Films Seen - September 2008

[Pre-'96 films not included.]

THE GUATEMALAN HANDSHAKE (36) (dir., Todd Rohal) Katy Haywood, Rich Schreiber, Sheila Scullin, Will Oldham, Cory McAbee I sat down to write some notes on this indie comedy, but was interrupted by a knock on the door. I opened it to find a Chinese-speaking midget, a folk-singer with a wooden leg and an Amish guy who'd just come back in a Time machine. They were selling Girl Scout cookies and bifurcated nozzles for vacuum cleaners. They winked at me, then ran off in gratuitous fast-motion. "Are you a professional wrestler?" asked a slow-witted old woman, apropos of nothing. She blew her nose, making a noise like firecrackers, then got down on all fours and howled at the moon, much to the dismay of a passing knife-sharpener. His cousin was Mr. Turnupseed, who'd once invented a game that mixed baseball and wrestling, only he never told anyone how it worked - not to be confused with "Spank" Williams, the children's TV host who staged his own suicide before a small but appreciative crowd. Somewhere in that crowd was 9-year-old Sally, who years later married an acrobat and lived in a pancreas-shaped trailer near Lake Okeechobee. Her son Clive sank into depression, grew a third nipple and one day made three wishes - for a lake of chocolate, a turtle the size of a horse, and a trophy with his name on it. In the swamp he found an electric octopus, and called it a "shock-topus". I admit all these quirky people drove me round the bend - but you lucky readers can enjoy hours of harmless fun trying to separate all the stuff I just made up from the stuff that's actually in the movie (the presence of McAbee - of AMERICAN ASTRONAUT fame - acting as a reminder that random quirkiness works way better in zany comedy than in the service of dreamlike, childlike "lyricism"). Don't thank me, thank Michael Atkinson. 

SHOTGUN STORIES (69) (dir., Jeff Nichols) Michael Shannon, Douglas Ligon, Barlow Jacobs Ultimately lacks a killer touch, both in specifics - late scenes like unhappy wife meeting bereaved girlfriend, or "Son"'s confrontation with the "hateful woman" who raised him, had the potential to be devastating, but needed some memorable line or bit of business instead of just going for poetic minimalism - and as a whole, in the way it refuses to transform into something else or take itself to the next level ('Hope it's not going to end like that,' I distinctly remember thinking to myself - and of course it did). Needed to be more than a slow-motion tit-for-tat in crystalline rural landscapes - but within its small-movie register it's superbly controlled, Nichols proving himself a master of pace, mood and tone, locating the rooted, inexorable, subtly oppressive rural vibe of e.g. SLING BLADE - his theme being, in part, the discarded past coming back to haunt all attempts at starting a new life - as opposed to the skittish, detached, subtly fantastical vibe of e.g GEORGE WASHINGTON (though David Gordon Green is executive producer, and the Malick influence is as evident here as it was in that film). Immeasurably helped by the great Michael Shannon, finding the character's frozen emotions - frozen in the poses of childhood - in his pained wary mien (he smiles once, in an early scene, a tentative tic that wilts and dies on his lips), his eyes forever on the alert, intermittently flashing with righteous violence. Contrived, but so expertly contrived it becomes hypnotic; the shot of an "empty-ass" town at 8 a.m. may be a little affected, but it is a beautiful shot.     

THE RUINS (55) (dir., Carter Smith) Jonathan Tucker, Jena Malone, Laura Ramsey, Shawn Ashmore Waited patiently (but increasingly impatiently) as clichés piled up in the first 20 minutes - a teaser pre-credits snippet with the terror already underway (as if to placate fidgety audiences) then the usual set-up of Americans Abroad, young people flirting and misbehaving, an invitation to go to a remote Mayan site that's "not on the map", mention of someone's brother who should've been back days ago but is obviously having too much fun (yeah, that must be it...), the local cabbie who refuses to take them saying "This place no good" - wondering what kind of twist would redeem such familiar material and explain the acclaim, at least in some quarters. The twist, it turns out, isn't a twist at all but simply a more focused and intense psychological emphasis than usual, charting our heroes' mental breakdown in the grip of terror and having them use their brains to (try and) think their way out of trouble instead of succumbing to the usual movie idiocy - and it's admirable but doesn't quite gel, because what they do is still slightly unconvincing (they're oddly blasé about hunting for the phone at the bottom of the well, considering it's their only way out) and because the threat/monster/call-it-what-you-will is hard to take seriously, rather giggle-inducingly reminiscent of a certain mid-80s horror musical. Good effort, middling result - and then the coda lapses back into cliché again.

