Colin Quinn, Tilda Swinton
Director: Judd Apatow
125 mins
Following her career as a stand-up comedienne, Amy Schumer attempts to expand her career from the comedy stage to the silver screen in her self-penned/Judd Apatow-directed “Trainwreck.”
In this, she plays a writer for a crass and low-demographic magazine and is given an assignment to write a story about a surgeon who works with athletes. She visits Dr. Aaron Conners (Bill Hader), and despite some chemistry of the non-medical kind, Amy prefers to maintain her highly promiscuous lifestyle and is reluctant to get involved with anyone on a deeper level. However, slowly but surely, she falls for Conners.
With a good cast containing the likes of Colin Quinn, John Cena and a barely recognisable Tilda Swinton consistently stealing scenes, the funniest moments of the film come from people who aren’t Schumer or Hader. As for Schumer herself, she proves to be quite a decent actress.
Commitment issues and arrested development are the main themes in this outing, but the people on board sadly don’t do
anything particularly new or interesting with it. However, the
romantic storyline with Schumer and Hader scrapes by into moderate success, mostly due to Hader who proves
himself to be a fine romantic lead. The script though, is quite inconsistent, with many of the alleged jokes only mustering (with your reviewer anyway) a barely audible advance on a smile.
As for Apatow, his worst tendencies of excessive running time prevail
and the whole piece just feels bloated. Scenes such as a lengthy toilet cubicle conversation about Johnny Depp with a camera only on the legs of the
girls, and a ludicrous, pointless and bizarre segment featuring LeBron James,
Matthew Broderick and Chris Evert
are completely superfluous, and should have been abandoned at the outset.
With a tighter, more consistently funny script, Schumer and Apatow could have had a fairly successful comedy. Instead, what we have is a moderately entertaining but ultimately forgettable piece of fluff.
Director: Jake Schreier
109 minutes
Most men in their younger days have had at least one experience involving a beautiful, wild girl who stole their heart but nothing ultimately came from it. In "Paper Towns," that girl is Margo Roth Spiegelman (Cara Delevingne). Quentin (Nat Wolff) has been living next door to her all his life, but they function with different groups of friends. He's your average decent teenager, academically fine but not too well versed in relationship strategies. Although popular, Margo is an elusive creature.
Set in suburban Orlando, fantasising is about the height of most young people's passions, and in this, the senior year of high school, Quentin (nickname 'Q') has had an incredible night in the company of Margo, running around the area, taking her revenge on people who annoyed her, including a cheating boyfriend. Her philosophy on her traitor-ex - "It's a penis, in the same sense that Rhode Island is a state: it may have an illustrious history, but it sure isn't big," Next day, Margo has vanished. 'Q' is worried - so he enlists the help of his friends Ben (Austin Abrams) and Radar (Justice Smith) and off they trot on the search for the missing enigmatic Margo.
John Green, the author of "Paper Towns" and "The Fault in our Stars." offers a fairly rote narrative but in a variation from the source material, Margo shows more bitchiness and the conclusion has been altered. Wolff is fine as the sensitively obsessive 'Q'. There's not really anything that interesting about Margo, which ultimately is the point. My main gripe is the seemingly endless supply of cash and credit card resources these teenagers seemingly have access to at will, buying fuel, clothes, food, drinks etc - presumably on their couldn't-care-less parents' card/s (what about ID?) and in a car they simply snaffle to swan across central America.
In essence though, "Paper Towns" is a pleasant enough if slight story that will skeedaddle from your mind as fast as Margo on her next sojourn.
