21 Jump Street

I've been hard-pressed to find a movie that I wanted to see since the entire world got caught up in Avengersmania a month ago. Whether it was the dreary Transformers-at-sea dreck called Battleship or yet the sequel that no one asked for in Men in Black 3, to my mind, there was nothing in theaters that presented a compelling argument for trooping to the mall except, well, The Avengers.

Fortunately for me, that changed when I saw the previews for the remake of the 80s television show 21 Jump Street, starring Jonah (Superbad) Hill and Channing (G.I. Joe) Tatum from directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller whose last work, oddly enough, was the animated cartoon Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, a film my family and I enjoyed immensely. The film, marketed as a raunchy action comedy with plenty of violence, swearing, drug use and nudity seemed like a marked departure for guys who had just done a family film (and who will do another one again as they are in the process of making the Cloudy sequel) but the trailers seemed to promise some belly laughs so I went for it, with my wife in tow, but left the kids at home this time. Boy, did we enjoy ourselves. I should clarify at the outset that I was not a fan of the original TV series. I was aware of it, and I may have even caught an episode or two, but I never followed it with any sort of regularity. I knew it was a lot more serious than this movie was, but not much else, so should anyone think to ask me if the film captured the spirit of the old TV show, I'd have to say I have no idea.

What I can say, though, is that this is hands down the funniest film I've seen all year. It's funnier than it has any business being, considering that a great chunk of the humor was extremely, unabashedly crude. High school students Morton Schmidt (Hill) and Greg Jenko (Tatum) couldn't be more different. Schmidt is brainy, shy and not particularly attractive. He is, in popular parlance, a nerd. Jenko, on the other hand, is, as high school students go, at the top of the food chain. He's handsome, a jock, and a complete ladies' man. For different reasons, however, neither of them gets to go to their senior prom. Jenko's grades are too bad, and Schmidt can't find anyone to go with him.

Years later, the two meet up again at the police academy and strike up an unlikely but genuine friendship, with Schmidt's brains helping Jenko hurdle the more cerebral aspects of the training and Jenko's athleticism helping Schmidt get in much-needed shape for the many physical challenge the pair of them must face. When the two of them graduate, however, they end up on bicycles pulling park duty. When they end up messing up an arrest of a drug dealer, however, due to Jenko's failure to read the perp his Miranda Rights, they are shuffled off to an undercover program shepherded by the foul-mouthed Captain Dickson (Ice Cube of Friday and Barbershop fame) in which they will pose as high school students in order to catch a drug dealer supplying a new, lethal synthetic drug to a local high school. Only when they get there, high school is not at all the place they remember it to be.

One of the most striking things about this completely over-the-top movie is how logic is one of its first casualties. Schmidt and Jenko are arguably two of the stupidest fictional policemen, the latter more than the former, I have ever encountered, and it completely mystified me that, after completely screwing the pooch with a simple arrest by failing to read a perp his rights during an arrest, Jenko at the very least wasn't busted to traffic cop duty or some kind of desk job. Why would the police department place a couple of morons like Schmidt and Jenko in a sensitive undercover assignment when their incompetence could well result in their cover being blown? The whole premise of the film makes next to no sense.

But that's one of the endearing things about this movie: by actually throwing logic out the window from the word go, the filmmakers set the stage for one bit of hilarity after another, and truth be told, by the time I realized how ridiculous the plot was I had laughed far too hard to care. Lord and Miller display, in highly stylized and utterly irreverent fashion, why they were the perfect choice for this project given their work on Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs; the movie actually plays out like a cartoon on amphetamines. Now, as good as they turn out to be, the directors could not have made this farce work without equally talented, and more importantly, game, actors, and in Hill (who helped write the script) and Tatum they have their muses. For Hill this kind of work is basically old hat considering the number of screwball comedies he's starred in practically since his career started, but Tatum is a revelation in his role as the dummy jock Jenko, whose failure to read the drug perp his Miranda rights is the reason the two of them get sent to the Jump Street program in the first place. To be honest, it's always fun to watch matinee-idol types play morons; I enjoyed Tatum's performance as Jenko the same way I enjoyed watching Brad Pitt play a dummy in The Mexican and Burn After Reading. It goes to show these guys know how to laugh at themselves even as they take the rest of us regular schmoes along for the ride.

