Film Movement Movie Review: Oh Lucy! (2017)

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Executive produced by Will Ferrell and Adam McKay's Gloria Sanchez Productions – the female-centric sister company to Gary Sanchez Productions – this quirky character driven dramedy centered on a bored middle-aged Japanese woman's impulsive journey to California makes for a downright intriguing double feature with Matt Spicer's fellow 2017 directorial debut Ingrid Goes West.

Comprised of people and places writer/director Atsuko Hirayanagi knows very well, Oh Lucy! is based upon the filmmaker's multiple award-winning 2014 short film by the same name, which served as her MFA thesis at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts.

And while there's a lot to like about the creatively ambitious director's wholly original take on the globetrotting road movie, unfortunately (and again similarly to Ingrid) her tonally uneven first feature starts to run out of gas before we've reached the final act.

Released by Film Movement following its successful run at fests around the globe (including screening as part of International Critics Week at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival), Oh Lucy! is bolstered by Shinobu Terajima's Independent Spirit Award nominated performance as a stuck-in-a-rut office worker inspired to start over by her charismatic English teacher, played by the always affable Josh Hartnett.

Likewise, in a welcome return to the screen, Hartnett fires on all emotional cylinders in an unusual and fascinating turn – serving as the tour guide to American culture for the film's leads as they journey after a runaway relative.

Focusing more on situational humor than audible laughs, Lucy revolves around the role past hurts and betrayals play on the film's familial triangle of lost female souls trying to move forward and find themselves.

As the characters inevitably combust, Lucy heads into darker territory despite the filmmaker's attempt to lessen the impact of the cruel third act twists by (disappointingly) using the film's men as the predominant voices of sanity.

Without offering the viewer more information about our leading lady – which is sorely needed to better understand what seems like a one-note response – Hirayanagi's Lucy moves backwards instead of forwards right along with our often antagonistic protagonist.

Seemingly trying to lighten things up a la genre-similar works such as Stranger Than Paradise and Sideways before it reaches its darkly comic yet foreshadowed ending, Oh Lucy! fails to fully pay off on its unique premise and dynamite second act.

Still in spite of its flaws, the picture remains an uncompromising, thoughtful, and impressively fresh cinematic calling card for its imaginative storyteller, which makes me eager to see what Atsuko Hirayanagi will bring to the screen next.


Text ©2018, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. 
FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.

Blu-ray Review - Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues (2013)

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From announcing the follow-up film as Ron Burgundy on Conan to co-anchoring the news in North Dakota in character, Will Ferrell and company led a tireless advertising campaign to remind the legions of viewers that had been clamoring for a sequel to the cult favorite for years that they were back.

Undeniably creative yet at times just plain obnoxious, as it turned out the aggressive ad campaign was a sneak preview of the very film they were plugging as Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues proved it is possible to have too much of a good thing.

For despite the infinitely clever idea to make a tongue-in-cheek revisionist satire of the decline in journalism in the era of the 24 hour news cycle, Ferrell and the gang should have stopped after the first Ron.

Thankfully the Blu-ray release of director Adam McKay’s unfocused, bloated misfire boasts a “super-sized R-rated version with 763 new jokes,” (including several that actually work better than the final cut that was distributed to theaters in time for the film’s Christmas release) so at least super fans can pick and choose which version and scenes they want to watch.

Yet that’s an awful lot of work to expect from an average viewer who is most likely to be disappointed by the theatrical presentation.

Ultimately Anchorman 2 amounts to a comedic car wreck that rather ironically (or fittingly, depending on your point-of-view) truly begins to go off the rails during an onscreen car crash that occurs as the result of a gag you see coming a mile away when the recently reunited news team of ego-driven airheads realizes that nobody is driving their RV.

An all-out disappointment that’s a missed opportunity of epic proportions, Anchorman 2 tests your patience right from the start after relegating series MVP Christina Applegate to what amounts to a near walk-on role, McKay proves equally inept at handling new female cast members.

