THIS IS 40

(Judd Apatow, 2012)

Judd Apatow needs to hire an editor who has the guts to tell him "No." This is 40 suffers terribly from his power and status and his own ability to indulge himself. His films have always been a little bloated and overlong in comparison with most comedies, but at least The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up had appreciable structures and some drive. This is 40 is an almighty mess of floating, interlinked doodles on the same subjects for the first hour and a half, before pulling a smidgen of narrative momentum together in the last act. In a young director who hadn't been responsible for billions of dollars of box office grosses as director and producer, that wouldn't be tolerated. But Apatow most likely has final cut on his movie, and if he wants to include numerous overlong scenes featuring his children improvising or linger a touch too long on his wife's (admittedly very fine) lead performance, then who is going to tell him to stop? Nobody is, evidently...
It doesn't help that the film is so nakedly autobiographical. Taking the characters of Pete (Paul Rudd) and Debbie (Leslie Mann) from Knocked Up, This is 40 chronicles their dual mid-life crisis as they both reach their 40th birthdays in the same week. They live in what - in most lives - would qualify as a mansion in an obviously affluent Los Angeles suburb, the house beautifully furnished and decorated and filled with electronic devices (every family member seems to have their own iPad), they drive beautiful cars and own their own businesses - he a retro Record Label and she a boutique. They have two daughters, one just entering adolescence, the other missing her suddenly too-old-to-be-friends big sister, and each has issues from relationships with their fathers. From here, Apatow introduces a large cast of friends, relatives and employees, and finds a few great scenes and moments from the result. But too often he instead spends overlong sequences embellishing slight observations on the quirks of early middle age. Much of this material has the sting of truth to it, as do the many gags and takes on long-term relationships, but too much of it is vaguely fuzzy and dull; a sort of lifestyle movie-making with a sheen of low-key edginess which is not enough to make it worthwhile.
Perhaps other elements are enough: Rudd and Mann are both superb, funny, sympathetic and believable people with layers and personalities even as their lives and angst are vaguely contemptible in all their ease and luxury. The supporting cast is a little ostentatious in its flagrant waste of performers, but the likes of Albert Brooks, Melissa McCarthy and Megan Fox all register well.
Apatow's films are always admirable for being about the world we live in now, even as they are so narrowly focused on a particular social group and setting, and This is 40 is no different. But a little less would have been good; if this had been 90 minutes it might have been a bracing, sharp, witty 90 minutes. As it is we have a baggy, middling but occasionally inspired and waaaaay overlong movie which feels like a DVD directors cut (one can only imagine how long that will be)..

JONAH HEX

(Jimmy Hayward, 2010)

Jonah Hex is a pretty simple character, so simple that it seems hard to believe any film could mess up his appeal so comprehensively. An ex-Confederate Soldier with a long, tragic history turned deadly, surly Bounty Hunter, he is more-or-less a generic Western hero type. He speaks little, kills often, but is bound by a personal code of honour to do the right thing and protect the innocent.
The place for such a character is in a stark, taut, visceral action Western, which is how the majority of the various comic book series in which he has featured have used him.
Jimmy Hayward's Jonah Hex is no such thing. Instead it seems set upon being a comic-influenced modern Western, shot like a music video, massively influenced by video games, determined to cram in as much of Hex's lore as possible into around 70 minutes (this feels like a film which was cut to bits in the editing room). The first five minutes fly through Hex's Civil War story in an unbearably shallow manner, mixing actual comic book art with brief snippets of scenes, all of it obviously meant to be held together by a Josh Brolin voiceover. Then it's onto the plot proper, with John Malkovich's insane Confederate General determined to destroy the USA by blowing up Washington with a Super-Weapon. Malkovich plays it at his usual high camp pitch, while Michael Fassbinder wanders around, utterly wasted as an Irish psychopath, giggling like a villain from the 60s Batman tv show.
Brolin is ok as Hex - it's a part that doesn't require much once his make-up is in place - and Megan Fox registers only as a strange sort of special effect, her celebrated body fetishized in a Western prostitute outfit, so insubstatial and pointless is her character; but they're all mired in an awful film, which is tonally berserk, incoherent for most of its running time, aggressively ugly and utterly boring. Its attempts to do "different" things with Hex are ill-thought: here he can speak to the dead, for some ridiculous reason, and carries twin Gatling guns strapped to his horse. This is like a Western having a seizure. It forgets all of the great things about the genre and replaces them with the worst aspects of modern blockbusters; explosions, murky action scenes, bad cgi. It makes the similarly disastrous steam punk Western Wild Wild West seem like a classical masterpiece. It makes me hope Hollywood never gets it's hands on another comic book Western character.