TED: This is the Theme Song from the Movie Octopussy

Ted (Theatrical Cut; 2012) – Directed by Seth McFarlane – Starring Mark Wahlberg, Mila Kunis, Seth McFarlane, Giovanni Ribisi, Joel McHale, Patrick Warburton, Matt Walsh, Jessica Barth, Bill Smitrovich, Ralph Garman, Alex Borstein, Laura Vandervoort, Ryan Reynolds, Sam Jones, Norah Jones, Tom Skerritt, Ted Danson, and Patrick Stewart.

Any movie that shows this much love for Flash Gordon and Octopussy and Fenway Park is going to score points in my book.

That’s not why I like TED, though, as Seth MacFarlane’s first foray into live-action movie making is the kind of movie that if I were 15 I’d watch a billion times. Heck, forget 15. When I was an undergrad at Syracuse, there were a handful of movies we watched over and over again: Dazed and Confused, Searching for Bobby Fischer, whatever Bond movie TBS was showing in their annual marathon. TED is that kind of movie, the kind that I just want to watch on permanent repeat, and it’s not because it’s funny (because it is), but because it’s a really well told story. Truth is, I’d watch it even if I didn’t laugh at it because I don’t really care if comedies are funny, so long as they’re good.

It may sound odd to hear me say that I don’t really care if comedies are funny, but I’m much more interested at this stage in my life in a comedy telling a good story than I am in how many laughs it generates. Certainly, I like to laugh and certainly, I want to laugh at a comedy, but simply stringing a bunch of funny jokes together isn’t really enough for me. If too many of the jokes fall flat, I lose interest and it’s not a movie I’m going to want to come back to over and over again.

That means I’m not going to buy the Blu-ray, Hollywood.

Great comedies like The Hangover, Young Frankenstein, Ghostbusters, and South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut are funny, but they all tell engaging stories, too, and it’s that narrative element that had me worried before seeing TED.

Look, I like Seth MacFarlane. I like The Family Guy and The Cleveland Show and, well, not so much American Dad, but they’re successful more because they do funny bits or create funny situations rather than because of any narrative strength. If one looks closely at these universes, they fall apart, and I largely agree with the infamous Eric Cartman takedown of The Family Guy on South Park where he railed against the show’s style of humor. Cartman discovers that Family Guy is actually written by manatees pushing balls around a fish tank, arguing that MacFarlane’s signature show is often built on weird associations. Unlike Cartman, I can acknowledge that style and still love it, but there’s a huge difference between a 22 minute cartoon and a 106 minute live-action movie.

And yes, I said 106 minutes as Netflix doesn’t send you the unrated version of the movie. If you get TED through them, all you get is the theatrical release, so that’s what I’ve watched. It’s a shameless attempt to get you to buy the Blu-ray.

In this case, it’s worked, though I’m buying that Blu-ray less because of the extra six minutes and more because I dug this movie so much.

How can you not love a film where Norah Jones jokes about f*cking a teddy bear in a closet?

Or maybe that’s just me.

I was so worried I wouldn’t like the film that it actually sat on my counter for over a week before I watched it. I like the idea of TED so much, of a kid’s wish granting life to his stuffed animal which then grows up alongside him, that I thought watching it could only ruin what the film was like in my head, but those fears were totally unfounded as the film was strong from start to finish, with excellent performances from Mark Wahlberg and Mila Kunis as John Bennett and Lori Collins, a couple about to celebrate their four-year anniversary as the film opens. Perhaps as a hedge against his own style to toss innumerable random jokes at the audience, MacFarlane (who also voices Ted) populates TED with a whole host of secondary characters who might get a single joke or two and that’s it. Just when you’ve figured out that the gorgeous blonde in that one scene is Laura Vandervoort (but before you can remember how to spell it), you realize you’ve seen her second and final scene.

TED opens in a winter early in John’s life, and we see he’s the unpopular kid in his neighborhood. His parents get him a huge teddy bear for Christmas, and John makes a wish that the bear was alive so they could be real friends. The wish is granted and John wakes up to find his teddy bear walks and talks and just wants to be his best friend. John’s parents freak out, as one would expect, but Ted wins them over and soon he’s a national celebrity, appearing on covers of magazines and making a guest appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.

I love this part of the movie for two reasons. The first is that it’s great to see the film build in a backstory that explains why people aren’t always freaking out when a big teddy bear starts walking and talking. We don’t have to get all those silly reactions and watch as everyone adjusts. Everyone already has so we can just get on with the movie. The second reason I love it is that it gives us a chance to hear Patrick Stewart as the narrator being one of the funniest parts of the entire movie.

