21 JUMP STREET: Embrace Your Stereotypes

21 Jump Street (2012) – Directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller – Starring Jonah Hill, Channing Tatum, Brie Larson, Dave Franco, Ellie Kemper, Rob Riggle, Ice Cube, Nick Offerman, Peter DeLuise, Holly Robinson Peete, and Johnny Depp.

There’s a lot going against 21 JUMP STREET – it stars Jonah Hill (who I honestly think I’d rather see doing quirky dramas like Moneyball instead of silly comedies) and Channing Tatum (who I never remember being intentionally funny before) in a comedic update of a TV show from the ’80s. Making things tougher on the film (though none of this is JUMP STREET’s fault), I was watching it in an old, semi-crowded theater on a crappy print. (It was the 10 PM show at the $3 casino cinema.) I’d heard good things about it, but I didn’t have high expectations.

Five minutes in, I was hooked.

21 JUMP STREET is an incredibly funny movie that does a smart thing – it tells a simple story very effectively, building most of the plot elements around the triangulation of Schmidt and Jenko’s job as police officers, the high school location of the their undercover investigation, and Schmidt and Jenko’s insecurities.

Let me say that again in case you skimmed over it – 21 JUMP STREET is an incredibly funny movie, and I come away from this film as impressed with Jonah Hill as I did after Moneyball. Hill co-wrote JUMP STREET with Michael Bacall (who also co-wrote the excellent Scott Pilgrim vs. the World) and they keep their script focused and driven, making the humor serve the story instead of simply stringing together a bunch of funny bits. Hill also wisely casts himself in the straighter role, allowing Tatum to handle more of the outrageous comedy.

Hill and Tatum make an interesting duo – they have the typical cinematic tall guy and fat guy bit look down, but unlike Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Spade and Farley, Hill and Tatum largely invert the stereotype, with the fat one being the practical one and the skinny one being the dummy. (And, yeah, I hate to use such base terms and paint with such a broad brush, but this is a pretty standard comedic configuration.) It works, too, because Hill is very good at playing a the put-upon guy who’s personal pain serves as the basis for the film’s comedic debasement of him, and Tatum is very good as the popular guy who’s used to doing the debasing.

Schmidt and Jenko (Hill and Tatum) went to high school together, but were on opposite sides of the cool line. Neither one of them got to go to the prom – Schmidt because no one would go with him and Jenko because his poor grades got him barred.

Years later, they unwittingly enroll in the police academy at the same. “Hey, Not-So-Slim Shady!” Jenko calls out, a reference to Schmidt’s Eminem-inspired look in high school. Very quickly, they realize they can help each other since Schmidt isn’t so good with the physical (being overweight) and Jenko isn’t so good with the tests (being dumb). Before we know it, they’ve both passed the Academy and been made partners.

Impressively, JUMP STREET moves through all of this set-up efficiently. The two guys are bike cops and they screw up a bust and they get kicked over into the Jump Street program, where they meet Captain Dickson (Ice Cube) at an abandoned church that serves as the program’s headquarters. Dickson sends them back to high school, but because Jenko can’t remember his cover identity, he ends up having to live as the science nerd and Schmidt gets enrolled in drama. It’s another smart twist, having these two guys live high school over, but this time from the other’s point of view.

Not only is the script smart, but the casting and acting is top notch. Ice Cube totally embraces the “angry black captain” stereotype, and Hill and Bacall’s script uses these stereotypes to its benefit, having Dickson address them directly. “Yeah, I’m black!” he shouts at them from the pulpit. “I worked hard to get where I am, and yes, sometimes I get angry!” After dressing Schmidt and Jenko down over their types, he tells them to “embrace your stereotypes!”

Which they then almost immediately screw up and have to live life as the other one.

There’s plenty of stupid humor here – the guys end up getting tricked into using drugs, they purposely throw a huge party at Schmidt’s parent’s house, the bad guy ends up getting his dick blown off, which he then tries to pick up with his mouth – but there’s also clever humor, too, like when Schmidt starts hitting on a high school girl (they make a point to tell you she’s 18), but does it anachronistically, calling her instead of texting her.

In a move the film didn’t have to make, but did, 21 JUMP STREET is set in the same continuity as the TV show – it’s just 25 years later and everything’s seen through a comedic lens. Johnny Depp, Peter DeLuise, and Holly Robinson Peete all return to reprise their roles from the TV show, and it’s a nice touch that probably 90% of the people in the theater completely missed. Maybe they knew Depp used to be in the show, but it’s not like DeLuise and Peete’s involvement got the crowd hootering and hollering in approval. Even “Jenko” is a shout-out to the original captain of the Jump Street program, who only lasted

JUMP STREET was directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the directing duo who made the excellent Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, and they display a wonderful gift for balancing the comedic with the dramatic.

