Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: A disappointing shellacking

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014) • View trailer 
2.5 stars. Rated PG-13, and rather harshly, for sci-fi action and violence
By Derrick Bang

I’m not persuaded the world wanted — or needed — another big-screen adaptation of this trés bizarre comic book franchise, but we critics must play the hands we’re dealt.

Having been taken to the underground lair populated by New York's rather odd vigilante
heroes, April (Megan Fox) hears their origin story from Splinter (foreground, seated) while
the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles — from left, Raphael, Donatello, Leonardo and
Michelangelo — listen attentively.

While director Jonathan Liebesman’s film is a hot gonzo mess, it does benefit from giddy pacing, wacky humor and a couple of ambitious action sequences. So, yes, young viewers will have a good time, but their older companions probably will find these proceedings too weird, too dumb, and much too disorganized.

Nor does it help that the film’s primary human star, Megan Fox, still can’t act a lick.

From a purely sociological standpoint, this film demonstrates a fascinating phenomenon: the intangible nature of credibility. Avid fans who wholly embrace the frivolous sci-fi nuttiness of, say, Guardians of theGalaxy, nonetheless will be hard-pressed to forgive Liebesman’s take on the Ninja Turtles. It’s not just the concept; both properties exist in equally impossible realms, and require a massive suspension of disbelief.

It comes down to tone and execution. Liebesman’s film is sloppy, its script — credited to Josh Appelbaum, André Nemec and Evan Daugherty — clumsy and inconsistent. The core premise is an eyebrow-raiser to begin with, but then the villains, and their scheme for world domination, are just lunatic. The narrative is slapdash, details introduced or abandoned at whim.

Original creators Peter Laird and Kevin Eastman did a far better job with their comic books, back in the 1980s.

Anyway...

In a New York apparently bereft of Superman, the Avengers or any of the other run-of-the-mill champions, an über-violent army of thugs known as the Foot Clan have terrorized the city for months. Nobody seems able to stop them; even the police are helpless, with “protection” having been outsourced (?!) to a private company headed by billionaire industrialist Eric Sacks (William Fichtner).

I dunno ... if helpless citizens are being assaulted, kidnapped and killed as shown here, it seems like the NYPD might rally a bit, perhaps even request assistance from the National Guard or some other federal strike force. Doncha think?

This Is 40: Fractured family frolic

This Is 40 (2012) • View trailer
Three stars. Rating: R, for relentless crude humor, sexual candor, pervasive language and drug use
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.21.12

Some perceptive truths about marriage, mid-life crises and parental angst linger around the edges of This Is 40, but they tend to be overshadowed by Judd Apatow’s reflexive insistence on vulgar humor, crude slapstick and bewildering plot detours. Obviously, he just can’t help himself.

Pete (Paul Rudd), having failed to realize that Debbie (Leslie Mann) could use some
help while getting their daughters ready for school, attempts to recover from this tactical
error while Sadie (Maude Apatow, far left) and Charlotte (Iris Apatow) watch with
wary amusement.

Nor should he, I suppose, since many of his films — either as producer, director or writer — tend to be crowd-pleasers. But we must remember that his lengthy 21st century résumé reads very much like the gag quotient in any one of his projects: Every Bridesmaids or Superbad follows on the heels of a bomb such as Drillbit Taylor, Funny People or Get Him to the Greek ... just as the truly funny bits in This Is 40 are bookended by stuff so forced and ill-advised that we can’t help wondering what Apatow was smoking that day.

Maybe that’s why This Is 40 runs a ridiculously self-indulgent 134 minutes. With that much time on his side, and that many comedic shots in the barrel, some of the humor is bound to stick.

Although Apatow oversees a busy comedy empire, This Is 40 is only his fourth feature as director, following The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up and the tediously morose Funny People. This new film, something of a peripheral sequel to Knocked Up, focuses on the five-years-later lives of Pete and Debbie (Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann), that film’s sidebar characters.

Except that Katherine Heigl, who played Debbie’s sister Alison in Knocked Up, is nowhere to be seen here. Apparently she got lost in translation.

