Interview: '21 Jump Street' directors Phil Lord & Chris Miller

A few days ago I watched Phil Lord and Chris Miller's outrageously hilarious and entertaining 21 Jump Street - the film stars Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum and is a buddy cop comedy that can make your face hurt with laughter.

Lord and Miller have doled out a deliciously wicked film that exudes the fresh, boisterously quirky tone of their previous movie Cloudy with a chance of Meatballs. The film releases in India this Friday, my review will be out the same day.

I had the chance to interview Lord and Miller - they talked about changing gears from animation to live action, their leads, their inspirations and their very interesting upcoming project. Embedded below is the transcript:

MF: Being a HUGE  fan of Cloudy with a chance of meatballs, I must ask you, what was the biggest challenge of shifting from animation to making a live action feature? Is there going to be a follow-up?

PL & CM: Animation is a much slower process, so you can take your time to discuss any tough decisions. With live action it came down to preparation. Going into every day we knew we would only have a limited time, so we would try to get as many options as possible since we would only get one shot at it. Fortunately we had a great creative team around us so we managed to come up with a lot of material that we could toy around with in editing.  

MF: Did you guys always plan on making both live action and animation films? Or is animation your first love? 

PL & CM: We come from a background in animation, but at the end of the day they are both just different ways to tell a story with characters you care about and hopefully make you laugh. Both certainly have their distinct advantages and limitations, but it has been a lot of fun broadening our horizons.  

MF: What was it like working with Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum? 

PL & CM: The two of them are absolutely fantastic and it was so great getting to collaborate with them. They both have very different backgrounds so they were able to add their unique experiences into the film. Jonah obviously is so experienced in the comedy world and you know what he brings to the table with his improvisational skills. Then with Channing he has a much more physical background and it was amazing to see how he brought his own improvisation to the action scenes. It was great to see both of the guys learning from each other on set and expanding their own skill sets, and benefitting from the natural chemistry that arose from the friendship they developed on set. 

MF: 21 Jump Street is by far the funniest buddy cop action comedy I've seen in years. What are your favorite films from the genre?

PL & CM: We looked back at several as we were developing Jump Street. Some of the major influences were the classic ones like Beverly Hills Cop and 48 Hours,  but also some less well-known films such as Freebie and the Bean and the Billy Crystal/Gregory Hines movie Running Scared.  

MF: You've got a Lego movie lined up next - it does seem like a pretty radical idea. Could you give us a few details on the project and how you landed it? Is it going to be animation or live action? 

PL & CM: It is mainly going to be animated, but will have a live-action component. The interesting thing we have discovered is there is this whole library of Brick Films that exist online, where people are just going into their basements making their own stop-motion films. So we decided to adopt that spirit but just bring it to a much bigger scale. We are still developing the story and many of the designs but it has been a lot of fun and we are very happy with where it is headed.

Movie Review: Battleship

Technically, Battleship is big CGI mayhem with some of the best special effects that money can buy. The rest is a rambling, ear-splitting, daft exercise in alien invasion clichés passed off as entertainment.

Director Peter Berg’s movies have been rather well constructed and visually interesting (The Rundown, The Kingdom, Hancock) despite having second-rate plots. Battleship has a few memorable big action sequences, and at a budget of $200 million it just limps along with the smarmy fingerprints of studio interference smudging up the imagery. It's hard to imagine whom the filmmakers had in mind for this huge production – it’s a movie based on a board game, and it has aliens. But it has far too much boring character-talk for kids and is far too dumb for adults. 

The premise of Battleship makes sense for about four seconds, after which you begin to wonder what writers John and Erich Hoeber were smoking. Half a dozen alien ships appear in the midst of a naval exercise, and missiles fly. That’s the entirety of the plot, which is juiced by the opening half an hour that plays more like a recruitment video for the US Navy than any character development. Thrown in are a few lead characters (Kitsch, Rihanna, Decker, Neeson) that make cardboard look like titanium. 

