NEIGHBORS 2: A Funny Enough Follow-Up But An Inessential Sequel

Now playing at a multiplex near you:

NEIGHBORS 2: SORORITY RISING

(Dir. Nicholas Stoller, 2016)

“Let’s do what parents do best, stop young people from having fun!” Seth Rogen enthusiastically implores in this sequel to the 2014 hit comedy NEIGHBORS, in which Rogen and wife, Rose Byrne, now have to contend with the wild shenanigans of a sorority next door.

It’s one of those ‘why does the same thing keep happening to us?’ scenarios which calls attention to the notion that this sequel really isn’t necessary, but the first one made almost $300 million worldwide so you just know that it was incredibly inevitable nonetheless.

Chloë Grace Moretz plays Shelby, a rebellious freshwoman at the fictional Braxton University who, when she finds out that only fraternities can throw parties decides to start her own sorority – Kappa Kappa Nu – with her new friends Beth (Kiersey Clemons), and Nora (Beanie Feldstein).

But, of course, their choice for their sorority’s headquarters is the same house that was run by Zac Efron and co. for their fraternity Delta Psi Beta in the first film. Efron, who’s now a directionless post-nongraduate with a police record from the events of the original, becomes a mentor to Shelby and the girls of Nu, showing them how to raise enough money to stay afloat, host killer parties, and piss off their neighbors.

That would be Rogen and Byrne, reprising their roles as Mac and Kelly Radner, who are trying to sell their house as they have a second baby on the way. Mac and Kelly’s house is in escrow for 30 days so the new buyers (Sam Richardson and Abbi Jacobson) could potentially withdraw their offer if they happen to stop by and find out about the wild partying next door.

Mac and Kelly try to make a deal with Shelby to keep the noise down for the next month but, yep, it doesn’t go well, especially with Teddy throwing shade on the Radners, and suddenly “it’s on!” Shelby declares. “Nothing’s on!” Kelly protests to no avail.

Things heat up when Teddy gets voted out of the house by the girls, and he joins forces with Mac and Kelly to shut down the sorority. With the help of the desperate couple’s best friends (Ike Barinholtz and Carla Gallo), Mac, Kelly, and Teddy plot to steal the sorority’s weed stash at a tailgate event so that the girls won’t have rent money.

This is arguably the film’s most hilarious highlight as it involves a chaotic chase through crazy crowds of college kids that made the audience at my screening as noisy as the people on screen.

NIEGHBORS 2 keeps a steady stream of laughs going through its gross-out pranks –such as used tampons being pelted against windows, vomiting, and a sight gag involving Efron’s balls –the relatability of its regular folks’ dialogue (Rogen and Byrne’s exchanges as a married couple who are on the same page are still endearing), and its continuous goofiness which even makes a winner out of a reprisal of the airbag joke from the first film.

So many laughs in fact that I can overlook the crudeness of the filmmaking, which isn’t very visually stylish - cinematographer Brandon Trost, whose shot several of Rogen’s pictures, has done way better before - or particularly well edited. But who’s going to go see this film for art reasons? Folks want lots of laughs from a film like this and it definitely delivers.

And they've certainly assembled a great supporting cast of laugh getters including the returning Dave Franco, Christopher Mintz-Plasse (forever Mc Lovin), Jerod Carmichael, and Hannibal Buress who are joined by a cluster of welcome cameos by the likes of Lisa Kudrow, Kelsey Grammer, and SNL's Kyle Mooney.

Rogen and crew, which includes longtime writing partner Evan Goldberg, Andrew J. Cohen, Brendan O'Brien, and director Nicholas Stoller (all returning collaborators from the original), may have not pulled off an essential sequel by any means, but they’ve fashioned what I consider a funny enough follow-up. So it’s true that sloppy seconds can still be worthwhile, but here’s hoping that these guys take a hard pass on thirds.

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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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3D CGI Suess On The Loose

DR. SUESS' THE LORAX (Dirs. Chris Renaid & Kyle Balda, 2012)

One of Dr. Seuss’ most enduring tales, “The Lorax,” gets the 3D CGI treatment by Illumination Entertainment in this film which successfully follows the formula that Blue Sky Studios used in 2008’s HORTON HEARS A WHO: hip celebrity voices (including a cast member from The Office), hyper-colorful visuals, zippy Ken Daurio /Cinco Paul screenplay, and a John Powell score.

As today is the 108th anniversary of Dr. Suess’ birth, directors Renaud and Balda (the duo behind DESPICABLE ME) posit THE LORAX as a tribute to the acclaimed author’s vision.

It works as such, but mainly when it sticks to the storyline and designs of Suess’ original 1971 book. When it veers into the flashy high speed chase scenarios that dominate its second half it loses a bit of its charm. However, that doesn’t sabotage its inventive intent and sense of fast paced fun.

In a clever, yet no-brainer, casting move, Danny Devito voices the title character – a small fuzzy orange creature with a bushy yellow mustache who speaks for the trees.

