NEIGHBORS: A High Concept Comedy That Never Becomes Overwhelmed By Its Concept

Guest reviewer William Fonvielle, of the blog Filmvielle, takes on:

NEIGHBORS (Dir. Nicholas Stoller, 2014)

Well how 'bout that. Lend it to this silly battle of Seth Rogen versus Zac Efron to produce the unofficial State Of The American Comedy. Raucously funny, tightly paced, and oddly thoughtful without being oppressively so, NEIGHBORS is one of those comedies where so much of what matters clicks, you're even willing to forgive the few parts that don't.

If it carries with it any sort of dread, it's only the countdown to the inevitable horrible sequel that doesn't understand any part of what made the original special.

An oddly omnipresent theme in recent comedies, particularly those produced or directed by Judd Apatow, is the need for adolescent males to leave their childish habits behind. The 40-year-old virgin accepted that he could no longer substitute action figures for companionship.

Rogen in KNOCKED UP didn't shirk the lifetime of responsibilities from his one-night stand. Instead of moping over his break-up in FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL (also directed by Nicholas Stoller), Jason Segel focuses his energy into his dream project about puppet vampires.

It's a simple concept, getting surprising mileage because each of these respective movies seems to genuinely believe what it's preaching. And it's not without lineage. If, as everyone suggests, Apatow is the closest we have to a Harold Ramis heir, then his movies are a direct continuation of Ramis' "snobs vs. slobs" classics (STRIPES, ANIMAL HOUSE, etc). Not an exact echo, mind you. Just carrying the torch further down the road - Apatow's movies relish the sight of grown men getting into mischief, but they invariably arrive at the point in the third act when enough is enough and it's time to grow up.

So where does that leave NEIGHBORS here in 2014? On the surface, you have a classic Ramis battle. A rowdy frat house (led by a shockingly adept Efron), whose bongs puff smoke with the same thoroughness as their stereos blast loud music, move in to the house next to a young newlywed couple (Rogen and Rose Byrne). The bros dreams of partytime antics so legendary, they can land on their frat's wall of fame. The young couple wants nothing more than blissful, suburban peace for themselves and their infant daughter. Snobs and slobs, enter the ring!

Wait a sec, though. Stoller immediately subverts expectations by casting Rogen not as the stoner party animal, but as half of the husband/wife team. That's right. Seth Rogen, once among the freakiest of the Freaks And Geeks, now convincingly stands as a movie's bastion of adulthood. Essentially, Stoller and screenwriters Andrew J. Cohen and Brendan O'Brien take their standard Ramis frame, plug in Apatow's favorite Boy Who Must Grow Up into the role of Boy Who Already IS Grown Up, and make that character and his wife the audience surrogate. 

And are the couple's demands really that extreme? They're not against partying. Hell, the movie opens with them brazenly having sex in the living room while their wide-eyed child gazes on. They're just trying to create a normal life for themselves in the process.

Ultimately this results in neither a Ramis cautionary tale of excess partying (where there are no consequences) or an Apatow cautionary tale of excess adolescence (in which there are no consequences for a while, until there are), but an impressive summation of both. There is where American comedy was. NEIGHBORS shows you where it leads.

All the more impressive is that Stoller doesn't club you over the head with this either. With each passing movie he grows more skilled as a true director of comedy. Not a mere assembler of scenes, but a director. A director makes the hard choices. He knows when to let his talented performers riff, and more importantly, he knows when to judiciously bring the editing blade down. The movie contains a few fantastic examples of actors running with a concept (witness Efron and frat brother Dave Franco's bit on bros vs. hos), but it still runs a tight 96 minutes and damn well means it. Apart from any scholarly examination you or I might bring to the table, this is fundamentally a movie that sprouts from a solid concept, embodies it with distinct characterizations, then honestly follows those characters and that concept as far as they go.

A comedy that decided what it wanted to be and made choices along the way to make that happen.

And by the end, Stoller and his team prove themselves adept at the fine art of having their cake and eating it too. After two acts that take great relish in the joy of watching mischief, an uneasy feeling began a-boiling in my stomach. Stoller and his writers overall did a nice job of adding layers to their characters along the way - Efron fears graduating college and entering a world where he doesn't matter, while Rogen and Byrne worry that becoming a couple who just wants a night of peace with their kid means their youth is effectively killed. All this works nicely as background to the action.

But will NEIGHBORS unfortunately remember that a story requires an end, and then fall into the trap of blatantly Imparting A Lesson? 

What makes NEIGHBORS so impressive is as it arrives at the finish line, it manages to simultaneously hit the gas while leaning on the brakes. The bawdy, lets-have-a-good-time nature of the movie never lets up. If anything, it only escalates. But Stoller ultimately never sides with anyone, and he takes a step back with these characters, by now so well established, and allows us to see things from everyone's point of view.

