In Theaters: LOGAN LUCKY (2017)

LOGAN LUCKY
(US - 2017)

Directed by Steven Soderbergh. Written by Rebecca Blunt. Cast: Channing Tatum, Adam Driver, Daniel Craig, Hilary Swank, Seth MacFarlane, Riley Keough, Katie Holmes, Katherine Waterston, Dwight Yoakam, Sebastian Stan, Brian Gleeson, Jack Quaid, Farrah McKenzie, David Denman, Macon Blair, Jon Eyez, Deneen Tyler, Ann Mahoney, Jim O'Heir. (PG-13, 118 mins)

Steven Soderbergh cried wolf on retiring from feature films a number of times before finally making it official after 2013's SIDE EFFECTS, but he never really went away. He directed HBO's Liberace biopic BEHIND THE CANDELABRA and all 20 episodes of Cinemax's two-season series THE KNICK. He didn't direct the MAGIC MIKE sequel MAGIC MIKE XXL but he served as its cinematographer under his D.P. pseudonym "Peter Andrews" and he edited it as "Mary Ann Bernard." He was also executive producer on other series like Amazon's RED OAKS, Starz's THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE (a spinoff of his experimental 2009 Sasha Gray vehicle), and Netflix's upcoming GODLESS, in addition to producing indies like WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN and Spike Lee's DA SWEET BLOOD OF JESUS. In short, Soderbergh is working more than ever, and with an arsenal of pseudonyms that's approaching Joe D'Amato and Jess Franco levels, his return to the big screen was only a matter of time. LOGAN LUCKY, shot by "Peter Andrews," edited by "Mary Ann Bernard," and written by the unknown "Rebecca Blunt," which is already assumed to be yet another Soderbergh alias, finds the filmmaker in familiar territory, insofar as it's a heist movie that puts it in the same wheelhouse as his OCEAN'S ELEVEN trilogy and OUT OF SIGHT, and like the OCEAN'S movies, it's played for laughs, but Soderbergh's feature film homecoming has some tricks up its sleeve that make it very much its own unique thing.

In his fourth Soderbergh film, Channing Tatum stars as Jimmy Logan, a West Virginia construction worker fired by his crew boss after failing to disclose the bum knee from a high school football injury that ended his once-plausible chances of making it to the NFL. His ex-wife Bobbie Jo (Katie Holmes) lives just across the state line in North Carolina and is planning to move with their daughter Sadie (Farrah McKenzie) to Lynchburg, VA, where her wealthy second husband (David Denman) is opening a new car dealership. Jimmy receives little consolation from his younger brother Clyde (Adam Driver), a bartender with a prosthetic left arm in place of the one he lost in Iraq. Clyde reminds Jimmy of the "Logan Curse," which has affected generations of their family, prompting Jimmy to take drastic measures to reverse it. With the help of their baby sister Mellie (Riley Keough), the Logan siblings team up to rob the cash deposit vault of the Charlotte Motor Speedway during the final NASCAR race of the season by taking advantage of the pneumatic tube system that moves throughout and under the speedway via chutes, a system Jimmy discovered on his last job with the construction crew, remedying a series of sinkholes that formed beneath the speedway property. The Logans enlist the aid of appropriately-named explosives man Joe Bang ("introducing Daniel Craig"), and are not deterred by the problematic fact that he's still locked up ("I am in-car-cer-ra-ted!" Bang sounds out for the Logans) for another five months and the job needs to be pulled off before the construction crew completes their work in four weeks.

Other figures drift in and out of the story in inspired, Coen Bros.-like situations, from obnoxious British business mogul and NASCAR team owner Max Chilblain (Seth MacFarlane, looking like a cross between Mandy Patinkin and Avery Schreiber); Dayton White (Sebastian Stan), a Chilblain driver who suffers a bad reaction after being contractually obligated to drink a Chilblain-endorsed energy drink on camera; Joe Bang's lunkhead brothers Sam Bang (Brian Gleeson) and Fish Bang (Jack Quaid); and, much later, humorless, no-nonsense FBI agent Sarah Grayson (Hilary Swank). Soderbergh goes against your gut expectations by avoiding the easy trap of milking these characters for condescending laughs, instead opting for a Coen Bros. approach where he shows much empathy for the Logans, and even for Joe Bang's brothers, who are more the stereotypical hillbilly yokels to a certain degree (they're introduced toilet seat-pitching and bragging that they "know everything there is to know about computers," including "all the Twitters"). Jimmy's plan is ridiculous and damn near impossible but time and again, he, along with Clyde, Mellie, and Joe Bang, prove themselves quite resourceful and have clearly thought this whole thing through even as obstacles constantly threaten to halt the job. The often absurdist humor doesn't approach the lunacy of, say, RAISING ARIZONA, but rather, the more deadpan side of FARGO. Tatum and especially Driver really nail the tone here and are gifted with numerous bits of quotable dialogue. Sure, Clyde's prosthetic arm is played for some easy laughs, but they're great laughs, and one brief detour into a prison riot negotiation (the standoff arranged to get Joe Bang out of jail) between the exasperated warden (Dwight Yoakam) and inmates demanding the prison library stock the titles in the Game of Thrones series that George R.R. Martin has yet to publish is brilliantly funny, as they refuse to believe that the new books don't exist and the warden can't convince them that the TV series has moved past the novels. LOGAN LUCKY could maybe run 15 minutes shorter and it has a few too many characters than it has time to properly showcase (MacFarlane, Stan, and Katherine Waterston as a nurse in a mobile free clinic are barely in it, and Swank doesn't even appear until 95 minutes in), but it's a lot of fun and a reminder that "offbeat" and "quirky" can still be a good thing. Plus it's got one perfect scene involving Sadie and John Denver's "Take Me Home, Country Roads," that's maybe the sweetest thing Soderbergh's ever done.

