Reviews of Crank 2: High Voltage, Parks and Recreation and Valentino: The Last Emperor

Crank 2: High Voltage
Lionsgate
$30
2-Disc: $35
Blu-ray: $40

Plot: After surviving a mile-high free-fall from a helicopter, hitman Chev Chelios (Jason Statham) is literally scrapped off the pavement by Chinese gangsters, who remove his heart and replace it with an artificial ticker that needs a steady stream of electricity to keep pumping.

Opinion: Complaining that the Crank films are over-the-top and stupid is like accusing reality shows of being exploitative and contrived.  Of course they are-that’s the whole point.  Both the original Crank and its even more insane sequel, Crank 2: High Voltage, are filled with gratuitous violence and nudity, as well as deliberately offensive stereotypes of just about every ethnic group out there.  If there was any hint that directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor intended for viewers to take this stuff seriously, they would instantly be locked up in jail for cinematic crimes against humanity.  But as the opening credits of both movies make clear, the Crank movies are first and foremost intended to be live-action video games, with the hero running through various levels before coming face-to-face with the final boss.  Chev even comes with his own built-in energy bar that has to be fed by regular power-ups throughout the “game.”  In the first movie, of course, he had to keep his adrenaline up in order to counteract a deadly toxin that was circulating through his bloodstream.  High Voltage has him jolting his body with electric shocks in order to keep his fake heart ticking.  Improbable?  Sure, but so are the plots of most video games or, for that matter, action movies.  If I’m being honest, the second Crank may be wilder than the first installment, but it’s a weaker movie overall, spending too much time on annoying secondary characters-like Bai Ling’s Asian hooker with an impenetrable accent-and indulging in flights of fancy (like a brief Godzilla parody) that seem like better ideas in theory than execution.  Nevertheless, both movies provide a major jolt to the system that definitely isn’t for the faint-hearted.

Bonus Features: A terrific two-part making-of documentary reveals the creative-some might say crazy-way the filmmakers made this movie.  (Think lots of little handheld cameras and one of the directors skating around on rollerblades filming the action.)  Neveldine and Taylor also contribute a commentary track and introduce a short reel of bloopers.

Verdict: Buy It

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Parks and Recreation: Season One
Universal
$30

Plot: The misadventures of public servant Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler) and her eccentric co-workers in the Parks & Recreation department of Pawnee, Illionis.

Opinion: Considering how strongly NBC hyped the new Amy Poehler show Parks and Recreation in the weeks leading up to its debut, people might have tuned in expecting to see the funniest show ever made.  It wasn’t, of course, but Parks proved that it had a lot of promise during its sex-episode first season.  Right now, the best thing about the series is Poehler, whose malapropisms and pratfalls provided the bulk of the series’ laughs.  The rest of the cast-with the exception of scene-stealers Aziz Ansari and Chris Pratt-are clearly still finding their groove, particularly Rashida Jones, who is primarily tasked with playing the straight woman.  Parks and Recreation was being watched particularly closely because it was the sophomore effort from the guys responsible for The Office, arguably the most popular comedy on the air right now.  What folks often forget though, is that the first season of The Office was wildly uneven too and the series didn’t really take off until its sophomore year when the cast got into a consistent rhythm.  Based on the first season at least, Parks and Recreation feels like it could follow a similar path.  So stick with it-the best is likely still to come.

Bonus Features: 20-minutes worth of deleted scenes, which do contain more than a few cutting-room gems, an extended version of the season finale and entertaining cast and crew commentary tracks on every episode

Verdict: Buy It

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Valentino: The Last Emperor
Phase 4 Films
$30
Blu-ray: $35

Plot: A portrait of the legendary Italian fashion designer Valentino Garavani as he enters the twilight of his iconic career.

Opinion: Were it simply an E! Channel mash note to Valentino, Matt Tynauer’s fly-on-the-wall documentary would be insufferable to sit through.  Fortunately, the director-a longtime contributor to Vanity Fair magazine-centers his film around the relationship between the designer and his longtime lover and business partner, Giancarlo Giammetti.  Seeing the affection these two men have for each other gives the movie an emotional core that balances its fantastical parade of glam parties and star-studded (Gwyneth!  Madonna!  Elton!) fashion shows.

Bonus Features: A 30-minute documentary about Valentino’s lavish homes in Paris and Manhattan and two short featurettes covering his last show and the making of one of the dresses seen in the film.

