This is the End (2013)

Film: This is the End (2013)
Stars: Seth Rogen, Jay Baruchel, James Franco, Jonah Hill, Craig Robinson, Danny McBride...and a host of hilarious cameos
Director: Evan Goldberg
Oscar History: The closest it got is its reference to Hill's Oscar nomination in the funniest scene in the movie.
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Every year or so, there's a movie that tickles me that I didn't expect to do so.  Tropic Thunder, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Pitch Perfect-they come out of nowhere and somehow hit me right where I want to be hit.  When I found myself non-stop laughing at the trailer to This is the End, I was wildly surprised.  After all names like Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, and Danny McBride hardly have me clamoring toward a movie under normal circumstances.  And yet, I felt my year wouldn't be complete until I saw the film.  Thankfully for myself (and for anyone who took the chance to see this instead of hitting another documentary at their local Landmark), I was right.  This is a delightfully twisted and crazy movie.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is meant to be a real-life reaction to the apocalypse, with every single character playing a fictionalized version of themselves.  James Franco plays an aloof artistic poser, Jonah Hill is pretentious and phony, Danny McBride a psychotic partier, and the opening scene gives us at least a dozen cameos of random Judd Apatow actors and celebrities (the best in the party scene is clearly Rihanna, who nails her diva-tude with the just the right amount of "is she acting"-take that Battleship critics!).  We see multiple people elevated to heaven in a scene in a gas station (reality check: anyone actually think that many people in Los Angeles are going to be raptured?) and then we bunker in with the six main guys, with only sporadic appearances from other actors later in the movie.

The film lives and dies off the chemistry of these men and our assumptions about their real life personas.  While none of them are clearly like this to this extreme in real-life (at least I would assume so), there has to be a thick enough line between our knowledge of their public personas and how they're acting to make the humor work.  While James Franco and Danny McBride give the best performances of the six men, Jonah Hill gets the cheekiest and most biting jokes.  Hill, who has gotten a bit of a reputation as somewhat ladder-climbing and pretentious since his Oscar nomination for Moneyball, gets so many great one-liners throughout the film.  The part where he's discussing the helicopter that will come for the A-listers ("they'll start with Clooney, Sandra Bullock, me") had me rolling, and when he introduces himself in a prayer as "Jonah Hill...from Moneyball," it's impossible not to have mad respect for someone that can so quickly laugh at himself.

All of the actors, though, have those moments.  You have to love the scene where they're sitting around, confessing their worst sins, and James Franco states that he "slept with Lindsay Lohan," and you sort of wonder if this happened in real life (who would honestly know how much truth lies in this script, which is of course part of the fun).  There's a killer extended cameo for Emma Watson midway through the film where Watson takes a battle axe to the six men and threatens to kill them all if they don't give her their water (after the six men wonder which one of them is most likely to attempt to rape her...and yes, it's the kind of movie that can go there with a joke of that nature).  It's the sort of scene that so boldly crosses the line into bad taste, but leaves enough heart and cleverness on the other side to not descend into horrifying (the film is always witty with the bawdy, and never goes into Adam Sandler-level anarchy).

The best scene in the film is the one we all became familiar with during the red band trailer (between This is the End and The Devil Wears Prada a few years back, can we all agree that single scene trailers may be the best thing to happen to our spoiler-infused lives?), with McBride taking down each actor with utter panache ("James Franco didn't suck any dick last night-now I know you all are tripping").  It's a perfect microcosm of the larger film-one that crosses the lines of our "knowledge" of celebrities and plays with it.  By the time Channing Tatum shows up as a sex-slave gimp to McBride's Road Warrior, we've hit the icing stage of the film; even a cheesy, non-sensical ending can't stop this movie from hitting its mark.  If this is what the end looks like, sign me up.