MW on Movies: Due Date, Megamind and Fair Game

Due Date (Two and a Half Stars)

U. S.; Todd Phillips, 2010

An odd-couple road trip comedy about a wired-tight middle class architect (Robert Downey, Jr.) and an effete but slobby Hollywood-bound wanna be actor (Zach Galifianakis), thrown together on an impromptu cross-country drive from Atlanta to L.A., Due Date isn’t up to the best of its most obvious antecedents, Midnight Run and Planes, Trains and Automobiles — even if it compares favorably enough to Phillips‘ own 2000 comedy crash-out Road Trip.

I laughed at this movie, though not nearly as much as I did at Phillips’ last show, the stratospheric comedy hit The Hangover. And I thought Due Date had a tendency to try for too many Farrellyisms, to get too big and car-crashy explosive too soon, and to waste the virtuosic Downey and overstretch the newly omnipresent Galifianakis. It’s not bad, but too frequently, it’s not too good.

Due Date actually lost me somewhere around the Mexican border at Ciudad Juarez, which Downey‘s Peter Highman and Galifianakis’ Ethan Tremblay accidentally cross, falling into the hands of some descendants of Alfonso Bedoya who have gotten jobs as border guards. But the trip actually started to go south even earlier, when Ethan fell asleep at the wheel and flipped his rental car off a bridge on its roof somewhere west of Atlanta. Or maybe it was the over-cozy scene when Peter and Ethan curled up together on the front seat (Why? Nobody wants the back seat?) for a nighttime snooze, and Ethan started jacking off (his substitute for a sleeping pill) and his French bulldog with a sun collar started masturbating too. (Could Rin Tin Tin do that?)

It never lost me completely, and the audience around me were laughing regularly enough. Put it in the middle. “Due Date” at least has some character comedy and personality gags, and it also has Downey, which puts it ahead of most recent comedies.

Downey is a master at both humor and drama and their various hybrids, even when the script won’t back him up (as it often won’t here). With his haggard soulful eyes balancing his glib run-of-the mouth exasperation, he mostly nails Peter Highman, an expectant father summoned back to L. A. to witness the birth of his baby. (“High man.” Downey. Get it? Michelle Monaghan is the mom, another inducement).

Things are hectic and about to get worse. Just outside the airport entrance doors, Peter bumps into Galifianakis’ Ethan (“Tremblay” is his stage name) when Ethan’s car clips Peter’s Town Car and he loses a door. That’s a pretty strenuous joke for a meet-cute gag, and it exhibits Due Date‘s worst vice almost immediately: a tendency to crank up the mayhem too fast, and to go over the top too soon.

In the mix-up, the two future co-stars and road buddies scramble suitcases, and later Ethan gets them both thrown off the plane, when he sits behind Peter and starts babbling about terrorists and bombs, refusing to shut up despite frantic shushing form Peter. (A rather odd lapse in this post-9/11 era, though using the word “lapse” for one of Ethan’s endless screw-up’s is a misnomer. He proves to be a walking hoodoo catastrophe magnet.)

Peter, slowly losing his temper, has now also lost his luggage, his wallet, all his I.D. and credit cards and everything but a cute huggie-toy rescued for him by thoughtful Ethan, and they’ve also been both plastered on the “no-fly” security list. But he foolishly acquiesces when Ethan offers to give him a ride to L. A. in a rental car, and to pay all his expenses. Off go the boy-os, toward what mad adventures we can only wildly surmise — accompanied by that friendly French bulldog, Ethan’s medical marijuana (for glaucoma, he keeps insisting ) and a coffee can containing the ashes of Ethan’s recently cremated father. (I give you two guesses what the pay-off gag for that one is.)

Well, I don’t want to telegraph any more jokes. (The movie does them better.)

SPOILER ALERT, SORT OF

… But Juliette Lewis is around to help Ethan replenish his cannabis stash, there’s a waffle shop where we discover, naturally, that Ethan is allergic to waffles, Jamie Foxx turns up as Peter’s best friend Darryl, to validate the movie’s “I’m hip” credentials and lend them fresh wheels, and Danny McBride does a nifty funny-mean turn as a wheelchair vet working at Western Union who proves astonishingly unhelpful when Peter phones wife Sarah to wire some cash and Ethan pulls another boner (not an innuendo) by asking them to transfer the dough to the account of his nom d’etage Tremblay instead of his real moniker Ethan Slade. Then there’s a frantic police car theft and a breathless smoking engine race to L. A., where another door gets torn off (which must be a brilliant post-semiotic sign-and-meaning symbol for double castration). That last mess-up, seems to be amazingly ignored or forgiven by the LAPD and our generous neighbors south of the border, who are possibly too busy polishing their stinking badges and directing lost, wandering Minutemen somehow back to Arizona.

END OF SPOILER

Downey is one of my favorite thesps, and proof of his histrionic skills comes here conclusively when Ethan breaks out his weed, and Peter insists he‘s never touched the stuff. Wow! What an actor! Downey, like Jack Nicholson, has the ability to do brilliant slow burns and blowups, great rants and rattle-offs, and to immerse himself heavily in any movies’ fantasies, however demented. Even though I thought Peter succumbed to Ethan’s bizarre charms a bit early (the script‘s fault), he uses all that formidable acting hardware to make Peter a near-perfect neurotic straight man — in several senses of the word.

If only Galifianakis could match him. He was a terrific needy slob in The Hangover, and he can grab those laughs, but I couldn’t really figure Ethan out. Obviously he’s in charge of homoerotic humor, full-blown prissy nerdiness, Hollywood delusions, class dissonance and dumb stunts here. But Galifianakis keeps shuttling between slob and effete modes, and he often seems to be dreaming up and doing stuff just to annoy us, drive Peter crazy and mollify his director. (Check out John Candy in Trains for the way to shape and pitch this kind of role.)

There’s also an over-reliance on Galifianakis” stomach for extreme sight gags, though I realize they may be trying to establish his tummy as his signature, like Jimmy Durante‘s nose, Betty Grable’s legs or Jennifer Love Hewitt’s boobs. But it doesn’t quite play. Galifianakis can punch up the gags and go dopey-grungy with anyone. But, unlike John Candy’s grating but soft-hearted buttinsky in Planes, Trains and Automobiles, an underrated classic, Galifianakis doesn’t really give this role honest poignancy, which it needs. (How about one scene where Ethan talks about the pain of being a freak and an outsider, or reminisces about his dad in the coffee can, and Peter really hears him?)

Comedy sometimes needs the shadow of its opposite, anguish, to work right. But, even when Ethan rips off a dramatic dry-eyed crying jag for Peter in a men‘s room, or goes all emotional in the movie‘s teary big scene in the Grand Canyon (no, it doesn’t involve onanism), he doesn’t go over the edge. I thought he could also use a few moments of early Gene Wilder-level hysteria, something to throw things even more off-kilter. But Galifianakis always seems too much in control of the role, too torn between slobbiness and flamboyance, a bit apart from his own nuttiness.

There are other good scenes. Lewis and McBride both shine in their showcase roles, and Jamie Foxx sure makes the movie look hipper, even if, as I wanted him to, he doesn’t sing Ray Charles‘ “Hit the Road Jack.“ But the script — by Phillips, Alan R. Cohen, Alan Freedland, and Adam Sztykiel — could certainly cut Zach some more dramatic slack. This is the kind of show whose budget is so big that Ethan can crack a joke about how Two and a Half Men was the show that made him want to be an actor, and Phillips can actually bring on Jon Cryer and Charlie Sheen for a capper. (“Charlie, Charlie You don’t understand….I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender.”)

Phillips, who once made a documentary called Frat House, and who directed Will Ferrell, Luke Wilson and Vince Vaughn in the Back to the Fraternity comedy Old School, has a bent for this kind of high-and-horny frat-boy humor. Maybe he’s the king of it — and it’s good to be the king (of something). But in Due Date, he’s up against our formidable memories of Candy and Steve Martin in Plains, Trains and of Charles Grodin and Robert De Niro in Midnight Run, not to mention Lemmon and Matthau (or Randall and Klugman) in The Odd Couple.

It’s not that his actors aren’t up to the challenge, or at least part of the challenge. But Due Date doesn’t have a sufficiently new take, heavy enough character insight, or wicked enough comic chops. It’s a little too much “Downey! Galifianakis! Together again for the first time,” or even “Downey’s back and Galifianakis has got him.” Merely introducing these guys to each other and spending a lot of money, or flipping cars off bridges, or going all Judd Apatow on us, isn’t enough. As they said in “Damn Yankees,” “You‘ve gotta have heart.” (Even if the way to that heart is though Galifianakis’ stomach.)

Due Date just goes too far, too fast, and is too automatic and undercooked on one end of its odd couple attack. But there are worse ways to spend a couple of hours. Saw 3D, for example. (Aaaargh!!!) Paranormal Activity 2, for another. (Errrrgh!!) Life as We Know It for a third. (Yeccccch!) By comparison, Phillips’ movie is like an old buddy who shows up, tells some good jokes, tells some groaners, farts a little, barfs the beer, doesn’t always flush the toilet, but is basically a good guy. (Just keep him away from your girlfriend.)

The movie, by the way, obviously as part of a conspiracy to change the country’s marijuana laws, treats the administering of Ethan’s glaucoma cure as a sort of epiphany. Look at Due Date’s release date and the California pot law vote! (“How does that tie in to your post-Obama Commie conspiracy? Incredibly obvious, isn’t it, Mandrake?”) But that’s okay with me too. The whole country may have to get stoned on something to survive the Republicans‘ latest hugely financed return from the dead, supposedly to rescue us from all the catastrophes they, like Ethan, caused in the first place. (Dracula has risen from the grave and his name is John Boehner.) It just goes to show that 260 plus million dollars can buy anything — even a Due Date or two.

Actually, to digress even further, and mess up this review even more: When I first heard of the tea party movement, (“Fluoride, Mandrake! Children‘s drinking water!) I didn’t really think it was a transparent sham set up by Dick Armey and others, and propagated by Fox News, mercifully released from their old dumb, useless, “Fair and Balanced” kick. (I can no longer stand idly by and watch Communist subversion, Communist indoctrination and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of out precious bodily fluids!”) No, I thought it was a genuine new grass roots movement to legalize ganja (tea in hipster argot, after all).

We’d probably all be better off it was. Due Date may not be another Midnight Run, but at least it’s funnier than the G. O. P., funnier than Michelle Bachman or Mitch McConnell, or that congressman who was prancing around in a German Nazi uniform. (Well, maybe not funnier than Mitch McConnell.) Less tragic too — even if unsuccessful tea-partier and so-called Witch of the East Christine O‘Donnell does want to put an end to Obama-care and masturbation. Even for French bulldogs? (“I first became aware of it, Mandrake, during the act of physical love. Women sense my power, but I deny them my essence…”)

By the way, why didn’t Peter just take a train?

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Megamind (Three Stars)

U.S.: Tom McGrath, 2010

You should have a pretty good time at Megamind, a DreamWorks 3D feature cartoon from director Tom McGrath (of the Madagascar movies), that satirizes superhero comics and, like Despicable Me, tells things from the villain‘s point of view.

Of course it’s a villain — initially a nasty little blue braniac bad scientist with a hatchet face and beady eyes, named Megamind and voiced by Will Ferrell — who has more strings to his bow than just villainy. Like the supercad in Despicable Me, Mega has his good side. And he even discovers, after finally vanquishing and apparently destroying his longtime superhero nemesis, Metroman (Brad Pitt), that he misses the Superguy and that villainy doesn’t mean much if you don’t have a hero to bash and maul and try to destroy every day or two.

After all, these two go back a long way, somewhat like Superman and Luthor (or The Prankster, or Mr. Mxyztplk), like Batman and the Joker (or the Penguin), like Spider-Man and Doctor Octopus. And they share a kind of joint saga of super-parallelisms. Metroman, like Superman and Megamind, came to Earth in a spaceship from a distant planet, but Superman (or actually, Superboy) was raised by a good solid Midwestern farming family, the Kents — while Metroman grew up rich, and Megamind was raised by criminals, a clear case of environment determining degrees of supergood or superbad. No wonder they can’t stop fighting each other; they’re superbrothers under the skin. There, but for the grace of Dreamworks, go I…

Megamind (the name was borrowed from a Japanese comic strip) is also a villain who finds he has a heart, who grows to dig and woo heroine Tina Fey as intrepid TV reporter Roxanne Ritchie, and who also has a cute sidekick, Minion (David Cross), a whirling, whisking fish in a robot spaceman’s suit and head-bowl helmet. (Remember Robby the Robot in Forbidden Planet? Remember Phil Tucker’s great God-awful mess of a movie, Robot Monster? Then you gotta love Minion). Finally, desperate for kicks, Mega decides he has to whip up another superhero, so he turns a nerdy cameraman named Hal into superdude Titan (played by Jonah Hill, cooking), to make life mean something again.

In other words, bad needs good and vice versa. Quite a heavy moral for a kid‘s picture — although, like many feature cartoons, this one isn’t just for kids. Or adults, whether superhero or supervillain-inclined. It’s for anyone who ever picked up a superhero comic, or wanted to, or will some day — or who looked up at the starry night and shook a fist at the whole black, blazing, endless super-universe and cried “Kryptonite be damned! I‘ll fight for truth and justice and the American way, even if I can’t raise ten million dollars for TV campaign attack ads!”

One of the things about comic superheroes that makes them work so well, is that they’re not always super. The classic superguys almost all had secret identities, often seemingly unsuper humans who got pushed around, or were “mild-mannered,” like Clark Kent, or were vulnerable kids themselves like troubled Peter Parker (Spider-Man) or zippy Billy Batson (Captain Marvel).

SPOILER ALERT

Metroman has no secret identity I could see and neither does Megamind. Mostly, they’re just non-schizo, straight-up super people. But Titan (or Tighten, if you want to believe imdb) starts out as nerdy Hal the sexless cameraman with a crush on sexy Roxanne, and when he’s in a position to realize his fantasies, he goes psycho. So much for nerd fantasies. At the end of the movie though, everyone begins to have a secret identity of sorts and they start morphing into each other, in a series of clever surprise gags.

END OF SPOILER

Of the actors, Tina Fey, Pitt, Hill and Cross all seem to match up perfectly — and Ben Stiller, J. K. Simmons and Justin Theroux are also around productively, and so is McGrath himself, who scorches up the soundtrack as an aristocrat named Lord Scott and a bewildered prison guard, whose prisoners keep changing shapes.

Actually, the only voice I sometimes had problems with was Will Ferrell, who’s been cast against type as Megamind instead of his trademark lecherous phonies and bewildered doofusses, and who could use a little more pizzazz and Vincent Price style sinister hamming at the start. But, to be fair, Gene Hackman wasn’t really right as mad inventor Lex Luthor, in the Donner-Lester Superman series. (It was the role Telly Savalas was born to play.) And yet now, for most movie fans of that era and afterwards, Hackman is Luthor. So by the same token Ferrell may be Megamind, just as Cross is Minion and Jonah Hill is Titan, or Tighten, or whatever.