Now the CGI wizardry is great, though most of it seems like a slightly tweaked version of the Transformers movies – complete with the same orange and green colors and drunken camerawork. The aliens look like the guys from the video game Halo with their helmets and like Bruce Willis without them. The film itself plays like five video game levels - majority of the action takes place right on the ship, and it involves one ship firing big guns on the other, and facing return fire. In the film’s most fun moment, the board game Battleship is incorporated in a crucial action scene, and as crazy as it sounds, it works.

But the rest is so typical of the alien invasion genre that it's hard to summon any real enjoyment. There are plot holes the size of the aliens’ planet, and the mystery surrounding the aliens is never massaged hard enough for anyone to care. Taylor Kitsch looks completely bored and miscast as the baffled hero – which is basically a repetition of his turn in John Carter. Alexander Skarsgard seems like filler for the spots that Kitsch doesn’t appear in, while Brooklyn Decker is a blonde eye candy clone of Megan Fox from Transformers. Then there is Rihanna who has quite a substantial part but is expectedly no Meryl Streep in front of the camera. It all seems like a corny Hollywood exterior under which a fun movie wasn’t allowed to shine through. In fact the only thing certain about Battleship is that Kitsch got a chance to work with Liam Neeson who was in it for the money. Full credit to Neeson, though, because he manages to keep a straight face throughout. 

Battleship is CGI-porn, but everything else about it is banal, achingly predictable and dimwitted. Watch it if you want to witness a two hour long tech demo.

(First published in Mid Day)

Movie Review: Housefull 2

One evening ten years ago I visited a dentist who for two and a half hours pulled out a tooth and then drilled the largest hole on my body. The pain was excruciating, but what kept me going was the knowledge that the throbbing pain was for a meaningful purpose. Housefull 2 is like that miserable evening, but instead it doesn’t have any meaningful intention. If one films all of my grumbling, hair-tearing, eye-rolling, sighing, groaning, whimpering, whining and slouching throughout this movie and sped it up, it could be marketed as a found footage comedy funnier than the whole of Housefull 2. Because it would be more unique, vastly more watchable and mercifully shorter. 

Housefull 2 is stark proof that watching Sajid Khan’s movies can fill one with the compulsion to plunge a large syringe full of Novocain into oneself with hope of ending the pain. A worthless story told in numbing images, the film merrily dances on the line between the completely unpleasant and the utterly distasteful. It's been five years since Sajid vomited out Heyy Baby and brought a new, satanic power to Bollywood with his own style of loud, cloyingly horrible filmmaking - a lethal combination of a large cast and obtuse jokes that have enraged critics, but scored big at the box office. And just like 2010’s Housefull, the sequel has all the cinematic value of donkey porn.

The first atrocious thing about this movie is its two and a half hour plus runtime. The longer the film rambles on, the more irritating it is, and the more you see how little Sajid cares for your threshold level of pain. I'd go into the ‘story’ and ‘plot’ but it’s nothing more than an excuse to get one dozen characters inside the house of a wealthy British Goonda Mithun, so I won't insult your intelligence by implying that Housefull 2 has anything new or exciting to offer. If you watch this movie, you will have to endure a musical cue of Akshay Kumar producing a sound that is a mixture of burping and orgasming. You will also have to witness a snake biting Shreyas Talpade’s crotch while John Abraham slaps his head and makes contorted faces. You will have to see a crocodile biting Ritesh deshmukh’s ass while Akshay Kumar squints his eyes and screams. You will have to see a horny Mithun running behind an overweight dwarf maid while folding his lungi. And when Johnny Lever is the lone voice of reason in the film, then you know you’re in for a turgid ride. 

The jokes are woeful and are delivered by the actors with the subtlety of a seizure. What Housefull 2 does have in abundance is an unending parade of flimsy mistaken identity gags, prudish movie-star mugging camera angles, grotesque makeup, a distasteful devotion to malignant humor and the intolerable air of self-satisfied moviemakers cobbling drivel together for a 100 crore weekend.  

