They Came Together

A throwback to the insipidly silly gags of the Naked Gun movies and Airplane (written by the Abrahams/Zucker/Zucker trio), They Came Together is a cheeky, "meta" spoof of romantic comedies, although, it's not exactly a pure spoof. It's more like watching a group of smart-ass comic writers give a tongue-in-cheek presentation on the tropes of the romantic comedy genre. Watching They Came Together, I was plagued with a nagging question: If this movie contained the enjoyable but dumb kind of humor of a Naked Gun movie (which I appreciate sometimes) as well as the presence of a slew of funny actors I love (including the great Amy Poehler as the romantic lead), why did I just want this movie to end?

The answer is quite simple. In the process of picking apart and laughing at the clichés of romantic comedies, They Come Together feels not different or clever, merely familiar. It falls into the bad-spoof trap of failing to tell an original story of its own. Indeed, They Came Together isn't much better than those wretched Scary Movie installments, all of which merely ape scenes and lines from the latest horror franchises. They don't actually try and tell an amusing story into which the parodies and references can be mixed.

The movie opens with Amy Poehler and Paul Rudd sitting across from another couple at a dimly lit restaurant. They're about to tell them (and us) how they met, and we're informed that their story is just like a corny romantic comedy. When the flashback starts, we see all the right notes being hit: Poehler's a klutz, but exaggerated to the point of absurdity. And she owns a too-adorable-not-to-like candy store that is about to be pounced on by the giant candy conglomerate for which Rudd works. That's when they meet and an unlikely romance begins. The detail about Poehler's character owning a candy store is priceless, one of the truly inspired jokes of this movie.

They Came Together is laugh-out-loud funny for about twenty minutes, until it goes completely stale and you start to feel that through some ingenious maneuvering of space and time you've been teleported to the Hallmark Channel. I grew restless. I perused my email. I sighed. I checked the remaining running time over and over. And it's mercilessly short at 83 minutes, but those minutes couldn't have gone by fast enough. What's so depressing about this movie is the sheer waste of talent. It would have been far better for them to have put the full power of their energy, intelligence, and comic wit and spontaneity into making a legitimate romantic comedy that was equal parts original and intelligent and funny. Instead, it's a forgettable pastiche that feels lazily contrived with nothing but a smarmy distaste for a popular genre, one that is an especially easy target.

With Cobie Smulders, Max Greenfield, Christopher Meloni, Bill Hader, Ellie Kemper, Jason Mantzoukas, Melanie Lynskey, Ed Helms, Michael Ian Black, plus cameos by, among others, Norah Jones, Ken Marino, Jack McBrayer, Adam Scott, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Michael Shannon, and Judge Judy. Directed by David Wain. Written by Wain and Michael Showalter.

A Most Wanted Man

Somebody from The Village Voice once said--it might have been Alan Scherstuhl--that there wasn't a single movie that wasn't improved by featuring a Philip Seymour Hoffman performance. As I sat in the theater watching A Most Wanted Man, I felt like a scout, looking for those moments in Hoffman's performance when something distinctly him emerged. For a while, I was worried, because the film is so subdued and so deliberately paced, I felt it might unintentionally blanch the normally colorful acting of this great, sadly now deceased performer. But, Hoffman "showed up" as it were, injecting little pieces of his big, unpredictable, yet somehow always structured, acting persona into a character that is mostly calm, organized, quiet, cautious.

Hoffman plays Gunther Bachman, a German intelligence agent relegated to a super-secret and decidedly small sub-organization that was created to bypass German laws in searching for terrorist operatives. Bachman lives with the grim guilt of failing to prevent 9/11 from happening (it was planned partly in his city, Hamburg). So now he's more focused than ever on nabbing potential terrorists. When a man (a suspected terrorist) named Isa Karpov flees Chechnya seeking asylum in Hamburg, it becomes a race between Bachman's group and the mainstream German intelligence to catch him: At first, their mission appears to be in sync, but soon Karpov's guilt is called into question. He seeks aid from a compassionate German lawyer named Annabelle Richter (Rachel McAdams) who works for a non-profit organization that aids people like him. She believes in his innocence, but Bachman isn't so sure, and both German and American intelligence agents are sharpening their knives and waiting to go in for the kill.

Like 2011's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, this latest adaptation of a John Le Carré spy novel is slowly paced but in a way that thoroughly pulls you in. The world of this film is quite fascinating, and the movie lets us savor it, think inside it. Even though there are many entertaining James Bond-esque movies (most recently, Skyfall), you don't always get a sense of the environment or of the characters and how they are affected by their work. (Although Skyfall is certainly an exception.) Both kinds of films have their place. However, the second kind, the deliberately slower kind, is in decidedly shorter supply. But perhaps this makes those of us who like these slower spy movies more grateful, possibly even less demanding of the films when they do appear. And yet, I was prepared to pronounce A Most Wanted Man boring and confusing for about the first 20 minutes. But soon after, I was hooked, and felt invested in everything that was going on. And there's nary an explosion to be seen in the entire film. What a refreshing thing it is to have another adult movie about spies. The ending is shattering, the characters all too human, and the film highly worth watching. 

With Willem Defoe, Daniel Bruhl, Robin Wright, and Grigoriy Dobrygin. Written by Andrew Bovell. Directed by Anton Corbijn.

Top Hat

As Top Hat (1935) opens, we're face to face with the entrance of some upper-crust men's club where an imposing sign reads, "SILENCE must be observed in the club rooms." The camera zooms in on this sign, not because it thinks we're not paying attention, but because the camera itself in Top Hat is playing a kind of joke and inviting us to partake. Cut to Fred Astaire, noisily reading the paper and disrupting the well-worn quiet of the otherwise aging gentlemen occupying a very large room full of tall upholstered chairs and warm, cozy fireplaces. A butler treads noiselessly over the carpet with a tray of drinks, but again, Fred Astaire keeps making a mockery of their reverentially quiet room by sneezing, coughing, and turning the pages of his newspaper. Somehow, this irreverent spirit feels completely and delightfully fresh, as though Top Hat had been released yesterday, and even when the movie slips into the occasional poky scenes, there's a vibrant spirit to the comedy and the music numbers that still works. (The film ends up in Venice, but the Venetian set resembles the Small World ride at Disney World more closely, as my friend put it.)

When Fred Astaire makes love to Ginger Rogers, she only half-heartedly turns him away. She doesn't really want him to stop, and it's a lovely kind of movie-going pleasure to see her grin appear, only a little at first, as he sings ridiculous love songs to her and tap dances all around her. The mistaken identity plot--which may feel somewhat weather-worn simply because it's been done so many times since--still amuses, especially with the aid of Edward Everett Horton and Helen Broderick. Broderick may be one of the most liberated women you'll ever see in a movie, although there were lots of them in the 1930s. It's only in the last 20 or 30 years that we've put women in the movies back in prisons. Top Hat is also a lot smarter and more sophisticated than the Doris Day-Rock Hudson movies that it spawned. They too used to mistake each other for someone else, and although those sudsy love comedies are certainly fun and charming in their own way, Top Hat works on a different level: it's blithely conscious of the fact that it's only a movie. Directed by Mark Sandrich from a script by Allan Scott, Dwight Taylor, Ben Holmes, and Ralph Spence. The songs are of course by Irving Berlin. With Erik Rhodes, and Eric Blore, and Lucille Ball who has a bit part as a flower shop clerk.