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Non-Review Review: The King of Staten Island

Posted on June 8, 2020 by Darren

The King of Staten Island is very much a typical late Judd Apatow project, in the style of Funny People, This is 40 or Trainwreck.

It is a serio-comic character study that essentially tries to wed the juvenile comedic sensibility that Apatow brought to the mainstream with films like Knocked Up and The 40-Year-Old Virgin with the more earnest adult coming-of-age stories that were popular in the early nineties. The results are sporadically funny and affecting, often built around a single or multiple star personas. In each cause, the quality of the film largely comes down to the quality of the star anchoring it, with Trainwreck standing out due to strong turns from both Amy Schumer and Bill Hader.

“King of One of the Boroughs of New York!”

The King of Staten Island tries this approach with Pete Davidson, the stand-up comedian who is currently best known for his work on Saturday Night Live that often involved him directly addressing his own personal controversies. As with Trainwreck, the film is driven by Davidson who shares a co-writing credit and whose character is transparently modelled on Davidson himself. As such, Davidson’s star persona exerts a strange gravity on The King of Staten Island, all the more notable for the fact that this is really Davidson’s first proper starring role of itself.

The King of Staten Island is occasionally moving and engaging, but it never manages to escape from Davidson’s shadow. Simultaneously, there’s something slightly frustrating in the way that for all The King of Staten Island transparently draws from Davidson’s own experiences and history, its narrative structure is painfully generic. Its central character arc is so routine as to undermine any real sense of personality or intimacy. This is the central paradox of the film. The King of Staten Island is both unable to escape Davidson’s gravity and unable to bring itself to look directly at him.

Fighting firemen.

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Non-Review Review: The Five-Year Engagement

Posted on June 13, 2012 by Darren

The Five-Year Engagement is the best romantic comedy of 2012 so far. Reuniting the talents of Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller, the film manages to offer a refreshingly frank and honest perspective of romantic relationships. The interactions feel more organic, the third act crisis is rooted in something more primal and relevant than some idle miscommunication and the resolution isn’t based on the notion that people can inexplicably change. Like Segel and Stoller’s superb Forgetting Sarah Marshall, The Five-Year Engagement is predicated on the assumption that love must mean accepting and embracing your partner for who they are, rather than what you want them to be. It’s a little depressing that this moral feels almost subversive in this day-and-age of formulaic and generic romantic comedies, but there’s no denying that The Five-Year Engagement is head-and-shoulders above most of its competitors.