Verdict: Rent It

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Also in Theaters:

With the fall season about to kick off, a number of television-themed box sets arrives on shelves this week, beginning with The Office: Season 5 (Universal, $60), which collects the entire fifth season of Parks and Recreation’s sister series along with the usual cornucopia of deleted scenes and mock-featurettes.  Fox’s sci-fi procedural Fringe got off to a shaky start, but morphed into must-see TV halfway through, building to a season finale that literally changed the world.  Catch up on what you missed-plus learn everything that you wanted to know about the making of the series-with Fringe: The Complete First Season (Warner, $60).  CBS’s 13-episode murder mystery Harper’s Island: The DVD Edition (CBS, $43) was an attempt to make a short-form BBC-style series on American television.  Too bad the scripts weren’t up to BBC level-quality or, for that matter, Friday the 13^th-level quality.  After he first made a name for himself as a guest commentator on The Daily Show but before he headlined Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock, comedian Demetri Martin starred in his own Comedy Central show, Important Things with Demetri Martin (Paramount, $20), a series consisting of his signature deadpan sketch comedy.  In non-TV releases, Darren Aronofksy’s freaky anti-drug drama Requiem for a Dream (Lionsgate, $30) gets a Blu-ray release and the low-budget horror flick Rise of the Gargoyles (RHI, $15) pits D-list actors like Eric Balfour and Tanya Clark against stone statues come to life.

The GIANT rundown on scene-stealer Aziz Ansari

In just a few short years, Aziz Ansari has gone from being an NYU Stern School of Business grad to a rising comedy star. After starting out on the stand-up circuit, the 26-year-old Indian-American comic co-founded the cult MTV series Human Giant, which led to memorable roles in movies like Observe and Report and the NBC sitcom Parks and Recreation, which just wrapped its first season and will return to the network’s Thursday night line-up in the fall.  His upcoming turn in Judd Apatow’s new comedy Funny People (starring Adam Sandler and Seth Rogen) due out July 31, confirms that this scene-stealer is here to stay.

Ansari is a Twitter addict.
I used to have a blog, but it was hard to keep up with when we were filming, so I started Tweeting.  I read Diddy’s Tweets and thought they were so entertaining, I mainly wanted to follow what he was doing. It was easy and quick and I really got into it.  Twitter is an interesting idea to me to send whatever dumb idea I have in my head to 17,000 people.

For example…
For a couple of days, I Tweeted like I was on The Wire. I pretended that I was sending messages to characters in the show or that I was going to [the fictional strip club] Orlando’s.  You can’t do stuff like that in your standup routines, because not everyone knows The Wire but on Twitter if you know the Wire you’re into it and if not you can ignore it.  It’s an interesting way to do dumb jokes or niche jokes.

He draws his comic inspiration from real life.
I take things that I’m into and throw them into my characters.  [The fast food chain] Chick-fil-A is something I’m really into in real life, so I worked that into my character in Observe and Report.  And I’m really into Lost and I Am King Cologne, so my character on Parks will probably be into those things too.  I try to mold the character so that it plays to my strengths.  If the character knows what I know or is into the things I’m into I’ll be able to do that character better.  If my character was really into baseball, I wouldn’t know what to say or do because I don’t know much about baseball.  If he’s into The Wire, I’ll be fine.

But he’s not into playing stereotypes.
I’ve turned down plenty of roles where it’s like, “You’re the guy with a thick Indian accent that drives the cab.”  I’m like “Nope, not interested.”  Everything I’ve done, I’m not playing up ethnic jokes.

Ansari takes a walk on the raunchy side in Funny People.
I play Randy, the vulgar comic that other comedians hate, but audiences go nuts over because he plays to the lowest common denominator.  He dances around and does this material about getting his dick sucked all the time.  I asked Judd if I could do a documentary about that character for the DVD so we’re shooting that right now.  It gets into who this guy is and what his world is.  It’ll be like a 30 minute doc—I did so much standup for the movie but only a small chunk will be in there so this will have a lot of that stuff that doesn’t get in.

He’s a disciple of Chris Rock.
When I first started doing stand-up, he was the person that I most wanted to be as a comedian. I know his HBO specials by heart.  As I started doing stand-up more, I discovered guys like Patton Oswalt and they became huge influences.  Those guys are my peers and you see them a lot more than the super famous guys.

