dark comedy

THE ONE I LOVE: a relationship enters the Twilight Zone

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Elisabeth Moss and Mark Duplass in THE ONE I LOVE
Elisabeth Moss and Mark Duplass in THE ONE I LOVE

Opening tomorrow, The One I Love is one of the year’s most original stories – a romance, dark comedy and sci-fi fable rolled into one successful movie.  Mark Duplass and Elisabeth Moss play a couple in that place in their relationship where quirks have become annoying instead of endearing, some trust issues have emerged and the two are just generally misfiring.  Their couples therapist recommends a weekend at an idyllic, isolated vacation cottage, which also has a second (presumably unoccupied) guest house.  The beautiful setting is enhanced by a bottle of wine and a reefer, and the desired rekindling of romance and intimacy occurs.  So everything goes as we would expect for this first nine minutes of the movie, and then – WOW – a major plot development that involves the guest house.

As soon as one of the characters explicitly references TV’s The Twilight Zone, the story becomes what would have been a perfect episode in that Rod Steiger series.  Screenwriter Justin Lader pulls off a What’s Gonna Happen Next? story that has its moments of creepy thriller and madcap comedy.  But, at its heart, the story explores these questions:  what is it about our partners that keeps us in or drives us out of a relationship?  How do we stay in love with someone who has changed from who we fell in love with?  Or who hasn’t become the person we had projected?  The One I Love is only 91 minutes, so the tension and the thoughtfulness can slowly build while keeping us on the edges of our seats.

Moss and Duplass are simply remarkable here – these are two great performances.

MINOR SPOILER ALERT: Both Duplass and Moss play other characters in this movie – and they excel at creating subtle differences in the characters that are revealing, thought-provoking and scary.

A Coffee in Berlin: slacker minus coffee equals plenty of laughs

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A COFFEE IN BERLIN (OH BOY)
A COFFEE IN BERLIN (OH BOY)

Ranging from wry to hilarious, the German dark comedy A Coffee in Berlin hits every note perfectly.  Opening tomorrow, it’s the debut feature for writer-director Jan Ole Gerster, a talented filmmaker we’ll be hearing from again.

Jan Ole Gerster
Jan Ole Gerster

We see a slacker moving from encounter to encounter in a series of vignettes.  Gerster has created a warm-hearted but lost character who needs to connect with others – but sabotages his every opportunity.  He has no apparent long term goals, and even his short term goal of getting some coffee is frustrated.

As the main character (Tom Schilling) wanders through contemporary Berlin, A Coffee in Berlin demonstrates an outstanding sense of place, especially in a dawn montage near the end of the film. The soundtrack is also excellent – the understated music complements each scene remarkably well.

I saw A Coffee in Berlin (then titled Oh Boy) at Cinequest 2013 and singled it out as one of the three most wholly original films in the festival and as one of my favorite movie-going experiences of the year.  A Coffee in Berlin was snagged for the festival by Cinequest’s film scout extraordinaire Charlie Cockey.

Cinequest: Heavenly Shift

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Heavenly Shift1The dark Hungarian comedy Heavenly Shift (Isteni mûszak) is deliriously funny.  A rogue ambulance crew gets kickbacks from a shady funeral director if the patient dies en route to the hospital.  Said undertaker also uses his coffin inventory for his human smuggling ring, and he makes his payoffs in a Chinese restaurant.  The ambulance driver is addicted to laughing gas and scolds everyone about the difference between samurai and ninja swords.  Then there’s the addict who lives in the subway and repeatedly slashes herself so she can jump the responding ambulance crew and steal their morphine.

The laughs are enhanced by spaghetti western music, complete with showdown-in-the-main-street power chords for dramatic confrontations.  The cast delivers wonderfully dead pan performances, especially Roland Rába (Question in Details in the 2011 Cinequest).  There’s an especially messy emergency tracheotomy in a produce market and a hysterically madcap runaway ambulance sequence near the end.

Now this is a DARK comedy – and if you don’t find the likes of Killer Joe, The Guard, Bernie and Headhunters really funny, then this may not be for you.  For cynics like me, the more noir the better, and I think Heavenly Shift is a freaking riot.

Heavenly Shift’s North American Premiere is March 7 at Cinequest, and it plays again on March 12 and 14.

White Reindeer: wickedly deadpan for the Holidays

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white reindeer“Autumn is my stripper name.  My real name is Fantasia.”

