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Trust Weighted
Really Great
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83Trust Points
Wick's Review
Summary - Really Great 4.5
Trainwreck is a benchmark movie for a millennial society that refuses to grow up. Kinda autobiographical, it paints a portrait of a sexual girl named Amy who plows through hookups like a drunk quarterback at a cheerleader convention. Amy Schumer – the current supernova It Girl – based it on her college-age self, so she says! Yet she’s almost 30 in the movie, holding down a demanding job in between her very busy, highly intoxicated social activities. IOW, she’s a millennial manchild with tits and a vagina, as she might put it.
Now to the essentials:
- Is it funny? Sidesplittingly so. Multiple org…, er, multiple LOLs get triggered by this female flick.
- Is it smart? Super smart, even as she mostly focuses on body parts below the brain.
- Is it mean? Really mean. She’s insatiable for more than sex. She’s insatiable for snark.
Secret Time: What’s Amy Schumer’s biggest comedy secret? She employees the old sexual switcheroo, starting with a girl named Amy who models male promiscuity, fear of intimacy included. Then she has guys emote like girls, such as LeBron James’ heart-to-heart with her about her “intentions” towards his BFF.
Speaking of King James, he emerges from Trainwreck as cinematically enhanced as Amy Schumer herself. It helps that she wrote funny bits & lines for lots of people in the movie, including several big-time athletes, Amar’e Stoudemire & John Cena among them. Yet it’s LeBron who is the revelation. Nails is what he is. Money. Deadpan funny. Not quite an MVP performance but certainly Rookie of the Year worthy.
The King is a star. However, the sexual girl is a bigger star, at least in this venue. Amy Schumer has just transgressed herself into immortality. True comedy goes deep and she goes deeper than anybody before.
Acting - Really Great 4.5
Amy Schumer channels many of her standup comedy bits into her quasi-autobiographical movie character Amy Townsend. She manages to marry cutesy blonde affectations with a devastatingly deep intelligence. Wow.
Brie Larson plays her cuter, normal and non-funny sister. The lovely Miss Larson was notable if not incandescent in 21 Jump Street & Don Jon, and now seems to have a future full of sidekick roles in store.
Devin Fabry and Carly Oudin play their 9 and 5 year-old incarnations in a very funny opening scene.
Bill Hader has long been the best supporting actor in comedies like Pineapple Express, Adventureland & Forgetting Sarah Marshall, to name a few, and has recently proven himself a serious actor as well in The Skeleton Twins. Thus it’s no surprise that he’s so likable and relatable in a mostly straight-man role.
Terrific Supporting Cast
- Colleagues
- Vanessa Bayer plays Amy’s goofy office buddy, BFF and deviancy validator.
- Tilda Swinton is nigh-on unrecognizable as a brutally glamorous men’s magazine editor who makes Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada look kind and gentle.
- Randall Park & Jon Glaser as men’s magazine writers trying to live up to their bullshit
- Ezra Miller as a magazine intern with a freaky side
- Family
- Colin Quinn notches a career highpoint as an alcoholic and philandering father.
- Mike Birbiglia as a wimpy husband & father
- Evan Brinkman as a nerdy little boy who rides the razor’s edge of rejection
- Boyfriends
- John Cena – professional wrestling superstar – endearingly mocks himself as a softhearted stud.
- One Night Stands: Bobby Kelly, Dan Soder, Jim Florentine
- Themselves (sort of)
- LeBron James plays himself to great effect: self-deprecating yet not self-abasing. Bravo!
- Marv Albert, Chris Evert & Matthew Broderick join LeBron for an LOL intervention.
- Daniel Radcliffe & Marisa Tomei as the stars of an inane movie
- Tony Romo comes to New York.
- Let’s hear it for the Knicks City Dancers!
- Random Others
- Keith Robinson as guy just trying to watch a movie
- Leslie Jones as an Angry Subway Patron
- Dave Attell as a very funny homeless guy
Male Stars - Really Great 4.5
Female Stars - Really Great 4.5
Female Costars - Really Great 4.5
Male Costars - Really Great 4.5
Film - Really Great 4.5
Amy Schumer teaming up with Judd Apatow is the bomb, the comedy fusion bomb that is. The result is a film that instantly goes into Apatow’s comedy canon, even if Schumer wrote most or all of it.
Direction - Perfect 5.0
Judd Apatow is a past-master at directing Hard R sex comedies that have squishy soft centers inside.Dialogue - Really Great 4.5
Amy Schumer's doppelgänger eulogizes her father as a man who insulted everyone, confirming this by a show of hands at his funeral. He says things that are racist, inappropriate, etc. Yet she goes on to call him the funniest guy any of them know, confirming that by a show of hands. Gee, who ya' really talking about, Amy Schumer?Music - Really Great 4.5
From Miley Cyrus's _Do My Thang_, to a big band take on _Danke Schoen_, to Billy Joel's _Uptown Girl_, to the _NBA On TNT Theme_, the music never misses a beat, a comedy beat that is.Visuals - Perfect 5.0
Edge - Sordid 2.8
Trainwreck earns its pronounced sordidness from meanness much more than sex. Hell, there’s no frontal nudity in the whole movie: male, female, animal. It is, however, super-mean-girl mean. Ouch.
Sex Erotic 2.7
Violence Fierce 1.7
Rudeness Nasty 4.0
Reality - Glib 1.7
PhD theses can and probably will be written about the sociological import of Trainwreck. Already, self-appointed arbiters of feminism have taken Amy Schumer to their breast and then angrily cast her aside for the sin of sucking a male appendage on the cover of the latest GQ. What, now you’re offended? Grow up.
Finally, can’t tell the players without a program? The Hollywood Reporter recently published Amy Schumer’s ‘Trainwreck’ Inner Comedy Circle: A Who’s Who Guide to set you straight.