One Last Christmas Eve Blow-Out In THE NIGHT BEFORE

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THE NIGHT BEFORE (Dir. Jonathan Levine, 2015)

Sure, the premise of this Seth Rogen joint is pretty flimsy - i.e. three friends have one last Christmas Eve blow-out and farcical hilarity ensues - but after giving the silly stoner spin to such subjects as the apocalypse, cancer, and Kim Jong-un, I’m cool with that, as long as they keep the laughs coming.

And that they do, right from the get-go with a very welcome voice-over appearance by Tracy Morgan reciting rhyming lines in the familiar style of the classic Clement Clarke Moore poem from which the film derives its title. This gives us the set-up that back in 2001, Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character Ethan lost his parents in an automobile accident, and in an effort to cheer him up, his friends Isaac (Rogen) and Chris (Anthony Mackie) initiate a hard partying holiday tradition that later comes to include an ongoing quest through the streets of New York City to find the elusive, mysterious Nutcracka Ball, considered “the Holy Grail of Christmas parties.”

In the present day, Isaac is a successful lawyer whose wife (Jillian Bell) is about to give birth to their first child, Chris is a pro football player who’s just started to get a taste of stardom, and Ethan is stuck in a rut as a struggling musician who has to take work that involves dressing as an elf and serving hors d’ourves at a corporate party on Christmas Eve.

The job is humiliating but things look up when while working coat-check Ethan happens upon 3 tickets to the Nutcracka Ball. Ethan gleefully steals them, quits his job, and runs off to find his friends. Meanwhile, in one of the movie’s most implausible moments (of which there are many), Isaac’s wife Betsy gifts him a neatly packaged box of hallucinogenic drugs and encourages him to go wild at his get-together. Yeah, sure.

So the fellows don tacky Cosby-style Christmas sweaters (Ethan’s has a standard line of red reindeer, while Isaac’s has a Star of David and Chris’s a black Santa – see above) and hit a karaoke bar, where they perform Run-DMC's “Christmas in Hollis,” and run into Ethan’s ex Diana (I forgot to mention that the guy is still reeling from a break-up) played by Lizzy Caplan.

Caplan, who, as a veteran of Party Down, THE INTERVIEW, HOT TUB TIME MACHINE, and going way back with these guys to the Freaks and Geeks days, is well acquainted with such sausage party shenanigans, is accompanied by Mindy Kaling (The Office U.S., The Mindy Project), who gets her phone mixed up with Isaac.

This leads to Isaac, who’s gone goofy by consuming most of the drugs in his gift box, getting dick pic texts and not knowing how to respond.

In true Seinfeldian-fashion, each character has their obsessive hang-up - Isaac’s is that he’s too fucked up to function, Chris is wanting to score weed for his team’s quarterback that he’s trying to impress (this is one of the film’s clunkiest scenerios, which involves Mackie chasing Broad City’s Ilana Glazer as an evil drug stealing freak), and Ethan’s is, of course, wanting to get back together with Diana.

And in a wonderfully unexpected appearance, a hilariously deadpan Michael Shannon shows up as the guy’s high-school pot dealer, Mr. Green. This marks the second time that Shannon has stolen a movie away from Gordon-Levitt (see: PREMIUM RUSH). Shannon kills it here – every line is a stone cold gem – so much so that he ought to have his own comedy vehicle some day.

The only thing that matters in a movie like this is if it’s funny, and THE NIGHT BEFORE has some of the funniest moments of any comedy I’ve seen this year, and it has a warm, fuzzy heart that conveys way more genuine Christmas spirit than, say, crap like the dysfunctional family comedy LOVE THE COOPERS (currently #3 at the box office).

The joyous energy that Rogen and gang, including screenwriters Jonathan Levine, Kyle Hunter, Ariel Shaffir, and longtime collaborator Evan Goldberg, bring to this round of crude gags, dick jokes, drug jokes, wacky mishaps, pop culture riffs, and surprise cameos, is crazy infectious.

THE NIGHT BEFORE is way better than THE INTERIEW, but a notch below THIS IS THE END on the scale of output of from the Apatow alma mater. It may have lazy plotting, some overly obvious set-ups, and much silliness just for silliness’ sake, but it brings so much in the way of laughter, likability, and an undoubtedly sincere theme of friendship, that it more than makes up for those faults.

