Judd Apatow's low-brow comedies have a lot going for them, particularly in the details. Take, for instance, Superbad (B-). The nerdy heroes, Seth, Evan, and their friend Fogel (who seems to be their friend more by social default than by design) are on a quest to get alcohol for a popular girl's party. By Evan's reasoning, this act will allow them access to said girl's and her friends' underpants and the rewards that lie within. The thing is, these boys are more concerned with getting laid simply to get the act out of the way, then to seek out sexual enjoyment for its own sake.
In a typical teen sex comedy, the protagonists go through a picaresque series of comical misadventures in an effort to get laid, and in the end, give the audience a warm-hearted message to go home with. Usually along the lines of, 'Friendship is important', or 'That hot girl you had a boner for turned out to be a genuinely decent person after all, and she'd be a better friend than a lover' or some other tired nostrum. I wind up being made to feel like I'm paying for my comedy in that case, like the filmmakers felt they had to justify the bawdy humour with a feel-good message.
There's a bittersweet undercurrent in Superbad, and it's about youth's anxiety towards facing an uncertain future, and the inevitable accommodations one must make to navigate one's way through that future. In this case, Seth is upset that his life-long friend Evan is off to Dartmouth with the squeaky-voiced Fogel as a roommate, while Seth has to settle for a local college. Evan is upset that his friend is upset, as well as discovering the aforementioned fact that adulthood is full of accommodations that he's going to have to make. In the course of the movie, they come to realize that perhaps being the guy who procures booze for a popular girl's party is perhaps not the best path to the glories that reside in her panties. And poor Fogel is stuck trying to catch up to Seth and Evan's level of anxiety. (Fogel spends most of the movie in the company of a pair of under-achieving policemen.)
What really makes the movie for me is Micheal Cera's perpetual look of worry throughout. Since 'Arrested Development', he's cornered the market as the living embodiment of teen anxiety. The movie also really has a handle on the profane wit that teenagers display amongst themselves. (Writers Seth Rogan and Evan Goldberg came up with the idea in high school.) The MOR soul-funk-r&b soundtrack is oddly appropriate. Only downside; The deluge of t-shirts proclaiming, "Pedro & McLovin for Class President" we're going to get hit with in the near future...
The Bourne Ultimatum - (B-) James Bond for the Target department store crowd. Matt Damon has a knack for portraying a neutral personality, and in the context of this movie, that's not a bad thing. (In my earlier comment on the previews, I offhandedly mentioned that Matthew McConnaghey or some other bland, if talented actor was cast as Bourne. Turns out, I was wrong on that point. The series' success hinges on Damon's bland neutrality...) In this installment, Bourne's struggle to discover how he became who he is gets challenged by an Agency operative trying to cover the agency's trail in creating the sub-structure that made Bourne.
It's a chase movie without an ounce of fat on it, which is where it's appeal lay for me. It doesn't give us any unnecessary back story; no sepia-toned flashbacks about Bourne's pre-Agency past, no angst-laden monologues by Pam Landy(name) over issues of morality. The thing is, this stripped-down level of narrative works against in in one scene where Bourne is with fellow disavowed operative Nicky (Julia Stiles- and why Julia Stiles? Oh, well...) There's a weird tension where you're hoping Bourne and Nicky don't start making out with each other, as it'll ruin the pacing of the entire movie. Damned odd thing to be worrying about in a thriller, I think. Also, director Greengrass' toned down the 'jitter-cam' aspect from the last one, which really helped.
Bioshock -Xbox360 (A-) Nice little fps-with-rpg elements, not unlike Deux ex or System Shock 2. Actually, I believe most of the people who worked on SS2 worked on this one. A survivor of a plane crash enters an underworld city right out of Ayn Rand's 'Atlas Shrugged' and finds this world's gone to the dogs. (Well, Big Daddys, actually...) The storyline involves finding out why this utopia became a dystopia, and putting a stop to its spreading evil.
What puts Bioshock over the top in terms of the usual video game with a storyline, is not only is the actual story is engaging and complex, and not only is the player's actions tied to the story's outcome, but that the story in this case has a more complex theme than 'good triumphs over evil' or 'rescue the princess' or whateves.
It's a repudiation of the Objectivist ideology of Ayn Rand. (Note the founder of the underwater city's name, 'Andrew Ryan') The storyline points out that in a pure free-market economy, there can be very few winners (Ryan, his few followers, an usurper to Ryan's throne named Fontaine and his followers.) and losers of everyone else in the city. As a result, once a power struggle erupts between Fontaine and Ryan, everyone else's options are limited to a) choosing sides or b) starving to death.
While I don't think 'Bioshock' adds to the debate that video games can be Art (The developer's take on Objectivism is irrelevant to the actual game play, and really, once you've played it through, you're done.) it does make a good argument that a video game can be damn fine satisfying entertainment.
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