Whether it’s in the tonally awkward performance of Meagan Good as Ron’s new African-American boss and love interest at the CNN-like Global News Network we find them working at in the 1980s to wasting Kristen Wiig as a female version of Steve Carell’s intellectually challenged, nonsense spouting Brick via a series of increasingly unfunny encounters, we wind up just feeling embarrassed Anchorman’s newest additions.

Likewise, despite a potential comedic goldmine given the new environment, screenwriters McKay and Ferrell wind up falling back on their old tried and true formulas we’ve seen throughout their oeuvre – borrowing plot points that worked better in previous pictures such as the character-building turning point that came from a medical trauma in Talladega Nights.

Mixing the old with new takes on favorite moments from the first film like a supernatural tinged news network rumble in New York that runs out of gas by the time it’s done introducing all of its celebrity cameo players, everything in 2 is bigger except for the laughs. Likewise, it has that unmistakable Ocean's 12 and 13 like air about it that makes you think that it was infinitely more fun to make than it was to watch.

By filling it with too many on the nose extreme references and crass jokes, the filmmakers have misgauged precisely what was funny about the first film. And while it’s possible that at least 25 minutes could’ve been trimmed from the movie to help match the pace established by the original, all in all it’s hard to guess how much of the work would actually be salvageable since there’s not enough good material upon which to build.

As such, this multi-disc set might just inspire fans to remix their own cut and given the vastly improved first act on display in the R-rated edition vs. the original, there might be a passable Anchorman sequel buried in there beneath all of the bulk. Unfortunately and despite all of the incredible talent involved (that may have spent too much time improvising than refining an already solid script), the one currently calling itself Anchorman 2 isn’t it.

It’s too bad too given the satirical potential of our infotainment-based media and the messages contained in the film that roast the practices of various 24 hour news stations from Fox’s jingoism and speculative reporting to the rise of sensationalism of celebrity fueled stories and car chases in the fight for ratings.

While the intriguing call-backs of age-old scandals from O.J. to Lorena Bobbitt earn chuckles, in an era where The Daily Show and Colbert Report cover the very same terrain with much more sophistication on a nightly basis, the lack of a sharper edge to the writing makes Ferrell and McKay’s gags seem halfhearted and dated at best.

A true letdown that may have earned audience (and critical) goodwill due to how much we love those involved as well as the original film, while at least this multi-version Blu-ray, DVD and Ultraviolet combo pack offers up a more thorough presentation of what went wrong and what went right, I only wish that Anchorman 2 would’ve been filled with as much ingenuity as some of the stunts pulled to raise awareness of its theatrical release.

In comedy, they say you should always leave your audience wanting more and because Anchorman 2 made me want less, in the end it proves that less is more – from the beautiful simplicity of the original to a shorter running time to the thought that regardless of demand, not every hit movie needs a sequel.

Text ©2014, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy of this title in order to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.

The Foot Fist Way

In the words of Fred Simmons, “Jujitsu sucks”; it’s
time for Tae Kwon Do, or more appropriately
its translation, “Foot Fist Way.”

How does one begin to describe Fred Simmons (played by Tropic Thunder and Pineapple Express scene stealer Danny McBride)? From the highbrow evaluation of the man as “the type of blustery, provincial narcissist who is always putting his foot in his mouth and absolutely loving how it tastes,” as Nathan Lee offered in The New York Times to the more straightforward call-it-like-he-sees-it approach offered by Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers who sums him up in two words — “loudmouthed bully” — there’s no way of getting around the fact that McBride and his co-writers Ben Best and Jody Hill have created one unforgettable character in their film The Foot Fist Way.

In my eyes (and I'm sure I'm not alone), he’s the white trash version of Ricky Gervais’ character David Brent from BBC’s The Office. In fact, had Brent been not only real but had a twin from whom he was separated at birth — I’d lay odds on the fact that it would be none other than Fred Simmons.