When Rogen and Byrne finally lie in bed in the end and lovingly coo over such boring things as the smell of freshly ground coffee, it plays not as a joke. NEIGHBORS means it. But when Efron gazes at the extremest of the extreme party he hath wrought as a source of genuine pride and accomplishment, it plays not as a moment of pity. NEIGHBORS means that too. Stoller never actively judges nor supports any one character. Instead he has the temerity to suggest they might both be right, a concept he subtly weaves between the laughs. There's a place for partying, there's a place for adulthood, and they both matter.

One hell of a juggling act, this movie is. It's a high concept comedy that never becomes overwhelmed by the concept. It's a loving embodiment of both the Ramis and Apatow schools of comedy while simultaneously tweaking the formulas in both small and meaningful ways (lets not gloss over the fact that instead of a shrill nag, the lead female is Rogen's equal partner in crime). And it's a movie that will make you cackle to the point of missing lines.

All NEIGHBORS had to do was make us laugh. How nice that it decided to do more.

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WARM BODIES Throws The Zombie Rulebook Out The Window With Mixed Results

Opening today at nearly every multiplex in the Triangle area:

WARM BODIES
(Dir. Jonathan Levine, 2013)

The premise of this film, which is being hyped as the zombified answer to TWILIGHT, is promising. 

After a zombie apocalypse, which is getting easier and easier to set up - just display some headlines and news clips about a plague and you're in, a teen-aged member of the walking dead falls in love with a human, and that love may not just bring him back to life, it may save the entire zombie population.

Nicholas Hoult (the kid from ABOUT A BOY and Beast from X-MEN: FIRST CLASS) plays the young zombie who tells us through a running inner dialogue voice over that he doesn’t remember who he was, or what he did, but figures “My hoodie would suggest I was unemployed.”

But wait a second, zombies aren’t supposed to have inner dialogues, right? Well, that’s our first indication that WARM BODIES, adapted from the bestselling novel by Isaac Marion by director/screenwriter Levine, is going to mess around a bit with zombie mythology.

Hoult lives at deserted airport in Montreal, Canada (at least that’s where it was filmed) among dozens of the undead who shuffle around aimlessly, grunting, like zombies do. Our protagonist has what he calls “almost conversations” with his best friend, Rob Corddry (The Daily Show, HOT TUB TIME MACHINE), consisting of mild groans, and he spends his nights in an airplane filled with stuff he collects, sort of in a WALL-E way.

Meanwhile, back in the world of the living, Teresa Palmer and Dave Franco portray a young couple who leave their heavily-guarded walled-off section of the city, ruled by John Malkovich as Palmer’s stern self-appointed General father, with a small group of fellow survivors to raid abandoned buildings for meds and other supplies.

Things go awry with they run into Hoult and other walkers, out on a hunt for human flesh, in a lab. Hoult kills Franco, but saves Palmer from the other zombies as its love at first sight.

Hoult takes Palmer back to the airport, telling her she’ll be safe there - yes, he can actually form a few words - and entertains her by playing records on a somehow functioning turntable from his vinyl collection (kudos for the extremely appropriate use of Bruce Springsteen’s “Hungry Heart”). “Better…sound” he actually musters about his preference for the vinyl format.

This is where the plot mechanics break down a bit. Hoult keeps his dream girl at the airport because it’s too dangerous for her to try to return to the safe zone, but then we see them taking a joyride in a snazzy red Mercedes around the runway. If they have access to a car like that, surely they can get her back home, but whatever.

The film breaks more of the established zombie rules by having the real villains be what’s called “Bonies,” that is zombies that are so far gone they have ripped off all their flesh and are just evil not-too-convincing CGI-ed corpses.

So the zombie romantic comedy (zom rom com?) WARM BODIES, with its conceit that the undead can be saved by love, is a mixed bag that made me laugh a few times, but ultimately I couldn’t completely buy into it.

It swiftly runs its course through to a battle climax between the Bonies and the humans, who learn that the not as dead zombies are on their side, but by then its spirit of invention has been replaced by an all too predictable formula.

Still, there’s some wit and charm here that may appeal to matinee moviegoers, Levine's direction is sharp (his previous film 50/50 was a lot sharper), and the visual style of the film, provided by cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe, absorbingly keeps in line with the horror aesthetics of the zombie genre, despite the rest of the movie throwing the rule book out the window.

As for the cast, Hoult and Palmer are likable even if they don't have much chemistry together, Franco has a pretty throwaway role mostly seen through flashbacks (you see, when Hoult snacks on his brains he gets to experience his victim's memories), and Malkovich isn't given the material needed for him to make his mark so he barely even nibbles on the scenery.

WARM BODIES severely stretches its premise thin with its lapses in zombie logic, and its high concept gets overly compromised by rom com conventions. Perhaps if it were funnier I could overlook its faults, but as it stands its promising premise never fully paid off.

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