LEATHERHEADS (61) (dir., George Clooney) George Clooney, Renee Zellweger, John Krasinski George Clooney's clearly a Force for Good in the cinematic universe though this teeters on the edge of rank nostalgia, going for the casual - and unfashionable - machismo of Hawks or Raoul Walsh, our hero not just a smooth-talking rascal but also good with his fists (the title recalls "leathernecks", with its military overtones), olden times celebrated not for being 'innocent' but being freer, less oppressive, less concerned with all those "goddam rules". Actually richer than it looks, able to veer from slapstick to a knowing, almost melancholy central relationship, two people secretly wishing they weren't quite as sharp as they are (their constant banter being - of course - an elaborate defence mechanism, albeit not a defence against sex, as in the 30s originals, so much as a defence against intimacy); I'd have preferred a more charming leading lady than Zellweger, who can't keep the modern edge of contempt out of her voice when her character admits she's "not really the homemaker type" - a more rueful reading might've fit the context better - though she intermittently scores with lines like "How quiet it must be at the Algonquin, with you here in Duluth" (try selling that to anyone under 35). The whole thing is basically sentimental, much like the 30s-set movies made in the 70s (does recession tend to nudge memories of the Great Depression?), but also underlain - like GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK - with a straight-talking respect for Doing the Decent Thing; the film's true talisman may be Big Eddie, a slow, friendly man who listens closely to our hero, shares a couple of drinks, and stops long enough to resolve the plot before heading off to fight "Over There". Add a few points to the rating if you know or care anything about (non-soccer) football.         

BURN AFTER READING (71) (dir., Joel & Ethan Coen) Frances McDormand, George Clooney, John Malkovich, Brad Pitt, Richard Jenkins I'll never understand the Critical Consensus (tm): How does this get tagged as "broad" when it's probably the Coens' most understated movie - and perhaps the first where their trademark conflict between dangerous-badass genre types (psycho killers, professional kidnappers, bikers from Hell) and ordinary folk worrying about their mundane pursuits (raising kids, paying off debt, working for the Post Office) gets resolved in favour of the latter (like Tarantino in DEATH PROOF - if less explicitly - the Coens are drawn by the tension between 'real' world and 'movie' world). A welcome corrective to NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN where the balance swung too far in the other direction - the dangerous badass won every battle, incl. the battle for the audience - the spy stuff, and the spy-action genre in general, with its urgent percussive score and CIA ops and mysterious people following other people, turning out in this case to be a red herring, a nonsense, not even real; instead, what's real turns out to be ... well, the real-world stuff, liposuction and divorce papers and the sexual desires and frustrations that end up shaping the narrative (it's a telling irony when McDormand's self-improving gym manager says she's not exactly the Hollywood type). Not too satisfying, since it basically collapses on itself, but recall what McDormand says she prizes above all - a sense of humour - and appreciate the sly misdirection, the Princeton gag (especially its punchline), the gun that's never been fired and is obviously primed to go off in the third act (yes, but to what purpose?) and of course the little throwaways, like the crates of remaindered Oliver the Cat books with titles like "Yea and Nay for Oliver" (the Coens also seem to find Dermot Mulroney hilarious - not so much the man, just the concept - and who can blame them?). Not exactly humanist, they're still too sardonic for that, but maybe the Brothers (benign ringmasters, like the gently baffled CIA chief instructing his assistant to "Keep an eye on everyone; see what they do") are finally secure - or mature - enough to stop making fun of Barton Fink for his love of the Common Man.    

TEETH (44) (dir., Mitchell Liechtenstein) Jess Weixler, John Hensley, Josh Pais Every age gets (or merely dreams about) the vagina-dentata film it deserves: 30 years ago this might've been an MS. 45-like feminist thriller about blank-faced girl slicing up male-chauvinist creeps (to be fair, the coda points in that direction), 20 years ago it might've been a sci-fi metaphor for AIDS à la THE HIDDEN - but this is the 00s so instead we get Victim Cinema, weeping girl asking "What's wrong with me?" and wishing she weren't such a lethal-vulva'd freak, closely followed by Empowerment as it transpires she can make the teeth withdraw at will, using them to punish unworthy partners and reward romantic "heroes". In short, she comes to terms with her body, and the film's (only) smart conceit is in linking her condition with the Christian abstinence drive - Silver Rings and so forth - which it sees as coterminous with her own fear of her body, and fear of sex in general. Otherwise drab and vaguely unpleasant, badly in need of a Cronenberg to create a chilly, suggestive world around the story. Couple of nice lighting effects, though mostly in the car-commercial sense of silhouettes and magic-hour.  

