Good cop, bad cop, batshit cop: The Other Guys

Two adrenaline junky celebrity cops dive 20 stories to their senseless deaths for no apparent reason other than the crazed bliss of suicidal recklessness. A punch-up breaks out at a funeral and everyone whispers while beating each other so as not to disturb the grieving guests. A guy gets loaded and eats a priest’s arm. A chopper’s taken out by an onslaught of golf balls. An NYPD captain moonlights at a bed and bath store to put his bisexual son through DJ school. Steve Coogan bribes investigators with tickets to Jersey Boys. These are some of the movie’s highlights, though they could just as easily be enjoyed as stand-alone slapstick shorts. Their being part of a feature film constitutes nothing beyond a convenient framing device.

It must be some kind of genuine praise when I confess that I dunno what to make of cop buddy gutbuster The Other Guys. When we talk about the necessity of approaching movies on their own terms rather than as variations on familiar templates, we typically do so with regards to relatively obscure or “difficult” movies in danger of vanishing into the art house fog, but this same re-negotiating of expectations can be applied to comedies. The Other Guys is a miserable failure at lots of things we typically consider essential. The narrative, for one, which seems to want to be some sort of satire at times, isn’t merely stupid, it’s also inconsistent, incoherent, and flamboyantly lumpy. But throughout film history we can find numerous comedies that work, sometimes beautifully, as nothing more than tautological accumulations of gag-assaults, knowingly absurd situations that are funniest when we realize they’re going absolutely nowhere—the Marx Brothers were at their best when using this tack. Mark Wahlberg and Will Ferrell get into a childish yet tense verbal sparring match based entirely around how animal versions of themselves could consume each other in a nonsensical food chain. The conversation is so silly, but they just keep at it until it seems utterly exhausted, and keep at it further still, until it’s not just funny all over again but actually funnier than it was to begin with. Like Van Morrison repeating a single lyric into blissful abstraction, these guys beat funny ideas to death so as to raise them from the dead.

The Other Guys was co-scripted and directed by Adam McKay, who helmed the earlier Will Ferrell loser comedies Anchorman, Talladega Nights and Step Brothers. The approach here is similar if perhaps more insane. This is busy, spastic, anxiogenic comedy, so the narrative isn’t really supposed to hold together. Wahlberg, as a humiliated high-strung peacock champing at the bit for some super-cop glory, and Ferrell, as the partner content to stay at his desk and quietly build cases against developers for neglecting to apply for scaffolding permits, do brilliantly funny things with the uneven material by making it all so deadly serious. Though its less recognized than Ferrell’s, Wahlberg has always had a very special gift for comedy—just go back to certain bits of Boogie Nights, the singing especially, or even the way he simply parks a bike in I Heart Huckabees—because he heroically hurls himself headlong into playing stakes rather than jokes. I was in tears at times. But for every well-drawn character there's one that just gets more half-assed with every new appearance—such as Eva Mendes as Ferrell's sketch of a spouse. For every inspired scene there’s another that falls drearily flat. Holding it all together is little more than our patient waiting for the next, hopefully better scene. Still, I’ll take this over a tediously over-manicured, story-edited-into-a-coma comedy any day of the week.

Schadenfreude and its limits: the not exactly funny, weirdly fascinating, simultaneously iconoclastic and conservative Hamlet 2

“I feel like I’ve been raped… in the face!” This is but one of many highly characteristic, uncomfortably revealing little one-liners that fire up like hot phlegm from the psychological bowels of hopelessly self-involved and dramatically disturbed high school drama teacher Dana Marschz (Steve Coogan). With a desperately unhappy, venomously unloving wife (Catherine Keener, who so rarely loves anybody), a full class of largely disinterested students aspiring to little more than lives of crime, and his entire department about to be wiped off the school curriculum, Marschz is a man reaching a major crisis point. Sorely in need of some solid therapy, he improvises his own flamboyant act of auto-analysis through writing, directing and eventually even starring in a sequel to Shakespeare’s brooding masterpiece that involves time travel, Jesus, greasers, musical numbers and some serious-as-cancer father issues.