A young boy named Ted (another tribute to Dr. Suess as his full name was Theodor Seuss Geisel), voiced by Zac Efron, learns the tale of the Lorax when he ventures out of Thneed-Ville, a plastic and fake city that is devoid of any nature. Ted wants to give the present of an actual tree to a girl (Taylor Swift) he has a crush on, and his Grandmother (the always welcome Betty White) advises the boy to seek out somebody called the Once-ler.

The Once-ler (voice of Ed Helms) lives in a house out in the dark tree-less terrain that used to be part of a ginormous factory that chopped down every last “Truffula” tree for material to make “Thneeds,” a useless item of clothing that was a big seller to the folks of Thneed-Ville.

After failing to stop the Once-ler from destroying the environment, the Lorax sadly lifts himself up into the polluted sky in defeat in one of the film’s most affecting images.

There is hope though, in the form of the last Truffula seed that the Once-ler gives to Ted, but he has to contend with the newly created character of O’Hare (a loud Rob Riggle) - the film’s villain who made millions off selling bottled air and will stop at nothing to keep Thneed-Ville from going green.

Chaotic sequences revolving around making sure the seed is safe from O’Hare and his goons, recall the hubbub surrounding the fate of the tiny seedling plant in “WALL-E,” but the film’s infectious energy keeps it from feeling derivative.

DeVito’s raspy line readings wonderfully give the film a great comic edge, and provide a counter balance to the sing songy slickness of Efron and Helms’ vocal stylings. Speaking of sing-songy, Swift, in both her speaking and singing, crafts the most listenable musical work I’ve heard yet from the Grammy-winning Country artist.

I can’t remember a single melody of the songs themselves, written by British composer John Powell, but they breeze inoffensively by like the rest of the movie.

Although the anti-industry, pro-environmental message may be somewhat buried in all of the shiny spectacle, (don’t worry - Fox News is digging it up) THE LORAX is an above average kid’s movie that does right by Dr. Suess’ spirit with no heavy-handiness.

I also enjoyed that my 3 young nephews, who attended the screening with me, really ate it all up. Bet you and your kids will too.

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A Swell Welles Period Piece

ME AND ORSON WELLES (Dir. Richard Linklater, 2009)
To be a young actor in the hustling bustling Big Apple of the 30's, cast by sheer chance as a player in an Orson Welles' Mercury Theater production is a dream many aspiring thespians have no doubt had, but is it believable that it would be a dream shared by "it" boy Zac Efron?


Sadly no, he's a blank slate of an actor who makes for a weak protagonist, but this period piece by cult director Richard Linklater is royally saved by Christian McKay's pitch perfect performance as the genius wunderkind Welles. It's a role he was seemingly born to play thanks to his uncanny likeness and delivery honed from over half a decade on stage in the one man show "Rosebud: The Lives Of Orson Welles".


As a wide eyed high school student, Efron is overjoyed to be cast in the small but crucial role of Lucious in Welles' controversial 1937 production of "Julius Caesar". It was controversial because Welles staged Shakespeare's play as contemporary commentary outfitting his performers in modern dress - specifically uniforms that resembled those of the Nazi party.


Efron is paired with a production assistant played by Claire Danes as a rehearsal partner and immediately falls for her. He also falls for the world of the theater; a world that Welles rules with a mighty swagger. McKay's Welles highjacks the film from Efron and breathes life into the predictable proceedings with every entrance. His powerful presence not only makes us forget Efron is in the room, it helps us forget he's in the movie.


When McKay isn't on screen the film suffers from the lack of chemistry between Danes and Efron and the simplistic nature of their relationship. It's funny (or more accurately damaging) that the excellent casting of McKay would be offset by the misguided miscasting of Efron. Luckily other members of the cast fare much better - James Tupper as a the wise witty Joseph Cotton, Eddie Marsan as the exasperated John Houseman, and Ben Chaplin as George Coulouris who has an effective scene dealing with stage fright right before going on as Marc Antony.


Linklater has one of the most intriquing and diverse filmographies of any working director out there. Since his brilliant breakthrough SLACKER (1991) his work has gone from indie (BEFORE SUNRISE) to mainstream (THE SCHOOL OF ROCK) and back again (BEFORE SUNSET) with mostly successful results.


Linklater's previous period piece effort, THE NEWTON BOYS, was one of his only major stumbles so it's wonderful to report ME AND ORSON WELLES is absolutely a superior and more assured work in the same arena.


The brisk pacing and solid structure show off Linklater's strengths as do the astute recreations of the original stage show - at times I wished the film would throw out the backstage bickering and just give us the play "Julius Caesar" in full.


Although my reaction to Efron and the presentation of the love triangle arc is decidedly mixed, this is still a worthwhile movie largely because of McKay. His Welles definitely deserves an Oscar nomination and that's quite a compliment considering that this is his first film.


A best-case scenario would be that HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL fans that follow Efron will see it and they'll walk away under the spell of McKay. I know that's just wishful thinking, but it sure would be nice for all those teenyboppers to actually get a whiff of what real acting is all about.


Post note: Christian McKay appeared previously on this blog in a post entitled "A Birthday Tribute To Orson Welles With 10 Welles Wannabes" (May 5th, 2008). He would definitely rank much higher if I did the list today.
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