THE ACCIDENTAL HUSBAND (37) (dir., Griffin Dunne) Uma Thurman, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Colin Firth, Sam Shepard Dunne gets some frantic screwball energy going here and there - esp. when Guy A has to pose as Guy B - but can't defeat how fake and predictable it all is. Everything's fake, from the early scene of Uma and Colin (a.k.a. the Wrong Man) canoodling and spelling out plot exposition at the same time, to the pub scene where Uma keeps getting distracted and forgetting what she came to say - then she gets drunk, and passes out before a roomful of strangers and it's all very unlikely - to the scene in the cake-shop where everyone assumes Morgan is her husband-to-be (though all she'd have to say is 'No, he's just a friend'); everything's predictable, from the teenage hacker to the cutesy soundtrack (at one point featuring a bhangra-pop version of "Ever Fallen in Love") to the way people stammer "It's not what it looks like" instead of just explaining, to the mass singalong (thankfully curtailed) to the sensible heroine choosing passion over security - and of course her brash, crude swain instantly charms the rich and powerful, the wishful-thinking Message being that successful people secretly long for the energy of stupid people (see also WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS), and of course the heroine is constantly abused, possibly taken down a peg for being prim and sensible, dropping papers, getting flustered, sneaking up behind a fireman and getting hosed full in the face. Note to anyone who attended TIFF 2007: you have a surprise in store.    

WALL-E (76) (dir., Andrew Stanton) with the voices of Ben Burtt, Jeff Garlin, John Ratzenberger What a strange and wondrous thing this is. Probably not since FANTASIA have kids been offered something so unlike what kids are (invariably) deemed to want: a dialogue-free first half-hour, no toilet-humour or celebrity voices whatsoever, not a lot of plot even when it decamps to outer space in the second half, a hero who may be 'loveable' but can't do very much, not even talk - I assumed there'd be a twist where he's injected with a new computer-chip allowing him to speak fluently (or at least do an E.T. and pick up a basic vocabulary), but no - above all a kiddie-cartoon recreation of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, a venture as ambitious as it's commercially insane (just as well kids are a captive audience; such a film would be deemed hopelessly arty if made for adults). Admittedly a little more energy might've been welcome - I guess I admire it slightly more than I love it - but in fact it's all of a piece because its austerity isn't just a gimmick; just as the porcine, incurious humans (sound familiar?) have been spoiled by a culture of More (more food, more technology, more toys and gadgets) so the film quite pointedly stands for Less, less of everything, less talk, less crowd-pleasing slapstick, less frantic energy, less consuming, less stuff in general - exemplified in WALL-E himself, who can really only do one thing (storing and compacting objects in his little pouch) but at least has feelings, not just his love for EVE but his shock when he almost crushes his little cockroach friend, making the film either a paean to spiritual values - Stanton is apparently a devout Christian - or a paean to the Beatles-inflected nostrum that "all you need is love". I'm puzzled by the comments hailing this as a return to the 'old' Pixar, because I've never seen anything like it from the intensely verbal, plot-heavy folks at the Desk Lamp Studio - but it certainly suggests something about Pixar, viz. that working in creative settings encourages people to challenge themselves. A Capraesque car movie, a cartoon about haute cuisine, and now this. What's next, DOG STAR MAN with talking dogs?

