Lawrence Kao and Lauren K. Montgomery in I HATE YOU
In the indie romantic comedy I Hate You, two very different twenty-somethings meet cute. Kelly (Lauren K. Montgomery) has plunged from one relationship to another and is particularly angry that the terms of her lease force her to stay in an apartment with her ex and his horny new girlfriend. Chi (Lawrence Kao) is an obsessive gamer who still lives with his mom.
Chi is not Kelly’s type but, then again, her type is a jerk. He is, however, way less experienced than she is. You’ve probably already guessed that they will get together, so that’s not really a spoiler. But she’s a workaholic, and when she’s off her laptop, she wants to analyze their relationship. Chi just wants a domestic life without much drama.
While following the usual arc of a romantic comedy, I Hate You mostly avoids dipping into rom-com clichés, and the ending is not predictable. I Hate You was written by Brad Kageno and Pyung Kim and is Kageno’s debut as a feature director.
This is an amiable and entertaining film. Cinequest hosts the US premiere of I Hate You.
Tommie-Amber Pirie and Aaron Abrams in THE GO-GETTERS
The bawdy lowbrow comedy The Go-Getters centers on the antics of two almost lovable losers who go to absurd lengths to avoid making an honest dollar. We meet Owen (Aaron Abrams) when, sleeping in an alley, he is awakened by being pissed on. Soon Lacie (Tommie-Amber Pirie) enters the movie, lying in a fetal position on a restroom floor, vomiting on Owen’s shoes.
The two are denizens of a dive bar owned by Owen’s brother. Owen is a hop-head whose gift is stealing his brother’s merchandise. Lacie is a pill-popping hooker whose pimp operates out of a booth in the bar; the pimp says that his Blockbuster card is worth more than Lacie’s, uh, charms. Lacie’s five-dollar hand job is so inept that one john fakes a male orgasm to get it over with.
These two are utterly base, venal and addiction-driven, which drives a comedy one might describe as a light look at substance abuse. Hitting bottom, of course, is entirely individual. These two have long since zoomed below what most of us would consider the bottom. There’s really seems to be no limit to how low they’ll go.
The humor comes from their continual scheming to get something for nothing – or nothing except increasing loss of dignity. The Go-Getters works as an absurdist exploration of an addict’s unceasing need to place his or her need above the interests of anyone else. This comes across most effectively in a very funny scene where a taxi driver forces them to pay their fare, and each’s sense of depraved self-interest is revealed.
The Go-Getters‘ world premiere will be at Cinequest.
Dave Franco and James Franco in THE DISASTER ARTIST
Really bad movies can be so unintentionally funny that they are fun to watch and mock. Such is the case with The Room, which has risen to number 2 in my Bad Movie Festival. The Room was a vanity project that was written and directed by its star, Tommy Wiseau, with his ravaged face, stringy hair and undeterminable accent. To fully appreciate Tommy Wiseau’s performance, search YouTube for “you’re tearing me apart Lisa!” – or watch The Disaster Artist, James Franco’s hilarious docucomedy about the making of The Room.
The primary element in The Disaster Artist (and the primary appeal of The Room) is that Wiseau is absolutely confident in his own talent, despite no validation from any one else.
Wiseau himself is a mystery. No one knows where he was born, how old he is or how he amassed enough of a fortune to blow six million dollars on making The Room. He is so psychologically non-functional, he couldn’t have made millions on his own. His accent betrays an origin someplace between Belgrade and St. Petersburg, even though he ridiculously claims the accent is from New Orleans.
Anyone who has watched The Room will marvel at James Franco’s brilliance in capturing all of Wiseu’s awkward and offbeat mannerisms. It’s a remarkable, All In comedic performance and the core of the film.
The Disaster Artist is based on the book by Greg Sestero, Wiseu’s friend/muse/roommate, on the making of the movie. Sistero is played by Dave Franco (and Sistero’s girlfriend Amber is played by Dave Franco’s real-life wife, Alison Brie). The entire cast, which includes Seth Rogen and Jacki Weaver is excellent.
