As per usual, I've screwed myself over with not knowing how to count (obviously this is problematic, being that I am an elementary teacher), but I have actually seen 63 movies this year, not 60. I'll give a small amount of lip service here to 3 different #27s and a #26 and then re-rank accordingly. This will at least take us to the top 25 in an...interesting fashion, right?
Get it together, Mulhern! (slaps face, headbutts mirror, etc.)
#27a Bad Words
Jason Bateman is Guy Trillby, a degenerate 40-year old copywriter who exploits a loophole in the annual Golden Quill Spelling Bee: you have to have not graduated 8th grade in order to compete, and Trillby never did. In a slow-mo sequence involving him grabbing the giant trophy and running, sliding along the hood of his journalist "sponsor" Jenny's (Kathryn Hahn) car and jumping in the passenger seat while pissed-off parents shout and pummel the vehicle, he says via voiceover "Maybe I didn't think this through." On the plane to the nationals with Hahn (who is interviewing him for a story), he meets his #1 competition, an adorable Indian boy named Chai Chopra (Rohan Chand) and tells him to "turn his curry hole toward the front of the plane before he tells the stewardess he heard his back ticking." These are the kind of crass one-liners--Michael Bluth meets Andrew Dice Clay, maybe--that Bateman fires off throughout the film, and they rarely seem stale. He eventually warms up to Chai, but is it genuine, and are his motives pure of heart? Of course not. It eventually becomes clear that he is there to exact revenge for a past transgression, and he will burn every latin root and overworked preteen in his way, antidisestablishmentarianism be damned. Not always the strongest, plot-wise, but laugh-out-loud funny and worth a watch.
#27b The Boxtrolls
Isaac Hempstead Wright is the voice of Eggs (named after the box he wears), an orphan who is raised by a number of friendly creatures who have built a home out of discarded junk underground; in one particularly touching sequence, Fish (Dee Bradley Baker) puts him to sleep via a record on an old 45 machine. Eggs and his boxtroll family are targeted by the vile and sinister Archibald Snatcher (Ben Kingsley), a large man with greasy hair and several protruding growths. With his team of "Red Hats", comprised of Mr. Gristle (Tracy Morgan), Mr. Trout (Nick Frost) and Mr. Pickles (Richard Ayoade), they swear to town mayor Lord Portley-Rind (Mad Men's Jared Harris) that they will take down the boxtrolls, who are threatening the city's cheese supply and well-being with their nightly escapades. Their extermination plots begin working and they eventually snatch up Fish, leaving Eggs, together with Portley-Rind's small daughter Winnie (Dakota Fanning), "scrambling" (get it?) to save his surrogate dad and his homies. A fun romp, The Boxtrolls is stop-motion animation, and visually it is a triumph, especially the machine used to round up the Box Trolls. The overall tone, though, is dark, surreal and incongruous. It's almost entirely at night and underground, which makes gives it a unique touch but one that I would caution Pixar-heads to look into before watching it with their four year old.
#27c 22 Jumpstreet
Directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller along with screenwriter Michael Bacall pose to the viewer a simple question: Can the same jokes work twice? For the most part, the answer is yes. Now that it's taken them two times to graduate high school, Schmidt (Jonah Hill) and Jenko (Channing Tatum) are put back into Jump Street with captain Dickson (Ice Cube), now across the street at 22 after the 21 building has been made unavailable. Their mission? Go back to school (again), this time as college kids, to infiltrate the dealer of a mysterious drug (again) called WHYPHY. Jenko connects immediately with his jock roots, befriending football players named Zook (Wyatt Russell) and Rooster (Jimmy Tatro), who may or may not be leads in their case. Meanwhile, Schmidt finds himself in the artist scene, hooking up with Maya (Amber Stevens) after pretending to be some sort of a white Saul Williams slam-poetry connoisseur. Her roommate Mercedes (Jillian Bell) doesn't approve, but Schmidt notes something fishy about her. The pursuits of Mercedes and Zook eventually lead them to the kingpin, a mysterious figure named Ghost; tracking him takes the duo to a full-fledged college Spring Break, where the ridiculous climax of the film comes to a head. Hill and Tatum earn the A's in comedy that they couldn't quite achieve as fake high school students, and they play the rift growing between them masterfully throughout. Just like last time, the film relies on sight gags, buckets of blue language, a couple unexpected twists and rampant bromance to carry it to the finish line. For most intents and purposes, this is the same movie as the first. That's not necessarily a bad thing.