I think that’s pretty funny. If you think so, too, you should watch White Reindeer on VOD. In this dark and subversive comedy, we meet a comfortable suburbanite who enjoys going overboard at Christmastime; suddenly, her husband is killed and she plunges into shock, grief and various manifestations of depression. Believe it or not, this is a comedy, and what makes it so funny is her deadpan reaction to each of the secondary indignities she undergoes. As she tries to cope with her loss, she learns some unexpected things about her late husband and winds up partying with strippers, dabbling in shoplifting and visiting a neighbors’ creepy swingers mixer. It’s all subversively funny.

White Reindeer is available streaming on Amazon, iTunes, Sundance Now, GooglePlay and XBOX.

Nancy, Please: an unhealthy (and unfunny) obsession

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NANCY, PLEASE

In the dark comedy Nancy, Please, a neurotic and feckless Yale grad student has just moved in with his new girlfriend and realizes that he has left his copy of Little Dorrit at his old digs. His former female roommate is both hostile and passive aggressive, and she won’t return it.  It’s a big deal, because he is up against a thesis deadline and his notes are annotated in the book.

But the central joke in the movie is that losing the book shouldn’t be THAT big a deal.  Sure, she’s being a jerk, but it’s pretty hard to imagine that he can’t reconstruct his notes, as he is advised by everyone else in his life except one friend who has the excuse of being drunk.  The grad student can’t let it go, making this molehill into a mountain that obstructs his progress on any and all fronts.  As he becomes more and more emotionally paralyzed, his academic career, his new relationship and even the walls of his new apartment disintegrate.  And a dose of maturity would solve the whole thing. 

I did chuckle when his girlfriend, alarmed by his escalating obsession, announces “I can’t support this any more.  I withdraw my support.”  Still, we’re talking about a $3.99 rental and 84 minutes of your life, and Nancy, Please just is not THAT funny.  Nancy, Please is available on VOD from Amazon, Vudu and Google Play. 

Cinequest: Oh Boy

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Ranging from wry to hilarious, the German dark comedy Oh Boy hits every note perfectly.  It’s the debut feature for writer-director Jan Ole Gerster, a talented filmmaker we’ll be hearing from again.

We see a slacker moving from encounter to encounter in a series of vignettes.  Gerster has created a warm-hearted but lost character who needs to connect with others – but sabotages his every opportunity.  He has no apparent long term goals, and even his short term goal of getting some coffee is frustrated.

As the main character wanders through contemporary Berlin, Oh Boy demonstrates an outstanding sense of place, especially in a dawn montage near the end of the film.  The soundtrack is also excellent – the understated music complements each scene remarkably well.

Oh Boy plays again at Cinequest on March 9. 

Fuzz Track City: I’ll have another Monte Cristo, please

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In the darkly comic Fuzz Track City, writer-director Steve Hicks riffs on the conventions of the detective genre to celebrate the most offbeat sides of LA.  Our hero could be a hard-boiled detective if he were more alert.  But Murphy Dunn (Todd Robert Anderson) is preoccupied with the death of his partner and the end of his marriage, two numbing losses that stem from betrayals.   It takes all of his remaining energy to order his daily Monte Cristo sandwich at the diner.

Look elsewhere for Hollywood gloss.  As Dunn searches for the MacGuffin, the B-side of a failed rock band’s long lost 45, he never enters a Bel Air estate.  Instead, he pads about the most ordinary neighborhoods of Burbank and Arcadia.  His office isn’t in an art deco office building – it’s in a strip on the run down Lankershim Boulevard.  Dunn doesn’t drive down storied Mulholland Drive or Sunset Boulevard; his bliss is cruising Ventura Boulevard.

Dunn is a lovable loser, still wearing his high school hair and driving his high school beater.  He’s so inexpert with his fists and gun that he needs to get bailed out of a bad situation by his extremely pregnant ex-wife (Tarina Pouncy).  The ex-wife witheringly says “take off those sunglasses – they don’t make you look cool” (and she’s right).     When he becomes the last LA resident to get a cell phone, he treats it as if it were about to explode.

Along the way Dunn encounters a series of oddballs.  One is an agoraphobic vinyl record collector (Josh Adell) who “hasn’t left Burbank in seven years or his house in three” and who scampers about in his tidy whities.  Another is a trailer-dwelling former musician (Dave Florek) whose idea of hospitality is to offer a choice of variously colored mouthwashes.  Abby Miller (Ellen Mae in Justified) brings some kooky originality to the role of the sad sack waitress.  And then there’s the object of Dunn’s schoolboy crush – his high school guidance counselor (Dee Wallace).

