Photo caption: Margaret Qualley in HONEY DON’T. Courtesy of Focus Features.
In Ethan Coen’s dark comedy Honey Don’t, the potential clients of private eye Honey O’Donahue (Margaret Qualley) keep getting killed, and she suspects that the deaths are connected to a sexually predatory sham preacher (Chris Evans). She’s a whip-smart lipstick lesbian, and she sizzles with the local cop MG (Aubrey Plaza). Honey and the phony pastor have lots of robust sex, none of it with each other. We think we know who the big villain is going to be, but there’s a big surprise twist.
There’s a lot of sassy dialogue, and there are some LOL lines like “no, but I saw Palmdale” that could have become iconic if this were a better movie. It’s kinda funny, dotted with a few inspired moments, but, on the whole, a disposable movie.
Director Ethan Coen co-wrote Honey Don’t with longtime Coen Brothers editor Tricia Cooke, who also co-wrote his Drive Away Dolls. In a twist on the detective genre, the oversexed, badass characters are women – Honey, MG and a mysterious, motor scooter-riding drug importer (Lera Abova). The two main male characters are Evan’s predatory minister, a doofus who thinks he’s a mastermind, and a smarmy cop (Charlie Day), who knows that he’s a doofus and is blissfully content with being one. That being said, Honey Don’t is all about the carnage-laden comic violence that men tend to enjoy, and I doubt that the female-centric angle is enough to draw women into the audience.
Qualley and Evans are both very good, and I will watch anything that features Aubrey Plaza. There are excellent comic performances by Josh Pafchek, as an impressively dim thug, and Kale Browne, as an old man whose identity isn’t revealed right away.
One of the most distinctive and fun stars of the film is its setting – emphatically downscale Bakersfield. I’m not convinced that there is a nice part of Bakersfield, but, if there is, we sure don’t see it here. Californians will also enjoy the references to Lancaster and Palmdale.
Honey Don’t is a mildly enjoyable 87 minutes, but not a Must See.
Photo caption: Tabatha Zimiga in EAST OF WALL. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.
In the engrossing indie family drama East of Wall, Tabatha (Tabatha Zimiga) is struggling to manage a messy home, which even she describes as chaotic, and to survive financially. Three years after her husband’s suicide, her household includes her teenage daughter and son, her three-year-old son, her mom, her partner of the past year-and-a-half, and four more stray teens. Everyone is damaged by some trauma or another – Tabatha’s nuclear family rocked by her husband’s death and the unrelated teens by their own parental abandonment.
Tabatha is running a dilapidated South Dakota horse ranch, selling the horses that she trains. She’s a gifted horse whisperer, and she teaches horsemanship to the kids. The daughter Porshia (Porshia Zimiga) is a brilliant rider and a champion barrel racer. Trouble is, Tabatha can’t sell the horses at prices high enough to sustain the ranch or keep her family in hamburger and pizza rolls. She’s run out of credit at the local grocery, and has to send in a mortified Porshia with cash to buy the basics.
Her colorful mom Tracey (Jennifer Ehle), isn’t much practical help, babysitting the toddler with horror movies and making moonshine. Tracey is a survivor of intimate partner violence, Tabatha was a teen mom, and it’s clear that Tabatha is trying to somehow break through multi-generational dysfunction. Ehle sparkles in a very colorful role, both providing comic relief in a grief movie and in grounding the traumas endemic to the neighborhood.
Enter Roy (Scoot McNairy), a Texas horse-trader who has both swagger and the humility to recognize someone more talented than he is. And he has enough business sense to spot an opportunity. Roy brings Tabatha the hope of financial salvation, but he’s damaged, too, and there’s a question as to the cost of his help.
In her first feature film writer-director Kate Beecroft, skillfully unspools what is really going on with Roy, and McNairy’s performance keeps us guessing. Beecroft handles the central thread of the story – the highly charged relationship between Tabatha and Porshia – with remarkable authenticity. What is most impressive is that, with the exception of McNairy and Ehle, Beecroft is doing this with non-professional actors in all the main roles. These are all rural South Dakotans playing fictionalized versions of themselves.
Tracey’s gal pals celebrate her birthday with some beers round a campfire. As each, including Tracey and Tabatha share their own traumatic experiences, you won’t hear a pin drop in the theater. It’s one of the most compelling movie scenes of the year.
