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By Cole Smithey

‘Mr. Bean’s Holiday’

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In what Rowan Atkinson has called his last feature outing as the childish accidental prankster “Mr. Bean,” this bookend sequel to “Bean” (1997) is a highly enjoyable family comedy for every unadorned moment of Mr. Atkinson’s comic genius. The British, deep-but-squawky-voiced, Mr. Bean wins a church raffle for a vacation to the South of France that includes all of 200 euros and a digital mini-cam to record his holiday. Accompanied by an arsenal of goofy faces, high-water pants and a brown winter blazer, Mr. Bean leaves a trail of disaster everywhere he goes. Bean’s impromptu photo session with a fellow traveler, Russian film director Emil (Karel Roden), strands the man on a train platform away from his son Stepan (Max Baldry), who Mr. Bean must chaperone on the train to Cannes.

It’s impossible to overestimate Rowan Atkinson’s skills as a comic. The nerdy Oxford graduate draws effortlessly on the performance vocabularies of comedians like Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati (“M. Hulot’s Holiday”), while adding his own akimbo physicality to create a curious man hampered with the brain of a nine-year-old boy. Atkinson pays homage to Buster Keaton, as when Bean circumnavigates Paris in a straight line using a compass that leads him over park benches and traffic-filled streets.

There’s a signature “Bean” sequence in a fancy Parisian restaurant where the maitre d’ (Jean Rochefort) mistakenly seats Mr. Bean, and takes the liberty of bringing out a seafood platter consisting of giant shrimp and oysters. Bean proceeds to consume one of the large crustaceans — shell, claws, head and all-from the back end as a naturally grotesque act of buffoonery. He goes on to make a show for the dining room manager by pretending to enjoy the oysters that he secretly spills into a napkin before pouring its slimy contents into the open purse of a nearby patron, whose sticky cell phone soon rings.

The universally accessible camp amusement builds to a breaking point when Bean tries to cheer up the lonely little Stepan by making a host of rubbery faces that cost him a slap in the face from the cheeky lad. Atkinson’s painstaking choreography and unflappable timing draws laughs when Bean busks for money at an outdoor provincial market by dancing and mouthing lyrics to songs ranging from pop to opera. It’s one of the funniest sequences and taps into the depth of Atkinson’s physical burlesque.

“Mr. Bean’s Holiday” gains texture from the inclusion of simultaneous footage filmed on Mr. Bean’s video camera during the vacation. The recurring film-inside-a-film device shifts the road movie episodes to a subjective viewpoint that lets the audience in on Bean’s boyish mindset. Good use is made of Cannes as a properly pronounced destination where insufferable American arthouse director Carson Clay (Willem Dafoe) is premiering his self-produced, directed, written and acted, navel-gazing vehicle “Playback Time.” The humor wanes here primarily because Willem Dafoe is not a comic actor, but also because his character barely reacts to Mr. Bean’s outré shenanigans.

Rowan Atkinson’s humor, as a British-inflected vindictive mime, walks a fine line between irreverence, anarchy and innocence. As with the skits of Monty Python, there’s nothing highbrow about it, and yet there is such art and irony at play that the sophistication is unmistakable. “Mr. Bean’s Holiday” is an immediate classic because its comic traditions are so faithfully employed at every level of execution. There’s something Shakespearean in the way director Steve Bendelack and his ensemble join in celebrating a fresh approach to a comic heritage that Rowan Atkinson perfected while working with the BBC-produced television show “Not the Nine O’ Clock News.” What could be next, a Jackie Chan and Rowan Atkinson buddy picture where Atkinson is the martial artist? CV

‘Superbad’

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That venerable genre, the teen sex comedy, gets a hot shot of warm lovin’ in director Greg Mottola’s (“The Daytrippers”) rendering of Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s irreverent script. Nostalgia for a funky white bread ’70s era yet to arrive, permeates the groovy vibe inhabited by geeky high school seniors Evan (Michael Cera), Seth (Jonah Hill) and Fogell (Christopher Mintz-Plasse). Intent on mastering their sex skills, i.e. losing their virginity, before heading off to college, the three friends luck into an invitation to a girl-loaded party where they are sure they can score. Entrusted by their female hosts to bring a goodly supply of alcoholic beverages to the fiesta, the guys suffer pratfalls and numerous indignities before taking their tenuous first steps toward intimacy with the fairer sex.

Produced by Judd Apatow’s company, “Superbad” is a continuation of the humorous zeal Apatow registered with “Knocked Up.” Here, retro touches of visual style and slick funk music combine with fresh delivery of unabashed amusement to create a heady cocktail of randomly explosive comedy. Lyle Workman’s impressive soul/funk soundtrack features funk icons Bernie Worrell and Bootsie Collins scoring the action with soul stirring grooves.

When Seth calls his friend Fogell “the anti-poon,” the line thoroughly sets up the likable dweeb for a twisting single night’s journey that will necessarily involve riding in the back of a police car with a couple of young lunatic cops on a mission to bend Fogell’s mind. High school cutie Jules (Emma Stone) reveals her improbable fondness for the potty-mouthed Seth when she invites him to her party and entrusts him with a hundred dollars to buy booze. But first the boys must take advantage of Fogell’s newly minted fake ID, on which he recasts himself as a 25 year-old Honolulu swinger with the unlikely single name of “McLovin.” Fogell is on the verge of leaving the liquor store with the goods when a robber clobbers him in the head and takes off. The cops arrive, and police officer Slater (Bill Hader) and officer Michaels (Seth Rogen) feign delight at Fogell’s moniker and offer to take him and his bags of alcohol home, albeit with a few detours for things like shooting up stop signs and arresting a deranged bum.

The cops play an important subversive thematic role by off-handedly showing where immaturity in adult men can lead. Their lack of social responsibility emphatically equates them as careless rivals to the stern minded militia that intimidate citizens. As the kindhearted de facto chaperones for the movie, they also act as a hands-on Greek chorus for the right to passage that the boys pass through.

A sense of twitchy suspense heightens the laughs as Seth and Evan crash a drugged out party of scary hippies. Hoping to lift a few bottles to take to their own party, the duo get a preview of where the party lifestyle could lead. Seth gets hit the hardest when he realizes that not only has he been dancing with the jealous host’s drunk girlfriend, but that she has left evidence of her menstrual cycle on his leg. The scene takes on a giddy “Jackass” brand of comedy that Seth’s character prolongs when he smuggles out a detergent container filled with stolen beer. The comic inventions at play are so beyond the pale, and yet so within the realm of teenage possibility, that we follow imaginary emotional arcs of pubescent experience.

“Superbad” soars via pitch-perfect performances by Hill, Cera (television’s “Arrested Development”) and Mintz-Plasse. Each boy finally achieves an intimate moment with a girl who individually represents a sexually opposite version of imperfection and horniness. Evan, Seth and Fogell sustain embarrassing lessons as they step across varying thresholds of passion. In the sobering aftermath, they stumble toward a new realm of friendship and maturity; one distanced from their familiar co-dependency on one another, but not from their obsessions with genitalia. CV

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