Trader Joe’s is his second home.
I don’t have good phone reception at my house, so whenever I do interviews I walk to Trader Joe’s and eat free samples.  I just tried some turkey with apple cranberry chutney—it’s very good.  I’m going to do a couple laps around the store and come back for seconds without her noticing I’m the same person who had one earlier.

His culinary tastes aren’t limited to TJ’s.
I’m really into food and I try to keep an open mind.  I usually like going out to eat.  I’m a big taco buff, probably because they’re so quick and tasty.  And LA has so many good taco places.  Right now I’m going to get some TJ’s chicken sausage ravioli.  It looks pretty good.  I’m not a chef by the way—I just by Trader Joe’s stuff and cook it.

Ansari wants you to know that Human Giant isn’t canceled, just on hiatus.
People are always like “It’s a bummer they canceled your show.”  And I’m like “No, they didn’t cancel it!”  MTV left the door open for us to do another special or something like that.  Right now there’s no official plan, but you never know.  It’s hard to work with all our schedules.  But I’d be psyched to do something with them again.

He’s on a first-name basis with Kanye West.
It’s crazy, because I’m a huge fan of his.  I was really psyched when he came to my show.  I feel weird just talking about it!

Read more about Aziz Ansari in GIANT’s July issue, on stands now.

Rating the week’s TV finales

Lost
I’ve been a fan of Lost since its first season, but it wasn’t until this year that I feel for the show big time.  While previous years have yielded some terrific hours of television, the series was always maddeningly inconsistent, particularly in the second and third seasons when the writers were uncertain how long they’d have to solve the island’s mysteries and thus kept spinning their wheels.  That all changed as soon as ABC announced that Lost would end in 2010; with the finish line clearly in sight, the show swiftly got back on track in its fourth year and Wednesday’s fifth-season finale encapsulated everything that made this year Lost‘s best—and craziest—season yet.  Aside from all the time-travel madness that has blown my mind on a regular basis, this action-packed episode also made room for the best Jack/Sawyer confrontation in the show’s history, a compelling glimpse at the mysterious Jacob that everyone has been talking about for two seasons now, a fine send-off for Rose, Bernard and Vincent (enjoy your well-earned retirement folks!) and the awesome (if expected) revelation that Locke isn’t actually Locke.  Sure there were a few dead spots—Kate and Jack’s “romance” has never clicked the way the writers hoped it would so their scenes together were the perfect time for a snack break—but for the most part the two hours flew by.  The worst part?  Now we have to wait eight months until we find out what happened after the bomb went off and the world turned white.
Finale: A-/Season: A

Parks and Recreation
I’ve been in the minority of folks who have enjoyed the fledgling season of Amy Poehler’s new sitcom, even though I would agree that the series is still very much a work in progress.  Fortunately, much like The Office did back in its freshman year, it ended its six-episode run with its strongest half-hour since the pilot, which bodes well for year two.  As always, Parks’ best asset remains its ensemble, particularly scene-stealers Nick Offerman, Aziz Ansari and Chris Pratt, who scored the biggest laughs of the night with his dead-on spoof of frog-throated rock groups.  You couldn’t ask for a better leading lady than Poehler either; as loony as her character can be, the actress is careful never to turn her into an object of pity or scorn.  I was also happy to see Rashida Jones get more to do last night, although it’s still unclear how she’ll fit into the show going forward—at some point she’s gotta join Pawnee’s Parks Department too, right?  Here’s hoping the writers are able to iron out the show’s rough spots during the summer and return next fall as a lean, mean comedy machine.
Finale: B+/Season: B

The Office
So Jim and Pam are pregnant!  Yay…I guess.  Sorry, but I have to admit I’m over these two lovebirds, as charming as John Krasinski and Jenna Fischer are.  In fact, I’m kind of over The Office in general.  Once a reliable source of laughs, this season has been far too melodramatic for my taste, from Andy and Dwight’s battle for Angela to Pam’s disappointing (and much to convenient) decision to give up art school to Michael’s brief run as his own boss.  That poorly conceived arc also suffered from hiring Idris Elba as the Scranton branch’s new boss and then never allowing him to be anything more than the Big Scary Black Man that intimidates Jim and the rest of the office.  In the past, the writers have always been smart about allowing actors to play against type—just look at Amy Ryan’s winning turn as the dorky HR head that stole Michael’s heart.  But Elba was straitjacketed from the first episode and the way he was exiled from Scranton left a bad taste in my mouth.  I know The Office remains NBC’s most popular comedy, but I’m getting the feeling it’s for the network to follow ABC’s example and announce an end date.  As of now, it feels like the show has only one quality season left…if that.
Finale: C+/Season: C

