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July 31-August 6, 2008
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Step it up, brothers
by Michael Phillips
Unidentified Film Objective
by Michael Phillips
Step it up, brothers
by Michael Phillips
Step Brothers is stupid, predictable and fairly funny, though even its bigger laughs — John C. Reilly clocking Will Ferrell with a cymbal in a nicely judged medium shot, for example — make you wonder if the whole arrested-adolescent streak in contemporary screen comedy may be running its course.
Watch the red-band trailer for this picture, the one with the R-rated language intact, and you’ll get a good idea of what’s in store. Too good, really: The R-rated teaser makes the film seem sharper and quicker on its feet than it is. The feature itself, co-written by Ferrell and director Adam McKay, is more hit and miss and come and go and now and then, coasting on its stars’ schlub-a-dub chemistry.
The setup: Ferrell plays Brennan, 39 and living with mom (Mary Steenburgen, sweetly tolerant of her surly offspring). Reilly is Dale, 40, still at home with dad (Richard Jenkins). The parents meet, fall in love, and suddenly you have a blended-family situation of extreme volatility (injurious pranks take up a good deal of screen time) followed by extreme bonding. The scene of Brennan and Dale realizing they have a few things in common is a highlight, particularly for the way Reilly’s character, who’s deeply into Chewbacca and fantasy baseball, says “Yup!” after an excited but poker-faced Ferrell asks him, “Did we just become best friends?”
That’s what you remember a day or two later — the ants-in-the-pants urgency behind each new project undertaken by these boy-men (such as turning their beds into bunk beds, with grim results). The film is simply a collection of scenes with a tiny bit of a plot, involving Brennan’s heinous younger brother (Adam Scott) and his lustful wife (Kathryn Hahn), who has a fling with the wide-eyed Dale.
The trick to the Men II Boyz comic genre — where grown men are simply older, pudgier versions of their teen selves, struggling to find their place in the world — is to find the surprises and payoffs within the Peter Pan syndrome. This is why The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up worked so well. The jokes came and went quickly, usually without a lot of laborious preparation, and you went with the socially retarded flow of things. Another hit overseen by arrested-development comic impresario Judd Apatow, Superbad, looked at actual teenagers desperate for their adult lives (and sexual lives) to begin, yet terrified of the unknown. The guyness of the humor was unapologetic; so was the underlying sweetness, made funnier by the surrounding raunch.
Up against those films, the Apatow-produced Step Brothers seems bland. Still, I laughed a few times — more often, in fact, than I laughed at Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, in which McKay first paired Ferrell and Reilly. Next time, though, it’s time for a change-up. I’m not saying Shakespeare. I’m just saying, enough with the 40-year-old teenagers for a while.
—MCT
Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
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Unidentified Film Objective
by Michael Phillips
Movie stardom isn’t in the eye of the beholder, it’s in the percentages demanded and received by the movie star. We’re talking about a state of fiscal grace, not a state of glamour or mystique.
By that measure Gillian Anderson is not a movie star. Yet she’s world-famous as FBI agent Dana Scully. She’s also a marvelous, coolly soulful actress (choice, for example, in a too-small role in The Last King of Scotland). Her range may not be limitless — she’s best murmuring in close-up, whether dealing with medical issues or spiritual ones — but her dramatic instincts are very stealthy indeed.
Anderson almost makes the new X-Files film, subtitled I Want to Believe, something to believe in. The new feature is like a protracted, passably engaging episode of the deliciously paranoiac series that began in 1993 and wrapped in 2002. A decade ago series creator Chris Carter and his stars, Anderson and top-billed David Duchovny, got together for their first spin-off feature (The X-Files: Fight the Future), which elaborated on the show’s UFO abduction mythology. The X-Files: I Want to Believe has no UFOs in it, and it relies less on the audience’s collective knowledge of the series and more on its own stand-alone storytelling skills.
Yet the story is both a muddle and a drag, having to do with stem cell research and regeneration and missing limbs and a fraught psychic, and that’s enough detail for the purposes of this review. The film will work, I suspect, about the same with die-hard series fans as it does with newbies. Which is to say: Fans and newcomers alike will find it just OK.
There are some comforts amid the disappointment. The second we see that first locator in the lower left-hand corner of the screen reading “Somerset, West Virginia,” X-Files geeks know that we’re looking at British Columbia, where the first five years of the series were shot. The second that Scully, now a doctor working with children, shows up at Mulder’s crazy-loner hideout, where he spends his days clipping newspaper accounts of paranormal activity and watching his Grizzly Adams beard grow, you know they’re about to dive back into the Truth, and the paranoia, and the things they cannot rationally explain.
Billy Connolly plays the psychic, a pedophile priest leading the feds to the solution of the case of a missing FBI agent. Amanda Peet talks tough as the agent spearheading the hunt, though the way she reads the line, “Fox Mulder, I believe?” — who has ever introduced herself to anyone that way? — you sense she’s going to be straining in every scene for that deadpan minimalist cool that comes so naturally to Duchovny and Anderson.
The surprise is the film’s lack of visual distinction. The best of the series’ episodes looked sleek and imposingly atmospheric. By design, director Carter and cinematographer Bill Roe favor a rougher, less shiny approach, but Carter’s handling of the action sequences is oddly lackluster. There’s a moment when Duchovny interrupts some evil lab work being conducted by a bunch of Russians, and it’s a blown opportunity for suspense in every respect.
On some level, too, I suppose I miss the UFO business. Plenty of terrific episodes of the X-Files series had nothing to do with aliens, but tell me this: How did Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull end up with all the UFO fodder while The X-Files: I Want to Believe went in a comparatively mundane direction?
—MCT
Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
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