This is the End?

Several times while watching "This is the End," Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg's attempt at biting social commentary, I caught myself wondering, when will this end?  Never rising above crass physical comedy, pervasive drug and sexual humor, and mediocre satire, this movie seemed to never end.  Ostensibly about six friends trapped together during the Apocalypse (wearily confused with the Biblical rapture, in which Christians are taken bodily to Heaven), it is really a disjointed treatise on friendship, self-sacrifice, and what constitutes the "good life."

I literally suffered for this movie, riding my bicycle 22 miles to see it, and though that shouldn't affect my appreciation of the movie, it did.  While I wouldn't say that my money was stolen (I used a gift card, after all) I suspect that my time was wasted.  I was never really entertained, and listening to six actors self-referentially dissect their faults on screen, parodying or satirizing their own misbehavior, seemed boorish, at best.  At worst, it was simply tedious.  At 107 minutes long, it felt both rushed and never-ending.  The two minutes discursive about how one should or should not dispose of one's ejaculate ("I'll come wherever I want, Franco") was particularly distasteful.

But, you know, maybe this just isn't my scene.  As one character complains after being dragged to James Franco's house party, he would just rather be at home hanging out with his friend.  I can sympathize.  The competing visions of happiness at odds here are a kind of philosophical treatise.  On the one hand, the hedonism of James Franco house party (a wannabe starlet doing lines of coke off Michael Cera's ass was particularly telling) contrasted with the slacker existentialism of Jay Baruchel, who would rather get high and play video games while reconnecting with his estranged friend, Seth Rogen.

Interrupting this philosophical competition is the rapture, which snatches "those of good heart" into heaven, while leaving the rest (including our gang) trying to figure out what happened.  Added to the mix are demons and hell-spawn intent on eating, raping, and tormenting the remainder of humanity.  The movie is far from subtle, and its maladroit handling of human depravity, what it means to be good, or even the basic theological implications (as one character says, "This means there's a god.  I haven't been living as though there was") left me wondering what other people have been raving about.

Generally, the reviews have been positive.  Many people see in the film a calm reflection on the L.A. lifestyle, the superficiality of Hollywood, and a generally comment on the hollowness of modern life.  I don't see that at all.  I can see where the writers wanted to make those comments, but it was like watching someone pick gnats with boxing gloves on.  In general it was just embarrassing.

More distressing was the blatant mishandling of Biblical material -- far from the most egregious mishandlings of the Bible that I've ever seen, but painful nonetheless.  Willfully misrepresenting the opposition's argument isn't simply lazy, it's deceitful, and blatant plagiarism.  But juxtaposing this mishandling was a disturbing depiction of heaven that remains misogynistic and sexist.  Finally overcoming their selfishness through various acts of self-sacrifice, our heroes are bodily taken to heaven, where they are told whatever they can imagine will come about.

While this worked in "What Dream May Come," it fails here.  Insofar as our selfish characters have learned a token humility, they are incapable of imagining anything but petty pleasures.  Weed is of course obtainable in Heaven -- though one wonders why one would need to be high in Heaven.  But on top of that, women appear as bikini-clad sexpots, representations of their sexuality, and I had to wonder why the producers feel heaven is as sexually exploitative as their Hollywood existence.

This led me to suppose this is their idea of heaven.  By dressing heaven up as a white-linen-clad and somewhat foggy realm populated by the same vapid  characters as occupy their moral cesspool the producers have consciously chosen to reject a life of moral, philosophic, or intellectual perfection and substituted instead a sexually dominant paradigm that casually rejects individual liberties for more than half of humanity.  Even the message that one should reject selfish ambitions in order to achieve perfection is simply a parody meant to highlight the real message: that selfishness is in fact a worthy end in itself.

I found this movie abhorrent and would recommend it to no one.