Stewart’s voice is so rich, so strong, so British, that when he recites something completely inappropriate, it’s extra funny just because of is manner of speaking. “Now if there’s one thing you can be sure of,” he tells us after John makes his wish to bring Ted to life, “it’s that nothing is more powerful than a young boy’s wish. Except an Apache helicopter. An Apache helicopter has machine guns and missiles. It is an unbelievably impressive complement of weaponry, an absolute death machine.” Stewart delivers these lines with such glee that it sets a perfect tone for the film. There’s bits that made me laugh out loud, but mostly TED is just constantly amusing, wonderfully blending real sentiment and absurdity.

At it’s core, of course, TED is a movie about a guy unwilling to embrace the idea of growing up. That he lives with his teddy bear is the primary image of this Peter Pan Syndrome, but he also has a “career” working at a car rental company, smokes pot (with Ted) whenever he can, and is still afraid of thunder. A moment that perfectly blends MacFarlane’s mix of sentimentality and absurdity comes when John and Lori are in bed and a massive thunderclap hits. John freaks out and Ted comes running into the bedroom, shouting, “Thunder buddies for life, right, John?”

“Thunder buddies for life!” Ted yells back as the best friends launch into their “thunder buddy” song.

That scene also perfectly encapsulates the cleverness of TED’s script. This isn’t just a movie about a guy you refuses to grow up and make something more of himself, but it’s also a film about a guy caught between his best friend and the woman he loves.

Mila Kunis is really fantastic in TED as Lori, the girlfriend who’s “too good” for John (according to her friends) but genuinely loves him in spite of all his flaws. She’s got a successful, professional gig and a boss (Joel McHale) who constantly hits on her. Lori isn’t looking to radically change John, but she is looking for him to advance a little. It’s to the film’s credit that Ted is such a real character that when she wants John to tell Ted to move out, we don’t immediately think, “You’re kicking a teddy bear out of your house?” Instead, I was on her side. Ted, after all, greeted John and Lori’s return home with the image of him sitting on a couch with four hookers – one of whom had taken a sh*t on the carpet. That’s not funny (or acceptable) to Lori, but she does think its funny when John drops a massive fart in a bar. Her final straw with John is when she’s understandably furious when he ditches her boss’ party to go hang out with Flash Gordon at Ted’s place.

Ah, Flash.

Or is that … Flash, ah ha!

Yes. Yes, it is.

I knew TED had an appearance from Sam Jones, the actor who played Flash in the classic 1980 movie, but I was unaware at how large a role Sam had. Flash is one of the movies that Ted and John bond over as kids, and it’s Sam’s appearance at Ted’s party that convinces John he has to exit the party at Lori’s boss’ house to go do shots with Jones.

There’s plenty of crude jokes sprinkled throughout the film – plenty of them sexual. Ted is forced to get a job after he moves out of John and Lori’s place and he’s rude at the job interview and then rude once he gets the job, telling his boss how last week he had sex on some asparagus and then sold it. Instead of being horrified, his boss (Bill Smitrovich) keeps promoting him. There’s jokes about sex with Norah Jones (“Thanks for 9/11,” is the most hilariously inappropriate joke of the movie on two levels) and sex without a penis and they often generate the biggest laughs, but it’s the smaller jokes built around John and Lori’s relationship that win me over.

When Lori is out on a date with her boss, Ted gets Norah Jones to allow John to sing a song during her concert at the Hatch Shell in an attempt to win Lori back. The song John sings is a song from the movie they watched the night they met – the theme from Octopussy. John butchers Rita Coolidge’s “All Time High” and the crowd turns on him, booing him offstage. Lori’s boss rips John in the parking lot, but Lori neither joins in mocking John nor runs back to him. It’s small moments like this that help to make the characters in TED feel real – even if they’re a walking, talking, cocaine-snorting teddy bear.

I’ve long stopped looking for the funniest movie ever. I like Hangover II almost as much as The Hangover because I like the characters and because the story’s good, even if it’s not as funny. I really like TED. It’s not the funniest movie ever, but it is funny and I really like hanging out with John, Lori, and Ted. Giovanni Ribisi provides just enough creepiness to give the film a shot of darkness and Mark Wahlberg proves again that while he is definitely not the most wide-ranging actor on the planet (or in whatever room he’s standing in), if you give him a role that plays to his strengths he’s a blast to watch. It all adds up to a very enjoyable film.

Plus, it reminds us we’d all be better off if Patrick Stewart narrated our life story.

I know he allows me to believe in magic.

And Apache helicopters.

IDENTITY THIEF: That’s a Terrible F*cking Name

Identity Thief (2013) – Directed by Seth Gordon – Starring Jason Bateman, Melissa McCarthy, Robert Patrick, John Cho, Jon Favreau, Amanda Peet, Genesis Rodríguez, T.I., Morris Chestnut, Eric Stonestreet, and Maggie Elizabeth Jones.

