MAIDENHEAD REVISITED

Check out my review, online at Phoenix Magazine, of Judd Apatow's comedy classic The 40-Year-Old Virgin...

...now getting a re-release in the multiplexes in celebration its 20th anniversary, if you can believe that.

THE DEFAULT IN OUR STARS

Opening today:

  

The Big Short—The prestige Christmas Day releases this year have such feel-good subjects as concussions in the NFL and two women persecuted for a lesbian affair in the ‘50s. Beating these two into the multiplexes today is this jolly romp about the criminal idiocies leading up to the collapse of the housing market in 2008.

But I’m not being facetious. It really is a jolly romp. Director and co-writer Adam McKay, best known for Will Farrell flicks like Anchorman, uses his anything-goes comedy techniques to give this infuriating and depressing material a sort of Brechtian vaudeville energy, and the result is one of the most absorbing and perversely entertaining movies of the year.

Based, like 2011’s excellent Moneyball, on a nonfiction book by Michael Lewis, the film follows several traders and investors who predicted, or were made to believe, that the market, balanced on atrociously unstable subprime mortgage bonds, would collapse starting in 2007. Because of the received wisdom that the housing market was unshakable, these guys were seen as crackpots when they began to “short” (bet against) the housing market with “Credit Default Swaps” in the mid-2000s. When the market did indeed melt down in 2007-2008, they looked like geniuses. Jackals too, perhaps—and the movie doesn’t try to deny it—but genius jackals.

Said geniuses (some of them are dramatized under their own names, others under pseudonyms) include Christian Bale as a socially awkward California doctor turned hedge fund manager who horrified his own investors by pouring millions into swaps, and Finn Whitrock and John Magaro as two small-potatoes hedge fund guys who got into swaps with the help of their disillusioned mentor Brad Pitt (who also executive-produced). Steve Carrell plays an abrasive hedge fund boss, haunted by a personal tragedy, who worked under the aegis of Morgan Stanley with his small team of wound-up, bantering, obscenity-spouting traders (Jeremy Strong, Rafe Spall and Hamish Linklater).

They’re all excellent, but the liveliest of the leads is Ryan Gosling as the swaggering Deutsche Bank trader who sells Carrell on shorting the market. Gosling’s character frequently looks into the camera and addresses us—several characters do, but this guy most of all—and having the least tortured, most unapologetically mercenary of  The Big Short’s players serve as its spokesman goes a long way to rescuing it from piety.

You’ll notice that in the preceding paragraphs I throw around financial terms like I remotely understand them. I assure you I probably understand them far less than you do, although after seeing this movie—assuming that it’s reasonably accurate—I now understand them far better than I did before. McKay makes the movie a remedial-level course in finance, and he uses gimmicky shtick to keep us interested—he shows us Margot Robbie luxuriating in a bubble bath with a glass of champagne while she explains subprime mortgages to us, and a couple of other celebrities pop up to give us brief tutorials.

The implication of these gags could be seen, in a sense, as an insult to the audience. But it’s an elegant and entertaining insult. And, alas, not an unfair one

IN TENS PASSION

Once again Valentine’s Day is upon us, and again I’m going to take it upon myself to make a few suggestions for romantic video choices. But what is Valentine’s Day if not a day for sentiment? And what’s more sentimental than an anniversary? Here, therefore, are three love stories enjoying landmark anniversaries this year:

30 years old:

Murphy’s Romance—The word “romance” is right there in the title. James Garner represents the title’s other half, Murphy, a mildly curmudgeonly widower who runs an old-school drug store in small-town Arizona (the film was shot in Florence). He falls in love with a much younger newcomer to the community, a broke single mother named Emma (Sally Field), who’s struggling to start a horse farm outside of town. Murphy buys a horse and takes up riding just to be close to her, but soon finds himself competing for her with her irresponsible ex (Brian Kerwin).

Based on a Max Schott tale and directed by Martin Ritt, the film is relaxed, charming and believable, and the stars have a lovely rapport. Garner was nominated for an Oscar for his performance, but he is said to have received an even higher honor: Field supposedly claimed that his was the best onscreen kiss she ever received.

20 years old:

French Kiss—Meg Ryan, as an American living in Canada, follows her doctor fiancé Timothy Hutton to Paris, where he’s wandered away from their engagement after a sultry young Frenchwoman. Ryan’s bags are stolen, but she gains the alliance of the unkempt, shady Frenchman, played Kevin Kline, who sat next to her on the plane. He promises to help her regain the doctor’s affections.

You can probably guess what happens, but watch the movie anyway. Ryan gave the best performance to date of her movie career in this one—detailed, delicately witty—and Kline gave one his best, too. Directed by Lawrence Kasdan from a carefully-constructed, mature script by Adam Brooks, this may be the most insufficiently celebrated American love story of the last twenty years.