Beecroft also captures the verisimilitude of the setting and the local ranch-and-saloon culture. The ranch is east of Wall, South Dakota, moderately famous for its Wall Drug attraction. The area is on the edge of the Badlands, which Beecroft and cinematographer Austin Shelton (in also his feature debut) use to their advantage. The shots of galloping horses are thrilling.
(A digression: The director Chloe Zhao (Nomadland) mined rural South Dakota for her breakout films, Songs My Brother Taught Me and The Rider, which also featured non-professional actors. There are only eleven people every square mile in South Dakota, and under a million overall, so ya gotta wonder how many great personal stories are out there for filmmakers to find.)
East of Wall won the NEXT audience award at Sundance and is now in theaters.
Photo caption: Ed Sullivan and James Brown in SUNDAY BEST: THE UNTOLD STORY OF ED SULLIVAN. Courtesy of Netflix.
Boy, was I ever wrong about Ed Sullivan. Coming of age at the end of the 23-year run of CBS’ weekly The Ed Sullivan Show, which seemed hopelessly old-fashioned and stale, I totally missed the fact that, two decades earlier, Sullivan had been alone in presenting African-American artists to national television audiences. And that African-Americans thought it was a very big deal.
The Ed Sullivan Show began in 1948, before many Americans owned a TV, and Sullivan helped invent the earliest evolutionary stage of television content. Sullivan himself picked every performer on The Ed Sullivan Show – over 10,000 of them over the show’s 23 year run. He harvested Vaudeville and nightclub performers who had not prospered in the Radio Era, including Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, and the Ink Spots. Virtually every major African-American act got an early showcase on Sullivan’s show – Nat King Cole, Harry Belafonte, Mahalia Jackson, Diahann Carroll, James Brown, Ray Charles, the Supremes, Stevie Wonder, The Temptations, and the Jackson 5. By the time I was occasionally tuning in to the end of Sullivan’s run, there didn’t seem like anything was risky about Louis Armstrong and Pearl Bailey – but, then again, they had been appearing on TV for twenty years because of Ed Sullivan.
This was not the norm for programming by the three corporate television networks (yes, kids, there were only three TV channels for many years). Sunday Best: The Untold Story of the Ed Sullivan Show lets White Americans learn that, on Sunday nights, African-Americans rushed to their TVs – it was their only chance to see performing artists that looked like them. Sunday Best presents the testimony from Berry Gordy, Oprah Winfrey, Harry Belafonte and Smokey Robinson.
Sullivan did all this with intentionality. His own sense of justice required him to showcase the talents of the best artists regardless of race. And he despised Jim Crow and racial segregation. Director Sacha Jenkins has accessed Sullivan’s own personal writings, as well as contemporaneous recordings, so we hear Sullivan’s own words. Sullivan modeled his fearlessness and principles from his father, who knew about earlier anti-Irish discrimination.
Two career incarnations earlier, Sullivan had been a NYC sports columnist. When NYU chickened out and benched their one Black football player so they play the University of Georgia, Sullivan was so outraged that his column called for NYU to drop football altogether in shame.
Personally, he was such a close friend of Bill Robinson that Sullivan helped organize (and probably pay for) Robinson’s funeral.
Everyone today (hopefully) remembers the Jim Crow era for the separate restrooms and drinking fountains, the segregated schools and accommodations, the back-of-the-bus shit and the terror of the KKK. But there was also prevalent a lot of craziness about people of different races touching each other at all (based, I’m sure, on fear of Black sexuality). In the South, black people were supposed to give change for retail sales without touching white hands, and whites would consider a swimming pool defiled if a black person dipped their feet in it. If a white person, like Ed Sullivan, even shook a Black person’s hand on TV – let alone put his arm on their shoulders – it was a Big Deal.
Imagine if John Legend introduced Taylor Swift at the Grammys and gave her a chaste buss on the cheek – in 1955, that would have made heads explode in a third of the nation.
Network executives were legitimately concerned about Southern Whites boycotting their sponsors. White supremacy activist Asa Carter and Georgia Governor Herman Talmadge both organized actual boycotts. But Ed Sullivan, fearless, just didn’t care.
Ed Sullivan and Ray Charles in SUNDAY BEST: THE UNTOLD STORY OF ED SULLIVAN. Courtesy of Netflix.
