Fleshing out their unreleased 2007 short film Jay and Seth vs. The Apocalypse, multi-hyphenate Seth Rogen and co-producer Jay Baruchel delve into end times with the winning, unabashedly vulgar This Is the End, in which a bunch of comedic Hollywood actors, playing themselves, cope with panic and paranoia while Armageddon unfolds outside around them. Befitting the backslapping nature of its casting, there are inside jokes and side-winding conversational riffs aplenty, but Rogen and his cowriter-director, Evan Goldberg, honor the conceit in all its zonked-out glory, studding their movie with slapstick gore, eccentric supernaturalism, some skewering of disaster and horror movie conventions, and lots of smart digs at particularly masculine vanity and insecurity.
While a lot of the humor in This Is the End trades in baser instincts (there are drugs, projectile vomiting and even point-of-view footage from a decapitated head, and an array of phalluses also make appearances, including the largest glimpsed onscreen since Watchmen), all the irreverent bickering and lashing out leads to some terrifically funny bits. And the movie gets in enough shots at horror films and the recent glut of siege tales to partially qualify as genre parody. Mostly, though, This Is the End is a relationship picture, with an improbably sincere ribbon of fraternal feeling and uplift. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (Sony, R, 106 minutes)
Daily Archives: June 11, 2013
Dances With Films: Tumor: It’s in the System
A recent Los Angeles premiere at the 16th annual Dances With Films, Tumor: It’s in the System joins a considerable slate of contemporary documentaries — inclusive of Peter Nicks’ raw, verité-style The Waiting Room — offering up a damning assessment of different elements of the American health care system. Here it’s a look at how potential alternative treatments (like divisive Gerson therapy) and even cures for cancer have been suppressed since the early 1900s — the implication being that some combination of the bureaucratic regulatory system and the rapacious self-interest of capitalism have combined to incentivize managed treatment of symptoms over the long-term health of the population.
Such material has the capacity to tip over into “black helicopter” territory fairly quickly, but co-directors Valerie McCaffrey and Cindy Pruitt, despite a fevered sense of advocacy that sometimes gets the better of their editorial plotting, do a generally good job of interweaving testimonials from an array of open-minded physicians and unusual survivors whose stories belie the myth that chemotherapy is the only — or indeed, even the best — way to combat cancer. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Become a Revolution Productions, unrated, 76 minutes)
Dances With Films: Kumpania
Hardcore fans of Dancing With the Stars may find ancillary enjoyment and reward in the nonfiction offering Kumpania, which just enjoyed a Los Angeles premiere at the 16th annual Dances With Films. A concise documentary look at flamenco dancing and music, director Katina Dunn’s movie is a subcultural curio invested with much depth of feeling. Those with a predetermined investment in its rhythms will want to get up and dance along. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Piece O’ Work Productions, unrated, 61 minutes)