comedy

TRIANGLE OF SADNESS: more subtlety, please

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Photo caption: Charlbi Dean and Harris Dickinson in in TRIANGLE OF SADNESS. Courtesy of NEON.

The biting satire Triangle of Sadness is very funny and is at its best in the first, most subtle moments. Yaya (Charlbi Dean) and Carl (Harris Dickinson) are a couple, both professional models. Because of Yaya’s status as an influencer, they are comped a cruise on a luxury yacht. This puts them amidst a boatful of superrich fellow passengers, and Triangle of Sadness, like Parasite and Knives Out is Eat-The-Rich cinema. It’s fun to laugh at the rich, with their entitlement, tone deafness and absurd customer requests.

The cruise starts going horribly awry, even before the formal captain’s dinner is scheduled during a ship-tossing storm. Eventually, things get all Lord of the Flies. The tone of Triangle of Sadness evolves from pointedly witty to all-out comic mayhem, a la the Marx Brothers, I Love Lucy or The Hangover. As the humor gets broader, there are belly laughs, but the humor is no longer as smart. And Triangle of Sadness would be more watchable if it were shorter than 2 1/2 hours, too.

The sly beginning of the film is brilliant, with a memorable and telling scene about picking up the check in a restaurant. And funny little Easter Eggs abound, like the first names of an elderly British couple and the dramatic express delivery of a mysterious case that we learn contains jars of Nutella.

Triangle of Sadness was written and directed by Ruben Ostlund. His first notable film, Force Majeure, was a masterpiece of subtle humor. Having lessened the subtlety, his next two inferior satires, The Square and Triangle of Sadness have each won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Go figure. Anyway, I recommend that you watch Force Majeure on Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu or YouTube.

The cast is very good. Charlbi Dean is excellent as the vivacious, frivolous and admittedly manipulative Yaya; (Dean died suddenly of a viral infection before the film’s theatrical release). I really admired Harris Dickinson’s performance as the dim and spineless Carl. Vicki Berlin is very good as the put-upon head steward. Zlatko Buric soars as a Russian fertilizer magnate, the self-described “King of Shit”. Woody Harrelson is very funny as the yacht’s alcoholic, Marxist captain, who does not suffer fools.

The most memorable performance is by Dolly DeLeon, who plays a character almost invisible until the final act, when she becomes pivotal and gives DeLeon the movie’s best opportunity for a killer line reading. She nails it.

I enjoyed most of Triangle of Sadness, less so as it became broader (and longer). It’s always fun to kick the rich, and Ruben Ostlund is a caustic observer of their frailties.

LINOLEUM: highly original and sweet

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Jim Gaffigan and Rhea Seehorn in LINOLEUM. Courtesy of Blue Fox Entertainment.

Colin West’s Linoleum, a gentle story of a lovable loser with a nose-diving kid’s science TV show, is superficially about the guy’s eccentric attempt to build a real rocket in his garage; but it’s really three love stories – or are they one love story? Although West peppers some clues throughout, it’s not until the final act that the audience connects the dots about what is going on. Linoleum is hard to review – or even describe – without spoilers, but let’s just say that it is a highly original and sweet film.

Our TV host Cameron (Jim Gaffigan) is an astronomer who seems overqualified for his charmingly corny children’s show. He takes the science seriously, but not himself. Cameron is the kind of affable guy who always gets run over by the more self-interested among us.

Cameron is married to Erin (Rhea Seehorn) a smarty pants aeronautical engineer who is direcying programs at a provicial air and space museum. Like Cameron, she started out as a whiz kid and is wondering. Unlike Cameron, who is placidly content, she is wondering how she got stuck in the bush leagues. Erin’s dissatisfaction with her career, and with Cameron’s lack of ambition, is threatening their marriage.

The teenage girl in the story meets the new boy in high school, and they tentatively stumble into a guileless friendship. This thread in Linoleum is especially charming.

The comedian Jim Gaffigan has shown that he’s also a fine actor (Light from Light), and Rhea Seehorn (Better Call Saul, Veep) is one of our finest TV actors. Both are very good in Linoleum.

The first two acts of Linoleum are fairly easy-to-follow, with a couple small mysteries that could be imagined or hallucinated. The third act, which I will not spoil, becomes more confusing until West connects the threads of the story and we understand what we’ve been watching ll along. Viewers who need linear stories may be frustrated, but the payoff is splendid.

