Post by Herr Director on Jul 18, 2015 13:25:47 GMT -6
Almost three years after his last film, American comedy power house Judd Apatow returns to the director's chair with "Trainwreck." Most notable about this film is that it's not only the first time Mr. Apatow has directed a script he did not write/co-write himself, but, it also marks the first time Apatow has helmed a film with a female protagonist. Said protagonist, and the writer behind the film's script is Amy Schumer, the on-the-rise comedy superstar of the hit Comedy Central show "Inside Amy Schumer."
Such a prolific combination of creator and performer has elevated the hype behind "Trainwreck" to considerable levels, and as such, it's ripe for some serious discussion. With that said, let's jump into our thoughts on Apatow and Schumer's film!
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I want to get this out at the forefront: I enjoyed it. It's has a lot of great comedic set pieces, winning lines, and performances that really surprise. Schumer and Hader are great leads and they sell the hell out of both the ups and downs of their relationship. The supporting cast features a lot of great turns, and even allowed me to see other performers in a new light (The highlight: John Cena, who wowed me after years of personal distaste brought on by his increasingly vanilla persona in the wrestling world). The script itself, for the most part, is a fresh skewering of American rom-com conventions, and to a further extent, even manages to flip the script on a lot of tropes that Apatow has managed to infuse within his own formula. If you're looking for laughs, you won't go home wanting.
But, on a film making level, I need to get a lot off my chest.
For all the good Schumer brings, in both her script and her on-screen presence, the most glaring issue I had is that all of that is still draped around the frame work of a typical Apatowian comedy, and that doesn't benefit the film at many points up-to and including the end.
Despite coming of age during the years of "The Forty Year Old Virgin" and "Knocked Up," comedies which I loved for what I then considered "daring" approaches to raunchy humor and free-flowing, improv based laughs; I've come to feel like I'm over Apatow as a director. As a producer, he's able to use his power to let some truly talented voices (Nicholas Stoller, Lena Dunham, Greg Mottola) make really great work (Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Girls, Superbad). But it seems that every time Judd steps back down to the role of director, his work has become lazier and more uneven. From the tonally inconsistent "Funny People" to the slothfully paced, self indulgent "This is 40" (Or as I like to call it: "This is Forty Minutes Too Long"), it seems to me that either A) Apatow has lost his groove or B) I've matured so much as a cinephile that his bad habits can no longer be ignored by my brain. I'll give Apatow the benefit of the doubt and ignore option A, addressing option B, because "Trainwreck" offers more evidence for that argument.
The bad habits I've come to find in Apatow's work are littered throughout "Trainwreck," to a point where it becomes a detriment to the film itself:
- Boring, TV level cinematography based around his preference to let the actors and their improvised material dictate the flow of scenes. This leaves us with simple, yet flat scene set-ups split between a master and several alternate angles for coverage. It's fine for laughs, but just visually stale.
It's also baffling in that some of his shot pairings just don't match up. The most aggravating item for me was during a sequence where Hader and Schumer are on a date. We get an establishing shot of Times Square, with all of the bright neon advertisements for Samsung and Aerie shoved in our face, only to cut to Hader and Schumer leaving a bar that is no-where near Times Square. It's embarrassing, and comes across to me as either lazy, or a calculated move to meet product placement quotas. Speaking of product placement:
-Product placement. We've come a long way from the simple charm of "40 Year Old Virgin's" "Sell Your Stuff on eBay" store. Now, we get entire monologues dedicated to name dropping products. A scene in which Schumer runs down her diet to Hader in a manner that's meant to draw laughs from her "un-lady like" eating habits consists of Schumer listing every chain restaurant she went to. "I had some Lays potato chips, and then I stopped at Starbucks for a red velvet...and then I went to Chipotle." This is almost a minute long scene of her just naming branded food products while Hader reacts in a befuddled manner. It has the potential to be funny, but it's so obnoxious it kills the joke.
An entire second act plot point is triggered by a discussion of Minecraft, LeBron James spends almost a whole scene pimping out the city of Cleveland, and so many other items stack up to a point where it's too distracting to ignore.
