The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard

"Listen man, I haven't been home in a year and a half... and I'm about 90% sure I left the front door open. Jibby Newsome (Ving Rhames)

That's the funniest line in the film.

Selling used cars and love have not always been successfully tandem motifs, so universally derided is that business. In The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard , starring Jeremy Piven as Don "The Goods" Ready, James Brolin as a hoping-to- be-gay car dealer hires Jeremy Piven's A Team to sell the cars off his ailing lot over a holiday weekend.

Piven falls in love while selling the cars to nary a laugh in the house. For this lame comedy he left successful Broadway and TV gigs? F bombs and gay innuendo cannot sell the picture any more than used cars. Try to answer why Piven thinks films are a better venue than TV and Broadway, where he had considerable success despite his leaving his last show under cloudy circumstances.

And that Will Ferrell is a producer of this failure with a forgettable cameo performance is further evidence that comedy is for sale, at least this one. No government help for this clunker.

Plot? Who says a comedy needs a plot? Apparently no one ever told Andy Stock or Rick Stemson, but that doesn't seem to matter much. The Goods is an absolutely hilarious look at the irreverent business of selling used cars that hasn't been addressed this well since "Cadillac Man" or "Used Cars".

They picked the perfect cast for this side splitter. Jeremy Piven is one of those guys who can pull off the two-dimensional character with finesse. His portrayal of Don Ready is the perfect lead for this cast of unlikely car salesmen trying to save the failing dealership. Ving Rhames plays his role with audacity, as do both Kathryn Hahn and David Koechner, all three exceptional comedians in their own right.

Seeing Alan Thicke and James Brolin in the film, along with Wendie Mallck, reminds us that older actors may not take the stage often, but when they do, they know their stuff. While their roles are brief, they are exceptional and add the right amount of balance to the film.

All in all, while I don't see this film walking away with any Oscars, it is an entertaining adult comedy with some great lines and a few scenes so ridiculous they are priceless. The kiddies need to be in bed or out playing in the yard though. Rated a serious R of language and nudity. Oh, don't forget to keep your eyes peeled for a cameo by the ever hot Gina Gershon.

It's something to note since not too many other reviews will point it out that the director of The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard is Neal Brennan. Who is Neal Brennan? For about the last decade and a half he was the white-guy collaborator, super-close in fact, with Dave Chappelle. Now that their collaboration has fallen apart after Chappelle's walk-away from his show, Brennan is now left to put his own career forward. If The Goods is a sign of where his career might be headed... he still has some ways to go. But it's a decent start: he can definitely let his actors go totally wild and is able to capture plenty of jokes and wacky characters along the way... and also, sometimes, not really at all.

Plot? What plot? It's so thin that you'd need Nicole Richie standing by it for comparison. Oh sure, there's character development, sort of, where we see Don Ready (Jeremy Piven), super hot-shot car salesman and his crew of hot-shot car salesman, come to a small town to help a fledgling car dealership for one weekend to avoid getting bankrupt and/or taken over by the dastardly competition plus a "Man-Band" (over thirty boy band) headed by Ed Helms. The rest of the movie's story focuses on this rag-tag group of characters and their one-track adventures, and Ready's whole "finding-himself" saga which includes facing the fact that he's an a-hole who wanders from town to town without any connections personally or acknowledging that he might have a son (who isn't really, by the way, another 'joke'), and the ultimate goal that you know is going to come around, with a twist or two perhaps.

This is a true throw-a-dart-at-a-board comedy where the filmmaker and writers just keep the gags going and going on. It's not just Brennan pushing it either, since Will Ferrell (who appears in one of the funniest scenes in the movie as an angel visiting Ready to give him a boost as a former salesman) produced it, and it has that crazy anything-goes style. What works? This will be subjective, 100%. You can't go into this knowing what to expect even if you think you'd like 'this' kind of movie, meaning a movie with lots of (very) R-rated comedy and actors that those of us who see these movies recognize (Craig Robinson, ken Jeong, Helms, Rob Riggle). Some may dispute if Rob Riggle playing a 10 year old man-child is funny (or the female salesman who keeps hitting on him) or if James Brolin's gay thing for another salesman is funny, or if Helms as a guy in a "Man-Band" going completely obvious is funny.