It was an afternoon of pleasant surprises: the weather was nicer than I thought it would be, IDENTITY THIEF is funnier than I thought it would be, and when I turned my iPhone back on after the movie, all of my contacts were mysteriously erased.

Okay, so that last one isn’t a pleasant surprise, but I was able to take Darwin for a long walk this morning before the movie and I was constantly amused by IDENTITY THIEF throughout the film. The film contains a handful of laugh out loud moments and if you like Jason Bateman and Melissa McCarthy (as I do), then there’s no reason you won’t like IDENTITY THIEF.

Directed by Seth Gordon (who directed the excellent documentary The King of Kong and the very funny Horrible Bosses), THIEF is a standard anti-buddy road comedy. Diana (McCarthy) is the titular identity thief, and when she steals the identity of Sandy Bigelow Patterson (Bateman), he takes the law into his own hands and flies from Colorado to Florida in order to bring her back to Denver to put everything right and allow him to keep his new job.

When Patterson gets to Florida he quickly finds Diana, but then criminals Marisol and Julian (Genesis Rodríguez and T.I.) show up for retribution for bad deeds Diana has enacted on them, and a bounty hunter (Robert Patrick) joins the mix, adding a small element of a chase film into the mix.

The focus is on Bateman and McCarthy, though, and the success of the film is thanks to their interaction. Sandy is the do-gooder and Diana is the shady con artist and the film does an excellent job both playing their differences off one another and then showing them growing together. THIEF is running the same ground as a film like Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, in that these two characters are definitely not pals at the start of the film but come to truly like one another as the story unfolds. Sandy is a nice guy but he’s not a total schlub who lets the world walk all over him. He’s understandably upset at Diana and doesn’t let her forget it for a good long while.

Critically, it’s Diana who first acts on his behalf. In a very funny sequence where Diana spins a lie at a bar to Big Chuck (Eric Stonestreet) about how Sandy likes to watch her with other men, Sandy ends up locking himself in the bathroom as Diana and Chuck have sex. It’s funny but there’s a really deep undertone to the scene – Diana’s actions are motivated by her own loneliness. We see this at the beginning of the movie when a bartender tells her no one in the bar actually likes her, they just like buying her drinks, and it runs through the movie until Diana comes clean about her origins of being abandoned by her parents and running through multiple foster homes. Here in the hotel room, once Sandy shuts himself in the bathroom, Diana intends to drug Chuck and abscond with Chuck and Sandy’s wallets and valuables. Instead of drugging Chuck, however, she ends up being moved by his story of not having been with anyone since his wife (she initially thinks he’s rejecting her, with gives the scene some gravitas), and decides to have sex with him.

McCarthy does a fantastic job here balancing Diana’s cons with her real emotions and I’m often left momentarily wondering whether we’re seeing the real Diana or the fake Diana. While she’s moved enough to have sex with Chuck, she has not undergone the full conversion, yet, as after he passes out she locks Sandy in the bathroom, takes Chuck and Sandy’s stuff, and leaves. When she hits the car, however, a phone call from Sandy’s family catches her off guard. She looks at the photo of his kids and has a change of heart. She returns to the room just as Sandy breaks the door down, and she tells him she was just out checking on the ice, and then crawls pathetically into bed.

Strawberry Quik in powder form. I drank the hell out of this stuff as a kid, even though I never understood why that pink bunny is wearing a strawberry for a hat.

Now that Diana has earned some sympathy points with the viewers, the film then immediately allows Sandy to have both a jerk and redemption moment. At checkout the next morning, he’s on edge and engages in a really funny exchange with a bored clerk. (“Did you enjoy your stay?” “No.”) A hungover Diana has asked him to get her some Strawberry Quik. Sandy asks the clerk if they have any and she says yes, but he doesn’t buy her any. When he’s getting himself some coffee, however, Robert Patrick kidnaps her and Sandy is quick to run after them. Now, yes, he needs her to get his good name back, but as she rightly points out later, he calls her his friend during his verbal exchange with Patrick, and his actions seem to be partially motivated out of genuine concern.

Sandy ends up crashing Patrick’s van and after he pulls Diana from the wreckage, there’s a small back and forthe between the two of them. I can’t remember exactly what was said, but what I do remember is that it was both quickly the exchange transpired and how none of it was all that important. It was a genuine exchange, though, that felt very conversational and real, and not just a set-up and punch line. I like that – Sandy and Diana are well-rounded characters, and maybe it’s because I’m getting older, but in comedies now I’m much more interested in movies with good characters in a good story that’s amusing than I am in watching a film that is constantly going for the quick hit-and-run jokefest approach.

