(Mark Mylod, 2011)
Despite the reliable efforts on Anna Faris and Chris Evans in the lead roles, What's Your Number? remains frustratingly second-rate throughout. The concept - based upon a lifestyle book - centres on the number of men the average American woman must sleep with before she finds her future husband. The average is 10, so when Elly (Faris) realises she has twice that to her name, she flips out and determines to track down all of her exes, so that she can marry one of them and not pass the 20 mark.
She enlists the help of her slacker neighbour Colin (Evans) in her quest and he sends her across Boston to rendezvous with various men, played by a nicely random selection of character actors including Martin Freeman, Andy Samberg and Anthony Mackie.
Inevitably, Elly and Colin fall for one another but don't realise it until the last five minutes of the film.
This is a romcom lacking in much com. Faris is a great comic actress, blessed with perfect timing and a good sense of physical comedy, and Evans has effortless charm. They have chemistry too, but there are virtually no laughs here. Scenes play out and the mechanics of comedy are visible, but not much works. Its too safe and obvious, too calculated and cold.
Mylod directs it like any one of a dozen directors might have - without much energy or anything visually distinctive. It's just there, wasting its cast, looking pretty.
Showing posts with label Anna Faris. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Anna Faris. Show all posts
Monday, 28 July 2014
Sunday, 24 February 2013
I GIVE IT A YEAR
(Dan Mazer, 2013)
A couple of things about I Give It a Year make sense as soon as you realise that writer-director Dan Mazer is best-known as Sacha Baron-Cohen's co-writer on Ali G, Bruno and Borat. The way the laughter isn't really spread throughout the film but comes in sharp little spikes, for one thing. Mazer is great at constructing comic set-pieces that gather momentum and grow funnier as they go on; he is great, in other words, at writing sketches. And so this film is full of them; neat, almost perfectly-formed scenes based around a single, hilarious comic conceit, which the film then pushes as far as it can go. Take the scene where Chloe (Anna Faris) is involved in a threesome with two of her co-workers at a charity and it turns into a wrestling match studded with excrutiating dirty talk, brilliantly played by the actress as a piece of sustained, undignified, unsexy slapstick. Or the scene where Josh (Rafe Spall) attempts to pantomime his way through "Dr Quinn Medicine Woman" in a game of charades by referring to the word "quim" and relentlessly pointing at his mother-in-law and her mother's genitals.
Another thing is the way Mazer introduces a host of brilliant, classically British comic grotesques - generally caricatures - as fleeting supporting characters. Olivia Coleman, for instance, is dazzling as a deranged marriage counsellor. Likewise, Stephen Merchant steals every scene he's in as Josh's best friend Dan, unable to stop himself rabbiting on about anything inappropriate that enters his head.
This is all overlaid atop what is quite a generic romantic comedy setting and storyline:
in a London of cute pedestrian streets, hip bars and cool restaurants, Josh and Nat (Rose Byrne) struggle with their first year of married life, having tied the knot only seven months after meeting. Their differences seem daily more relevant and they are both tempted to stray - Josh by his girl-next-door ex Chloe, Nat by the suave Guy (Simon Baker). Their problems are only magnified by their friends and families, especially Nat's sister Naomi (Minnie Driver), happily miserable with her husband (Jason Flemyng).
Mazer dusts off a series of ancient "men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" observations about the sexes (he leaves the seat up and makes lame jokes, she gets song lyrics wrong and hates his family) and his film is curiously unbalanced. While Josh is a bit of a pratt, his side of the story involves a sympathetic, touching relationship with Chloe, genuinely the one who got away, and their mutual affection and shared sense of humour, together with warm performances from Faris and Spall, makes the audience root for them to get together. That's in sharp contrast with Nat and Guy, who are both beautiful but a little humourless, and whose relationship - played out in corporate spaces, plush hotel suites and factory floors as coldly, superficially slick and smug as their characters - is meant to be based upon a chemistry absent between the two actors.
Like most romantic comedies, the soundtrack here is full of pop songs, only in this case many of them are awful covers of songs which only make you think: Damn, I wish they'd used the original version here...
