Friendship (2024)

Director: Andre DeYoung

Cast: Tim Robinson, Kate Mara, Jack Dylan Grazer, Paul Rudd

Have I Seen it Before: Nope.

Did I Like It: If you haven’t watched Robinson’s superlative Netflix series I Think You Should Leave, I wonder why you’re coming to see this film, and I wonder if it would work for you. Robinson has a comedic voice unlike anyone now or before. It can take a second to calibrate to his perfect picture of the modern man dealing with the frustration of existing via expulsions of non sequitur and rage. You should really go watch that show. It’s great!

I write those preceding sentences and realize that there should be plenty of moments to get eased into Robinson’s style. It probably still wouldn’t work entirely. It didn’t for me, sadly.

It’s entirely possible that Robinson’s persona doesn’t work in a longer form. The bubbling up of his ire and confusion can’t sustain itself, or at least can’t do so with consistently being as funny as he clearly can be. He works better as a firecracker of comedy. He may have been built for sketch comedy.

Maybe it’s because Robinson only performs and didn’t write any of the material here. I tend to believe that assessment more than the long term versus short term of it all. His sitcom Detroiters managed to capture that same level of magic. The writers are imitating his style, and while Robinson can play this character, there isn’t much more than a journeymen’s effort on display.

The film isn’t without its charms. It does manage to depict—if not quite elevate—the quiet desperation of middle class life in the the 21st century. It also makes a valiant effort at deconstructing the forever-young myth of Paul Rudd. Even if he wears a bald cap*, he’s willing to make himself the butt of the joke, and that’s always something nice to see from a movie star.

*Is it possible that what Rudd might actually look like?

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024)

Director: Gil Kenan

Cast: Paul Rudd, Carrie Coon, Finn Wolfhard, Mckenna Grace

Have I Seen it Before: I once had a VHS filled with old episodes of The Real Ghostbusters and so, yeah, I may have seen the whole thing many, many times before.

Did I Like It: That last statement will make you think that I did, in fact. not like the latest Ghostbusters film, but let’s get a few things straight before we proceed: I’ve never disliked a Ghostbusters film. Never.

What I find most shocking about this film is that I wasn’t at all excited about. I enjoyed Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021) (see above) but the prospect of more time watching ghosts get busted barely registered for me. Just a few short years ago, the prospect of seeing Murray, Aykroyd, and Hudson once again fill the firehouse would have gotten me to line up for a week beforehand. Now, I kind of wanted to see it, and Lora and I didn’t have anything on the schedule for Saturday afternoon of opening weekend*.

I’m just sort of ambivalent. Some people despise it, and I don’t disagree with what bugged them about it, but I don’t think I can get too worked up about a film that’s probably underwhelming. (I think something about The Flash (2023) might have broken me.)

Oddly enough, some of my quibbles with Afterlife were actually addressed here. We’re presented with a new Big Bad. No one cares about Zuul, no matter what they might say. The original surviving Ghostbusters are more than just glorified cameos, aside from Murray, who barely shows up in the movie and perpetually gives the impression that he’d like to sneak just outside of frame, if only no one would bother to notice.

The real problem? The thing that could have made me a believer in the movie despite my ambivalence going in? It needed to be funnier.

*Now that I think about it, I had roughly the same level of interest in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantummania (2023). Is it possible this an example of some unfortunate side effect of Paul Rudd?

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023)

Director: Peyton Reed

Cast: Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Jonathan Majors, Michelle Pfeiffer

Have I Seen it Before: Na.

Did I Like It: As a reframed high-pulp adventure with its protagonist and beating heart being a gender-swapped Obi-Wan Kenobi played by Michelle Pfeiffer, this third Ant-Man and thirty-first MCU film is exactly what I could want from two hours worth of diversion.