- Editing choices. Scenes are cut mostly around improv-heavy conversations, so we usually get a character riffing, before jumping between reactions of the other characters in the scene. This leads to some messy beats where punchlines are often delivered off-camera, dulling their effectiveness because Apatow and "Trainwreck's" trio of editors don't seem to have an editorial discipline to keep things focused. Instead, scenes drag out way too long, often killing any good-will the humor in the moment might have been generating, culminating in a domino effect where the pacing of the film is ruined because it ultimately runs far too long. (Honestly, "Trainwreck" could've been at least 20-30 minutes shorter).
-Hit or miss celebrity cameos, and in this film's case, athlete cameos. I'll admit I'm not a sports guy, so the number of professional athletes and sports personalities that show up playing caricatures of themselves left me lost. Even still, there's a fair amount of famous stars who show up to mug around. LeBron is mostly fine when he's allowed to play it up as Hader's overly-committed friend, but other examples just fall completely flat (like a late in the film "intermission" that, even when I BEGAN to get who the participants were, was still not funny).
It all piled up for me to a point that, I began to feel bad for Schumer. A lot of the pre-release hype behind this movie revolved around her involvement behind and in front of the camera. And given the boundary pushing, critically acclaimed heights that "Inside Amy Schumer" has reached, it bummed me out that this movie is far less impressive than her other work.
I mean, it's good. But Amy's capable of GREATNESS. I've seen it. The world's seen it. She deserves all the praise she can get. But I don't understand how the woman who wrote "12 Angry Men Inside Amy Schumer" can also be the woman who wrote a romance with an ending so cliche and over-the-top it would make Richard Curtis blush. It made me wonder if Schumer's script may have been reshaped by Apatow or outside forces to deliver something more crowd-pleasing and less controversial, which sadly happens a lot in this business. While it's still a modern miracle that a big-budgeted American comedy can be fronted and written by a woman (especially a woman who refuses to adhere to traditional gender expectations), it's disappointing to me that most of said movie presents this new POV via the same delivery we've seen in every Apatow movie to date (for example: Schumer cleaning up her act in the finale feels shot for shot like the wrap up to Seth Rogen's character arc in "Knocked Up").
Overall, "Trainwreck" manages to avoid earning the pun that it's title so riskily set it up for. It's a fine movie that for me, sits squarely in the middle of Apatow's 5 movie-run as a director. A terrific performance/character perspective brought down by mediocre filmmaking choices. I hope that it leads to more female driven films of this caliber to be made, but I also hope that said female driven cinema is also crafted better.
Such a prolific combination of creator and performer has elevated the hype behind "Trainwreck" to considerable levels, and as such, it's ripe for some serious discussion. With that said, let's jump into our thoughts on Apatow and Schumer's film!
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I want to get this out at the forefront: I enjoyed it. It's has a lot of great comedic set pieces, winning lines, and performances that really surprise. Schumer and Hader are great leads and they sell the hell out of both the ups and downs of their relationship. The supporting cast features a lot of great turns, and even allowed me to see other performers in a new light (The highlight: John Cena, who wowed me after years of personal distaste brought on by his increasingly vanilla persona in the wrestling world). The script itself, for the most part, is a fresh skewering of American rom-com conventions, and to a further extent, even manages to flip the script on a lot of tropes that Apatow has managed to infuse within his own formula. If you're looking for laughs, you won't go home wanting.
But, on a film making level, I need to get a lot off my chest.
For all the good Schumer brings, in both her script and her on-screen presence, the most glaring issue I had is that all of that is still draped around the frame work of a typical Apatowian comedy, and that doesn't benefit the film at many points up-to and including the end.
Despite coming of age during the years of "The Forty Year Old Virgin" and "Knocked Up," comedies which I loved for what I then considered "daring" approaches to raunchy humor and free-flowing, improv based laughs; I've come to feel like I'm over Apatow as a director. As a producer, he's able to use his power to let some truly talented voices (Nicholas Stoller, Lena Dunham, Greg Mottola) make really great work (Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Girls, Superbad). But it seems that every time Judd steps back down to the role of director, his work has become lazier and more uneven. From the tonally inconsistent "Funny People" to the slothfully paced, self indulgent "This is 40" (Or as I like to call it: "This is Forty Minutes Too Long"), it seems to me that either A) Apatow has lost his groove or B) I've matured so much as a cinephile that his bad habits can no longer be ignored by my brain. I'll give Apatow the benefit of the doubt and ignore option A, addressing option B, because "Trainwreck" offers more evidence for that argument.
