One of the early summer’s more hotly anticipated mainstream flicks (and rightly so I can say, having seen it), director Jon Favreau’s Iron Man screens at the Aero Theatre on Thursday night, May 1, at 7:30 p.m., to be followed by a Q&A and discussion with Favreau. The movie, centering around a dissolute industrialist, the brilliant, sardonic Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), who builds a heavily weaponized suit of armor and becomes a superhero after a near-death incident, will release nationwide on May 2, from Paramount; Jeff Bridges, Terrence Howard and Gwyneth Paltrow also star.
The Aero Theatre
is located at 1328 Montana Avenue in Santa Monica. While tickets for most events are available through Fandango, $20 tickets for this special screening will be available at the theatre only, with proceeds going to a special Aero Building Fund. For 24-hour recorded
information on directions and the Aero’s upcoming schedule,
phone (323) 466-FILM. To visit Iron Man‘s official web site, click here.
Sometimes perfectly met expectations are a great thing. Case in point: Baby Mama, starring Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. Written and directed by Michael McCullers, a Saturday Night Live veteran and co-writer on the last two Austin Powers flicks, the comedy reunites the former “Weekend Update” co-anchors, and lets them butt heads and play off one another in exactly the mode, tone and fashion one could have predicted from the trailer, or a logline synopsis of the plot. And that’s enough, that’s what best serves this concept and story.
Kate Holbrook (Fey), a newly promoted vice president for Round Earth, an organic market chain, feels her biological clock ticking. Thirty-seven years old and unmarried, Kate has everything else in her life in perfect order: a nice apartment in a tony section of Philadelphia, a pony-tailed guru of a boss, Barry (Steve Martin), who values her, and of course all the financial security that brings. After trying to conceive through artificial insemination, and being told her chances are slim, Kate considers adoption, but is put off by the wait.
She then turns to a surrogacy center run by Chaffee Bicknell (Sigourney Weaver), which sets up a meeting with Angie Ostrowiski (Poehler) and her common-law husband Carl (Dax Shepard). Impressed by both Kate’s “aura” and her bank account, Angie agrees to be her surrogate. When Angie’s pregnancy test brings good news, Kate goes into nesting mode, but her well-organized plans are thrown into disarray when Angie shows up at her doorstep after a fight with Carl. All of Kate’s structure and patience is tested by the loudmouthed Angie, an under-educated caffeine addict, and the working definition of a “downmarket” voter who would surely be targeted by Hillary Clinton in a direct-mail campaign. Naturally, there’s also a potential love interest, in the form of juice shop owner Rob Ackerman (Greg Kinnear).
Fey’s innate likability and self-effacing demeanor keep Kate from ever becoming shrewish or overbearing. Poehler of course specializes in playing rude, screwy and chaotic, and here she plays the sort of woman who is just a rung-and-a-half, maybe two rungs up the socioeconomic ladder from one of the chicks from Rock of Love. The pair’s shared chemistry is what makes the movie work, and gives it some lift. Martin, meanwhile, is also a hoot, “transferring [his] success” by touching foreheads and gazing wordlessly into his workers’ eyes. Baby Mama doesn’t have a lot of complications, but it is witty enough, well paced, and tailored to its stars’ strengths and charms, which is all that it need be, truth told. (Universal, PG-13, 99 minutes)
So I had coffee with Forgetting Sarah Marshall director Nicholas Stoller a week-plus ago, in advance of his movie’s release, for a forthcoming Q&A magazine piece. Some of it didn’t make the cut, naturally, so you’re getting some parceled out odds and ends. But really, when it includes exacting shop-talk about male nudity, how can you complain? To wit, another fun excerpt:
Brent Simon: So testing the movie, were you surprised by the crowds’ “penis reactions,” or were there any memorably funny ones?
Nicholas Stoller: You know, how much penis do you think is in our movie? Like, how many seconds?
BS: Maybe like two.
NS: You’re good. Most people [say] like 10 or 15 seconds. It’s two-and-a-half seconds. Our funniest thing [was] in focus groups — guys would get like, “Why was the penis up there for 20 minutes?” Like, really angry, but also in that hilarious and awesome homophobic way, and also slightly turned on or confused about their own sexuality — like, “I am so angry you showed us a penis!”
BS: “I was not expecting that! That was not part of the deal for this movie!”
