The Five Year Engagement

I'm generally a fan of the comedies produced by Judd Apatow. He has a pretty high hit rate with me so far, and I like the people he works with both behind and in front of the camera. Knowing this going in, and the fact that it looked like a lot of the subject matter mirrored my life in some way, I was pretty sure The Five Year Engagement was going to be right up my alley. I ended up disappointed.

The Five Year Engagement is the story of Tom (Jason Segel) and Violet (Emily Blunt), a couple who get engaged, but have to keep repeatedly pushing back their wedding whenever life gets in the way. The longer they wait, the harder things get, until they question whether they should get married at all. It's a good enough premise, and I like the leads, but I found the movie just really light on laughs.

It was a weird feeling for certain aspects of the story to really hit home for me on a personal level, even though I wasn't laughing a great deal. Hey look! They have to move to Michigan! I grew up in Michigan and they're making Michigan jokes! They move because Violet is working on her psychology doctorate, and he's miserable there. MY wife is working on her psychology doctorate. I moved with her from Chicago to Texas and, no, I don't like it here either. We didn't delay our wedding, though. This movie reflects my life a whole bunch, yet I still wasn't feeling it.

My biggest problem came in the section of the film set in Michigan, where a depressed Tom tries to make the best of his situation and throws himself into the Michigan way of living. He starts hunting deer almost obsessively and grows a funny beard. Once that happens, I found it hard to believe Tom as a character, because they push it all too far. And I take pride in my very durable suspension of disbelief.

It's not all bad, though. The characters are all quite likeable. Segel and Blunt are actually upstaged by Alison Brie and Chris Pratt, as Violet's sister and Tom's best friend, who hook up at the engagement party, and end up married and with children while Tom and Violet are stuck in purgatory. I could watch a whole movie about Brie and Pratt.

The Five Year Engagement was directed by Nicholas Stoller who cowrote it with Segel. The two of them typically make a great team. My favorite Apatow production is Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which they made together. They crafted such a likeable cast of three dimensional characters in that, that I even wanted to hang out with the ones I wasn't supposed to like. Segel also helped out with the hilariously vapid songs in Stoller's 2nd film, Get Him to the Greek, and they also cowrote last year's glorious and sincere love letter, The Muppets. I have no reason to think they won't make another great comedy together at some point, but this one didn't work for me.

Jeff, Who Lives at Home

Jeff, Who Lives at home had me at the very first scene, where the title character, played by Jason Segel, professes his undying love for the M. Night Shyamalan movie, Signs. He explains that the family in the movie, though somewhat broken by personal tragedy, manages to fend off an alien invasion, by realizing that every odd thing in their lives has been building up to this one perfect moment.

Jeff has also suffered from a personal tragedy: his father died when he was a teen, and since then he's been in a holding pattern. He lives with his mother (Susan Sarandon), and spends his days watching TV and getting high in the basement, just waiting for the sign that will lead him to his own one perfect moment.

The story kicks into gear when Jeff gets a wrong number call for a guy named Kevin. Sent on an errand by his mother, he goes out, but is distracted into following a guy with the name Kevin on his basketball Jersey. Jeff continues following his "Signs", as they lead him to his brother Pat (Ed Helms), who is a bit of a tool, blissfully unaware that his marriage is falling apart. Meanwhile, Jeff's mother, Sharon, bored and depressed with her work situation and family life, is engaged in the excitement of an unconventional office romance.

The stories don't seem to fit together at first, but things coalesce as events hurtle their way to the big moment the demands of the plot promise to Jeff at the end of the movie.

I think Jeff, Who Lives at Home is very likely the best dramedy inspired by an M. Night Shyamalan movie ever made. Jason Segel is wonderful as Jeff. Even though he's a bit of a loser, you sympathize with him because he's trusting, hopeful, and perceptive. And though it's usually Ed Helms job to play that naive, open-hearted guy, this time around he gets to play a bit of a different character. He thinks buying an expensive new car that he can't afford will solve all of life's problems and maybe give him the social status he's not getting from being a paint company sales rep. Judy Greer plays his wife, and she's great as always. She keeps doing all these great supporting roles and getting none of the attention she deserves.

