Monster's mall: Observe and Report

The first fat white man is glimpsed scampering across the vastness of the mall parking lot. He wears only a trench coat. We don’t see his face. He flashes his flabby nakedness to all available female victims. “Hey bitch!” “I’m gonna fuck you!” “See my dick!” His attacks are essentially verbal hit-and-runs, though the sight of his flapping ding-dong probably causes the more lasting trauma. The second fat white man is the mall’s self-designated head of security. Ronnie (Seth Rogen), delusional, bullying, gun-obsessed, bipolar, socially disabled, overly fond of jogging pants, and possessing violent impulses about ready to blow, is a potentially far greater threat to the general public, yet he is, in his small way, their protector. He’s the protagonist of Jody Hill’s Observe and Report.

The two fat white men are marked from the outset as opponents. In a sense they’re mirror images of one another, and as is usually the case in tales of döppelgangers, there’s only room for one. In this case, it’s the younger, weirdly charming one. He might make racially driven threats, get trigger happy with his Taser and beat the living shit out of adolescent skaters now and then, but he never goes around showing his johnson to the world, and that apparently makes all the difference.

With Ronnie’s fixation on an unattainable blonde (Anna Faris, quite brilliant in a frustraingly underdeveloped part), his messiah complex, and his voice-over—“The world doesn’t need another scared man…”—speaking to us over images of him working out, the model for this anti-hero is quite clearly Travis Bickle, and the notion of setting a blackly comic Taxi Driver in the sunny suburbs is an inspired one. The cast seems to be beautifully aligned in their ability to fuse the necessary bleakness and mania, and Hill’s immediately apparent knack for cutting out of a scene right on the crest of a comic-shock wave invites us to settle in for something special. But Observe and Report is sadly neither here nor there. Its dementia is all surface. It’s a tease of a movie that finally doesn’t even try to follow through on its promise to probe psychosis for comic payoffs.

Part of the problem is that the world of Observe and Report is one without consequence. Sometimes, for the sake of a solid but purely short-term gag, it allows to us to recognize Ronnie as a total nutcase living in a world of puerile fantasy. At other times, especially the ending, the movie surrenders itself to Ronnie’s fantasy and rewards his insanity, though strictly in the modest ways of the mainstream lovable loser comedy, which is precisely where Feris' character, who should have been as unpredictable as Rogen's, glaringly shows itself to be a missed opportunity. Going in either direction might have resulted in something compelling, disturbing or more consistently hilarious, but Hill tries to have it both ways, going for the schadenfreude and the sentimentality at once, and winds up making something essentially incoherent.

These movies stink: Rocknrolla, Zack and Miri Make a Porno

Rocka Rolla is the name of Judas Priest’s first album, released back in ’74, produced by the same guy who did the first three Sabbaths and the debut for Budgie. The driving title track—a romance narrative, featuring the encouraging refrain of “You can take her if you want her/If you think you can!”—has solid crank, a pleasingly inane octave switch in the guitar solo, and wilted harmonica accents that accentuate the overall sense of ambitious young lads still testing out various aural accoutrements to see whether they fortify the metal hammer. I mention Rocka Rolla here only because, while a modest work to be sure, it is so much better than Rocknrolla, the new Guy Ritchie movie with the strikingly similar yet, however implausibly, even stupider title.

Ritchie’s been working out his sub-Tarantino kooky crime shtick for a while now—it’s been a full decade since Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels—but age, practice and marriage to Madonna hasn’t made his movies any better. This time around, Ritchie’s motley crew is comprised of a couple of lower echelon crooks (Gerard Butler and Idris Elba); an overconfident mob boss (Tom Wilkinson) and his smarter, classier right-hand (Mark Strong, who also narrates for some reason); a foxy super accountant (Thandie Newton, not acting so much as modeling a collection of tear-away power suits as prelude to an astoundingly lifeless and pointless booty call); a junky rock star with father issues (Toby Kebbell, impressively emaciated, seemingly on the verge of death); and a Russian billionaire with a soft spot for high class prostitutes (Karel Roden).