It did make me wonder how much longer the 33-year old Rogen can make these man-child has to face growing up movies. He’ll probably yet again take a cue from Apatow, and do ‘em til the big 4-0. As long as he keeps bringing the funny, that’s fine by me.

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Pixar’s INSIDE OUT Pulls Every Heartstring There Is

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INSIDE OUT 
(Dirs. Pete Docter & Ronaldo Del Carmen, 2015)

Pixar’s entry into this year’s summer event movie sweepstakes is one of the trusty animation studios’ most purely pleasurable productions.

Its strengths are many: it’s not another sequel, it has an incredibly solid comic cast headed by Amy Poehler, it’s a dazzling display of colorful concepts, it has the right amount of light, the right amount of darkness, it’s hilarious, it’s heartfelt, and it has a much better female-centric scenario than BRAVE.

Most of INSIDE OUT takes place inside the psyche of an 11-year old girl named Riley, voiced by Kaitlyn Dais. We learn right off the bat that there are five emotions behind the control panel of Riley’s mind: Joy, Sadness, Anger, Disgust, and Fear, which are respectively personified by Poehler, Phyllis Smith (best known as Phyllis from The Office), Lewis Black, Mindy Kaling (another Office alumni), and Bill Hader (Poehler’s former SNL co-star).

When Riley and her parents (voiced by Diane Lane and Kyle MacLachlan) move from Minnesota to San Francisco, Sadness starts to affect her core memories (represented by glowing orbs which are gathered on shelves in a vast long-term storage library). These core memories power personality islands – i.e. essential components of Riley’s identity – with names like Friendship Island, Hockey Island, Goofball Island, and Honesty Island, which are connected to the central control room via thin bridges.

Joy tries to stop a sad core memory of Riley crying in front of her class on the first day at her new school from becoming part of her being, but ends up getting sucked with Sadness, and other core memories, through a vacuum tube and deposited into the far reaches of the ever-growing more despondent girl’s mind.

So Joy and Sadness have to make their way back to headquarters, which is faltering due to Anger, Disgust, and Fear being in charge. Joy and Sadness journey through realms such as the Center for Abstract Thinking, Imagination Land, and Dream Production, but most significantly they encounter Riley’s long forgotten imaginary friend, Bing Bong, adorably voiced by Richard Kind.

Bing Bong, a hot pink hybrid of elephant, cat, and dolphin outfitted with a porkpie hat and bowtie, who cries hard candy, is eager to help the stranded emotions get back by way of the Train of Thought though Riley’s subconscious. Meanwhile, the identity islands are collapsing, and Anger plants the idea to have Riley run away back to Minnesota in a misguided attempt to fix things.

Poehler brings a can-do gusto to her lead role of Joy that would make her Parks and Recreation character Leslie Knope proud, while Smith’s Sadness gets to do more than just amusingly mope through – her developmental arc is key. The remaining emotions have their funny moments, especially Black’s red hot Anger, whose concern for learning curse words is a great running gag. I wouldn’t have minded more of Kaling and Hader’s takes on Disgust and Fear, but maybe less really is more.

As for the outside of Riley, Lane and MacLachlan provide a grounded parental presence – we get to see inside their heads in one of the film’s funniest scenes – that we see in flashes as being as stressed in adjusting to the move as their daughter. Dias does a good job as the everygirl Riley, wonderfully capturing the awkwardness, confusion, and pain that any kid and adult can relate to.

INSIDE OUT is on par with the best of Pixar. It maybe doesn’t scale the heights of Docter’s previous masterpiece UP, but that it gets so close is reason to rejoice. Its screenplay, courtesy of Docter, Josh Cooley, and Meg LeFauve, definitely re-establishes the studio's high standards of humor, invention, and emotional pull that had gotten a little misplaced in one too many sequels (that one being CARS 2).

As usual, the obligatory 3D presentation didn’t do much for me, but I was glad that I had the glasses on throughout as they helped to hide how much I kept tearing up. Consider every heartstring pulled.

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