If you were a rich,
young, Hollywood celebrity who came from nothing but were now famous what would
you do? Probably something close to what
Seth Rogen did with This is the End.
Get a pack of your friends together and make a comedy about the end of
the world wrought with giant demon penises, sink-hole humor and lots and lots
(and seriously…lots) of drugs.
This is the End is one of those movies where people play
themselves (like Being John Malkovich) but instead of being a weird
introspective movie about a portal into the body of a movie star, this flick
has always-awesome Emma Watson wielding an axe and stealing all the booze the
fellas have.
Rogen brought in
some heavy hitters for this movie: Jay Baruchel, James Franco, Craig Robinson,
Jonah Hill, Danny McBride round out the main cast with appearances from the
aforementioned Emma Watson, Jason Segel, Mindy Kaling, Paul Rudd, Aziz Ansari
and Michael Cera.
We are left to
wonder at the closeness to reality in which these characters play themselves in
This is the End. Franco exhibits
a serious man-crush on Rogen, Hill and Baruchel HATE each other, Robbins is
constantly wearing a towel that says simply: Mr. Robinson, as if people didn’t
know who he was.
Michael Cera plays a
drug addict psychopath who slaps Rhianna in the ass, blows a handful of coke in
the face of Christopher Mintz-Plasse and gets a tag-team style blowjob in the
bathroom Baruchel was attempting to use in Franco’s house.
The movie goes from “over-the-top
Hollywood party” movie to full-on craziness when the rapture hits and hundreds
of people are sucked into the sky on beams of blue light. The “good” people are taken from Earth,
leaving the terran planet to the heathens.
Of course everyone at the party remains.
Eventually the main
cast is stranded in Franco’s house with limited supplies and no hope of rescue
because the world has gone to hell in a hand basket. They battle demons, themselves, Emma Watson
and hell hounds before they eventually make a run for Franco’s Prius, which of
course is almost immediately totaled by cannibals.
The culmination of
all that is funny and wrong with this movie is when Rogen and Baruchel are
running from the cannibals and they encounter none other than the devil
himself. He is in the form of a giant,
horned, fire breathing monster with a proportionally giant swinging dong. In true kid-like humor this is the focal
point of the entire scene, but not directly…you just can’t miss it because
it…keeps…swinging…like the pendulum on the world clock.
Often-times comedies
that try to go “too big” fall flat, but some do not – Tropic Thunder
comes to mind – and This is the End manages to go big but stay small in
the humor department while maintaining a level of serious discourse about how
relationships are strained and tested in life-threatening situations.
Overall I would give
This is the End a thumbs up. You
should check it out!
Tb
No comments:
Post a Comment