Some are the slimy scumbags that try to screw everybody; others are just the regular scumbags that we’re supposed to like. Any sense of relationship between the characters is nonexistent. Come to think of it, any sense of character is nonexistent. The actors are asked only to prop up a tired old hag of a plot involving the usual web of cons, the pathetic pretexts for violence, the slow-mo and fast-mo, and the fussy montage sequences that resemble corporate training videos with huge budgets. There are attempts at conveying a gentler, more sensitive side, but the hero’s embracing of homosexuality only serves to exacerbate the boy’s club atmosphere, while the attention given to junky wisdom makes for a regrettable detour, with Kebbell delivering a monologue about the life lessons to be learned from a pack of smokes that’s a lot less profound than Forrest Gump and his metaphorical box of chocolates. In short, Ritchie seems to be on autopilot more than ever with Rocka Rolla—and he didn’t even have the decency to use Priest on the soundtrack!

“There ain’t no such thing as free titties.” The line, one of many throwaway faux-truisms on offer here, is spoken by Delaney (Craig Robinson), the first-time producer employed by the titular independent filmmakers of Zack and Miri Make a Porno, a man who offers to bankroll his destitute friends’ radical get-the-lights-back-on scheme primarily out of a burning desire to see breasts that aren’t dangling off his emasculating wife. He says the line during a crisis point in the movie, when the team’s dream of penetrating the porn market seems to be shattered following the unexpected—for them at least; for the audience it’ll seem right on cue—demolition of the old garage they’ve been using as a makeshift film studio.

Funny thing is, Delaney’s declaration seems pretty much on the nose. For all the potty-mouthed dialogue, gross-out gags, general licentiousness and rampant supporting role nudity gleefully strewn throughout Zack and Miri Make a Porno, this finally feels like a blithely puritanical tale, limpid, shackled to tired convention and extolling an emotionally juvenile foundation for love—no free titties, indeed. Whether or not Zack and Miri’s porn will ever pay off or even give some lonesome surfer a chub seems dubious and is of little concern in any event; what matters most here, what is crucial in Smith's moral universe, is that Miri doesn’t have sex with someone other than Zack because, implausible as it seems, this is actually the story of two lifelong friends and roomies who supposedly were always destined to become lovers, and—here comes the irony—just as they’re on the brink of being porn stars, ingrained, panic-driven monogamy rises up like an iceberg in their lives’ heretofore libertine sexual trajectory.

Maybe I should get to the point and let you know how obscenely lazy this movie is, yet another testament to the jack ass attitude-trumps-all approach of writer/director Kevin Smith, whose prolific oeuvre includes such overrated titles as Clerks, Mallrats, Dogma and Jersey Girl. Smith’s desire to shock, cajole or titillate seems far greater than his ability to develop character, tell a story with even a hint of originality, or genuinely articulate the unspoken, hopefully comical rage of the American suburban working class he’s appointed himself some sort of spokesman for. Of course, here I am talking about craft, imagination and style when we’re not supposed to give a shit, right? At least so long as we’re entertained, which, thanks only to Robinson and most especially the smart pairing of Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks, the actors playing Zack and Miri, we occasionally are. I guess Smith is in the business of making critic proof movies, which, if this latest effort is any indication, is another way of saying he doesn’t want to try very hard.

There’s doubtlessly a fun movie to be made from just spinning out all the inevitably humorous and even unconsciously insightful steps involved in turning a couple of everyday folks into pornographers, a sort of let’s-put-on-a-sex-show story. It’s all the more disappointing then that Smith, whose sense of humour is nothing if not frank, manages to get in so little of that bawdy comedy of recognition, though he does offer a few of the better porn movie titles I’ve heard in while, ie: A Cock and Lips Now. Everything is sidetracked by the half-assed When Hairy Met Dangly palsy romance that, for all the fun Rogen and Banks have here, is so lacking in chemistry as to be a joke in itself. Smith’s dogged adherence to the dopey, overworked rules of the romantic comedy is perplexing given that he could have had done so much more with a far simpler narrative than he has, while little spectacles like his truly sad “funny dancing” montage or his staging of the big token moments, such as Zack and Miri’s scene where they finally do it for the camcorder on a sack of coffee beans, is so incompetent as to prove the guy can’t even sell us a cheap cliché. At least porn queen Traci Lords shows up in a few scenes. There’s a certain pleasure to be had to seeing someone who actually knows how to do their job.