A High-Concept Disappointment?: Analyzing the Yes Man Trailer

Anyone else find that their television sets were inundated with TV spots for Jim Carrey’s new comedy, Yes Man, during the end of September and early October? It struck me as odd that they would start pushing the film so forcefully on television with the release date a solid two months away (the website says 12/19/08 but the ads vaguely state Christmas). The plot involves a callous jerk who rejects most ideas and people but one day changes his mind (or maybe gets hypnotized by Terrence Stamp?) and finds himself unable to respond to a question in anything other than the affirmative. The problem with marketing a high-concept formula like this is that the core humor of the film is contained in set pieces and easily extractable dialogue exchanges (e.g. Carrey receives an e-mail asking if he would like to increase the size of his penis and he answers aloud to his co-workers) that work just as well as stand-alone clips as they do in the context of the film. This means that the film itself can only be effective if the threads holding together the set pieces are strong enough to match the comedic high jinks already consumed for free in the advertising. You can’t sit through a 90-minute film exclusively made of Carrey responding yes to crazy/embarrassing questions (it’s hard enough stringing it out in a 2-minute trailer) so by fundamental nature of plot concerns, it needs to contain extra material to stretch out the conceit past sketch-length. But the problem is that the marketing sells it solely on the high-concept scenario and that’s what will compel people to head out to the multiplex. As the advertisements already offer a vast array of these scenarios, the film is setting itself up for failure, at least in terms of quality if not finance – it takes a lot for a Carrey comedy to gross under $100 million.

The most obvious comparisons to previous Jim Carrey vehicles are Liar Liar and Bruce Almighty. The Yes Man trailer seems very much in the same mold as Liar Liar. Yes Man is adapted from a 2006 memoir of the same name by British journalist Danny Wallace. According to Publishers Weekly Wallace was inspired to answer yes to everything by an encounter with a stranger on a bus. His decision to spend a year saying yes was self-governed. But the marketing for the film makes it look like Carrey’s decision is not entirely self-motivated as we see a clip of him getting hit on the head by a motivational speaker and blankly responding yes. The implication here is that his decision to say yes is against his will (i.e. “I CAAAAAN’T LIIIIIIIEEEEE”). Scrutiny of the subsequent dialogue in the trailer suggests that his character is merely influenced by the motivational speaker rather than possessed but still, the connection to the zany antics of Liar Liar is firmly established.

Based on the subsequent montage of Carrey flying a plane, riding a motorbike, playing DDR and talking down a suicide attempt, the film follows a fairly rote formula of nasty, up-tight guy reclaims life by opening himself to new experiences and discovering humanity. No wonder the marketing keeps pushing the word Christmas – when else to release such schmaltzy fare?
Liar Liar’s strength beyond the conceit of Carrey being unable to lie was that it was actually a fairly wholesome family film that not only tickled funny bones but warmed hearts with its story of a fractured family’s fairy tale reconciliation. Bruce Almighty on the other hand, in which Carrey is bestowed deity powers from God, turned fairly lame fairly quickly once the “I’ve Got the Power” montage was over and the syrupy goodwill-to-all themes took over. Too risqué for a family film but not riotous enough for the post-teenage crowd, Bruce Almighty flounders when it isn’t milking its conceit. Could Yes Man follow suit?

Well, Yes Man is co-written by Nicolas Stoller who directed the simultaneously raunchy and cuddly Forgetting Sarah Marshall and collaborated on the screenplay for another Carey vehicle, Fun with Dick and Jane, so perhaps there is some potential for Yes Man to sustain itself beyond its central shtick. Fun with Dick and Jane was based on an easily marketable ploy – suburban mom and dad turn to petty crime to pay the bills – but excelled by using its concise running time to efficiently comment on corporate greed and the state of the American economy (maybe it was released 3 years too early?) rather than loading up on easy set-pieces. True, the moment of Carrey accidentally sticking up a friend was in every commercial but there was a darker current to that scene in the actual film.

Fun with Dick and Jane is one of Carrey’s lesser remembered broad comedies, despite grossing $110 million in 2005, it’s faded from memory due to its less easily extractable comic scenarios and its mostly negative reviews. James Berardinelli at ReelViews criticized Carrey for being past his prime and for yearning to recapture the glory of his early comedies: “Carrey's antics give the appearance of someone out of practice trying too hard. They're more awkward than funny. His body's not as plastic at age 43 as it was at age 32.” I disagreed with him then but fear that it might be necessary to reposition his point toward the case of Yes Man. In the new film, Carrey’s pals seem to be played by Danny Masterson (That 70s Show) and Bradley Cooper (Wedding Crashers) and his romantic interest is Zooey Deschanel (Elf). Carrey (who turns 47 in Januarys) is almost 15 years older than all of them and their casting can’t help but underline the fact that Carrey has gotten too old for this kind of comedy. Aging down the female romantic interest is a sad but inevitable trend in Hollywood but even aging down the buddies? It’s possible the filmmakers will work this age discrepancy into the plot for some added poignancy but something tells me it’s more likely to go by untouched.

But I mean don’t get me wrong, it’s still a Jim Carrey movie so I’ll definitely see it when it opens. It’ll probably be lame but I can’t say no to the man who brought Ace Ventura into the world. My main gripe (for now) is with the advanced promotion and how it preordains the film as a letdown. Next time a TV spot appears during SNL or The Office I’ll just have to switch the channel in the hope of preserving any fresh yuletide yuks for my multiplex viewing.

Jumper: Stop the World - I Want to Get Off

And here my love affair with Doug Liman’s films comes to a crashing halt. I still respect his rebelliousness and refusal to churn out a by-the-numbers action flick and suspect that Mr. and Mrs. Smith will come to be held in high regard in 20 years time but his latest output, Jumper, is a seriously boneheaded film.

The plot involves a snotty kid named David (Star Wars’ Hayden Christensen) who at age 16 developed the supernatural power to teleport himself from place to place as a way of escaping a schoolyard bully and his alcoholic father. The majority of the film takes place 8 years later, where David has grown up to be a bank robber with a plush NYC bachelor’s pad and the ability to sit atop the Great Pyramids and surf the Maldives all before breakfast. His life of hedonistic excess is put into jeopardy when a mysterious group of global watchdogs called Paladins catches on to his spatial transgressions. Led by the white-haired Roland (Samuel L. Jackson), the Paladins have been hunting down and killing jumpers since the middle ages, at least that’s what we’re told by Griffin (Jamie Bell), another stunted adolescent who shares David's teleporting ability and unpleasant personality.

Aside from the general illogical behavior and young adult fiction vibe (both of which I admittedly kind of enjoy) what shocked me about this film is its utter irresponsibility and teen-targeted nihilism. It’s one thing when Jason Bourne leaves a trail of destroyed cars and presumably injured or deceased civilians in the wake of exposing government corruption; it’s quite another when a pair of spoiled, immature, 20-year-old mischief makers traipse around the globe causing death and destruction with their every move. The mayhem begins with the wrongful incarceration of a childhood bully – slightly understandable – but the ill-treatment of innocent bystanders escalates at an alarming rate. It’s as if the filmmakers are trying to up the ante of reckless behavior without any sort of conscience. Most disgusting are instances of Griffin purposefully driving at high speed toward a woman with a stroller before ‘jumping’ to a different street, scaring a little boy by making eye contact and yelling ‘boo’ before ‘jumping’ and the most egregious example in which Griffin ‘jumps’ with a bewildered truck driver into an Iraq war-like setting with live ammunition and proceeds to casually walk away from the battlefield while a tank drives by in the background, crushing the truck and presumably the innocent driver inside.

SPOILERS AHEAD

There is an opportunity for the film to redeem itself in the third act but despite a few hints at a third act shift in audience identification, it fails to capitalize on its prospect. In the last thirty minutes or so, it becomes increasingly obvious that the film’s purported villains – The Paladins – are in fact the heroes, methodically hunting down and trying to stop these bank robbers and trespassers from wreaking havoc upon the unsuspecting world. And yet the film keeps asking us to identify with the snotty brats instead.

There is an unrealized irony about the ending in which David transports a ‘villain’ to a deserted plateau far out of reach from civilization and before deserting him says, “I could have left you with the sharks” as if to say, hey, I am a nice guy after all. What the film doesn’t seem to realize it is saying here is that the ‘hero’ is essentially telling the villain that instead of killing him swiftly he has decided to leave him to face a much more drawn out death that likely ends in starvation, dehydration or heat exhaustion.

Their unbridled lawlessness and general disregard for humanity would be acceptable if there was some buried allegory about the detrimental effects of absent parents on their children and the repercussions that effect the world on a global size. But other than a couple of comments that suggest the imperative of nurture for children aged five, any such commentary has been excised during the script rewrites or studio-imposed editing. I don’t want to blame Doug Liman completely for the disaster that is this film and if Fox allows him to release a two-hour director’s cut, I’ll happily rent it. I agree with London Student film critic Nick Jones who states, “Liman’s direction retains the energy and excitement of previous films, but fails to anchor the story in any reality or consistency.” Given Liman’s notorious track record for infuriating studio brass and having his films go through multiple permutations as he and the studio struggle to reach an agreement (Steve Fishman recently wrote a fantastic profile on Liman for New York Magazine), I hold out hope that Liman had at one point hoped to cast scorn on the Jumpers and reposition the reception of the Paladins in a remarkable third act twist.

I keep the hope alive because there are a still few murmurs of the awareness of the film’s disregard for humanity lurking around the edges of the film. For starters, there’s the definition of the word paladin. According to dictionary.com, Paladin can be defined as: 1. any one of the 12 legendary peers or knightly champions in attendance on Charlemagne 2. any knightly or heroic champion or 3. any determined advocate or defender of a noble cause. Given this understanding, the moniker Paladin is actually quite revelatory about the film’s moral positioning although the movie never spells it out as such and I confess I had never encountered the word before but still it does provide an indexical trace of filmic conscience. There’s also a scene early on in which David watches a news report about hurricane victims and the reporter pleas “there looks to be no way anyone can get here in time.” Fans of Superman might expect this to lead to David ‘jumping’ to the disaster zone and saving the day. But in Jumper we instead have David shrug, turn off the television and ‘jump’ to London so that he can go bar hopping and pick up girls. This scene could be usefully positioned as the setup for an interesting social commentary but from there on out the film seems to relish and even endorse David's increasingly solipsistic behavior.

The failed potential of this prospect comes back full force in the film’s final scene. How can one not be excited about the perversity of ending a big budget studio action flick that with the reunion between a mother and son that concludes not with an embrace but with the mother putting forth a legitimate death threat to her son. It’s just a shame the film gives off the impression it’s far too dumb to realize the subversive potential of this moment and is more interested in the glossy stereotype of having David embrace his love interest and 'jump' off into the sunset.

This Movie Sucks: Juno What I Mean?

Alright, so that’s overly hostile. Juno is okay and I concede that by the end, it’s difficult not to get wrapped up in things, but this movie is infuriatingly overrated. The angry rant that follows is a response to the near universal praise – both critical and popular – and the impending Oscar nomination for Best Picture that will be announced on January 22nd.

The only form of commiseration for my distaste for Juno I have so far been able to find comes in the writings of New York Magazine’s ever-reliable David Edelstein, L Magazine’s film editor Mark Asch and the Chicago Sun-Times’ pop music critic Jim DeRogatis. In hope of finding more people with my feelings I figured I’d store my dissatisfaction with the film electronically.

My biggest bone of contention is the dialogue by screenwriter Diablo Cody. It’s all so overwritten and so painfully yearning to be hip. Admittedly, I have enjoyed films in which the dialogue is just as blatantly overcooked – Woody Allen, the occasional Wes Anderson film – but the characters in Juno talk in a code indiscernible to the viewer. Just like those smug cats in the Ocean’s sequels, Juno (Ellen Page) and her ilk talk in purposefully mystifying mumbo jumbo that reeks of “I’m cooler than you are, mere moviegoer.” Edelstein voices similar exasperation nicely, “The relentlessly jokey banter of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is taken to a screechy new level. Every character’s wisecracks come from the same place, like in bad Neil Simon.”

What separates Juno from the work of Woody Allen or Wes Anderson is that the characters in their films all exist within a confined universe in which everyone talks that way. Juno, on the other hand, offers a maddeningly inconsistent universe. During the first twenty minutes – twenty of the most unbearable minutes of 2007, I honestly contemplated walking out of my screening to find refuge in No Country for Old Men – we are bombarded with the same sort of rapid-fire banter from every single character. If the film had continued that way, I would have indeed hated it but at least it would have been true to its universe. Instead, it introduces us to the adoptive parent characters, Mark (Jason Bateman) and Vanessa (Jennifer Garner), who are complex and intriguing characters who actually talk like – gasp – human beings.

Not surprisingly, this is around when I started warming to the film; when I realized not everyone in the film talked like Juno. I was relieved that I found a few characters to invest interest in but I was also frustrated because it meant the first twenty minutes were so incredibly disingenuous. If we are to later find out that sane people also inhabit this universe, why initially surround Juno only by characters just as irritatingly verbose as her: the cheerleader best friend (Olivia Thirlby), step-mom (Allison Janney), the abortion clinic receptionist, the anti-abortion protestor and most egregiously, the convenience store employee (Rainn Wilson)? A.O. Scott does make an eloquent case for excusing the film’s horrible beginning: “like Juno herself, the film outgrows its own mannerisms and defenses, evolving from a coy, knowing farce into a heartfelt, serious comedy.”But even if I were to accept Scott’s words or any of the other ways the film’s proponents choose to forgive the lousy opening, my reservations extend throughout the entirety of the film and beyond my base hatred for the irritating Juno as a character.

One of Mark Asch's many well-argued frustration is over the film's endemic striving to be hip quality, attacking the film for being just as hung up about being cool as the characters are depicted to be: “Get ready for shoehorned-in name-drops of Sonic Youth, the Melvins, the Runaways, Suspiria, etc.” Out of those, the ones that pissed me off the most were the Sonic Youth and Suspiria scenes because they’re written and presented with such pretentiousness. In the Sonic Youth scene, Mark puts on a record and tells Juno that she’ll have never heard anything like this and the camera lets it play out with great revelation, even though it’s the same Carpenter’s cover that was used 12 years ago and less crassly in Peter Jackson’s The Frighteners. Even more frustrating is when Mark forces Juno to watch Hershell Gordon Lewis’ The Wizard of Gore after she proclaims Dario Argento to be the best blood and guts horror director. While the two watch the film, Juno gasps in wonderment, “Wow, this is even better than Suspiria. The sticking point here is that anyone who has seen more than one Argento film would never compare the supernatural and less bloody (at least in terms of Argento and Lewis) Suspiria to The Wizard of Gore. Yes, my disgust for these two scenes is an example of nit picking to a considerable degree but it gets under my skin because the film is so clearly proud of their “offbeat” references. To these scenes I respond with DeRogatis’ opening statement, “Get real, 'Juno': You're a phony.”

I don’t want to get too wrapped up in the film’s stance (or lack of stance) on abortion (DeRogatis and Asch already do a sterling job dissecting the matter) but I will say that the rosy-colored everything’s fine ending does make me a little uneasy about the positive portrayal of teen pregnancy that is presented. Maybe the scenes of the eight-month pregnant Juno strutting through the halls of her high school without concern or her step-mother defending her honor during an ultrasound can offer beacons of hope for any real-life girls in similar situations but the detriment of the film’s decision to omit the full effects of the social stigma that would have ensued outweigh any illusory scenes of empowerment. That we don’t see active menace through scorn, ridicule or even violence from her classmates or neighbors or that her schoolwork is in no way impacted by a nine month pregnancy is enough of a problem. But what really gets me is the unbelievable aspect of Juno’s cheerleader friend sticking by her side throughout the pregnancy. It extends well beyond my realm of suspension of disbelief to buy that a cheerleader, no matter how quirky, would still be seen conversing with a pregnant sixteen-year-old girl in the super-judgmental world of high school, let alone continuing to eat with her at lunch time (sitting inside some sort of school trophy case for that matter, but that’s another issue…).

So, there are some positives in the film: Bateman’s performance, it’s got me listening to Mott the Hoople’s “All the Young Dudes” again, some very successful lines (“Paulie Bleeker? I didn’t think he had it in him.”) and perhaps most importantly, as pointed out by A.O. Scott, “[the film] respects the idiosyncrasies of its characters rather than exaggerating them or holding them up for ridicule.” It’s this last point that makes the film tolerable and what distinguishes itself from the wretched Napoleon Dynamite, a film it inevitably evokes in style, which – surprise, surprise – is also a film that Cody cites as an influence on her script in a recent interview with Matt Hoey in Written By.

Yes, I admit my distaste for Juno is impacted by the near-universal love for the film and had it not caught on like wildfire, I would be fine to let it fade away into the recesses of other 2007 films that irked me in such a way. But it’s Edelstein’s chilling premonitory words that scare me into adding my two bits on the matter: “Prepare yourself for the Juno generation.”