What can you say? Megamind certainly won’t change your life, unless you’re a troubled super villain, or an exploited minion, or a psycho with a camera. But it’s a funny movie and also a visually spectacular one. (The settings look like Fritz Lang gone a little Chuck Jones). It uses 3D imaginatively, cracks some funny jokes (not too many, but enough), and ends with an avalanche of action. It isn’t as snazzy and creative as The Incredibles, but so what? It isn’t as snazzy and creative as La Dolce Vita either. And I’ll freely admit it isn’t as good as Despicable Me. But then, sauerkraut isn’t as good as chocolate cake, unless you like sauerkraut.

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Fair Game (Three Stars)

U.S.; Doug Liman, 2010

The movies always do something well in every period, even the Eighties, and one of the things they do best right now is bio-dramas. (They’re also good at fantasy adventures, neo-noir thrillers and feature cartoons.) Fair Game, in which director Doug Liman dramatizes the Valerie Plame-Joe Wilson story, based on their separate memoirs, is a good example, even if it’s disappointing in several key ways.

It’s an almost formulaic political bio-drama, but the formula isn’t a bad one. Basically, this is a good-hearted, well-done show, crisply and knowledgably written, sympathetically directed and extremely well-acted — by Naomi Watts as Valerie, Sean Penn as Joe, and a strong supporting cast that includes Bruce McGill, Noah Emmerich, Anand Tiwari, Adam Lefebvre (as Karl Rove) and David Andrews as Lewis “Scooter” Libby, and, as themselves, George Bush, Dick Cheney and Condoleeza Rice. (Some of the names in the cast list are partly redacted and I hasten to add that almost none of the real-life stars would have had anything to do with this movie if they could help it, though it’s their best work.) As Cheney hit-man Scooter Libby, Andrews is so good that maybe Libby should hire Andrews to be him for a while, whenever he wants an impromptu vacation. (“Hey, Dave, thanks a lot. Leaving Friday for a couple of days hunting with Dick. The key is under the mat. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”)

But the Plame-Wilson-Libby-Rove affair is no laughing matter. It’s still a shocking story, and I‘m amazed that there are still people who can apologize for the Bush administration on this one, and also try to give them a pass on their preemptive pre-”nucular“ antics, and try to demonize Wilson and Plame, or call them “traitors.” (Maybe Wilson will be attacked all over again now, just because Sean Penn played him in a movie.)

The real-life Plame was a longtime C. I. A. operative, with a lot of agents in the field, including (this movie says, or dramatizes) some crucial ones in Iraq. Wilson was an ex-ambassador and adviser/consultant who had investigated for and briefed the U. S. government on the so-called “Yellowcake from Niger” rumor, and concluded it was almost certainly a crock. Wilson, a feisty guy, then sat through Bush’s tense speech recounting the road to doomsday and the “mushroom cloud” awaiting us all unless we did what he wanted us to: invade Iraq and uncover the supposed Weapons of Mass Destruction hidden under every sand dune, or secreted there, someplace, somewhere. Wilson became incensed and wrote a New York Times op-ed piece saying it was all a load of baloney, at least from his angle.

Truth has consequences, of course. What followed was the famous Robert Novak column, outing Valerie as a C. I. A. officer, ending her career, damaging her marriage and her and her husband’s lives and spewing heavy negative implications (many on that paragon of creative journalism, Fox News), mainly that Valerie pulled strings to get Joe the W. M. D. gig, and that they were a couple of rogue liberals anyway, and wasn’t she really just a secretary? (And Joe a soda jerk?) Karl Rove allegedly told MSNBC’s Chris Matthews Valerie was “fair` game,” a frightening thought in the era of sportsman/citizen Cheney.

That’ll show ‘em. Lousy little traitors. Creepy little Com-sumps. Lippy little pinheads. Mess with the best and die like the rest! Were phrases like that running through the hearts and minds of Scooter Libby (Andrews), Karl Rove (Lefebvre) and Dick Cheney (himself) as they contemplated the “disloyalty“ of the Wilson’s? We’ll never know. They’ll never tell. And remember to catch Karl, current frequent commentator on Fox News.