I saw Linoleum at the opening night of Cinequest, with Gaffigan and West in attendance.

SPIN ME ROUND: unpretentious and delightful

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Aubrey Plaza and Alison Brie in SPIN ME ROUND, Courtesy of IFC Films.

In the unpretentious and delightful comedy Spin Me Round, Alison Brie plays the assistant manager of an Italian chain restaurant who wins a corporate junket – a week at the CEO’s villa in Tuscany. She arrives in Italy with a cadre of peers, misfits all, to discover that they aren’t exactly at the villa and the corporate retreat isn’t exactly what it seems. The charismatic zillionaire CEO (Alessandro Nivola) seems to be grooming them – but not for corporate advancement. Many laughs ensue.

Alison Brie, so good as Trudy Campbell in Mad Men, has proven to have a wonderful gift for comedy. She ably works her Girl Next Door quality to reflect the more overtly zany characters around her. Brie co-wrote Spin Me Round’s screenplay with director Jeff Baena. Baena and Brie had worked together on The Little Hours and Horse Girl (which they also co-wrote).

Spin Me Round is a showcase for comic actors:

  • If you can’t get enough of Zach Woods’s Silicon Valley character, he returns with his naive, overly nice, worshipful devotee – with the capacity for a massive meltdown.
  • Aubrey Plaza (director Baena’s wife) plays archly cynical and dangerously edgy better than anyone.
  • Molly Shannon can convincingly play a deranged, over-the-top character because she just commits so entirely.
  • Fred Armisen is as we rarely, if ever, see him – as a macho, oily Silvio Berlusconi type.
  • Nivola, known mainly for his dramatic roles (The Many Saints of Newark), can be very funny.
  • Ego Nwodin, in the tiniest of roles as Brie’s Skypeing roommate, is just perfect.

One of the funniest threads in Spin Me Round is the send-up of The Olive Garden, the restaurant chain so obviously parodied here, The chain’s managers know shockingly little about Italian cuisine. And you may never eat alfredo sauce again.

In real life, wild pigs are not funny; here, they are very, very funny.

I saw Spin Me Round, before its release, at a well-attended screening at Cinequest, where the crowd loved it. It opens this weekend in LA, but I haven’t located a screen in the Bay Area.

Laughs at Cinequest

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

Comedies abound at this year’s Cinequest. Here are four:

  • 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. Their differences spawn lots of laughs, but Dealing with Dad addresses both depression and the issues that many second-generation Asian-Americans face because of their immigrant parents’ parenting styles. Cinequest audiences will appreciate that Dealing with Dad is set in MILPITAS.
  • 18 1/2 is a dark comedy that sends up the paranoid thriller genre. A low-level government clerical worker (an excellent Willa Fitzgerald) finds herself in possession of the infamous 18 1/2 minute gap in the Watergate Tapes. Of course, co-writers Daniel Moya and Dan Mirvish had to devise a way to get this MacGuffin in her hands; given the paranoia, deviousness and clumsiness of the Nixon White House, their solution is surprisingly plausible. Double crosses and red herrings escalate, as does the dark, dark humor. Richard Kind and Vondie Curtis-Hall sparkle in supporting roles.
  • Sweet Disaster, from Germany, is driven by the protagonist’s ever-unleashed impulsiveness and utter lack of boundaries. Frida (Friederike Kempter) encounters and falls for an airline pilot and audaciously charms him into a relationship; their affair lasts just long enough for her to become impregnated and for him to abandon her for his ex. Consumed by the urge to win him back, Frida throws propriety to the winds. Frida’s zany roller coaster is tempered by sweet relationships with her apartment neighbors, a precocious teenage neighbor and a Greek Chorus of card-playing older women.
  • Alpha Male, from Poland, is another dark comedy. A feckless young man has been dispatched by his girlfriend to a smoking cessation self-help group. Given the chaos of the community center, he ends up in the wrong room, among a men’s support group headed by a charismatic instructor. He hangs around anyway – and even returns – because this group has better food. The group focuses on their resentment of women, which seems silly and harmless at first, but descends into a paranoid fixation on an imagined organization of women seeking to emasculate them. Both the misogyny and their submissiveness to their bullying leader are taken to absurd levels.

