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June 22, 2009
TODD PHILLIPS
On his kind-of frustrating Podcast, "The Treatment," Elvis Mitchell interviewed HANGOVER director Todd Phillips. Phillips made his name directing documentaries that I didn't see, but sky-rocketed with the dopey arrested development comedies ROAD TRIP and OLD SCHOOL. I thought both movies had a few funny moments, but were almost completely forgettable. What's interesting is that Phillips views himself as "punk rock" director, because he has embodied some kind of iconoclastic spirit that he has intellectualized to an absurd degree. We are talking about the director of MR. WOODCOCK here, not Jean-Luc Godard.
I haven't seen THE HANGOVER, but I'm guessing it thrives on the kind of knuckleheaded misogyny and semi-shocking envelope-pushing that makes his previous popular in frat-houses everywhere. Phillips clearly sees himself as a darling of a certain politically incorrect criticaluminati, guys who debunks meaning and significance and think films should ultimately be about nothing. So Phillips thinks he's farting in the face of suburban values or something by celebrating drunkenness and immaturity. What he's done, however, is made staples of frat-boy DVD collections, who clearly don't talk about the "lack of irony" in OLD SCHOOL so much as they enjoy its quotable crudeness.
Phillips sees himself in the vein of Judd Apatow which, in a way, he is. But Apatow - while no Preston Sturges (the subject of a future blog post) - and his productions are substantially better than Phillips. Phillips may be able to talk about himself as making paeans to masculine identity, but he really appeals to the lowest common denominator. Apatow at least puts that stuff under his (limited) cinematic microscope instead of exploiting it for cheap laughs.
Ten years ago, AMERICAN PIE kick-started this genre by upping the ante with a particularly disgusting scene of gross-out humor; this was redeemed, it seemed, by some compensatory sentimentality at the ending that (to me, anyway) was a hollow excuse to indulge in all the crassness that preceded it. Phillips seems to think he's an innovator because he avoids that sentimentality and, I guess, in some ways he is. He seems pretty purposefully empty, but the bottom line is he isn't all that funny. I don't think comedy should necessarily teach us life lessons; ANIMAL HOUSE didn't - it was the kind of ode to the value-free paradise that Phillips seems religiously dedicated to reproducing. Satires have to have objects, and points - at least according to those wrote them in the 17th Century. But Phillips, in his brazen "confidence" (a word he used a lot to describe himself), will not stand by and have his films be meaningful in any way.
This mission would be refreshing if he were any good at it, but if THE HANGOVER is any good, it will be the first in his awful catalog to be so.
--- On a (mostly related unrelated) side note, in the song American Pie - most of the symbolism has been unshrouded. But why do the guys drinking whiskey and rye in the dry levy sing "This will be the day that I die?"
| By Andytown | 4:32 PM