A New King of The Idiots
"The Foot Fist Way," a new comedy made for pennies by a bunch of pals from the North Carolina School of the Arts, is not a particularly good movie. Many of the actors can't act. Whole scenes fall flat. And you'll find more sophisticated camerawork on YouTube. But you should see the movie anyway, because what it does have is Danny McBride, the most hilarious man you've never heard of, heir to Will Ferrell's throne as king of the idiots. Last year McBride was the funniest thing in two deeply unfunny star vehicles for Andy Samberg ("Hot Rod") and Ben Stiller ("The Heartbreak Kid"). "The Foot Fist Way" is something of a first: a star vehicle for a guy who's not even close to a star.
McBride plays Fred Simmons, a strip-mall tae kwon do instructor who bullies his 6-year-old students ("Your weakness disgusts me") out of the delusion that he's preparing them for a world in which a man is defined by how many planks of wood he can break with his palm. To Simmons, life is just one long version of the tournament scene in "The Karate Kid," only in his version, the jackhole sensei from the Cobra Kai dojo is the hero, not Daniel-san. McBride is blessed with a face that oozes dumb. His eyes are always at half-mast, and that black scrapple of fuzz on his lip is not, to put it mildly, a thinking man's mustache. But that's why his whipsaw comic timing always catches you flat-footed. When it comes to stupidity, McBride is a borderline genius.
My Five Most Important Books, Michael Lewis (Liar's Poker, Moneyball, The Blind Side)
1. A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole. "Among the funniest books every written."
2. Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain. "Gave me a new sense of the pleasure to be had from books."
3. The Education of Henry Adams. "The book I kept nearest at hand when I wrote my own first book."
4. Writing Home, by Alan Bennett. "Reminds me of how much interest can be got by paying attention to the most picayune details of life."
5. The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe. "Put to rest any fears about the limits of the nonfiction narrative."
Book to which you always return: Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, by George Orwell. "Reminds me of the force of a writer working to strip his prose of pretension and nonsense."
Book you hope parents give to their children: His Dark Materials, by Philip Pullman. "Even my 8-year-old could sense she was in the grips of a master storyteller."
June 30, 2008
My Five Most Important Movies, Andrew Stanton (Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Wall-E)
1. Lawrence of Arabia. "David Lean is the master of filmmaking. His staging and editing is awe-inspiring."
2. The Lion in Winter. "Not the most cinematic film, but you'll never encounter better dialogue."
3. Gallipoli. "Peter Weir's WW1 story of friendship and purpose is deeply engaging. A seminal movie for me."
4. Close Encounters of the Third Kind. "Sheer wonder has never been captured better, before or since."
5. Cool Hand Luke. "What a character. What an allegory. A man's movie, introduced by my father, and I've introduced it to my son."
The trailers for the action movie "Wanted" promise some hot romantic sparks between stars Angelina Jolie and James McAvoy. "Is this when we start to bond?" asks McAvoy. "Would you like to?" Jolie purrs. Then there's a shot of the two smooching. The thing is, that first rooftop scene isn't even in the movie and the kiss (which is) has nothing to do with romance. There is no love story. At all.
So much for truth in advertising. The rest of the trailer, however, gives you a fair taste of Russian director Timur Bekmambetov's hyperbolically violent movie. The filmmaker, whose Russian sci-fi fantasies "Day Watch" and "Night Watch" broke box-office records in his homeland, whips this preposterous tale of an ancient secret society of assassins into an expressionistic frenzy, relishing every slo-mo bullet through the skull. McAvoy is an anxious, cuckolded office drone who's recruited by the Fraternity and transformed into the superhuman super assassin he was born to be: it turns out his murdered father was this nutty organization's greatest killer. Its sagacious leader (Morgan Freeman, natch) explains that they are just restoring order to a chaotic world. "Trust your instincts," he advises, which should give you an inkling of the script's originality.
Jolie, radiating slinky, lethal glamour, is one of the more accomplished death-dispensers, though when she punches out McAvoy (during his training) you fear her needle-thin arms will crack on the spot. Somebody needs to give this beautiful assassin a Fatburger.
"Wanted" has one good plot twist in store (though it makes little sense), and its sense of humor about its own silliness keeps the fantasy afloat for a while. But as the body count rises, so does the portentous tone, and the relentlessness of Bekmambetov's overamped style becomes oppressive. The astonishingly versatile McAvoy does more than keep a straight face; he works his butt off to anchor the tale in real emotions, and almost pulls it off. Here's a movie that offers mass murder as a cure for the 9-to-5 blues. Is that Russian, or what? Personally, I'd have preferred the love story.
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