I saw 21 JUMP STREET Saturday night and then went to a different theater to see Men in Black 3 on Monday (review coming shortly), and it’s not even close as to which was the better movie. I laughed more times and with greater intensity in the first 15-20 minutes of JUMP STREET than I did in the entire length of MIB3. At the end of JUMP STREET, they tease a set-up for a sequel where Schmidt and Jenko go to college, and I’m honestly looking forward to seeing it.

DARK SHADOWS: You’ll Have to Imagine Us On a Better Day

Dark Shadows (2012) – Directed by Tim Burton – Starring Johnny Depp, Michelle Pfeiffer, Helena Bonham Carter, Eva Green, Jackie Earle Haley, Jonny Lee Miller, Chloë Grace Moretz, Bella Heathcote, Christopher Lee, and Alice Cooper.

“These people might be freaks and weirdos, but don’t freak and weirdos deserve to be happy, too?”

That quote does not come from DARK SHADOWS, which takes the title for being the worst Tim Burton movie made to date, but rather from Derrick Ferguson on the Better in the Dark #129 podcast. In episode #129, Derrick and Tom Deja hold a Director’s Court on the career of Tim Burton. (And if you like Burton, or movies, or good conversation, you should be listening to the BITD podcast; I’m listening to #129 right now as I write this review.) They released this episode back prior to the release of DARK SHADOWS so they don’t discuss this latest Burton/Depp team-up but it’s all the better they don’t because DARK SHADOWS is as bad a movie as a major talent like Tim Burton could ever hope to release.

At the end of the film, Victoria Winters (Bella Heathcote) has been turned into a vampire by Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp). He calls her Victoria and she corrects him, telling him her name is, “Josette,” which was the name of the original love of Barnabas’ life, who looks just like Maggie Evans, which is Victoria Winters’ real name. The person I saw the movie with asked me if we were supposed to think Victoria had become Josette, or if she had always been Josette.

My answer?

I don’t care.

I don’t. DARK SHADOWS is brutal, awful, bad film making. If it was just a bad movie, I wouldn’t freak out because bad movies happen all the time. What’s unforgivable about SHADOWS is that it’s a poorly made film and a director with all of Burton’s talent should not be making fundamentally flawed movies. He can make bad movies but not poorly made ones, and DARK SHADOWS has so many problems that I felt like Burton turned in his film and then someone who hates him re-cut it to make it as stupid as possible.

There are problems with tone and narrative here, and I’ll start with tone.

DARK SHADOWS has no idea what it wants to be. It’s ostensibly a horror-comedy, but it’s neither scary nor funny. Really, it’s a bad comedy because there’s very little attempt to do anything horror-related, at all, beyond the “mob captures the monster at his castle” sequence early in the film. There’s an attempt to have a love plot going on, but it’s barely touched upon and it’s given lip service instead of active proof. Barnabas falls in love with Victoria because she looks like Josette.

That’s it.

He has much more passion with Angelique (Eva Green), even though he doesn’t love her. Heck, he has more passion with Dr. Hoffman (Helena Bonham Carter) than he has with Victoria, which isn’t a bad thing because Victoria looks like she’s 16.

Right, so I’m now listening to the portion of the BITD podcast where they touch on the unseen DARK SHADOWS and Tom Deja makes the point that Johnny Depp’s Barnabas looks like (based on the TV commercials) it’s another role where Depp’s conception of the character is all artifice. Without seeing the movie, Tom has rather nailed it, but the artifice critique really applies to the whole film – you know, except for the actually being clever part. Things just happen here and then disappear and you get the feeling they just happen because they make a good scene or have a good visual and not because they add to the film’s narrative. There’s no consistency here, in feel or story.

For instance, the movie opens two centuries ago and we get the whole back story of Barnabas not being in love with Angelique, and Angelique actually being a witch, and casting spells that sends his real love off a cliff. She curses him with becoming a vampire and then turns the town against him, sticking him in a coffin. Great.

We cut to the present and spend a good amount of time introducing Maggie Evans/Victoria Winters in 1972. First, she’s on a train, then she gets a ride from some hippies, then she ends up at Collinwood where she gets hired to play governess to David Collins, a young kid who thinks he can talk to his dead mom. Pretty clearly, the film has set up Barnabas and Victoria to be the two leads of the film because it’s taken all this time introducing them.

It’s rather curious, then, when Victoria then proceeds to largely disappear from the film for huge chunks of time.