Here’s the Cinequest program, the schedule and the passes and tickets. My CINEQUEST page links to all my coverage. 

Vondie Curtis-Hall, John Magaro, Willa Fitzgerald and Catharine Curtin in 18 1/2. Credit Elle Schneider (c)2021, Waterbug Eater Films, LLC.

SUPERCOOL: a teen comedy familiar, until it isn’t

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A scene from Teppo Airaksinen’s film SUPERCOOL, which played at SFFILM. Photo courtesy of SFFILM.

Supercool has the familiar arc of a teen comedy – until it doesn’t. We get the high school cafeteria lunch period, the adolescent social awkwardness, the bullies and the parents-away teen house party. And then there are some unexpected sparkles.

Our protagonists, Neil (Jake Short) and Gilbert (Miles J. Harvey) have a commonplace obsession for teen boys: they aspire to get SOME sexual experience with another person. And Neil worships a girl whom he is afraid to even talk to,

There’s a funny scene (glimpsed in the trailer below) where the guys fantasize a situation where girls would be attracted to them, unaware that Neil’s parents are hearing every word.

The guys also have two misadventures that put them in hilariously uncomfortable sexual situations.

Neil has a helluva imagination and creates graphic novels that picture how he hopes to eventually woo his beloved. Fortunately, he is sweet on a girl who turns out to have an awesome sense of humor.

I must note that Supercool does contain the best-ever movie use of the (only?) Haddaway song What Is Love.

I screened Supercool for its world premiere at SFFILM in April 2021. Supercool can now be streamed from Amazon, Vudu, YouTube and redbox.

OFFICIAL COMPETITION: egos, power and a perfect ending

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Photo caption: Oscar Martínez, Penélope Cruz and Antonio Banderas in OFFICIAL COMPETITION. Courtesy of IFC Films.

The smart and biting satire Official Competition uses the world of filmmaking (where better?) to send up professional jealousies. A billionaire wants to produce a great movie as his legacy, so he assembles a filmmaking Dream Team: the famed director Lola (Penélope Cruz), the global movie star Félix (Antonio Banderas) and the renowned sage actor Iván (Oscar Martínez). Their egos come along, too.

Ivan, a leading acting teacher who pioneers new and challenging theater, is the critical and academic world’s most esteemed actor. There’s a wonderful scene where Ivan and his wife (a children’s’ author) sit in their boho apartment listening to an avant garde audio performance.

Felix, in contrast, has become a world-wide celebrity by starring in what Martin Scorsese calls global audio-visual entertainment to distinguish these movies from cinema. Adored by millions of fans and used to having his whims and appetites satisfied by toadies, Felix is convinced that he has earned his reputation as a great actor. (And he shows up to every event with a different bimbo on his arm.)

The tycoon has purchased a Nobel Prize-winning novel (that he hasn’t read) to be adapted into a screenplay. It’s about a rivalry between brothers. (In one of Official Competition’s many delicious ironies, this source material is very pedestrian, several rungs below East of Eden, for example.)

Lola (Cruz wears a wig that is a mountain of reddish tangles) is a piece of work herself. She enjoys abusing her power as director and is devoid of personal boundaries.

Felix and Ivan are oil and water,and Lola, for artistic reasons (and more than a touch of sadism), provokes their latent rivalry, seeking to enhance what will be the tension in their on-screen rivalry. In nine days of rehearsals before the shoot, Lola plunges Ivan and Felix into a series of evermore ridiculous, intrusive and degrading acting exercises. She has them read lines under a huge, suspended rock, binds their bodies together in cling wrap, and overamplifies their kissing noises.

Lola’s caprices accomplish two things with Ivan and Felix. She turns their passive contempt for each other into open hatred. And she makes them hate her, too.

Each actor (and Lola, too) has a massive ego begging to be deflated, and the battles between them in Official Competition are very, very funny.

The ending of Official Competition is perfect – one of the cleverest and most satisfying that I’ve seen in a good long while.

The Argentines Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat co-directed Official Competition, which they co-wrote with Andrés Duprat. Official Competition is being described as an arch takedown of the movie industry, but the egos parodied here are present in many walks of life.

