FILM REVIEW: FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS

A scene from Friends with Benefits.

Marital parachute

By Don Simpson

As if revenge for losing the Swan Queen character to Natalie Portman's Nina in Black Swan, Mila Kunis one-ups Portman's role as Emma in No Strings Attached with Friends with Benefits. At least that is the word around Tinseltown (in Austin). Though I like Portman, I have avoided No Strings Attached with her portrayal as Jamie in like a STD because I do not want to watch her makin' whoopee with co-star Ashton Kutcher. (Maybe it is unbridled jealousy, but I do not find them to be a likely pair.) Kunis and co-star Justin Timberlake, however, seem like they would be a more likely (and likable pair), and I guess they are.

Jamie (Kunis), a Manhattan headhunter, has placed Dylan (Timberlake) in a high-profile position as Art Director forGQ magazine. While cozily watching Jamie's favorite movie -- a film-within-a-film rom-com with a satirically amped-up cheese factor -- like BFFs, the emotionally psychotic Jamie and the emotionally vacant Dylan decide that sex can be just like...um...tennis? Tennis is a recreational sport enjoyed among friends who cordially shake hands at the end of the match and then go their separate ways; surely sex among two impeccably beautiful Hollywood stars can be enjoyed as a recreational sport as well. Jamie and Dylan give it a go and the experiment goes well at first. The pair are able to communicate their sexual likes and dislikes in bed and fulfill each other's desires to the rhythm of Dylan's repeated sneezes. (Note: Dylan sneezes whenever he ejaculates.)

Eventually, though, all of their repressed emotional baggage bubbles to the surface, thus disproving their theory that friends who sneeze together can remain just tennis buddies. If Jamie and Dylan cannot pull off this experiment, where does that leave the rest of us horny Americans? Well, it looks like heterosexual marriage truly is our only road to eternal salvation. Thank God! And thank you, Jamie and Dylan, for taking one for the team so that no other God fearing Americans will need to go down the dastardly rabbit hole of emotionless sex.

Two films in one calendar year (three if you include November 2010's Love and Other Drugs with Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway) about loveless fuck buddies must mean something about our modern society, or at least there will be plenty of bible-thumpers who will say so. Of course if the bible-thumpers would just sit down and watch Friends with Benefits, they would realize that Friends with Benefits redeems itself in God's eyes (well, at least a God who is not opposed to premarital sex) by the closing credits.

Despite the manic meta-ness of its first half, the second half of Friends with Benefits shamelessly relies on all of the very same rom-com genre tropes that the film had just hysterically satirized. As with Easy A, writer-director Will Gluck's previous film, the wink-wink-nudge-nudge Gen-X quotation marks of Friends with Benefits are exclaimed ad nauseum. Gluck's hyperactive propensity for pop culture references (flashmobs, iPads, T-mobile, Harry Potter, John Mayer, Third Eye Blind, Criss Cross, etc.) would be much funnier if he could utilize them with more restraint. Instead he leaves the valve wide open, thus drowning the audience in what could have been some really funny stuff. Besides, by eventually embracing all the clichés that Friends with Benefits so manically attempts to deconstruct, Gluck is essentially saying that all of the jokes from the first half of the film were for naught.

Friends with Benefits also seems intent on making excuses for Jamie and Dylan's lack of sexual morality. One look at Jamie's boozy and slutty single mother (Patricia Clarkson) and we know that Jamie inherited her sexual prowess (yet no physical traits) from this woman; and in a continuance of the cinematic device of characters being defined by the films they watch, Jamie's mother watches Paul Mazursky's Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice. The reckless promiscuity of Jamie's mother has also forever blurred Jamie's ethnic identity -- she has no idea who her father is, therefore Jamie does not know her own ethnic background.

Dylan's father (Richard Jenkins) is mentally wasting away due to Alzheimer’s -- though he does enjoy some suddenly lucid flourishes during which he is able to deliver crucial motivational monologues to Dylan -- and Dylan feels guilty for leaving his father in the sole care of his sister (Jenna Elfman) in Los Angeles. Dylan's estranged mother divorced his father ten years ago, abandoning their family in a time of need, resulting in abandonment and commitment issues for Dylan.

Dylan is also riddled by fears of being presumed gay. His ex-girlfriend (Emma Stone) thinks he likes a finger up his ass during sex; Dylan feels "emasculated" when Jamie is on top of him in bed; and, a sure-fire sign of gayness (at least according to Friends with Benefits), Dylan likes Harry Potter. Dylan's fears are then magnified tenfold when his gay co-worker (Woody Harrelson) suggests that they go "trolling for cock" together. The only good that could possibly come out of all of the gay jokes is if you turn this into a drinking game, slurping one down every time the word "gay" is used in relation to Dylan's sexuality.

FILM REVIEW: YOUR HIGHNESS

Thaddeus (co-writer Danny McBride) in Your Highness.

Beasts and beat offs

By John Esther

Judging by the responses at a recent media screening with critics, film reviewers and cinema civilians, audiences will need to be of a certain mindset to enjoy the depravity, joy and juvenilia of Your Highness. After fifteen minutes or into Your Highness some felt it was necessary to switch gears and guffaw his or her hardest at every moment possible, even if a visual pun was sexist in (un)nature or a joke implied child molestation with a Yoda-creature (Mario Torres) while others remained unamused in the face of a Minotaur with an erection or watched the words "I've had a burning in my beaver" come out of the mouth of the recent Oscar-winning actress, Natalie Portman (Black Swan).

Set in some mystical medieval kingdom, Thaddeus (co-writer Danny McBride) is the second rate son of King Tallious (Charles Dance). Thaddeus just wants to toke it all in, spread the harem out and daze away with his slave, Courtney (Rasmus Hardiker). A man of little action, Thaddeus is a great disappointment compared to his brave older brother, Fabious (James Franco, who is younger than McBride).  

