Ian T. McFarland

After giving us “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” a mature but funny look at dating, it must have been a logical next step for Judd Apatow to direct “Knocked Up,” a mature but funny film that takes place a few years later in an average person’s life, during the process of preparing for parenthood.  Smart but never pretentious, funny without ever stepping away from reality, Apatow’s newest film is a clear winner and one worth seeing.

Knocked Up
4 Stars

Comedies are just about always about the absurd.  Think about it, try to name five comedies in the past few years that have given us real people and real situations.  Sure, there are rare gems like the semi-grounded Clerks II, but most of what we get is something along the lines of the over-the-top Talladega Nights or – dare I mention its name – Wild Hogs.  The very definition of humor is a comic, absurd, or incongruous quality causing amusement.  So when a movie like Knocked Up, a film ripped straight out of reality, and is one of the funnier movies in the recent output of Hollywood; it’s one worth noting.

Ben, a man with a little extra chunk, finds a woman with a face worthy of the cover of Seventeen magazine at a club, and even gets the invite to go home with her for a one night deal.  That’s good!  She gets pregnant.  That’s bad!  But they’re going to try to make it work and have the child together.  That’s good!  They start yelling at each other and having a hard time creating a relationship out of nothing.  That’s bad!

But hey, no one ever said that love was easy, and writer/director Judd Apatow gets some serious brownie points for portraying this fragile relationship that started out mostly thanks to alcoholic consumption and a rogue condom as being as volatile as it should be.

Our director adds to the reality of the situation with steady-cam shots, what must have been largely improvised scenes and a sometimes bland, unintentional but utterly believable color scheme delivered by its digital cameras.

The jokes are fueled by the nervousness of the impending baby and relationship of the parents, not by larger-than-life people who you’ve often seen on the big screen but never on walking on the street.  It helps to make the film feel as though it might have been a documentary about two random people who happened to get pregnant together.

Apatow gets plenty of help from his actors though.  Seth Rogen, as Ben, is undeniably the slacker-extraordinarie that his character calls him to be.  Living off of a lawsuit settlement, the guy’s only ambitions are to smoke pot and help his friends create their website that highlights nude scenes from movies.  On the other hand, you’ve got Katherine Heigl as the blonde who sails into her job as a personality for the E! Network with her carefree laugh and easy going but serious attitude.  When their lives are crashed into each other, they’re awkward together.  They aren’t some Hollywood romance, and you can feel the discomfort in each one’s demeanor.  You can see why they’re fond of each other, but they’re just too different to be peas in a a pod with each other.  We also get a great performance out of Paul Rudd, the family man who just doesn’t know how live as a husband.

Maybe the best thing about Knocked Up is if you cut out every laugh the comedy, it could have absolutely been your typical European independent film about the difficulty of relationships, communication and love.  Not that there’s any justification to editing out Apatow and his cast’s jokes, Rudd in particular will have you on your side with just his imitation of Robert DeNiro or his soul-searching speech about bubbles.  With so many comedies out there solely relying on laughs to work, it’s refreshing to see a true filmmaker deliver something as mature as Knocked Up, a movie that works on every level.  If you want laughs or if you want reality, you can’t go wrong.

Do I really have to review Gracie?  I mean, I guess if I can try to avoid the specifics in here, I can just recycle the review for future clones that inhibit the sports drama of over-coming the odds, but it just seems so redundent to have to review a film you’ve already seen, and will see again a lot in the future.

Gracie
2 Stars

Gracie is never a bad film, it’s just a repeat of countless other films that came before it.  Why should you go out to the megaplex and plunk down all of your hard-earned money on a rerun?

Gracie wants to play soccer, but can’t because she’s a chick.  Boo hoo, whatever; come back when you can give me a movie where I care about the characters.  It’s not a total mess-up – the lead of Carly Schroeder can hold her own, and Dermot Mulroney is actually pretty good as the father who trains his daughter to play like a son.  Still recovering from a death in the family, he doesn’t know how to reconnect with his family, and doesn’t know how to connect in the first place with his only daughter.  This isn’t quite a noteworthy performance, but it is solid and the only above-average aspect in a movie full of average.

