Observe and Report

I’m pretty sure Observe and Report is a comedy.  It’s billed as one, and it stars comedian Seth Rogen.  But it isn’t funny.  It’s disturbing.

In the film, Rogen plays a functionally psychotic head of security at a shopping mall.  He’s unstable and violent, but appears to have found a niche in which he can mask the former and occasionally indulge the latter.  Over the course of the film, events disturb his balance and he spirals down into a full-blown psychotic episode.

Observe and Report plays this for laughs, but it isn’t funny.  Rogen’s character is, by turns, pathetic and repulsive.  The people he hurts stay hurt.  The people he intimidates stay afraid.  Nothing about this is good, and nothing ends well.  This is a disturbing, scary, deeply weird film, and nothing at all like what I expected.  Perhaps the joke was on me.

Make Way for Tomorrow

I was on board Make Way for Tomorrow, an American precursor to the superior Tokyo Story, for roughly half the movie.  Then, one of the leads make a decision so stupid that he lost me, killed my disbelief, and tuned me out.  Once that happened, I saw for what it was: a one-note movie that plays its note on a title card before the story even begins. 

Here’s the setup: an older couple (roughly 70, which in the world of this film is absolutely ancient) calls their adult children home.  This is not a happy reunion, however.  They’ve invited them to announce to that they’ve lost their home and need to move in with somebody.  The kids are displeased.

Ok, I know where this is going and so do you: it’s right there in the title.  Besides, you’ve seen King Lear and Tokyo Story (What? You haven’t seen Tokyo Story?  Why are you wasting time reading this blog when you could be doing that?  Go on now, shoo.  I’ll be here when you’re finished.).  You know how this works out.

The rest of the film is, essentially, a slog to the bitter end.  But there’s a moment, about halfway through, when a friend presents the man of the couple an opportunity on a silver platter with a couple of mints and a lovely flower in a little vase.  The man waves away the opportunity because he’s an idiot.  This made me so mad, so incredulous, that I stopped seeing him as a man and started seeing him as a cardboard cutout with “pathetic” scrawled upon it in magic marker.  I wondered why the “opportunity” scene was even included.  And then I was done.

Make Way for Tomorrow is technically competent and decently performed, but it failed to make me believe.  What a disappointment.