A legendary warrior, Fabious and his men have just returned from another knightly journey -- this time with the head of a cyclops and Fabious' bride to be, Belladonna (Zooey Deschanel), a flowered princess whose lifelong seclusion has taught her to sing well, but little in the way of befitting decorum.

Asked to be the best man at Fabious' wedding, Thaddeus misses the nuptials, preferring to smoke some primo herb and chase sheep around instead. As a result he is not there when Leezar (Justin Theroux) the wizard takes a wiz on the wedding and re-steals Belladonna. Now Fabious, Thaddeus and company must stop "The Fuckining" before it is too late.

So the quest begins, in all its self-reflective, déclassé diegesis. As the characters state their timeworn-ed out lines of knighthood lore, encounter bare-breasted women, slay dragon-like creatures and sojourn toward the predictable conclusion, Your Highness shows very little in taking the high road or itself serious. It merely mocks what it understands oh so well without being cynical, although occasionally quite distasteful. 

Directed by David Gordon Green (Pineapple Express), in Dark-Ages light of the film's tongue-up-cheeks satire on knighthood lore vis-à-vis the deliberate dialogue, steady homoeroticism and multiple metaphors for castration, one gathers a number of those geek & nerd fests, such as Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings, are being ridiculed. The harder you are for fantasy, the limper you are for Your Highness.

For a film marketed for younger audiences -- yet, dare I say, geared toward matured audiences (certainly the "primo-herbed" ones) -- the film's deconstruction of some myths is clearly the film's strongest attribute and somewhat of a rebuttal to those who think the writer-director who started off with notably independent films like George Washington and Snow Angels has become any less edgier. Green can shoot an action scene, too. 

Okay, Your Highness does not reach the great depths of the Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols in shattering the sanctity of paradigmatic presentation and prose, but it will definitely upset comic book guy filmgoers -- often as anti-intellectual as non-athletic -- raised on a diet of dorky fairytales where goober guy is a warrior beyond all socially-inept and transferred viewer's dreams. 

However, Your Highness is not some cock & fuel dream either. Isabel (Portman) proves to be the mightiest of warriors as she metaphorically-castrates or penetrates her foes to death (all the while wearing an unusual chastity belt. How does she urinate?). Moreover, Your Highness frequently embraces the homoeroticism that dares not mention its name in Hollywood Blockbusters of this kind. From Lethal Weapon to Rush Hour to Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, Hollywood has given a new generation of filmgoers much manly tension to muster without much mention. Perhaps that is why younger generations tend to be more GLBT-friendly? That the buddies here are brothers -- and we know how incestuous royal families can be -- only pushes the film closer to the edge.

Granted, this machismo mockery only goes so far. There is something to be said via the three biggest villains in the film: a virgin mamas' boy, a "dickless wonder" and a bisexual in love with Fabious. And the film does parade more than its share of naked women without giving the non-gay girls something to look at in exchange.

Still the film has its attributes yet you may want to think twice about who you go see Your Highness with. Funny movies are diminished when your companion is not laughing. Going down pretty low to raze a few higher ups, Your Highness requires a certain taste that is not necessarily refined but adaptable to its play(against the)ground rules. 

DVD REVIEW: BLACK SWAN

Nina (Natalie Portman) in Black Swan.

White out

By Allan Heifetz

The rock star called Pink in Pink Floyd’s The Wall had a great many reasons to go completely bazonkers. His soldier dad died when Pink was little, his mom smothered him, his wife left him, the drugs, the drink, the Nazi-flavored paranoia, etc. All of these nasty ingredients combine in the end to smash Pink’s sanity. Nina, the meek ballerina of Black Swan, is also a sensitive artist with a large handful of issues that threaten her mind and eventually her life. She lives in near seclusion with her creepy and resentful mother (Barbara Hershey) and dances for a prestigious NYC company that runs her ragged physically and emotionally. Her scary director, Thomas (Vincent Cassel, playing the President of Sexual Harassment in the Workplace), demands perfection from her as well as 24-hour-access to her emaciated booty.

Nina has a brief moment of elation when she wins the coveted lead role in Swan Lake in which she must dance as both the white and the black swan. Her triumph is snuffed out after word is spread that she’s sleeping with the director. Nina becomes an outcast as Thomas continues to bully her into melding with her inner Black Swan in order to unleash the sexual, amoral and dark spirit inside. Alas, Nina is severely blocked sexually and can’t even successfully masturbate. Lily (Mila Kunis), a pretty, sexually open and popular dancer, tries to befriend Nina, but Nina’s delusion and paranoia quickly snuffs out that relationship. Nina is soon convinced that Lily is out to steal her role and destroy her. Nina’s hallucinations ramp up as she spirals down the crazy hole. Which side will seize control in the end; the white or the black? Always bet on black.

Black Swan is truly a rare bird; an extremely bleak story about ballet that somehow became very popular with filmgoers. Even though Natalie Portman put people in seats with her super-tortured and Oscar-winning performance, it’s Darren Aronofsky’s playfulness and technique with a camera that makes this horror story watchable and even fun. This is a horror movie where even the jump scares are artistic and breathtaking and the CGI effects are subtle. Black Swan feels like a little sister to Repulsion (1965), director Roman Polanski’s ode to isolation and sexual psychosis. If Repulsion is the ultimate “Girl descends slowly into madness” movie, then Black Swan just might be the Princess ballerina of the sub-genre that I might have just made up.

As far as DVD extras, there is an interesting, 30-minute behind-the-scenes documentary that leaves you wanting more. Unfortunately, that’s it.

The Blu-Ray extras reportedly offer the above documentary, plus three other behind-the-scenes pieces.