The self-centered Tae Kwon Do instructor with delusions of grandeur runs a low-level suburban studio and recruits students as “The King of the Demo” in local North Carolina parking lots along with his sycophantic youthful sidekicks Julio (Spencer Moreno) and Henry Harrison (Carlos Lopez). Moreover, Simmons spends most of his time acting in ways that would give Miss Manners a heart attack. With virtually no filter from his head to his mouth, he is also prone — like David Brent — to making extremely unethical and unprofessional requests and comments of and to his students. Whether it’s nearly sending an elderly lady to the morgue after instructing a young man to come at her with all he has since he questions Simmons’ methods, wailing on children, telling one gentleman who balks at the prices that he’s fat and feminine or blaming his sidekicks when he messes up in his routine by addressing their lack of confidence, Simmons is — much like David Brent — the boss from hell still clinging to a championship title won in Vegas years earlier.

After he’s cheated on by his bimbo wife Suzie (Mary Jane Bostic), a woman who defends granting sexual favors to fit in by saying she was as "Myrtle Beach drunk" as their beach-like home décor, Simmons goes off the deep end. And although anyone with half a brain saw the Suzie debacle coming a mile away as she’s fond of wearing skin tight leotards and off the shoulder Flashdance apparel to church, photocopying her “naughty bits” at work and making a ranked list of coworkers who would be the most likely to freak out and go on a shooting spree, we quickly realize that mate-wise, she’s probably the best a guy like Simmons could do.

But that doesn’t prevent him from attempting to play the field such as in an excruciatingly Office-like scene wherein he comes on to one young woman (in a manner similar to Brent) by saying that since he already has all of her personal information like phone number and address, there’s no real need to go through the “weird schematics” of actually asking her out. However, what he fails to realize is that perhaps it wasn’t the biggest turn-on that the married Simmons was the very same man who freaked her into signing up for lessons by discussing that her admiration of yoga and meditation never saved “anyone from a gang rape type situation.”

The film, which is divided up into the admirable, selfless, and peaceful tenets of Tae Kwon Do (which translates literally to “foot fist way”) has loads of fun showing the irony of a man like Simmons who embodies the polar opposite of his teachings. The film is beyond hilarious and even far more so than Napoleon Dynamite, the film to which it’s most likely compared. Yet for roughly the first half, once other subplots begin to overpower the madness of David Brent… er, I mean Fred Simmons and he takes to the road with his intense and possibly psychotic friend Mike (director Jody Hill) to meet their idol, Chuck “The Truck” Wallace (a hilarious Ben Best playing a Chuck Norris/Steven Seagal hybrid), the film loses some of its momentum.

Far better off when it was a martial arts styled version of The Office than as an impromptu road film, the last twenty minutes falls into intense mediocrity during a horrifically vulgar tell-off to Suzie as Simmons literally pisses away their relationship through a superfluous contest montage between Simmons and The Truck. Then — making one rank Dynamite above it for its more consistently funny tone — Foot at least refuses to go out without a fight. Serving up some truly quotable lines—especially from The Truck who makes strange propositions like “Who wants me to see me with my shirt off?” and confronts Simmons’ group with “you think it’s cool to just come into my party and beat up the band?” before admitting that he himself finds it awesome, it will be the type of film to gain even greater cult status when it kicks DVD shelves on September 23.

Proudly using Roger Ebert’s assessment that “children should not be allowed with a mile of this film,” as a selling point in a sticker on the box, the underground, cult comedy hit The Foot Fist Way -- made “for two cents” and “shot in 19 days” — has made its long journey from the Los Angeles Film Festival to theatrical release and DVD distribution thanks to the ardent support of two die-hard fans, namely Will Ferrell and Adam McKay. Their love for the film is so resolute that it’s even the major narrative thread running throughout the hysterical green band version of the film’s trailer they posted on their rousingly hilarious and irreverent website Funny or Die (a.k.a. the more consistently comedic answer to YouTube) that you can see below.

