Review: "A Night at the Roxbury" is Sometimes Funny (Happy B'day, Will Ferrell)

TRASH IN MY EYE No. 154 (of 2004) by Leroy Douresseaux

A Night at the Roxbury (1998)
Running time: 98 minutes (1 hour, 38 minutes)
MPAA – PG-13 for sex related humor, language and some drug content
DIRECTOR: John Fortenberry
WRITERS: Steven Koren and Will Ferrell and Chris Kattan
PRODUCERS: Amy Heckerling and Lorne Michaels
CINEMATOGRAPHER: Francis Kenny
EDITOR: Jay Kamen
COMPOSER: David Kitay

COMEDY

Starring: Chris Kattan, Will Ferrell, Dan Hedaya, Molly Shannon, Richard Grieco, Loni Anderson, Lochlyn Munro, Michael Clarke Duncan, Dwayne Hickman, Meredith Scott Lynn, Colin Quinn, Elisa Donovan, Gigi Rice, Jennifer Coolidge, and (uncredited) Chazz Palminteri

The subject of this movie review is A Night at the Roxbury, a 1998 American comedy film starring Chris Kattan and Will Ferrell. The film is based on the long-running “Saturday Night Live” skit called “The Roxbury Guys,” which also featured Kattan and Ferrell. Amy Heckerling, the director of such films as Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Look Who’s Talking, and Clueless, is one of the film’s producers, and she also apparently directed some of this film.

Doug (Chris Kattan) and Steve Butabi (Will Ferrell) are the Roxbury Guys, a long-running skit Kattan and Ferrell performed while they were “Saturday Night Live” cast members. The Butabi Brothers go club hopping, always trying to get in the hottest spot, the hottest spot being, The Roxbury. In A Night at the Roxbury, one of many films adapted from Saturday Night Live skits, the Butabi boys want to open their own club, one as hot as The Roxbury.

Of course, they face many obstacles. Their father Kamehl (Dan Hedaya) wants Steve to marry Emily Sanderson (Molly Shannon) so that he could merge his plastic plant business with Emily’s father’s lamp shop. Doug doesn’t like Emily, and Kamehl doesn’t think much of his son Doug’s intelligence. It doesn’t help that the boys live at home with their parents, so Kamehl is always in their business. They finally get a break when they meet The Roxbury’s owner, Mr. Zadir (Chazz Palminteri), who likes the boys and wants to go in business with them. Zadir’s assistant, Dooey (Colin Quinn) hates the Butabi boys and runs interference to keep them from having that meeting crucial with Mr. Zadir about opening a club. Meanwhile, Emily and Kamehl set a date for the wedding, and Doug severs his close relationship with his brother over the wedding. Will the Butabi Bros. get back together in time to open their dream club?

A Night at the Roxbury is only funny when Kattan and Ferrell are onscreen, and then it’s mostly for their silliness, not for their acting. The film just seems to meander through its plot, and one can’t help but get the feeling that this film is going nowhere, so the Butabi’s desperately need to be on the screen for this film to be tolerable. For all its dilly-dallying, the film suddenly drops its ending in your lap, but other than a few laughs, this is, at best, a temporary distraction. It is a testament to the leads’ styles, that they elicit laughs from mediocre material (material that is surprisingly mediocre when one considers that Clueless director Amy Heckerling and comedy superstar Jim Carrey made substantial uncredited contributions to this film), and their comedic gifts make A Night at the Roxbury worth watching.

5 of 10
C+

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Review: "Fun with Dick and Jane is Timely and Timeless" (Happy B'day, Jim Carrey)

TRASH IN MY EYE No. 189 (of 2005) by Leroy Douresseaux

Fun with Dick and Jane (2005)
Running time: 90 minutes (1 hour, 40 minutes)
MPAA – PG-13 for brief language, some sexual humor, and occasional drug references
DIRECTOR: Dean Parisot
WRITERS: Judd Apatow, Nicholas Stoller, and Peter Tolan; from a story by Judd Apatow, Nicholas Stoller, and Gerald Gaiser (based upon the novel by Gerald Gaiser)
PRODUCERS: Jim Carrey and Brian Grazer
CINEMATOGRAPHER: Jerzy Zielinski
EDITOR: Don Zimmerman

COMEDY/CRIME with elements of historical


Starring: Jim Carrey, Téa Leoni, Alec Baldwin, Richard Jenkins, Gloria Garayua, John Michael Higgins, Jeff Garlin, and Angie Harmon

In Fun with Dick and Jane, an upper middle class couple finds themselves unemployed and broke, even though they always played by the rules to reach their American dream. Desperate, they finally turn to crime to pay the bills.

It’s America, circa 2000. Dick Harper (Jim Carrey) and his wife Jane (Téa Leoni) have a lovely son, Billy, a Latino housekeeper named Blanca (Gloria Garayua) to take care of him, and a fancy two-story home in a swanky neighborhood. After waiting 15 years for that big promotion, Dick becomes Vice-President of Communications at Globodyne, a media consolidation company. This new prestige position allows Jane to quit her horrible job at a travel agency and become a stay-at-home mom.

But the American Dream is about to become a nightmare. Globodyne goes belly up in an Enron-style meltdown, and Globodyne CEO Jack McCallister (Alec Baldwin) leaves his new VP of Communications holding the bag. After months of ceaseless job searching, Dick can’t find another company to give him an executive job. Eventually, because the bank is about to foreclose on his home, he has to take any job he can find, which includes working as a greeter at a giant box store, a Wal-Mart type place named KostMart. Jane even bluffs her way into a job as a Tae Bo instructor.

Neither is good at their new jobs, so Dick, at his wit’s end, suggests that he and Jane start pulling off nighttime robberies. The screwball Bonnie and Clyde eventually have a chance encounter with former Globodyne CFO Frank Bascom (Richard Jenkins), who tells Dick that Jack McCallister siphoned off 400 million dollars from the company before it collapsed. Dick, Jane, and Frank promptly launch a plot to steal Jack’s ill-gotten gains, just as he stole them from Globodyne.

Fun with Dick and Jane is a remake of a 1977 film starring George Segal and Jane Fonda as an upwardly mobile couple who find themselves unemployed and in debt and turn to armed robbery to alleviate their problems. While the original film took place in the post-Nixon malaise of the late mid-1970’s, the new film starring Jim Carrey and Téa Leoni takes place at the turn of the century when the communications and Internet boom of the go-go 90’s hit an awful Wall Street bump and many people found themselves unemployed, in deep debt with mortgage companies, credit card companies, and sometimes the IRS – not to mention having much of their savings and/or personal worth died up in worthless stocks.

The current version actually looks at the Dick and Jane Harper’s situation from two angles. The first is to view the Harper’s disintegration as a satirical comment on materialism. The audience can certainly sympathize with the couple, but at the same time, the Harpers are largely responsible for their situation. They mortgaged their future for an expensive car (a Mercedes), a big home in a “good” neighborhood (the kind where the residents play “keeping up with the Joneses”), and a house full of expensive trinkets, accessories, appliances, and toys, such as a plasma screen TV. Their fall is not only poignant, but it is also quite real. This isn’t some idealized financial fall; people who go deeply into debt for the American dream often fall so low as too literally have nothing – to go from being executives to working lower paying service jobs. In the hands of the capable Jim Carrey and the surprisingly nimble Téa Leoni, the kind of financial “hardship” is actually quite funny to watch.

The second angle or second half of this film is purely a comic caper. Fun with Dick and Jane becomes a screwball, revenge film in which the Harpers gleefully rob various businesses. They even rob an executive (who made fun of Dick) of cash and expensive home furnishings. When Dick plots his revenge against Jack McCallister, the film goes overboard in asking us to suspend disbelief. However, Carrey and company give us such madcap antics that we can forgive the script’s more ridiculous notions.

