Exactly what it sounds like, the Pick of the Week column is written up by the Cinapse team on rotation, focusing on films that are past the marketing cycle of either their theatrical release or their home video release. So maybe the pick of the week will be only a couple of years old. Or maybe it’ll be a silent film, cult classic, or forgotten gem. Cinapse is all about thoughtfully advocating film, new and old, and celebrating what we love no matter how marketable that may be. So join us as we share about what we’re discovering, and hopefully you’ll find some new films for your watch list, or some new validation that others out there love what you love too! Engage with us in the comments or on Twitter or Facebook! And now, our Cinapse Pick Of The Week…
I would never imply that comedy is harder than childbirth, because I shouldn’t have to. I mean, look at the facts, people: tens of thousands of people (usually women) give birth every day, but there’s only like, thirty to thirty five funny people on Earth. And most of them are Wayans.
I mean, that’s just statistics.
But there’s one thing harder than childbirth and comedy combined, and that’s writing about comedy.
Writing about comedy is the single hardest thing you can possibly do in this world, which is why we have a cure for cancer, but nobody can definitively explain how Daniel Tosh has a career. But Great Men must venture Great Deeds. And as an aspiring Great Man, it is in that grand spirit of taking on new challenges and surmounting them with grace and wit that I have taken it upon myself to write about comedy. Or, more accurately, A comedy. Or, most specifically, Get Him To The Greek.
Get Him To The Greek is a spinoff of the 2008 Jason Segal vehicle Forgetting Sarah Marshall, a pretty good movie in its own right, but not good enough to earn a place as an official Victor Pick Of The Week. It takes scene stealer Russell Brand (who reprises his role as drugged out rock star Aldous Snow from the original film) and Jonah Hill (who was also in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, playing an entirely different character), and puts them together in a raucous road trip kind of scenario where they must get from London to Los Angeles in time for a much anticipated reunion concert.
Not that story matters in a comedy, ever. All you need is a decent setup for things to go hilariously wrong and your work is half-done.
The other half, of course, is actually making it funny.
You’d be surprised how often people forget that…
Get Him To The Greek snuck up on me, the way the best comedies do. I didn’t care for Anchorman or Talladega Nights the first time I saw them. But little by little, little quotes and moments and jokes started taking root in my mind, and spilling out into the real world.
Whenever I heard “Afternoon Delight” (which would happen more than strictly necessary), I would make slide whistle noises with my mouth that turned out to be rather off-putting to strangers (Though I suppose it’s possible they were already pre-put off by the fact I was singing “Afternoon Delight” in the first place…)
People who annoyed me were no longer people, they were ‘smelly pirate hookers’. I started referring to the “5 lb., 6 oz. newborn infant Jesus” on a regular basis.
I would proclaim “I spilled my Macchiato” in a weird Gallic accent, apropos of nothing, and to no one in particular.
I don’t even drink Macchiatos….
And that’s that great moment: when you realize a comedy has burrowed its way into your consciousness.
But I’m not here to talk about either of those movies. Or any of the many, many other movies where the same exact thing happened. I’m talking about Get Him To The Greek, because it has Russell Brand, and that dude fascinates me.
It’s very strange to me that, however briefly, Russell Brand was kind of a thing in America. He’s just such a uniquely British version of a comedy person that it’s hard to imagine anybody ever thought he’d translate to these shores.
To wit: this is his version of the #hashtag trend that eventually comes to claim everybody with a modicum of fame these days…
Good lord, even his meme is the most Blighty-ish shit ever…
(For completions’ sake, here is his response, and it’s really quite impressive how he skates that line between being in on the joke and embodying the joke to such an extent that recursive occlusion is the only possible outcome…)
Having most likely just lost you with a fairly obscure reference in the previous parenthetical, this seems as good a time as any to remind you guys that he was once married to Katy Perry, who as we all know is basically a malfunctioning robot made out of marshmallows.
There are no words…
But it’s this unique presence and this singular energy that grounds Get Him To The Greek and rises it above a lot of what’s happening in the current comedy scene.
This is unmistakably the work of the Apatow Factory, a bunch of dudes that took over comedy and replaced well-crafted jokes and gags with aimless, grasping improv. And it’s generally funny because the people involved are funny, but it doesn’t stick in the mind because at the end of the day, it’s all arbitrary. When you can make a whole other movie out of outtakes and ad-libs, it’s not craft… it’s the cinematic equivalent of macaroni art.
Greek sidesteps this sort of rot through its casting. You’ve got Brand, who plays his long winded spaciness as a front for the genuine despair of addiction and makes it all feel real; the character is absurd, but his problems aren’t a joke. Then you’ve got Hill, whose best comedic trait is being possessed of an actors generosity (that is to say he plays well with others). And backing them up you’ve got an impressively unlikely list of ladies and gentlemen, the likes of which are unlikely to ever be seen together again.
The cast is stacked with actors you don’t get to see do these sorts of things, and changing things up like that does the movie a world of good. Rose Byrne (kind of an Apatow fixture at this point, but never more enjoyably off the chain as she is here), Colm Meany, Lars Ulrich (!), Paul Krugman (!)… everyone gets to partake in some inspired bit of business or another. Elisabeth Moss doesn’t get a whole hell of a lot to do as Hill’s long-suffering girlfriend, but her delivery of the line “I’m fuckin’ psyched!” is funny to me in a way that few things have ever been.
I mean, you know a movie is something special when Puff Daddy turns out to be one of the funniest parts of the whole thing:
But, you know what? All of this is just words, man. I had to write something and so I did. But all I really wanted to do is tell you to watch the movie, and find out if it makes you laugh, if it speaks to you the way it spoke to me. Everything I’ve written besides that has essentially been superfluous.
Because the thing about comedy, why it’s so hard to write about, is that it’s a language all its own. We quote Monty Python or The Simpsons or Friends to someone, and if they laugh… well, that’s like a code: this person gets it. This person gets me. Laughter can bond us like few other things in this world.
When I quote Get Him To The Greek, not enough people “get it”, and that has to change.
Also, if not for the movie, I wouldn’t have heard the greatest song of all time:
