Movie Review: Superbad (2007)

Genre: Raunchy High School Comedy  

Director: Greg Mottola  

Starring: Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Seth Rogen, Emma Stone, Bill Hader  

Running Time: 113 minutes  

Synopsis: The excitable Seth (Jonah Hill) and the more circumspect Evan (Michael Cera) are best friends approaching high school graduation. Seth is obsessed with the idea of having sex, and thrilled when hot classmate Jules (Emma Stone) invites him to her house party believing he can use the fake ID of dorky unwanted friend Fogell (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) to bring alcohol. With Evan also sensing an opportunity to get intimate with classmate Becca (Martha MacIsaac), an evening of hunting for booze on the way to the party disintegrates into chaos.

What Works Well: Written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg based on their high school experiences (with the two lead characters named after them), this is an unapologetically raunchy and often hilarious high school misadventure. With all events taking place on one day followed by a wild night, the  personalities of Seth and Evan are quickly established, and the script proceeds to capture a hormone-defined period in life when libidos, alcohol, the imperative to be popular, and end-of-high school disorientation collide. Hitherto unquestioned friendship codes are tested by diverging priorities, surprising behaviours emerge, and no matter how the night ends, not much will be the same afterwards. Christopher Mintz-Plasse achieves legendary status in adopting the fake ID "McLovin" (no first name) persona, while Seth Rogen and Bill Hader as less-than-upstanding cops add zesty sauce to the carnage.  

What Does Not Work As Well: With the profanity dial set on high throughout, this is very much a male-focused representation of teenaged awkwardness. Despite good work by Emma Stone and Martha MacIsaac, the girls are sketch representations.

Key Quote:

Evan: Stay calm, okay? Let's not lose our heads. It's... it's a fine ID; it'll... it's gonna work. It's passable, okay? This isn't terrible. I mean, it's up to you, Fogell. This guy is either gonna think 'Here's another kid with a fake ID' or 'Here's McLovin, a 25 year-old Hawaiian organ donor'. Okay? So what's it gonna be?

Fogell: I am McLovin!

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Movie Review: You People (2023)

Genre: Satirical Romantic Comedy

Director: Kenya Barris

Starring: Jonah Hill, Lauren London, Eddie Murphy, Julia Louis-Dreyfus

Running Time: 118 Minutes

Synopsis: In Los Angeles, 35-year-old Ezra (Jonah Hill) falls in love with Amira (Lauren London). He is white and Jewish, she is black and Muslim. They quickly make plans to get married, but Ezra's mother Shelley (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) tries too hard to be liberal in front of her future daughter-in-law, and Amira's father Akbar (Eddie Murphy) is determined to persuade Ezra he is unfit to marry into black culture.

What Works Well: The cast is talented and willing, with Eddie Murphy (arrogant passive-aggressiveness) and Julia Louis-Dreyfus (socially and culturally hyper-clueless) leaning hard into their roles. A few jokes and humorous moments do land, including the culmination of a dinner-from-hell.

What Does Not Work As Well: Star Jonah Hill and director Kenya Barris co-wrote the script, and they veer too far into a bizarre - and quickly tiresome - world where race and religion are the only topics of often vulgar conversation. Meanwhile, the romantic elements are tepid at best. Plenty of dialogue appears improvised and undisciplined, and needless to say, the final resolution is bland enough to negate everything that preceded it. The content does not come close to justifying 118 minutes of running time.

Conclusion: An attempt to satirize the overheated culture wars predictably flounders.

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Movie Review: Accepted (2006)

A high school comedy, Accepted has one bright idea but then fails to do anything of substance with a story of oddballs launching their own place of higher learning.

In suburban Ohio, Bartleby Gaines (Justin Long) graduates from high school, fails to get accepted into any college, and equally fails to get noticed by beautiful classmate Monica (Blake Lively). Wilting under the pressure of his disappointed parents, Bartleby teams up with fellow misfits, including brainy Rory (Maria Thayer) and athletic "Hands" (Columbus Short), and creates an acceptance letter from the fake South Harmon Institute of Technology. Bartleby's best friend Sherman (Jonah Hill), who does have an acceptance to the real Harmon College, helps out by creating a functional website for the fake Institute.

Using $10,000 from his parents Bartleby and his friends leases and refurbishes an abandoned mental hospital. Soon they are flooded with underperforming students, as Sherman had programmed the website to issue one-click acceptances. While Sherman struggles with demeaning fraternity initiating rights, Bartleby is faced with the challenge of actually creating a functional college, winning Monica's heart, and fending off the evil ambitions of Harmon College's Dean Richard Van Horne (Anthony Heald).

A one-joke teen comedy, on a few occasions Accepted threatens to create a few laughs. But the film, mechanically directed by Steve Pink and featuring an obnoxious soundtrack of obvious rock tracks, quickly exhausts its premise and spends most of its 92 minutes killing time until a tired climactic speech exalting the virtues of individuality, nonconformity and yes, acceptance.

