This Is the End & Prince Avalanche

This Is the End (Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg – USA) 106 minutes

Prince Avalanche (David Gordon Green – USA) 90 minutes


Canadian childhood friends Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, who wrote the comedies Superbad and Pineapple Express under the auspices of the Judd Apatow stable, step behind the camera for the first time. The result is at times diverting, but more often annoying and desperately shorter on ideas than it thinks it is. Rogen, noticeably slimmed down from his early days in Hollywood, plays himself – as does everyone else in the film – and, at the beginning, picks Jay Baruchel (another Apatow regular) from the airport. Baruchel professes to hate the phoniness of LA and is not impressed when Rogen drags him along to a party at James Franco’s house.

At first, Jay is pissed off at his friend for abandoning him among the party’s glittery but unengaging guests, but then an earthquake intervenes, and appears to be more than your average LA tremor, swallowing up a number of the party’s guests – including none other than Rihanna – and it soon becomes apparent the Apocalypse is upon us. The assembled remaining guests – Seth and Jay, Franco, Danny McBride, Craig Robinson, Jonah Hill, familiar faces all – bicker among themselves as they fight for survival and the film runs through the expected gamut of gags for the constituent group of man-children – how are these guys expected to pull through Armageddon when all they have is weed, beer, beef jerky and an Xbox?

There are a few cumbersome and tasteless jokes along the way, including one where Emma Watson mistakenly believes the guys intend raping her and makes off with the last of their water. The scenario and most of the jokes will be familiar from Shaun of the Dead but that film being nearly a decade old now, This Is the End’s core audience is not going to notice that too much. The one thing that Rogen and Goldberg probably imagined was fresh in their approach was their casting everyone as fictional versions of themselves; unfortunately, there is no genuinely edgy Curb Your Enthusiasm-esque self-deprecation on display – Michael Cera is made to look a bit pathetic and there are digs at both Franco and Hill’s thespian vanity but it is all very complicit and very safe.

You come away with the rather annoying impression of witnessing a litany of frat-boy in-jokes that every one (the supposedly dissident Baruchel included) is in upon. This Is the End made its first appearance as an April Fool trailer for a sequel to Pineapple Express and it resembles that film in its basic structure and tone – with apocalyptic forces replacing the murderous drug traffickers. It’s predictable and occasionally amiable enough and will please Rogen’s teenage fans but as is increasingly the case with the Apatow circle, you feel that all are capable of much better.








The director of Pineapple Express was David Gordon Green, for whom, back in 2008, it represented a radical career following his earlier Malickian dramas George Washington, All the Real Girls and Undertow (the latter of which was produced by Terrence Malick himself). Green has since Pineapple Express continued along in the same vein of boisterous comedy, directing Your Highness, The Sitter and the Danny McBride TV show Eastbound and Down. With Prince Avalanche, he returns to the more restrained tenor of the earlier movies even if he retains a proclivity to cheap laughs.

Prince Avalanche is loosely based on a little-seen 2011 Icelandic film Either Way and is set in 1988, a year after a massive forest fire in Western Texas. The film was actually filmed in Bastrop County, close to Austin, which itself suffered a devastating fire two years ago, but, presumably for reasons of sensitivity, Green chose to move the action 25 years into the past. Middle-aged Alvin (Paul Rudd) and his girlfriend’s feckless younger brother Lance (Emile Hirsch) are working as road maintenance men, repainting road markings and replacing signs and bollards after the fire. It’s a solitary existence, one savoured by Alvin, despite the fact it takes him away from his girlfriend, and hated by Lance, who just lives for the weekend and the opportunity to dip his wick.

We get a sense of the initial promise David Gordon Green showed in his earlier films – he films beautifully the destruction wrought by the forest fires and his casual, wordless observations of people bring home the sense of disbelief and disarray it must have occasioned those made homeless. The only two other characters in the film – an elderly alcoholic road worker and a mysterious woman who has lost her home – are never explained, and the background of the fire maintains a pregnant intrigue all the way to the end. It is a remarkable resistance to the obvious temptations of explaining everything away with signposted narrative developments and earned Green the Silver Bear for Best Director at this year’s Berlin Film Festival.

Where the film fails though is the central buddy-movie plot, which is perfunctory, hastily-constructed and never comes to life. The very first scene, in which the uptight Alvin argues with Lance when the latter removes Alvin’s German-learning tape from the stereo, gives you a taste of the contrived relationship that will follow. You imagine Green had Robert Altman or Hal Ashby in mind when conceiving the pairing, but his characterisation is slip-shod and inert in comparison. It is unlikely that greater diligence at the scripting stage would have lifted the film beyond run-of-the-mill Sundance standard but the whole thing could have been a whole lot better. As it is, it’s an interesting effort sunk by too great a cleaving to formula, which is another feature of Apatow and his circle.