In Theaters: A MILLION WAYS TO DIE IN THE WEST (2014)

A MILLION WAYS TO DIE IN THE WEST

(US - 2014)

Directed by Seth MacFarlane.  Written by Seth MacFarlane, Alec Sulkin, and Wellesley Wild.  Cast: Seth MacFarlane, Charlize Theron, Liam Neeson, Amanda Seyfried, Giovanni Ribisi, Neil Patrick Harris, Sarah Silverman, Wes Studi, Evan Jones, Matt Clark, Christopher Hagen, Rex Linn, Alex Borstein, John Aylward. (R, 116 mins)

One of FAMILY GUY and AMERICAN DAD creator Seth MacFarlane's strong suits is his voice acting ability, bringing life to most of the characters on his animated shows as well as to a talking teddy bear in his 2012 feature directing debut TED.  What makes his latest film, A MILLION WAYS TO DIE IN THE WEST, different is that director/producer/co-writer MacFarlane also puts himself front and center as a leading man.  His presence as an actor doesn't offer him the versatility and spontaneity that he demonstrates as various animated characters, and he just doesn't have the chops to carry a movie as "Seth MacFarlane." And make no mistake, that's essentially who he's playing in this western spoof that offers a decidedly 2014-ish MacFarlane as Albert Stark, a sensitive, cowardly sheep farmer with a snark-laden view of the Old West in the kill-or-be-killed 1882 Arizona frontier town of Old Stump.  The Monument Valley location shooting and the sweeping, reverent score by Joel McNeely do a nice surface job of paying homage to John Ford westerns, but with his bland, one-note performance, his propensity for dragging jokes past their breaking point and continuing to beat it to death after that, and his general sense of self-indulgence, MacFarlane gets some scattered laughs but falls far short of hitting the mark.  Forget any absurd comparisons to BLAZING SADDLES--this doesn't even measure up to RUSTLER'S RHAPSODY.

After negotiating his way out of a duel in front of all of the Old Stump townfolk, Albert is dumped by his embarrassed girlfriend Louise (Amanda Seyfried), who runs to the open arms of sneering, pompous mustachery boutique owner Foy (Neil Patrick Harris), who's rich and successful and everything Albert is not. When he's not drowning his sorrows at the saloon with his devoutly religious, repressed best friend Edward (Giovanni Ribisi) and his prostitute wife Ruth (Sarah Silverman), Albert is hanging out with Anna (Charize Theron), the tomboyish crack shot who just arrived in town with her brother Lewis (Evan Jones), who's already in jail for starting a bar brawl.  What Albert doesn't know is that Anna is the wife of dastardly outlaw Clinch Leatherwood (Liam Neeson), who sent Anna and Lewis to Old Stump to pose as siblings and wait for the arrival of the rest of his gang as they hunt for gold in the region.  With Lewis locked up, Anna realizes this is the perfect chance to escape Clinch's clutches and comes to genuinely like Albert, who's funny and kindly and everything Clinch isn't.  Albert, meanwhile, is obsessing over Louise and asks for Anna's help in winning her back from the insufferably smug Foy.  She helps train him in firing a pistol after he gets so jealous and enraged that he challenges Foy to a gunfight.  Of course, all of their plans go awry when Clinch and the gang arrive in Old Stump earlier than expected, and word gets back to Clinch that his wife's been spending a lot of time with the hapless Albert.