The talent in front of the camera almost makes the experience watchable. Justin Long, Jonah Hill, Blake Lively and the bright Maria Thayer are committed enough to deserve better material, but they cannot save Accepted from sinking in its sea of bland predictability.

Their characters are borrowed from ancient and much better movies including Animal House and all its imitators. After creating the clever-but-lazy Bartleby and his brainstorm of inventing his own college, the team of three writers forgets to insert anything resembling actual laughs or original content. The Institute's abbreviation appears to be their proudest achievement. The result is a tired movie that sits by the pool, ogles girls in bikinis, attends parties and waits for the end credits.

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Movie Review: War Dogs (2016)

A dramatic comedy, War Dogs is an unapologetic story of young men profiteering from the business of weapons trading. Brash and vivid, the film passes no judgment: this is digital capitalism as applied to the often hypocritical enterprise of feeding the global death machine.

It's the mid-2000s in Miami. David Packouz (Miles Teller) is a pot-smoking college dropout, making ends meet as a massage therapist serving creepy rich men. David tries his hand at selling high quality bed sheets to retirement homes, and nearly bankrupts himself, just as he discovers that girlfriend Iz (Ana de Armas) is pregnant. Fortunately, David's high school friend Efraim Diveroli (Jonah Hill) has just moved back to Miami. A fearless, quick-witted entrepreneur, Efraim is dabbling in low-level arms trading as a middle man bidding on official US Army requisitions through a public procurement website.

Efraim is good at what he does and asks David to join his fledgling company AEY Inc, an offer David accepts although he lies to Iz about his sojourn into the arms trading business.  AEY lands an order to supply handguns to the Army in Iraq, but when the shipment is held up in Jordan, the two friends have to personally intervene, resulting in a harrowing war zone experience. Higher stakes opportunities lie ahead, as AEY goes after a mammoth contract to supply the Afghanistan Army. Efraim and David partner with shady international arms dealer Henry Girard (Bradley Cooper), and find themselves in an Albania warehouse where Cold War surplus equipment can be translated into huge profits.

Based on real events chronicled in a Rolling Stone feature article and directed by Todd Phillips, War Dogs picks up the theme and style developed by The Wolf Of Wall Street and The Big Short: young men behaving badly and finding extreme riches in surreal yet factual environments. And War Dogs polishes the formula to a shine, mixing millennial brohood comedy, the ugly yet fearless American prototype, and deadly serious world events into a potent mix. Propelled by an excellent thumping soundtrack featuring plenty of 1970s and '80s rock, the result is a tight dramatic comedy with plenty of punch.

At just under two hours the film contains no flab. Phillips uses the first 30 minutes to draw in the characters of David and Efraim, and they are a classic opposites-attract duo. David is more timid, struggling to find his place in life and reduced to half-baked business ventures doomed to both cause embarrassment and financial failure. Efraim is brash, big, and ridiculously confident, finding opportunities, swinging for the fences and easily able to cast aside the horror of a bad war in search of the capitalist dream. While David frets about profiting from a war he and Iz do not support, Efraim has no such qualms: the war is happening anyway, the weapons have to be sold, and the profit is there to be made.

The heart of the film is then dedicated to the seemingly bizarre world of modern weapons bought and sold to feed war's voracious appetite. It's a wild west but real market where young men can make money by sitting in nondescript offices and clicking their way into the world of go-betweens, connecting idle weapons with active war zones. Phillips captures the anticipation, excitement, and frenzy of dealmaking, with David's character providing engaging narration to fill in the gaps. And when deals go bad and on-the-ground sojourns are needed, War Dogs soars, first to the chaotic Iraq theatre and then onto Albania, a forgotten Cold War front line now waiting to translate ancient surplus hardware into cold hard cash.

The interaction between David and Efraim is maintained at the heart of the film, Phillips guiding the two protagonists through phases of a friendship that morphs into a hazardous business relationship, ultimately revealing some painful true colours. Jonah Hill easily occupies the eye of the storm, giving Efraim a force of nature personality, deploying the same obtuse behaviour whether in glitzy Miami bars or in the world's worst hell holes. The story is told through David's eyes, and Miles Teller delivers a circumspect performance, David's dilemmas shaped by burgeoning family responsibilities both pushing him towards money-making opportunities and pulling him to question his motives.

War Dogs is absurdly serious, the business of war translated into a wild adventure where extreme riches dance with death.

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Movie Review: Knocked Up (2007)

A crude romantic comedy, Knocked Up does not hold back on the vulgarities but also finds a few good comic moments in the story of an unwanted pregnancy resulting from a drunken one night stand.

Alison (Katherine Heigl) works at the E! television channel, and is unexpectedly promoted to celebrity interviewer. To celebrate she goes out for a night of clubbing fun with her sister Debbie (Leslie Mann), who is married to Pete (Paul Rudd) and the mother of two. Alison ends the night having unprotected sex with slacker Ben (Seth Rogen), who does nothing in life except get high and hang out with his equally useless friends Jason (Jason Segel), Jay (Jay Baruchel), Jonah (Jonah Hill) and Martin (Martin Starr). The morning after, Alison confirms that she has nothing in common with Ben and they part ways.

Eight weeks later Alison discovers that she is pregnant. She reconnects with Ben, and decides to go through with the pregnancy. They try to make it work as a couple, while Debbie and Pete face a crisis of their own. As the due date draws nearer, the stresses of the forced relationship between Alison and Ben come to the fore.

Directed and written by Judd Apatow, Knocked Up is a hit-and-miss romantic comedy, although the romance element is more of a search through the jungle of incompatibility. There are plenty of laughs to be sure, but also many jokes that fall flat and others that are overcooked. The improvisational, irreverent vibe is a welcome shot in the arm for an often tired genre, as is the unapologetic celebration of the brotherhood of offensive slackerhood. But there is only so much humour that can be squeezed out of men who waste their life on dope, juvenile sex jokes and the general pursuit of nothingness, and Knocked Up frequently bumps up against these limits.

Beneath the coarse exterior, Apatow does add thoughtful commentary on relationship dynamics. The women, through Alison and Debbie, are portrayed as more stressed but also more responsible and more caring. The men, represented primarily by Ben and Pete, are either diamonds in the rough, or just rough, seeking escape from the emotional responsibilities of adulthood through actions that avoid accountability. While the men seem to be more fun, it is the women who set the agenda and make the key decisions that strive towards meaningful happiness.

The cast is mostly made up of Apatow regulars, and they are all in, riding the wave of organic humour, soaring and crashing depending on the cleverness of the dialogue. With all the bromances in full flow, it is left to Heigl and Mann to provide any sense of organizational structure, and they deliver steady performances. The cast also includes Harold Ramis and Kristen Wiig in small roles, and a host of celebrity cameos.

Knocked Up works its way to a spectacular climax, the pregnancy reaching full term just as the reality of what it takes to achieve couplehood finally dawns on Ben, labour pain mixed with manic panic and over-the-top laughs.

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The Movies of Jonah Hill

All movies starring Jonah Hill and reviewed on the Ace Black Movie Blog are linked below:

The 40 Year Old Virgin (2005)

Click (2006)

Accepted (2006)

Knocked Up (2007)

Evan Almighty (2007)

Superbad (2007)

Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008)

Moneyball (2011)

Django Unchained (2012)

The Wolf Of Wall Street (2013)

Hail, Caesar! (2016)

War Dogs (2016)

Don't Look Up (2021)

You People (2023)

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The Movie Star Index is here.

Movie Review: Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008)

A raunchy sex comedy with some romance elements, Forgetting Sarah Marshall finds humour in breakups, new beginnings, and revenge sex in the alternate reality of a picture-perfect Hawaiian resort.

Peter (Jason Segel), the creator of music for television shows, is unceremoniously dumped by girlfriend Sarah (Kristen Bell), the glamorous sex-symbol star of a CSI-style series. Unable to get over the breakup, Peter seeks to mend his broken heart at a Hawaiian resort only to find Sarah also vacationing there with new boyfriend Aldous (Russell Brand), a global pop music star.

As Peter and Sarah do their best to avoid each other and regularly fail to do so, Peter meets the resort's receptionist Rachel (Mila Kunis), and they start a tentative relationship. Surrounded by assorted other guests and resort employees stumbling through their own issues, Peter, Sarah, Rachel and Aldous need to untangle their lives, which suddenly become more complicated when Sarah receives unwelcome news.

Co-produced by Judd Apatow, directed by Nicholas Stoller and written by Segel, Forgetting Sarah Marshall is a rare example of an adult sex comedy that actually works, and without resorting to toilet humour. The film's success resides with Segel's witty script, which in addition to a continuous stream of raunchy situations creates a large number of memorable and often hilarious characters, even in the smallest roles, and sets them loose to do their thing.

The depth of enjoyment within the ranks of the secondary characters is quite remarkable. The list covers Russell Brand as Aldous Snow, Jonah Hill as Matthew the waiter with stardom aspirations, Paul Rudd as Kunu the surf dude with memory issues, Jack McBrayer and Maria Thayer as the newlyweds with wildly diverging sex drives, Bill Hader as Peter's stepbrother and even William Baldwin and Jason Bateman doing their best David Caruso impressions in promo snippets as Sarah's co-stars.