10 years old:

The 40-Year-Old Virgin—For several years I’ve been telling a female friend that this film isn’t the crude farce she thinks it is, and that she’d enjoy it, and she’s repeatedly seemed unconvinced. And she’s not altogether wrong, perhaps. The film, decidedly not for the kiddies, is full of raunchy gags and language—indeed, it’s one of the most honest depictions I’ve seen in a mainstream movie of the way men talk about sex.

It’s also got a lovely romance at its core, expertly played by Steve Carrell as the fellow who finds himself in the title state and Catherine Keener as the woman for whom he’s very understandably fallen, and to whom he’s ashamed to disclose his shocking secret. The large supporting cast includes Seth Rogen, Paul Rudd and Romany Malco as the coworkers who give Carrell hilarious, atrocious advice. Along with director Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up, from two years later, this is one of the best popular American comedies so far this century, and for all its off-color gags, it casts a surprisingly romantic spell.

Happy Valentine’s Day everybody!

PRO AND CONJURE

The opening minutes of The Incredible Burt Wonderstone are a pretty convincing depiction of how, very probably, most show-biz careers are spawned.

The title character, though he hasn’t yet given himself that grand moniker, is chased down the street by a gang of bullies on his 10th birthday, in 1982. Their gift to him is a punch in the stomach and a blunt reminder that he’s a loser who no one will ever like.

His gift from his mother, however, is better: a Rance Holloway magic set with an instructional videocassette in which the great prestidigitator assures him that everybody loves a magician. Burt and his only friend Anton build on what they learn from this basic stuff, and soon they’re partners in a stage act.

Burt and Anton are played, in this prologue, by the excellent Mason Cook and Luke Vanek, respectively. Steve Carrell and Steve Buscemi take over when they hit adulthood, and their Vegas act, full of elaborate sets and huge hokey props, is a fixture at Bally’s, with its own theatre. Ten years into their run there, Burt has been turned by boredom and repetition into a hateful jackass, snarling contemptuously at everyone who works with him, including the long-suffering Anton. He lives in joyless luxury in a casino penthouse, where even his nightly seductions of comely volunteers from the audience have become a carefully-rehearsed routine.

But like any other star, Burt finds himself in decline, threatened by the newfangled stylings of the insufferable Steve Gray, “Brain Rapist” (Jim Carrey), who wows the crowds with extreme “street magic” stunts, often involving revolting abuse of his own body. Burt and Anton’s act—and friendship—fall apart when they try to compete with this approach, and Burt finds himself unemployed, broke and at the reluctant mercy of his disgusted assistant Jane (Olivia Wilde), herself an aspiring magician.

The rest of the movie, rather snappily directed by TV veteran Don Scardino from a script by several hands, including John Francis Daley of Freaks and Geeks, is about Burt’s attempts to resurrect himself, both as a performer and a person. It’s a perfectly legitimate template for a showbiz story, and The Incredible Burt Wonderstone entertained me, and made me laugh quite a bit.

But it’s marred, for me seriously, by a high degree of cloddish, heavy-handed shtick of what I suppose might be called the Hangover school: mean-spirited slapstick and obvious, telegraphed jokes. There are lengthy set-pieces, like Burt and Anton’s stunt in a suspended booth, or Anton’s imbecilic charitable efforts, that seem meant to convulse us with hilarity. But they just go thud, like a failed a magic trick.

It isn’t just that these scenes aren’t funny. It’s that they’re not consistent with the characterizations. Anton, for instance, is supposed to be the smart, sensitive half of the pair, so the gag about his misguided interactions with Third World people plays particularly dumb.

This side of the material also feels disingenuous in the face of what the movie seems to be championing—corny but comparatively genteel showmanship over shock. It struck me, by the way, that Burt and Anton’s show could still play in Vegas to full houses, and leave them well and unironically satisfied. (I’d certainly go.)

What saves the movie is the sensational cast. Despite the unhilarious nature of the stuff he’s given to do, Carrey isn’t bad at all in his Criss Angel send-up. James Gandolfini is very funny as the dull-souled Bally’s honcho, and Buscemi is always easy to like.

As for Carrell, he’s about as poised a leading man as you’ll find in American movies right now. He has suavity and charm balanced with an accessible everyman quality and a comedic fearlessness. His best moment here is the pleasure Burt registers, quietly but deeply, when he meets his old idol Rance Holloway (Alan Arkin in full curmudgeon mode) in a retirement home—it’s the point at which Burt starts the trudge back from Assholedom, and it gives a hint of the movie that The Incredible Burt Wonderstone could have been.

But then, the potentially touching scene in which Burt and Anton make up is thrown away on overplayed and way overextended mock-sniveling. Carrell and Buscemi both deserve better than this, but alas, they’re complicit in it. It’s a lousy trick they’ve played on themselves.