FILM REVIEW: A MILLION WAYS TO DIE IN THE WEST

Anna (Charlize Theron) and Albert (Seth McFarlane) in A Million Ways to Die in the West.

Gun damn our history

By Ed Rampell

Meanwhile, back at the ranch:

 

For those who enjoy genre spoofs and gross out humor, Seth MacFarlane’s A Million Ways to Die in the West serves up a heaping pile of humor with a million mirthful movie moments. Others who prefer their comedy to be cerebral and refined, rather than raucous, may wish to hang up their spurs and sit this dizzy dosey doe out. While those minus any sense of humor at all should just stay at the old homestead, instead.

 

Although your critic also enjoys the dry wit of a Cole Porter or Noel Coward lyric, he belongs in the former camp and laughed (what’s left of) his head off. Around 40 years ago, when Mel Brooks unleashed Blazing Saddles on an unsuspecting public, scenes such as Mongo’s horse-punching and the campfire farting vignette were considered to be irreverent and outré. In a similar way, in our post-Brooks world, MacFarlane pushes the envelope of our more jaded 2014 sensibilities with scatological humor and jokes in bad taste (and that surely taste badly) that have rarely been seen on the big screen in a major Hollywood production. In terms of standards per onscreen behavior, this is MacFarlane’s Family Guy and American Dad animated TV series on cinematic steroids, raising crudity to the level of high art. (Although A Million Ways to Die in the West holds back when it comes to breasts and female genitalia, which Sarah Silverman as the droll hooker Ruth merely describes, whereas male genitalia is more graphically exposed. Why the shyness, Seth?)

 

As the auteur of A Million Ways to Die in the West (MacFarlane directed, co-wrote and stars -- although, unlike Brooks, he did not punch the holes in the sides of the celluloid), he takes deadly aim at the genre conventions of the Western. Indeed, for our continent’s indigenous peoples, the Westward ho! expansion from sea to not so shining seas was nothing short of a cataclysmic, genocidal catastrophe that is now also turning into an ecological nightmare. Underlying MacFarlane’s critique of the Western lies an awareness of this unadorned history.

 

Like numerous John Ford classics, part of A Million Ways to Die in the West was shot on location in Monument Valley. Mac the Knife satirically deconstructs and debunks cowboy clichés, stressing that in stark contrast to silver screen hagiography, the Wild West was an awful place to find one’s self in. There is an especially delicious joke about the “selfishness” of American Natives, and at the very end (warning -- don’t leave before all the end credits have rolled!) whitey gets his comeuppance for caricaturing newly free slaves at a county fair.

 

Like many a genre spoof A Million Ways to Die in the West walks a fine line in between making fun of the Western’s archetypes and tried and true traits. Sometimes the mockery devolves into becoming the very thing which the iconoclastic artiste has been poking fun at. Such may be the case vis-à-vis the relationship between Albert (MacFarlane) and Anna (Charlize Theron, who may be the horse opera’s most fetching, winsome gunslinger since Jane Fonda rode the purple sage in 1965’s similarly hilarious Cat Ballou, which co-starred Oscar winning Lee Marvin and what is, hoofs down, screendom’s most screamingly funny steed ever).

 

A Million Ways to Die in the West is at its satirical best when it lampoons the mythos of gunslinging. As gunman Clinch Leatherwood, Liam Neeson does a good job of harpooning not only the long-ballyhooed celluloid stereotype of the High Noon-type triggerman, but of the action hero/tough guy roles the actor, who once played Oskar Schindler has been, lamentably, cast in of late. Although it’s hard to assess the psychological impact of and quantify the romanticizing of gunplay in our culture, who knows how many Westerns that pathetic, demented mass murderer in Santa Barbara and others of his shooting spree ilk have seen since birth?

 

MacFarlane’s screen romp is also at its finest when depicting Native Americans, Hollywood’s perennial “noble savages.” A Million Ways to Die in the West portrays them as savage, then as noble -- enlightened heathens who, through psychedelics. lead Albert on an Oz-like trip wherein he attains clarity, if not a taste of enlightenment. Wes Studi -- who played Magua in 1992’s The Last of the Mohicans, the title character in 1992’s Geronimo: An American Legend and the Na'vi chief in 2009’s Avatar -- is, as usual, great, portraying Cochise. For my wampum, Studi steals the show (his niece DeLanna Studi is also a gifted thespian).