This is big news to those of us who remember Sullivan’s anti-telegenic stone face and the acts with spinning plates and hoop-jumping dogs. The CBS network censors were notorious for not letting the camera show Elvis’ gyrating hips and for trying to get the Stones to change the lyrics of Let’s Spend the Night Together to Let’s Spend Some Time Together. But Elvis was only censored from waist down in his THIRD appearance on the Sullivan Show.
There are lots of gems in Sunday Best, including Sammy Davis Jr and Flip Wilson trying to outdo each others’ Ed Sullivan impression while standing next to Ed Sullivan.
A 1958 Jackie Wilson performance on the Sullivan Show is gloriously entertaining by today’s standards. But, knowing what we learn in Sunday Best, it’s absolutely thrilling. In 1958, mainstream audiences would never have seen anything like Jackie’s rendition of Lonely Teardrops, effortlessly sliding into falsetto and nonchalantly dropping a jazz split. And all with a confident, cool swagger and without a hint of racial deference.
White Baby Boomers like me should watch Sunday Best to discover how invested Ed Sullivan was in civil rights before it became mainstream on national TV. Younger people, not just kids and Gen Xers, but also Millennials, should watch it to appreciate the ridiculous limits to which the American mainstream was cowed by Southern White racism. And all of should appreciate how The Ed Sullivan Show didn’t just reflect the cultural taste of America – it helped drive it.
Sunday Best: The Untold Story of Ed Sullivan is streaming on Netflix.
Ed Sullivan in SUNDAY BEST: THE UNTOLD STORY OF ED SULLIVAN. Courtesy of Netflix.
You could argue that Act of Violence is the single most underrated film noir, because a story of moral relativity and situational ethics is told as a thrilling man hunt, with two career-topping performances and a starkly photographed nighttime chase through Los Angeles’ seamy Bunker Hill. Just like the top tier films in the film noir canon, Act of Violence has it all. I’m writing about it today because it’s playing on on Turner Classic Movies on Friday night, and it’s not available to stream.
WW II vet Frank Enley (Van Heflin) is a successful developer with a new bride and baby, popular and prominent in his community. Then, the sunny prosperity of the postwar boom – and Frank Enley’s life – is shattered by the arrival of Joe Parker (Robert Ryan), a guy with a trench coat, a limp and an obsession. Parker’s limp is only the physical manifestation of a psychological wound from the war. While in the same Nazi prisoner of war camp, Frank took an action that Parker believes cost the lives of their buddies. Parker has come to town to kill Frank as retribution.
In the extremity of a Nazi prisoner of war camp, Frank was faced by a situation with no good choices; he knows (correctly) that few in 1949 America will be able to see his action in that context. Because he would instantly lose his standing in the community, he can’t call the police. Now Frank is plunged into both the terror of being killed and self-loathing because he thinks he deserves it,
Frank flees in a panic, going underground in Bunker Hill, a far cry from Frank’s bright, well-tended suburb. Dazed by the position he finds himself in, Frank tries drinking, but there isn’t enough booze in LA to quell his terror. He encounters the world-weary prostitute Pat (Mary Astor), who hides him in her apartment while she figures out how to bleed some money from him; she connects him with a couple predatory bottom-feeders (Barry Kroeger and Taylor Holmes) who may be more heartless and lethal than Joe. All the time, Joe Parker is closing in, right up to the unpredictable climax.
There’s no question that Ryan’s Joe Parker is the villain here, but you can make the case that it’s Frank Enley who committed the unforgiveable and that Joe is the avenging angel, here to deliver justice.
Remarkably versatile for a leading man, Van Heflin was so good in war movies (Battle Cry) and westerns (Shane, 3:10 to Yuma) and corporate drama (Patterns). He may have been his best in classic film noir (Johnny Eager, The Kid Glove Killer, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, Possessed, The Prowler and East Side, West Side) and the neo-noir Once a Thief. Underrated in his lifetime and overlooked today, Heflin was naturally relatable (but very scary in The Prowler and Once a Thief). Topped by his staircase scene with Janet Leigh and his wild stumble to Pat’s apartment, Heflin captures all of Frank’s stunned desperation and self loathing despair; in my book, Heflin never surpassed his performance in Act of Violence.
Mary Astor in ACT OF VIOLENCE
Mary Astor was one of the very most beautiful humans as a teenager, and was 35 when she played the alluring Brigid O’Shaughnnessy in The Maltese Falcon. Astor was 42 when she made Act of Violence, and she looked the part Pat, with all of the mileage on her, without any vanity, . Capturing all of Pat’s exhaustion, cynicism and ambivalence, Act of Violence rates with The Maltese Falcon as Astor’s finest performance.
