When watching This is the End the other day, I just kept thinking. o O (I wonder what http://www.capalert.com thinks of this movie.) Sadly, ol' CAPpy's ministry is inactive at the moment, but surely his mind would have exploded. Forget the drugs and violence and demon cocks—we have people being saved by works rather than faith, individuals ascending bodily after the Rapture and during the Tribulations, and of course all the mass media is down and the water system is broken, but homes still have working lamps and gas stoves. Huh? Well, scenes are hard to light without practicals, I guess.
In This is the End, the actors James Franco, Seth Rogen, Emma Watson, Jay Baruchel etc. play themselves. There are lots of cameos too—Franco is having a party to show off his new fancy open-floorplan (good for shooting movies in!) house. Jay is snobby and artsy—like in real life??—and doesn't like LA, but everyone else loves the LA lifestyle. Michael Cera gets his cock sucked and his asshole licked at once in the bathroom during the party. There's drugs and excess and craziness, and like the old-timey radio preachers have been predicting, God is Officially Tired of This Shit. So the rapture is on, and the actors of course are Left Behind. And they're aaalll soft as baby shit, incapable of carrying out even basic survival strategies.
The movie is hilarious! Of course, there is lots of slapstick, situational comedy, scatology, and the like, and there's some subtle stuff too. Craig Robinson, we're told, sweats a lot, but we're only told this twice (screenplays usually like to mention things half a dozen times, for slow people) and the only joke based on it is that he carries around a towel at all times monographed "Mr. Robinson." Nobody makes an All Jews Go to Heaven joke. Most everyone had great comic timing. Even obvious lines like Danny McBride's "James Franco didn't suck any dick last night? Now I know you are all trippin'" work.
There are also great set-pieces, the best of which is the trailer to the sequel to Pineapple Express the fellows make, elements of which SONY Pictures has put online:
But like pretty much any movie involving Seth Rogen, it's too long. Do we need a "do all the drugs in the house" montage, and a Franco/McBride ejaculate argument, and two attempts to get to the water first in the basement and then next door, and the exorcism of Jonah Hill, and and and...some of them could have been cut.
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(This one I think, but Olivia liked it.)
We saw this movie in Seattle, during the Locus Awards Weekend. Olivia was a sport and sat through a number of writerly chats at the bar. She said later that listening to writers talk to one another isn't all that interesting. Writers, she said, leave a lot of themselves on the page so when they're together they tend to chat about rejections and agents and whatnot. More interesting topics they save for something else. Who knows if this is so—I suspect it is, honestly—but I felt the same way about This is the End. The movie's an attempt to be critical of momentary Hollywood hotness, of friendships between actors, and of the dopey (in more way than one) lifestyle in which the likes of Jay Baruchel can show that he's deep and artistic by spending more time in New York than in LA. And of course there are limits to the critique; the film ends with a round robin of self-sacrificing behaviors, some more successful and some less, and it feels a little like the dusty old sitcom conceit of people saving one another's lives to get out of certain obligations. But the friendships of these actor-characters shine through, and conflicts (whether true or just inspired by truth) do too—so it's better than just two hours of screaming and running. Not bad for a movie that makes enormous demon dicks a recurring visual joke.
Check it out.
In This is the End, the actors James Franco, Seth Rogen, Emma Watson, Jay Baruchel etc. play themselves. There are lots of cameos too—Franco is having a party to show off his new fancy open-floorplan (good for shooting movies in!) house. Jay is snobby and artsy—like in real life??—and doesn't like LA, but everyone else loves the LA lifestyle. Michael Cera gets his cock sucked and his asshole licked at once in the bathroom during the party. There's drugs and excess and craziness, and like the old-timey radio preachers have been predicting, God is Officially Tired of This Shit. So the rapture is on, and the actors of course are Left Behind. And they're aaalll soft as baby shit, incapable of carrying out even basic survival strategies.
The movie is hilarious! Of course, there is lots of slapstick, situational comedy, scatology, and the like, and there's some subtle stuff too. Craig Robinson, we're told, sweats a lot, but we're only told this twice (screenplays usually like to mention things half a dozen times, for slow people) and the only joke based on it is that he carries around a towel at all times monographed "Mr. Robinson." Nobody makes an All Jews Go to Heaven joke. Most everyone had great comic timing. Even obvious lines like Danny McBride's "James Franco didn't suck any dick last night? Now I know you are all trippin'" work.
There are also great set-pieces, the best of which is the trailer to the sequel to Pineapple Express the fellows make, elements of which SONY Pictures has put online:
But like pretty much any movie involving Seth Rogen, it's too long. Do we need a "do all the drugs in the house" montage, and a Franco/McBride ejaculate argument, and two attempts to get to the water first in the basement and then next door, and the exorcism of Jonah Hill, and and and...some of them could have been cut.
(This one I think, but Olivia liked it.)
We saw this movie in Seattle, during the Locus Awards Weekend. Olivia was a sport and sat through a number of writerly chats at the bar. She said later that listening to writers talk to one another isn't all that interesting. Writers, she said, leave a lot of themselves on the page so when they're together they tend to chat about rejections and agents and whatnot. More interesting topics they save for something else. Who knows if this is so—I suspect it is, honestly—but I felt the same way about This is the End. The movie's an attempt to be critical of momentary Hollywood hotness, of friendships between actors, and of the dopey (in more way than one) lifestyle in which the likes of Jay Baruchel can show that he's deep and artistic by spending more time in New York than in LA. And of course there are limits to the critique; the film ends with a round robin of self-sacrificing behaviors, some more successful and some less, and it feels a little like the dusty old sitcom conceit of people saving one another's lives to get out of certain obligations. But the friendships of these actor-characters shine through, and conflicts (whether true or just inspired by truth) do too—so it's better than just two hours of screaming and running. Not bad for a movie that makes enormous demon dicks a recurring visual joke.
Check it out.