‘Run Fat Boy’ too caught up in conventional tricks

One of the worst things to see at the theater is a movie with an identity crisis. There are just enough high points to keep it from being terrible, and just enough low points to keep you from praising it.

Run Fat Boy Run is two things: the new Simon Pegg movie and the new Michael Ian Black movie. Over the course of 100 minutes, it becomes clear that this joint enterprise compromises their comedic inclinations.

Certainly, Pegg is in true form – he remains steady in his recent stride, at least in terms of his performance. He is the prototypical double threat as a comedic actor who writes his own material. Anyone who’s seen Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz or even Spaced, from his earlier years, can attest to this.

Black’s humor is strictly surrealist, deadpan and vaguely intimidating. Black’s comedic work has been epitomized in Wet Hot American Summer, The State and Stella – cult classics of a very specific following.

Most of those headed in to see Fat Boy are bound to be fans of one of these two, but, unfortunately, they’ll find watered-down versions of Pegg’s Brit comedy and Black’s absurdist bite. To be sure, there are examples of both, moments that will remind fans of their greatest hits, which are clearly out of sync with what this movie ultimately ends up being.

There’s one problem that would definitely make a Pegg or Black fan flinch – the movie is far too caught up in conventionality. Every sincere moment will have the Black fan waiting for the other shoe to drop; every dramatic moment will have the Pegg fan waiting for some dialogue to invalidate the tension.

As with any movie, there are many paths the plot could have taken. Five years after leaving his pregnant bride, Libby (Thandie Newton), at the altar, Dennis Doyle (Pegg) tries to win back the affection of his ex and son by competing in the Nike River Marathon, a race along the Thames River in London, to show he is no longer the immature and unmotivated man he once was. Along the way, audiences are introduced to “the bad guy,” a physically fit, generous and seemingly good man played by Hank Azaria, who turns out to be a jerk and gets his comeuppance. Audiences are introduced to the wacky friend (Dylan Moran) who believes in Doyle and, despite much bumbling and fooling around, ends up motivating his friend.

There are certain beats a “win-him/her-back” romantic comedy usually hits, and unfortunately Fat Boy goes out of its way to hit all of them. A viewer might think, knowing Michael Ian Black, that the movie probably won’t have a happy ending. As the movie continues, that same viewer might then think, knowing Simon Pegg, that the inevitable happy ending will be nontraditional. In the last five minutes of the movie, it becomes clear there has been some misconnect, as the happy ending and a familiar crane shot of the main character and his son fade to black, an unthreatening pop-rock song starts up, signaling that this is the end. Put bluntly, Run Fat Boy Run finds two off-beat writers who’ve somehow ended up with a much more mainstream movie.

There may be a source of this misconnect, one that might be surprising. David Schwimmer directed Run Fat Boy Run. Yes, Ross from Friends. Based on Schwimmer’s career on and off screen, there is a genre he seems to thrive in — the genre of Kissing a Fool and Friends. This is not the genre of Black or Pegg. If this confusion of three types of comedies wasn’t enough, the movie was produced by Sarah Curtis, who’s spent the last 10 years producing indie dramas.

Although Run Fat Boy Run’s end result is not a failure, it simply isn’t anything special.  The partnership of Pegg and Black has produced something neither fan base will be satisfied with, something mediocre. And yet, this is something that a mass audience might be inclined to see: funny title, absurd characters (even an Indian landlord!), gross-out jokes (a giant blister!) and a nice sweet ending filled with morals. Everyone else, however, may be forced to face the dreaded question: which one sold out?

Luke Marron can be reached at luke.marron@temple.edu.

Drama ‘Bella’ takes an emotional journey through New York

REVIEW – In the era of the big-budget blockbuster movie, it is hard to find a film that doesn’t rely on explicit sex, violence and car chases to draw in audiences and make money. It’s always refreshing to find a good film with a simple story that still has mass audience appeal. Such a movie is Bella.

Bella focuses on a young woman, Nina (Tammy Blanchard), who works as a waitress in a Mexican restaurant in New York City. The movie follows her on a day when her life has hit an all-time low. She is in the midst of a crisis, has no one to ask for help, and, to top it all off, gets fired from her job.

