Daily Archives: September 17, 2013

Jake Johnson on Alcohol, the Wandering Male Eye and More

Interviews


Jake Johnson is a married man. Recently, however, he’s been logging some major screen time stumbling across more blurred lines than Robin Thicke. On the Fox comedy New Girl, which enjoys its third season premiere tonight, his character Nick has finally escaped the gravitational pull of a manipulative ex-girlfriend and consummated a lengthy flirtation with Zooey Deschanel‘s bubbly, optimistic Jess, one of his roommates.

In director Joe Swanberg’s Drinking Buddies, meanwhile, Johnson plays Luke, an amiable, bearded thirtysomething who, despite being in a long-term relationship with Jill (Anna Kendrick), has one of those friendships with coworker Kate (Olivia Wilde) that feels like it’s teetering on the precipice of something more. Given that they work at a craft brewery with liberal policies of workplace imbibing, that makes for a decidedly slippery slope. For Playboy, I recently sat down with Johnson to discuss alcohol, the work wife, the wandering male eye, and the perils of mixing alcohol with the work wife and the wandering male eye. The conversation is a fun and interesting one, so click here for the read.

Hell Baby

Film Reviews


A disappointingly scattershot, sigh-inducing comedy from the creators of Reno 911!, Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon, Hell Baby represents a slog through improvisation run amok. A horror comedy that doesn’t make hay out of lampooning the genre (which is totally fine), Garant and Lennon’s joint feature directorial debut seems downright allergic toward anything that might be construed as a legitimate throughline, lest that somehow be interpreted as “selling out,” and not subversive enough.



The story centers around Jack and Vanessa (Rob Corddry and Leslie Bibb), a married couple, expecting their first child, who move into a possibly haunted and certainly rundown house in an unsafe borough in New Orleans. There’s a weird dude, F’resnel (Keegan Michael Key), living in a crawl space in their home who tells them about all the murders committed there; then a grotesque old lady, Mrs. Nussbaum (Alex Berg), appears out of nowhere and sexually assaults a confused Jack, who fights her off, apparently killing her.

While this puts two inept detectives (Rob Huebel and Paul Scheer) in Jack and Vanessa’s orbit, the former also begins to wonder if his wife — who’s taken to spiking his drinks with paint thinner — may have forces other than just prenatal stress acting upon her. Garant and Lennon, meanwhile, portray Vatican exorcists dispatched by Rome to, like, solve a mystery of in-utero evil or something.

Hell Baby is “just” a comedy, sure, but there’s simply not a lot of tension, discipline or consequence to the story, really. It’s just a bunch of lowest-common denominator wankery, without any sort of unifying aesthetic. (Even “dumb” generally coalesces around a couple central ideas.) It doesn’t help that it’s 70-plus minutes before Jack learns that Vanessa is possessed, but even when she slashes his stomach (offscreen, weirdly), there’s no immediate escalation of action. Editorially and structurally, the film is a huge mess, which makes its 94-minute running time often feel interminable.

Garant and Lennon‘s movie is also characterized by a screenplay that embraces digression, and scorns backstory. The latter is fine, but the tangential asides and other comedic indulgences herein don’t have the same warped silliness of something like Billy Madison, Happy Gilmore or Andy Samberg’s Hot Rod, which I underestimated upon its theatrical release. When Hell Baby descends into one of its extended superfluous riffs — Po Boy sandwich eating montages, group puke fests or juggling babies — it feels like a stalling technique as much as anything else. (And speaking of gratuitousness, as Vanessa’s Wiccan sister Marjorie, Riki Lindhome pops up to make a run at 2013’s Most Consecutive Seconds of Screen Nudity crown.)

The sad thing is that Hell Baby has some fine, funny folks in it. The array of familiar faces may make one want to take a flyer on this proudly oddball offering, but the curses you’ll be left uttering at the end won’t be of delight. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Millennium Entertainment, R, 94 minutes)