Sadly, though, this nearly perfect pitch for a movie only makes up at best half of the runtime presented. Even in those scenes where Pfeiffer reigns supreme, I don’t think I’ve yet to see a star more bored with the movie around him than Michael Douglas here. It’s to his credit that I couldn’t help but share in his boredom. Pfeiffer is game, but every utterance and gesture from Douglas screams “contractual obligation.”

Elsewhere, things don’t fare any better. Paul Rudd has never—even from his first appearance in Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995)—been anything other than a perfectly pleasant screen presence, and he has always brought the right amount of levity to Ant-Man. This is not a typical case of miscasting. But Ant-Man does feel like the wrong character to usher in this new era of Marvel movies. He is forced to look earnest as Kang (Majors) foreshadows things to come and kicks the shit out of him (anyone else really looking forward to Creed III, regardless of whether or not a Stallone-less Rocky movie feels like a shaky idea?). There are very few jokes. Certainly fewer than either of the two previous Ant-Man films. Luis is nowhere to be found. The filmmakers have explained that he didn’t fit into the story, and they are probably right. I think that says more about how much, again, this is the wrong story for Ant-Man.

But other films in the series have been weighed down by the burden of having to set up the larger story of that phase. Iron Man 2 (2010) and Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) immediately come to mind. And yet, here, I am underwhelmed. I’ve missed most of the movies released post-Avengers: Endgame (2019). I honestly wouldn’t have made a point to see this film if I didn’t have an oil change running and a couple of hours to kill. I even left the theater before any tag scene started*. These films aren’t surprisingly delightful anymore. Marvel will somehow have to get back that feeling if they are going to keep their dominance over the multiplexes.

*I had to pee. I checked wikipedia to see what the tag scenes were, and were more than fine missing them.

Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021)

Director: Jason Reitman

Cast: Carrie Coon, Finn Wolfhard, McKenna Grace, Paul Rudd

Have I Seen it Before: Well… We’ll get to that.

Did I Like It: As I fully expected, I would be remiss to not spend a little bit of time in this review talking about Ghostbusters (2016). That movie was perfectly fine and more than a little funny. Sure, it looks like it was definitely filmed in front of a green screen for large stretches, instead of any New York I might recognize. I’ve never understood why that film had to be a total reboot. By 2016, Ghostbusters could have been a nationwide franchise, and that could have been the story of one of those franchisees with very little changed*. I saw Answer the Call in theaters twice. I bought it on Blu Ray. I’ve bought ever comic book that featured those characters. We—and by we, I mean America—did Ghostbusters (2016) dirty. It stinks that the movie became a political cause at a time when nearly every political cause only served to nauseate, and there was never a way a Ghostbusters film was going to be any fun when it was an issue we all had to take sides on. We now have twice as many Ghostbusters films as we did just over five years ago, and you all nearly ruined it.

Now, that I have taken up for the maligned, I feel like I can say that I looked forward to this film with more than a moderate amount of anticipation. The notion of a sequel to Ghostbusters II (1989) progressively felt like a shaky idea, especially after the death of Harold Ramis in 2014. But this film largely makes a case for itself in ways with which any other version of a direct continuation would have struggled. Ramis is given his hero’s sendoff, and Egon Spengler is a very real part of the movie. The remaining Ghostbusters appear sparingly, which is about right. I always said I never really wanted a Ghostbusters III, I was always more interested in a trailer, and that’s about the amount—aside from post-credits scenes—we get. The new characters are charming, and I feel sad for the five-year-old me who never got to see the Ghostbusters descend on Oklahoma. The film is fun, I’ll buy it on Blu Ray just as soon as it is available, and will delightfully consume any additional stories featuring the new characters, should they be in another movie or some other kind of ancillary material.

Here’s the problem: the film threatens to completely fall apart when it is desperate to recreate moments from the first film. Not characters and cast, mind you, actual scenes. Making Gozer the villain of the piece again, we see more comedies of error about Keymasters and Gatekeepers, that the whole thing almost, kind of, veers dangerously close to Gus Van Sant’s Psycho (1998) territory. I don’t give two shits about Gozer the Gozerian, Ivo Shandor, Zuul, or the rest. They should have gone with something new. That’s one more thing the last Ghostbusters film got right, and well… also got wrong in a post credits sequence, now that I’m thinking about it.