But Mazer's sensibility is sharper than that evident in the majority of films in this genre, there are some big laughs here, the cast is generally excellent, and it is all nicely paced. Mazer obviously understands the pitfalls of the romcom, and while he avoids most of them, it proves beyond him to avoid all, which is a bit of a shame.
A couple of things about I Give It a Year make sense as soon as you realise that writer-director Dan Mazer is best-known as Sacha Baron-Cohen's co-writer on Ali G, Bruno and Borat. The way the laughter isn't really spread throughout the film but comes in sharp little spikes, for one thing. Mazer is great at constructing comic set-pieces that gather momentum and grow funnier as they go on; he is great, in other words, at writing sketches. And so this film is full of them; neat, almost perfectly-formed scenes based around a single, hilarious comic conceit, which the film then pushes as far as it can go. Take the scene where Chloe (Anna Faris) is involved in a threesome with two of her co-workers at a charity and it turns into a wrestling match studded with excrutiating dirty talk, brilliantly played by the actress as a piece of sustained, undignified, unsexy slapstick. Or the scene where Josh (Rafe Spall) attempts to pantomime his way through "Dr Quinn Medicine Woman" in a game of charades by referring to the word "quim" and relentlessly pointing at his mother-in-law and her mother's genitals.
Another thing is the way Mazer introduces a host of brilliant, classically British comic grotesques - generally caricatures - as fleeting supporting characters. Olivia Coleman, for instance, is dazzling as a deranged marriage counsellor. Likewise, Stephen Merchant steals every scene he's in as Josh's best friend Dan, unable to stop himself rabbiting on about anything inappropriate that enters his head.
This is all overlaid atop what is quite a generic romantic comedy setting and storyline:
in a London of cute pedestrian streets, hip bars and cool restaurants, Josh and Nat (Rose Byrne) struggle with their first year of married life, having tied the knot only seven months after meeting. Their differences seem daily more relevant and they are both tempted to stray - Josh by his girl-next-door ex Chloe, Nat by the suave Guy (Simon Baker). Their problems are only magnified by their friends and families, especially Nat's sister Naomi (Minnie Driver), happily miserable with her husband (Jason Flemyng).
Mazer dusts off a series of ancient "men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" observations about the sexes (he leaves the seat up and makes lame jokes, she gets song lyrics wrong and hates his family) and his film is curiously unbalanced. While Josh is a bit of a pratt, his side of the story involves a sympathetic, touching relationship with Chloe, genuinely the one who got away, and their mutual affection and shared sense of humour, together with warm performances from Faris and Spall, makes the audience root for them to get together. That's in sharp contrast with Nat and Guy, who are both beautiful but a little humourless, and whose relationship - played out in corporate spaces, plush hotel suites and factory floors as coldly, superficially slick and smug as their characters - is meant to be based upon a chemistry absent between the two actors.
Like most romantic comedies, the soundtrack here is full of pop songs, only in this case many of them are awful covers of songs which only make you think: Damn, I wish they'd used the original version here...
But Mazer's sensibility is sharper than that evident in the majority of films in this genre, there are some big laughs here, the cast is generally excellent, and it is all nicely paced. Mazer obviously understands the pitfalls of the romcom, and while he avoids most of them, it proves beyond him to avoid all, which is a bit of a shame.
Sunday, 20 May 2012
THE DICTATOR
(Larry Charles, 2012)
A strong narrative is not really an important factor in the success of Sacha Baron Cohen's first two successful vehicles. Both Borat and Bruno - each directed, like The Dictator, by Larry Charles - Work best when they adopt the device Baron Cohen perfected in his tv work, whereby he provokes outraged and outrageous responses from unsuspecting "normal" people with the behaviour of his comically exaggerated character.
There are other funny scenes and skits, and some good ideas, in each of those films, but their stories are relatively unimportant. The problem with The Dictator, then, is that in abandoning his most successful device, Baron Cohen places himself at the mercy of story to a much greater extent. But he doesn't have a much greater story to tell.