This is a very successful comedy. The Disaster Artist is one of the funniest movies of the year.
Note: The end of The Disaster Artist features a split screen for the very worst scenes of The Room side-by-side with the re-enactments by the cast of The Disaster Artist. And make sure you wait through ALL the end credits for an encounter between the real Tommy Wiseau and James Franco in character as Wiseau.
Note #2: Yes, I have turned to The Wife and bellowed, “you’re tearing me apart, Lisa!”
The Must See romantic comedy The Big Sick is the closest thing to a perfect movie this summer. Kumail Nanjiani (Dinesh in Silicon Valley) plays a Pakistani-American stand-up comedian whose parents insist on arranging a marriage with a Muslim Pakistani woman. He falls for Emily (Zoe Kazan), who is neither Muslim nor Pakistani. Kumail is too cowardly to make a choice between Emily and his family, so he keeps delaying the decision by lying to both. At a critical moment in his relationship with Emily, she suddenly and mysteriously becomes very ill and is placed in a medically induced coma. Kumail waits out the coma in the hospital with Emily’s out-of-town parents (Holly Hunter and Ray Romano), whom he is meeting for the first time. The parents have relationship issues of their own.
How can Kumail and Emily’s parents weather the stress of an unconscious loved one on a respirator? Will Emily’s parents accept Kumail? Will Emily’s parents stay together themselves? Will Kumail’s parents kick him out of the family? Will Emily wake up, and what will she think of Kumail if/when she does?
The coma may seem contrived, so it’s important that you know that THIS REALLY HAPPENED to Kumail Nankiani’s real-life wife Emily V. Gordon. Nanjiani and Gordon co-wrote this screenplay, with support from producer Judd Apatow.
The Big Sick is hilarious (and not just for a coma movie). The humor comes from the characters, and how they must individually deal with life’s struggles. Kumail is cowardly delaying a choice between Emily and his own family by lying to both; we know that’s it’s only a matter of time before somebody finds out, and the clock is ticking. The Big Sick is flawlessly directed by comedy writer and television director Michael Showalter.
Zoe Kazan, the very talented screenwriter (Ruby Sparks) and actress, makes us fall in love with Emily along with Kumail. Kazan nails the heartbreaking scene when she finds out that Kumail hasn’t been straight with her. It’s a pretty remarkable performance, especially given that she’s in a coma for most of the movie.
The casting of Holly Hunter and Ray Romano as Emily parents is inspired. Each of them brings unusual depth and texture to their characters, the tightly wound mom and the conflict-avoidant dad. Each has at least one of the Big Scenes that bring Oscar nominations
The Big Sick is the best American movie of the first half of 2017 and the best romantic comedy in years. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll fall in love. The Big Sick can be rented in DVD from Netflix and Redbox and can be streamed from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
In Greta Gerwig’s triumphant debut as a writer-director, Lady Bird, Saoirse Ronan plays Christine, a Sacramento teen in her final year of high school. I’ve seen lots of good coming of age movies and lots of high school movies, but rarely one as fresh and original as Lady Bird. Gerwig is an insightful observer of human behavior, and she gets every moment of Christine’s journey, with all of her aspirations and impulses, exactly right.
Movies rarely explore the mother-daughter relationship, but this is the biggest thread in Lady Bird. Christine and her mother (Laurie Metcalf) deeply need each other but just can’t get out of each other’s way, perpetually on each other’s very last nerve. Christine insists on being called “Lady Bird”, rejecting even the name her mother gave her. From the very first scene to the last, Lady Bird probes how this most complex relationship evolves.
A girl’s relationship with her father is also pretty central, and the great writer Tracy Letts’ understated performance as the dad is extraordinary. Letts can play a despicable character so well (Andrew Lockhart in Homeland), I hardly recognized him as Christine’s weakened but profoundly decent father. The dad is a man whose career defeats have cost him his authority in the family and he is suffering silently from depression. Yet he remains clear-eyed about the most important things in his children’s lives and is able to step up when he has to. It’s not a showy role, but Letts is almost unbearably authentic.
There isn’t a bad performance in Lady Bird. Ronan soars, of course. The actors playing her high school peers nail their roles, too, especially Beanie Feldstein as her bestie.
Lady Bird’s soundtrack evokes the era especially well. Thanks to Sheila O’Malley for sharing Gerwig’s letter to Justin Timberlake, asking to license Cry Me a River. It’s a gem.
Visually, Gerwig is clearly fond of her hometown, and fills her film with local landmarks. It’s not my favorite California city (and I’ve worked in the Capitol), but Sacramento has never looked more appealing than in Lady Bird. I did really love the shots of the deco Tower Bridge and the Tower Theater sign.
I don’t care for Gerwig’s performances as an actress, and, in writing about them, I have not been kind. As a director, she is very promising, eliciting such honest and singular performances from her actors and making so many perfect filmmaking choices. As a writer, she’s already top-notch. Write another movie, Greta.
Grace Van Patten, Ben Stiller and Adam Sandler in THE MEYEROWITZ STORIES (NEW AND SELECTED)
The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), writer-director Noah Baumbach’s latest family comedy, is entirely character-driven (usually a very good thing). We really don’t see anything on screen that isn’t intended to reveal something about a character – a man’s lack of confidence, his father’s vanity, his daughter’s surprising well-groundedness. The story (not really a plot) moves from set piece to set piece, beginning with a funny (and futile) search for a Manhattan parking space, each depicting the family quirks and tensions.
The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) is star studded (Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller, Dustin Hoffman, Grace Van Patten, Emma Thompson, Judd Hirsch, a cameo by Sigourney Weaver) and very well-acted. The problem is that, once I was introduced to these characters, I really wasn’t interested in what would happen to them next. I only lasted 42 minutes before reaching for the remote.
Baumbach has become somewhat of a brand name for naval-gazing (The Squid and the Whale, Margot at the Wedding, Greenberg, Mistress America), and his work has tended toward the Woody Allen neurotic New Yorker genre, only with less depth and FAR less comedy.
You can stream The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) on Netflix Instant, but I can’t imagine why you would want to.
Channing Tatum and Adam Driver face Daniel Craig in LOGAN LUCKY
There’s not much to say about Stephen Soderbergh’s Logan Lucky, except that it’s a benign and sporadically entertaining two hours at the movies. A couple of down-on-their-luck West Virginia brothers, played by the always appealing Channing Tatum and Adam Driver, mastermind a high-profile heist. These guys have never had a bit of success in their lives, and they are Not Bright, but they are seeking to outsmart an icon of American corporate culture. The funniest aspects of Logan Lucky stem from their need to enlist an imprisoned safe-cracker, improbably played by Daniel Craig; Craig, deadpan in his bleached buzz-cut, is very funny.
The heist is cool because I hadn’t seen this particular money delivery system before (it ain’t an armored car), and one of the guys gains some critical intel because he’s a coal miner. There’s an effective plot twist AFTER the heist, and Hilary Swank shows up to presage a sequel.
I was moderately glad that I saw it and haven’t thought much about it since.
Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan in THE TRIP TO SPAINIn The Trip to Spain, comics Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan play caricatures of themselves assigned to a gourmet road trip, just as in The Trip and The Trip to Italy. Both masters of impressions and improvisation, the amiable Brydon and the snootily competitive (but needy) Coogan banter their way through delectable Spanish cuisine. One of the franchise’s running gags is Coogan’s constant name-dropping and one-upmanship, which begs Brydon to deflate him.
Brydon’s wonderful impressions of Sean Connery and Michael Caine are legendary, and Coogan is no slouch. They do impressions of Marlon Brando and Robert Deniro, and mimic across the British acting greats John Hurt, Ian McKellen, Anthony Hopkins and Michael Holdern. Brydon even “does” Mick Jagger doing Michael Caine and Jagger playing Shakespeare’s Shylock.