What?

The love story is never really developed; they’re both drawn to each other and that’s apparently all the film has to say about love.

And that’s where the film falters in terms of character. Barnabas is a monster, but not because he’s a vampire with a pale look, but because (in the past) he’s screwing Angelique without being in love with her. Angelique’s rage is lit when she tells Barnabas she wants to hear that he loves her, but Barnabas refuses, and says that wouldn’t be true. Now, that alone doesn’t make him a monster because lots of guys sleep with women they don’t love, but when you add in the fact that Barnabas lives in the house and Angelique works there as an employee of the family, things get a bit trickier.

Still, not wholly a bad guy at this point. But cut to the present where he falls in love with Victoria, and then proceeds to have sex with Dr. Hoffman and Angelique on the side. He slaughters the workers who free him from his coffin and the hippies who help him understand the contemporary world, but the film treats these events as coldly as Barnabas does. At the end of the film, Barnabas tells Angelique that her curse is that she’s incapable of love, but she’s not. Her love is misguided, but there’s no indication at all that Angelique was anything but in love with Barnabas back in the 18th century. Her problem isn’t that she cannot love, but that she cannot move on from who she believes to be her one, true love.

Think back to Derrick’s quote up at the top of this review. He perfectly encapsulates the heart of Tim Burton’s movies, but there’s no heart in DARK SHADOWS. The Collins’ family endures, but there’s no sense of family here. The mom (Michelle Pfeiffer) is the hard matriarch overseeing the downfall of the family business. Her brother (Jonny Lee Miller) is a letch, who eyes the newly arrived Victoria like a piece of meat to be humped, but then never, ever talks to her. Mom’s daughter Carolyn (Chloë Grace Moretz) is an angry, isolated teen who wants to run away. And the brother’s son (Gulliver McGrath) talks to his dead mom and no one believes him. They are dysfunctional and the film ultimately tries to bind them through their supernatural abilities: David talks to the dead, Barnabas is a vampire, and Carolyn is a werewolf (which comes out of nowhere), and Michelle Pfeiffer is, um, a mom?

DARK SHADOWS tries to draw a line about who’s the actual monster because David’s father chooses to leave Collinwood with a huge sum of cash instead of acting like David’s dad, but the film hasn’t taken the time to make them seem like real people, so I don’t care.

Carolyn’s status as a werewolf is a good example of things just happening. It comes out of nowhere, which is just as bad as things going nowhere. When Barnabas returns, he decides he’s going to restore the family’s business to its former glory. So he goes and hypnotizes Christopher Lee and then they have a ceremony where they open the factory and then … nada. The next time the cannery plays any role in the film of note is when Angelique blows it up.

The film probably should have set itself up as a total Barnabas vs. Angelique film because that’s where the film clearly wants to go. Eva Green is her usual gorgeous self (I have a fondness for black boots and she rocks that look deliciously) and her character provides the wildness to counter Barnabas’ bland exterior. That whole opening sequence with Victoria is time they should have spent with Angelique.

DARK SHADOWS has two positive things going for it. The first is the look of the town, which is fantastic. The second is the mid-film appearance by Alice Cooper an the use of my favorite Cooper song of all time (which is also one of my favorite overall songs of all time), “Ballad of Dwight Fry.” The song integrates wonderfully with the story during this sequence (including Carolyn speaking the little girl’s part of the song) and gives the film some much needed life, and is the only real evidence of any ingenuity from the film makers.

The theater I saw the movie in actually had a decent crowd, but there were no rumblings of approval on the way out the door. People shuffled out either complaining about the film or silently, shuffling back to the light like disappointed zombies. Tim Burton and Johnny Depp have both made bad movies in the past, but this time around they failed at the simplest aspects of storytelling.

Simply put, DARK SHADOWS is a poorly made movie, and the worst of Tim Burton’s long, illustrious career.

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: AT WORLD’S END: All Men Are Drawn to the Sea, Perilous Though it May Be

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (2007) – Directed by Gore Verbinski – Starring Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley, Stellan Skarsgård, Bill Nighy, Tom Hollander, Chow Yun-fat, Geoffrey Rush, Jack Davenport, Naomie Harris, Kevin McNally, David Schofield, Jonathan Pryce, Mackenzie Crook,
Lee Arenberg, and Keith Richards.

If you want to argue that PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: AT WORLD’S END is too bloated and too dark, you won’t get a huge fight from me; I will, however, counter that despite these problems, I still enjoy the movie a good deal. I find it works much better as a home view than it did in the theaters, as 11 minutes short of 3 hours is just too darn long for a fun movie-going experience.

And that length exemplifies what is both ill-conceived and admirable about AT WORLD’S END: they forgot they were making a popcorn movie.

When I saw this movie in the theaters I left bitterly disappointed at the various endings. For a series that had delivered so much fun, so many thrills, and such nice character growth, AT WORLD’S END is a downer of a movie: Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) is killed and becomes the new captain of the Flying Dutchman, meaning he and Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley) can see each other only once every ten years; Barbosa (Geoffrey Rush) has stolen the Black Pearl away from Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp); and Norrington (Jack Davenport) and Governor Swann (Jonathan Pryce) are dead.

Why? If there was ever a series in which giving us a Happy Hollywood ending would have been totally justified, it’s PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN. Yet the only character who really ends on a high note is Will’s dad, “Bootstrap” Bill Turner (Stellan Skarsgård), and the crew of the Dutchman, who stop being fish men and go back to being regular men.

Watching AT WORLD’S END now, however, I can better appreciate what Gore Verbinski and the rest of the creative team were attempting. Clearly, they want AT WORLD’S END to have a real sense of inevitable decline. At one point in the film Jack mentions he wouldn’t mind being the last pirate alive and Barbosa reminds him that one of the downside of being that last is that inevitably there will be no one left.

The idea that the “old ways” are becoming extinct has been at the heart of the PIRATES trilogy, and here we see that idea taken as far as it can go: Lord Beckett (Tom Hollander) has control of the Flying Dutchman because he controls Davy Jones’ heart, and he’s on a quest to rid the world of pirates. In response, the pirate convene a meeting of the Brethren of Pirates, bringing together the nine Pirate Lords to try and figure out what to do.

There’s just one problem – Jack Sparrow is one of the pirate lords and he didn’t name a successor before getting sucked down into Davy Jones’ locker. As seen at the end of DEAD MAN’S CHEST, Tia Dalma (Naomie Harris) has brought Hector Barbosa back to life to captain the Pearl‘s crew, Will, and Elizabeth on a quest into Davy Jones’ locker to bring Jack back.

AT WORLD’S END suffers from taking it’s sweet ass time getting anywhere. The opening sequence is an elongated negotiation/fight/team-up with Sao Feng (Chow Yun Fat), as Barbosa takes the crew to Singapore to ask this Pirate Lord. It’s a half hour before we even get to see Jack on screen, and then we get ten minutes of him acting bonkers.

The film needlessly has Jack, Will, Elizabeth … heck, nearly everyone switching sides to cut the best deal for themselves. I know this loyalty hopping has been a trademark of the series, but it feels a bit tired and unnecessary here because there’s just so much of it. Becket is the enemy yet Sao Feng, Jack, and Will all cut deals with him on the sly for their own benefit. It shouldn’t be this much work keeping track of who’s betraying who.

The movie suffers, too, from a bit of Keira Knightley worship. All the major male players but Barbosa have a thing for her (or Elizabeth Swann, I should say) and it gets a bit tedious to watch every single male try to get in her pants. I mean, I get it, she’s hot and all, but enough’s enough. By the time Sao Feng makes a play on her, I’d had it.

AT WORLD’S END continues the trend of having Elizabeth step into the main spotlight, and while can handle the smaller bits, she’s not very convincing as a Pirate Lord, let alone Pirate King.

Problems aside, the bloatedness of AT WORLD’S END is nearly completely forgotten by me when we get to the final battle between the Black Pearl and the Flying Dutchman. If there is a greater ship vs. ship battle in cinematic history, I have not seen it. The two ships battle in the wind and rain as they circle an oceanic whirlpool. It’s phenomenally great work from the CGI folk and a rousing battle. I could watch just this final battle on a loop and be satisfied.

In the end, however, I keep coming back to the fact that Verbinski and Company coated everything here in darkness. It’s a blast to see Keith Richards show up to play Jack’s dad, but there’s not enough of these moments. AT WORLD’S END is still an enjoyable movie because I like hanging out with Barbosa, Jack, Will, and Elizabeth and because the action sequences are amazing. It is admirable to see a trilogy go out with all guns blazing (as it were).

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PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN Review Index

POTC: THE BLACK PEARL: You Best Start Believing in Ghost Stories, Miss Turner, You’re in One
POTC: DEAD MAN’S CHEST: I’m Afraid Currency is the Currency of the Real,
POTC: AT WORLD’S END: All Men are Drawn to the Sea, Perilous Though it May Be
POTC: ON STRANGER TIDES: Does This Face Look Like It’s Been to the Fountain of Youth?