HANCOCK (48) (dir., Peter Berg) Will Smith, Charlize Theron, Jason Bateman Will Smith, Unhappy Superstar: second film in a row that culminates in noble self-sacrifice, third film in a row where Smith is essentially alone against the world, fourth film in a row where he's seeking love or companionship (what's going on? does Jada know?). Not unheard-of for superstar types to adopt a masochistic persona (see also Gibson, Mel), though Smith's is skin-deep in any case: as in HITCH, Hancock is protected at every turn - the two title-characters have much in common, both omnipotent when it comes to fixing other people's problems, lost and lonely in their own lives - and it's clear from the start that he's more misunderstood than misanthropic ("He just needs people to care"); if he occasionally hurts a baddie, punishes a bully or sticks a man's head up another man's backside (and you thought you'd seen everything), it's only because they've provoked him beyond endurance. Fun for a while, but the deck's so stacked it's hard to get much traction, character-wise, then the second half goes off into CGI battles and insufficient plot twists (presumably there was more, at some stage; Johnny Galecki's character is barely glimpsed). Wish I was 14 again so I could spend two hours debating, post-movie, whether Hancock and his girl lose their powers if they grow apart geographically (in which case why did they lose them "80 years ago"?) or just emotionally.  

KUNG FU PANDA (63) (dir., Mark Osborne & John Stevenson) with the voices of Jack Black, Dustin Hoffman, Angelina Jolie My personal variation on the Harry Cohn ass test: If a film keeps me alert - even amused - after I've spent a 12-hour day on the computer and watched two other films on top of that (all but falling asleep during HELLBOY II), then I'll recommend it to the world, even if it's doing nothing especially original (or even remotely original). Emphasis on action-comedy slapstick, some of it quite intricate - easy to be blasé about, say, the feline villain's escape from his Lecter-like prison, but compare with the bulk of action scenes and it's full of inventive detail (as opposed to the usual punching and shooting) - mercifully light on Dreamworks' trademark media in-jokes and toilet humour. Also nice to note that whoever wrote it clearly watched a couple of Shaw Brothers first (hence a couple more than the target audience), though sadly it didn't inspire the studio to change its look; the crushing disappointment of going from the swooping, garish comic-book visuals of the opening dream sequence to the clean, becalmed backgrounds and rounded lines of Dreamworks Central might be a 37th Chamber of Shaolin just in itself.

HELLBOY II: THE GOLDEN ARMY (51) (dir., Guillermo del Toro) Ron Perlman, Selma Blair, Doug Jones 'No story' seems to be the main grumble here, which is only a problem if you thought "One Ring to Rule Them All" made for a fascinating story. Never really cared about fantasy-movie quests and adventures, though admittedly the climactic battle - when the Golden Army finally awakens - is anti-climactic; plot less important than design and Attitude, the inclusion of a Human Torch-like heroine making this resemble an alt-rock version of FANTASTIC FOUR (not too implausible to view it as a comix fan's contemptuous riposte to the widely-reviled FF movies), these heroes being anti-social - "I hate it when people stare" - and hard-bitten, Hellboy himself a no-nonsense, gun-loving prole (his moniker, "Red", might as well stand for 'Redneck'). Then there's the scene where he joins his fish-faced C3PO friend in a drunken singalong, and his Saturday-morning-cartoon sparring with the vaporous Kraut cohort/rival - and there's something bracingly daft about a film where the best way to get a troll to talk is to threaten it with a canary (they hate canaries). Tedious whole but amusing asides - "I'm not a baby, I'm a tumour" - a villain who plans to destroy humanity because he hates shopping malls (I paraphrase) and a total absence of the Spanish Civil War, which is progress, at least for del Toro; he really ought to stop writing scripts, though.    