Pat’s sordid apartment and the grimy joint where she drinks and picks up customers seem so much farther from Frank’s well-trimmed suburb than the actual distance of a few miles. It’s a milieu that has worn out Pat, and she knows it; she’s about to move and try another town.
Pat’s sense of morality is flexible. What she does for a living is illegal although it’s a victimless crime. She tries to milk as much money out of each man she meets. But she has her limits; she’s ok with bleeding some money from a rich guy like Frank, but, while she might tolerate fraud or blackmail, she won’t countenance murder.
Ryan’s single-minded, relentless and cruel Joe Parker would be the best thing in most movies, but the performances by Heflin and Astor are for the ages. Ryan is off-screen for the most chilling moment in the film, when Pat, holding the telephone receiver, relays Joe’s reaction to Frank’s buyoff offer.
Van Heflin and Janet Leigh in ACT OF VIOLENCE
Frank’s wife is played by a 21-year-old Janet Leigh, in only her second year of screen acting. Leigh is excellent as a fresh-faced, naive young woman who could never have imagined the situation she faces now.
Barry Kroeger and Taylor Holmes really elevate Act of Violence with their supporting turns. Kroeger’s shark-like grin is very scary, and Holmes is an even more venal lawyer (disbarred this time) than the one he played in Kiss of Death.
Van Heflin, Mary Astor and Barry Kroeger in ACT OF VIOLENCE
Act of Violence came early in the career of director Fred Zinnemann, who had debuted impressively with The Kid Glove Killer and was only four years away from his masterpiece, High Noon. As an A-lister, he went on to direct iconic films like From Here to Eternity, Oklahoma! and A Man for All Seasons, garnering seven Best Director Oscar nominations and winning for The Sundowners. Another thriller, The Day of the Jackal, is my personal favorite Zinnemann film.
Cinematographer Robert Surtees’ remarkably varied body of work included Oklahoma!, Ben-Hur, PT 109, Mutiny on the Bounty, The Collector, The Graduate and The Last Picture Show. Surtees was not known as a noir DP, but he brought out all the obsession, desperation and shabbiness of this story. No one ever lit and photographed Bunker Hill any better.
Van Heflin in ACT OF VIOLENCE
Robert L. Richards (Winchester ’73) adapted the screenplay from a story by Collier Young.
Remember, you can’t stream Act of Violence, so make sure to DVR it this Friday on Turner Class Movies.
Photo caption: Maddison Brown in TO KILL A WOLF. Courtesy of To Kill a Wolf.
In the character-driven indie drama To Kill a Wolf, a reclusive woodsman in the Pacific Northwest (Ivan Martin) finds the seventeen-year-old runaway Dani (Maddison Brown) collapsed in the forest. He brings her back to his isolated cabin, nurses her back to health and tries to learn how he can return her to her home. She’s not forthcoming, so he has a mystery to solve. Meanwhile, the audience is on to other mysteries – why is the Woodsman (that’s the character’s appellation in the credits) living such an isolated life and why is his relationship with local community members so charged? As the Woodsman takes Dani on a road trip to her most recent residence, the answers, one by one, are revealed. It’s an absorbing story.
To Kill a Wolf is the first feature for writer-director Kelsey Taylor, who demonstrates herself to be a very promising filmmaker. A superb story-teller, she doesn’t explain behaviors before you need to understand. We’re continually wondering about the characters and about what will happen next, and are usually surprised about what the Woodsman is doing and why. Music is unusually important to the characters and to the film itself. The way Taylor ends the film is perfect – the final shot is not even a half-second too long.
Ivan Martin in TO KILL A WOLF. Courtesy of To Kill a Wolf.
The lead performances are excellent, as are those of the rest of the veteran professional cast. The roles of Dani’s Aunt Jolene and Uncle Carey are especially well-written, realistic and textured, and the performances of Kaitlin Doubleday and Michael Esper are vividly authentic. As the Rancher, David Knell captures the surprises in the character’s attitudes.
To Kill a Wolf opens this weekend at the Regal Sherman Oaks Galleria and rolls out in Regal theaters elsewhere. I’ll be sure to let you know as it becomes more accessible.
