comedy

NO HARD FEELINGS: an amusement with Jennifer Lawrence

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Photo caption: Jennifer Lawrence and Andrew Barth Feldman in NO HARD FEELINGS. Courtesy of Sony Pictures.

In the comedy No Hard Feelings, the summer season is beginning in Montauk, and the introverted rich kid Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman) is slated to enter Princeton in the fall. His over-protective and intrusive parents worry that his social immaturity will stunt his future, so they hire a financially strapped Uber driver/bartender (Jennifer Lawrence) to date him and get him out of his shell – essentially to take his virginity for a used Buick Regal.

Of course, it’s absurd that Jennifer Lawrence would have 103 minutes of difficulty in seducing a high school senior, and part of the fun is in suspending disbelief. It all makes for good, dirty fun, and No Hard Feelings is an amusing diversion because of Jennifer Lawrence.

After her stunning dramatic debut in Winter’s Bone, Lawrence has shown a gift for comedy in Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle and Don’t Look Up, establishing that she can soar in wise-cracky role. She cracks wise here, too, and also shows off a gift for broad physical comedy in bits like climbing concrete stairs on roller skates.

Lawrence has achieved fame and fortune from eight fantasy movies as Katniss and Raven, respectively, in the Hunger Games and X-Men franchises. She has recently voiced her desire to return to human-scale stories, and No Hard Feelings is one of these, along with the much better Don’t Look Up and Causeway. Good for her.

No Hard Feelings skewers helicopter parents and the invasion of rich outsiders pricing the locals out of their hometowns. Matthew Broderick and Laura Benanti are excellent as the parents, and Broderick’s rich guy haircut is priceless.

The Wife and I laughed together at some scenes; she laughed at some others and I laughed at some more. I liked the movie more than she did, but neither of us complained about wasting an hour-and-a-half of our lives. We talked about it on the way to dinner, and I haven’t thought about it since.

Co-writer and director Gene Stupitsky wrote for the American version of The Office, earning some Emmy nominations, so he is capable of better comedy than this, I’m not embedding the trailers because both the Sony red band trailers make No Hard Feelings look like a very stupid teen comedy and, although it has elements of that type, it’s much better that that overall.

Photo caption: Jennifer Lawrence in NO HARD FEELINGS. Courtesy of Sony Pictures.

DEALING WITH DAD: two serious topics in an ok comedy

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Peter S. Kim, Ally Maki and Hayden Szeto in DEALING WITH DAD. Courtesy of 1091 Pictures.

Dealing with Dad is a topical family comedy with an Asian-American cast. Three adult siblings – the super-achiever oldest sister, the passive middle brother and the infantilized youngest brother, a gaming slacker – meet at their parents’ home. The dad, whose harsh and never-bending expectations battered them as kids, has become paralyzed (and defanged) by severe depression.

Although Dealing with Dad is a comedy, its strengths are in addressing two serious subjects – depression and the issues that many second-generation Asian-Americans face because of their immigrant parents’ parenting styles.

The differences between the siblings spawn lots of laughs, but I found the banter a bit too sit-commy for my taste.

Bay Area audiences will appreciate that Dealing with Dad is set in MILPITAS.

I screened for the 2022 Cinequest. It started rolling out in theaters on May 19.

BLACKBERRY: woulda, coulda, shoulda

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Photo caption: Jay Baruchal in BLACKBERRY. Courtesy of IFC Films.

BlackBerry is the funny true story of Canadian geeks who find themselves suddenly dominating the nascent smartphone market…but not for long. The improbable rise of BlackBerry’s parent company is a tale of the Odd Couple partnership co-CEOs, Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchal), who ran the engineering side, and Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton), who managed finance and sales.

Mike Lazaridis solved the technical challenge that had kept cell phones from becoming the email machines that they have been since. As played by Baruchal, Lazaridis is reserved, even shy, supremely confident in all things tech and not all confidant with other humans.

Lazaridis needed a pitchman, and that was the hard charging Balsillie, who, as played by Howerton ranged between hard-charging and abusive. A tech exec I knew in Silicon Valley was described to me as having “too much testosterone” and that’s Howerton’s Balsillie.

Lazaridis’ engineering brilliance, combined with Balsillie’s sheer will and audacity, allowed the company to nimbly pivot through various product cycles. Balsillie’s hubris even began to leak into Lazaridis. But then came an advance in product design that Lazaridis hadn’t anticipated, and Balsillie had cut one too many corners in finance.

