The Five-Year Engagement review

                When it comes to falling in love timing is everything. We have learned this through years of romantic comedies like “When Harry Met Sally”, “Manhattan”, and most recently in “The Five-Year Engagement”. Produced by the prolific Judd Apatow, this film is the follow up effort of director Nicolas Stoller and co-writer Jason Segal, the creators of 2008’s “Forgetting Sarah Marshal”. In this film Segal and Stoller bring us another forlorn tale of love gone astray, brought to us in that sometimes comfortably familiar, sometimes tired, comedic-slacker perspective.

                Jason Segel and Emily Blunt play Tom and Violet, a young and enthusiastic couple who have just become engaged.  While planning their wedding in their home city of San Francisco, life throws them a curveball when Violet is accepted into an academic psychology program in Minnesota. Being supportive, Tom quits his job as the assistant chef of one of Frisco’s hottest restaurants and follows his fiancés dream into the cold, cultureless Midwest, where the best job he can land is at a college sandwich deli. This of course delays the wedding, and as they plan on getting things back on track newer obstacles such as promotions, pregnancies, and family deaths keeps pushing their matrimonial hiatus further and further away from the foreseeable future. 

                “The Five-Year Engagement” tries to balance the high concept laughs with the crude and crass, while still trying to retain a warm heart for its characters and their plight.  Segel’s script commendably rounds out both the male and female protagonists and gives them both ample motivations for their behavior. This same script is also unstructured, undisciplined, sloppy, and at times over indulgent. Scenes drag on too long, many jokes are only peppered in to create comedy where it didn’t exist, and entire subplots should have cut out altogether. What results is a flabby five act comedy where you will feel every single minute of every year of their engagement.

                Luckily the cast is great. Segel and Blunt have very believable chemistry, and while you might be literally begging the movie to end at times, on the strength of their authentic charm you root for their relationship. The side performances from Brian Posehn, Chris Pratt, Jacki Weaver, and Rhys Ifans often steal the scenes they are in—sometimes to the movie’s detriment. In fact Jason Segel’s gift as a writer may be in his peripheral characters (as exemplified by Russell Brand who stole every scene from “Forgetting Sarah Marshall”).  As per-usual Jason Segel seems to be playing Jason Segel. And after “Freaks and Geeks”, “Sarah Marshall”, “How I Met Your Mother”, and “Jeff Who Lives at Home”, I really need him to quit playing the lovable and goofy tall guy who just can’t catch a break. In his next film if he isn’t playing either a drug addict or a child molester I may scream in my theater seat.

                What’s most disappointing about “The Five-Year Engagement” is that I strongly believe there is a 90 minute cut somewhere in there that works. Here is a film that could have been saved by good editing, but because everyone involved in a Judd Apatow production seems to have final cut, we are left with a labored mess of a film. Though there are well-done individual scenes, stand out performances and great exchanges of dialogue, they are trapped like mice in a meandering maze of a plot, where by the time we get to the finish it doesn’t feel like the reward was worth the effort.

Grade: C-

Originally Published in The Basic Alternative/May-2012

Cabin in the Woods review

A week before it was released “The Cabin in the Woods” had already boiled up quite a buzz. Premiering at South by Southwest, this film started an early positive campaign from nerds and critics alike. Written by Joss Whedon, creator of TV’s “Buffy: The Vampire Slayer”, “Firefly”, and director of Marvel’s upcoming “The Avengers”, and directed by Drew Goddard, writer of “Cloverfeild” and many episodes of “Lost”, this films fanboy pedigree is something to be distinguished. The few negative reviews there have been have only seemed to give the movie even more attention, as the geek fan-base has fought against these critics as misrepresenting and sometimes outright spoiling the film. So though it might be somewhat difficult, I will try to avoid as many spoilers as possible with this review.

            The film begins with the introduction of five college-aged friends, out to blow off some steam at a cabin…in the woods. The group consists of a blond jock, a shy brainy girl, an extroverted easy girl, a shy brainy dude, and their greasy haired pot-head friend—evocation of the “Scooby Doo” gang may or may not be intentional. After ignoring a warning of doom from a sketchy gas station attendant, they stick with their plan and settle into the creepy cabin for some beer drinking, weed smoking, sexy good fun. Not long after they enter, they notice some peculiar things, like one-way mirrors that have been used to spy on those in the next room, paintings of grotesque murder, and a basement full of ritualistic trinkets and ghostly diaries. Soon, without their knowledge, they unleash an ancient evil, which leads them to discover the sadistic secrets behind “The Cabin in the Woods”.

             If you know your horror movies than this plot should sound suspiciously familiar to the slasher films of the 80s like “Sleepaway Camp” and “Friday the 13^th”, as well as Sam Raimi’s ultimate cabin-in-the-woods flick “The Evil Dead”. To just say ‘that’s kind of the point’ would be an understatement. Godard and Whedon wrote everything here to be incredibly self-aware and their screenplay makes many overt attempts to keep the audience conscious that they are watching a clichéd horror film, with an aim to destabilize all of these obvious horror tropes. What comes out of this is a thoughtful and oftentimes very funny post-modern exercise in genre. Throughout we get a picture of the films creators as two geeks who like horror and seem to be having a lot of fun playing around in it. The last twenty five minutes in particular feels a bit like a Halloween spook house mash-up of some of the most satisfying aspects the genre can deliver. 

           Now, is this the first time anyone has ever deconstructed a horror film within a horror film? No.  Back in the 90's one may remember Wes Craven’s “Scream”, a movie that made a specific attempt to address and poke fun at the basic horror movie structure. A few years ago Austrian director Michael Heneke released a home-invader thriller called “Funny Games” in which the screenplay unabashedly shattered the 4^th wall. Last year the low budget splatter-comedy “Rubber” also played around with the ideas of the film, the filmmaker and audience (with mixed results for this critic).  But “Cabin in the Woods” seems to find a funny and entertaining way to communicate these ideas without confusing the audience or being pretentious. While the movie might be clever it never feels like homework, and there honestly hasn’t been anything else in theaters this year that made me laugh more.

           With all of that said, there are some aspects about the plot that don’t completely work for me. Without giving anything away, there is a final reveal that involves a strange and tired cameo in which a final showdown seems to redirect the tone into a much more apocalyptic direction. Given the rock and roll atmosphere the movie had up to that point, the ending seemed a bit too grim and ponderous. But nevertheless this movie is a hell of a good time! While you might enjoy everything a bit more if you’re a seasoned horror fan (I for one especially enjoyed the skewering of Japanese ghost movies) you can easily come into this without a point of reference and sit back and enjoy the bloody mayhem.

Grade: B+

Originally published in The Basic Alternative/May-2012