As he toys with the tropes of detective fiction, filmmaker Hicks takes us on a leisurely journey through the San Fernando Valley that finally crescendos into an uproarious climax.  It’s a fun ride.

Seven Psychopaths: just not the sum of its parts

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Upon leaving the theater, The Wife asked the revelatory question: “How come it wasn’t as good as its parts?”.  True, Seven Psychopaths is well-acted by a very deep team of my favorite actors and is embedded with belly laughs, but, as a whole, it’s just not that satisfying.

Colin Farrell plays an alcoholic writer struggling to get past the title of his new screenplay. He expertly plays the straight man against an assortment of raging oddballs.  Sam Rockwell is brilliant as the writer’s not-a-good-influence friend who, underneath a shiftless exterior, is profoundly psychopathic. Christopher Walken hits another home run as a dignified eccentric. And Woody Harrelson plays a pedal-to-the-metal raging psycho crime boss as only he can.

The supporting cast includes the immortal Harry Dean Stanton, Abbie Cornish, Gabourey Sidibe (Precious), Michael Pitt (The Dreamers, Boardwalk Empire), Michael Stuhlbarg (A Serious Man), Olga Kuylenko and the always reliable Zeljko Ivanek.   The best performances are by Tom Waits (as a bunny-petting retired serial killer) and Linda Bright Clay (as Walken’s tough-as-nails wife).

But the story isn’t tight enough.  Writer-director Martin McDonagh (In Bruges) (who doesn’t admire Quentin Tarantino) here only delivers Tarantino Lite.  Instead, I recommend McDonagh’s brilliant In Bruges (and The Guard which McDonagh produced).  For those who like dark, dark comedy with lots of violence, Seven Psychopaths is entertaining.  For everyone else, nothing special.

DVD of the Week: Bernie

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BERNIE

This is one very funny movie. Playing against type, Jack Black is Bernie, an assistant funeral director who is the kindest, most generous guy in a small East Texas town. Bernie becomes entangled with the most malicious town resident, the rich widow played by Shirley MacLaine. We are used to seeing Black playing venal and devious characters, but Bernie is utterly good-hearted. He has built up so much good will in the community that when he snaps and commits one very gravely wrong act, he is still locally beloved. Black also gets to show off his singing voice on some heartfelt gospel hymns.

But the real main character is really the East Texas town of Carthage. Director Richard Linklater has the local residents (some played by actors) tell the story in capsule interviews. Through this chorus, we see how the locals view Bernie and the widow, and we learn a lot about the local values, customs and colorful language. Linklater is from East Texas himself and clearly revels in sharing the culture with us. It’s very, very funny.

The plot takes one improbably funny turn after another – but it’s a true story, which makes it even funnier. You can look it up in the New York Times [major spoilers in the article]. During the end credits, we even see Jack Black conversing with the real Bernie at Bernie’s current residence.

(I’m not embedding the trailer, because it doesn’t make clear that Jack Black’s character is not the winking, edgy guy that he usually plays. Just see the movie.)

Bernie is on my list of Best Movies of 2012 – So Far.

DVD of the Week: Headhunters

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The smug Norwegian corporate headhunter named Roger Brown (don’t ask) explains his motivation at the very beginning of the movie:  at 5 feet, 6 inches, his insecurity about keeping his six foot blond wife leads him to cut some corners.  As ruthlessly successful as he is in business, he feels the need to also burgle the homes of his clients and steal art treasures.  So the dark comedy thriller Headhunters (Hodejegerne) begins like a heist movie.  But soon Roger becomes targeted by a client with serious commando skills, unlimited high tech gizmos,  and a firm intention to make Roger dead.

Roger Brown is played brilliantly by Aksel Hennie, a huge star in Norway who looks like a cross between Christopher Walken and Peter Lorre. The laughs come from Roger’s comeuppance as he undergoes every conceivable humiliation while trying to survive.  As a smoothly confident scoundrel, Roger is at first not that sympathetic, but Hennie turns him into a panicked and terrified Everyman when he becomes a human pinata.

Headhunters is based on a page-turner by the Scandinavian mystery writer Jo Nesbo.   There are reports that Headhunters will be remade soon by Hollywood.  In the mean time, see Headhunters and have a fun time at the movies.