As this new film’s title suggests, events center around the ramp-up to Pete’s impending 40th birthday. He’d normally share this milestone with Debbie, but a refusal to face the onset of middle age has prompted her to deny her own birthday; indeed, she even rolls back the clock and claims a younger age, a running gag that becomes truly hilarious during a routine doctor’s office visit, when various nurses and receptionists try to nail down her birth year.

That scene works, by the way, because Apatow goes for subtle underplaying, rather than his usual, last-row-of-the-upper-balcony broad strokes.

Friends with Kids: The best-laid plans...

Friends with Kids (2011) • View trailer
3.5 stars. Rating: R, for pervasive profanity and sexual candor
By Derrick Bang


Most adult friendships face two crisis points.

Couples signing on for the long term — whether via the bond of marriage, or a less formal commitment — inevitably lose their single friends. All concerned may try to avoid this outcome, but the dynamic invariably fractures. The singletons don’t want to be third wheels; they’re also likely to feel lonely in the face of such love.

When longtime best friends Jason (Adam Scott) and Julie (Jennifer Westfeldt)
decide to have a baby together, they initially get hung up over how to handle
"the act" itself; after all, they're friends, not lovers. Finally, Julie hits the
perfect solution: "Let's just pretend that we're really into each other," she
suggests. Ah, but is it only pretense?

Then, too, I’ve always suspected that our (former) single friends, back in the day, decided that we just weren’t fun any more.

Okay, so couples make new friends, generally with other couples. The second rift occurs if all your new friends start having children ... but you choose not to take that path. Getting together —enjoying everybody’s company during a raucous night out — becomes impossible, in great part because new parents just can’t do that.

Fine, you think, then why not visit them at home? And yet — somehow — even that never seems to happen.

My suspicion, this time, is that the new parents now regard their childless friends with grim disapproval and jealousy, because they’re not suffering enough.

This is a rich dynamic, and one that writer/director Jennifer Westfeldt mines to excellent comic effect, in Friends with Kids. But while her first few acts are funny, snarky and hilariously vulgar — in the way we now must accept, post-Judd Apatow and Bridesmaids — Westfeldt’s film is far from frivolous. The core premise here comes with an unpleasant catch, and she doesn’t shy away from its consequences.

Although primarily an actress, Westfeldt pops up every so often with perceptive, sharp-edged scripts; she enjoys exploring relationships that involve unusual twists, and she remains well remembered for writing and starring in 2001’s charming Kissing Jessica Stein. Her sophomore writing effort, 2006’s Ira & Abby, wasn’t as successful; Friends with Kids — her third script, and her directorial debut — deserves to do much better.

Although Westfeldt always writes herself the starring role, she’s savvy enough to involve talented colleagues, each of whom is granted an equally rich character. Friends with Kids is no different in that respect, and Westfeldt is doubly lucky to have snagged Maya Rudolph, Kristen Wiig and Chris O’Dowd, all still riding high on the buzz of last year’s Bridesmaids.

Thirtysomething Manhantanites Julie (Westfeldt) and Jason (Adam Scott) have been best friends for years: each squarely in the other’s corner, come what may. Jason seems content to sail through a series of short-term relationships with well-endowed hotties; Julie hasn’t been able to make things click in the romance department. Despite their devoted bond, they’ve never considered dating each other, perhaps sensing that such an act might destroy their friendship.

Although not really a “couple” themselves, Julie and Jason are part of a convivial sextet that includes the married Ben and Missy (Jon Hamm and Wiig), and the equally hitched Alex and Leslie (O’Dowd and Rudolph). Outings are lively, profane and cheerfully vulgar: good friends having great times together.

Jennifer's Body: A total nottie

Jennifer's Body (2009) • View trailer for Jennifer's Body
2.5 stars (out of five). Rating: R, for violence, gore, profanity and teen sexuality
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 9.18.09
Buy DVD: Jennifer's Body• Buy Blu-Ray: Jennifer's Body (+ Digital Copy) [Blu-ray]

Absent the involvement of an Academy Award-winning screenwriter, Jennifer's Body would be just another easily ignored, late-summer teen fright flick dumped with the expectation of two weeks on the big screen, prior to fitful video afterlife a few months down the road.