#26 Chef
If Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler doubled as an analogy for the life and career path of Mickey Rourke, I think that to a much lesser degree, the same could be said about Chef and Jon Favreau. Here you have a promising young New Yorkian who, with the help of buddy Vince Vaughn, takes the indie world by storm with Swingers, subsequently adding "you're so money" and "Vegas, baby, Vegas!" to the lexicon of ubiquitous late '90s quotables for high schoolers and frat boys alike. Next up was Made, less impressive but still in the Swingers ballpark, and a memorable guest appearance as himself on The Sopranos, further establishing his street cred. Since then, he's been decidedly hit-or- miss, scoring big with Elf and Iron Man, making a decent family film with Zathura, and more recently, committing crimes against humanity with Iron Man 2 and Cowboys & Aliens. Unlike Rourke, who disappeared for decades amidst personal and professional failures, Favreau, despite being commercially successful, seemed to be losing sight of who he was and what got him there in the first place.
Enter Chef, Jon Favreau's first time with leading man/director duties in over a decade. He plays Carl Casper, a renowned chef with a team of trash-talking cooks on his squad (Bobby Cananavale and John Leguizamo), but he is starting to crack under the pressure. His boss Riva (Dustin Hoffman) wants him to play it safe, while he wants to throw something wild at make-or-break food critic Ramsey Michel (Oliver Platt) when he visits. Ramsey trashes him, taking shots that Casper takes very personally, and he later confronts him at the restaurant in a profanity-fueled tirade that immediately goes viral, making the situation for the old school, tech-fearing Carl much worse. He is let go and spiraling into self-pity, an older, wiser version of his Mike from Swingers. Spunky ex-wife Inez (who else but Sofia Vergara?) suggests that he open a food truck and take son Percy (Emjay Anthony) along for the ride. Together they travel across America, slinging Cuban sandwiches and other wears while Martin (Leguizamo) mans the kitchen and Percy captains the social media helm. The movie is a little bit too long and has a little bit too neat of a conclusion, but Carl discovers that by going back to basics, he regains his passion and reinvents himself along the way. It's a pretty joyous affair. Is this mirroring things for Favreau? Maybe I'm overthinking it, but it kind of felt to me like he was saying "Relax, all right? I've still got it."
More to come!
Isaac Hempstead Wright is the voice of Eggs (named after the box he wears), an orphan who is raised by a number of friendly creatures who have built a home out of discarded junk underground; in one particularly touching sequence, Fish (Dee Bradley Baker) puts him to sleep via a record on an old 45 machine. Eggs and his boxtroll family are targeted by the vile and sinister Archibald Snatcher (Ben Kingsley), a large man with greasy hair and several protruding growths. With his team of "Red Hats", comprised of Mr. Gristle (Tracy Morgan), Mr. Trout (Nick Frost) and Mr. Pickles (Richard Ayoade), they swear to town mayor Lord Portley-Rind (Mad Men's Jared Harris) that they will take down the boxtrolls, who are threatening the city's cheese supply and well-being with their nightly escapades. Their extermination plots begin working and they eventually snatch up Fish, leaving Eggs, together with Portley-Rind's small daughter Winnie (Dakota Fanning), "scrambling" (get it?) to save his surrogate dad and his homies. A fun romp, The Boxtrolls is stop-motion animation, and visually it is a triumph, especially the machine used to round up the Box Trolls. The overall tone, though, is dark, surreal and incongruous. It's almost entirely at night and underground, which makes gives it a unique touch but one that I would caution Pixar-heads to look into before watching it with their four year old.
