This Is the End (2013)

Take Yo Panties Off!

Based on the poster alone, I had no interest in seeing today’s movie.  I liked the people I saw on the poster, but I’ve seen them all in movies that were both great and awful, so the poster alone couldn’t really capture my attention.  But that’s why they make trailers.  When I started seeing the trailers for the movie, my desire to see it took to a sharp incline.  The trailer wasn’t laugh out loud funny, but that could be a good thing in this case.  The trailer should just show the potential for the movie; not spoil the best jokes.  And that’s what this trailer did.  Plus, the premise seemed fantastic.  But Friendboss Josh already had an appointment to see this movie with his girlfriend, the Whitney-Bird.  So we went down to the theaters to catch Man of Steel instead.  But that shit was sold out.  Good thing for me, Friendboss Josh values his friendshipbossship with me more than he values vagina, so we went to see This Is the End, written and directed by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, and starring Jay Baruchel, Seth Rogen, James Franco, Craig Robinson, Jonah Hill, Danny McBride, Emma Watson, Michael Cera, Jason Segel, David Krumholtz, Paul Rudd, Mindy Kaling, Martin Starr, Channing Tatum, Kevin Hart, Rihanna, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, and Aziz Ansari.

Jay Baruchel goes to Los Angeles to visit his friend Seth Rogen.  After a celebratory day of smoking weed and playing video games, Rogen suggests that the two of them go to a party at James Franco’s house, but Baruchel doesn’t want to go because he doesn’t know or like anyone at the party and worries about being left alone there.  Sure enough, upon arriving to the party Rogen goes off on his own, leaving Baruchel in uncomfortable conversations with people like Michael Cera, Emma Watson, and Rihanna.  Rogen and Baruchel walk down to a store to pick up some snacks, but their shopping is interrupted when blue beams of light grab some of the shoppers and drag them up to the heavens.  Then the fuckin’ apocalypse happens, instantly killing many of the celebrities at Franco’s party, leaving Rogen, Baruchel, Franco, Craig Robinson, and Jonah Hill alone in the house to fend for themselves.  They ration out what little supplies they have and go to sleep for the night.  When they wake up, they find that Danny McBride had crashed the party and fallen asleep in a bathroom upstairs, and had come down and prepared all of their food for breakfast.  How will this group of sheltered celebrities be able to survive the reckoning?

I feel like I won’t have very much to say about this movie.  What I will say is this: this is probably the best comedy I’ve seen in a very long time.  I just can’t think of very many funny things that I could put in a review about something that was keeping me laughing super consistently for the greater majority of the movie.  There was a moment to make me laugh out loud at least once every five minutes.  That’s one hell of a ratio!  I barely ever laugh in movies, so that should tell you just what I think about this movie.  I would say that it could be easily argued that the story was a little underwhelming.  It was mainly just an excuse to get these really funny people into situations they could improvise jokes about.  But a comedy doesn’t really need to blow you away with story.  One of my favorite comedies is Airplane! and that’s really all that movie is.  I’m not going to come back here and write a review about the fact that its story wasn’t spectacular when all it was trying to be was a comedy and it kept me laughing.

The cameos in this movie are crazy.  They have ridiculous celebrities in this movie.  I liked most of those people and was tickled to see them in this, and I even really liked the celebrities that I don’t normally like.  Rihanna had a funny moment with Michael Cera, Channing Tatum had an amazing joke, and even though I don’t like them, the Backstreet Boys reveal was pretty awesome, albeit unnecessary.  Jay Baruchel was a little whiny in the movie, but he was also plenty funny.  Seth Rogen was hilarious.  I did think that it didn’t make sense for people to act like he wouldn’t get into heaven if he used Jesus’ name in vain.  He’s Jewish!  They don’t care about Jesus!  James Franco had plenty of funny moments as well.  I especially liked the story he told about Lindsay Lohan thinking he was Jake Gyllenhaal and him telling her to call him the Prince of Persia.  Danny McBride is always a strange character for me.  He never really plays anyone likeable, but he’s really good at playing that character.  And he made a great joke about Franco being gay.  I would say if there were anything bad to say about the cast of this movie it would be that Emma Watson had too small of a part in the movie.  She was great in the movie, and the parts she was in were pretty hilarious, but I want to look at her at all times, and I also want to have a little resolution to what happened to her.  After she leaves, we never see her again.  I assume there’s no way she could go to heaven because she portrayed a witch in 8 movies, so that’s means she’s for sure Hell bound, but the movie never said for sure.

I really can’t do much in a review of This Is the End.  I cannot add funny to the funniest movie I’ve seen in a long time.  This movie was created by a bunch of professionally funny people, and I do this for free.  The story was an interesting idea, but a little simplistic, but who cares because it was mostly there to set up some really funny people being funny.  This movie kept me laughing all the way through, giving me only brief pauses to catch my breath so I wouldn’t die while watching it.  You definitely need to get out to see this movie as soon as you can.  I can’t imagine you’ll regret it.  This Is the End gets “The power of Christ compels you!” out of “I’d be pretty bummed if I don’t at least get a bite of the Milky Way.”

WATCH REVIEWS HERE!  YouTube  OTHER JOKES HERE!  Twitter  BE A FAN HERE!  Facebook  If you like these reviews so much, spread the word.  Keep me motivated!  Also, if you like them so much, why don’t you marry them?!