View the Trailer

See more funny videos at Funny or Die

While it will be widely available for rental, director Jody Hill’s movie from Paramount Vantage and MTV Films will be exclusively for sale at Best Buy. Loaded with bonus footage that salvages some of its weaknesses including commentary by Hill and McBride, bloopers, English, French and Spanish subtitles, and 5.1 surround sound, the widescreen DVD also provides twenty extended and/or deleted scenes and an alternate ending for Simmons’ devotees to explore.

While it’s uneven at best, when the film works, it really works, sending you into hysterics by the frankly matter-of-fact and deadpan delivery by a scarily convincing McBride who elevates this film and makes quite a name for himself, leading to future work alongside some of Hollywood’s funniest men in Tropic Thunder and Pineapple Express. Although David Brent would be green with envy, no doubt Fred Simmons is proud to keep kicking ass to a much larger audience who will eagerly seek out this little indie that could.

Step Brothers

Director:
Adam McKay

In the gospel according to Robin Williams, Eddie Murphy, Bill Murray, Steve Martin, Jim Carrey, Ben Stiller, Adam Sandler and even Will Ferrell, to become a successful comedic actor in Hollywood, it’s traditional practice that you go for giggles first and awards later. Along the way, these stars and others have literally done anything for a laugh from sticking bananas in tailpipes in Beverly Hills Cop to beating themselves up in a bathroom in Liar, Liar before suddenly these multimillion dollar men decide they’d like the opportunity go from pratfall to highbrow in order to earn some indie film cred, show off their acting chops, and maybe earn a golden statue or two in the process.

Unfortunately, regardless of numerous accolades and positive critical acclaim, the public usually isn’t as supportive of seeing someone like Adam Sandler cry in Spanglish or Reign Over Me. And by staying away from theatres in droves, it sends a loud and clear message to Hollywood that when it comes time for spending our hard earned dollar, we’d rather be the ones who cry… in fits of laughter, that is. More importantly, despite mixed views, when these stars stretch their range from comedy to drama, it reminds viewers just how skilled one must be as a performer to have made humor look so effortless, which becomes especially apparent when “serious” actors decide to tackle comedy to sometimes disastrous results. It’s become an oft-repeated phrase that the worst thing one can do as an actor in a comedy is to try to be funny and typically, that’s precisely the crime most serious actors are guilty of when they make the leap from Shakespeare territory to Judd Apatow country.

With this in mind, it’s been a refreshing and delightfully unexpected surprise to discover the ridiculous hilarity of former independent film favorite John C. Reilly as he’s gone from his earlier work in films like Casualties of War, Boogie Nights, The Thin Red Line, Magnolia, The Hours, The Good Girl and Gangs of New York to dazzling all of us with his Oscar nominated turn in Chicago. While his role in that film was filled with emotion most notably on display in the show-stopping number “Mr. Cellophane,” it recalled some of the comedic spark he’d begun to ignite even briefly in his previous roles. And after showing up for an un-credited daring turn as a bullying monk in Anger Management, the comedy world took note, and Reilly has just gotten funnier with each passing year, making the sad-sack character he cornered the market on in the past seem like a distant memory, especially when he was paired alongside Will Ferrell for the 2006 Nascar comedy, Talladega Nights: The Legend of Ricky Bobby.

The freewheeling, improvisational style of Ferrell clicked so well with Reilly’s unlimited range that even when the film threatened to take a few wrong turns and go off course, seeing the two of them together is what elevated that film above some of Ferrell’s lackluster comedies over the past few years as he’s spread himself far too thin. While Ferrell made the bold decision to forgo another easy paycheck to appear in a few serious works, including a tremendous turn in the woefully underrated Stranger than Fiction before returning to his humorous roots, Reilly continued to dabble with comedy, becoming an Apatow favorite after his work in director Jake Kasdan’s Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.