The singular documentary Architecton is cinema as high art and surprisingly entertaining. Almost narration-free and elevated by Evgueni Galperine’s original music, Architecton is director Viktor Kossakovsky’s immersion into rocks – rocks arranged and moved by Nature and by humans. The visual experience is hypnotic.
Kossakovsky takes us to the site of Baalbek, with its famed, massive stones, somehow hewn in antiquity and still among the world’s largest quarried stones and to its Roman quarry. We see scores of fallen segments of ancient fluted columns – and, then, the majesty of five columns still standing intact. Kossakovsky presents an enormous, tiered modern quarry, rock-crushing machinery in close-up and light cascading on wet, glisteneing rocks. In a very long shot, we see a seemingly endless freight train pulling a hundred gondola cars filled with rocks.
Architecton begins with ugly Soviet apartment blocks in Ukraine, destroyed by Russian bombardment. Later, we see similar damage in earthquake-ruined cities in Turkey. As the rubble is hauled away, it makes new mountains. It’s like the circle of life for inanimate rock.
There’s an elderly Italian architect named Marcele De Lucchi, who is directing construction of a circle of stones at his home; the only dialogue in Architecton is chatter between De Lucchi and his crew of stone masons.
ARCHITECTON. Courtesy of A24.
Kossakovsky had previously made the highly acclaimed Aquarela, taking audiences into the worlds of water. The movements of the camera and Kossakovsky’s choices of perspectives make looking at rocks for 98 minutes actually enthralling. The cinematographer is Ben Bernhard (Aquarela), who should win awards for his drone photography alone.
Early in Architecton there are close-ups of a rock slide, with four shots taking about four minutes, followed by an overhead shot. The scene could only have been safely captured by a drone zooming in, presumably, on a quarry explosion. It’s absolutely mesmerizing.
I take notes in darkened cinemas, and I wrote, “nowhere I’d rather be than in this theater watching this movie.” That was before the epilogue where Kossakovsky himself prompts De Lucchi to expound on the role of architecture, the malignant impacts of concrete and the planet’s future. The epilogue takes us out of the immersive experience and is a buzz kill, the one weak part of Architecton.
Architecton is now in theaters, and it’s one of those films which must be seen on the biggest screen that you can access.
Photo caption: Naomi Ackie and Eva Victor in SORRY, BABY. Courtesy of A24.
Set at a small New England liberal arts college, Sorry, Baby, revolves around Agnes (Eva Victor), a star grad student on her way to a professorship in American literature. Agnes experiences a trauma, and Sorry, Baby traces her path to healing over the next few years. Eva Victor also wrote and directed Sorry, Baby, and has infused leavening humor, including some LOL moments, throughout the film.
Sorry, Baby generated lots of buzz for Victor at Sundance and Cannes, and justifiably so. In her first feature film, she has demonstrated a gift for story-telling that is economical, always seems to hit the right tones and doesn’t underestimate the audience. For example, we don’t see the trauma, but we know what’s happening as Victor shows us a long shot of a house over an afternoon and evening. Then, Agnes’ matter-of-fact recounting of the event is infinitely more searing than if Victor had shown it as it happened.
Agnes isn’t the only smarty pants who has her quirks. But she must perpetually navigate life as the smartest-person-in-the-room, and is particularly observant of others’ foibles. Victor is sharply observant of human behavior, which gives her Agnes plenty of fodder for quick witticisms. The situation where Agnes would theoretically be the LEAST comfortable is jury duty, and Victor takes advantage of that in a very funny, and slyly revelatory, scene.
Eva Victor and John Carroll Lynch in SORRY, BABY. Courtesy of A24.
Sorry, Baby benefits from excellent performances from its remarkable cast. Agnes’ best friend is played by Naomi Ackie, the best thing about Mickey 17, and just as charismatic here. Louis Cancelmi (Killers of the Flower Moon, Billions) brings conflict and texture to what is, ultimately, a very selfish, cowardly and character-deficient villain. Lucas Hedges (Lady Bird, Manchester By the Sea) and John Carroll Lynch (Zodiac, Fargo) shine in their scenes with Victor’s Agnes. The broadest comedy comes from Kelly McCormack as Agnes’ most awful peer, a person so unhealthy that it’s hard to imagine her functioning outside of sheltered college life.
in the end, I admired Sorry, Baby more than I enjoyed it. I think that it was difficult for me to relate to the characters who inhabit the rarefied, insulated, self-congratulatory world of academia, which lends itself to so much self-absorption and over-thinking. That being said, Eva Victor is a promising filmmaker, and Sorry, Baby, manages to be smart, funny and heartfelt.
