THE WE AND THE I

THE WE & THE I
Written by Michel Gondry, Jeffrey Grimshaw and Paul Proch
Directed by Michel Gondry
Starring Michael Brodie and Teresa Lynn

Michael: Gut feelings suck.
Luis: Gut feelings suck my dick.

The first time I ever knew I was getting older was when I was waiting in line at a concession stand behind several teenagers. I couldn’t get over how loud they were, how insistent they were to be noticed and recognized. I found them infuriating and I thought to myself, I was never that bad when I was their age, was I? That’s when I knew. And now, Michel Gondry, has captured that familiar feeling of frustration on film, with his latest, THE WE AND THE I. Only Gondry’s version is worse because it all takes place on one singular bus ride.

THE WE AND THE I is an ambitious experiment in filmmaking that Gondry more or less pulls off with the tools he has at his disposal. Like all experiments though, some things go wrong. A bus full of Brooklyn high school students make their way home on the last day of school and square off with each other until the last students reach their stop.  First of all, it takes so long to get all the kids off the bus that it actually goes from light to dark out, in June! I don’t know where these last few kids live but this was a stretch for me. Secondly, you wouldn’t know it was the last day of school unless they told you at the beginning, as none of the kids seem the least bit jubilant about it. And finally, all the kids in the film are naturally amateurs and, also naturally, some are better than others. Fortunately, none are so bad that it distracts from the film.

That’s what doesn’t work about the film. What does is actually pretty interesting. By forcing us to spend this much time in cramped quarters with these kids, they inevitably show their hands. As they all yell over each other and bully each other and blow things way out of proportion, THE WE AND THE I becomes akin to watching a nature documentary. They have no respect for others but they have even less respect, or understanding for that matter, for themselves. And, while I may have wanted to pull that bus over and throw them all off of it to start, I finished by feeling rather sorry for them. Maybe next time I am annoyed by teenagers in public, I will just go up to them and give them a hug instead of cursing them under my breath.

THE GREEN HORNET

Written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg

Directed by Michel Gondry

Starring Seth Rogen, Jay Chou, Cameron Diaz, Tom Wilkinson and Christoph Waltz

Britt Reid: That is the balls.

I’ve got to give it up for Seth Rogen. The man has gone from full on geek to perpetual stoner to slimmed down, unexpected superhero in Michel Gondry’s most indisputable attempt to penetrate the mainstream, THE GREEN HORNET, a big budget 3D adaptation of the popular 1930’s radio series. Rogen’s transformation is admirable but ultimately not as successful as it needed to be to irradicate the image of the affable teddy bear character we’ve all come to know, love and get slightly tired of in recent years. Subsequently, THE GREEN HORNET plays like a laid back stoner flick without the actual weed, and Rogen, without the haze of smoke surrounding him, is just not as funny as he is when he’s high. That said, he could have been high throughout the entire production for all I know. It just isn’t written in this time.

Rogen co-wrote the script to THE GREEN HORNET with SUPERBAD co-writer, Evan Goldberg. Under Gondry’s somewhat scattered direction, their screenplay becomes a surprisingly well-woven send-up of many superhero clichés, while remaining reasonably grounded in a realistic place, with the exception of random misplaced bursts of Gondry’s hyperactive imagination. Rogen plays Britt Reid, the only heir to his father’s (Tom Wilkinson) newspaper fortune. Britt lost his mother when he was just a boy and his relationship with his father has always been strained, living in that vastly cast shadow. His life is one party after another until his father dies suddenly. Unable to resolve the public admiration for a man who never seemed to care about him, Britt decides he is going to save the world his way – in a green mask and hat, one bad guy at a time.

Of course, Britt can’t do this alone so he enlists the help of his super genius buddy, Kato (Jay Chou), to be his alter ego, The Green Hornet’s sidekick. He also takes Cameron Diaz into his fold but she just looks confused as to when her career became about playing such superfluous secondary characters the whole time. Together Britt and Kato form something much stronger than your everyday bromance; each of them now orphaned, they actually become brothers. It is their relationship, uneven and influenced by class and status yet still devoted, that makes THE GREEN HORNET so relatable and real, which is a lot to say about a movie where guys can stop time in their mind. This is the age of the every man superhero after all. The trouble with regular guys though is that they are often nowhere near as funny as they think they are.