Together, Hill's Schmidt and Tatum's Jenko are a perfect "odd couple" pairing, and in this film they manage to take the whole "bromance" concept to uncomfortable but nonetheless hilarious new depths. The rest of the cast provides the two ample support, from Dave Franco (James Franco's brother) as the smooth-talking hipster/drug dealer to Rob Riggle as the high school coach, to Ellie Kemper as a chemistry teacher with the hots for Jenko, although Brie Larson, cast as Schmidt's love interest, seems a tad old for a high school student. Fans of the original can look forward to cameos from the original cast as well, including its most prominent member. With the summer movie season in the U.S. beginning in earnest this coming week with films like Prometheus, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and a whole other slew of rather exciting movies coming to theaters I'll be glad to have something other than The Avengers to watch, but in the meantime it certainly was good to have this little confection to keep me occupied.

Score: 4/5

3-D

What I have to say on the topic of 3-D isn't exactly new, but having spent a small fortune watching The Avengers in 3-D, only to constantly take my glasses off during the first hour or so of screening to be able to see what was happening I felt the need to weigh in on a discussion that's been going for the last seven years or so, with the introduction of supposedly "new and improved" 3-D technology. Since the reintroduction of 3-D movie viewing within the last ten years or so, I've only seen a handful of 3-D films, and of that handful I've only truly enjoyed an even smaller handful, i.e. it was only in very few instances that my viewing experience was significantly enhanced by the additional viewing dimension. It's easy to say that 3-D should only be used when it can somehow enhance the experience, but considering that movie-making is obviously by and large a business it's pretty much a given that the extra revenue gained from a relatively cheap 3-D post-production conversion will always be a preferred option for filmmakers, as opposed to actually designing and shooting a film in 3-D or (gasp) not presenting the film in 3-D at all. That, of course, doesn't make it right. Fortunately, it seems that the folks with real integrity when it comes to 3-D seem to be rewarded the most richly, with James Cameron, who has effectively set the standard for truly excellent 3-D presentation with Avatar, sitting pretty at the top of the heap. Probably the best example of 3-D tacked on for extra cash is the global smash hit The Avengers. As much as I loved that movie (and anyone who's followed this blog knows that I do) the added on 3-D added absolutely nothing to the viewing experience save perhaps for the last fifteen to twenty minutes. In fact, it detracted from it by making about a quarter of the film so dark that I had to take off my glasses to determine what was going on, such as the chase at the beginning and the Thor/Iron Man fight scene. As far as 3-D viewing experiences go, it's not the worst I've ever had (that "honor" is reserved for the third Chronicles of Narnia film, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the post-production conversion of which was so obviously an afterthought that it's downright offensive), and clearly Marvel has spent a lot of money on this film, but even for a conversion they could have done much better; Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, which came out two years ago and which was likewise converted to 3-D, made far better use of the format even though it was a far inferior film overall. Watching The Avengers in 3-D I honestly couldn't help but smell the decision-making of a bunch of suits rather than an actual creative choice by the filmmakers themselves. Ultimately I think it's up to audiences to reject poor 3-D switchovers in favor of 2-D and to reward good 3-D jobs. Pixar, for example, quite frankly deserves to be pilloried for the virtually non-existent 3-D of Toy Story 3, which, while shot in 3-D, is second only to Dawn Treader on my crappy-3-D-experience list (especially considering it's one of the two 3-D films I've seen to give me a headache). The 3-D of that film added next to nothing to the experience, and the following year, Pixar did not get my extra money for 3-D tickets for Cars 2, nor are they likely to ever get my extra money for a 3-D film again. For all my love for them, did not get a penny out of me for the 3-D presentation of Captain America last year, especially not after the awful experience I had with Thor. The good news is that for all of the cash it's making, The Avengers isn't making as much off its 3-D format as Avatar did, or a number of other 3-D films of the last year or three. Audiences seem to be learning to be a little more discriminating with their hard-earned money, and I would really encourage that. Avoid crappy 3-D, conversions or otherwise and reward the well-wrought 3-D. Not only that, but a number of films released in 3-D have tanked at the box-office in the last coupe of years or so, like Mars Needs Moms, Alpha and Omega, Wrath of the Titans, Happy Feet 2, Cats and Dogs 2, Gulliver's Travels, Conan the Barbarian, and so on and so forth, demonstrating to studios that 3-D is not a surefire, idiot-proof way to ensure the profitability of their films. It's up to us, then. Let's tell people we won't waste the money we practically bleed for every day on shoddy 3-D and force filmmakers to either put up decent 3-D or shut up.

