FILM REVIEW OF ''TED 2" (2015)

The last thing Hollywood wants to do is either insult or offend individuals, groups, races, religions, causes, genders, and ideologies with their films.  The refreshing thing about the hilarious teddy bear satire “Ted” and its unapologetic sequel “Ted 2” is that neither have any such compunctions.  Seth MacFarlane, who co-scripted, directed, and provided the voice of the titular teddy bear with a potty mouth, spends most of the 115 minutes of “Ted 2” (***1/2 OUT OF ****) saying and showing subject matter that most respectable people would think twice about before either saying or showing.  Like its iconoclastic predecessor, “Ted 2” bears an R-rating for what the Motion Picture Association of America considers “crude and sexual content, pervasive language, and some drug use.”  The audaciously subversive humor either will make you cringe in horrific revulsion or howl in gleeful elation.  If you enjoyed “Ted” with its cretinous heroes, beyond borderline gross out humor, wanton drug abuse, and impertinent profanity, you’ll love this high-brow sequel.  The worst thing you can say about “Ted 2” is that it is pretentious from fade-in to fade out.  Clearly, MacFarlane and “Family Guy” co-scribes Alec Sulken and Wellesley Wild sought to overshadow the lowbrow original, and they have triumphed in this respect.  The elaborate song & dance choreography that opens “Ted 2” after our eponymous protagonist ties the knot with his goofy girlfriend has guys and gals cavorting around a gigantic wedding cake and stomping about on a huge dance floor with diminutive Ted keeping up with them.  This is the last thing that you’d ever imagine seeing in a movie about a profane bear and his idiotic friend.  If you haven’t seen “Ted,” then you probably won’t understand half of the hilarity.  During a thunderstorm, young John Bennett clutched his Hasbro teddy and made a wish that it would come to life, and it did!  Consequently, they became “thunder buddies for life.”

Virtually everybody from “Ted” reprises their roles in “Ted 2,” except Mila Kunis. According to the Internet Movie Database, Kunis didn’t return as Lori because she was pregnant during the production with Ashton Kutcher’s baby. Meantime, MacFarlane and his co-scribes explain that John Bennett (Mark Wahlberg of “Contraband”) and she divorced for six months before the outset of the action. A dejected John is petrified of getting himself involved in another relationship and his life has spiraled out of control.  Meantime, Ted and Tami-Lynn (Jessica Barth of “Next”) marry, but their marriage has degenerated into a disaster.  They argue about finances, throw things, and Ted cusses out their neighbors. At the supermarket where Ted works as a cashier, an obese African-American cashier advises him that the best way to restore a marriage is to have a baby.  The cashier’s comments are incredibly racist in a reverse sort of way.  Indeed, those comments are so rude that they cannot be repeated. Tami-Lynn breaks her angry vow of silence with Ted after he tells her that they must have a baby, and they celebrate their momentous decision.

Sadly, neither are prepared for the obstacle course of trials and tribulations that ensue.  Since the toy company Hasbro didn’t endow Ted with sex organs, our hero must search for the ideal sperm donor. They approach Flash (Sam J. Jones), but he complains about his low sperm count.  John suggests Patriots’ quarterback Tom Brady.  Now, things get really bizarre.  John and Ted sabotage Brady’s air conditioner so he has to sleep with his bedroom balcony windows open.  These two nitwits set out to obtain a sperm sample from Brady while he is asleep!  Ted decks himself out like a seafaring fisherman for the occasion, and John is appalled to learn that he must masturbate Brady. Fortunately, for everybody involved, Brady awakens in time and throws them out.  Johnny offers to help Ted, and they enter a fertility clinic.  A comedy of errors occurs while they are at the clinic. Accidentally, John tips over a storage bin of sperm samples and winds up sloshed in sperm. Nevertheless, everything goes awry when Tammy-Lynn’s physician (Dennis Haysbert of the "Allstate" commercials) informs her that she devastated her reproductive system abusing narcotics. Ultimately, Ted learns the State of Massachusetts no longer recognizes his status as a person so they cannot adopt a child. Furthermore, the court has invalidated their marriage.  Ted and John seek legal representation. The best they can afford is 26-year old Samantha Leslie Jackson (Amanda Seyfried of “Les Misérables”), a freshman attorney who smokes a bong to counteract the ill effects of migraines.  Predictably, since Ted and John are still getting wasted, several scenes of euphoric pot-smoking ensue, with our heroes and heroine smoking in public places, too.  The funny thing about Samantha Leslie Jackson is that she is pop culture illiterate and doesn’t even realize the significance of the joke Ted makes when he observes that they have hired Samuel L. Jackson as their lawyer.  MacFarlane gets a lot of mileage out of this joke as well as some of the exotic types of pot our heroes and heroine smoke.  One running gag concerns a strain of marihuana that induces the fear of getting lost on the way home.  In subsequent scenes, Ted and Samantha are shown leading a terrified John home because amnesia has set in as a consequence of smoking this ‘lost’ dope.