A Good Old Fashioned Orgy (2011)

If You’ll Excuse Me, I Can Feel the Blood Rushing Back Into My Sword

My inspiration for today’s movie was twofold.  First, I knew that at least three of the people that were in the movie were people that I find hilarious.  Second, it arrived from Netflix because I wasn’t paying good attention to my queue.  And, if there were to be a third thing, it would be that the word “orgy” is in the title, and I could watch this without feeling bad, as I do every time I watch porn.  The problem with the first reason is that I find those three people funny, but I’ve also been underwhelmed by the results of their involvement with a movie before.  How did they do this time?  We’ll find out in my review of A Good Old Fashioned Orgy, written and directed by Alex Gregory and Peter Huyck, and starring Jason Sudeikis, Michelle Borth, Tyler Labine, Lake Bell, Nick Kroll, Lindsay Sloane, Martin Starr, Angela Sarafyan, Leslie Bibb, Will Forte, Lucy Punch, Lin Shaye, David Koechner, and Don Johnson.

Eric (Jason Sudeikis) loves to throw giant elaborate parties at the house of his father, Jerry (Don Johnson).  Most of these parties he throws with his close friends from high school – Sue (Michelle Borth), Mike (Tyler Labine), Alison (Lake Bell), Adam (Nick Kroll), Laura (Lindsay Sloane), Glenn (Will Forte), Glenn’s wife Kate (Lucy Punch), Doug (Martin Starr), and Doug’s girlfriend Willow (Angela Sarafyan).  At Eric’s White Trash Bash, he meets Kelly (Leslie Bibb) and gets her number.  The next morning, Eric’s father tells him that he’s selling the house because he doesn’t need it anymore.  Realtor’s Dody (Lin Shaye) and Kelly are in charge of the sale.  Eric and Mike decide that they need to throw one last party, but it needs to be special.  After some brainstorming, Eric decides that the group’s last party should be an orgy.  Most of the group takes a while to come around to it, but eventually they are all in.

I went into this movie as a fan of Nick Kroll, Tyler Labine, and Jason Sudeikis from some of their other endeavors.  Though this movie did not change that, I found it underwhelming.  It’s not a bad movie, and there are one or two solid laughs in the movie, but that seems like it’s a bit low for something that is exclusively a comedy.  The other jokes were not painful failures at funniness; it just didn’t have anything good enough to make me laugh.  They got a lot of mileage out of uncomfortable situations such as a lady having a heated argument with her boyfriend on opposite sides of the bathroom door while another guy was on the toilet in the bathroom with her, or like having a conversation with a guy while he was preoccupied with having sex with a woman who should’ve stopped appearing naked on camera roughly 20 years ago.  I’ve also noticed an upsetting trend in comedies recently.  Far too many comedies recently are going for the shock value laugh of putting some wang up on screen.  Walk Hard did it, Forgetting Sarah Marshall did it, and this movie does it as well.  My problem with this isn’t just the fact that, as a straight man, I’ve no real interest in seeing dick.  I look at penises all the time … when I’m watching porn.  I don’t like being caught off guard by it.  Also, it just seems too easy.  It makes you shocked and uncomfortable and people tend to laugh as a release for that stuff, but that is not to be mistaken for something that’s actually funny.  Boobs and vagina being on display is rarely used as comedy by itself, so why should it be that just putting a penis on screen is comedy?  The only occasion I can think of that boobs by themselves were the joke was in the movie Airplane!, and that wasn’t the one of the only funny things in the movie.  …Perhaps I’ve talked about penis too much…  The movie does not disappoint with its title.  There is indeed a big orgy at the end of the movie.  It’s much sweeter and nicer than the orgies that I’m accustomed to.  It’s like if a group of friends that were really comfortable with each other decided to get down and dirty.  They would joke around while fucking, so it wasn’t as obscene as someone might expect going into it.  But I ultimately went into the movie looking for laughs, and found them few and far between.  I can find boobs much easier.

I like the people in the cast of this movie, but none of them really succeeded in doing much for me in this movie.  Jason Sudeikis seemed a lot like his character from SNL where he plays one of two assholes, along with Kristen Wiig.  And, though I really like those sketches, I didn’t find much of interest in his character.  He was just kinda douchey.  I’ve ranted over a particular movie that Tyler Labine was in before, playing a sweet and innocent hillbilly in Tucker and Dale vs. Evil.  He played it kind of stupid and sweet again in this one, but without the writing quality of the other movie, it never had much effect.  I was also all in for Nick Kroll, having loved his comedy special and his appearances on the Doug Loves Movies podcast, but this role was hardly a stretch for him.  He played a neurotic Jew.  What else is new?  I don’t really blame the cast for this movie not connecting with me, but I also can’t claim that any of them really connected with me.  All of the main cast females were attractive and did their parts, but none stood out.  There were a pretty good amount of nice-lookin’ boobs; I’ll give the movie that much.

Perhaps I expected too much because of my bias towards some of the cast members, but I found myself to be very underwhelmed by A Good Old Fashioned Orgy.  It wasn’t laughably bad, but nothing else was making me laugh either.  I liked the cast; I just didn’t connect with them in any way.  Sadly, I can’t really recommend this movie.  But, with comedy being so subjective, it’s hard to say what different people will find funny.  This movie just wasn’t for me.  A Good Old Fashioned Orgy gets “Endurance training.  For Labor Day” out of “This is the worst orgy ever.”

Let’s get these reviews more attention, people.  Post reviews on your webpages, tell your friends, do some of them crazy Pinterest nonsense.  Whatever you can do to help my reviews get more attention would be greatly appreciated.  You can also add me on FaceBook (Robert T. Bicket) and Twitter (iSizzle).  Don’t forget to leave me some comments.  Your opinions and constructive criticisms are always appreciated.