 

Neil Patrick Harris also co-stars as Foy, a cross between a city slicker and gunslinger who competes with Albert for the affections of Louise (played by Amanda Seyfried, who, unlike Theron, is not, for some reason, very attractive here). Look for comic Bill Maher in a clever cameo.

 

As for the plot of the movie, it’s very secondary to the boundless laughs for those tickled pink by sheep penises, hats full of excrement and the like. In other words, your humble scribe loved it and recommends it to those for whom this type of rude, crude comedy is their cup of piss -- uh, I mean “tea.” To paraphrase Horace Greeley, it made this reviewer say: “Go Seth, young man!”        

 

 

 

  

 

  

 

    

 

FILM REVIEW: TED

A scene from Ted.

Barely bearable

By John Esther

Way back in the 1980s there was a boy named John (Bretton Manley). John was so lonely not even Greenbaum (Max Harris), the Jewish kid frequently beaten by the ungentle gentile kids, would play with John.

Then one Christmas morning John receives a special gift: a teddy bear. John and the teddy bear do everything a boy and a teddy bear can do. But it is not enough. John wishes Ted could talk.

Low and behold the next morning Ted (voice by Zane Cowans) is a walking and talking Teddy Bear. John has a best friend, a sui generis Snuggles to call his own. The clever boy names the teddy bear Ted. As the world's first talking stuffed animal, for a few fleeing moments Ted becomes quite famous and proverbially belongs to the crowd, but Ted and John will always be "Thunder Brothers" for life.

Flash forward 27 years later. The scientific, military, and religious community, plus the rest of the world, have all accepted a talking teddy bear as just something that is a part of the world. (In the real world they would have torn him apart for answers.) A pop culture flash in the pan, today the  beer-swishing, bong-banging, anti-Semitic, racist, sexist Ted (voice by Seth MacFarlane) is hanging out with his best buddy, John (Mark Wahlberg).

As inseparable as Ted and John have been all of these years, John has managed to develop a relationship with Lori (Mila Kunis),  a -- here we go, again -- woman who is, for the most part, out of John's league. (Do women ever get tired of watching female film characters settling for less in love?)

Lori has showed a considerable amount of patience over the past four years, waiting for John to get his act together but, at the moments where the storyline in the film picks up, she has just about had enough of John and Ted. What are a man and his teddy buddy to do? Well, get high, get crazy, then serious, then crazy, then stupid, then drunk, then high, horny, cry, plea, deny, fail, reunite, save...until the predictable and hackneyed ending.

Written and directed by MacFarlane, the brilliant and very cynical creator behind Family Guy and many other television shows, Ted, like those shows, is full, if not masturbatory, nods to pop culture -- usually of the populist type. Nods to TV, blockbuster films, pop singers and the ilk are the themes MacFarlane's texts are mostly made of and Ted takes the brow down with few efforts to enlighten his audiences. The Søren Kierkegaard quote in the film does not fit, but what does a stoned, horny stuffed teddy bear without a penis know about philosophy?

Some of these ir-reverent pop references are quite funny -- such as a Bourne-inspired fighting scene in the hotel room; a Flash Gordon metanarrative; a Tiffany video "cameo"; and the film's own nod to its creator ("He thinks my voice sounds like that Peter Griffin"). For the most part, those are the funniest parts in the film -- although I had to bite my tongue to stop laughing at Ted's impersonation of a trashy Boston woman having sex. MacFarlane knows American pop culture and, when at his best, he uses it in a critical way that is hilarious.

MacFarlane is also intelligent when it comes to American politics as well, but that does not show in Ted, unless you consider Ted a synecdochefor mind-numbing Americans, albeit of various ages, who are not adverse to disliking Mexicans, blaming dark skinned people for 9/11, making anti-Semitic jokes and treating women like sex objects. But Ted does not play Ted that way. Ted insults women and minorities and we are supposed to laugh. At least much of the audience at the screening I attended did laugh at such sentiments.

The film also sends quite a few mixed messages about gay men. One the one hand, Ted is a homophobe whose anti-GLBT jokes are supposed to be funny (they are not) and John's co-worker, Guy (Patrick Warburton), gets beat up at gay bars and yet he does not know why. But on the other hand, or eventually, Guy meets and falls in love with another man (Ryan Reynolds) and the film treats the relationship with respect.

Ted is definitelya mixed bag, a movie trying to reach the largest audience, even if that means lowering itself to a lower common denominator. Ted has its middle, low and lower moments. For every time I laughed until tears rolled down my face there was another moment where I cringed.

In a way Ted reminded me of Gasper Noé's Irreversible, but I have to stop here.