MacFarlane can be a smart satirist and the script (co-written with regular collaborators Alec Sulkin and Wellesley Wild) gets in a handful of legitimately good laughs about various western cliches, the joylessness of old-timey photos, the sheer misery of what life must've been like back then, and occasional digs at religion, antiquated norms of that time ("Why are the Indians so mad all the time?  We share this land with them, it's pretty much 50/50" and a carnival shooting gallery game called "Runaway Slave" are particularly stinging), and the present-day culture wars ("Oh, Parkinson's is one of those things that God gives you that somehow shows how much He loves you"). Anachronistic humor is inherent in this kind of thing, but MacFarlane just doesn't have the screen presence to make it work. Neither his character nor his performance are very funny. Too much of A MILLION WAYS TO DIE IN THE WEST is focused on Albert's whining about Louise and on his slowly-blossoming romance with Anna.  MacFarlane may be a gifted voice actor, but on the screen himself, he never seems comfortable and a lot of the script seems to be geared toward stroking his own ego, whether Theron's Anna is laughing at everything he says or constantly affirming what a nice guy he is and how he deserves someone better than the shallow Louise. Theron does a good job of playing the always-appealing, no-bullshit, "just one of the guys" types, but she can't really sell the idea of finding the self-pitying, constantly-complaining Albert that interesting.  The supporting cast is mostly wasted, but Harris steals the film with his inspired turn as the loathsome Foy, especially when he makes Louise suck the end of his perfectly waxed mustache while he fondles himself.  But even Harris is forced to succumb to the frequent bouts of MacFarlane's toilet humor--quite literally, at one point. After being introduced early on, Neeson is absent until the third act, so he doesn't really have time to make Clinch Leatherwood (a great name, by the way) anything more than a two-dimensional caricature of a western heavy.

One criticism that's rightfully been leveled at MacFarlane over the years is the way he finds humor in beating a joke to within an inch of its life (think FAMILY GUY's infamous Conway Twitty cutaways or Peter Griffin's epic brawls with Ernie the Giant Chicken).  Here, MacFarlane isn't content with a couple of mustache jokes when 15 will do, and even then he'll tack on two musical numbers about mustaches just to be sure.  Even the funny observation about stone-faced people in photos of the era is rehashed multiple times. The most labored jokes center on the relationship between Edward and Ruth.  Ruth is Old Stump's busiest prostitute, but she refuses to have sex with Edward before marriage. Edward goes to the whorehouse to wait until she's done working, and even uses his finest handkerchief to wipe "dirty cowboy cum" off of her face.  The joke of Edward waiting downstairs while she loudly screws Old Stump's skeeziest is funny once, so of course MacFarlane repeats it five more times.  His set-ups are also getting predictable.  As Edward and Ruth leave for lunch, the madam (Alex Borstein) tells Ruth she's got someone planning to see her around 5:30 that day.  "What does he want?" Ruth asks.  Now, if you've seen enough of MacFarlane's work, you know the answer will be "Anal," and it is.  But it's not enough.  Edward and Ruth have to somehow be confused about how soon they should be back, and need clarification on what time the guy will be there.  "Whenever he feels like putting his penis in your asshole," the madam tells her.  "Anal" was predictable but amusing.  But MacFarlane just lets the scene go on and on.  And then Ruth can't sit down because, yes, her asshole hurts. This happens time and again throughout the film, and with its nearly two-hour running time, it goes on entirely too long.  Just when things should be heating up for the confrontation between Albert and angry Clinch, MacFarlane sends the story an unfunny, running-time-padding detour which finds Albert hanging out with Cochise (Wes Studi) and drinking a hallucinogenic potion that has him tripping and the film looking like the old west version of a Storm Thorgerson-designed album cover. Why? Because nobody's going to stop him, that's why.

A MILLION WAYS TO DIE IN THE WEST isn't a terrible movie, but it's not a very good one.  It probably could've been a little better with someone other than MacFarlane in the lead.  He tries to go for a sort-of Jason Bateman-type demeanor with his snide detachment and wry observations pointing out the absurdity of his surroundings, but instead, he's loud, aggressive, and annoying. There's simply too much Seth MacFarlane in this movie. He also tries to milk some easy laughs out of several cameos, but only one approaches the sheer insanity of James Woods voicing himself as "James Woods" on FAMILY GUY, and making Peter watch VIDEODROME (Peter: "Does anyone get naked in this?"  Woods: "Yeah.  I do") or FLASH GORDON's Sam J. Jones turning up as himself in TED.  What MacFarlane doesn't understand about parody is that it has to be done from a place of genuine affection. That's why the one really inspired cameo here works as well as it does. That's also what shines through in the best work of Mel Brooks and the ZAZ team in their AIRPLANE/TOP SECRET heyday, and that's why those parodies are timeless. While very disappointing, A MILLION WAYS TO DIE IN THE WEST is nowhere near the depths of say, a typical Friedberg/Seltzer abomination like DATE MOVIE or MEET THE SPARTANS. But it does share with those films a certain fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to parody something.  Most of the dud jokes here--and there's a lot of them--would probably work as single brief cutaways in a FAMILY GUY episode, but MacFarlane's script isn't nearly as funny as he thinks it is and he doesn't seem to realize that parodying something at feature length requires a bit more than being a flippant smartass.