The bad habits I've come to find in Apatow's work are littered throughout "Trainwreck," to a point where it becomes a detriment to the film itself:
- Boring, TV level cinematography based around his preference to let the actors and their improvised material dictate the flow of scenes. This leaves us with simple, yet flat scene set-ups split between a master and several alternate angles for coverage. It's fine for laughs, but just visually stale.
It's also baffling in that some of his shot pairings just don't match up. The most aggravating item for me was during a sequence where Hader and Schumer are on a date. We get an establishing shot of Times Square, with all of the bright neon advertisements for Samsung and Aerie shoved in our face, only to cut to Hader and Schumer leaving a bar that is no-where near Times Square. It's embarrassing, and comes across to me as either lazy, or a calculated move to meet product placement quotas. Speaking of product placement:
-Product placement. We've come a long way from the simple charm of "40 Year Old Virgin's" "Sell Your Stuff on eBay" store. Now, we get entire monologues dedicated to name dropping products. A scene in which Schumer runs down her diet to Hader in a manner that's meant to draw laughs from her "un-lady like" eating habits consists of Schumer listing every chain restaurant she went to. "I had some Lays potato chips, and then I stopped at Starbucks for a red velvet...and then I went to Chipotle." This is almost a minute long scene of her just naming branded food products while Hader reacts in a befuddled manner. It has the potential to be funny, but it's so obnoxious it kills the joke.
An entire second act plot point is triggered by a discussion of Minecraft, LeBron James spends almost a whole scene pimping out the city of Cleveland, and so many other items stack up to a point where it's too distracting to ignore.
- Editing choices. Scenes are cut mostly around improv-heavy conversations, so we usually get a character riffing, before jumping between reactions of the other characters in the scene. This leads to some messy beats where punchlines are often delivered off-camera, dulling their effectiveness because Apatow and "Trainwreck's" trio of editors don't seem to have an editorial discipline to keep things focused. Instead, scenes drag out way too long, often killing any good-will the humor in the moment might have been generating, culminating in a domino effect where the pacing of the film is ruined because it ultimately runs far too long. (Honestly, "Trainwreck" could've been at least 20-30 minutes shorter).
-Hit or miss celebrity cameos, and in this film's case, athlete cameos. I'll admit I'm not a sports guy, so the number of professional athletes and sports personalities that show up playing caricatures of themselves left me lost. Even still, there's a fair amount of famous stars who show up to mug around. LeBron is mostly fine when he's allowed to play it up as Hader's overly-committed friend, but other examples just fall completely flat (like a late in the film "intermission" that, even when I BEGAN to get who the participants were, was still not funny).
It all piled up for me to a point that, I began to feel bad for Schumer. A lot of the pre-release hype behind this movie revolved around her involvement behind and in front of the camera. And given the boundary pushing, critically acclaimed heights that "Inside Amy Schumer" has reached, it bummed me out that this movie is far less impressive than her other work.
I mean, it's good. But Amy's capable of GREATNESS. I've seen it. The world's seen it. She deserves all the praise she can get. But I don't understand how the woman who wrote "12 Angry Men Inside Amy Schumer" can also be the woman who wrote a romance with an ending so cliche and over-the-top it would make Richard Curtis blush. It made me wonder if Schumer's script may have been reshaped by Apatow or outside forces to deliver something more crowd-pleasing and less controversial, which sadly happens a lot in this business. While it's still a modern miracle that a big-budgeted American comedy can be fronted and written by a woman (especially a woman who refuses to adhere to traditional gender expectations), it's disappointing to me that most of said movie presents this new POV via the same delivery we've seen in every Apatow movie to date (for example: Schumer cleaning up her act in the finale feels shot for shot like the wrap up to Seth Rogen's character arc in "Knocked Up").
Overall, "Trainwreck" manages to avoid earning the pun that it's title so riskily set it up for. It's a fine movie that for me, sits squarely in the middle of Apatow's 5 movie-run as a director. A terrific performance/character perspective brought down by mediocre filmmaking choices. I hope that it leads to more female driven films of this caliber to be made, but I also hope that said female driven cinema is also crafted better.