Country:
USA
Recognizable Faces:
Russell Brand
P. Diddy
Lars Ulrich
P!nk
Directed By:
Nicholas Stoller
There are movies you watch under extraordinary circumstances. Like at 4 A.M in a plane after a few hours of useless, uncomfortable sleep. I was in a horrible mindset to watch a comedy, but Get Him To The Greek has lived up to the challenge. I picked it from a list of twenty something movie because I remembered AT telling me he found it funny. If he, of all people, laughed in a comedy, I had high expectation. And he was right. It made me laugh in the most difficult circumstances.
Aaron Greene (Jonah Hill) works for a record company lead by Sergio Roma (Diddy) who's in need of a big success. Aaron proposes to reignite the career of his idol Aldous Snow (Brand) who's in free fall since doing an uber-racist song called "African Child". His plan is to make an anniversary concert from his legendary performance at The Greek theater in Los Angeles. To Aaron's surprise, Roma accepts to set up the show and it's up to Aaron to bring his idol to The Greek theater in one piece. And it's one hell of a task, considering Snow is a wild, self-destructive rock star in decline, who's second guessing his decision to go in music at the first place. Hilarity ensues.
Most of the fun of Get Him To The Greek relies in Nick Stoller's ability to engineer chaotic scenes where individual realities clash and the level of absurdity rises with constant vigor. No character is realistic except maybe for Aaron, who Jonah Hill interprets like token-Hollywood-fat-pitiable-guy. The other protagonists, especially Snow and Sergio are over-the-top wild beasts in the vein of Tropic Thunder's Les Grossman. The clash in between their music veteran personality and Aaron's baby-faced innocence is a real show stopper.
Beyond the comic character of the movie, Get Him To The Greek is another "follow your dreams" movie, which is a little bit played out. With Hill's heavy handed play, it sometimes drag along. BUT (because there's a but) Nick Stoller's willingness to portrait a real approach to dream seeking throughout this larger than life tale of rock n' roll excess is admirable. Aaron puts his life on hold and everything he built so far in danger in pursuit of his absolute. It's a real portrait of a driven dream seeker, somebody that refuses comfort and challenges himself.
It's not a game changing movie. It's following the rules of comedy by the book, but it's a bulletproof stress reliever and a sincere movie that tells its viewer something despite being light hearted. "Achieving your dreams is possible, but it's going to require so much work , you'll change a lot along the way". That's how I like my Hollywood blockbusters. Easy to digest, but with clue of what it's trying to say. I'm not going to watch Get Him To The Greek as much as I watched The Big Lebowski (which is in the three digits anyway), but it's worth a try.
SCORE: 78%