Director Dean Parisot (Galaxy Quest) juggles satire with slapstick and pratfalls. He makes an even smarter move by giving Jim Carrey all the space he needs to roam. Carrey is the ultimate class clown, but he is also the consummate actor. Some may not give him enough credit for all that he can do, but in Fun with Dick and Jane, there is both pathos and farce in his performance. Like many of his performances, here, he realizes both the comic horror and monotonous drama of life. He is droll one second, wickedly funny the next, and miserable just a few second after that.

Téa Leoni may never convince anyone that she is a great actress, but she is a superbly capable co-star. Few actors, either male or female, can keep up with Carrey. She does that and brings her character to meaningful life. Too often, actresses allow their characters to be loose appendages to the big male star’s role. Leoni doesn’t go for that, making us believe that this is Jane Harper’s story, too.

Also good in smaller roles are Alec Baldwin and Richard Jenkins. Baldwin does a tart turn as the consummate Southern-born and bred businessman who uses his employees like slaves and then steals their wages. Jenkins is like a gleeful child as Richard Bascom, making the most of his screen time.

I liked the screenplay’s good mix of social satire and ludicrous comedy, though I regret that the entire film couldn’t be a satire. As fun as the revenge portion was, Fun with Dick and Jane was on the way to being an outstanding and dead-on commentary on corporate greed and crass materialism. Still, I enjoyed watching Jim Carrey, Téa Leoni, and their supporting cast make chaotic and zany comedy out of the material they had.

7 of 10
B+

Saturday, December 24, 2005

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Review: "Eternal Sunshine" is a Spotless Delight

TRASH IN MY EYE No. 196 (of 2004) by Leroy Douresseaux

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
Running time: 108 minutes (1 hour, 48 minutes)
MPAA – R for language, some drug and sexual content
DIRECTOR: Michael Gondry
WRITERS: Charlie Kaufman; based upon a story by Charlie Kaufman, Michael Gondry, and Pierre Bismuth
PRODUCERS: Anthony Bregman and Steve Golin
CINEMATOGRAPHER: Ellen Kuras
EDITOR: Valdìs Óskarsdóttir
Academy Award winner

DRAMA/ROMANCE/SCI-FI with elements of comedy

Starring: Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Kirsten Dunst, Elijah Wood, Mark Ruffalo, and Tom Wilkinson

Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) has just had a really bad break up with his girlfriend, Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet), but there is still more bad news. Clementine has undergone a psychiatrist’s (Tom Wilkinson) experimental procedure in which all her memories of Joel were removed. Joel is frustrated by the fact that he still loves Clementine deeply, although she often irritates him greatly, so he undergoes the same procedure to erase his memories of her. The film then moves into Joel’s mind as the setting, and the procedure works backwards in time, removing the most recent memories first. So we see a memory, watch as it fades or is destroyed, and Joel’s mind moves backwards to the next oldest memory before that one is likewise scragged. Midway through the process, Joel decides realizes how much he still loves Clementine and doesn’t want to lose his memories of her. He begins to move parts of his time with her into places of his memory where she doesn’t belong, like his childhood. That only alters his other memories, and as his mind travels farther back in time, he wonders if he’ll retain any memories of Clementine when he awakens in the morning and the procedure has finished.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is another brilliant screenplay from the mind of Charlie Kaufman, author of Being John Malkovich and Adaptation. As usual, his scripts are directed by excellent filmmakers; in this instance, the director is Michael Gondry, known for his work directing music videos for Björk and The Chemical Brothers. Gondry expertly directs the inspired madness of Kaufman’s script. The film, for all its surreal moments and shifts both in “real time” and dream time,” makes sense. Gondry also weaves out of this a poignant and genuinely heartfelt romantic drama.

The performances in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind range from great to pretty good. This is Jim Carrey’s best work and one of the few times he completely looses the clown and turns his creative energy and his longing for acceptance into a fierce, dramatic performance worthy of standing with the best “serious” actors. Kate Winslet is good…of course, and she does a better working class or ordinary American woman than most American actresses her age. The supporting roles are great with Kirsten Dunst making the most of a small part, but Tom Wilkinson is either a bit too aloof or too distant, or maybe the script didn’t give him enough.

