Aka, Judd Apatow and his cronies make a lazy, intermittently funny movie.
First, I must thank my friend Karen for taking me to this press screening (it opens April 18).
As for my review, that was it, in the first line. I guess I could summarize the plot--guy gets dumped by his famous actress girlfriend, goes to Hawaii to forget her, by coincidence she shows up there. They meander through a movie with cameos from Judd Apatow regulars--Bill Hader, Johah Hill, Paul Rudd, etc.--all playing the part of "conspicuous cameo from a friend of Judd Apatow". As I said, I laughed at bits. There really are a lot of good jokes, they're just hung on such a lazy, lazy story. And I should say that the audience seemed to laugh a lot more than I did.
Now what I really want to write about--penises (penes? What's the plural? Cocks.) Something has happened to mainstream film while I was off watching art house and festival films. I first noticed it in "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story". Apparently to mainstream American audiences, the sight of a penis is hilarious. A naked lady can be presented either erotically or comically in mainstream American film, but apparently a naked man can only be comedy. And it's getting worse. At least in "Walk Hard" there was some comedy in the penis being uncomfortably close to John C. Reilly's face. Here the comedy is just a naked man standing in his living room. Neither the penis nor any other part of the man is doing anything funny, but this was the biggest laugh of the movie. I think "Idiocracy" got it slightly wrong. The most popular movie 1000 years from now won't be "Ass" (2 hours of a guy's ass, sometimes it farts), it'll be "Cock".
I can't believe that after going to three film festivals back-to-back-to-back, this is the movie that eases me back into mainstream cinema.
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