This Is the End
Go! A self-deprecating hoot.
After disaster laughter crafter.
There was a time when actor/comedians (a.k.a. slashies) were at least reasonably good-looking. I mean, we can all agree that Ben Stiller is no Hansel, but his face is still fairly chiselled. He, along with Owen and Luke Wilson, Will Ferrell, Vince Vaughan, John C. Reilly and Paul Rudd formed the relatively Hollywood-looking "Frat Pack" that gave us some of the chunkiest belly laughs of the 20th century. Seemingly now, their decade of polished dominance has passed and a new gang have inherited the tickle-stick. The new troupe is more of a peculiar "Splat Pack". Led by the elmo-looking Seth Rogen (Knocked Up), it includes Jonah Hill (Superbad), Danny McBride, Craig Robinson (Both Hot Tub Time Machine), Michael Cera (Scott Pilgrim vs. the World) and Jay Baruchel (Tropic Thunder), all of whom star in This is the End, with James Franco (Pineapple Express) added to give the film an incongruous dose of traditional cinematic James Deanism.
This shift towards eccentricity has brought with it a change in the nature (if not the sizeable weight) of the comedy. With the Frat Pack, we revelled in the inherent ridiculousness they found in various pursuits. News-readers (Anchorman), figure-skaters (Blades of Glory), students (Old School), cops (The Other Guys), racing drivers (Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby) models (Zoolander) and, of course, wedding crashers (The Wedding Crashers) were all subjected to a piece-by-piece slagging. In contrast the Splat Pack finds its biggest funnies when looking inwardly, with Knocked-up, Superbad, Funny People and Youth in Revolt all cuttingly self-critical and achingly amusing; parodying ordinary, day-to-day happenings and exploring insecurities.
This is the End, continues the character assassinations. With the film's writer Seth Rogen now discontent with fictional versions of his life on screen (Superbad), he has devised a 106-minute destruction not only of his and his friends' real-life comic personalities, but also of Hollywood actors in general. It picks up from where the excellent and self-effacing Tropic Thunder left off, and no hole is barred.
This is the End, continues the character assassinations. With the film's writer Seth Rogen now discontent with fictional versions of his life on screen (Superbad), he has devised a 106-minute destruction not only of his and his friends' real-life comic personalities, but also of Hollywood actors in general. It picks up from where the excellent and self-effacing Tropic Thunder left off, and no hole is barred.
It is set in the Hollywood Hills, where James Franco is hosting the kind of party us ordinary folk can only dream of attending. It is glamorous, raucous and gratuitous, with a wealth of titillating cameos from a multitude of familiar faces. Most of these additional luvvies meet their ends in the first 30 minutes of the film, when a biblical apocalypse strikes. Almost everyone is killed and Hollywood is left engulfed in flames and thronged with demons. What remains are Franco, Rogen, Baruchel, McBride, Robinson and Hill (and Emma Watson), locked down in Franco's house with limited food and even less self-respect; all playing amplified, self-centred versions of themselves, with stonkingly hilarious results.
Without divulging too much about the giant hydrant of jokes that power-hoses the audience throughout the film, it is fair to say that there is sufficient crudeness to put a large, pleasant section of society off this film. It is very male humour, never better evidenced by a five-minute tirade between Franco and McBride about masturbation, which I hope my Granny never has to see. In this respect, it occasionally threatens to move from being satirically amusing to offensively uninteresting, but the tongue-in-cheek charm of Rogen's smart writing and characterisation just about sustain the chuckles. In amongst it all, there is even somewhere a meaningful message about being a good person. Remarkably, it all feels very real in spite of the clearly fictional apocalypse, which is down to the talents of the actors and their evidently close off-screen relationships. The best compliment I can pay it is that I have not heard a whole cinema audience laugh out loud together like this since Borat in 2006.
So, yes, go to this film, but probably not on a first date, probably not for Mother's Day, and definitely not on a Sunday School trip.
Without divulging too much about the giant hydrant of jokes that power-hoses the audience throughout the film, it is fair to say that there is sufficient crudeness to put a large, pleasant section of society off this film. It is very male humour, never better evidenced by a five-minute tirade between Franco and McBride about masturbation, which I hope my Granny never has to see. In this respect, it occasionally threatens to move from being satirically amusing to offensively uninteresting, but the tongue-in-cheek charm of Rogen's smart writing and characterisation just about sustain the chuckles. In amongst it all, there is even somewhere a meaningful message about being a good person. Remarkably, it all feels very real in spite of the clearly fictional apocalypse, which is down to the talents of the actors and their evidently close off-screen relationships. The best compliment I can pay it is that I have not heard a whole cinema audience laugh out loud together like this since Borat in 2006.
So, yes, go to this film, but probably not on a first date, probably not for Mother's Day, and definitely not on a Sunday School trip.
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