Some of this, in fact, is. But if I had one problem really overall it was Jeremy Piven. I have a feeling you either really go with this guys work or you don't. I don't, at least not anymore. To describe his performance as Ready is as simple as saying that he walked off the set of Entorage and didn't get out of character except to switch from talent agent to car salesman. It's old-hat by this point, and it's something that Piven has had for a lot of his career going back to PCU. If someone else had played this character it might have been funnier, or more interesting, but with Piven his obvious streak in this film becomes obnoxious, and even funny lines are overplayed as if "hey, this is FUNNY". This can be a problem sporadically in the film as well (one of the characters, for me, that had this was the WW2 veteran car salesman), but none so more prevalent than Piven.

On the opposite side of this is Ving Rhames, who gives a surprisingly funny comic performance as a mack-daddy who's had sex with hundreds of women... but has 'never made love' and finds his possible match with a political-science major stripping to make ends meet. It's a sign of subtlety that the film lacks otherwise. The Goods is an in-your-face * broad* comedy that keeps the jokes flying like a fast food joint. I don't fault the film for trying, but it will be at best a cult curiosity as opposed to something fans of 'this' kind of comedy fully embrace (the Will Ferrell school of crude absurdity to a tee). 5.5/10

It seems like every week i'm saying there is a new "funniest movie of the year." "Funny People" is my current favorite but "The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard" is it's non-dramatic equivalent.

First off this is a great role for Jeremy Piven, very much in Ari Gold-form as Don Ready, a car salesman-for-hire who travels around America with his crew helping out lackluster dealerships. Don is the type of character you immediately love, a born talker who not only manages to smoke on the plane ride over to Temecula, CA, he turns it into an all-out orgy complete with live mariachi band.

Why go to Temecula? The car dealership owned by Ben Selleck (James Brolin) is in trouble, struggling with rag-tag salesman, poor sales returns, and as Babs (Kathryn Hahn), one part of Don's crew points out, the place looks like a "refugee camp for dirty men." Along with his other two sidekicks, Brent (David Koechner) and Jibby (Ving Rhames), Don must sell all the cars off the lot or the dealership faces being sold to Stu Harding (Alan Thicke), another more successful dealer.

His son is Paxton Harding (Ed Helms), a late-30's man whose real dream is for his boy band to finally get off the ground. Paxton is engaged to Selleck's daughter Ivy (Jordana Spiro), who Don also finds attractive. Soon Ivy, plus a long-lost son Don fathered when he was 10-years old, encourages him to think about finally settling down. Wall to wall ridiculousness ensues.

Directed by Neal Brennan (a former writer on Chappelle Show) and written by Andy Stock and Rick Stempson, this is an offensively rude, crude, profane laugh machine from first scene to last. There are a few really good lines and the supporting cast gets some of the most hilarious material i've seen this year. The Daily Show's Rob Riggle as Selleck's son Peter, a 10 year old with a pituitary problem that makes him look 40. Kathryn Hahn as Don's sexually abrasive partner, using porno to sell cars and lusting after the innocent but very hunky Peter. Charles Napier as an older salesman who pines for the olden days and gets crazily angry and offensive to women, gays, Asians, and just about everybody really. Ving Rhames, playing a character who's had sex with thousands of women but has never "made love". Ed Helms, with his pot-belly and spiky hair-do, does nice work with the boy band stuff. James Brolin has a running gay gag with David Koechner that never gets old, and Brolin's car commercial, where he guilt-trips everyone to buy because he is dying of ball cancer, had me in tears. And like I said, I'm trying not to give too much away but Will Ferrell gets a cameo that single-handedly makes you forgive the atrocity that was "Land of the Lost."

This is all just the tip of the iceberg of this insanely hilarious movie. You just want to start listing funny thing after funny thing, its that good.

I went in to this movie with very low expectations and it turned out to be worse than i thought. I liked Stepbrothers and Talledega Nights and all those other movies but this just wasn't funny. It had plenty of funny people in it ( Jeremy Piven, Will Ferrel, Craig Robinson, and Andy Bernard from the Office), but they didn't have any funny lines. I think I laughed maybe 3-4 times. The writers just didn't write anything funny. Hollywood needs to quit with the over-hyped garbage they have been making lately. Comedy movies should have to pass through a screening before they get released. This was even worse than Land of the Lost.

Someone owes me 7 dollars plus some gas money...