#27c 22 Jumpstreet
Directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller along with screenwriter Michael Bacall pose to the viewer a simple question: Can the same jokes work twice? For the most part, the answer is yes. Now that it's taken them two times to graduate high school, Schmidt (Jonah Hill) and Jenko (Channing Tatum) are put back into Jump Street with captain Dickson (Ice Cube), now across the street at 22 after the 21 building has been made unavailable. Their mission? Go back to school (again), this time as college kids, to infiltrate the dealer of a mysterious drug (again) called WHYPHY. Jenko connects immediately with his jock roots, befriending football players named Zook (Wyatt Russell) and Rooster (Jimmy Tatro), who may or may not be leads in their case. Meanwhile, Schmidt finds himself in the artist scene, hooking up with Maya (Amber Stevens) after pretending to be some sort of a white Saul Williams slam-poetry connoisseur. Her roommate Mercedes (Jillian Bell) doesn't approve, but Schmidt notes something fishy about her. The pursuits of Mercedes and Zook eventually lead them to the kingpin, a mysterious figure named Ghost; tracking him takes the duo to a full-fledged college Spring Break, where the ridiculous climax of the film comes to a head. Hill and Tatum earn the A's in comedy that they couldn't quite achieve as fake high school students, and they play the rift growing between them masterfully throughout. Just like last time, the film relies on sight gags, buckets of blue language, a couple unexpected twists and rampant bromance to carry it to the finish line. For most intents and purposes, this is the same movie as the first. That's not necessarily a bad thing.
#26 Chef
If Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler doubled as an analogy for the life and career path of Mickey Rourke, I think that to a much lesser degree, the same could be said about Chef and Jon Favreau. Here you have a promising young New Yorkian who, with the help of buddy Vince Vaughn, takes the indie world by storm with Swingers, subsequently adding "you're so money" and "Vegas, baby, Vegas!" to the lexicon of ubiquitous late '90s quotables for high schoolers and frat boys alike. Next up was Made, less impressive but still in the Swingers ballpark, and a memorable guest appearance as himself on The Sopranos, further establishing his street cred. Since then, he's been decidedly hit-or- miss, scoring big with Elf and Iron Man, making a decent family film with Zathura, and more recently, committing crimes against humanity with Iron Man 2 and Cowboys & Aliens. Unlike Rourke, who disappeared for decades amidst personal and professional failures, Favreau, despite being commercially successful, seemed to be losing sight of who he was and what got him there in the first place.
Enter Chef, Jon Favreau's first time with leading man/director duties in over a decade. He plays Carl Casper, a renowned chef with a team of trash-talking cooks on his squad (Bobby Cananavale and John Leguizamo), but he is starting to crack under the pressure. His boss Riva (Dustin Hoffman) wants him to play it safe, while he wants to throw something wild at make-or-break food critic Ramsey Michel (Oliver Platt) when he visits. Ramsey trashes him, taking shots that Casper takes very personally, and he later confronts him at the restaurant in a profanity-fueled tirade that immediately goes viral, making the situation for the old school, tech-fearing Carl much worse. He is let go and spiraling into self-pity, an older, wiser version of his Mike from Swingers. Spunky ex-wife Inez (who else but Sofia Vergara?) suggests that he open a food truck and take son Percy (Emjay Anthony) along for the ride. Together they travel across America, slinging Cuban sandwiches and other wears while Martin (Leguizamo) mans the kitchen and Percy captains the social media helm. The movie is a little bit too long and has a little bit too neat of a conclusion, but Carl discovers that by going back to basics, he regains his passion and reinvents himself along the way. It's a pretty joyous affair. Is this mirroring things for Favreau? Maybe I'm overthinking it, but it kind of felt to me like he was saying "Relax, all right? I've still got it."
More to come!
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