30 Rock

Funnily enough, 30 Rock also seemed to have an endgame on its mind.  At one point in the finale, Alec Baldwin’s Jack turned to Tina Fey’s Liz and asked her how many years she things the fictional variety show TGS has left.  “20?” she said, hopefully.  “Two if that,” he responded.  In other words, look for 30 Rock to close its doors in May 2011.  And you know what?  I’m okay with that.  As sad as it will be to see the show leave the air, five years is a great run for a comedy series, particularly one like 30 Rock, which spent a lot of this season just barely skirting the edge of self-parody.  The biggest problem this year was the revolving door of big-named guest stars that dropped by in an effort to boost ratings.  While some of these apperances worked (particulary Jon Hamm as Liz’s too-perfect boyfriend), too often the visiting stars only served to take the spotlight off of the show’s terrific cast.  Tracy Joran and Jenna were sidelined for the first half of the season, while Jennifer Aniston, Oprah and Salma Hayek kept Fey and Baldwin occupied.  Fortunately, the writers took things back to basics in the home stretch, bringing the focus back to workplace hijinks.  That said, the last episode did make some room for a ton of guest stars–including Sheryl Crowe and Mary J. Blige–but they were strictly backup for the bulk of the half-hour before ripping into the hilarious musical number that closed out the season in style.  
Finale: B+ /Season: B+

Two new comedies premiered last night–one shows promise, the other doesn’t.

Considering how strongly NBC has been hyping the new Amy Poehler show Parks and Recreation the past week, people might have tuned in to last night’s series premiere expecting to see the funniest show ever made.  It wasn’t, of course, but Parks did pass my “four laugh” rule for sitcom pilots, which basically goes if the episode makes me laugh out loud at least four times, I keep watching.  Right now, the best thing about the series is Poehler, whose malopropisms and pratfalls provided three out of the episode’s four biggest laughs.  (The fourth came courtesy of supporting player Aziz Ansari, formerly of Human Giant and who also has a scene-stealing turn in the movie Observe and Report, which opens in theaters today.)  The rest of the cast are clearly still finding their groove.  As Poehler’s sort-of love interest, Paul Schneider is a little too bland and the teen intern played by Aubrey Plaza feels like a less shady version of Ryan from The Office.  The actress with the hardest job right now is Rashida Jones, not just because she’s primarily tasked with playing the straight woman, but also because her character isn’t part of Poehler’s workplace, which would seem to limit her ability to establish a rapport with the rest of the actors. Jones had some strong moments last night regardless, but I do worry about the writers’ ability to make her an important part of the show.  Parks and Recreation is being watched particularly closely because its the sophomore effort from the guys responsible for The Office, arguably the most popular comedy on the air right now.  (Sure, Two and a Half Men gets higher ratings, but it doesn’t have anywhere near the passionate following that The Office does.)  What folks often forget though, is that the first season of The Office was wildly uneven too and the series didn’t really take off until its sophomore year when the cast got into a consistent rhythm.  Based on the first episode at least, Parks and Recreation feels like it could follow a similar path.  So stick with it–the best is likely still to come.

On the other hand, there’s absolutely no reason to stick with Comedy Central’s new fantasy spoof Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire.  If Parks and Recreation passed my “four laughs” rule, Mandoon conformed to my “zero laughs” rule, which states that if a pilot doesn’t have any laughs at all, I delete it from my DVR without a second thought.  This is one of those shows where you actively pity everyone involved, because they’re trying so hard and yet the show is still so bad.  Set in a Lord of the Rings-style medieval world, the show follows the exploits of the titular warrior, who wields a flaming sword in an endless battle against his nemesis, Chancellor Dongalor.  The gags range from lame slapstick, to lame fantasy jokes, to lame (and insulting) gay jokes.  The strangest thing about Krod Mandoon is why Comedy Central is broadcasting this now instead of eight years ago when the Lord of the Rings movies were actually in theaters and Xena: Warrior Princess (another obvious inspiration) was still on the air.  Not only is this show not funny–it’s totally behind the times.

Click here to read GIANT’s interview with Rashida Jones

Check out a clip from Parks and Recreation below and watch the full episode here