This is the end
Starring: Seth Rogan, Jay Baruchel, James Franco - Dir: Evan Goldberg
I'm always up for a good stoner comedy, and with the cast and writers of This Is The End being the current reigning champions of stoner comedy, I found this to be a whole bunch of fun.
Sure, it's not a movie for everyone. It's not even really that wonderful in the great scheme of things – Citizen Kane this ain't. But I laughed a lot and sometimes that's all you want from 90 minutes in front of the box on a rainy night.
Confirming Hollywood's fixation with doing everything twice (witness also the two recent Die Hard in the White House flicks), this is the second ‘rapture comedy' to emerge on DVD in so many months. The set-up this time – and its simplicity itself – is that Seth Rogan and Jay Baruchel (playing themselves), go to a party at James Franco's house (he's paying himself too, as are almost the entire cast). While partying, the apocalypse strikes, rapturing away the righteous in a column of blue light, and leaving behind the sinners. So everyone at the party stays. Or dies horribly, which is the most fun – grisly deaths for Rihanna, Paul Rudd, Aziz Ansari, Michael Cera and many more.
Danny McBride, Jonah Hill and Emma Watson are among the survivors, riffing away on parodies of their ‘real life' characters, while Craig Robinson has the honour of starring in both this and Rapture-Palooza.
Some of it works, some doesn't; don't watch if you're easily offended.
And the misses just keep coming...This week it's The Lone Ranger, yet another blockbuster that tanked at the box office. And, just like Oblivion, WWZ, and other panned failures, it's not that bad. In fact, there's a lot that's very good about it, including Johnny Depp's entertainingly deadpan Tonto (who tells the story in flashback), and some cracking action scenes. Problems come with the plot, which is insistently over-complicated. Meaning the first half-hour is fine, the last half-hour is fine; but the middle hour wanders round trying to make sense. There are also – fatally – some tonal misjudgements, which will alarm kids.
Despicable Me 2 is hardly worth reviewing. If you liked the first one you'll like this one. Clearly, market research showed the small yellow ‘minions' are the thing kids like most, so there are even more of them here. ‘Hero' Gru (voiced by Steve Carell), meanwhile, isn't as nasty as he once was, which makes him less fun. It's about as sentimental as first time out. Actually, it's just more of the same. Of course the animation's good. Of course there are funny bits. Of course it all ends happily.
Hotel Noir is an eccentric proposition: a series of interconnected hotel-set stories presented in black and white in a 1950s noir style. Shower door installer Danny DeVito is our initial narrator but the baton is passed as things progress. There's Rufus Sewell's cop on the lam, his partner Robert Forster, Carla Gugino's cocktail singer, Rosario Dawson's housemaid, Kevin Connolly's gambling guitarist, more dames and mobsters, and a lashing of hard-boiled old Hollywood dialogue. A half-homage, half-affectionate reinvention, this is sharp, witty, melodramatic stuff, revelling in its very artificiality. I liked it a lot.
All Superheroes Must Die. Cool title I thought. And a cool cover, all moody night-time skyscrapers and helicopters. Then comes an introduction from writer/director/producer/editor/star Jason Trost, who explains they made the film in two weeks for $20,000; and that there are no skyscrapers or helicopters – that was just to get people to watch it. Okay. So the story has four estranged superheroes (without superpowers), kidnapped and deposited in a depopulated small town by their old nemesis, who forces them to play bizarre deadly ‘games'. It very geeky stuff, aimed clearly at those who indulge in philosophical discussions about the minutiae of superhero lore.