Film Review!
I am heart-broken: I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, and I can barely masturbate – I am about to massacre a Paul Rudd movie. Our chopper’s ready to lower down on the quarry. It’s one of those massive ones you can fit a Humvee into when an imperial dictator’s been misbehaving, but on this landing we’ve plumped for a mouthful of soldiers. I look across the space at the tragic expression on Chipo’s face – if I somehow haven’t made the grade, he is the ultimate picture of regret right now, a soul-dead assortment of colours too sombre to have names. Michael couldn’t care less; he’s hooked up to an iPod full of cat-porn, trying to psyche himself up for bloodshed. Cat-porn makes him...angry.
An assault rifle is my new best friend, the reason I’m also wearing a sash of ammo; a nice haul of grenades represents my new circle of confidantes, other than the band of brothers surrounding me. When the battlefield apparent introduces itself – a camouflaged wasteland of self-assuredness, bad jokes, and deceptively pretty actresses – we’re like the Americans approaching Iwo Jima, the Allies coming down on Normandy. Tension swells my toes in my boots, and I can’t believe my eyes; oh my God, OMG, and holy Thanksgiving niblets, Batman: I’m about to go Apocalypse Now on Paul Rudd’s ass.
When the trailers first started seeping out, the boys and I were dancing. Paul Rudd had finally snagged his big movie, and there was no Judd Apatow, Steve Carell or Seth Rogen in sight; there was finally an effort, a piece of cinematic chutzpah you could stand up and call a ‘Paul Rudd movie’. No more windy references that summoned the trenches of people’s papery memory, to that gloriously milk white guy with the oddly Freudian disposition. Given that his appearances on the Daily Show were always stellar, his shimmies always Sinatra-esque and his T-shirts sweetly ordinary, it was about freaking time.
In my excitement, I went so far as to suspend my infatuation with Sarah Palin, just so I could launch a wonderfully mediocre campaign for a Paul Rudd presidential push in 2012. Maybe we don’t have to go Apocalypse Now on Rudd’s ass; maybe we could go Saving Private Ryan on him, but everybody died in that one.
The political campaign is a work-in-progress, and so’s I Love You, Man, which we abandoned half-voluntarily after little more than an hour. There’s little one should find offensive about a movie called I Love You, Man, unless you’re homophobic and it happens to be set in Austria. At first glance, there’s nothing remotely offensive about I Love You, Man; on a whim, I’d probably return the sentiment. It’s got Jaime Pressley in it, Jason Siegel, that hot admin. employee Jim’s postponing Pan the receptionist with on The Office, and, oh, looky here, Jon Favreau. Did we by any chance mention Paul Rudd? All the marketing suggests you should recognise it as the first ‘bromance’ ever – not because it actually is, but because it’s the first rom-com (sorry: brom-com) to just come out and call itself that. They’re trying to be nice about it, really, but it still smacks of Columbus pulling one over the Indians.
Try out the adjective ‘milky’ on your tongue. Milky. The first five minutes of I Love You, Man are milky, but in a bad way – you know how a pint of milk will start to smell like morning breath somewhat, if you boil it too long? You may presume, like we did, that once Rudd’s character is done proposing to the hot admin. employee from The Office, you’ll be allowed to settle into a nice a nice neurotic bowl of corn-flakes. But the film just gets cheesier, ‘cause that jar of milk’s curdling very slowly.
Gouda, cheddar, mozzarella –it’s an absolute convention out here, of people called Kevin Claven whose diet of depressing news comes from their Voicemail, who shorten words like pleasure into ‘pleaj’, who update their significant others on every little thing going in or out of the microwave. The jokes in between would be pretty funny if it didn’t all feel like such a dental appointment, if “the waste of such a brilliant cast” (Chipo) didn’t sound like a group of Americans impersonating Americans.
When the F-word is employed, a flattering gesture meant to assure you you’re not just watching another PG-13, you’re going to feel like such an adult, unimpressed by a 10-year old’s seemingly daring attempts to get noticed. When it’s Jason Siegel’s turn, as he yells at an enormous man in the street to mind his “mind his own f_hole,” you can’t help but imagine Vince Vaughn making better use of the liberty. Speaking of Vince Vaughn, Jon Favreau looks pissed to be here, notwithstanding how pissed his character is already, and that’s probably because everybody’s playing the foil to somebody else – nobody’s taking charge of any scenes, except when Rudd rocket-pukes all over Favreau after a drunken poker game, which is so 2006. Like we’re supposed to believe any sane realtor eats that much oatmeal.
How do you review a movie you haven’t even finished seeing? You stumble out of the theatre gagging. Our work here is done.
POPCORN: We didn’t have any, but we might have cleared out half the box – and that’s just me being mathematically illiterate. A movie so far up its own rear-end it forgets to come up for air. Disappointing, depressing even, but at least it’s not all Paul Rudd’s fault.
