Friday, September 10, 2010
Film Your Evil, Residential Weekend at the Movies
Posted by Jesse Hassenger on Fri, Sep 10, 2010 at 3:10 PM
- Look at all those evil residents.
The Virginity Hit: Will Ferrell and Adam McKay produced this first-person faux-documentary comedy, and while it has some amusing digressions that wouldn't be out of place in a McKay or Apatow joint, it's mostly akin to crossing American Pie with mumblecore. It's neat that the Ferrell/McKay team wants to support a comic style less obviously compatible with their own (a previous pickup from their company, the would-be cult comedy The Foot Fist Way starring the admittedly hilarious Danny McBride, felt more like Ferrell Extreme! than an original comic voice), but while The Virginity Hit is many things—likable, often believable, and observant about the way some teenagers are now willing and able to broadcast their adolescent victories and embarrassments to the world—it's never really all that funny. Amusing, yes, but almost too real to work as a comedy; it feels like real kids hanging out and screwing around, a nice vibe with a realistically low percentage of actual good jokes. Although: it should be said that these low-budget upstarts have produced a far better guys-just-screwing-around comedy than the similarly unpolished Grown Ups.
The Romantics: Galt Niederhoffer's adaptation of her own novel has a decent cast—Katie Holmes, Anna Paquin, Josh Duhamel, Elijah Wood, and, in a surprise career-best turn, former Silk Spectre Malin Akerman playing drunk and brazen—but they get blurred not just by the digital video photography (this looks like a book trailer, you guys!) but a focus on a romantic rivalry between Holmes and Paquin; neither (unlike Akerman!) do their best work here. At first, the movie feels like the smart kind of novel adaptation, taken from a limited timeframe and point of view. But then characters start having long conversations about their feelings and suddenly it's the regular kind of novel adaptation: unwieldy and overemphatic.
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