But the plot is just blah.  I mean, if Gracie is the first film you ever see, it just might have you cheering on the heroine as she trains to be the best, but if not it’s just going to feel like a Disney Channel movie that twinges just a shade or two darker.  But the worst part is the over-exaggerated misogyny.  Here’s how half of the men think in the film: “Whoa – what?  Wait, you’re telling me that a girl wants to play soccer?

That’s outrageous!  Not only will I try to keep her from playing at all, but I’ll go out of my way to foul her and give her a bloody nose, because I don’t think a woman’s place is anywhere outside of a Kitchen!”  As a man, I can say that I’m honestly offended by this.  I mean, I can understand that political correctness was different in the 70s (when the film takes place,) but the men in this film are so unnecessarily discriminatory that I can’t take it seriously, and the fact that Bro-Seller-Outer director Davis Guggenheim paints men this cruelly seems like just too easy a method to use to get the audience on your side.

You know, I’ll give this much to Gracie.  Aimed at a demographic of young girls, it may be the first sports drama that they ever see; and maybe if its their first experience with it, it will be a fun one.  But there’s just not anything here for veterans of the genre.

I don’t think there’s any possible way I could prepare you for the hard-edged, offensive humor that isn’t just utilised in Borat, it’s abused and raped to the point that you don’t think a more offensive film is possible.  It’s also easily one of the funniest films in a good year for comedy.

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan
4 Stars

There are a lot of things that are wrong in this world.  There Racists who dismiss people by the color of their skin, CEOs who care more about their bank accounts than their employees and they even cancelled Arrested Development.  But none of that, not even Arrested being cancelled, comes close to being as wrong as Borat.  You start wondering at some point if Sasha Baron Cohen created a movie with the sole intention of offending every minority on the planet.  But whatever the intent, Borat is a so foully funny it’s almost revolutionary.

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan centers on Cohen playing a character named Borat Sagdiyev that he showcased in his Da Ali G Show.  The film works as a fake documentary, it’s supposedly the documnetary film of Borat traveling to the States to discover how it works.  The ultimate goal is that he will come home with ideas to rejeuvinate his home country of Kazakhstan.

Let’s just get this out of the way: If you don’t like mean humor, you can stop reading this review now.  If you feel like those punks who write South Park deserve a good talking-to every time you see a commercial for their show, then you should probably just head to The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause this weekend and forget you ever heard of this movie, because it’s offensive enough to make South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut look like the Passover special of Rugrats.  No hard feelings, but you should just stop reading the review and go to MySpace to contemplate who you want in your “Top Friends.”

Okay, now that they’re gone, let’s get down to the good stuff, because Borat has a lot of it.

Where do you start?  Greeting his friendly neighborhood rapist, making fun of his mentally-handicapped brother or going to bed afraid the Jews are going to take him in his sleep, Cohen is clearly a master of pushing buttons.  He takes stark offenses against society so far that you might expect the Government to issue a warning against letting your children go to the movie.  How the film ever got past the MPAA with a mere R is a paradox that will likely go unsolved until the next Einstein is born to answer the question.

If pushing stereotypes past the line of decency isn’t your bag, perhaps pushing gross-out humor past the line of decency is.  Only, Borat doesn’t just pass the line, it keeps going until it crosses several State Lines.  One sequence – of which I will only say involves two men – is so atrociously out of bounds that it may even make slasher movie buffs feel queasy.  I know I did.

But the most insane aspect of the movie is its reality.  We know that Cohen is acting throughout the movie, along with a few other players; but outside of four actors everyone in this movie is a real person, someone who thinks they’re a part of a documentary about a man named Borat learning about America.  You’ll get authentic Americans authentically reacting to a man who asks what to do with a Ziploc full of his own feces.  It’s a great idea that, thanks in great deal to the fake documentary style, sets this comedy apart from anything else put out in recent memory.

The only reasonable complaint is with the story.  Evident from even the commercials, the film serves as nothing but an excuse for Cohen to put together hilariously wrong sketches; but to create a competint film you need to connect all the sketches together with a story to keep the viewer’s attention.  Borat is able to do this well enough, but the scenes still feel too loose and apart to make the entire film feel united.

But it doesn’t matter.  People shouldn’t won’t see the film for its story, they’ll see Borat because it’s a politcally incorrect film that somehow works.  By being so unbelievably and morally wrong, they’ve made one of the more innovative comedies in the past decade, and if Borat is wrong, I don’t want to be right.