MOVIE PREVIEW
“Top Five”
Starring Chris Rock, Rosario Dawson, Cedric the Entertainer, Jerry Seinfeld and Adam Sandler. Directed by Chris Rock.
Rated R for strong sexual content, nudity, crude humor, language throughout and some drug use. Check listings for theaters. 1 hour, 41 minutes.
Chris Rock’s manner offstage is different than it is onstage. He doesn’t pace back and forth like a tiger in a cage. His voice doesn’t go up quite as high when he’s making a point. He doesn’t bristle with live-wire energy. But one thing is the same: He is unafraid to be brutally candid.
Take the way he tells the story behind his new comedy, “Top Five.”
In summer 2012, the stand-up comic turned actor and filmmaker was in Massachusetts working on “Grown Ups 2,” the sequel to the commercially successful but critically panned 2010 buddy comedy. He didn’t have a whole lot to do in the movie — he was third or fourth on the call sheet behind Adam Sandler and Kevin James — which meant he had endless hours of down time.
“On a big movie, there are a lot of days off,” Rock, 49, remembered this month. “I’m going, ‘What am I doing here?’”
So he decided to write a screenplay. “You don’t know where ‘Grown Ups 2’ is going to fall, quality-wise, but you know it will make money, which will get me some goodwill,” he said. “So let me write a movie.”
Rock had collaborated on scripts before and directed a couple of movies: 2003’s “Head of State,” in which he played an unlikely presidential candidate, and 2007’s romantic comedy “I Think I Love My Wife.” But nothing he’d done on the big screen had ever approached the heights of artistic daring or popular appeal he’d reached as a stand-up comic. And he knew it.
“I just had this nagging feeling like, ‘I haven’t done a really good movie yet,’” Rock said. “I’d written and directed movies, and they were OK. They have their moments. But none of them felt like me from beginning to end. They felt like a sanitized version, honestly.”
Rock can take that off his list of worries. “Top Five,” which he wrote and directed, is anything but sanitized.
Bitingly satirical, brazenly profane and sometimes raunchy, the R-rated comedy opening Dec. 12 stars Rock as a stand-up turned movie star named Andre Allen who is undergoing a midlife career crisis. Struggling to reinvent himself as a serious actor, tugged between his glamorous Hollywood life and his inner-city roots, Andre pours his heart out — in more ways than one — to a journalist (Rosario Dawson) over the course of one tumultuous and at times calamitous day.
Since its well-received premiere in September at the Toronto International Film Festival, “Top Five” has been hailed as a breakthrough for Rock as a writer, director and leading man, the most unadulterated cinematic expression yet of the irreverent, boundary-pushing brand of comedy he’s known for. Indeed, that was Rock’s goal from the start: to make a film that from beginning to end felt like him.
“Chris knew if he was going to make another movie, he had to do something that was more personal,” said Scott Rudin, who produced “Top Five” and is known for shepherding Oscar fare such as “The Social Network” and “Captain Phillips” to the screen. “The whole idea was, how do you turn the giant appeal of his stand-up into a full movie? What would the Chris Rock opus be?”
On a recent afternoon, the thin, wiry Rock, who lives in New Jersey with his wife and two daughters, had just flown in to L.A. to collect the comedy film trophy at the Hollywood Film Awards. Granted, the Hollywood Film Awards may not be the most prestigious honors in filmdom (“All my life I’ve dreamt of getting one of these,” Rock cracked sarcastically on receiving the prize). But “Top Five” finding its way into this awards season at all has come as a great surprise to him.
Simply making a successful transition from stand-up comedy to acting is difficult enough; for every Sandler or Jim Carrey, there are an untold number of comics whose Hollywood aspirations never made it past a sitcom pilot or a development deal. The list of comedians who’ve gone on to significant filmmaking careers — a group that includes Mel Brooks, Mike Nichols, Judd Apatow and one of Rock’s biggest influences, Woody Allen — is even shorter.
Ironically, by making a comedy satirizing the stereotypical comedian’s urge to be taken seriously, Rock now finds himself being taken more seriously than he ever has before. The key, he said, is that, with “Top Five,” he didn’t take himself seriously. He simply set out to make a funny movie.
“The thing is, just be funny and they’ll take you seriously at some point,” he said. “Nothing tops making people laugh. I always say, you can have sex with someone or you can make them laugh — those are, like, the biggest things you can do for people. And by the way, people stop talking to people they have sex with — but no one stops talking to people who make them laugh, ever!”