He plays Admiral General Aladeen, Ruler of oil-rich North African state Wadiya, who finds himself alone and anonymously beardless in New York City after his bitter, greedy Uncle (Ben Kingsley) seeks to dispose of him during a trip to address the UN. He is rescued by Zoe (Anna Faris), a passionate Political protestor and the Manager of a Collective Grocery in Brooklyn. Aladeen takes a position there while he plots to return to his old life, ruining his Uncles attempt to bring democracy to Wadiya in the process.
That plot may sound silly, but it plays out in a halting, arrhythmic, poorly edited fashion. None of that prevents The Dictator from being at times wildly funny. Baron Cohen's gift for making the offensive spectacularly, accessibly funny is as sharp as ever here. His character is a racist, sexist boor without any social graces, meaning that he says brilliantly inappropriate things in every situation, spraying insults around in all directions, some of them extremely amusing.
Then there are the broad situations engineered by the script - Aladeen delivering a baby, complete with shots from inside the womb, Aladeen and friend terrifying Americans with their conversations about Bin Laden and fireworks while taking a helicopter trip over Manhattan, Aladeen discovering masturbation ("What sorcery is this?") - which, while often crude, are again generally very funny. As are the scenes which poke fun at comedic conventions - montages Of Aladeen, first adapting to American life, then running the Grocery like a dictatorship - and the few, heavy-handed attempts at satire on show. Even the details are tellingly funny; the soundtrack here is filled with what sounds like Arabic version of classic pop.
For Baron Cohen's greatest strength is his devotion to making an audience laugh. For that he is willing to abandon a coherent narrative, tonal consistency, and any ideological or satirical intent; he simply wants us to laugh. Luckily, he is a very funny man.
A strong narrative is not really an important factor in the success of Sacha Baron Cohen's first two successful vehicles. Both Borat and Bruno - each directed, like The Dictator, by Larry Charles - Work best when they adopt the device Baron Cohen perfected in his tv work, whereby he provokes outraged and outrageous responses from unsuspecting "normal" people with the behaviour of his comically exaggerated character.
There are other funny scenes and skits, and some good ideas, in each of those films, but their stories are relatively unimportant. The problem with The Dictator, then, is that in abandoning his most successful device, Baron Cohen places himself at the mercy of story to a much greater extent. But he doesn't have a much greater story to tell.
He plays Admiral General Aladeen, Ruler of oil-rich North African state Wadiya, who finds himself alone and anonymously beardless in New York City after his bitter, greedy Uncle (Ben Kingsley) seeks to dispose of him during a trip to address the UN. He is rescued by Zoe (Anna Faris), a passionate Political protestor and the Manager of a Collective Grocery in Brooklyn. Aladeen takes a position there while he plots to return to his old life, ruining his Uncles attempt to bring democracy to Wadiya in the process.
That plot may sound silly, but it plays out in a halting, arrhythmic, poorly edited fashion. None of that prevents The Dictator from being at times wildly funny. Baron Cohen's gift for making the offensive spectacularly, accessibly funny is as sharp as ever here. His character is a racist, sexist boor without any social graces, meaning that he says brilliantly inappropriate things in every situation, spraying insults around in all directions, some of them extremely amusing.
Then there are the broad situations engineered by the script - Aladeen delivering a baby, complete with shots from inside the womb, Aladeen and friend terrifying Americans with their conversations about Bin Laden and fireworks while taking a helicopter trip over Manhattan, Aladeen discovering masturbation ("What sorcery is this?") - which, while often crude, are again generally very funny. As are the scenes which poke fun at comedic conventions - montages Of Aladeen, first adapting to American life, then running the Grocery like a dictatorship - and the few, heavy-handed attempts at satire on show. Even the details are tellingly funny; the soundtrack here is filled with what sounds like Arabic version of classic pop.
For Baron Cohen's greatest strength is his devotion to making an audience laugh. For that he is willing to abandon a coherent narrative, tonal consistency, and any ideological or satirical intent; he simply wants us to laugh. Luckily, he is a very funny man.
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