However, as good as the men were solo, audiences who’d begun wearing out their Frat Pack comedy DVDs including Talladega, Anchorman, Wedding Crashers, Old School, Dodgeball, Semi-Pro and others longed for the two to reunite. And working with their Talladega team of director/co-writer Adam McKay and producer Judd Apatow, they’ve finally done so. With this in mind, they go from Talladega’s “Shake and Bake” to “Dragon” and “Nighthawk” a.k.a. Dale and Brennan in the far trashier but downright hilarious new release, Step Brothers.

Middle-aged, lazy and filled with a narcissistic sense of entitlement, the two star as overgrown children with one of the most twisted versions of Peter Pan Syndrome you’re likely to see in a mainstream comedy. Still living at home, without the benefit of college education and little in the way of job prospects which would undoubtedly interfere with their overreliance on video games, fanboy culture, junk food and round the clock television, Dale (Reilly) and Brennan (Ferrell) leech off their respective parents, played by Mary Steenburgen and Richard Jenkins (The Visitor).

Predictably however, just minutes into the film, at an out-of-town work conference, the parents meet and decide to marry after an impulsive coupling. Even odder, their horny hookup becomes filled with greater glee when the strangers bond in a hotel suite amidst the realization that they’re both stricken with the same ailment of not being able to kick their roughly forty year old children out of their houses. Although the bliss of the newlyweds is cut short when Nancy (Steenburgen) and Brennan move into the home occupied by Jenkins’ Robert Doback and Brennan’s equally immature new stepbrother Dale.

After sizing each other up on the front lawn whereby they state their wish to go by tougher monikers (the aforementioned Dragon and Nighthawk), the new family make a strained attempt at bonding over dinner. As expected when the “boys” are forced to share a room with one another and proceed to menace each other with vicious, foul-mouthed threats, in the following days it escalates into physical brutality culminating in an over-the-top fight which nearly tears apart the entire house.

However, soon the foes become fast friends when they unexpectedly bond upon the discovery that Brennan’s smug, yuppie, pompous, name-dropping, slang-happy, SUV driving younger brother Derek (Adam Scott) is an even bigger jerk than both of them put together. But after Derek-- who’s not above insulting his wife (Kathryn Hahn) and forcing his children into a sing along-- makes it his new mission to sell Robert’s home for a monster profit so the elders can retire, thereby forcing Dale and Brennan out of the house, the two newly aligned step brothers must concoct a grand scheme first to sabotage Derek’s real estate ambitions while avoiding taking on anything resembling a job.

Quickly, as expected and par for the Frat Pack comedy course, they realize that their antics are starting to drive an irreparable wedge in their parents’ relationship and understand that—better late than never and definitely on their own terms—it’s time to attempt to grow up. And while the third act falters and feels a bit forced in rushing to wrap up all the loose ends, it’s saved by a truly memorable musical number at a Catalina Wine Mixer that is sure to get fans recommending it to others, telling them that it’s something they’ll just have to see to believe.

Earning its “R” rating only moments into the movie, the overwhelmingly foul-mouthed and mean-spirited first forty-five minutes of the film threatens to kill the successful and genuinely earnest humor that follows. While it may leave a bad taste in your mouth—especially considering some of the unnecessarily vulgar sight gags, not to mention the guilty feeling of finding humor in something so juvenile-- it’s the charm of Reilly and Ferrell that saves the film.

Although you’ll definitely want to keep your children away, despite the appeal of the leads since the comedy isn’t as family friendly as the laughs served up in Talladega, the presence of the two and the sheer exuberance on display in their performances reminds us that no matter how cruel the actions of the characters are, you just know that it’s done with the best of intentions. And ultimately you can’t help but buy into the silliness as they damn near break their necks in order to just make us laugh, making Step Brothers a wickedly funny, if uneven blend of a little surprisingly sweet and some horrifically sour comedy.

Note: Be sure to stay in your seats after the credits begin to roll as Reilly and Ferrell exact revenge on a group of playground bullies in an admittedly tasteless yet unforgettably hilarious finale.