I figured my 16,000th post should really be a TRAINWRECK. (Spoiler Alert!)

[Agschmid]

Well at least about one

Trainwreck
It’s not one!

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The wiki site TV Tropes, in its infinite nomenclatural wisdom, has created a term for films or TV shows in which the protagonist’s first name is also the name of the lead actor: the Danza (after Tony Danza, who played a guy named Tony in two long-running sitcoms, Taxi and Who’s the Boss?). There are many reasons to pull a Danza, but the most important has to do with name recognition as brand leverage. Some performers, especially stand-up comedians (think Louis C.K. or Roseanne Barr), are so identified with their names that basing a character on their stage persona and then giving that character a different name just seems like a needless waste of ready-to-hand audience goodwill.

Judd Apatow’s Trainwreck, scripted by and starring Amy Schumer—who hosts the similarly eponymous Comedy Central sketch show Inside Amy Schumer—goes full Danza, christening its leading lady “Amy” in a film populated by other well-known comics not using their own first names. That choice in itself says a lot about the cultural place Amy Schumer occupies at this moment: that of a brashly honest young comedian who’s building a successful career on the radical premise that, even as a pretty blonde woman who talks a lot about sex, she intends to get away with being exactly who she is. The arrival of Trainwreck in theaters feels major—not because it’s a perfect movie by any stretch, but because it marks the big-screen arrival of Amy, a character/creator/performer who takes the romantic-comedy heroine and the onscreen treatment of feminism to places they’ve seldom, if ever, been before.

The Amy who Amy plays in Trainwreck isn’t a rapidly rising TV comedian (that would be an “As Herself,” not a Danza). She’s a staff writer for a glossy men’s magazine called (A-plus on this joke) S’Nuff. At their editorial meetings, headed up by a spray-tanned and near-unrecognizable Tilda Swinton, un-shamefaced journalists pitch headlines such as “You Call Those Tits?” and “You’re Not Gay, She’s Just Boring.” Despite her complete indifference to sports (I feel you, sister!), Amy is saddled with the assignment of profiling a prominent sports-medicine specialist, Aaron Conners (Bill Hader), who’s also known for his volunteer work with Doctors Without Borders. Dr. Conners is earnest, serious, and deeply committed to his job—a far cry from the ambitious but self-sabotaging Amy, who’s so alienated by her soulless workplace that she parties just a shade too hard, sometimes waking up in a borough she doesn't even remember going to and stumbling her way home in red stiletto heels. (Schumer’s brilliant bit of physical comedy on that Staten Island walk of shame provides the closest onscreen approximation I’ve seen of what walking in very high heels after a long night on the town feels like.)

It doesn’t take long until Amy and Aaron have slept together (because it doesn’t take long till Amy and anyone have slept together), but they each respond to the encounter very differently. He’s smitten, calling her the next day with an invitation to dinner; she’s so used to casual hookups she’s almost offended by his show of interest. As we’ve learned from a brief opening flashback, Amy is the child of a proud philanderer (Colin Quinn, in a dryly funny and ultimately moving performance) who used to lecture his two young daughters on the impossibility of monogamy. The adult Amy has absorbed his lesson, resisting intimacy in favor of a series of one-night stands and an occasional night at the movies with a pea-brained gym rat (the pro wrestler John Cena, who lays bare nearly everything in one bravura comic sex scene). Amy’s younger sister, Kim (Brie Larson), grew up to prove her dad wrong—she’s happily married to a sweet suburban dork (Mike Birbiglia) and stepmother to his ultrageeky preteen son (Evan Brinkman, nailing the kind of exuberant kid energy that’s endearing if you love the kid in question and exhausting if—like Amy, at least when we first meet her—you don’t).

Read the rest of the review here.

[DFW]

1. I though you meant this:

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