Photo caption: Mohammed Ghassan (right) in TO A LAND UNKNOWN. Courtesy of Watermelon Pictures.
The searing thriller To a Land Unknown takes us to Athens, into the underground world of Palestinian migrants stuck until they acquire false passports that will get them into Germany. Yasser (Mohammed Ghassan) is a decent family man forced into low level criminality to survive and raise money for the forged passport; he is also burdened by responsibility for his cousin, whose drug addiction is a ticking bomb. Repeatedly exploited and defrauded, Yasser conceives of one very risky way out – to scam the very human traffickers preying on him.
Ghassan is excellent, as is Angeliki Papoulis as a fun-loving but clear-eyed Greek woman also living in the margins.
To a Land Unknown is the gripping first feature for Dubai-born Mahdi Fleifel, who works between Britain, Denmark and Greece.
I screened To a Land Unknown for the Nashville Film Festival and recommended it in my Under the radar at Nashville. To a Land Unknown is now in arthouse theaters, including the Laemmle Royal, Town Center 5 and Glendale.
Manfredi Marini (right) in Giovanni Tortorici’s DICIANNOVE. Courtesy of Oscilloscope Laboratories and Frameline.
The title of the coming-of-age film Diciannove is Italian for nIneteen, the age of Leonardo (Manfredi Marini), who is leaving his Palermo home for the first time to begin college in London. Ever restless, he is eager to embark on his life journey, but doesn’t know where to head, and, being nineteen, he won’t listen to anyone else. In mere days, Leonardo pivots from business courses in London to the study of Italian literature at a university in Siena. He discovers a passion for old Italian writers – just not the ones his professor assigns.
Nineteen is an age that most of us sample experiences, but Leonardo is an introvert, sometimes bratty, who refuses to socialize, and we wonder if he will ever forge relationships or act on his sexual urges. Diciannove is that highly original coming-of-age film in which what even Leonardo chooses NOT to do is interesting, and we can’t predict what could make his spirit soar at the end.
Diciannove is the debut feature for writer-director Giovanni Tortorici, a protege of Luca Guadagnino, who produced the film. Tortorici and cinematographer Massimiliano Kuveiller (who has also worked with Guadagnino) maintain visual interest by throwing everything at the screen – disco scenes with an operatic score, slow motion, animated dreams and every kind of fancy cut. Nighttime scenes in a cold and hard London give way to lovingly beautiful shots of tranquil Siena.
Diciannove is the singular and imaginative calling card of a new auteur; Tortorici may be a visual show-off, but he has an uncommon gift for creating a realistic, but compelling and unpredictable character.
I screened Diciannove in June for Frameline. It’s now releasing into US arthouse theaters, including Laemmle’s Monica Film Center and the Glendale.
Photo caption: Logan Lerman as Isaac and Molly Gordon as Iris in OH, HI!. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.
The dark romantic comedy Oh, Hi! begins with Iris (Molly Gordon of Booksmart, Theater Camp, The Bear) and Isaac (Logan Lerman of The Perks of Being a Wallflower) heading off to a countryside vacation rental for their first romantic getaway. All is lustful fun until they discover that each has a different perception of what their relationship is and where it is headed. What could have been a merely awkward or hurtful moment precipitates an extreme reaction, and escalates into an absurdly funny situation.
Oh, Hi! is the sophomore feature for writer-director Sophie Brooks. Commitment-averse guys and overthinking gals are common fodder for rom com humor, but Brooks is sharply observant about relationships tending to evolve at different speeds for the participants. Although she has created a broadly funny, over-the-top situation, much of the comedy is character-driven. Brooks has mined the first act and later flashbacks with clever hints about each character’s level of commitment to the relationship and their emotional stability. It’s a smart screenplay.
The success of Oh, Hi! depends on Molly Gordon’s fine performance as a woman whose increasingly unhinged and transgressive behavior is vulnerability-based. Logan Lerman is very good as a guy thinking his way through through a surreal experience with complete helplessness.
Polly Draper (Thirtysomething) is very funny as Iris’ mother, dispensing supportive yet unhelpful advice. Josh Reynolds is hilarious as an uxorious goof who has become entangled in a No Win state of affairs.
I screened Oh, Hi!, which premiered at this year’s Sundance, for the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. It releases in theaters this weekend.
