22 Jump Street review

                Phil Lord and Chris Miller have a made a career out of meta-absurdism, first in their short-lived Mtv cartoon “Clone High” and then later with their feature-length animated films “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs” and  this year’s  “The Lego Movie.” While primarily working on high concept, half-thought adaptations, these guys know exactly how to approach a project with enough creative distance to see Hollywood cynicism for what it is and point it out on screen, while still living up to their end of the bargain. This puts them in the unique position where they can make fun of their own movies and be as subversive as they want as long as they still make a profit.

                Like their animated features, nobody expected a “21 Jump Street” movie to be anything worthwhile, but because of their devil may care self-awareness they managed to wrangle an adaptation of a forgotten 80s high school drama into being a pretty relevant and effective comedy. The sequel—an even harder pill to swallow conceptually— doesn’t deliver as much heart or as much insight into the modern American teenage experience, but it does maintain the first movie’s quick wit and the skewering of its own commercial purpose.

                After a disastrous drug pinch, undercover agents Jenko (Channing Tatum) and Schmidt (Jonah Hill) are placed back into their student personas, now enrolled in University to find the source of a new street drug called WhyPhy. While there, they each find a new niche to fit into. Jenko finds his fit as a super-jock football star, and Schmidt finds love as a sensitive poetry slammer.

                While the plot is peripherally interested in the drug case they’re supposed to be following, the movie tends to focus more on the two’s relationships and the awkwardness of masculine bonding in male dominated crime-comedies. The Lord/Miller meta-humor is prevalent throughout, including many fourth-wall shattering in-jokes about the franchise itself as well as pop-culture references surrounding both actors’ celebrity. However, instead of the perceptive commentary surrounding teen trends that peppered the first movie, this installment delves more into homoerotic tension inherent in cop movies and post-Apatow buddy flicks. As Jenko finds kinship with a dreamy football meathead and Schmidt falls for an artsy creative writing major, the two begin to drift apart, causing jealousies and comedic set-pieces based on clichés and set-ups from American rom-coms.

                 The gay jokes become even more punctuated when Tatum’s character berates a drug dealer for using the three lettered ‘F’ word, in a scene that could be interpreted as a sign that casual homophobia is officially intolerable or that straight Hollywood has to find craftier ways to get away with it. This double-sided suspicion can be read throughout the film’s entirety, but because it kept me laughing and because I am still on board with the unlikely comedic screen chemistry between Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill I am willing to give the questionable social politics within movie the benefit of doubt. Others may not be as forgiving.

                As a pop-corn comedy “22 Jump Street” does exactly what it says on the box, it’s funny, it’s fast moving, and while it’s constantly winking at the camera it manages to surprise with quick plot shifts and mini-jokes hidden underneath the folds of the major set-ups. What it doesn’t do as well is tell a coherent story that moves effortlessly from point-A to point-B. Between the jokes and the character work, the framework of the story is occasionally muddled from too many gags and too many call-backs to the previous movie. In poking fun at the excessive nature of unwarranted sequels Lord and Miller have--maybe intentionally?--created an excessive sequel that, intentional or not, still suffers from the same trappings.

Grade: B-

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/June-2014

The Wolf of Wall Street review

            The economy has been the underlying theme of many of the films released in the last 3 years, and this year being no exception. But whereas “The Hunger Games” and “Killing them Softly”  focused on the  struggle of the lower class and the inertia of the economic climb, moves of this topic in 2013, such as “The Bling Ring”, “Spring Breakers”,  “The Great Gatsby” and  “American Hustle”, are bleak satires of the bloated excesses of the one percent and the material obsessions of American culture.  Martin Scorsese’s latest, “The Wolf of Wall Street”—bizarrely released on Christmas weekend—is perhaps the most salty and biting of this crop; an unrelenting, tenacious carnival of queasy decadence and mind boggling affluenza.

                After losing his first fortune in the big Wall Street crash of 1987, young stockbroker Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) builds his way back up through an unregulated investment scam, tricking small start-up companies to sell stock to him for half the profits they receive. Later, when Belfort learns he can take this same business model to catch the bigger fish, his life, his friend, his wives, and his firm begins to quickly spin out of control.

                Not unlike Marty’s “Goodfellas” back in 1991, this film follows the rise and fall of an overconfident and mostly unlikable main character as he narrates the events of his life in a barely confessional, but mostly self-congratulatory, tone.  The friends and colleagues who surround Belfort, such as his sloppy yes-man Donny Azoff (played with spot-on comic sleaze by Jonah Hill), his mentor Mark Hannah (A Mathew McConaughey cameo, that almost steals the entire movie in one scene), and even his playboy-model second wife Naomi Lapaglia (played by newcomer Margot Robbie, who’s tough enough to keep up with all of the barking dogs in this movie) not only encourage his extreme behavior but they count on it to maintain their own status.  And when I say extreme behavior, sex, drugs and rock and roll is a reductive bumper-sticker in comparison to the day to day risk-taking these executives indulge in, as they engage in company-funded sex-parties on airplanes and consume fistfuls of illegal pills before and after meetings.

                Barely avoiding an NC-17 rating, Scorsese and company have been heavily scrutinized for portraying this lifestyle as all party and no hang-over and for possibly giving Belfort more money for his actions by adapting his own autobiography. While I can’t speak for Belfort’s royalties, I can say that if this had been a ninety minute blaze of orgiastic crunking, I could see the cocaine ecstasy that this film displays as being problematic. However, this is a three hour film, and after the first few hours of scandalous fun, the darkly-comedic beats begin to ramp up faster and faster until it becomes a numbing montage of capitalistic gluttony. What was once funny, dangerous, and sexy in the first half of the film becomes depressing, disgusting, and irredeemable by the second half, and I don’t consider that as a point of criticism. That, I believe, is exactly the point.

                The half-way mark is where audiences will likely take their position on the film. While some will find the epic build of this to be a monumental critique of privileged narcissism—a kind of Citizen Kane by way Gordon Gekko on bath-salts—others will not be as charmed by Scorsese’s persistent energy and may simply feel like they are sloshing in a bog of exploitation.

                 If this were a straightforward morality tale the characters would learn something valuable and karma would be the ultimate victor, but history isn’t fair and justice isn’t thorough.  Instead, you’re supposed to watch the actions of these men with conflicting sense of curious envy and outraged condemnation, and in that sense, “The Wolf of Wall Street” boldly puts its money where its mouth is.

Grade: A


Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Jan-2014