![]() ![]() Thor, in a frizzy Stacee Jaxx wig, belted out Foreigner's “I Wanna Know What Love Is,” and for a few brief moments while watching this hysterically inappropriate junior-high pageant, I absolutely did know.Ī question mark isn't quite the only thing missing from Where'd You Go, Bernadette, Richard Linklater's engaging yet oddly unconvincing adaptation of Maria Semple's 2012 bestseller. But overall, I adored Good Boys, and might have even if it didn't climax with a middle-school-musical production of Rock of Ages that any sane adult would pay handsomely to see. ![]() It has major flaws and more uncomfortable and merely blah moments than I would've liked. (Williams proves most adept at scoring laughs from under his breath, and also pulled off my personal-favorite bit in the film when the depressed Lucas cried his way through a school-choir rendition of “Walkin' on Sunshine” and told his pals, “That song always makes me sad.”) Good Boys, though, is at its finest when its title characters are trying, and desperately failing, to act mature: peppering sentences with words they don't understand such as “nymphomaniac” and “feminist” engaging in a hurtful verbal fight that ends with all three boys sobbing, 10 feet from one another, on their individual walks home Lucas telling the others that his parents are divorcing and Thor, with a steady hand on Lucas' shoulder, asking his friend, “What did you do?” (That one, at my screening, elicited both a cackle and an empathetic “Aw-w-w-w!”) And while Superbad concluded with the touching suggestion of impending separation, Stupnitsky's comedy takes its heroes' inevitable trek one step further, making Max, Lucas, and Thor keenly aware of their trajectories yet clear-eyed, and big-hearted, enough to accept them. (Your knowing that the actors were in no legitimate danger doesn't make witnessing this ill-considered sequence any easier.) Yet what kept me laughing, and surprisingly moved, almost throughout was the youths' utter sincerity as their attempts to look, sound, and behave like adults were consistently waylaid by their being, you know, 12.ĭespite the running gag eventually growing old, if not quite as quickly as I expected, hearing hard-R profanities from the cherubic mouths of Tremblay, Williams, Noon, and others – including the remarkable Izaac Wang as a five-foot icon of awesome named Soren – is good for plenty of giggles, especially when the curses are just tossed off with conversational casualness. A few are cruelly upsetting, such as the kids' terrified attempt to cross a six-lane super-highway. Some of the antics in director/co-writer Gene Stupnitsky's prepubescent gross-out are really funny, among them the boys' encounter with Stephen Merchant's weirdo and Thor's attempt to sneak a stolen beer past Sam Richardson's unimpressed cop. Williams, and Brady Noon play sixth-graders Max, Lucas, and Thor, whose self-appointed cool as sole members of their “Beanbag Boys” club is tested by an invitation to their first middle-school make-out bash – a panic-ensuing event whose lead-up involves an abducted drone, pilfered drugs, a skeevy frat house, a horrifically dislocated shoulder, and a life-size sex toy mistaken for a CPR dummy. Ah, progress.īut also like Bugsy Malone, there's an inherent sweetness in this latest Rogen/Goldberg production that keeps it from merely being a one-joke “Look at the cute tykes playing awful grown-ups!” freak show. In Good Boys, the ammo is upgraded to paint balls. In that cult hit, characters were annihilated by machine guns that shot whipped cream. I did, however, think a lot about Bugsy Malone, Alan Parker's 1976 kiddie musical that imagined a stereotypical 1930s gangster flick cast entirely with teens and tweens (among them a very young Jodie Foster and Scott Baio). Even though the raunchy comedy Good Boys, like the Jonah Hill/Michael Cera slapstick Superbad, is about nerdy best friends prepping for a party and boasts Superbad screenwriters Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg as producers, I didn't spend much time at the new film reflecting on its 2007 cousin.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |