Amy Schumer tries to find some peace in TRAINWRECK
TRAINWRECK (Judd Apatow, 2015)
Pier 63 Lawn, Hudson River Park
Cross at West 22nd or 24th St.
Wednesday, July 20, free, 8:30
www.hudsonriverpark.org
www.trainwreckmovie.com
Amy Schumer’s meteoric rise continued last summer with Trainwreck, and this semiautobiographical, raunchy romantic comedy did nothing to derail this New York native’s ascent. Schumer, who first broke through to national attention on Comedy Central’s roast of Charlie Sheen, then won a prestigious Peabody Award for her extremely clever and insightful cable series, Inside Amy Schumer, wrote and stars in Trainwreck, playing Amy, a magazine writer who prefers drinking and quick sex to cuddling and sleepovers. Once the deed is done, either she or the dude is gone, and she continues on with her supposedly happy life, which includes her sister, Kim (Brie Larson), who has had the gall to go all suburban mom and housewife on her; her philandering father, Gordon (Colin Quinn), a Mets fanatic who is suffering from MS; and her boss at S’Nuff, Dianna (an unrecognizable Tilda Swinton), a sassy Brit with no time for melodrama. Fortunately, through most of the film, director Judd Apatow eschews the melodrama as well, until he lets it all cave in with closing scenes that undo nearly everything that has been built up before. Thankfully, however, most of what happens before is as smart and funny as it is outrageous and perceptive. Amy is assigned a story on Dr. Aaron Conners (Bill Hader), a sports specialist whose best friend is LeBron James, who is a blast playing himself as a deeply sensitive, extremely cost-conscious man. Amy has to reevaluate her world view when she starts falling for Aaron, going against everything she believes in by dating a nice guy who just might really care about her.
Director Judd Apatow and costars Amy Schumer and Bill Hader laugh it up on the set of TRAINWRECK
The film starts unraveling once Aaron begins treating Amar’e Stoudemire, who is a Knick in the film but since has gone on to play for Dallas and then sign with Miami, and ends with a cringe-worthy scene in Madison Square Garden. However, by then Schumer has already won you over with her ribald appeal over the course of numerous hysterical vignettes that are not quite as surreal as those on her Comedy Central show but are just as perceptive and tongue-in-cheek, skewering everything in her path, from love and romance to sexism and misogyny, doing the kinds of things men usually do in such movies, including those written, directed, and/or produced by Apatow (The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, This Is 40). Professional wrestling champ John Cena nearly steals the show as Amy’s boyfriend who gets into an unforgettable argument with a guy (comic Keith Robinson) in a movie theater, an improvised scene that might make you choke on your popcorn. And King James rules with surprising chops when dishing lovelorn advice to Aaron. Many of the smaller roles are played by yet more comics; be on the lookout for Dave Attell, Vanessa Bayer, Jon Glaser, Tim Meadows, Jim Norton, and Bridget Everett, among others. Yes, that’s Method Man as Amy’s father’s caretaker, while ninety-nine-year-old Norman Lloyd, a veteran of Hitchcock, Welles, and St. Elsewhere, is her dad’s hospice pal, and the two people in the mock dogwalker movie are indeed Daniel Radcliffe and Marisa Tomei. But the stunt casting eventually gets burdensome, especially when Chris Evert, Matthew Broderick, and Marv Albert show up, as well as the Knicks City Dancers. It’s as if Schumer and Apatow didn’t have enough faith in their central story and had to fill it up with lots of silly fluff, which is a shame, because Schumer and Hader have a winning, infectious chemistry, and the film’s unfortunate plot turns ultimately undo much of what Schumer had accomplished as a woman in a man’s world, as writer and actor. But that shouldn’t slow down this express train of a talent. Trainwreck is screening July 20 on the Pier 63 lawn in Hudson River Park in the Hudson RiverFlicks: Big Hit Wednesdays series, which continues July 27 with The Big Short and August 3 with Creed.
John Cassavetes’s 1976 gangster picture, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, is no mere neonoir shoot-’em-up but a deep and involving character study of a low-level jiggle-joint owner who fancies himself a classy, big-time player. Cassavetes regular and close friend Ben Gazzara gives one of his best, most nuanced performances as Cosmo Vitelli, a Korean War veteran who runs the Crazy Horse West gentleman’s club on the outskirts of the Sunset Strip. Instead of just having his female employees take their clothes off to music, he writes, directs, and choreographs ridiculous fantasy scenarios with songs, costumes, and dialogue, hosted by the shlumpy Mr. Sophistication (screen and television writer Meade Roberts) and poorly acted by his devoted harem, Sherry (Alice Friedland), Margo (Donna Marie Gordon), Haji (Haji), Carol (Carol Warren), and his lover, Rachel (Azizi Johari). After gambling impresario Mort Weil (Seymour Cassel) enjoys a night at the Crazy Horse, he invites Cosmo to his club, Ship Ahoy. Cosmo turns the outing into a pseudo prom, taking a limo to three of his girls’ houses, giving them corsages, drinking Dom Perignon, and bringing them with him to the secret gambling club, where he proceeds to embarrass himself and lose twenty-three thousand dollars. Because Cosmo is unable to pay the debt, Mort has a proposition for him, one that weighs heavily on the club owner’s conscience, but he’ll do just about anything to keep his beloved club.
BAMcinématek follows up the opening film in its “Four More Years: An Election Special” series, John Frankenheimer’s conspiracy noir, The Manchurian Candidate, with a very different kind of political thriller, Alan J. Pakula’s analog conspiracy neo-noir, All the President’s Men. Adapted by William Goldman from the book by Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the breathless procedural follows two young reporters who may have stumbled onto a national story with international impact. Woodward (producer Robert Redford) is sent to cover a hearing involving five men who broke into Democratic National Headquarters in the Watergate complex and soon finds himself and fellow reporter Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) caught in a cover-up that begins with the Committee to Re-elect the President (appropriately known as CREEP) and may lead all the way to the Oval Office. The wily veteran newspapermen at the Post — editors Harry M. Rosenfeld (Jack Warden) and Howard Simons (Martin Balsam) and executive editor Ben Bradlee (Jason Robards) — keep a close watch on the youngsters to make sure they don’t screw things up, admiring their hunger but worrying about their lack of experience. Woodward and Bernstein, whom Bradlee calls “Woodstein,” are polar opposites; Woodward is a handsome, conservative WASP, Bernstein a somewhat funny-looking liberal Jew perpetually smoking cigarettes, even in an elevator. But they make one of the greatest detective teams in the history of cinema, armed with notebooks and typewriters instead of guns, knocking on doors and making phone calls. But Redford and Hoffman — an urban take on Redford and Paul Newman from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which was also written by Goldman (Marathon Man, The Princess Bride) — turn doorways and landlines into intense objects of suspense. Redford’s hand and eye movements during several calls from his desk are utterly mesmerizing; don’t miss how he shifts dialing from one hand to the other without missing a beat. (Try it on an old rotary phone; it’s nearly impossible.) As the names keep getting bigger — from Hugh Sloan (Stephen Collins) and Maurice Stans to Charles Colson and John Mitchell (voiced by John Randolph) as the White House is implicated — the film gets better and better, building almost unbearable suspense even though we know what’s going to happen. But All the President’s Men is one of those movies you can’t stop watching, can’t switch away from when you chance upon it on television; every aspect of it is that good.