YOU DON'T MESS WITH THE ZOHAN (53) (dir., Dennis Dugan) Adam Sandler, John Turturro, Emmanuelle Chriqui, Ido Mosseri Let no-one accuse Adam Sandler of not keeping up with new directions in comedy: Judd Apatow turns up as a co-writer, and the funny-foreigner Zohan with his retro trappings ("Disco!") clearly owes much to the success of BORAT. The star - and comic auteur, Dugan or no - seems to be energized, at least in the first half-hour which is funnier than he's been in years ('in my opinion', natch) as well as surprisingly successful on the Sandler's MUNICH aspects, i.e. making a comment on Zion vs. Palestine - thus e.g. Israeli superman Zohan, confronted by the inevitable rock-throwing intifada kids, not only plucks the rocks out of the air but delights the pint-size Palestinians by twisting their missiles into a rock doggy, in the manner of balloon animals (translation: the problem might be solved if both sides could only remember that these children are children). Looked like a winner, with the Zohan spitting out his terse catchphrase ("So let's go"), Turturro as a terrorist with dreams of shawarma, Sandler's usual preoccupations on full display - esp. strenuously-denied homoerotic undertones and Our Hero being a friend to the marginal (and unthreatening), so e.g. super-stud Zohan specialises in post-menopausal women, the more decrepit the better - plus Israeli comic Ido Mosseri doing awesome riffs on the Levantine hustler; then the Z. gets a job in New York City and the film totally collapses, turning into ... well, a Judd Apatow movie. Jokes grow thin, then irrelevant, then desperate, with random unfocused scenes devoted to Zohan's bushy pubes (!), comical cat-football, a Rocky Balboa interlude for Turturro, then finally no jokes at all, just appearances by various celebrities as themselves (the John McEnroe bit - as in MR. DEEDS - is especially painful); and of course any talk of politics dissipates, the key scene being perhaps when New York Jews and Arabs start to talk about the Problem, only to segue after 10 seconds into silly chatter about US politicians and their wives (Laura Bush isn’t bad, right? yeah, but Hilary has that dominatrix thing going on). Maybe it's deliberate, a way of showing they've become Americanised - which may also explain why e.g. they unite to fight a ruthless developer who wants to knock down the neighbourhood and build a mall, only to build a mall themselves (having presumably knocked down the neighbourhood) in the film's coda - and of course Sandler knows this is how (most) US multiplex viewers view the Israeli Question, a complex conflict thousands of miles away where they might (if sufficiently liberal) shrug that "both sides are crazy" before turning back to the usual superficial Western discourse. Still quite depressing.   

VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA (67) (second viewing: 73) (dir., Woody Allen) Rebecca Hall, Scarlett Johansson, Javier Bardem, Penelope Cruz Not sure why it took me two viewings to realise this is probably the sexiest film of the year (Woody may be something of a runt - even before his dirty-old-man phase - but he knows how to make beautiful women show off their beauty to best advantage; guess he just makes them feel relaxed or something). The other - slightly more important - thing I missed on first viewing was the little snippet where well-known painter Juan Antonio admits he dabbled in writing and music as well as painting as a young man, "reaching for a means of self-expression" to channel his "emotion" - making him a soulmate of sorts to restless Cristina who flits from one distraction to another, knowing only what she doesn't want, and spelling out the film's larger theme which is Art, and Artistic impulse in general (it has much in common, in the Allen oeuvre, with BULLETS OVER BROADWAY). Cristina and Juan Antonio are similar in having no real talent - no "genius", as Maria Elena puts it - but a restless need to be creative, except that he's found a way to live from that and she hasn't (not yet); Vicky is the opposite, in that she feels no pressing need to create but turns out to have some 'talent', in the sense of a great and powerful emotion (her love), except she has no mechanism for dealing with this, and may well be destroyed by it; and Maria Elena is the synthesis, being the only true Artist and therefore - like Chazz Palminteri in BULLETS - a little bit insane. Woody, with his film-a-year schedule, probably empathizes more with the restless creatives, and maybe knows deep down that he's not a great film artist - maybe that explains why he's always so revered the Arthouse Masters, the Bergmans and Fellinis, and why he tends to write True Artists (Chazz again) as lacking moral compunction, very free yet also slightly mad (a kind of hidden envy, from a Cristina type to the world's Maria Elenas); maybe he knows the world works best for in-betweens, like the - doubtless very successful - interior decorator whom Vicky's rich friends adore because "he's creative, but he knows when to back off". Art is also equated with Love here, hence the corollary that True Love - like True Art - is a little masochistic, only romantic when it's unfulfilled (says Maria Elena), all of which is why the film succeeds as airy Rohmerian rom-com as well as thematic meditation from a man who's now been making Art for almost half a century (and of course playing jazz - and this may be the closest he's come to free-form jazz, patterns and counterpoint abstracted from the tyranny of plot). Too bad it took him all that time to discover dissolves, but you can't have everything - and Vicky and Juan's first kiss, when his head inclines towards hers and against the moonlight, blending them both in a sensual yet menacing darkness, suggests Woody may yet become a great film artist after all.         