Cruz, Banderas and Oscar Martínez (the hilariously dark Wild Tales) each deliver dynamite performances. Irene Escolar is very good in a deadpan and essentially silent role as the billionaire’s daughter cast in the movie.

[Note: Prior to Official Competition, the Spanish stars Cruz and Banderas had only shared the screen for about two minutes in I’m So Excited; they did not work together in Pain and Glory, in which they both appeared in different segments.]

Official Competition, so far the wittiest film of 2022, is in theaters.

MY DONKEY, MY LOVER & I: it had me at the title

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Laure Calamy in MY DONKEY, MY LOVER AND I

In the intriguingly titled French comedy My Donkey, My Lover & I, Antoinette (Laure Calamy) is a vivacious and goofy schoolteacher in a French provincial town.  She’s single, but she’s head over heels into a fling with a married man.  She’s excited that’s he’s taking her away to a resort at the upcoming school holiday, but – at the very last minute – he instead submits to a mountain hiking trip with his family.

Antoinette’s distraught and angry disappointment soon transforms into determination and lunacy – she decides to go to the same network of mountain trails, rent a donkey and encounter him in the mountains.

Here’s what I didn’t know before I stumbled on this film at the Mill Valley Film Festival.  In 1879, a lovelorn Robert Louis Stevenson, with only a donkey companion, took a solitary hike in Southern France and penned his travel memoir Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes. It’s common for today’s French to spend a week of their vacations re-creating Stevenson’s experience.  It’s a thing, and it’s spawned a cottage industry of donkey rentals and mountain hostels.

Antoinette can be an over-sharer, and when she blurts her mission to another hiker, it goes viral, and soon everyone else in the mountains knows.  Having prepared for a lie-by-the-pool vacation, she is ill-equipped, especially in the footwear department, to trudge over mountains,.  And, of course, she gets the very most uncooperative donkey.  How is she going to find her lover – and, if she does,  what is she going to do with him?

Laure Calamy is a brilliant comic actress (and one of the highlights of last summer’s Sibyl). She knows that the key to comedy is for an actor to be absolutely committed (with no hint of winking at the audience) to an absurd course of action.  This is why Buster Keaton, Lucille Ball and Gene Wilder were performance geniuses.  And it is why Will Ferrell isn’t as funny as Bill Hader or Kristen Wiig.

In My Lover, My Donkey & I, Calamy is all in on Antoinette, a woman who can be both alarmingly unself-conscious and cringingly self-conscious, and both pathetic and empowered.  Antoinette endures indignity after indignity, but Calamy’s radiance shines through.

The premise of this film seems utterly unbelievable, but the story is based on actual events which are well-known in France, hence the French title Antoinette dans les Cévennes.

My Lover, My Donkey & I may not be Annie Hall or even There’s Something About Mary, but there are worse ways to spend 97 minutes than with the delightful Laure Calamy. It’s opening July 22, including in the Bay Area at the Opera Plaza and the Rafael.

THE SIXTH REEL: endearing farce

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Photo caption: Charles Busch and Julie Halston in THE SIXTH REEL. Courtesy of Frameline.

The endearing madcap comedy The Sixth Reel is set in the insular world of classic movie geeks. I’m not talking about the average Turner Classic Movies devotees; these are folks who would sell their souls for the right lobby card and say things like, “William Powell is sexier with Kay Francis than he is with Myrna Loy.”

Jimmy (Charles Busch) is a down-on-his-luck collector and dealer of movie memorabilia. Jimmy has a history of becoming the companion of aging filmmakers and emerging with their memorabilia collections after their demise. Despite this unsavory business model, Jimmy is broke when stumbles upon a lead – the final reel of an iconic “lost film” is extant after all.

Jimmy and his peers, each shadier than the last, plunge ahead, competing with each other for their Holy Grail. Wackiness ensues.

Charles Busch and Julie Halston in THE SIXTH REEL. Courtesy of Frameline.

Busch co-wrote and co-directed The Sixth Reel with Carl Andress. This is my first Charles Busch film, but I understand that his movies, dappled with drag performances, constitute their own comedy sub-genre.

Busch’s committed performance is excellent. The rest of the cast, which includes Tim Daly and Margaret Cho, is fine, too, especially Julie Halston as an assertive widow and Patrick Page as an imperious mogul.