Just when everything appears to be working out favorably for our heroes, the villainous Donnie from “Ted” surfaces. Donnie (Giovanni Ribisi of “Public Enemies”) has gotten a job as a janitor now at Hasbro.  He interrupts Hasbro executive Tom Jessup (John Carroll Lynch of “Zodiac”) during a hallway conference and tells him that he doesn’t flip the cakes in his urinal. Instead, he replaces them. Naturally, Jessup doesn’t know what to make of this sinister cretin. Later, Donnie has a moment with Jessup in Jessup’s office because Hasbro has an open-door policy with its employees. The news is out that Ted is going to court to determine what his status in society is. Donnie tells Jessup if the prosecution can prove that Ted is actually property rather than a person, they can abduct him with minor legal consequences, slice him open, and fathom what makes Ted so singular.  Jessup’s eyes gleam at the prospect of eviscerating Ted so Hasbro can manufacture a new teddy that will sell millions.  Of course, Jessup wants to exploit this opportunity, but he reminds Donnie that he cannot be implicated in this pseudo crime. Altogether, Jessup’s earlier opinion of Donnie has changed and he realizes that this nincompoop may be a genius.  That Hasbro would allow themselves to participate in this irreverent farce is amazing considering the unfavorable shade of evil in which MacFarlane and company paints them. 

Mind you, Ted the talking teddy still looks as adorable as he did in first film, especially when he dresses up in a suit and tie. You never get the impression that the cast was interacting with nothing when the CGI Ted was on-screen with them. While the front and center Ted dominates the action with his woes, Mark Wahlberg’s John stands out as his best friend.  Until “Ted” and now again with “Ted 2,” Wahlberg has deviated rarely from playing a straight-up, conventional, role model, W.A.S.P. protagonist.  As he did initially with “Ted,” Wahlberg appears to be poaching on Adam Sandler territory with some of his absurd antics.  The splashy scene in the sperm facility and the looney episode in Tom Brady’s mansion make John the butt of the jokes, and Wahlberg displays no inhibitions to playing second banana to Ted while ridiculing himself in the process. The dialogue again qualifies as quotable material with politically incorrect meanings.  Although the sight gags are amusing, particularly in the Comics convention scene, this above-average gross-out comedy serves up some pretty impudent shenanigans. Indeed, if vulgar humor poses no problems, “Ted 2” is right for you.

FILM REVIEW OF ''FIGHT CLUB'' (1999)

"Fight Club" (**** out of ****) is a knock-out!

Brad Pitt and Edward Norton co-star and spar in this bizarre but insightful bare-knuckled, no-holds-barred, pugilistic parable. "Fight Club" takes some mighty savage but satirical swings at consumerism, anarchy, and male impotence. "Se7en" & Alien 3" director David Fincher delivers another of his kinetically super-charged, darkly lensed, adrenaline-laced epics about guys gelded by a gilded society who come to life when they stain their fists with blood. At one point, Brad Pitt tells Edward Norton: Penned by "Jumper" scenarist Jim Uhls from Chuck Palahniuk's first novel, "Fight Club" appears to glorify violence, promote fascism, and degrade women. Instead, "Fight Club" denigrates the first, shows contempt for the second, and give Helen Bonham Carter her juiciest role in years.

"Fight Club" spins a yarn every bit as audacious, manipulative and exhilarating as Fincher's earlier opus "The Game." Edward Norton of "Rounders" serves as our narrator for this 140-minute marathon that goes the distance. Caged in a dead-end job, Norton files reams of car accident statistics for a major automaker. Essentially, he must calculate when the best interests of the company are served by paying off car crash survivors rather than demanding a recall. As the narrator states: "A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one." Anyway, the narrator flies everywhere to inspect these wrecks and begins to suffer from more than occupational jet lag.

Inevitably, our anonymous narrator turns into a depressed white-collar insomniac. Lack of sleep drives him to the hospital. Incredibly, his doctor refuses to give him any drugs. He suggests instead that our narrator attend a support group for survivors of testicular cancer so that he can appreciate what constitutes real pain. Surprisingly, Norton discovers that he can purge himself emotionally without fear of humiliation. Afterward, his burden sloughed off, he goes home to his luxuriously appointed condo, hits the sack and sleeps like a baby. Franz Kafka couldn't have captured the malaise of modern society as crisply as Jim Uhls has in "Fight Club." Soon our unnamed narrator begins to gleefully orchestrate his life around these 12-step meetings and support groups for habits and diseases that he doesn't have. He is hooked and happy about until Marla Singer (Helen Bonham Carter of "Hamlet") spoils these gatherings. He knows that she is a fraud and fears she will expose him. They snarl at each other but call a truce and form an uneasy alliance. They will alternate nights at different groups so they won't collide with each other.

Marla poses few problems compared with Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt of "The Score"), a mysterious maverick of a man encountered by our hero during a bumpy plane ride. Durden epitomizes cool; he has everything our narrator lacks. Self-assured, scruffily clad, with all the hypnotic charm of a snake, Durden lurks around the narrator. When they form Fight Club, Tyler lists the rules: "The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is: you DO NOT talk about Fight Club! Third rule of Fight Club: someone yells "stop!", goes limp, taps out, the fight is over. Fourth rule: only two guys to a fight. Fifth rule: one fight at a time, fellas. Sixth rule: No shirts, no shoes. Seventh rule: fights will go on as long as they have to. And the eighth and final rule: if this is your first time at Fight Club, you have to fight." Tyler attracts followers like a magnet. After an unknown arsonist destroys our narrator's condo, he hooks up with Tyler. They create "Fight Club," a form of underground tough man boxing.

Remember "Every Which Way But Loose," with Clint Eastwood or Charles Bronson in "Hard Times?" They fight in dark, dank basements. Fincher pulls no punches when the combatants start swinging at each other. Quite simply, these fights are brutal, especially when a pretty boy (Jared Leto of "Urban Legend") is battered to a pulp until he resembles the elephant kid. Only the knuckle-headed will exit "Fight Club" looking for an excuse to scrap. The friendship between Tyler and our hero takes some wildly out-of-control turns. Tyler takes "Fight Club" to other cities, and then movies to the next level with "Project Mayhem," a demolitionist's fantasy that involves destroying credit card corporations. Our hero balks at Tyler's outlandish aims and the mindless, skin-headed idiots that he recruits for his cause. But it isn't until the third act, so to speak, when "Fight Club" decks you with a shocking revelation: Tyler Durden may not be who we think he is.

"Fight Club" will send some audiences reeling in disgust at its sicko shenanigans—like when Durden urinates in the soap at an expensive restaurant where he waits tables. Don't ask what he puts in the clam chowder. When Tyler works as a projectionist at a movie theatre, he splices frames of male genitalia into family movies! If you cannot handle a film poling fun at you, you probably won't appreciate some of the subversive humor. Twentieth Century Fox appears to have gone out of its way to sanitize "Fight Club," but Fincher is such a good director that his visuals contain more bite than his narrative. Like in "The Game," where Michael Douglas' snotty rich guy had to run a grueling gauntlet—a present of sorts for the man who has everything—"Fight Club" lowers the boom on hypocrisy. The Uhls script brims with several snappy and quotable one-liners.

"Fight Club" will strike some people as pretty strange, too. Any movie that never reveals its hero's name, especially when he provides the narration, is probably too pretentious for its own good. Nevertheless, the performances are flawless, particularly the two leads as well as Meatloaf as Robert 'Bob' Paulson. Meatloaf plays the most outlandish character and milks the role for everything that it is worth. As Marla Singer, Helena Bonham Carter is equally as funny and brilliant as both Pitt and Norton. "Fight Club" emerges as an abrasive movie, and Fincher digs his satirical claws in deep. We live in a media jungle, and "Fight Club" smirks at the notion that we would want to destroy it to return to lives of quiet destitution. With "Fight Club," Fincher matches anything that Stanley Kubrick helmed in his prime and shows Terry Gilliam a trick or two.

"Fight Club" ranks as the main event of the millennium.

FILM REVIEW OF ''REPO MEN" (2010)

No, “Dreamer” director Miguel Sapochnik’s violent, outlandish science fiction thriller “Repo Men,” co-starring Jude Law and Forest Whitaker, bears no relation to director Alex Cox’s cult hit “Repo Man” (1986), with Emilio Emilio Estevez and Harry Dean Stanton, about repossessing automobiles. Instead, “Repo Men” (** ½ out of ****) concerns the sales and manufacture of artificial body parts in the unspecified future and the ruthless ruffians dispatched to repossess these state-of-the-art organs from individuals who fail to maintain their payments. Although it features many suspenseful scenes, some appealing characters and charismatic performances, “Repo Men” looks more often than not like an uneven blend of “Brazil” and “Blade Runner” with an ending that leaves an unsavory taste in your mouth.