Directed by Andrew Fleming (Dick, The In-Laws) and written by Fleming and South Park writer/producer Pam Brady, Hamlet 2 is a racy, ribald, risqué comedy out to bust any number of sentimental stereotypes and empty gestures of political correctness. The residual damage of childhood sexual abuse is here rendered as grounds for hilarity! Racial phobias in the classroom aren’t so much put to rest as capitalized as a launch pad for shamelessly exoticized teenage lust! Yet, curiously, Hamlet 2 is also one of the most deeply conventional movies you’ll see this summer. No less than mainstream feel-good movies like Pride, The Great Debaters or Mr. Holland’s Opus, one of several movies it makes fun of, Hamlet 2 is a textbook go-for-it movie, as well as a let’s-put-on-show movie, religiously observant of every last trope these subgenres imply, from the kids who learn to believe in themselves to the wildly implausible love interest to the even more implausible über-triumphant denouement. It’s entirely possible that Fleming and Brady intentionally adhered to the conventional model as a way of emphasizing the film’s seemingly incompatible let’s-offend-everybody comic sensibility, but that doesn’t make it any less tiresome to watch all the pegs fall all too neatly into place.

It’s hard to know how to approach Hamlet 2, hard to know how to sum up the rollercoaster of responses it invites, the constant swerving from tedium to gut-busting astonishment to strange fascination with just how far the film is willing to plumb Marschz’s not so winning dementia. From the opening montage of his embarrassing non-career in bad TV and infomercials, to highlights of his two-hander stage version of Erin Brokovich, to his endless humiliation at the hands of a spouse who clearly regards his bunk sperm as a sign of his general impotence, to his virtual invisibility as an entity at his place of employment—when the kids playing in the gym where he’s forced to hold his drama classes hit him in the head with a volleyball, it seems less out of spite as utter disregard—Marschz is a parade of fathomless schadenfreude, though only roughly half of the film ever really provokes laughter.

I have to assume Coogan however is laughing all the way to the bank. A distinctive talent with an unusually, palpably sharp comic edge, Coogan is clearly cruising for a big break here, hoping to reach the sort of audience that would never bother with something like 24-Hour Party People, which features Coogan’s outstanding leading performance as Manchester music impresario Tony Wilson, or Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, the two films Coogan’s made with English director Michael Winterbottom. I certainly can’t knock the guy for trying to branch out, but his hamming in Hamlet 2 is taken to such a grotesque extreme that it’s hard to imagine this film making him the bankable star he arguably deserves to be. Dude rollerblades to work in a kaftan.

More bizarre and self-effacing a turn however comes from, get this, Elizabeth Shue, who makes an unexpected appearance as… Elizabeth Shue. She’s apparently given up acting to be a nurse in Tucson, Arizona, where she’s practically mauled by a salivating Marschz eager to brush up against anything vaguely resembling fame. It wouldn’t be so shocking to see Shue turn up in a thankless role if she weren’t playing herself, reciting dumbed-down versions of the sort of smart comments about the heartlessness of the industry she made in her interview with director Mike Figgis for the Hollywood issue of Projections from a few years back. She later has to sit through Marchz’s bombastic—albeit very entertaining—production and make stupid “Wow!” faces the entire time. Like the rest of us, I guess she just doesn’t know what else to say.

Jim Jarmusch and the vice squad: sitting down for a hot dose of Coffee and Cigarettes

Addictive, unhealthy and socially unacceptable, the twin vices that inspire and give shape to Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes are, like cinema or conversation, capable of providing the purest of pleasures when experienced in the simplest of circumstances and with minimal distractions. Jarmusch has always been one of our finest practitioners of comic minimalism; although his films never seem bound by a rigourous, predetermined structure, they rely on formal constraints and carefully chosen repetitions to give them shape, tone, humour and, most rewardingly, meaning. The 11 short films that make up Coffee and Cigarettes give me such meditative pleasure because they feel loose enough to potentially slide off in any direction at any moment, and yet they whirl around within a tight enough thematic and visual landscape to allow me to participate vicariously in their subtlety, wit, cheeky philosophizing and finely-honed charm.