ROMAN POLANSKI: WANTED AND DESIRED (62) (dir., Marina Zenovich) Yes, the la-la-la theme from ROSEMARY'S BABY sounds properly ethereal when laid over Roman Polanski's secret escape from LA, fleeing America forever, but the effort to make Polanski's legal troubles seem like one of his films doesn't really take. The word "surreal" is used with respect to the trial, but e.g. the prosecutor - set up as implacable moralistic Mormon - turns out to be fairly reasonable, and the judge's behaviour is insecure and erratic rather than deranged (there's also some confusion, as it seems to be established early on that giving RP jail-time wasn't an option for the judge - since it was bound to be appealed - yet that's exactly the threat that causes Polanski to take flight). Well enough made and extensively researched - the final credits show another 30+ names of people who were interviewed but didn't make the final cut - but not much more than a straight biography with not-so-hidden agenda, though I did like the prosecutor watching a Polanski festival in preparation for the trial and coming up with a unifying theme for his oeuvre: "Corruption meeting innocence over water". Everyone's a critic.  

Toronto International Film Festival, September 4-13 (34 films)

HAMLET 2 (55) (dir., Andrew Fleming) Steve Coogan, Catherine Keener, David Arquette, Skylar Astin Let's (not) do the show right here: Curse of Camp - and its handmaiden, a taste for flamboyant musical theatre - strikes again (it's a sign of the times, see also MAMMA MIA! plus "Pop Idol" and its various iterations, though admittedly the combo worked in the SOUTH PARK movie 10 years ago). The climax - the show itself - all but kills this modest comedy, turning what should be raw and confessional into toe-tapping kitsch that Corky St. Clair of WAITING FOR GUFFMAN would be proud of; Coogan does a variation on St. Clair, trying to shoehorn his love of theatre into small-minded surroundings, but the character seems cheaply-conceived - coming close to pathos, a loser whose only real talent is his love for theatre, but written for easy laughs (it seems wrong e.g. that he sings in public and acts zany in a restaurant; his flair for drama ought to be his secret weapon) - and Fleming draws back when he ought to go deeper, also making little of our hero's obvious superficiality (it's a gag, not a sign of some inner hollowness - or a dig at the movie spin-offs on Broadway itself - that he thinks "Hamlet" is a downer and adapts ERIN BROCKOVICH for his Drama class). Sets up an inspirational-teacher situation then, to its credit, ignores it, finding productive tension between how our hero perceives himself - a mentor, a vessel for Theatre - and the objective view (there's no 'inspiration'; the kids just get used to him), though for every halfway-interesting direction there's also a pubescent drama critic, a nice teenage white girl speaking gangsta and the Gay Men's Chorus of Tucson singing Michael Sembello's "Maniac". Also, Elisabeth Shue.  

PINEAPPLE EXPRESS (60) (dir., David Gordon Green) Seth Rogen, James Franco, Danny McBride Based on this and SUPERBAD, the Rogen-Goldberg writing style operates by setting up protagonists who appear to be misfits or cut-ups, then increasingly creating a film in their image (who is the real-life equivalent for the mysterious Third Guy - McLovin' in SUPERBAD, the indestructible Red here - who joins the coarse, aggressive Rogen figure and more head-in-clouds Goldberg figure?); it's surprising, and a little exhilarating, when authority figures (the two cops in SUPERBAD, the girl's parents here) turn out to be just as irresponsible as our heroes, the film consciously giving up tension and replacing it with something else, the writers' (and their protagonists') fantasy world where everything is a variation on themselves (the girlfriend is set up, half-explored in a puzzled kind of way, then quietly discarded). All very Generation iPod, but it works because the genre allows it - teen comedy in SUPERBAD, stoner comedy here, both based around appetite-driven heroes without much self-knowledge (*) - and also because DGG helps out, using his fabled 'generosity' and willingness to observe the characters at play (esp. when they leapfrog, mock-swordfight and talk about "the apex of the vortex" while under the influence); even the villains get a seemingly improvised moment, when Gary Cole takes time off from plotting nefarious deeds to jam with Rosie Perez and dare her to "say something in Spanish" (the violent slapstick may be a surprise, but recall the relish taken in the spike through Jamie Bell's foot in UNDERTOW). The vibe is at least appropriate - and funny - though it's still a little flabbergasting (see also HAROLD & KUMAR) how stoner humour seems to have lost its subversive dimension; how can you make your hero a process-server - the ultimate Tool of the Man, doing the System's dirty work - and not call him out on that? (He has fun with it, wearing outlandish disguises and so forth, which is not quite the same as subverting it.) Bonus points for raising the spectre of - but not following through on - a spoof STAR WARS light-sabre duel using neon lights.  

(*) which I'm not necessarily applauding, but that's the genre; those who find stoners and all their doings self-indulgent should take 10 points off the rating imo.