But expectations are raised when the credits include Diablo Cody, who took a well-deserved Oscar for her original screenplay for Juno, and charmed both the industry audience and home viewers with a particularly exuberant acceptance speech. Cody's clever and whimsically snarky script for Juno demonstrated a sensitivity for teens in general, and misfit girls in particular; fans therefore were more than a little intrigued when she selected a gal-centered horror entry as her next project.

Despite having a loyal girlfriend -- even if she has gotten a bit strange lately --
Chip (Johnny Simmons) quite foolishly allows himself to be seduced by
Jennifer (Megan Fox) on the night of the high school prom. Little does he
know that this encounter is about to move up the hill, into the sort of
dilapidated, shrubbery-infested indoor swimming pool that exists only in
horror movies ... where Jennifer's appetite will prove more cannibalistic
than carnal.

Surely, we hoped, Cody could bring a fresh perspective to a genre dominated by male writers and directors far too willing to demean, debase and disembowel women.

It didn't work out that way.

To be sure, most of the on-camera victims in Jennifer's Body are guys, but they're not exactly misogynistic jerks whose fates would be greeted with vicarious delight; indeed, the one granted the most attention is just the sort of disenfranchised nice guy who would have been one of Juno's best friends. Of course, that could be the point: Cody builds this character into a well-defined individual, rather than a disposable, two-dimensional nonentity. His eventual fate hurts a bit.

The most gruesome demise, however, still is reserved for a female character, and hack director Karyn Kusama — most notorious for the sci-fi bomb Aeon Flux, with Charlize Theron — lingers on this sequence just as exploitatively as the genre usually demands.

Actually, Kusama doesn't bring much to this party. She and cinematographer M. David Mullen orchestrate only one really great shot: an eerie, late-night tableau that shows the next victim, just barely seen waaaay at the end of a deserted street, as his silhouette moves toward the house where he'll meet his eventual fate. It's a wonderfully moody image, and there ain't nothin' else like it in the rest of this humdrum and utterly predictable film.

That's the most disappointing part: Jennifer's Body is nothing fresh, and has no surprises. It's not fun in the manner of TV's Buffy, the Vampire Slayer or the more recent Being Human; it's actually rather depressing.

Transformers, Revenge of the Fallen: Monster mash

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) • View trailer for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Two stars (out of five). Rating: PG-13, for smutty dialogue and relentless action violence
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 6.25.09
Buy DVD: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen • Buy Blu-Ray: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (Two-Disc Special Edition) [Blu-ray]


While certainly no classic of American cinema, 2007's Transformers at least took itself fairly seriously ... or as seriously as any movie about two warring factions of shape-changing extraterrestrial robots could take itself.

The just-released Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, in stark contrast, injects so much numbnuts slapstick — devolves to such a clumsy, desperate parody of itself — that the result is neither exciting nor funny. To put it in the story's own terms, it's neither battle-bot nor muscle car.

Sam (Shia LaBeouf) and Mikaela (Megan Fox) spend a lot of time in this film
running ... running from giant robots, running from explosions, running from
each other. One hopes they were paid by the mile, because they sure don't earn
their paychecks with any sort of acting talent.

Frankly, this film is a mess ... and, at a stultifying 149 minutes, a very long mess.

Back in the day, every time Universal Pictures wanted to squeeze one more entry out of a sagging monster franchise, Abbott and Costello would put a comedy stake through the undead remnants: Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man, and so forth.

Well, this flick feels like Transformers Meets the Three Stooges.

Bad enough that the utterly incomprehensible script — blame Ehren Kruger, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, although I've no doubt countless uncredited hands helped spoil this soup — stitches together unrelated scenes and half-baked sci-fi clichés so poorly, that the resulting film feels cobbled together from at least half a dozen disparate projects.

Bad enough that these same writers also inject the smarmy humor and coarse dialogue that also plagued the first film in this series, apparently in an effort to secure the more marketable PG-13 rating, and to please the arrested adolescent males who represent the target audience.

I mean, really, aren't scenes of humping dogs — eventually followed by a scene of a little robot humping Megan Fox's leg — the stuff of bad Will Ferrell comedies? This is the height of humor?

