I don’t want to die at James Franco’s house.

This is the End

(2013)

(SPOILERS) As the apocalypse comedy of 2013 that isn’t The World’s End, This is the End was at least favoured by limited expectations. Schlubby Seth Rogen and his semi-famous pals essay versions of themselves as the world falls apart. Cue a succession of semi-improvised scenes of variable quality. Rogen and co-writer/co-director Evan Goldberg based the picture on their short film Jay and Seth vs. The Apocalypse. It’s more a credit to the essential narrative fortitude of end-of-the-world scenarios than their threadbare plotting that This is the End is, for the most part, moderately amusing.

Possibly the best choice Rogen and Goldberg make is picking the Rapture as their end game scenario. Unfortunately it also shows limitations, unable to tease out laughs from religion and philosophy (their attempts amount to Jay Baruchel quoting Revelations and the appearance of an enormously-hung Satan). It’s not all that far from the way in which Kevin Smith’s “scathing” Dogma turned out to be little more than a succession of dick and shit jokes. Sure, you could argue that maintaining a resolutely base level of humour highlights the self-consciously superficial nature of these guys and of Hollywood in general (which is the entrance-level view of Baruchel’s version of himself, reluctantly visiting sell-out fellow Canadian Rogen after time away from LA-LA Land). But that would be a very convenient excuse for the paucity of ideas in their comedy bag; there’s little here that your average adolescent couldn’t think up. Only so much mileage ican be gained from self-awareness of vacuity, particularly if you’re really suggesting that such an outlook is great (because, like, it’s fun and you get to smoke lots of weed maaaaan).

One thing you couldn’t accuse This is the End of is inconsistency. Rogen and Goldberg find their tone quickly and stick to it, thus avoiding many of the pitfalls that beset The World’s End. On the other hand, their aspirations are no higher than a urine-soaked toilet seat. The movie is a steady stream of dick jokes, rape jokes, anal penetration jokes, gay jokes and jizz jokes. And weed jokes (just to show the feckless band don’t have one-track minds). The picture quickly succumbs to an exhaustion factor owing to the realisation that they have only one level from which they can milk the funnies.

This kind of bromance/vaguely homoerotic-homophobic character scenario is so over-familiar, one might charitably view the whole as a sly commentary on both the potty/snot/ejacualate fixations of (Rogen mentor) Judd Apatow and the sentimentally-brotherly-but-so-not-gay attitudes of Adam Sandler. But the picture is shot through with a mawkish moral about the value of (platonic, of course!) male friendships, such that most of the time the laddish crudity really is just laddish crudity. Nevertheless, when it comes to expertly skewering perceived ideas about the “true” personas of this motley band, the movie is at its meta-textual best. But it’s also shy of anything that might suggest actual wit or intelligence, which is why it makes sure to fall back on gross-out humour or cock gags every minute or two. I should emphasise I’m not particularly prudish about this, but there’s an inevitable fatigue through repetition. Not to mention the “He said wee-wee!” schoolboy laziness of trying to impress your peers through shock rather than real inventiveness.

While Rogen and Goldberg set up their apocalypse with some flair (the Rapture takes place on a munchies run to the local supermarket), they quickly run out of ideas. It is a little over-confident of the chemistry between its leads, but solid material surfaces when it is focuses on the perpetual in-fighting, small-mindedness, and egotism of the sextet of James Franco, Jonah Hill, Rogen, Baruchel, Danny McBride and Craig Robinson. They have gathered for Franco’s party at his new pad (“I designed it myself”) and most of them secretly or not-so-secretly loathe one or more of the others to various degrees. There’s ammunition enough here for a time but around the mid-point the scenario succumb to circular plotting, with plural expeditions for supplies and multiple encounters with demonic creatures.

As you’d expect from a best chums’ home movie (just one that cost $32m, is all) there’s a tendency to indulgence at the expense of sticking to the script. The gags are puerile ad infinitum, so it’s a surprise the movie holds together as well as it does. Certainly better than most of the other Rogen/Goldberg collaborations. No one saw The Watch, including me, but The Green Hornet is actively terrible and Pineapple Express (which gets its “sequel” here) quickly wears out its “watching stoned people is sooooo funny, dude” premise (whereas, conversely, Harold and Kumar manages to sustain the same dumb idea for three movies). Only Superbad can make a claim to justifying their rep. After a while, all Rogenberg can summon up is yet another Rosemary’s Baby/The Exorcist spoof in which Hill shows he’s no great shakes at acting possessed.

