Reeling Backward: "Chuck & Buck" (2000)

Like a lot of tiny independent films, the true legacy of "Chuck & Buck" lies in the careers it launched rather than being a defining moment in cinema itself.

Writer and star Mike White has gone on to a productive career, first acting and then seguing into mostly writing, directing and producing, including "The Good Girl" with Jennifer Aniston and the TV series "Enlightened."

Co-stars Chris Weitz and Paul Weitz had just achieved breakout fame by co-directing "American Pie" a year earlier, and would receive Oscar nominations for "About a Boy" in 2002. They've since transitioned to very successful solo stints as writer/directors, with Chris directing one of the Twilight movies and earning a screenplay credit on the recent Star Wars spinoff, "Rogue One." Paul has been the guiding light behind the TV series "Mozart in the Jungle," and also directed last year's "Grandma" with Lily Tomlin.

Notably, the Weitz brothers have not done much acting since "Chuck & Buck," and based on their turns in the movie it's probably for the best. They're not horrible actors; it's just that White is the dazzling center of the piece. No less an authority than Jeff Bridges called White's performance among the best of the decade.

All three guys straddle the line between comedy and pathos in their work. That's evident in "Chuck & Buck," which is either the blackest comedy every made or a darkly funny exploration of sexuality and growing up. Director Miguel Arteta has similarly built a body of work that's hard to pigeonhole. For good measure, Maya Rudolph makes one of her earliest film appearances as Charlie's snarky assistant.

Back when they were 11, Chuck (Chris Weitz) and Buck (White) were the best of friends who did literally everything together. They were so close they actually kept other kids out of their little club, reveling in their own coolness. Though we later suspect it was also Buck wanting to keep his special friend all to himself.

They were also nascent lovers who engaged in some serious body exploration -- "Chuck and Buck and suck and fuck," as Buck calls their boyhood dalliances.

Time has reeled on, and they're now both 27 years old and following very different paths. Chuck, now going by Charlie, has moved to Los Angeles and become a very successful record producer. He has a lovely fiance, Carlyn (Beth Colt), seems content in his life and has seemingly suppressed all memories of his gay escapades.

Buck is stuck in a virtual time warp, still living at home while taking care of his ill mother for the last few years. When she dies, that brings Charlie back to his hometown for the funeral where they reconnect. Buck makes some unwelcome overtures, thinking they can pick up the friendship right where they left off.

Buck, apparently oblivious to all clues and protestations otherwise, then moves to L.A. on a whim so he can rekindle his relationship with Charlie, withdrawing his life savings to pay for it. Buck is hurt when Charlie keeps dodging his calls and blows him off at a party he throws to celebrate a recent promotion.

This ramps up to increasingly harassing behavior, then to outright stalking -- phone calls every 15 minutes, etc. Based on the timbre of the film, I wouldn't have been surprised at all of it fell over into a straight-up psychological thriller/horror flick, culminating in some desperately sweaty and bloody face-off a la "Fatal Attraction."

But "Chuck & Buck" is really, despite initial appearances, a hopeful story.

Buck eventually wanders into the run-down theater across the street from Charlie's office, where they put on unambitious kiddie plays for wannabe child actors. Buck rents the theater to put on a play he writes himself, a thinly veiled parable of his crushing desire for Buck, squeezed through a "Wizard of Oz" backdrop. Here Carlyn, despite being perfectly nice to Buck -- nicer than Charlie is, and certainly nicer than Buck deserves -- is represented as the evil witch.

I really loved Lupe Ontiveros as Beverly, the cranky house manager of the theater who befriends Buck and helps him put on his play -- for $25/hour, cash up front. She's an older woman who's obviously been beaten down by life, is fast to criticize others but with a center of warmth and ambition that she's never been given a chance to show. Given an opportunity to direct an original play, she jumps into becoming Buck's partner and then friend.