*That change could have also allowed them to not be essentially retconned out of existence with this entry, which would have made all the correct people furious all over again. But I digress, and that’s why that thought is footnote.

Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995)

Director: Joe Chappelle

Cast: Donald Pleasance, Paul “Stephen” Rudd*, Marianne Hagan, Mitchell Ryan

Have I Seen it Before: It came out at one of those moments in my life—the age of 11—when I was so into the series, but between the one-two punch of the MPAA and over-protective parents, I was stymied. I even remember watching—with my heart pounding—the first few minutes of a pay-per-view airing of the film before things went all staticky.

Did I Like It: I eventually watched the whole thing. It is truly amazing how kids imagining what horror movies might be like are infinitely more frightening than what many slapdash sequels end up being.

Speaking of endings, I am struggling to come up with a movie that has a more incomprehensible ending than what we are subjected to here. I’m not talking about a choice that beggars any understanding, that at least could be accepted if not celebrated. I don’t think the ending for Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1983) particularly works, but it definitely follows from the rest of the film. Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987) ran out of money and was knowingly released by the studio despite its toxic faults, but at least that movie ended with an upbeat, rousing quality (and stole the closing shot of Superman (1978)). Here, Donald Pleasance says goodbye to the film series which gave his career new life in his twilight years, and to the planet Earth itself, and disappears amid a hodgepodge of jump cuts and incomprehensible sound samples. Had this movie kept things together even minimally, we may not have needed to be rebooted multiple times in this series. Which actually ended up giving us something great far down the line.

Yes, I’ve seen the fabled producer’s cut, and the result is only marginally better, don’t let superfans of the series try to tell you any different. If a film is rotten at its core, there’s no number of alternate cuts which will fix matters.

Although it does start to shed light on just how Michael Myers managed to do all of the things he did in earlier films, despite spending his formative years in Smiths Grove. And the mask… well, the mask has certainly looked worse, so the film does have that going for it.

*Yes, that one. Sort of endearing that the series could still produce a verifiable movie star after all this time… Sure, most people would argue Clueless (1995) was our introduction to him, I think that he was able to pull off any kind of a performance in a movie like this, that was far more indicative of his future stardom than being perfectly charming in an otherwise charming movie.

Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004)

Director: Adam McKay

Cast: Will Ferrell, Christina Applegate, Paul Rudd, Steve Carrell

Have I Seen it Before: Seeing this film for the first time in the summer of 2004 was one of those special screenings. I don’t remember laughing that hard at a movie before, and I can’t think of a time since, either. 

Did I Like It: But that’s the thing about a comedy. It can age horribly, not just because the jokes are from a different time, but because the version of you that enjoyed the film so much is an increasingly dim memory.

Who would have thought that a review for a movie that insists “San Diego” means “a whale’s vagina”?

I watch the film now and I have some mildly positive feelings about it, but that’s still largely memories of that summer 17 years ago. Maybe the film is just a bit too quotable. With so many movies that land on the tips of the tongues of every frat guy in the western world, the film may have grown tired and old by New Year’s Day 2005. 

That’s a shame, because I remember this film delighting me beyond all measure. Now, it’s mildly diverting background noise. It’s probably not fair to judge the films on those terms. McKay and Judd Apatow probably didn’t count on the film being so loved in the instant of its release that there would be thousands of Facebook groups within the year called “I’m kind of a big deal”, they certainly didn’t bargain for a guy staring down the barrel of his 40th birthday occasionally feeling wistful for 20.

The soundtrack—where Ferrell, in character as Burgundy uncontrollably weeps throughout “Shannon”—has still got to be as funny as it was back then, right?

