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.
Showing posts with label JUDD APATOW. Show all posts
Showing posts with label JUDD APATOW. Show all posts
Friday, August 22, 2025
Friday, June 12, 2020
DAVIDSON'S ISLAND
Streaming this weekend:
The King of Staten Island—Although undeniably funny in the right dosage, the Saturday Night Live comedian Pete Davidson never struck me as a having a broad range. But playing the semi-autobiographical title character in this, his first star vehicle, he shows the ease and emotional accessibility of, well, a star.
Working from a script he co-wrote with director Judd Apatow and Dave Sirus, Davidson plays Scott, a twenty-four-year old stoner and aspiring, though not very promising, tattoo artist, living with his weary but doggedly upbeat widowed Mom (Marisa Tomei) in New York's persistently unglamorous Fifth Borough. The son of a firefighter who died in the line of duty—Davidson’s real-life dad died in the 9/11 attacks—Scott is funny, intelligent, likable, even charismatic, but also traumatized, stuck in adolescence, and quietly, almost unconsciously desperate.
Even for Scott, though, change is of course inevitable. His younger, better-adjusted sister (Maude Apatow) heads off to college, and soon his Mom has started a relationship with another firefighter (Bill Burr). Scott responds to it all with bursts of edgy anger—something like Adam Sandler without the mannered eccentricity—offset by a peculiar gentleness that suggests self-awareness and the potential for growth.
Like many of Apatow’s works, the film meanders around at a dawdling clip, exploring subplots and secondary characters, setting up gags that will pay off far down the road, if at all. Not everything works, but it’s a natural approach for a movie about an aimless hero, and we keep rooting for him.
Friday, February 13, 2015
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.
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!
Friday, December 21, 2012
MIDDLE-AGED CRAZIES
With This is 40, Judd Apatow brings two memorable supporting characters from his 2007 hit Knocked Up to center stage: Debbie and Pete, the heroine’s bickering sister and brother-in-law. It appears that the reason they were such successful characters in the earlier film is precisely because they were supporting characters. This is 40 is well-acted, and it’s not without laughs and strong scenes. But watching these two squabble for more than two hours is, ultimately, more ordeal than pleasure.
L.A. fashion boutique owner and mother of two Debbie, played by Leslie Mann—Mrs. Apatow—is a blonde beauty and a bright-eyed, freaky obsessive. Pete, played by Paul Rudd, manages a struggling record label (he’s gambled big on a Graham Parker album). He’s emotionally recessive in the face of the intensity of his wife and daughters. He regularly retreats to the bathroom when he doesn’t need to relieve himself, just to play handheld electronic games. But he’s not safe from his wife’s intrusion even there.
Even so, for some reason Pete comes off less sympathetically than Debbie, maybe because the underlying dynamic seems to be that he’s no longer in love with his wife—he sometimes fantasizes about being a widower—yet she’s still desperately fascinated by him. In real life, of course, Pete’s trapped and overloaded feelings could awaken compassion, as could his terror at the prospect of admitting to Debbie that they’re on the brink of ruin. But in the movies, even with the always-appealing Rudd playing him, he just seems like a detached skunk who’s not trying. When we see him weeping in his car at one point, the moment falls surprisingly flat.
The movie centers, way too loosely, on the lead-up to a joint 40th and “38th” birthday party for Pete and Debbie, respectively. But it pursues a profusion of subplots, from Debbie’s troubles with her shop employees (Megan Fox and Charlyne Yi) to the growing pains and Lost fixation of her older daughter (Maude Apatow, who’s excellent) to the daddy issues that fuel Debbie and Pete’s dysfunction. Pete’s Dad (Albert Brooks) is a jolly, outrageous deadbeat—with toddlers from his more recent wife!—who shamelessly leeches off his son. Debbie’s Dad (John Lithgow) is the ultimate absentee, a hotshot spinal surgeon who can’t even confidently remember the names of his granddaughters.
I like Apatow, a lot. Knocked Up and The 40-Year-Old Virgin are already classics, I think, two of the best American comedies of the past decade. But his instincts are way off here. He tries to give every little strand, down to Debbie’s efforts to quit smoking or Pete’s cupcake addiction, its own story arc and payoff, and it’s just too much. He lets scenes play too long, and overindulges what appear to be improvisations until they become unfunny.
There’s a lot that’s good about This is 40, and with some fairly merciless cutting it could probably have been made into a decent movie. Not a great one, though, I don’t think. The core situation—affluent married people find themselves facing middle age without having attained a perfectly satisfactory life—isn’t exactly unique, and it lacks the urgency of Apatow’s earlier films. After all, at least they aren’t still virgins.
Make no mistake, the athletic and acrobatic feats captured on film in Cirque du Soliel: Worlds Away are enough to make you believe in superheroes. The performers in the circus franchise’s feature film come across like some other, higher species; some Nietzschean improvement on Homo Sapiens. What they do with their bodies doesn’t seem possible, and yet there they are, clearly doing it.
Considering how jaw-dropping their abilities are, and their beauty and erotic presence, it’s hard to understand why the movie is a bit of a bore. The franchise, started in the early ‘80s by a pair of Canadian street performers, has grown into a worldwide empire, with shows on six continents. It’s a contemporary take on the circus—no animals, a New-Agey, music-driven style and unifying themes to the performances. Worlds Away, directed by Andrew Adamson of Shrek, showcases the seven Cirque du Soleil productions in Las Vegas alone.
I have friends who are serious fans and repeat customers of the live shows, but even they admit that the videos of the performances just aren’t the same. I’m inclined to believe them—I can see how witnessing this stuff live could be overwhelming. But while watching this movie, more than once my chin began to droop toward my chest.