Paul Weitz plays Sam, a terrible actor Buck insists on hiring to play Charlie's role because of the physical resemblance. Sam is a tremendous lout, the sort of guy who hangs around his apartment all day drinking beer and annoying the neighbors with his loud noise. But Buck feels a connection, not just because he looks like Charlie but because Sam seems to have some of the same social wiring short-circuited that he does.

It's the dilemma of the awkward outsider, who sees people getting along easily with each other and wonders why he doesn't have that ability.

Things end on a note that's simultaneously creepy and comforting. After essentially extorting Charlie into having sex with him one last time, Buck moves on with his life -- taking a job at the theater, befriending Sam -- after Sam makes clear he's not gay -- and giving Charlie and Carlyn space.

It would have been interesting to explore what happened to Buck between age 11 and now. It's mentioned that Charlie moved away at some point, though I'm guessing it was before high school.

It's hard to believe Buck would still maintain this elaborate fascination for Charlie if they had stayed friends -- especially ones "with benefits" -- all the way through senior year. It's also difficult to buy that Charlie would treat Buck as such a weirdo stranger if they had kept "sucking and fucking" up through young manhood.

I'm also not sure how much of an exploration of burgeoning homosexuality the film is. Buck is presented less as gay than an unformed man-child, a sexual tabula rasa. He doesn't seem so much attracted to men as obsessed with one man in particular. In the end, his feelings for Charlie represent a dam that prevents Buck from continuing his life's journey downstream.

At once disturbing, funny and fascinating, "Chuck & Buck" is exactly the sort of movie people make at the training grounds of their careers.

Review: "Cedar Rapids"

Critics are supposed to be repositories of sharp opinions and certainty, but I admit I didn't quite know what to make of "Cedar Rapids." This new comedy is springboarding out of the Sundance Film Festival and into theaters, starring Ed Helms as an incredibly naive insurance agent sent to a big conference in the title city.

When I say naive, I mean that Tim Lippe seems to have reached adulthood without having emerged from the cocoon of puberty. He's literally sleeping with his former sixth-grade teacher (Sigourney Weaver), and it's not a wild guess this is the only semblance of a relationship he's ever had. She's a recent divorcée enjoying her sexual freedom, but Tim thinks he's in love.

Tim appears to be a variant of Andy, Helms' dweebtastic character from TV's "The Office," with a double helping of cluelessness and a schmear of the uptight dentist he played in "The Hangover."

"I said, 'Here's a kid who's gonna go places,'" his boss tells him, "and then somehow you didn't."

Tim was born and raised in Brown Valley, Wisconsin, a small town where everybody knows everyone else, and the bad apples get picked out pretty quick. When the hotshot at Tim's company suddenly dies of auto-erotic asphyxiation, Tim is charged with taking his place at the insurance convention in Cedar Rapids.

His mission: To bring home another Two Diamond Award for excellence in insurance and integrity. They've got a three-year streak going, and the boss wants another.

Awards are funny things. It seems like anybody can dream up a prize with no tangible benefits, and people will trip over themselves trying to win one.

At my first newspaper gig, we were turning a sleepy community weekly into a competitive daily, and our editor cleverly dreamed up the "20 Byline Club" to motivate us to churn out copy. It was just a cheap plaque, but anybody who wrote 20 or more stories in a week got their name on it. Mine was plastered all over it, of which I was exceedingly proud at the time, but now I look back and chuckle. I was working 75 hours a week for 17 grand a year, killing myself so an upstart rag could be filled with stories on the cheap, and the only person who benefited from my 20 bylines was the guy at the trophy shop who got a few bucks to stencil a name.

Anyway, Tim meets up with a host of other characters equally as unlikely as himself. There's Dean Ziegler (John C. Reilly), a boozing, loudmouthed glad-hander whom Tim was expressly warned to stay from. Of course, they're forced to be roommates, and soon they're downing shots together.

Then there's Joan Ostrowski-Fox (Anne Heche), nicknamed Foxy, who uses the annual convention as a chance to liberate herself from her boring life, married with two kids. She sets her sights on the gullible Tim as this year's dance partner.