There should always be a place for well-crafted farce like this. The Sixth Reel screens at Frameline on June 25, and can be streamed from Frameline after June 24.

EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE: often indecipherable and mostly dazzling

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Photo caption: Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, Michelle Yeoh and James Hong in EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE. Courtesy of A24.

The mind-bender Everything Everywhere All At Once is often indecipherable and mostly dazzling. It’s as if a martial arts version of It’s a Wonderful Life were written by Terry Gilliam on LSD and Red Bull

Michelle Yeoh shines as Evelyn, the burned-out owner of the coin laundromat that she lives above. Evelyn is simultaneously tying to run the business, survive a crippling IRS audit, organize a birthday party for her cranky father and avoid facing her daughter Joy’s (Stephanie Hsu) having a girlfriend. Stressed out to the max, Evelyn is so emotionally neglectful of her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) that she doesn’t grok that he’s trying to divorce her (for emotional neglect).

Suddenly, Evelyn is plunged into a multiverse where a master villain named Jobu Topaki is wreaking carnage and sometimes inhabiting Joy’s body. And, just as suddenly, we are plunged into a mile-a-minute adventure like being inside a pinball machine. Every so often, Waymond is possessed by a multiverse good guy and blurts out a stream of exposition, but it’s best not to try to follow it.

An “everything bagel” appears – both literally and metaphorically. There’s a heartfelt message embedded that is much simpler than all the sci fi hoopla.

It takes a movie star like Yeoh (the martial arts star of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the Bond Girl in Tomorrow Never Dies, and the steely mom in Crazy Rich Asians).tio hold the center of this wacky extravaganza.

Jamie Lee Curtis in EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE. Courtesy of A24.

The rest of the cast is excellent, too. Ke Huy Quan, who, as a child, played Short Round in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom captures Waymond’s gentle cluelessness and domestic frustration. I especially loved 93-year-old James Hong (recognizable from his 450 screen credits) as Evelyn’s dad. The funniest performance is by a hilariously glammed-down Jamie Lee Curtis as the IRS agent.

Everything Everywhere All At Once is co-written and co-directed by the Daniels – Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. The pair is best known for getting $3 million to make the utterly transgressive Swiss Army Man, starring Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter) as a flatulent corpse.

Everything Everywhere All At Once is a succession of zany action and eye candy with an avalanche of googly eyes at the climax. The best bits are:

  • a brilliant martial arts set piece with a fannypack as a weapon.
  • a fantasy of what Evelyn’s life would be if she hadn’t married Waymond, which turns out to be the real movie star life of Michelle Yeoh.
  • the moment in evolutionary history when hot dog fingers overcame real human fingers in natural selection.
  • a live action homage to the movie Ratatouille with a CGI racoon.
Stephanie Hsu in EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE. Courtesy of A24.

One more note: the costume design (Shirley Kurata) and makeup (Michelle Chung) for Joy when she’s possessed by the villain is inspired.

I’ve rarely seen so much imagination thrown up on the screen, mostly for the better. Everything Everywhere All At Once is kinda draining to watch and often frustrating, but its best moments are very, very good.

ADVENTURES IN SUCCESS: sending up seekers

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Photo caption: Lexie Mountain in ADVENTURES IN SUCCESS. Photo courtesy of Nashville Film Festival.

The broadly comic Adventures in Success traces the misadventures of a self-help retreat center led by Peggy (Lexie Mountain), a self-described energy transformationist. Peggy claims to have experienced a 12-hour orgasm. Her movement is centered on the female orgasm, the mantra is Jilling Off, and the sessions are essentially orgies where men are not allowed to ejaculate.

Of course, Adventures in Success sends up self-help movements, New Age affectations, and, especially, would-be cult leaders. As Peggy, Lexie Mountain projects a demented self-assurance.

The comic tone is set early – the opening shot is an impressive 28-second performance of urination art.

ADVENTURES IN SUCCESS. Photo courtesy of Nashville Film Festival.

There some inspired LOL moments, but Adventures in Success is not a laugh-a-minute. It runs out of energy when the group takes a final, doomed bus trip to Vegas.

Cinequest hosted the world premiere of Adventures in Success; I screened it for the Nashville Film Festival. Adventures in Success is streaming from Amazon and AppleTV.