Man on Film: The Campaign

Let's just get this one out there.

The Campaign was decent but ultimately forgettable with very few moments stuck. Galifianakis was fine. Ferrell was fine. Sudeikis was fine.

Man on Film: Everything Must Go

From the mounting queue of entries that need to be tended to, it probably makes the most sense to get this one out there, as it keeps with the theme of alcoholism ever-present in the subject of yesterday's entry on Charles Bukowski's Post Office.

Not to be confused with the superb Manic Street Preachers album of the same name (featuring this song),

Everything Must Go is an adaptation of a Raymond Carver short story ("Why Don't You Dance?") from the same collection that the Robert Altman masterpiece Short Cuts was culled from. Adapted and directed by first-timer Dan Rush, Everything Must Go stars Will Ferrell as Nick Halsey, a relapsed alcoholic whose drunken transgression set off a bender that led to being fired from his job and left by his wife. After getting fired, he heads home to find his belongings in the yard and locks having been changed. With his company car then repossessed, Nick finds himself essentially left with nowhere to go but his yard with the remnants of his old life sit displaced.

As the days pass, Nick finds friendship with a new neighbor from across the street and a boy whose mother is a home-care nurse down the block. The neighbor, Samantha, is played by the outstanding Rebecca Hall, who imbues her pregnant character with a pitch-perfect dose of vulnerability, compassion, and loneliness. Hall is riding an impressive streak of standout performances in The Town, Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1974, and Frost/Nixon, and this one joins those ranks.


Christopher Jordan Wallace (son of The Notorious B.I.G. and Faith Evans) stands tall here as well. Ferrell plays well off of him, and their relationship definitely provides the film with its best humor.


As for Ferrell, he may not have the most dramatic range in the world, but for the most part he handles the role well. There are a few points in the film where his performance sticks out as being slightly off key, but there are no more than a handful.


As a whole, the film reminds me much of Steve Buscemi's feature-length directorial debut, 1996's Trees Lounge, a film I rather liked at the time. It definitely has the feel of a mid-90s indie dramedy, which one can take for whatever it is worth. There was a time when it seemed like I only watched films like Trees Lounge or The Low Life, so this may have struck a note with me that it would have missed with others.

If the movie does have a failing, it is that it woefully underutilizes Michael Pena's skills. While his role is more significant than Glenn Howerton's, there isn't much that he gets to do with it. Where Howerton's role sees him playing the prick former boss with aplomb, Pena is left to play what could be loosely termed a wet blanket. It is no fault of Pena's that the character is relatively uninteresting, but the conventional nature of his character's presence is disappointing given who's in it.

Without having read the short story that has been adapted here, I cannot speak to its comparison to the source material, but Everything Must Go is an enjoyable if slightly forgettable way to spend 97 minutes.

Man on Film: The Other Guys

If you have actually had a conversation with me in the past year or so, there was a very good chance that at some point I said, "So I was watching Step Brothers today/yesterday..." Between its ever-presence on the premium movie channels, its availability on Netflix Instant Queue, and the fact that I own it on Blu-Ray, it seems that it's always calling out to me, and I answer its call an inordinate amount of the time.

The reason for this is simple: Step Brothers might just be the funniest movie in the past 10 years. The premise is simple (two 40-year-old men live their lives like 10-year-olds) but basically allows for the odd comic brilliance of Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly to shine.

Following on the heels of that release, my expectations were going to be impossibly high for The Other Guys. To be fair, The Other Guys was a perfectly all right movie. It was funny. I actually found myself laughing pretty consistently throughout the film, which is the truest test of how well a comedy succeeds at being a comedy.

Mark Wahlberg gets to play the angry man that he played in The Departed and I Heart Huckabee's so well, and while it may not be new territory, it definitely works. He absolutely made The Departed for me. Every moment he was on screen was golden. Here, his anger and his frustration at his partner not wanting to be the kind of cop he needed him to be works very well.

Samuel L. Jackson and The Rock were fucking great in their limited roles as the super cops. Their chase scene was absurdly over the top, and the "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" sequence is uproariously funny. Michael Keaton and the TLC quotes are deliciously bizarre.

Will Ferrell is very funny, especially as his Gator alter-ego.

Unfortunately, the film isn't transcendent. It is certainly unfair to expect this of a film, but The Other Guys, at least upon first viewing, didn't make me forget about Step Brothers.

It certainly isn't that I didn't like the film, and it was a thousand times better than this year's Kevin Smith "film" Cop Out, but The Other Guys is remarkably forgettable.