I’ve mostly seen Baruchal in much more broadly funny roles (Tropic Thunder, This Is the End). Here, Baruchal successfully carries the leading role with a much more subtle and textured performance. One nice (and slyly underplayed) touch is that when Baruchal’s character transitions from the CEO of a start-up to the CEO of a company with a massive market cap, his haircut transitions, too.

For much of the movie, we see Howerton playing Balsillie as a one-note, hard charger. He refuses to acknowledge any obstacle, until, in a wonderful moment of performance, his face shows when knows he’s finally been had.

BlackBerry was directed by Matt Johnson, who also co-adapted the screenplay and plays one of company co-founders.

Make sure you watch the end credits to see what happened to the real guys.

I screened BlackBerry for the San Luis Obispo Film Festival, where it won the audience award for Best of Fest. BlackBerry opens in theaters tomorrow, and it’s a surefire audience-pleaser.

on TV – Preston Sturges’ comedy masterworks

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Veronica Lake and Joel McCrea in SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS
Veronica Lake and Joel McCrea in SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS

On May 9, Turner Classic Movies will be presenting the best work of Preston Sturges, the first workaday Hollywood screenwriter to transition into a major writer-director. TCM will be screening The Lady Eve, The Palm Beach Story, Sullivan’s Travels, Hail the Conquering Hero and The Great McGinty, an impressive body of work that Sturges churned out between the ages of 42 and 46. Unfortunately, his turbulent personality led to conflict in his business affairs, which exacerbated his drinking. He burned out and was dead at age 60, but he left behind some of the very, very smartest and funniest movie comedies.

Preston Sturges’ masterpiece is Sullivan’s Travels, a fast-paced and cynical comedy about a pretentious movie director who goes on the road to be inspired by The Average Man – and gets more of an adventure than he expects. There has never been a better movie about Hollywood. (See the clip below.) It’s on my A Classic American Movie Primer – 5 to Start With.

And don’t miss the brilliantly funny Hail the Conquering Hero.  It’s one of Preston Sturges’ less well known great comedies.  Eddie Bracken plays a would-be soldier discharged for hay fever – but his hometown mistakenly thinks that he is being sent home a war hero.  Hilarity ensues.  All the funnier when you realize that this film was made in 1944 amid our nation’s most culturally patriotic period.

Eddie Bracken surrounded by his new Marine pals in HAIL THE CONQUERING HERO.

ROISE & FRANK: therapy dog and hurling coach

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Photo caption: Bríd Ní Neachtain in ROISE & FRANK. Courtesy of Juno Pictures.

In the delightful and sweet Gaelic comedy Roise & Frank, it’s two years after the death of Roise’s (Bríd Ní Neachtain) husband Frank, and her grief has turned her into a reclusive depressive. An apparently stray dog insists upon intruding into her life. She becomes convinced the dog is the reincarnation of her deceased hubbie – and the screenplay cleverly gives her credible reasons to believe this. She names the dog Frank, and off we go, as Frank the dog guides Roise out of her melancholy, despite the resistance of her adult, also still grieving, son and her lovestruck neighbor. Soon, there are even implications for the local school’s hapless hurling team.

Roise & Frank was deftly directed by Rachael Moriarty and Peter Murphy, who overcame W.C Fields’ admonition about working with animals and children. They succeeded in keeping Roise & Frank light and funny without turning it into sitcom silliness.

Bríd Ní Neachtain, who played the nosy postmistress in The Banshees of Inisherin, is convincing and relatable as both the gloomy and the rejuvenated Roise. In his first screen credit, Ruadhán de Faoite is especially winning as Mikey, the confidence challenged middle schooler next door.

The dog Frank is a mutt described as possibly part lurcher, a breed unfamiliar to many of us in North America. Lurchers, a mix of greyhound and terrier or herder, historically used in hunting, are more common in the British Isles.

Roise & Frank opens on April 7th at the Opera Plaza in San Francisco, the Smith Rafael in San Rafael, and the Laemmle Town Center and Royal in Los Angeles. This is a charmer and well worth seeking out.

DADDY: four guys, four chances to fail

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A scene from DADDY. Courtesy of Cinequest.

The dark sci fi comedy Daddy: is set in a future where only a limited number of men are approved by the government to father children. Four guys apply for the privilege and are isolated in a mountain lodge to wait for the expert evaluator, who doesn’t immediately show up. As they try to figure out what’s going on and what they should do, they succeed only in demonstrating how unfit they would be as parents – until things get all Lord of the Rings. It’s a very funny skewering of both male overconfidence and male angst.

Finally, the guys get an unexpected visitor, who may or may not be the evaluator that they expect. What’s impressive about this episode is how each man’s instinctual reaction, different from each other’s, can be so profoundly wrongheaded.

The mountain lodge is equipped with an artificial baby model (a doll). Co-writers Neal Kelley and Jono Sherman refrain from overusing this prop in slapstick. It’s far funnier to glimpse the doll as it seems to silently rebuke the foolhardiness around it.

Daddy is the second feature and first feature, respectively, for for co-directors/co-writers Kelley and Sherman, who also play two of the guys. Cinequest’s online festival Cinejoy hosts the world premiere of Daddy.

THE PEOPLE WE HATE AT THE WEDDING: just empty

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Ben Platt, Allison Janney and Kristen Bell in THE PEOPLE WE HATE AT THE WEDDING. Courtesy of Amazon.

The purported comedy The People We Hate at the Wedding feels like an agency deal that attached the talent and was sold to Amazon before there was any story to justify the film. The story, if you chose to call it that, is a compendium of rom com tropes – the anxious bride, the Bridezilla, the bride keeping a Big Secret from the groom, the brides’ estranged parents, the mom not comfortable with her out gay son and his partner, and some more. The tropes are there, but there just isn’t a single moment of authenticity. Nor any reason to care about the characters. Nor laughs.

I’ll watch just about anything with Allison Janney and/or Kristin Bell, but they’re hopelessly wasted in this stinker. The usuallycompelling French actor Isaach De Bankole is surprisingly wooden (perhaps because his lines are in English?).

If you must, The People We Hate at the Wedding is streaming on Amazon (included with Prime).

SEE HOW THEY RUN: Is this supposed to be funny?

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Photo caption: Sam Rockwell and Saiorse Ronan in SEE HOW THEY RUN. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.

“Is this supposed to be funny?”, asked The Wife about 20 minutes into the purported comedy See How They Run, which is a send up of the drawing room mystery and its tropes. There’s a murder at a theater running an Agatha Christie play, and everyone involved with the play is a suspect for detectives played by Sam Rockwell and Saoirse Ronan.

But what’s the point of parodying a form that doesn’t take itself seriously? Can one even parody the drawing room murder mystery? Agatha Christie was a smart cookie who never thought that the Miss Marple books were great literature; she knew that she wrote popular entertainment and that she was exceptionally good at it.

There’s also supposed to be some humor from the Odd Couple pairing of the jaded veteran cop (Rockwell) and the eager rookie (Ronan). However, the script doesn’t provide any freshness to this time-honored comedy situation, and the normally excellent actors don’t develop any chemistry. Other fine actors are similarly wasted: David Oyewolo, Ruth Wilson, Harris Dickinson. Only Adrien Brody gets the benefit of a flamboyant role and makes the most of it.

See How They Run was written by Tom Chappell and directed by Tom George, and this misfire is their fault.

The trailer promises a funny film, but it’s misleading. See How They Run is streaming on HBO. Skip it.

THE MENU: immune from pretension

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Photo caption: Ralph Fiennes and Ana Taylor-Joy in THE MENU. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.

The darkly funny horror film The Menu is a battle of wits set in absurd foodieism. This isn’t the kind of horror film with a lot of jump scares, although one sudden event shocks and disgusts the diners (though some think that it’s all part of the show). The Menu builds a sense of dread, a situation where it looks like survival is impossible.

Chef Slowik (Ralph Fiennes) presides over a restaurant on its own island in the Pacific Northwest, with its own carefully curated gardens and aquaculture and a staff as cultish as The People’s Temple. The restaurant has 12 seats and each evening’s prix fixe goes for $1250.

Slowik seems like a self-important and officious kitchen tyrant, but unsettlingly high strung. That signals, and this is really not a significant spoiler, that he’s a balls out psycho intending to slaughter all his guests.