While Ritesh is borderline likable, Akshay Kumar plays the same character he has played in every comedy film of his to date. Shreyas Talpade and the ultra-pretty Shazahn Padamsee are almost nonexistent, but Jacqueline Fernandez, Zarine Khan and John Abraham make you want to jam a pen in your ears. If you have ever seen Asin at work before, then you can tell already that she was miscast - I just felt sorry for her and wondered if another director might be able to showcase her better. The less said about Rishi and Randhir Kapoor, Boman Irani and Chunkey Pandey the better, because their performances are straight out of a drunken game of dumb charades. Sajid-Wajid’s music makes the songs of the first Housefull sound like the works of Mozart. 

Housefull 2 is the zenith of ugly filmmaking. As someone who loved Sajid Khan’s TV shows in the past I found myself regretting that affection less than 10 minutes into this movie. Any filmmaker naturally evolves as he makes his films, Sajid strives to devolve and count his currency notes. The only explanation for the existence of Housefull 2 seems to be Sajid wondering how terrible a film can be and still cross the 100 crore mark.

Movie Review: Titanic 3D

When it released in theaters back in 1998, people either desperately loved Titanic or pretended to hate it. It was impossible to genuinely dislike the movie because it was an immensely stunning technical triumph, so far ahead in terms of visual grandeur that one could not look away from the screen. The eye-roll inducing love story might now seem like a rejected Mills & Boon novel, but even to this date the chemistry between stars Leo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet has not been replicated in Hollywood. It was easy to be won over by the $200 million kitsch, and it was clear that director James Cameron had brought a turning point in modern cinema history, for the third time in his career.

So what better way to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the second highest grossing movie of all time? Re-releasing the film worldwide in post-Avatar 3D, of course. Avatar recently went on to become the biggest money spinner of all time, and thanks to that 3D rehash of Pocahontas, there are now far more 3D movies being catapulted into theaters than we ever received from Hollywood. More and more studios are converting their films into 3D and asking audiences to pay a premium ticket price. Most big animation movies are being rendered in 3D as well. The 3D hasn’t exactly taken the industry by storm, because for every Avatar or Tintin, there is a Clash of the Titans or The Last Airbender. Ninety nine percent of the current crop of 3D films are buoyed by Hollywood’s greed, and are either disappointing or downright torture to the eyes. These are ‘fake 3D’ movies, shot in 2D and post converted to 3D – it’s Hollywood hustling the public because the resultant picture quality is dim and/or out of focus. Then there are movies like Resident Evil: Afterlife which are shot in 3D but feature a lousy story and are unbearably ugly to look at. 3D hasn’t transformed the movies, it has made them gimmicky. 

So how does the 3D rendition of Titanic fare here? For one, Cameron has gone on record saying that he wanted to get the 3D done right – close to $20 million and 50 long weeks have been spent in carefully enhancing the seminal movie into 3D. He went so far ahead as to re-edit the astral pattern of a scene featuring the night sky to make it more scientifically accurate. The good news is that in some parts, the 3D works brilliantly, and we still get the visual and aural epic that we hoped for. Russel Carpenter’s camera and James Horner’s gorgeous music glide you through a breeze of fresh air and the practical sets rather than the digital claustrophobia of Avatar. The 3D becomes more apparent only during the wide shots of the ship, but the interiors shots are a joy because they almost make you feel like you’re strolling about the ship along with the characters. Unlike in Avatar, where the 3D cinematography was used to overtly define the landscape, there’s a lot more subtle shifting in Titanic 3D. 

Apart from the marginally dim colors, the gaffes of Titanic 3D are still the clunky dialogue and Billy Zane’s unintentionally amusing turn, and most of the plot contrivances become more jarring in the current era of sophisticated audiences. The 3D does add more visual depth to the final hour where the ship sinks, but whether or not it adds to any intimacy you share with the story or the characters is moot. That said, sometimes you need to let nostalgia get the better of you - despite being a film that is fifteen years old and available on your DVD shelf, Titanic miraculously again becomes the best movie to see in theaters this weekend. Watch it with the people you love, because nothing compares with watching grand cinema on a huge screen with a big crowd. Just don’t let anyone catch you secretly listening to that Celine Dion song on your iPod afterwards.

(First published in Mid Day)