In most other comedies these secondary and tertiary roles would be sketched in and played by nobodies. Here they are recurring and sustained, carrying their own comic momentum and delivered by actors keen to leave an impression. Brand, in particular, delivers a performance so cool and laid back as the superstar who stole Sarah's heart, that it's impossible not to fall under his magnetic spell.

And in the three main roles, Segel, Bell and Kunis shine as the three awkward points of the love triangle. Segel has rarely been better in a restrained performance that emphasizes pathos over doofiness. Bell is perfectly cast as Sarah, an ice cold and self-assured television star who will unexpectedly meet her own vulnerabilities once she hits a crisis point. And in a breakout role, Kunis dazzles with a fresh spray of girl-next-door appeal.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall is firmly aimed at adults, and the unrated version does not shy away from nudity (mostly Segel's) and several scenes of couples energetically and loudly coupling for comic effect. The film wastes no time in setting up the premise, surrounding it by anarchy and then vigorously milking it for all its worth over the course of 110 frantic minutes. While most of the jokes do work, the approach here is that the next good gag is only as far as the next minute.

With talent in peak form delivering the laughs, Forgetting Sarah Marshall will be no easy task.

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Movie Review: The Wolf Of Wall Street (2013)

Based on the autobiography of convicted stockbroker Jordan Belfort, The Wolf Of Wall Street is concurrently an exuberant celebration and a devastating condemnation of the greed-addicted lifestyle lurking behind the stock market's promise of unimaginable riches.

In the late 1980s, a young Jordan (Leonardo DiCaprio) is introduced to the real business of trading stocks on Wall Street by his first boss Mark Hanna (Matthew McConaughey). The name of the game is not helping clients make money, but rather closing sales to earn commissions. When a downturn costs Jordan his promising job, he joins a scuzzy penny-stock trading firm on Long Island, and quickly establishes a reputation as a consummate salesman, peddling junk stocks and earning huge commissions. He gets rich, teams up with Donnie Azoff (Jonah Hill), and creates his own firm Stratton Oakmont, hiring scrappy low-lifes and training them to close sales.

Jordan's rise into a Wall Street superstar is meteoric, and his firm's aggressive sales tactics earn him the title Wolf Of Wall Street by Forbes magazine, which only enhances his reputation. His lifestyle becomes one of non-stop drug abuse and sexual debauchery. He meets and marries glamorous model Naomi Lapaglia (Margot Robbie), casually dumping first wife Teresa (Cristin Milioti) in the process. While enjoying his huge mansion of a house, a luxurious yacht, non-stop parties and never ending quantities of drugs, Jordan and Donnie steer Stratton Oakmont into the lucrative Initial Public Offering game, launching the stock of hot footwear brand Steve Madden. With Jordan using every illegal trick in the book to enrich himself ever more, FBI agent Patrick Denham (Kyle Chandler) starts sniffing around, and eventually Jordan has to decide to either fight or cooperate with the serious criminal investigations into his business.

Martin Scorsese creates a three hour masterpiece of depravity, exposing the corruption at the heart of Wall Street and the morally unconstrained race to unmitigated greed. The Wolf Of Wall Street is a horrifying yet seductive examination of the men who control much of the world's economic activity, and while the film itself avoids preaching and dwelling on the societal damage, the conclusions are obvious: the system is at the mercy of soulless maggots, and its long term prospects can only be gruesome.

The Wolf Of Wall Street is also magnificently hypnotic, Scorsese packing the movie with the glitzy trappings of immense wealth, as enjoyed by the morally void. Wild parties, nude girls, raunchy sex everywhere, the fastest cars, the most unique drugs, the most exclusive yachts, the largest mansions, and the most expensive threads: any material thing that money can buy, Jordan gets, and Scorsese vividly displays on the screen in overwhelming colour, volume, and size.

And yet Jordan wants more, upset that his average weekly take is less than $1 million, and seeking Swiss banks to hide his wealth and "ratholes" in the form of friends who hold stock for him to benefit from insider trading, understanding nothing of life except what his addictive personality continuously demands. The Wolf Of Wall Street becomes a study of a classic obsessive character as Jordan chases the next high, the next girl, the next million, and the next deal to scratch itches that will never be satisfied.

Leonardo DiCaprio dominates the screen, portraying Jordan with a single-minded zeal to worship ill-gotten wealth with not a single principled bone in his body. The supporting cast trails in his wake, Jonah Hill as Donnie representing the many flim flam type characters who benefitted from Jordan's ability to sell garbage to easily duped investors. Margot Robbie slips comfortably into the role of the trophy wife, perhaps the one person never fooled by Jordan, and a woman as superficial as her man in her life's desires. Matthew McConaughey has a one-scene but eternally memorable role, teaching Jordan what it means to be a man governed by the most base instincts.

The Wolf Of Wall Street is a breathless display of life on hyper fast forward, where everything serves the bottom line in a race to the lowest form of achievement: hawking rubbish.

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