But somebody (Dick Armitage, he claims) leaked to Novak, and somebody decided that Novak should be leaked to, and soon both Valerie and Joe were twisting in the wind. The rest of the movie shows how they survived, and how the truth came out, thanks to Attorney General Ashcroft and a bulldog of a prosecutor named Patrick Fitzgerald.

By the way the WMD‘s are still missing. But I’ve heard unconfirmed reports from unnamed British spies and unidentified, unreliable journalistic sources that they were moved from the dunes of Iraq to Lebanon to somewhere in Antarctica, and are now probably hidden in the White House attic, next to the shredded U. S. Constitution, and an autographed copy of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, awaiting use in a full scale assault on the ladies’ gun club of Bent Barrel, Texas. We may be safe though. Nobody can figure out how they work.

SPOILER ALERT

The movie of Fair Game is oddly constructed. Written by the British team of Jez Butterworth and John-Henry Butterworth, it skitters at first through fact and what may be fiction, then settles down for a long engrossing stretch as Wilson talks and the White House strikes back, and the couple face a vicious battering by the government and the friendly media (especially, of course, Fox). Then it takes a huge leap from an emotional father-daughter scene between Valerie and Sam Plame (played by Sam Shepard), to the end of the story, the convictions (two on perjury for Libby), to the credits and a shot of the real Valerie on the 2007 congressional witness stand.

In the process, the movie skips past almost all the legal battle and throws away our chance to see just a little more comeuppance for these guys — which I think was a mistake. (Was anything cut?)

END OF SPOILER

Watts and Penn are both excellent. Both capture the professional savvy of the Wilson’s, and the drama of their disrupted patrician comfort zone and marital battles, as well as Valerie‘s accelerating unease and Joe‘s increasing anger. Watts never suggests an actress stepping into or out of a role; nor does she seem overdressed and over-styled for the part. (At the credits, we see the real life Valerie taking the oath and testifying to Congress, and she‘s just as blonde and glamorous as Watts.) Instead, the actress suggests, with great economy and a mastery of undercurrents and subtext, exactly the look and feel of a woman used to power and privilege, trying to do a hellishly difficult job while her world explodes around her.

As for Penn, he has Joe‘s brainy manner, quietly combative mood and wavy, gray-streaked hairdo, and a hint of much of what lies beneath it. It’s crucial for Penn to seem both stubborn and absolutely straight in this role, and he does, he is. This character is about as far as you can get from ebullient gay San Francisco politician Harvey Milk (the role that won Penn his second Oscar): stern, unsmiling, a bit testy but knitted-together, and firmly part of the establishment –which is about to screw him and his wife.

There’s a tendency to review Penn’s politics and his past youthful surly public image more than his movies whenever another one comes out, which is also what sometimes happens to Penn’s usually Republican director (on Mystic River) and admirer Clint Eastwood — and which is even understandable here in a movie with a political subject, made mostly by liberals whose agenda is to expose a case of right-wing establishment perfidy. But that kind of judgment is unfair, unbalanced. From my observation, the actor isn’t like either Harvey or Joe or the grim, unforgiving guy in Mystic River. Maybe bits of him are like all three, but he can draw them out at will, use them, and assay almost every nuance possible in all of these guys, and more.

Penn’s politics are his own business. (So are Watts‘s.) But he is a consummate actor, a consummate pro, one of the best there ever was. Accept it, Penn-haters. Live with it. Or mess with the best and die like the rest.

Doug Liman, who also acts here as his own cinematographer, has directed one preposterous but sexy comedy thriller (Mr. and Mrs. Smith), one unlikely but engrossing political thriller (The Bourne Identity, from Robert Ludlum), and now this all-too-likely political bio-thriller/domestic drama. Of them all, Bourne works best as a movie, but I’m glad Fair Game was made. I just wanted more legal thrills, more comeuppance. It doesn’t come as much as it should in life, so the movies shouldn’t squander the opportunities to do honestly what they do best, to mess with the worst.

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