Casting Baruchel as the reluctant anti-Hollywood type makes him the most relatable of the cast but, if you don’t like these guys anyway, their self-mockery is unlikely to change that opinion. Rogen is as charmless as ever, and no number of self-deprecating swipes about his laugh or how he always plays the same role will alleviate that. McBride is much loved by some; I tend to find him on the unappealingly boorish side. But his first scene, as he launches into an aggressive demolition of his fellow housemates (“James Franco didn’t suck dick last night. Now I know you’re all tripping”), might be the funniest extended sequence in the movie.

Franco gamely mocks his ambivalent sexuality (most especially through an unlikely obsession with Rogen). But, when Rogen reveals that Franco was the only performer who didn’t think anything requested of him was going too far, it’s fuel to the fire of suggesting an actor who feels the need to whorishly and indiscriminately attract as much media attention as possible. The joke being that Franco considers himself a bona fide artist – some of which adorns his walls in the movie – and his exposure is to that end that rather than mere lurid self-promotion; alas, when your art is mediocre, it amounts to the same thing. Hill plays a version of himself as a slightly-too-creepy-to-be-nice guy. His crowning moment is a version of Woody Harrelson in “Pineapple Express 2”. Craig Robinson, even with his missing-the-mark eye-gouging story (Franco’s “admission” regarding Lindsay Lohan is both too obvious and too “rapey” – to use their term – to be funny), is the probably the most appealing of the bunch.

Michael Cera has the most fun in an extended cameo as an out-of-control, drug-crazed, version of himself, while Emma Watson’s appearance leads to a vaguely astute rape joke (the guys worry that they are “giving off a rapey vibe”). Channing Tatum also puts in an appearance, which is back in the guys’ “safe territory” of “Ewwww! Gay sex!” (as is Jonah Hill’s penetration by an enormous demon dick). There are also cameos for Rihanna, Kevin Hart and Christopher Mintz-Plasse.

As directors, Rogen and Goldberg are competent if predictably unsubtle. Once is too many times for indulging celebratory slow motion music montages of party going antics. Unfortunately, they are employed incessantly. The special effects-heavy exteriors are reasonably rendered, but both these and the heaven-side sequences suggest there is little visual imagination to go round. Their approach to the morality of who gets into heaven and hell is suitably flippant, leading to a telegraphed but still funny Franco not-saved scene. But the God of This is the End must be quite the masochist if he’s willing to welcome Seth Rogen through the pearly gates.

***

Comments

My name is Dr. King Schultz, this is my valet, Django, and these are our horses, Fritz, and Tony.

Django Unchained (2012)
(MINOR SPOILERS) Since the painful misstep of Grindhouse/Death Proof, Quentin Tarantino has regained the higher ground like never before. Pulp Fiction, his previous commercial and critical peak, has been at very least equalled by the back-to-back hits of Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained. Having been underwhelmed by his post Pulp Fiction efforts (albeit, I admired his technical advances as a director in Kill Bill), I was pleasantly surprised by Inglourious Basterds. It was no work of genius (so not Pulp Fiction) by any means, but there was a gleeful irreverence in its treatment of history and even to the nominal heroic status of its titular protagonists. Tonally, it was a good fit for the director’s “cool” aesthetic. As a purveyor of postmodern pastiche, where the surface level is the subtext, in some ways he was operating at his zenith. Django Unchained is a retreat from that position, the director caught in the tug between his all-important aesthetic pr…

She writes Twilight fan fiction.

Vampire Academy (2014)
My willingness to give writer Daniel Waters some slack on the grounds of early glories sometimes pays off (Sex and Death 101) and sometimes, as with this messy and indistinct Young Adult adaptation, it doesn’t. If Vampire Academy plods along as a less than innovative smart-mouthed Buffy rip-off that might be because, if you added vampires to Heathers, you would probably get something not so far from the world of Joss Whedon. Unfortunately inspiration is a low ebb throughout, not helped any by tepid direction from Daniel’s sometimes-reliable brother Mark and a couple of hopelessly plankish leads who do their best to dampen down any wit that occasionally attempts to surface.

I can only presume there’s a never-ending pile of Young Adult fiction poised for big screen failure, all of it comprising multi-novel storylines just begging for a moment in the Sun. Every time an adaptation crashes and burns (and the odds are that they will) another one rises, hydra-like, hoping…

Everyone wants a happy ending and everyone wants closure but that's not the way life works out.

It Chapter Two (2019)
(SPOILERS) An exercise in stultifying repetitiveness, It Chapter Two does its very best to undo all the goodwill engendered by the previous instalment. It may simply be that adopting a linear approach to the novel’s interweaving timelines has scuppered the sequel’s chances of doing anything the first film hasn’t. Oh, except getting rid of Pennywise for good, which you’d be hard-pressed to discern as substantially different to the CGI-infused confrontation in the first part, Native American ritual aside.

That woman, deserves her revenge and… we deserve to die. But then again, so does she.

Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004)
(SPOILERS) I’m not sure I can really conclude whether one Kill Bill is better than the other, since I’m essentially with Quentin in his assertion that they’re one film, just cut into two for the purposes of a selling point. I do think Kill Bill: Vol. 2 has the movie’s one actually interesting character, though, and I’m not talking David Carradine’s title role.

Do you read Sutter Cane?

In the Mouth of Madness (1994)
(SPOILERS) The concluding chapter of John Carpenter’s unofficial Apocalypse Trilogy (preceded by The Thing and Prince of Darkness) is also, sadly, his last great movie. Indeed, it stands apart in the qualitative wilderness that beset him during the ‘90s (not for want of output). Michael De Luca’s screenplay had been doing the rounds since the ‘80s, even turned down by Carpenter at one point, and it proves ideal fodder for the director, bringing out the best in him. Even cinematographer Gary K Kibbe seems inspired enough to rise to the occasion. It could do without the chugging rawk soundtrack, perhaps, but then, that was increasingly where Carpenter’s interests resided (as opposed to making decent movies).

When you grow up, if you still feel raw about it, I’ll be waiting.

Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003)
(SPOILERS) It sometimes seems as if Quentin Tarantino – in terms of his actual movies, rather than nearly getting Uma killed in an auto stunt – is the last bastion of can-do-no-wrong on the Internet. Or at very least has the preponderance of its vocal weight behind him. Back when his first two movies proper were coming out, so before online was really a thing, I’d likely have agreed, but by about the time the Kill Bills arrived, I’d have admitted I was having serious pause about him being all he was cracked up to be. Because the Kill Bills aren’t very good, and they’ve rather characterised his hermetically sealed wallowing in obscure media trash and genre cul-de-sacs approach to his art ever since. Sometimes to entertaining effect, sometimes less so, but always ever more entrenching his furrow; as Neil Norman note in his Evening Standard review, “Tarantino has attempted (and largely succeeded) in making a movie whose only reality is that of celluloid”. Extend t…

Check it out. I wonder if BJ brought the Bear with him.

Death Proof (2007)
(SPOILERS) In a way, I’m slightly surprised Tarantino didn’t take the opportunity to disown Death Proof, to claim that, as part of Grindhouse, it was no more one of his ten-official-films-and-out than his Four Rooms segment. But that would be to spurn the exploitation genre affectation that has informed everything he’s put his name to since Kill Bill, to a greater or less extent, and also require him to admit that he was wrong, and you won’t find him doing that for anything bar My Best Friend’s Birthday.

He tasks me. He tasks me, and I shall have him.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
(1982)
(SPOILERS) I don’t love Star Trek, but I do love Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. That probably isn’t just me, but a common refrain of many a non-devotee of the series. Although, it used to apply to The Voyage Home (the funny one, with the whales, the Star Trek even the target audience for Three Men and a Baby could enjoy). Unfortunately, its high regard has also become the desperate, self-destructive, song-and-verse, be-all-and-end-all of the overlords of the franchise itself, in whichever iteration, it seems. This is understandable to an extent, as Khan is that rare movie sequel made to transcendent effect on almost every level, and one that stands the test of time every bit as well (better, even) as when it was first unveiled.

I don’t think you will see President Pierce again.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)
(SPOILERS) The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and other tall tales of the American frontier is the title of "the book" from which the Coen brothers' latest derives, and so announces itself as fiction up front as heavily as Fargo purported to be based on a true story. In the world of the portmanteau western – has there even been one before? – theme and content aren't really all that distinct from the more familiar horror collection, and as such, these six tales rely on sudden twists or reveals, most of them revolving around death. And inevitably with the anthology, some tall tales are stronger than other tall tales, the former dutifully taking up the slack.

Where’s the commode in this dungeon? I gotta have a squirt.

Reservoir Dogs (1992)
(SPOILERS) I’m not shy to admit that I fully bought into the Tarantino hype when he first arrived on the scene. Which, effectively took place with the UK’s reception of Reservoir Dogs (and its subsequent banning from home video), rather than the slightly tepid post-Sundance US response. That said, I think I always appreciated the “package” more than the piece itself. Don’t get me wrong, I admired the film for what it achieved, shrewdly maximising its effectiveness on a limited budget by, for example, making a virtue out of notshowing the all-important heist. But its influence was everything, more than the sum total of the film itself – that slow-motion parade in cheap matching suits (not so much Chris Penn’s track one), the soundtrack CD that was a fixture until, basically Pulp Fiction came out, the snatches of dialogue, most famously the “Like a Virgin” monologue, even the poster, adorning every student’s wall for the next half decade – so I wouldn’t quite say I …

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

Search This Blog