Derived from Eric Garcia's 2009 novel "The Repossession Mambo,” this slickly-produced dystopian chiller -vaguely similar to "Repo: The Genetic Opera"--boasts its share of twists and turns that will keep your hands clenched into white-knuckled fists until its one-too-many endings alienates you. Jude Law toplines an incomparable cast and you’ll find yourself cheering for him, even though he qualifies initially as a quasi-villain. Forest Whitaker and Liev Schreiber play unrepentant villains and they milk their roles for every ounce of villainy that they can muster. An opening metaphor about a cat trapped in a metal box filled with a deadly nerve gas will most certainly offend feline animal lovers, but the crowd that this Universal Pictures release is targeting will take pleasure in the adrenaline fueled action sequences and the high-tech equipment with which the principals deal. Hopelessly far-fetched in every detail, “Repo Men” has some elements that should undoubtedly absorb sci-fi fans. The aerosol foam that seals up gashes in the human body like fast-acting super-glue and the miraculous resiliency of the victims as they endure hands probing around inside them is pretty far-out stuff.

In the future, a billion-dollar corporation, the Union, fabricates high-tech artificial organs, nicknamed "artiforgs," so that nobody’s loved ones need endure the heartache and torment of biding their time awaiting genetically compatible body parts. The catch, however, is the sky-high cost of these miracle organs. In fact, few people can afford loan-shark interest rates imposed by the Union once they have signed a contract with the company. As a result of not being able to manage their credit cards anymore than their debts, these unfortunate souls wind up not only paying through the nose, but also often losing those pricey parts. When a recipient falls behind more than three months on their payments, the eponymous men materialize when they least expect them to gut and retrieve the Union’s property.

Remy (Jude Law of “Sherlock Holmes”) and Jake (Forest Whitaker of “Vantage Point”) are childhood pals, and the best repo men at the Union. They waste no time when they are on the job and show no more compassion that a repo man in the car business. Standard operating procedure dictates that our heroes provide the victim with the option to call an ambulance before they eviscerate them. Meantime, Remy’s wife Carol (Carice van Houten of “Valkyrie”) wants her husband to stop repossessing organs and move over into sales so he can allocate more time with their adolescent son, Peter (Chandler Canterbury of “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”), who doesn’t see his dad as often as he’d like. Eventually, Carol puts her foot down and refuses to let Remy sleep with her, much get gain access to their comfortable house. As much as Remy wants to accommodate Carol, he loathes the idea of a buttoned down suit and tie existence on a 9-to-5 schedule.

Matters come to a head during one job when Remy visits a musician. As he is about to give the guy a jolt from a defibrillator to take his heart, the device malfunctions and knocks him unconscious. When Remy recovers, he finds himself in a hospital bed with Jake and local Union branch manager Frank (Liev Schreiber of “The Manchurian Candidate”) hovering over him with their smiling faces. The horror of what has occurred sinks in and Remy wants nothing to do with his new high-priced ticker. Nevertheless, Jake and Frank bring him around and Remy is back on his feet in no time and prepared to pick up where he left off repossessing organs. The problem is that Remy is no longer the same guy and he no longer has his heart in his job. In fact, he ends up in the same predicament that virtually every Union creditor finds themselves in and has to worry about Frank sending out Jake to repossess his heart.

“Repo Men” is a darkly-themed satire that never takes itself seriously, and Sapochnik stages several visceral action scenes involving blood, gore, and stabbing galore that may challenge your ability to keep from chucking up, when body parts are repossessed. Like the hero in Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil,” Remy winds up on the other side and helps out other organ recipients who have gone to the black market to save themselves. Like the heroes in a Sam Peckinpah western, our life-long friends—Remy and Jake--find themselves on opposite sides. Clearly, the producers couldn’t have picked a better time to release this sardonic nail-biter about high-tech medicine as Congress has passed a new health insurance bill. This compelling, sometimes convoluted, amoral thriller shows the two sides of humanity. Ironically, once it has eliminated the problem of obtaining human body parts, our capitalistic society has created a larger problem, footing the bill for manufactured variety. Organ donor epics will never be the same with the advent of “Repo Men.”