There’s a little bit of story to Worlds Away. An extremely cute gamine (Erica Linz) goes to the circus. In the middle of the act, a hunky aerialist (Igor Zaripov) makes eye contact with her and, distracted by her extreme gamine cuteness, misses his trapeze and plummets into the ring. But instead of going splat, he plunges right through the dirt, and the gamine, rushing to his aid, falls through after him.
She finds herself in a strange alternative avant-garde circus dimension. For the rest of the movie she wanders, accompanied by a grim-looking clown (John Clarke) with a bad case of bed head, from tent to tent, in search of her hunk. Some of her encounters are visually magical—like a lovely staging of “Octopus’s Garden”—and all are eye-popping demonstrations of physical skill and prowess.
But this slender thread of plot isn’t enough to disguise what Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away really is—a commercial, first of all, but also a concert movie. And I would propose that the concert movie, with a handful of rule-proving exceptions, may be the most wearying of all film genres, blunting as it does both the immediacy and excitement of live performance and the narrative pull of cinema.
Oh yeah, it’s in 3-D. I honestly can’t remember one particularly striking effect that this added to the film.
L.A. fashion boutique owner and mother of two Debbie, played by Leslie Mann—Mrs. Apatow—is a blonde beauty and a bright-eyed, freaky obsessive. Pete, played by Paul Rudd, manages a struggling record label (he’s gambled big on a Graham Parker album). He’s emotionally recessive in the face of the intensity of his wife and daughters. He regularly retreats to the bathroom when he doesn’t need to relieve himself, just to play handheld electronic games. But he’s not safe from his wife’s intrusion even there.
Even so, for some reason Pete comes off less sympathetically than Debbie, maybe because the underlying dynamic seems to be that he’s no longer in love with his wife—he sometimes fantasizes about being a widower—yet she’s still desperately fascinated by him. In real life, of course, Pete’s trapped and overloaded feelings could awaken compassion, as could his terror at the prospect of admitting to Debbie that they’re on the brink of ruin. But in the movies, even with the always-appealing Rudd playing him, he just seems like a detached skunk who’s not trying. When we see him weeping in his car at one point, the moment falls surprisingly flat.
The movie centers, way too loosely, on the lead-up to a joint 40th and “38th” birthday party for Pete and Debbie, respectively. But it pursues a profusion of subplots, from Debbie’s troubles with her shop employees (Megan Fox and Charlyne Yi) to the growing pains and Lost fixation of her older daughter (Maude Apatow, who’s excellent) to the daddy issues that fuel Debbie and Pete’s dysfunction. Pete’s Dad (Albert Brooks) is a jolly, outrageous deadbeat—with toddlers from his more recent wife!—who shamelessly leeches off his son. Debbie’s Dad (John Lithgow) is the ultimate absentee, a hotshot spinal surgeon who can’t even confidently remember the names of his granddaughters.
I like Apatow, a lot. Knocked Up and The 40-Year-Old Virgin are already classics, I think, two of the best American comedies of the past decade. But his instincts are way off here. He tries to give every little strand, down to Debbie’s efforts to quit smoking or Pete’s cupcake addiction, its own story arc and payoff, and it’s just too much. He lets scenes play too long, and overindulges what appear to be improvisations until they become unfunny.
There’s a lot that’s good about This is 40, and with some fairly merciless cutting it could probably have been made into a decent movie. Not a great one, though, I don’t think. The core situation—affluent married people find themselves facing middle age without having attained a perfectly satisfactory life—isn’t exactly unique, and it lacks the urgency of Apatow’s earlier films. After all, at least they aren’t still virgins.
Make no mistake, the athletic and acrobatic feats captured on film in Cirque du Soliel: Worlds Away are enough to make you believe in superheroes. The performers in the circus franchise’s feature film come across like some other, higher species; some Nietzschean improvement on Homo Sapiens. What they do with their bodies doesn’t seem possible, and yet there they are, clearly doing it.
Considering how jaw-dropping their abilities are, and their beauty and erotic presence, it’s hard to understand why the movie is a bit of a bore. The franchise, started in the early ‘80s by a pair of Canadian street performers, has grown into a worldwide empire, with shows on six continents. It’s a contemporary take on the circus—no animals, a New-Agey, music-driven style and unifying themes to the performances. Worlds Away, directed by Andrew Adamson of Shrek, showcases the seven Cirque du Soleil productions in Las Vegas alone.
I have friends who are serious fans and repeat customers of the live shows, but even they admit that the videos of the performances just aren’t the same. I’m inclined to believe them—I can see how witnessing this stuff live could be overwhelming. But while watching this movie, more than once my chin began to droop toward my chest.
There’s a little bit of story to Worlds Away. An extremely cute gamine (Erica Linz) goes to the circus. In the middle of the act, a hunky aerialist (Igor Zaripov) makes eye contact with her and, distracted by her extreme gamine cuteness, misses his trapeze and plummets into the ring. But instead of going splat, he plunges right through the dirt, and the gamine, rushing to his aid, falls through after him.
She finds herself in a strange alternative avant-garde circus dimension. For the rest of the movie she wanders, accompanied by a grim-looking clown (John Clarke) with a bad case of bed head, from tent to tent, in search of her hunk. Some of her encounters are visually magical—like a lovely staging of “Octopus’s Garden”—and all are eye-popping demonstrations of physical skill and prowess.
But this slender thread of plot isn’t enough to disguise what Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away really is—a commercial, first of all, but also a concert movie. And I would propose that the concert movie, with a handful of rule-proving exceptions, may be the most wearying of all film genres, blunting as it does both the immediacy and excitement of live performance and the narrative pull of cinema.
Oh yeah, it’s in 3-D. I honestly can’t remember one particularly striking effect that this added to the film.
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