Movie Box Review

Until its final 45 minutes, the one thing that could be said about this year's Oscar telecast was that it was at least brisk.  Merely 2 hours and 15 minutes into the show, there were amazingly only 3 awards and the In Memorium segment still to go.  But for ABC, running under the appointed time would be at least as bad as running over--those commercials all had to get on the air--so at that point the brakes went on, and like the last 2 minutes of a close basketball game, when endless fouls and time-outs stretch the very nature of time, the remainder of the show moved in extreme slow-motion.  Most egregiously tedious:  the fatuous nominee-by-nominee description of each Best Actor and Actress performance that Natalie Portman and Colin Firth were forced to deliver.

The fact that from the network's point of view, the biggest problem with this year's show was that it ran too efficiently tells you all you need to know.  Billy Crystal, given the mantle of Host like a retired general brought back to action after some dreadful military defeat (in this case two of them:  last year's James Franco/Anne Hathaway debacle and the Brett Ratner/Eddie Murphy embarrassment), did what he does.  There was the polished opening bit with Billy inserted among the film clips and movie stars, the "Wonderful Night For Oscar" musical number (not particularly audible, although it was unclear whether that was Crystal's fault or ABC's sub-par microphones, a problem all night), the light digs at celebrities that were better timed than they were funny, the now-ancient "What They're Really Thinking" sketch, which ran horribly flat (Brad Pitt is thinking about parent-teacher conferences!  That's because he and Angelina have so many kids!  LOL!).  There wasn't a genuinely imaginative or inspired moment in Crystal's whole evening, but damn it, the show ran on time. 

The whole tone of the night seemed something like an Old People's Revenge, as though the Academy, after both its efforts at getting "hip" had ended in disaster, had thrown up its hands and embraced its creakiness.  (It was like the Academy had turned into the aged derelicts getting their revenge on Malcolm McDowell in the second half of A Clockwork Orange.)  Instead, they ridiculed--repeatedly--the whole idea of pandering to youth.  Take that, you young demo you--get off our lawn!

So the entertainment centerpiece of the night was Cirque du Soleil, the members of the troupe throwing each other around like cast members in Broadway's Spider-Man and resembling the Vegas floorshow they are.  A seemingly endless series of montages featured movie stars photographed like the Witnesses in Warren Beatty's Reds (including, briefly, Beatty himself), opining very seriously about What The Movies Mean To Us, and sidestepping the fact that few of them have probably paid for a ticket in a real movie theater for the past decade or more.  Christopher Guest's rep group turned up in a parody of screening focus groups that was so inside baseball, you'd have had to be a marketing executive to find it funny. 

Among the presenters, few of the pre-planned schticks paid off:  Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis with cymbals and Robert Downey Jr's unbearable Best Doc/reality-show bit (watching it, you felt sorry for Gwyneth Paltrow, a seeming impossibility) both fell flat.  Emma Stone managed to survive her gimmick, partly because it was fun to watch Ben Stiller play straight man, and partly because Emma Stone seems able to survive anything.  Chris Rock had some funny moments.  And Angelina Jolie stuck her leg out.

It came as a surprise to exactly no one this past week when the LA Times reported breathlessly that an analysis of the Academy membership revealed it to be predominantly elderly white guys.  And this show was for them, from the winners (Christopher Plummer, Meryl Streep, Woody Allen, 10 of the awards split between 2 loving tributes to the world of classic cinema) to the telecast itself.  The night felt as though the Academy was desperately hoping that if everyone pretended the world wasn't changing... maybe it wouldn't.

Good luck with that.

In Hollywood, the word "sequel" is often code for "remake."  This isn't news:  the James Bond series has been going on for almost 50 years, and allowing for the occasional change in cast and some fluctuation in quality, it's pretty much been the same movie repeated over and over again (Hey look, it's Q with the gadgets!).  So one can't really blame Warner Bros and director Todd Phillips for essentially duplicating their giant success with The Hangover ($467M worldwide) 2 years later by giving us the putative sequel THE HANGOVER PART II.

And by duplicate, I mean a copy so close to the original that if they didn't already own the copyright, the filmmakers could be sued for infringement.  Not only is Phillips back as director and co-writer (this time with Craig Mazin and Scot Armstrong) and the core cast (Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis, Justin Bartha, Ken Jeong) reassembled, not only is the basic storyline the same, but the "changes" are basically just swaps of one detail for another.  The only real difference is one of location; with an eye to the international market (the first film only made 41% of its total gross overseas--come on, guys, Warners must have said, you can do better!), we're in Bangkok instead of Vegas.  But it almost doesn't matter, since the cities are used in exactly the same way, for their linked associations with outrageous excess and dirty secrets. 

The groom-to-be this time is Stu (Helms), who's marrying a Thai-American girl, the Heather Graham character from Hangover having vanished.  Phil (Cooper) is again the swinging ringleader of the group, and Alan (Galifianakis) the odd man-child who's along for the ride and incapable of keeping himself under control.  Again a spare member of the pre-wedding group goes missing, although this time it's the bride's brother (Mason Lee)--but the movie is so intent on following the original slavishly that Doug (Bartha), the original lost boy, is still kept off-screen for most of the film.  Where the first movie had the gang saddled with an unknown baby, this time it's a monkey; where Stu suffered knocked-out teeth 2 years ago, now he's got a Tyson-like facial tattoo.  They've upped the ante on the transgressive act involving one of them, but deleted the good-natured hint of romance that Graham's hooker provided in the original.  Jeong is again semi-nude and outrageous, Helms provides new lyrics for a song... I could go on; suffice it to say that the script here was less an act of creative writing than an exercise in painting-by-numbers.

None of this makes Hangover II bad--after all, there's a reason they're still churning out Bond movies after 50 years.  The cast continues to be terrific together, and even where the story beats are predictable, the little twists and reactions (particularly from Galifianakis) make them work.  Also, Phillips is one of the few current comedy directors to have a strong sense of visual style; his work with cinematographer Lawrence Sher is atmospheric and handsome (compared to Bridesmaids, Hangover II practically looks like Barry Lyndon).  The picture has the benefit of the same crackerjack story structure as the original, so it meanders and drifts far less than films from the Apatow school of comedies do.  It's all just a little tired.  Watching the film with a sold-out crowd, there's surprisingly little loud laughter, and what there is seems to be expressing fond familiarity more than the surprising hilarity of the first film.

Because the differences between the movies are so minute, after a while one watches Hangover II for the tonal changes that occasionally appear--it's like going to see a favorite band play a live show, and hearing a new riff in one of their old hits.  There are brief moments in this film that suggest a darker, even deeper story about friendship and manhood could have emerged, bits where the picture almost seems ready to suggest that these guys aren't the easygoing heroes we know, and that they might genuinely not like each other all that much.  But those kinds of implications are bad for business, and Hangover is a franchise.  Maybe in Hangover V (set in Rio?), we can look forward to a revisionist reboot.