FILM REVIEW OF ''BRUNO'' (2009)

Some comedians will do anything for a laugh. Sasha Baron Cohen has already proven his penchant for getting laughs in his previous improvisational mockumentary farce “Borat.” “Borat” (2006) consisted largely of gross-out jokes aimed at exposing racism and religious hypocrisy done guerrilla “Candid Camera” style on clueless, unsuspecting rubes. Cohen repeats the “Borat” formula in “Bruno.” If you thought “Borat” constituted the nadir of bad taste, nothing in “Borat,” including the nude wrestling match between two guys, can compete with the smutty jokes, outrageous sight gags, and flagrant display of genitals in “Bruno.” Indeed, “Bruno” (* out of ****) attacks homophobic rednecks, parochially minded prudes, and nincompoops desperately seeking their 15 minutes of fame in the ubiquitously mediated society. Anybody who doesn’t like to laugh at jokes that are liable to offend them shouldn’t see “Bruno.” Watching “Bruno” is the equivalent of having your friends make a YouTube video of you sticking your finger down your throat to see how far down you can get it before your hurl. Another way to describe “Bruno” would be to think of the last really awful traffic accident that you went out of your way to stare at because everybody else was gawking at it.

Calling Bruno (Cambridge native Sasha Baron Cohen of HBO’s “Da Ali G Show”) conspicuously gay qualifies as a hopeless understatement. Bruno cavorts about in clownishly obvious costumes that leave little to the imagination and takes his gay masquerade to incendiary levels of idiocy. Added to that he utters every word in a falsetto voice that nobody in their right mind would attempt without feeling self-conscious. The thought that Cohen could be taking swipes at Gay Liberation isn’t that difficult to fathom considering the subject matter of “Bruno.” Indeed, Bruno could have stepped off a spaceship from another galaxy with his uber-queer performance that alienates everybody except the most feeble-minded. While Cohen’s cretinous Kazakhstani journalist in “Borat” amounted to a somewhat sympathetic character, nothing about Bruno is remotely sympathetic. At the outset, Bruno stars in a European television program entitled "Funkyzeit." He has to leave his native Austria after he disgraces himself at a fashion show in Milan when he shows up dressed in an all-Velcro outfit. Predictably, every place Bruno turns, he attaches himself to curtains, backdrops, and models and then stumbles out onto the stage in front of the crowd. Afterward, Bruno decides to fly to Los Angeles and to become "the biggest Austrian superstar since Hitler."

Bruno takes a stab at producing a reality show called “A-List Celebrity Max-Out mit Brüno” where he interviews luminaries. He invites Paula Abdul to a posh house where Mexicans on their knees and elbows to act as furniture. Abdul looks around suspiciously at the live-action furniture, and she isn’t quite sure what to make it. Bruno invites her to have bite to eat and Abdul decides to exit when Bruno tries to serve her sushi from the body of a naked Mexican. Later, Bruno tries to ambush Harrison Ford for an interview. Yes, the guy actually looks just like Harrison Ford. Ford doesn’t take long to let Bruno know where to get off. Afterward, Bruno’s agent arranges for a focus group to evaluate his show. During the presentation, Bruno twirls his genitals like a cheerleader and the expressions that he elicits from the focus group are horrifying. Predictably, Bruno cannot imagine why they are so repulsed by his program. Later, cornering the recent libertarian presidential candidate Ron Paul in a bedroom, Bruno begins to disrobe. The witless Paul realizes his error and exits in a heartbeat. Eventually, Bruno decides that the only way that he can scale the summits of superstardom is to straighten himself out. He visits a minister in Alabama who tries to help Bruno renounce his homosexuality. Along the way, Bruno visits a karate studio where he learns methods of defending himself from gays who might be stalking him. The karate instructor is either the greatest actor in the world or he was in on the joke because he looks genuinely convinced that Bruno is deathly afraid of homosexuals. Finally, at a cage fight in Arkansas, Bruno masquerades as a heterosexual fight promoter inciting brain-dead rednecks for forthcoming fights until he shocks them with a gay love making scene that devastated the entire crowd.

Director Larry Charles, who knows a thing or two about embarrassing people in public, helmed Cohen’s earlier film “Borat” as well as Bill Mahler’s “Religulous.” The biggest problem with “Bruno” is that you know some of the scenes had to have been staged with the participants in on the joke. Indeed, in this respect, because it is so obscene, “Bruno” must have been worked out ahead of time. The most clueless of the clueless is Bruno who never realizes how out-of-place that he is around ordinary, everyday people. Reportedly, Universal Studios deleted a scene with La Toya Jackson where Bruno tried to obtain Michael Jackson’s phone number. Nobody can say that Sasha Baron Cohen lacks nerve, because it takes a lot of nerve for him to serve up some of the sights that appear in this 82-minute mishmash. The karate scene is the best that “Bruno” has to offer. The scenes with the religious figures are far too cruel. Mind you, a lot of what transpires in “Bruno” is deliberately mean-spirited. Not even stupid people deserve the treatment that Cohen gives them. Believe me, nothing you’ve ever seen will prepare you for the sights in the R-rated “Bruno.”