No Longer "Just" a Comic Book Movie

"What would you prefer, yellow spandex?" This was a line uttered by Cyclops (played by James Marsden), a character in Bryan Singer's 2000 film The X-Men, to his fellow X-Man, Wolverine (played by Hugh Jackman), in reference to the latter's derogatory comment about their black leather costumes. The costumes, however garish-looking, were quite a departure from the colorful and sometime silly-looking spandex costumes the characters sported in the comic books on which the movie and eventual franchise were based. More than that, though, the line was a jab at how silly the thought of a direct, page-to-screen adaptation of Marvel's famous mutant team would have been, and how it was so much better to dress the X-Men like rejects from the 1999 smash-hit The Matrix. There could have been no more damning vote of no confidence in a truly faithful adaptation than a statement such as that. It's funny how, despite the overwhelming success of Richard Donner's Superman back in 1978, featuring a very colorfully-garbed Christopher Reeve, as well as a slew of successful and critically-acclaimed comic-book-based movies spanning the decades that have passed since then, the motion picture derived from a comic book has had a notably difficult time earning the respect in the pop culture landscape that it deserves. While the above-mentioned line of dialogue from X-Men is but one example, there are plenty of others ranging from the quips of studio execs to the fact that a major studio with several Marvel Comics properties in its roster continually treats these gems like second-class citizens. In general, when a comic-book movie has done well or has been received well by critics, for some reason a lot of writers have difficulty saying "it's a great movie" choosing almost invariably to qualify their statements with "it's great...for a comic book movie." There's something hurtful about this, as no one ever hears anyone describing Raiders of the Lost Ark as "great...for a movie derived from the trashy serials of the 30s" or the original Star Wars as "great...for a movie that's set in outer space." There's no qualification, no equivocation. To use a more recent example, The Lord of the Rings films are hailed as great milestones of cinema, not great examples of geek fodder. No one even judges Avatar, with its rather hackneyed plot, as being great for a genre film. These are films judged purely on their merit. Even worse, the handful of comic-book movies that have been described as great, like Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, are described as such "because they don't feel like comic book movies" as if that categorization inherently and necessarily drags the film's quality down a notch or three. Nolan himself, like Singer before him and other makers of comic-book-based films who visibly try to tone-down the four-color sensibility of their works, seems distinctly ashamed of the Batman's comic book roots. Someone commenting on a forum said that it was great because "it was no longer a comic-book film, but a crime drama" which, again, denigrates comic book films as a whole to suggest that the only way this film could be truly great was for it to be something else entirely. It's catchy; I'm ashamed to admit than in praising one comic book movie or another (I think it was the first Iron Man film), I used the phrase "transcends its comic book roots." Looking back that was such a hateful thing for me to say; why should comic book roots be something to transcend? There are many comic books of the latter half of the 20th century, namely the work of Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, John Byrne, and Walt Simonson to name a very, very few, that, in terms of sheer inventiveness and visual verve, still far outstrip anything we see in modern cinema. Like one writer praising Joss Whedon's smash hit film The Avengers pointed out, movies are only just starting to catch up to comic books in terms of being imaginative. Which brings me to the point; I think The Avengers, with its massive, unprecedented popularity, is in a position to do what no other film has been able to do even as far back as the first Superman movie, which is definitively legitimize the comic-book film as an art form. A lot of films have had their shot at this and failed, even though many of them have come tantalizingly close. Unlike any of the Marvel movies, The Avengers is a marriage of four-color heritage with Joss Whedon's trademarked wit and razor-sharp storytelling, and with the very finest technology Hollywood has to offer. It's a heck of a three-way. There's no underlying sense of embarrassment that this movie came from "just" a comic book. The characters don't wear black leather or body armor, there's no attempt to present this film as anything other than what it is, a faithful but wonderfully updated adaptation of Stan Lee's and Jack Kirby's comic book creation. The Avengers could be the film that breaks the glass ceiling for comic-book movies, that shows that they are every bit the legitimate art form that silent movies starring French people are or British war dramas are...just a different kind of art form. It's a movie that's proud of what it is and where it came from, and which has been eagerly embraced by audiences everywhere. Hey, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, I hope you're paying attention. For me, success will come the day comic book films in general, and Marvel Films in particular, have the same cinematic pedigree as, say Pixar movies, which are hardly ever spoken of as "just cartoons." Perhaps it's fitting, therefore, that Marvel has found a home in Disney. Maybe the one sure sign that comic-book-based movies have shattered the glass ceiling is the when truly great comic-book based movies are spoken of by the public and the media alike as great movies, period.