This is 40 - Judd Apatow

This is 40 (Judd Apatow - USA) 135 minutes

I am beginning to learn the folly of expecting too much from a Judd Apatow film, much as one learns not to expect much of a centre-left party when it enters government. It is not unreasonable to have high hopes of him — he is a rare beast in Hollywood, a writer-producer-director making resolutely commercial films, unburdened of the wasteful need to chase Oscars every year. The films, like many of the others in the wider Apatow stable — by Greg Mottola, Paul Feig, Adam McKay and (who would have thunk it?) David Gordon Green — are intelligently scripted, competently made and amiably straddle the divide between solid studio material and a more surreal low-comedy sensibility. You can even, given the thematic and formal continuity in his films to date, make a strong case for him being an auteur.

That, I think, is where lies the problem with his films though. The personal edge to Apatow’s movies gives them a Generation X bildungsroman air and, for all their flaws, they resonate far more sharply with audiences than most mainstream contemporary comedies. With increasing success and creative autonomy though has come a greater tendency to self-indulgence. His last film as director, Funny People,was great for about two-thirds of its running time but it ran out of steam as its plot needlessly changed tack; the last half-hour was kept afloat only by Eric Bana’s stellar comic performance. This is 40 is similarly promising but drifts off into aimlessness even sooner amid a cluttered script and some gags that are woefully weak.

The film reunites a number of supporting characters from Apatow’s second film, Knocked Up, including the unnamed family that functions effectively as a famille Apatow à clef — his real-life wife Lesley Mann, their two daughters Maude and Iris, and Paul Rudd once again standing in for himself. Pete and Debbie are both approaching 40, and are each equally disillusioned with their marriage. Pete’s music label is going down the drain, leaving him with the prospect of having to sell the family home, none of which he tells Debbie about; she in her turn is having problems in her boutique with $12,000 missing from the accounts. A further drain on their finances — and their mutual goodwill — is Pete’s father, Larry (Albert Brooks) who bums money off him at every opportunity to pay for the three infants he has recently sired with his second wife. Debbie herself has a father with other children much younger than herself; he (John Lithgow, sadly wasted in an overly straight role) is a successful spinal surgeon but wounded by his negligence, Debbie refuses to chase him down for financial help.

The family’s financial troubles look like they might be the premise for a strong comedy, echoing the brilliant Apatow-produced Bridesmaids, which drew much of its comic tension from financial stress. Apatow, disappointingly, lets it slide about half-way through and the film then wanders. There is a lot in the mix here, some parts more justified than others. The parents’ conflicts with the children Sadie and Charlotte are deftly sketched (and, you imagine, are drawn from the Apatows’ own experiences) and the script briefly sparks into life whenever Apatow gets potty-mouthed — there are great cameos from Annie Mumolo as Debbie’s friend Barb and Melissa McCarthy as a shrewish school parent. For much of the time the comedy grates though and far too many gags are played out, such as the battles Pete wages with the rest of the family for control of the stereo or iPod to listen to his wretched white-boy rock. Pete also banks his record label’s future on a new Graham Parker album; the old pub rocker plays himself and is a disconcertingly regular presence in the film. The album, naturally, does not sell as well as expected but Apatow continues to milk the joke dry — it’s such a lame gambit that it is not so much a running joke as a limping one by the time the film reaches its end.

Another big problem is the film’s length, something that was already an issue in the far superior Funny People. This is 40’s conceit is far too mundane to drag it to two and a quarter hours without it flagging. The story arc is similar to Apatow’s three previous films, with a strong sense of déjà vu in the final act; there is nothing wrong with that — comedy thrives more often on formula than on formal innovation — but it all gets quite predictable. There is also a nasty element to some of the humour with Apatow revelling in cruel, unpleasant ribbing, such as when Pete mocks a doctor’s Indian accent or when the couple round on the mother (McCarthy) whose 13-year-old son Debbie has previously threatened. It hardly comes as a surprise — Katherine Heigl, star of Knocked Up, publicly criticised that film’s sexism — but it is none the less galling for that. I suppose a film advocating family solidity can only be expected to go in one direction. Apatow would be incapable of being evenly remotely subversive even if he wanted to be but he needn’t be quite so reactionary as he is.