The films were shot between 1986 (the year Jarmusch made Down by Law) and the present, though most were made fairly recently, a sign that Jarmusch took plenty of time discovering the most appropriate context in which to create and present them, picking up a gag from one piece, a stray idea from another, until the final work felt like much more than just the sum of its parts. Each piece, naturally enough, centres around a table and two or three individuals, many of them familiar from Jarmusch’s previous works, smoking, talking and riding out a caffeine buzz. And nearly all, photographed in lovely black and white by some of the world’s finest cinematographers—like Frederick Elmes, Tom DiCillo and Robby Müller—feature eloquent overhead shots of checkered tabletops, dingy espresso cups, grimy ashtrays and scattered spoons that amount to the most painstaking fetishization of diner/café culture I’ve ever seen. (And as a connoisseur of the greasy spoon, I write this with absolute affection.)

The first piece, though by far the most overtly absurdist of the bunch, sets the tone nicely, with Roberto Benigni and Steven Wright meeting at a café, their familiarity with each other not especially clear, but bonding over their love of caffeine and nicotine before arranging a bizarre trade-off of personal duties, sort of a playful, banal version of Strangers on a Train. The young Benigni is oddly handsome and hilarious, while the cooler Wright provides one of the film’s funniest recurring notions: drinking lots of coffee before bed makes you dream faster. This is just one of several epiphanies surrounding consciousness, health and bad habits that build in silly sophistication over the course of the film.

In most of the pieces the actors essentially play themselves rather than characters, and the tension between these loners, eccentrics and famous or semi-famous people that we see in the scene between Benigni and Wright is echoed throughout: Tom Waits and Iggy Pop meet "Somewhere in California" and seem incapable of getting past their discomfort with each other’s peculiar celebrity; waiters struggle to balance the implied familiarity of their roles with customers; Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA and GZA are so starstruck by Bill Murray (clumsily and hilariously disguised as a cook) that they continually refer to him by his full name; a glamorous Cate Blanchett, in the film’s most technically impressive piece, squirms in the company of her resentful cousin (also played by Blanchett, in a rock-chick get-up that makes her look like Kate Bush). And in what is perhaps the all-around best piece, Alfred Molina sets up a meeting with fellow British actor Steve Coogan (the brilliant star of 24 Hour Party People) that becomes utterly stripped of conventional niceties by the two men’s mid-level celebrity status and the ridiculous hierarchy they perceive between them. Jarmusch is something of a dramatic purist in his ongoing interest in the follies of everyday communication (witness the role of linguistic barriers in several of his films) and the episodic nature of Coffee and Cigarettes allows him to attend to such scenarios with greater focus then ever.

Coffee and Cigarettes closes with a surprisingly poignant and beautiful piece featuring Taylor Mead and Bill Rice, who sit in a dim and dusty warehouse of inky shadows, drinking bad coffee, apparently on a break from whatever sort of paid work these two old guys could possibly be doing. A man sweeps the floor laconically somewhere behind them as Mead begins fantasizing about being somewhere else, explaining that, like the title of Gustav Mahler’s melancholy song (which the two catch a few bars of somewhere in the ether), he feels that he’s "lost track of the world." Mead suggests they pretend the coffee is champagne and they share a toast to better times. And at that moment the toast seems shared by all of us, a toast to the space that Coffee and Cigarettes inhabits, a place of refuge from the noise of the world and the demoralizing effects of modern life, a place where someone like Jarmusch can produce films outside the oppressive box of narrative commercial filmmaking. A place where things can move along with the ease of great conversation or sweet music and we have the freedom to indulge in the simple pleasures of life.