Enter Jose (Eduardo Verástegui), the restaurant’s chef. Jose’s brother Manny (Manny Perez) owns the restaurant, and Jose watches Manny fire Nina for tardiness and missing work without asking for an explanation. Jose, who carries some demons himself, recognizes Nina’s desperation and follows her from the restaurant.

So begins Nina and Jose’s day-long trek through the jungle of the Big Apple. The location provides a chaotic atmosphere that complements and contrasts the two characters’ turmoil.

At one point, Nina stops in front of a blind homeless man who asks her to describe the view in exchange for one of his junk creations. Nina lights up for a moment while talking about the mess of the city.

The movie is not all depressing. Arguably the best scene in the film is the family dinner at Jose’s house. The alternating funny, sweet, embarrassing and heartbreaking antics of his parents and younger brother illustrate the “sentimientos fuertes” that people associate with their families – good or bad. It is when he is with his family that the mystery of Jose is resolved, and some of the revelations the parents have about their sons provide an unexpected and emotional twist.

The enthusiasm from audiences and Hollywood hotshots regarding Bella should hardly be surprising. Monteverde impressed audiences during his undergraduate years at the University of Texas, when he set the record for the most festival wins by a student for his first short film Bocha.

He later broke that record with Waiting for Trains, which won awards at seven major festivals, including the New York International Film Festival. Bella surpassed both those honors when it captured the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival, beating out such films as Babel and Borat.

Even after positive audience responses at the festival, major Hollywood studios doubted the movie’s profit-making ability. To prove them wrong, the filmmakers used grassroots campaigning to spread the word about Bella. The movie has sold out in theaters across the country.

At its heart, Bella is a story about relationships and the bonds of family – and what happens when those bonds are broken. At the movie’s start, Nina and Jose are wanderers. Both characters are looking for ways to cure their pain, but each person approaches it in different ways. In reaching out to each other, they are able to find some sort of peace.

Mary Elizabeth Coyle can be reached at mary.coyle@temple.edu.

New York City’s secret society

For many, New York City is the city that never sleeps. For director Viktor David, it is the home of the Mole People, a society of people that dwell in the abandoned subway tunnels beneath the city’s busy streets.

“I was always fascinated with this idea of a civilization living beneath the city,” said David, the director of the explosive documentary In Search of the Mole People. “I had heard about the urban myth and decided to check it out.”

The main inspiration for David’s film came from “The Mole People,” a novel by Jennifer Toth, who was a graduate student from Columbia University who examined the mythical underground society in the early 1990s.

Following the 1993 publication of her book about the Mole People and their way of life in the tunnels, Toth’s life was threatened and she was forced to leave New York for her own safety.

Six years later, David and a small crew of filmmakers decided to pick up where Toth’s book left off. The production crew included associate producers Erik Dane and Ken Chery, both of whom appear onscreen as the interviewers/tunnel guides in In Search of the Mole People. The project itself took two years to complete.

“We found a lot of people down [in the tunnels] who wouldn’t want to talk to us and wouldn’t be very friendly because they saw us as a threat,” David said. “They were very territorial. We did go back to follow up on the people that we did interview for the film, but by the time we got back, a lot of people had left their homes and the places where we had spoken with them.”

David himself is no stranger to documentary filmmaking. The Russian-born graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts is the founder of Studio7NY, a non-fiction production studio that produces Real New York, a TV magazine for European television markets. David’s American documentary, In Search of the Mole People, has garnered plenty of acclaim and a Telly Award nomination.

According to David, his investigative documentary was supposed to be a segment for Real New York but, in the end, the project took on a life of its own.

“Real New York looks at the most provocative parts of New York City: topics like male prostitution – the things you don’t see. It’s New York beyond the tourist attractions,” David said with a smile. “We had talked about topics for future episodes and societies living underground was one of those ideas.”

In Search of the Mole People, is a dark documentary with enough suspense and creepy subjects to give the creators of The Blair Witch Project a run for their money.

But unlike Blair Witch, In Search of the Mole People portrays real-life men and women living in the underbelly of New York City – living and, in some cases, dying by their own set of rules.

“To [the Mole People], stealing is a bigger crime than murder,” said Dan Fisher, editor of In Search of the Mole People. “They have a completely different mentality altogether.”

For more information on Viktor David and his film, In Search of the Mole People, visit the Web site at www.molepeoplemovie.com.

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Marta Rusek can be reached at mrusek@temple.edu