I'm really interested in the way Jay and Mark Duplass, the brothers who wrote and directed the movie, have been evolving. I just found out about them last year, through their previous movie, Cyrus, which I also enjoyed. It appears that with each movie, they're getting bigger and more ambitious than the last. I like that they're casting these great comedy actors and putting them in roles that encourage them to stretch. I also like seeing comedies that have more to them than laughs.

In addition to all that praise, Jeff, Who Lives at Home just made me happy. It was earnest and free of cynicism and uplifting, without ever seeming forced or cloying. It's not like one of those schmaltzy 90's Robin William movies; it really means what it says. There aren't too many movies like this, so check it out if you can!

The Muppets

There are few things I love in this world more than The Muppets. Friends and family excluded, I rank the creations of Jim Henson up there with pretty much all of the greatest things in life. So it always saddened me a little when the property fell into disrepair and disuse for the better part of the last two decades. I've been hoping for a revitalization for, well, maybe half my life. I am proud to announce that Muppets are once again vital.

Writers Nick Stoller and Jason Segel, and director James Bobin bring a lifetime of love, passion, and enthusiasm to The Muppets. From the moment the first musical number begins, you can tell that Jason Segel (in the lead human role) is living a dream come true. Everyone involved in the movie appears to be having a blast, and giving it their all, and their joy is infectious.

The Muppets follows Gary (Segel) and his brother Walter. Walter has always been different. He stopped growing at age 7, he's small and fuzzy. He never knew how to relate to his world. That is, until the day he saw The Muppets on TV. From that day forth, he was The Muppets' biggest fan. When Gary and his girlfriend, Mary (Amy Adams) are planning a trip to Hollywood for their 10th anniversary, they invite Walter along, so he can visit Muppet Studios.

Unfortunately, when they get there, the once glorious studio is now abandoned and decrepit, all of the locations in the tour are closed "for repair". Sneaking off into Kermit's old office, Walter overhears an evil oil millionaire (Chris Cooper) plans to tear down the studios and dig for oil there. Walter, Gary, and Mary decide that the only way they can save the studio is to reunite the Muppets and have them put on one last show.

What follows is what you would hope for in a Muppet movie. Endless gags and vaudevillian banter, big, moving musical numbers, celebrity cameos, and a hilarious and disarming self awareness that tells you that even the characters are aware that they are in a movie and that the narrative is bound by certain rules.

I loved the musical numbers. The new songs were written by Bret McKenzie of the musical comedy duo Flight of the Conchords (whose show was co-created by Muppets director Bobin). They're clever, catchy, and silly in much the same fashion as the Conchords songs are. And the old songs are, well, there are a few old Muppet favorites in there, and I have to say, I teared up when they came on. Sorry I'm such a dork. I teared up a lot during the movie.

Bobin, Segel, and Stoller's love for the characters comes through, too. They give everybody a moment, including many of the more obscure characters that only geeks like me know the names of. They bumped up the role of Uncle Deadly, the cool looking dragon character usually only seen in brief Muppet Show gags, and gave him a little dimension for the first time. While Segel and Adams were welcome additions, I hope that now that we've been reintroduced to the Muppets, any possible future Muppet movies will be able to shift attention away from the human leads and back onto the Muppets where they belong. In the old movies, the humans were reserved for villain roles and cameos.

I enjoyed the movie a great deal, but it wasn't quite the same as Henson's Muppet movies. The energy was different. The difference was especially noticeable with Kermit. Steve Whitmire, the performer who operates Kermit, doesn't have Henson's distinctive hand acting. Obviously, he has his own. Kermit is still endlessly earnest and hopeful, but I kept waiting for him to have the frantic, frazzled energy that Kermit gets when he is trying to run his show, and keep everything from falling apart at any given moment while he's surrounded by so many loose cannons (figurative and literal cannons when Gonzo is around). That Kermit never arrives. Still, he was a good Kermit, it's just got to be tough under the shadow of Henson.

I am so happy that this group got The Muppets right. I want a whole new generation of children to see this movie for the first time and react to it the same way Walter and I did when we first encountered Kermit and the gang. There's still a month to go, but when all is said and done, I'm fairly positive The Muppets is going to be my favorite movie of the year. There just aren't enough movies with such unabashed joy and positivity out there anymore.