NS: Exactly. But of course the girls didn’t give a shit. The worst was that they might roll their eyes and say, whatever, it was a dumb joke — and they’re not wrong! But I thought we might have walk-outs on the penis. We didn’t. The only time we had walk-outs was the pig-killing scene. …Still, we tested it to the nth degree, it was almost scientific. You know, there’s a flash at the end, and we showed three flashes during the break-up. We tested four flashes in the break-up, and by the fourth flash the audience is kind of like, “All right, we’ve had enough.” We tested two flashes, and with two flashes it just wasn’t charged enough, the audience wasn’t on edge in the way that you are during a break-up — albeit they were on edge because they thought they were going to see Jason’s penis again. So we settled on three. Also, when he stands up from the couch, that’s 13 frames of penis, and we cut it to 10 frames, but you couldn’t read that it was a penis, so we added back in three frames, which as you know is just a millisecond. In total, 83 frames of penis.
BS: Very scientific indeed, as you said — and comedy’s “rule of three” is again proven out. So on a giant editing bay screen, how much time did you spend looking at Jason’s member?
Made for only $9 million, and released in the summer of 2004 the week after The Bourne Supremacy, as rib-nudging counter-programming to the seriousness of both The Manchurian Candidate and M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, New Line’s raunchy, pot-driven teen comedy Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle may be one of the more simultaneously unlikely and inspired movies to spawn a spin-off in the past decade-plus.
After courting high school and college kids in coded fashion (“Fast food, high times” was the poster’s tagline), the movie grossed a respectable $18 million in theaters. But it became a true sensation on DVD, where a cultish following developed around the wild hijinks of the two namesake New Jersey pals (John Cho and Kal Penn) as they attempted to sate a case of the munchies, and in the process crossed paths with both a cheetah and the erstwhile Doogie Howser, M.D. — Neil Patrick Harris, playing an obscenity-spouting, drugged-up, hyper-masculinized version of himself.
Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay ups the ante even further. Picking up right at the conclusion of the first movie, the guys head to Amsterdam to track down Harold’s crush, Maria (Paula Garcés). En route, they bump into Kumar’s former girlfriend Vanessa (One Tree Hill‘s Danneel Harris), now engaged. After Kumar’s smokeless, battery-operated bong is mistaken for a bomb, though, he and Harold are assumed to be terrorists, and shipped off to Guantanamo Bay. Harsh forms of subjugation that even former Justice Department official John Yoo couldn’t have crafted a loophole memorandum around seemingly await the pair, but they escape, and make their way back to the States.
On the lam, they make their way west to Texas. The intent is to seek help from Vanessa’s fiancé, and make good on his professional connections; Kumar has the secret intention, though, of busting up their marriage. It’s not long before a chance reunion with Neil Patrick Harris occurs. Meanwhile, the entire time, federal agent Ron Fox (Rob Corddry, above right, playing one of the most brazenly racist film characters in recent memory) is feverishly hunting down Harold and Kumar. He finally catches them, but they again escape his grasp, and end up meeting with the president, and helping him work through some daddy issues.
The writers of the first movie, Hayden Schlossberg and Jon Hurwitz, make their joint (get it?) directorial debut here, and improve upon the original in virtually every way. Naturally, things are driven by some of the same coarse, rapid-fire patter (i.e., “Shotgun anus!”), and certain other structural similarities remain; in both movies the guys have a moment with nature, and come across a strange married couple living in seclusion. And then there’s Neil Patrick Harris, who is an integral, if zonked part of the films’ careening, out-of-left-field charm.
Stoner flicks of course have a rich screen history all their own, from Dude, Where’s My Car?, How High and Half Baked to of course just about anything starring Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong. But that’s just a small part of the world of Harold and Kumar — the spark to their fire. While weed was a big part of the comic misunderstandings that fueled the plot of the first movie, and works in similar fashion here as well, the fact is that both films operate on a higher plane than an awful lot of sludgy spliff flicks.
The drugs — and in particular Kumar’s voracious appetite — are a means to an end. They’re what fuels the outrageousness of the scenarios (a “bottomless party” in Miami, Harris branding a prostitute, sky-diving to safety over Crawford, Texas), and otherwise allows Schlossberg and Hurwitz to tackle sacred cows and semi-topical socio-political humor. The relationship at the core of both movies is essentially a riff on The Odd Couple, with Kumar living sloppily and in the moment, and Harold fretting about consequences.
The nerviness of the film is impressive. There’s a KKK beer party in the woods, and Corddry’s agent attempts to wheedle a confession out of an African-American by opening up a can of grape soda and pouring it out on the ground; the ethnicity of its leads gives its makers some extra leeway, no doubt. But Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay mostly works not because of its baser instincts (of which there is plenty of indulgence), but because it’s well cast, wildly written and full of good, old-fashioned comedic friction. That’s a formula for success, no matter the age, ethnicity or drug intake level of your protagonists. (New Line, R, 100 minutes)
It’s a happy 20th birthday to Sara Paxton, of Superhero Movie and, err… Sydney White and Aquamarine? Her hotness increases by several multiplied factors based on the fact that she wears it well… that is to say, doesn’t yet seem fully aware of it.
