WET HOT AMERICAN SUMMER

(David Wain, 2001)

Something just a little off about Wain's parody, which is perhaps what has given it enduring appeal and made it a cult film, while so many movie spoofs date quickly and are never thought about again.
The sense of humour here is more Anchorman than Scary Movie - there is a decided strain of absurdism and an anarchic sensibility informing many of the jokes, which makes it feel like anything can happen (the trip into town that ends up in a crackhouse montage is the best example of this) -and the writing is generally very strong, and clever, making sure there is a variety of comic material throughout.
Firstly, it works as a spoof. Set on the last day of summer camp in 1981 and focused on a disparate group of characters mainly concerned with pairing off before they all go their separate ways, the plot could come verbatim from some lost American teen movie from that era. The music is hilarious, the hair and fashions just right, and the photography and montage sequences are note perfect. The obsession with sex of more or less every character also tunes into tasteless '80s teen cinema in a way no modern teen comedy can ever really approach.
Then there are the flashes of surrealism, absurdism and post-modernism, with talking vegetable tins, psychic powers and falling satellites all part of the story.
Lastly, the characters are frequently hilarious, most notably Paul Rudd as a rebellious camp counsellor given to gurning and posing, Amy Poehler as a pretentious drama teacher, and Ken Marino as a desperately virginal colleague who embarks on an odyssey to lose his cherry.
The cast seems incredible in retrospect, which perhaps says enough about how good most of them are here.

THEY CAME TOGETHER

(David Wain, 2014)

Great gags and inspired scenes are studded through They Came Together. The best of those, oddly, are the ones that aren't parodying romcom cliches, the ones that have their own internal humour.
Like the scene where the boss of Paul Rudd's Joel finds himself unable to remove his superhero costume at a fancy dress party - shot by Wain in a series of frantic takes as he contorts his body, his face more and more crimson -  and shits his pants, then denies any culpability, having left his soiled costume on the bathroom floor. Or the many random moments of exaggerated behaviour, like Molly's (Amy Poehler) Mom propositioning Joel as a "test" then casually revealing herself as a White Supremacist.
But the film is chiefly a parody of romcoms, and as such it gets so much right, ticking off cliches and conventions as it goes along. Told in flashback by Joel and Molly from a restaurant dinner with another couple, it winks at the audience consistently and from the first moment with it's acknowledgement that New York City is like the "third character" in their story. The problem is that while many of these cliches are presented in hilarious contexts, not all of them are, and it's not enough just to notice conventions; you need to use them somehow, and Wain doesn't do that quite enough.
His cast are a great help, delivering a series of arch "bad" performances full of mugging and telegraphed emotions. Rudd and Poehler have genuine chemistry, which keeps this watchable even as it gets bogged down in a series of short sketches with an at-times-tiresome narrative link. Some gags become funny through repetition (characters constantly say "Shit!" to themselves after somebody else has left, while in other situations, stop people from leaving just so they can say "Thanks.") while some fall flat instantly, but overall this is a pleasantly clever comedy. It's just not quite funny enough.

WANDERLUST

(David Wain, 2012) There's a very old idea at the centre of Wanderlust. Two relatively straight-laced modern city dwellers encounter a bunch of hippies on a Georgia commune ("We prefer 'Intentional Community') and the film finds most of its comedy in the ensuing clash of attitudes and expectations. The city dwellers are George (Paul Rudd) and Linda (Jennifer Aniston). Forced to leave their tiny Manhattan apartment after he loses his job, they eventually end up living on the idyllic commune, Elysium, with the group of eccentrics who are already there. George, initially enthusiastic, finds his attitude shifting when Linda begins to enjoy the lifestyle a bit too much, embracing veganism, the lack of privacy - no doors - and free love. Wain and co-writer/star Ken Marino use a variety of comic approaches to tell ther story, chiefly a quite gentle satire which points in just about every direction, beginning with New York and it's property quirks (a studio apartment is a "micro-loft"), extending through self-medicating middle class housewives when George and Linda have a nightmarish sojourn in Atlanta suburbia staying with George's boorish brother (Marino, who more or less steals the film) and finishing with Elysium's enlightened attitudes to relationships and lifestyles. Funnier is the character comedy. The cast create a parade of memorable comic types, from Marino's bullying asshole, through Justin Theroux as Seth, the smug alpha-male who covets Linda, sleeps in a tree, is a virtuosic flamenco guitarist and lists the technologies of the modern world he thinks people seek to escape as including "VCRs, pagers, fax machines, zip drives", to Alan Alda's acid-damaged commune founder to Joe Lo Truglio as a nudist winemaker who insists on discussing his novel-in-progress with George and a few more jolly freaks. There is often a surreal edge to Wain and Marino's comedy, leavened with an appealing sharpness, most notable in some wicked verbal humour. Rudd plays a big part in this. He can play these roles in his sleep; as an essentially nice but sarcastic hero he can remain likeable and sympathetic even as his hero does awful things. His long monologue into a mirror, trying to psyche himself up for some "free love" with Malin Ackerman's Eve, is a seemingly improvised comic highlight. He and Aniston, both veterans of The Object of My Affection and Friends, have genuine chemistry and compliment one another well in their scenes, even if her character has fewer gags to handle than his. The real weakness here then, as in many comedies, is the narrative itself, which feels frustratingly written-by-committee. The climax, all revelations, ridiculous action scenes and reversals, is by far the worst thing here. The film is a touch ambiguous about how it feels about Elysium; fine in principal, it seems to say, but as with so many other things, messed up by people.