They Came Together (2014)

Director: David Wain

Cast: Paul Rudd, Amy Poehler, Cobie Smulders, Christopher Meloni

Have I Seen it Before: Yes. I’m strangely tempted to watch it whenever it shows up on a streaming service I’ve already paid for. Several years ago, it was Netflix, and when it came up on HBO, that temptation came again.

Did I Like It: On my second viewing of Wet Hot American Summer (2001) I was struck by a disheartening realization: after viewing the Netflix spinoff shows, I realized I liked those shows better than the movie. I bring this up here because I’m disappointed to report that I liked this film far less the second time around. It’s partially because those shows have the time to turn the absurdism up to the maximum without any need to ape the format of previous films.

So it is that They Came Together doesn’t work as well this time. Too much time is spent making sure we all know that we’re going through tropes that we’ve all seen. It borders on that type of humor that has been done to death in Cinema Sins youtube videos and the films of Friedberg and Seltzer, wherein pointing out something that another film does is the same thing as a joke. I get that the notion that “New York is another character in the film” is a hoary cliché, but there is a point in the life of dismantling a cliché that the dismantling itself becomes cliché.

Thankfully, one has no problem watching Paul Rudd and Amy Poehler do anything, so the time of disappointment goes by rather pleasantly, and the proceedings do reach for that sublimely ridiculous, even if it doesn’t do so as often as I might hope. The dead-eyed reactions of Bill Hader and Ellie Kemper went along with my own reactions, and the ultimate realization that Rudd and Poehler’s characters should never be together adds some semblance of sanity, even if things would have worked better if logic and reason had been abandoned altogether.

Clueless (1995)

Director: Amy Heckerling

Cast: Alicia Silverstone, Stacey Dash, Brittany Murphy, Paul Rudd

Have I Seen it Before: Yes. I have a very strong memory of watching it for the first time on HBO. I’m allowing for the possibility as I spent the 90s growing up with a younger sister that I *may* have watched all of it in bits and pieces as it wound its way through a VCR in multiple viewings over the year. It’s only fair, I’m sure my sister saw Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) in much the same way.

Did I Like It: I recently wrote in my review of Natural Born Killers (1994) that it may not be fair to judge satire by the effectiveness with which it annihilated its target through wit. It’s even less fair here, as the wealthy continued to grow vapider as we’ve leapt into the twenty-first century. Indeed, many probably viewed the Cher Horowitz of this film’s first and second act as the hero of their times and ignored any of the changes she went through at the end of the movie.

But this movie strikes me as way funnier, or at the very least more deliberate in its attempts at humor. The jokes land with mor accuracy when the movie is not trying to buzz its way past my perception.

It’s also worth marveling at the fact that this one of the few teen comedies that does not feel the need to predicate its third act on some kind of dance or prom. I’ve been racking my brain for other examples as I type this, and all I can come up with is Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) and The Breakfast Club (1985) and the specific settings and timeframe of both of those films are the only thing protecting them from defaulting to the trope. Clueless gets bonus points for not tracking in the same tired old beats.

Wet Hot American Summer (2001)

Director:  David Wain

Cast: Janeane Garofalo, David Hyde Pierce, Molly Shannon, Paul Rudd

Have I Seen It Before?: Never. That’s the secret anxiety of these reviews: Learning just how profoundly behind I am on the great stuff. As the streaming singularity looms, it’s becoming clear that I could strap myself to a TV and never catch up

Did I like it?: Truly, madly, deeply, but it took a moment.

For the first several minutes of the movie I became very concerned that the film might be too earnest for its own good, but I think the genius is that it lulls us in with a sense that it might be trying to be a normal film, but secretly is nuts under the surface. 

One might even come to think that the tone is uneven. It is populated with performers who are more well-known from cerebral comedic material, passes itself off as a convincing replica of 80s films that had aged incredibly poorly, but it is actually an exercise in cascading non sequitur.