What's truly lamentable, though — and what really turns this flick into a brain-paralyzing endurance test — is that director Michael Bay and his editors (no fewer than four of them!) have done sloppy work. The continuity between scenes frequently is absent, as often is the case with the continuity within scenes. Characters shown to be sitting suddenly are standing when the camera angle shifts; characters hiding from bad robots in this spot suddenly are running away from that spot when camera two takes over.

Worse yet, the very soul and essence of the Transformers universe has been subverted by the tiresome insistence on gag humor. Suddenly Bumblebee, Optimus Prime and all the other noble robots have been saddled with comic cut-up robots that spout one-liners as if they're auditioning for a Saturday Night Live stand-up routine.

How to Lose Friends and Alienate People: A modest winner

How to Lose Friends and Alienate People (2008) • View trailer for How to Lose Friends and Alienate People
3.5 stars (out of five). Rating: R, for frequent profanity, drug references and brief but explicit nudity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.3.08
Buy DVD: How to Lose Friends and Alienate People • Buy Blu-Ray: How to Lose Friends & Alienate People (2008) [Blu-ray]


Simon Pegg is both very funny and quite shrewd; his recent film roles — starting with his breakout success in Shaun of the Dead — have been carefully calculated to take maximum advantage of his sharp timing and pliable features, which can slide from woebegone to deeply mortified at the blink of an eye.

Newly arrived British journalist Sidney Young (Simon Pegg), unable to make
sense of his job at the pretigious Sharps magazine, gets little sympathy from
fellow staffer Alison Olsen (Kirsten Dunst), who can't stand her office
companion's rude, crude and boorish behavior. And the dead goldfish? A
failed attempt, on Sidney's part, to gain the attention of a young starlet.

His role as Sidney Young, the focus of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, is certain to continue Pegg's winning streak.

Director Robert Weide's film — deftly scripted by Peter Straughan — is based on the best-selling 2001 memoir by snarky British writer Toby Young, who mercilessly charted his move from London to New York, to become a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, a job for which, as it turned out, he was spectacularly unsuited.

Expecting the prestigious magazine empire's corridors to be filled with the sort of clever, fast-talking journalists who had populated the Algonquin Round Table roughly 90 years earlier — an image reinforced by American movies such as His Girl Friday and The Philadelphia Story — Young instead discovered a rule-laden environment where all the hacks (writers) had long ago sold their souls to the flacks (publicists) who ruthlessly controlled access to their celebrities-of-the-moment.

"We have this idea that America's this great informal place," Young comments, in the film's press notes, "like one giant speakeasy where everyone is completely themselves. But London's quite like that; New York is nothing like that. New York's much more like London was 100 years ago."

Pegg's Sidney is introduced while struggling to make ends meet at a low-rent scandal-rag vaguely patterned after Spy, by way of any smutty British newspaper that boasts Page 3 girls. After he tries to crash the annual BAFTA Awards — with a pig he blithely claims is "Babe 3" — his cheeky stunt piques the interest of Clayton Harding (Jeff Bridges), editor-in-chief of New York's prestigious Sharps magazine (Vanity Fair in all but name).

Harding offers Sidney a job, which the eager Brit accepts ... for all the wrong reasons.

Bridges is a howl, all the funnier for the degree to which Harding maintains a straight face while first gently explaining the ropes to the pushy young newcomer, and then — as time passes — finding ample cause to question the decision that brought Sidney to New York.

Because Sidney doesn't just fail to fit in with the Sharps atmosphere; he willfully refuses to. Dressed as if he expected to be joining the crew at Mad magazine — despite being surrounded by Prada-garbed models and tuxedo-clad executives — Sidney cannot believe that this icily formal office environment is for real; he keeps expecting people to appreciate and even participate in his irreverent sense of humor.

Worse yet, the writers at Sharps blithely consent to producing vacuous puff pieces disguised as "revealing glimpses" of equally vacant-eyed celebrities, rather than puncture their self-absorbed balloons in a manner that Sidney remembers Harding doing, back when he was just starting out in the biz, as the youthful editor of a tell-all mag dubbed Snipe.