Altman and Aldous

Get Him To the Greek: Unrated Version (2010): based on characters created by Jason Segel; written and directed by Nicholas Stoller; starring Jonah Hill (Aaron Green), Russell Brand (Aldous Snow), Rose Byrne (Jackie Q), Colm Meaney (Jonathan Snow), Dinah Stabb (Lena Snow), Sean Combs (Sergio), and Elisabeth Moss (Daphne Binks): Rapidly becoming an all-timer on my list of film comedies that cheer me up. Jonah Hill has never been funnier. 

Russell Brand has only been used well in one other film -- Forgetting Sarah Marshall, in which he also played dissipated Brit-rocker Aldous Snow. There's a bizarre, endearing, obscene, profane chemistry between Hill and Brand that makes me wish they'd do another movie with writer-director Nicholas Stoller and Aldous Snow-creator Jason Segel. Even Sean Combs is hilarious. And Aldous Snow's songs are hilariously catchy. Highly recommended.

Altman (2014): written by Len Blum; directed by Ron Mann: Excellent, too-short documentary from Canadian Ron Mann on the life and times of Top Ten All-Time director Robert Altman (1925 –2006). The iconoclastic Altman spent about 20 years in TV and B-movies before his film version of M.A.S.H. made him an 'overnight' success. 

Even when ha had access to major-studio money in the first decade after M.A.S.H., Altman was fiercely iconoclastic and eccentric in his film choices. Losing studio money after 1980 or so didn't finish him -- instead, he directed on the stage, came up with an innovative TV show, and eventually came back 'into the fold' (sort of) with popular and critical hit The Player. His movies are his testament; this documentary does a nice job of looking at the man, and the affection so many actors had for probably the greatest actor's director of all time. Recommended.

Get Him to the Greek

Get Him to the Greek, written and directed by Nicholas Stoller, starring Jonah Hill, Russell Brand, Elizabeth Moss, Rose Byrne and Sean Combs (2010): Even movies that have only been produced by Judd Apatow have that odd (for today's comedies) gentleness about them, like a bassline behind the surface dramatics.

Russell Brand reprises his Aldous Snow character from Forgetting Sarah Marshall, a wonky rock star given to non sequitirs and epic drug and alcohol abuse. Jonah Hill is the low-level record company employee who suggests having Snow stage a 10-year anniversary show at the Greek theatre in Los Angeles. Sean Combs, straining and heaving mightily in an apparent attempt to replicate Tom Cruise's bizarro-hilarious performance as a studio exec in Tropic Thunder, is the executive who approves Hill's plan -- and sends him off to pick up Snow in London, England to get him first to New York for the Today Show and then to L.A.

All Hell breaks loose, of course, of course.

There are a lot of laughs here. Hill is gradually perfecting a somewhat unusual comic character -- the neurotic fat guy -- and he has some killer moments here, including a ridiculous bit in a limosine as he tries to stop Snow from getting stoned and drunk before the Today Show...by smoking all the pot and drinking all the booze in the car. Russell Brand possesses a weird, oily likeability, and he and Hill play pretty nicely off each other. They're not Laurel and Hardy, but they're also not Vince Vaughn and Kevin James, thank God. Rose Byrne and Colm Meaney have nice supporting bits as Snow's estranged WAG and father, respectively. Recommended.