Despicable Me: Spy Versus Spy Meets Bugs Bunny Humor in Postmodern Suburbia

A six-year-old child is just beginning to form cognitive connections about the outside world. They are beginning to understand other people, that things can happen in the future, and that there is such a thing as lying.

This new found awareness of tense, truth/falsity, and otherness also imparts the six to nine-year-old with a heightened awareness of jokes, riddles, and fantasy games. They suddenly "get" that people may not mean what they say, that someone can play a joke on someone else. Essentially, they suddenly understand the concept of irony, and they like it.

Or rather, one might say - as with a new found taste for peanut butter and playing doctor - they love it.

The most beloved childhood comic animations understand the six-year-old infatuation with simple irony. Think Bugs Bunny and his turning the tables on Elmer Fudd (six year olds also get such seemingly adult humor as Road Runner defying gravity when Coyote cannot, or Bugs Bunny in drag).

What's astute about Despicable Me, the latest animation from Universal Studios (the studio that brought us The Tale of Despereaux), is that it understands the six-year-old mind at least as well as Bugs Bunny ever did, and goes after guffaw after guffaw with an old-fashioned evil-genius rivalry and some easy sentimentality borrowed from Pixar. That's fantastic, if you're a six year old. If you're the adult accompanying them, well, the movie manages to be entertaining for a good hour and a half, and there are worse things you could be doing with your time.

Despicable Me starts from the premise of making a kind of Austin Powers-esque villain into the movie's hero. Gru (voiced by Steve Carroll) is an evil genius with a nifty lair and a freeze-ray gun whose despicable genius was never understood by his indifferent mother, but who manages to eek out a decent living managing an underground hive of cute worker minions and a British evil scientist (voiced by Russell Brand), whose collective job it is to get into endearing mischief and occasionally perform mass mayhem.

The film's conceit is that Gru is secretly a softy who simply needs to express his fatherly tendencies in order to actualize his suburban existence while at the same time achieving the grand success that has so far eluded him (he has ambitions to shrink the moon, so he can steal it). Gru adopts three orphan girls, initially thinking they will suit his purposes combating his arch rival - the new evil upstart, Vector - only to find that he actually likes the annoying little things.

When real-life suburban spies are being uncloaked on the news, one can almost say this movie was prescient for setting its cold-war combat amongst the yuppie background of the modern suburbs. Gru versus Vector has a bit of a throwback Spy Versus Spy feel (the movie gets its humor executing Road-Runner-esque setups of various ray guns, shrink rays, and evil experiments going off), perhaps updated with a PC versus Mac art direction that places Gru squarely in the less sexy arena of the tried but true PC who must best his younger and nimbler Mac-ified rival.

There are some jokes here that adults will appreciate (the Lehman Brothers joke is worth an out-loud laugh), but most of the humor, well-executed as it is, is strictly of the Fart Gun kind. Those chattering minions are designed with evil genius as well: perfect for lunch boxes and fast food glasses, they are a kind of perfection of movie merchandising, and their appearance in the film as a kind of yellow Thebian chorus serves mainly as branding of themselves.

Most of the story seems borrowed from a recent Pixar movie - Up - which featured a similar crotchety old guy learning to open his heart to an annoying six-year-old. The genius of Up that this movie misses has to do with the depth of character and the facility with human insight. These characters lack the human contextualization that Pixar has become so grand at providing. Instead, even as their movie is 3D-ified, the characters exist purely in the 2D world of cartoon stereotypes. Gru eventually finds himself torn between attending the girls' dance recital and his plot to steal the moon, but it's an artificial choice (he decides to do both), and even if he's ready to adopt these girls, the only real difference between them and the masses of other minions already under his care is that they're not yellow.

In other words, he was a softy from the start - a plush huggable toy that's menacing enough to be funny to a six year old, as are the rest of the creations. The movie takes great care to get all the jokes right, and it goes after its young audience relentlessly. Judging from the reaction of all of the kiddies in the audience, they loved it.

Get Him to the Greek: A Sex & Drugs, Rock-n-Roll Detour

This Apatow-sponsored flick written and directed by Nicholas Stoller opens with Sean “P. Diddy” Combs playing a music producer looking to rehabilitate his sagging music industry revenue flows. “We’ve got to thicken my ***n’ flow,” he declares to his team of sad-assed wannabes (including Apatow regular Jonah Hill as the assistant with the bright idea), and the half-caricature / half-insight tells you all you need to know about where this film is going. Basically, this is a movie about a wide-eyed young music producer's (Hill's Aaron Green) bright idea of rehabilitating the career of rock disaster Aldous Snow (Russell Brand), and how he's sent to England to transport the party-boy back to L.A. for a ten-year reunion concert meant to save both the label and the artist. The movie has all the rock-legend feel and sassy vulgarity of Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous without the nostalgic nuance.

Despite its simplistic take, this is actually one of the better rock-and-roll flicks of the last couple of years. The movie has a real feel for the idiom, not just of rock-and-roll but the entire spectrum of celebrity music culture, from the street ironies of rap (a rapper and his manager have a debate over pink Izod versus leather zipper jacket which is “one zipper away from Thriller”) to the Entertainment-Tonight bubble-gum antics (captured with aplomb in the opening number, “African Child”), all the way to rock music inspiration (nicely summarized with the closing bad-drug-trip-inspired “Furry Walls”). While the tub-tapping music itself is one notch beneath parody and makes its point with but a few repetitive chords, it hits the satire dead on.

The script mostly follows tried-and-true rock-and-roll drug-and-sex stereotypes: Aaron is immediately stymied in his intentions when Aldous takes him to have drinks with his mates, then sex at a club, and so on – barely making their flights to New York, creating a comic mess on the set of the Today show (with some well-placed cameos from random celebrities such as economist Paul Krugman), then on to yet another drug-detour in Las Vegas. Stock stuff, to be sure, but done with both a tinge of wit and evident love for the rock scene: only a true music fan would slip a still of the Chelsea Hotel into a transitional montage of NY music venues or position the climactic moment in a hotel balcony overlooking Sunset Boulevard.

In the vein of all Judd Apatow produced flicks, this is also a bromance. Hill’s Aaron has to learn to loosen up, while Aldous needs to re-connect with his passion for music, so the two are thrown together in this road-movie of outrageous antics so they can learn these lessons from each other. In the middle is Daphne, Aaron’s girlfriend (played by Elizabeth Moss of "Mad Men" fame as a bit of sly casting), an overly tired intern who’s trying to negotiate career moves with Aaron. The three actors are nicely matched: Brand’s cynical insouciance is a great counterbalance to Hill’s uptight earnestness (on the road, they’re a kind of modern Martin and Lewis), while Moss adds a touch of sensible-yet-badass sweetness. There’s a quite icky but nicely handled three-way that activates all these characters into their closing resolutions and ties up the movie in a nice post-modern, metrosexual bow.

Apatow meets Sid and Nancy, then, seems to be the formula: a post-modern, rap-rocker mash-up that’s probably two-parts stereotypical cliché to every one part media satire. For a fun, summer flick, you could do worse.