It’s a drama about a boy growing up. Linklater thought the most effective way to shoot such a project, would be to literally allow a kid to age in years during the filming process.


They Came Together
David Wain and Michael Showalter (“Wet Hot American Summer”) reunite as the writers of this sardonic looking romantic comedy, starring Paul Rudd, Amy Poehler and a cast of dependably funny actors. Wain directs and hopefully this will be a return to form for a very funny artist who by 2012, had disappointingly resorted to the conventional studio comedy formula with the only somewhat funny “Wanderlust.”

Under the Skin
Jonathan Glazer (“Sexy Beast”) makes a dark sci-fi movie. Scarlett Johansson is an alien. ‘Nuff said.