Creepily, it is revealed that tonight’s customers have been carefully selected by Slowik. The one exception is Margot (Ana Taylor-Joy), the last minute substitute date of Tyler (Nicholas Hoult) an obsequious celebrity chef groupie.

I’m a foodie myself; after all, I named my blog The Movie Gourmet. But, as much as I enjoy fine dining experiences and my own amateur cooking, I look askance on a $60 small plate of foam. The Menu is a wicked, The-Emperor-Has-No-Clothes sendup of that kind of culinary silliness. Each of the courses of Chef Slowik’s meal (and each wine pairing) is its own very funny comment on food fads. The best is the “breadless bread”, which I guess is not a “deconstructed” dish, but an “unconstructed” one. The Tyler character gets funnier as he ignores the escalating horrors to laser in on the avant-garde flavor combinations.

The key to the story is that Margot is immune to pretension. Margot never buys into the extreme food scene, and she has street smarts, which equip her for an epic psychological showdown with Slowik.

Ana Taylor-Joy is one of my very favorite actors, endlessly watchable with as she projects her unique blend of intelligence and danger, I first discovered her in Thoroughbreds, and have enjoyed her in The Queen’s Gambit, Last Night in Soho and even the blah Amsterdam.

Ralph Fiennes is really cast perfectly as an ego monster with a telling insecurity or two. Hoult is a hoot, and Hong Chau, is a master of deadpan as Slowik’s henchwoman.

The Menu is only the fourth feature for veteran television director Mark Mylod (Game of Thrones, Succession). The screenplay – and it;s a damn good one – is by Seth Weiss and Will Tracy, who come out of The Onion. These guys, with Ana Taylor-Joy and Ralph Fiennes, have made a pointedly acid and entertaining movie.

AMSTERDAM: a star-studded thriller without the thrills

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Christian Bale, Margot Robbie and John David Washington in AMSTERDAM. Courtesy of 20th Century Studios

Amsterdam, which wants to be a star-studded paranoid thriller, is only star-studded.

Burt (Christian Bale) and Harold (John David Washington) met as American soldiers in WWI, and stay in Europe after the war, sharing an Amsterdam apartment and a bohemian lifestyle with another spirited American expat, Valerie (Margot Robbie). As Amsterdam the movie opens, Burt, now a shady physician, and Harold, now a lawyer, have returned to New York City, and the two share a commitment to helping other WWI veterans. The two are called to investigate a suspicious death, which they determine to have been a murder, and then there’s another murder, for which they are framed. Off they go to find the real murderers and clear themselves, becoming entangled in a convoluted conspiracy and re-encountering Valerie in the process.

Despite Bale, Washington and Robbie delivering solid performances, the story never pops. That’s the fault of a remarkably disappointing screenplay by director David O. Russell (Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle). We’re never surprised, never waiting for the next page to be turned, and not particularly invested in the characters.

The movie’s stars aside, Russell also wastes the talents of a ridiculously deep cast: Robert De Niro, Rami Malek, Andrea Riseborough, Ana-Taylor-Joy, Chris Rock, Michael Shannon, Zoe Saldana, Mike Myers, Timothy Olyphant, Taylor Swift, Matthias Schoenaert, Alessandro Nivola. There’s not a bad performance in the lot, but they just don’t get much to do. Michael Shannon and Mike Myer bring some laughs, but Schoenaert and Nivola have roles that could have been played by cardboard cutouts. Two weeks later, I can’t even remember Olyphant’s character. After winning an Oscar for wearing horse teeth and NOT singing like Freddie Mercury, Rami Malek seems to have settled into a career playing reptilian villains.

Here’s an example of bad storytelling . [SPOILER ALERT] The movie’s climax is an attempted assassination in an auditorium, like in The Manchurian Candidate. Burt is staggered by a bullet in the torso. Then there’s a fracas in which the shooter is apprehended. There’s a melee with uniformed Nazi sympathizers. Malek and Taylor-Joy’s characters are exposed, and the conspiracy is explained. Ten minutes later, as everyone leaves the auditorium, Burt removes his jacket and reveals that the bullet had only struck his back brace, and he doesn’t have a gunshot wound after all. By this time, I had FORGOTTEN THAT HE HAD BEEN SHOT.

An allusion to a real historical conspiracy is only a half-hearted political statement because this movie’s plot is just like that of every fictional paranoid conspiracy.

I recommend skipping Amsterdam and watching American Hustle again.