I can see why some people disliked the movie. I can even see why some people bordered on active hostility. It’s pointedly, blissfully aloof. I’ve been accused of the same more than once in my life, so the film becomes less a movie that I take in and try to detach myself from the experience to unpack what works and what doesn’t work. It’s more like meeting a friend for the first time who is—as unlikely as that seems to be at times—on my save wavelength.

So strange that I took so completely to something that I had missed for so long. I might delve deeper into the film but thank the Gods of streaming that Netflix decided to give us not one, but two seasons of additional stuff to watch. 

Is that how you’re supposed to feel about a movie after its over? I guess it is now.

Ant-Man (2015)

Director: Peyton Reed

Cast: Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Corey Stoll, Michael Douglas

Have I Seen it Before: Oddly enough, this is the only Marvel movie so far that I somehow missed at the theater, although I have since caught in on DVD.

Did I Like It: Ok. So, here’s the thing.

It is ultimately unfair to judge a film through the prism of what it was during pre-production or its earliest development. David Lynch’s Return of the Jedi. Tim Burton’s Batman Forever. Patty Jenkins’ Thor: The Dark World*. And at the same time, it is hard to watch the final result and not think about the potential abdicated.

So, too is it with this movie. Edgar Wright had been attached to direct throughout pre-production, but eventually dropped out of the project, citing creative differences with Marvel. The resulting film directed by Peyton Reed is at the disadvantage. One wants to imagine what the film could have been under Wright, and determine that any flaws (like the protracted training sequence that plays like a cut scene from a video game tutorial) are a result of the studio interference.

It’s a lively comedy when judged within its own context, with just enough a caper feel to it to differentiate it from the rest of the Marvel oeuvre. It is largely buoyed by the undeniably engaging presence of Rudd in the lead role, and remnants of Wright’s influence on the film (he retains an Executive Producer and writing credit). Which I think is one of the better realities about our sometimes over-produced blockbuster system. So much of the work is done in the pre-production that the resulting film can never fully pull away from a vision about which the studio might have had second thoughts.

*Although, to be fair, had any of those auteurs actually made the films in question, it is reasonable to assume that the world wouldn’t have been that dark, Jedi might not quite return, and Batman would be finite in the temporal sense.

Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018)

Director: Peyton Reed

Cast: Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Michael Douglas, Michelle Pfeiffer

Have I Seen it Before: Yep.

Did I Like It: It’s the Marvel movies that are the least burdened by setting up Bigger And Better Things™ and instead content to be a movie. This could have been weighed down by the task of providing the missing link between the hopelessness of Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and what—at the time of this writing—is the hopeful rebound of Avengers: Endgame (2019. Instead whatever place-setting obligations the film has is largely relegated to the post-credits scenes where they belong.

Thus the film operates as a diverting extended comic chase sequence with plenty of sci-fi weirdness gobbledegook. It is about as perfect an example of counter-programing to the aforementioned Infinity War as one is likely to see.

And still, I wonder how the film and the series would be different if Edgar Wright had gotten to direct the movie he wanted to way back when.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. CGI de-aging is getting good. Scary good. Whereas Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan tried to take the 80s by storm in X-Men: The Last Stand (2006), the technology seemed so pointedly stupid that I couldn’t fathom why filmmakers kept coming back to it. Now, I’ve traded in my request for a Batman Beyond film for a hope that Warner Bros. can just get their act together and give as the third Michael Keaton Batman film we all deserved. This film practically has a proof-of-concept for such a dream film in the performance of the hypnotic-at-any-age Michelle Pfeiffer. Hell, Pfeiffer could play 90s era Pfeiffer without CGI de-aging. But that statement may have more to do with my chronic 90s nostalgia madness. 

Oddly enough, it’s some of the scenes where Lang has to interact with a slightly larger world that—while funny—don’t work as brilliantly on the special effects side of things. Not all special effects are perfect, and even fewer advance along the quantum leaps (see what I did there?) of the CGI de-aging process.