The ending of IDENTITY THIEF is really something fantastic, and had me leaving the theater feeling up. From the moment Sandy takes Diana to his house and through to Sandy’s family visiting Diana in jail, the film has an almost perfect mix of being funny, touching, and even a little sad. The resolution of Diana going to jail, but Sandy and his family visiting her hit a perfect note, and the funniest line of the movie (the title of this review) comes right at the end.

IDENTITY THIEF isn’t quite as funny as either of Bateman or McCarthy’s best efforts, but it is a really good film. I only went to see it because I was in the mood for some popcorn, but I had a smile on my face from start to finish.

CLUE: Communism Was Just a Red Herring

Clue (1985) – Directed by Jonathan Lynn – Starring Tim Curry, Eileen Brennan, Lesley Ann Warren, Michael McKean, Christopher Lloyd, Madeline Kahn, Martin Mull, Colleen Camp, Lee Ving, Bill Henderson, Jane Wiedlin, Jeffrey Kramer, Kellye Nakahara, and Howard Hessman.

CLUE is in that rare class of movies that I watched a million times as a kid. Along with the Cannonball Run films and the Star Wars movies, we rented CLUE from the town’s video store whenever we couldn’t find something else to watch. I loved watching CLUE; unlike Cannonball and Star Wars, my parents would watch CLUE with us, so there was a sense of “adultness” to CLUE that the other films didn’t have because of that. We figured, if our parents are watching it with us, this film must be more for them than us. Looking back on it, of course, there’s just as many adult jokes and themes in Cannoball as CLUE, so it’s really just a matter of my parents not liking that movie and liking this one.

There’s always a bit of trepidation when I watch a movie I haven’t seen in years that I used to love. CLUE was such a big part of my movie-watching childhood that I was always going to love the movie for what it meant to me, but whether I would still love it or not …

It took about three minutes for me to realize I still love CLUE just as much now as I do then, and any movie or TV show or book that you can love as a child and as an adult is a special thing.

If you’ve seen CLUE you probably know what joke they pull a few minutes in that sealed the deal, but if you haven’t, let me assure you that CLUE gets more laughs out of Wadsworth the Butler (Tim Curry) stepping in dog poop than most movies get in 90 minutes. There’s nothing graphic about the poop stepping, either. At a wonderfully spooky mansion, Wadsworth placates the two snarling, yapping guard dogs with a couple cuts of fresh meat. With the dogs distracted, he shortens their leash so they can’t attack the night’s guests. At the end of his moment of triumph, Wadsworth makes a face and looks down and you know he’s stepped in it. From there, each of the first few guests smells the poop, too, and does the same “check the shoe when no one’s looking” routine.

People looking for poop on their shoes isn’t high comedy or particularly deep comedy, but it is wonderfully observational. Each person waits until Wadsworth’s back is turned to check their shoe as they balance their need to know with potential personal shame. It helps that CLUE is full of funny people, but it also demonstrates how clever the movie is by not overplaying their hand. No doubt, if the movie was made by today’s cinematic comedy stars, the urge would be to show the poop or to have the guests refer to the poop. Maybe it would work, but CLUE shows that it can be just as successful to generate laughs from quiet moments.

It helps, of course, that CLUE has a ridiculously funny cast. In a true ensemble piece, we’ve got Martin Mull (Colonel Mustard), Eileen Brennan (Mrs. Peacock), Michael McKean (Mr. Green), Lesley Ann Warren (Miss Scarlett), Mrs. White (Madeline Kahn), and Christopher Lloyd (Professor Plum) joining Tim Curry for all the festivities.

The plot is wonderfully simplistic, set up to get our crew together and create enough suspicion that everyone is on edge as the murdered bodies start piling up. The players have been assembled because they’re all being blackmailed by an unknown person. When Wadsworth reveals that Mr. Boddy (Lee Ving) is their blackmailer, the murders start happening. Boddy gets killed (twice), the cook (Kellye Nakahara), Yvette the maid (Colleen Camp), a passing motorist (Jeffrey Kramer), a cop (Bill Henderson), a telegram singer (Jane Wiedlin) … and all the while our blackmailed visitors are growing more nervous and tense.

CLUE works because all of the actors willingly share screen time. Everyone here is a total pro and no one tries to do more than their character need. With the bodies piling up and the nerves fraying, CLUE puts itself in a position to be successful.

CLUE has one of the great endings of all time. Originally, the theatrical release contained only one of the three endings (which one you got varied by theater), but in the home release they’ve all been cut together, and the result is a fantastic, wild, “here’s what happened” finish. Each of them feature Howard Hessman as an undercover cop, but the whodunit changes each time.

CLUE is one of those movies that I could watch 1,000 times and never tire of it. If you haven’t see it, do yourself a favor and correct that oversight.