At times, the film seems like a nightmare from the mind of the late, great sci-fi author and writer of speculative and mind-bending fiction, Philip K. Dick. In fact, Eternal Sunshine has a better PKD flavor than the films allegedly adapted from Dick’s books and short fiction. All things aside, this is excellent cinema. The time shifts and surrealism in Charlie Kaufman’s screenplays are practical and move the narrative similar to the way Quentin Tarantino does with his films. As of the closing days of September 2004, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is the best film of the year.

10 of 10

NOTES:
2005 Academy Awards: 1 win “Best Writing, Original Screenplay” (Charlie Kaufman-screenplay/story, Michel Gondry-story, and Pierre Bismuth-story); 1 nominations: “Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role” (Kate Winslet)

2005 BAFTA Awards: 2 wins: “Best Editing” (Valdís Óskarsdóttir) and “Best Screenplay – Original” (Charlie Kaufman); 4 nominations: “Best Film” (Steve Golin and Anthony Bregman), “Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role” (Jim Carrey), “Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role” (Kate Winslet), and “David Lean Award for Direction” (Michel Gondry)

2005 Golden Globes: 4 nominations: “Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy,” “Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy” (Jim Carrey), “Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy” (Kate Winslet), “Best Screenplay - Motion Picture” (Charlie Kaufman)

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Review: "Ace Ventura: Pet Detective" Eternally Funny

TRASH IN MY EYE No. 116 (of 2005) by Leroy Douresseaux


Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994)
Running time: 87 minutes
MPAA – PG-13 for off-color humor and some nudity
DIRECTOR: Tom Shadyac
WRITERS: Jack Bernstein and Tom Shadyac & Jim Carrey, from a story by Jack Bernstein
PRODUCER: James G. Robinson
CINEMATOGRAPHER: Julio Macat
EDITOR: Don Zimmerman, A.C.E.

COMEDY

Starring: Jim Carrey, Sean Young, Courteney Cox, Tone Lōc, Dan Marino, Noble Willingham, Troy Evans, and Udo Kier

Jim Carrey had appeared in a few minor movies in the 1980’s; then, a national TV audience discovered his talents for monkeyshines, physical comedy, and impersonations in the hit television sketch comedy series, “In Living Color.” Carrey, however, blew up as a movie star with the 1994 debut of his first film as the lead actor, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, and in the eleven and a half years since that movie first opened at the box office, Carrey’s film career has hit few potholes on the road to continued success.

Ace Ventura (Jim Carrey) is a Miami-based pet detective, a private dick who finds lost and stolen pets. He’s also a serious animal lover, and his apartment is filled with dogs, penguins, raccoons, etc. Ace, however, isn’t making much of a living as a pet detective, but he gets his big break when Snowflake, the dolphin mascot of the NFL’s Miami Dolphins, is kidnapped. The Dolphins top management is furious because Snowflake is popular with both the fans and the superstitious Dolphin players who consider Snowflake a good luck charm – one without which they’d really rather not play the upcoming Super Bowl. No one else can find Snowflake, so a Dolphins front office employee, Melissa Robinson (Courteney Cox), hires Ace, but the case grows complex when another Dolphin official is found murdered. Can Ace solve the mystery before something else goes wrong, or will his unorthodox methods lead to disaster?

Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, which certainly would never win an “Edgar Allan Poe” award as an example of exceptional detective or mystery film, is strictly a vehicle for Jim Carrey’s talents, and it certainly features Carrey’s raw, juvenile, and sometimes infantile act – the talking butt hole, the twisted facial expressions, hamming for the camera, the ADD, the ADHD-inspired antics, etc. Of course, much of the act is uproarious; since those early years, however, Carrey’s refined his act, and we can look upon Ace Ventura: Pet Detective as the beginning of a short, golden age when Carrey reintroduced audiences to gross out comedy and then, took it to the next level.

6 of 10
B

July 18, 2005