Kurtwood Smith is Orin Helgesson, the association president who dreamed up the Two Diamond thingamajig. He explicitly wants to marry God and business, which prefers the secular life.

The only one who seems grounded and plausible is Ronald Wilkes (Isiah Whitlock Jr.), a straight-arrow type who professes a fondness for "The Wire," which is an inside joke because Whitlock was in it.

There are a decent amount of laughs, and John C. Reilly in particular gets off a lot of incredibly tasteless yet funny one-liners. At a morning prayer breakfast, he complains of "big-time beer (poops) this morning."

My ambivalence about this movie is rooted in the way the director Miguel Arteta and rookie screenwriter Phil Johnston approach these characters. We don't believe for a second in them as real people, or that the cast is invested in them beyond a vehicle for yucks.

Helms and company seem like they're mocking middle-America vanilla-ness, which is ripe for mocking, but they also want to embrace it with a cuddly ending. Even Tim Lippe could see through that ruse.

2.5 stars out of four

Review: "Youth in Revolt"

Michael Cera has become an unlikely but bonafide movie star by essentially playing the same role over and over. (Don't knock it; John Wayne lasted 40 years that way.)

In Cera's case, he's always the smart, verbose kid of ironic disposition and dubious social skills who's desperate to win the attention of a particular girl, or just one in general.

"Youth in Revolt" is a refreshing turn for him because he plays the prototypical Cera character, Nick Twisp, but also Francois Dillinger, the "supplementary persona" Nick creates to lend him the bad-boy courage he needs to land the girl of his dreams.

This comes about from Nick's accurate observation, "In movies, the good guy gets the girl. In real life, it's usually the (jerk)."

Francois looks just like Nick, though a bit older, more sallow, with a faint mustache and facial peach fuzz. He's perpetually smoking a cigarette, staring at Nick with disquieting blue eyes while suggesting he do all sorts of unpleasant and usually illegal things.

Nick is naturally so nice and meek that Sheeni (Portia Doubleday), the smart, French-loving girl he meets while staying at the Restless Axles Trailer Park in Ukiah, Calif., has to hurry along their dawdling courtship with the instruction, "Kiss me, you weenie!"

Alas, events keep conspiring to keep them apart. Soon Nick has to move back to his home in Oakland with his mom (Jean Smart) and her ignoramus boyfriend (Zach Galifianakis).

With Francois' help, Nick arranges to get thrown out of his mother's home and move in with his dad (an ill-used Steve Buscemi), whom he finds a job for in Ukiah. But then Sheeni's overly religious parents send her to a private school in Santa Cruz.

Even worse, Sheeni's longtime suitor, the poet/athlete Trent -- who's heard of but not seen -- just happens to be transferred to the same school.

The film was adapted from C.D. Payne's novel (actually, a series) by Gustin Nash and directed by Miguel Arteta, who's mostly been doing TV lately but got his start with similarly quirky indie fare like "Chuck & Buck" and "The Good Girl."

It's funny in an urbane way, and I enjoyed the characters and spending time with them.
A few things don't quite add up. Sheeni remains something of a mystery -- she's more a collection of a traits a geekboy would imagine his perfect mate to have rather than a believable character.

The movie also has a habit of discovering and discarding interesting minor characters that we wish would stick around a little longer. There's Lefty, Nick's ostensible best friend, who's in the first couple of scenes, goes away for an hour, comes back and then disappears permanently.

Fred Willard has the beginnings of a nice turn as a kooky neighbor with a thing for helping illegal aliens, but again, by the time he turns up again we'd mostly forgotten about him.

Sheeni's brother (Justin Long) shows up just long enough to get everyone stoned and then leave. Vijay, a fellow sex-addled student at Nick's new school, accompanies him on an excursion to Sheeni's school that seems like it was lifted entirely from an '80s T&A flick.

But the good traits of "Youth in Revolt" outweigh its detractions. Francois steals every scene he's in, which is appropriate for a movie that celebrates, or at least recognizes the usefulness of, bad boys.

2.5 stars