In Theaters: TED (2012)

TED
(US - 2012)

Directed by Seth MacFarlane.  Written by Seth MacFarlane, Alec Sulkin, Wellesley Wild.  Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Mila Kunis, Seth MacFarlane, Joel McHale, Giovanni Ribisi, Patrick Warburton, Sam J. Jones, Matt Walsh, Jessica Barth, Laura Vandervoort, Alex Borstein, narrated by Patrick Stewart.  (R, 107 mins)

FAMILY GUY creator Seth MacFarlane's live-action directing debut, co-written with show collaborators Alec Sulkin and Wellesley Wild, is a lot like most FAMILY GUY episodes: moments of incredible hilarity offset by long, drawn-out, laborious gags, but nothing as long as say, an Ernie the Giant Chicken appearance or a Conway Twitty song. 

TED tells the raunchy and occasionally heartfelt and insightful (yes, really) story of 35-year-old John (Mark Wahlberg) and his best friend, a talking teddy bear named Ted (voiced by MacFarlane).  John was a lonely child who had trouble making friends, and he made a wish that his large teddy bear could talk and be his best friend forever.  And that's what happened.  The quick-witted Ted even became a flash-in-the-pan celebrity in the late '80s (and as narrator Patrick Stewart intones, "Much like Corey Feldman, Frankie Muniz, and Justin Bieber, the time came when nobody gave a shit"), but now lives a relatively obscure life with John in Boston, occasionally coasting on his long-gone fame to get women or weed.  John works for a car-rental service and has a loving, committed girlfriend in Lori (Mila Kunis), but Lori wants to take the relationship to the next level, while John seems content to get high with Ted and rewatch their favorite movie, 1980's FLASH GORDON, over and over.  Eventually, Lori demands that John make Ted move out on his own, but John repeatedly demonstrates that he isn't ready for a move that drastic.

Ted and John doing shots with FLAAAAASH!

What MacFarlane and his co-writers have fashioned here is essentially a very R-rated look at perpetual adolescence, with John unable to put away his childish things.  He loves Lori and wants to eventually marry her, but even when he gets his own place, Ted is always there to pull John in the opposite direction, be it cutting out of work early to come over, get baked, and watch the bonus features on a CHEERS DVD set, or to ditch Lori at her boss' party to head over to Ted's place, where he's having a loud, destructive bash and FLASH GORDON star Sam J. Jones happens to show up with cocaine (Jones is admirably self-deprecating here, even putting on his Flash outfit at one point).  Amidst the constant profanity and offensive humor, there's an undeniable heart to TED and John's dilemma is one faced by all boys when the time comes to be a man. 

Ted entertaining four hookers: "You know, somewhere
out there are four terrible fathers I wish I could
thank for this great night."

But all that seriousness aside, TED is often tears-down-your-face hilarious, whether the believably-CGI'd Ted, forced to get a job as a cashier at a supermarket, is having hot sex with co-worker Tammy Lynn (Jessica Barth) in the stockroom (Ted: "Oh yeah...now stick your finger in the loop of my tag!"), doing lines of coke with Flash Gordon, or just in the many scenes of Wahlberg and MacFarlane doing a lot of verbal back and forth.  With zingers aimed at nearly every ethnicity and religion, homosexuals, washed-up celebrities, white trash, the decline of America, fat kids, Adam Sandler movies, and pretty much everything in between, there's something here to offend everyone, and on an even grander scale than the comparitively-clean FAMILY GUY.  TED starts to lose itself in the back end, with a completely unnecessary subplot involving a crazed Ted stalker, played by Giovanni Ribisi.  It doesn't really gel with the rest of the film, and seems to exist only so Ribisi can do some crazy shit while dancing to Tiffany's version of  "I Think We're Alone Now."  Likewise, one cutaway to a 2008 flashback at a dance club ("Chris Brown can do no wrong!") is funny, but another pointlessly recreates almost the entire "Stayin' Alive" flashback in AIRPLANE! (1980).  Not only is it a cutaway to what amounts to a parody of a parody, but it's very much like something thrown into a FAMILY GUY episode to get it to 23 minutes.

TED isn't perfect and runs out of steam before the end, but it's on its game most of the way, and it's very funny, with some surprising heart and depth to it, as well as several cameos by some celebs who are obviously good sports about spoofing themselves.