Drinking At the Movies (2010/ This edition 2015): written and illustrated by Julia Wertz: Julia Wertz is one of a handful or so of the funniest cartoonists currently working, and has been since she began her career on the Internet back in the mid-oughts. Mid-oughts? Whatever.
It's a trick to make autobiography funny without avoiding the horrors of being alive. Wertz has got that trick. Her autobiographical works deal with her alcoholism, her brother's drug problems, and her life with lupus after being diagnosed with same at the age of 20 (in 2002).
This volume was Wertz's first full-length 'graphic novel,' coming in at a dialogue-dense 200 pages or so. Drinking At the Movies covers Wertz's first year in New York City in the late oughts after a move from San Francisco. Her comics career has begun to take off. That doesn't save her from dead-end jobs and squalid apartments. Wertz is a comic commentator on urban life at the edge of poverty, all of it alcohol-soaked in this volume. Sobriety would come later.
Wertz is a deceptively simple cartoonist. She can draw complex representations of the real when she wants to, as her renditions of the various apartments and streets of Brooklyn shows throughout Drinking At the Movies. The characters are much simpler, in the tradition of comic strips, with a simple six panels per page for much of the volume. It all works beautifully. Also, there's something really funny about the way Wertz draws arms when people are sitting at a table with arms bent.
Through four apartments and seven apartments, Wertz drinks a lot, comments a lot, and worries over family problems back on the West Coast (one brother is a drug addict). She gets shingles, manages her Lupus, discovers that being a bike courier sucks, teaches comics to kids at a library in the Bronx... well, many things happen.
Moments of self-evaluation and sorrow burst forth throughout. But Wertz is a fabulous entertainer at heart with the critical eye of the jester. I don't recall when I've laughed so much at a volume of anything, comics or writing or whatever. Highly recommended.
Brooklyn (2015): adapted by Nick Hornby from the novel by Colm Toibin; directed by John Crowley; starring Saoirse Ronan (Ellis Lacey), Fiona Glascott (Rose Lacey), Jane Brennan (Mary Lacey), Emory Cohen (Tony), and Domhnall Gleason (Jim Farrell): Pleasant, nicely acted melodrama got a couple of Oscar nominations for Saoirse Ronan (Best Actress) and Nick Hornby (Best Adapted Screenplay). Montreal also does fine work pretending to be a town in Ireland in 1952. This is the sort of immigrant's story that makes me think of Golden Age Hollywood and earnest CBC movies. But the cast is charming and the low-key writing and characterization fine except for a bit involving an eight-year-old boy writing love letters for his writing-challenged older brother that seems to have wandered into the movie from some lame 1970's Disney comedy. Recommended.
The Sitter (2011): written by Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka; directed by David Gordon Green; starring Jonah Hill (Noah), Sam Rockwell (Karl), Ari Graynor (Marisa), Max Records (Slater), Landry Bender (Blithe), Kevin Hernandez (Rodrigo), and JB Smoove (Julio): Jonah Hill plays Fat Jonah Hill for the last time (to date) in a movie that's a lot funnier than it should be. One thing that helps is that the movie isn't simply foul-mouthed -- it's intermittently perverse, which is actually rare. It's also short and surprisingly tightly plotted and directed. Recommended.
Date Night (2010): written by Josh Klausner; directed by Shaun Levy; starring Steve Carell (Phil Foster), Tina Fey (Claire Foster), Mark Wahlberg (Holbrooke), and Taraji P. Henson (Detective Arroyo): A bit of a mess into which I assume Tina Fey and Steve Carell were parachuted so as to improvise some laughs. This bullets-and-cops-and-fish-out-of-water comedy seems to have been written in, oh, 1985. It wasn't, but it seems like it. A short, perfectly adequate time-waster that would have been even better with a Giorgio Moroder soundtrack and star turns from Chevy Chase and Goldie Hawn. Lightly recommended.
The Watch (2012): written by Jared Stern, Seth Rogen, and Evan Goldberg; directed by Akiva Schaffer; starring Ben Stiller (Evan), Vince Vaughn (Bob), Jonah Hill (Franklin), Richard Ayoade (Jamarcus), and Rosemarie DeWitt (Abby): The Trayvon Martin tragedy saw the studio re-title this film (from Neighbourhood Watch). I don't know if some scenes were removed as well. The movie seems to lack a transitional middle section, but that may just be sloppy writing and/or editing.
This cast and these writers should have managed something at least mildly great. They don't, but the movie improves noticeably about 45 minutes in as it finally gains some traction and leaves the sad-nebbish comedy behind for loopier stuff involving an alien invasion of suburbia centered on the local Costco, of which Ben Stiller is the manager. Richard Ayoade (Maurice Moss on The IT Crowd) is mostly wasted, though he manages to put an amusing spin on some of his lines. Stiller and the newly thinnish Jonah Hill are also fine. Vince Vaughn is a comedy-killing machine, as is mostly always the case. He's the place where jokes go to die. Lightly recommended.
