comment #1

jesse says ...

Usually I'm not so down with your weird weight fixations, Jeff, but I agree with you on Hill, as I'm sure many people do -- in that I like the guy, he's hilarious, and I don't want him to die at age 35, so I hope he gets back down to pudgy-funny-guy territory. I have to say, he looked a bit better on those MTV awards last night than he did in Greek (which I really enjoyed, including his excellent performance). Maybe things are turning in the right direction for him.

comment #2

Sabina E says ...

He's rich and famous, can't he afford his own personal trainer?

comment #3

62Lincoln says ...

Perhaps Seth Rogen could be his weight mentor.

comment #4

crazynine says ...

Total aside: saw the movie yesterday, and was genuinely surprised that I enjoyed it. I'd *totally* have been satisfied running into this thing on cable.

That said, in the theater, I noticed a few things I wouldn't have complained about had I seen it on late-night TV. One, it's too long by about 15 minutes (the scourge of all comedies lately). Two, the threesome scene felt totally out of place and really brought the film to a screeching halt when it should have been rushing to a conclusion.

And three, the direction was really off. I noticed it most in the P. Diddy scenes: it was joke... BEAT... joke... BEAT... very staccato, no natural flow. The lack of rhythm didn't bother me so much in the Brand scenes if only because he's such an odd duck with a bizarre cadence to begin with, but most every other scene featured it to no end. Annoying.

Finally... something about Russell Brand rubs me the wrong way in real life, but in both Marshall and this, I dig him. Not to go all Wells or anything, but if I met him in real life, I'd probably want to stuff his head in a toilet, but Aldous is quite the fun character (and deserves to be a running joke through more movies, methinks).

comment #5

jesse says ...

crazynine, you've hit upon something with the direction of Get Him to the Greek -- which I enjoyed, I think even more than you did, and more than I expected to. It's a very funny, well-acted, and I'd say even pretty well-written movie, and I felt like the darker/weirder stuff (including the threesome) was integrated pretty well into the comedy and gave it a little more comedic heft than just Family Guy style shock-laughs. So well-done all around.

But Nicholas Stoller, the director, who I assume is a pretty strong writer (having worked on the script for this, Sarah Marshall, and written for Undeclared), doesn't really, as you say, get a good rhythm going. I felt it more in Sarah Marshall, actually -- just the staging and maybe the blocking? I'm not sure what it was, but the way the movie was put together felt sort of sloppy and diffuse. At very least, it didn't add to the comedy the way I think Superbad and Pineapple Express are actually really well-directed movies. But Sara Marshall and Greek both have sort of a meandering, uncertain flow to them, which is especially odd in Greek since it seems like a set-up for more tension. There were moments in Greek that I thought were better-directed than Sarah Marshall, but I still felt the clunkiness. Actually, the cameo from "Sarah Marshall" herself is a good example: funny bit, but it's just something someone notices on the plane, and then the movie slams into a longer ad for her show, and then cut to another scene entirely (if I remember correctly).

Of course, Diddy, as funny as he is in the movie, probably wasn't a huge help. Dude isn't really a pro actor, and he sounded to me like he was reading lines off of cue cards. Still hilarious, and it sort of works for the character, but I still noticed it.

All that said, though, it was better than I had expected based on the more manic trailers.

comment #6

THE MovieBob says ...

What's strange about Hill is, even in Greek he's a scary-precise physical comedian and can really "move" when he wants to, even at this size - guy must be pretty strong.

The movie is... okay, overall. What kills A LOT of it is the insistance on making all the music/showbiz stuff (i.e. Snow's songs) broad pardoy because thats how it was in "Sarah." Brand is doing a really, REALLY good job playing a believable, three-dimensional "smart but haunted" artist/addict type, but the movie keeps undercutting him by having all his "work" be a joke. We get TWO really good, well-staged scenes establishing how Snow gets "ressurected" by performing onstage that are ALMOST tanscendant... and then they both fall apart because he has to start crooning about British double-entendres.

That said, I'm STILL in awe of how good (and understated, comparitively) a comic actor Diddy is.

comment #7

jesse says ...

THE MovieBob, I did feel like the songs in Get Him to the Greek were a bit more Jason Segel sensibility (he co-wrote a couple of them, which I thought was cool), which is to say sillier parodies, rather than close imitations. Jarvis Cocker of Pulp supposedly had written some material for the movie, but in the credits it looked like he only had his hands in one number. The Segel stuff is, as you say, double-entendres and more like a joke song, while I feel like you could've gotten Cocker to write some really good fake rock songs.

That said, it didn't really detract from the movie for me, because even if the lyrics were a little too silly to be a close parody of Britpop, the sound was pretty believable as an Oasis type band. Plus, I like Snow making sort of mass-appeal, not particularly well-written songs; it makes him both more believable as someone who got massively popular, and more vulnerable in that it's not a stretch that he would make a collossal misfire of an album, or not stay on task as a musician.

comment #8

bluefugue says ...

>He's rich and famous, can't he afford his own personal trainer?

He probably doesn't want to get too fit, as being a funny fat guy is his current meal ticket. (One of those unfortunate and indeed deadly side effects of typecasting.)

I wonder, do actors pay personal trainers to keep them at a certain pudgy-but-not-too-pudgy weight? Do said trainers, if they exist, feel ethically conflicted about same?...

comment #9

Deathtongue_Groupie says ...

A Jeff Wells post about an actor's weight?

Must be Monday....

comment #10

LexG says ...

Loved the movie til about the 90-minute mark, but then just kind of goes on and on, with that unpleasant scene with the arm injury running too long, then Aldous's final concert looking WAY UNDERLIT and kind of low-rent, like those bogus Oscars in THE BODYGUARD.

But mostly... where do Rose Byrne and Colm Meaney go in the last twenty minutes? Those threads, especially Meaney's, just kind of stop abruptly. Not that I have to be Joe Happy Ending, but did anyone else sit there waiting for a credit cookie of his dad playing with him onstage, or at least shooting a thumbs-up from the audience?

And Byrne was SO SCORCHINGLY HOT, especially her song about her asshole, that I wanted her to come back at the very end. It particularly ruled when she showed her feet.

comment #11

crazynine says ...

Good comments Jesse. I *did* like the film, just pointing out things I notice more when I'm sitting in a dark movie theater vs. on the couch, where I'm more willing to let things go (distractions and all).

To me, there were two spots that actually stopped the movie for me: the conversation about "Jeffrey" *before* the fight broke out in the hotel took forever to get to the point, and again, the aforementioned threesome scene (which "worked," as you said, but was so uncomfortable-- I'm assuming intentionally so-- that it just felt like an unnecessary detour to me. To each their own).

My pacing issues weren't so much with the arrangement of scenes as again the actual speaking parts in the film. I laughed at P. Diddy, but you hit the nail on the head: it was as if he was reading cue cards, and they didn't cut away soon enough and just let the dead air hang in there for a split second too long each time. When the movie shows up on HBO this fall running six times a day, watch the morning business meeting, then later the "mind fuck" scene, and you'll spot what I'm saying. Intensely distracting.

comment #12

CitizenKanedForPostingThoughts says ...

"A Jeff Wells post about an actor's weight?

Must be Monday...."

Or any of the other six days ending in "y."

comment #13

Travis Crabtree says ...

Forget his fatness..... I just don't think he's that funny. He was terribly annoying in the inexplicably over-rated "Superbad".

comment #14

jesse says ...

Superbad is one of the best comedies of the past ten years.

comment #15

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