In one of the funniest bits, a lunchtime reference to the “Moors in Spain” sparks a Rob Brydon marathon of ROGER Moore riffs; as Coogan and their companions try in vain to change the subject, Brydon is hilariously unstoppable.
There are plenty of other laughs, too, as Coogan tries to pronounces the French name “Aurore” and Brydon quips that the Spanish Inquisition was launched by a “Catalytic Converter”. They even refuse to pass up the obvious joke about Herb Alpert’s Spanish Flea.
As in the other Trip movies, the travel and food porn is exquisite. They cross Spain from the Basque country, through the dinosaur sites of Rioja, the Don Quixote heritage of La Mancha, the streets of Cuenca and the marvels of Granada, ending in Malaga. I didn’t notice any green vegetables until their fifth day of eating (always fine by me). (However, Spain’s ubiquitous jamón doesn’t show up until their final day.)
Frankly, Brydon’s and Coogan’s improvisations are reason enough to make (and see) one of these movies. Unfortunately, someone felt the need to focus the final 15 minutes of The Trip to Spain on the contrast between Brydon’s happly family life and Coogan’s disconnected loneliness and his career and personal insecurities. Blaaaaaaaaaah. Snooooooze.
So it’s simple: go see The Trip to Spain and, when the characters say goodbye to each other in Malaga – leave the theater.
The Must See romantic comedy The Big Sick is the closest thing to a perfect movie this summer. Kumail Nanjiani (Dinesh in Silicon Valley) plays a Pakistani-American stand-up comedian whose parents insist on arranging a marriage with a Muslim Pakistani woman. He falls for Emily (Zoe Kazan), who is neither Muslim nor Pakistani. Kumail is too cowardly to make a choice between Emily and his family, so he keeps delaying the decision by lying to both. At a critical moment in his relationship with Emily, she suddenly and mysteriously becomes very ill and is placed in a medically induced coma. Kumail waits out the coma in the hospital with Emily’s out-of-town parents (Holly Hunter and Ray Romano), whom he is meeting for the first time. The parents have relationship issues of their own.
How can Kumail and Emily’s parents weather the stress of an unconscious loved one on a respirator? Will Emily’s parents accept Kumail? Will Emily’s parents stay together themselves? Will Kumail’s parents kick him out of the family? Will Emily wake up, and what will she think of Kumail if/when she does?
The coma may seem contrived, so it’s important that you know that THIS REALLY HAPPENED to Kumail Nankiani’s real-life wife Emily V. Gordon. Nanjiani and Gordon co-wrote this screenplay, with support from producer Judd Apatow.
The Big Sick is hilarious (and not just for a coma movie). The humor comes from the characters, and how they must individually deal with life’s struggles. Kumail is cowardly delaying a choice between Emily and his own family by lying to both; we know that’s it’s only a matter of time before somebody finds out, and the clock is ticking. The Big Sick is flawlessly directed by comedy writer and television director Michael Showalter.
Zoe Kazan, the very talented screenwriter (Ruby Sparks) and actress, makes us fall in love with Emily along with Kumail. Kazan nails the heartbreaking scene when she finds out that Kumail hasn’t been straight with her. It’s a pretty remarkable performance, especially given that she’s in a coma for most of the movie.
The casting of Holly Hunter and Ray Romano as Emily parents is inspired. Each of them brings unusual depth and texture to their characters, the tightly wound mom and the conflict-avoidant dad. Each has at least one of the Big Scenes that bring Oscar nominations
The Big Sick is the best American movie of the year so far and the best romantic comedy in years. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll fall in love.
The amusingly naughty but forgettable comedy The Little Hours is based on the dirty fun in your Western Civ class, Boccaccio’s The Decameron. A hunky young lad goes on the lam after cuckolding a local lord and hides out in a nunnery, pretending to be a deaf-mute. He is then serially molested by the young over sexed nuns. There is lots of sexual activity in The Little Hours, all played for laughs and none of it erotic.
It’s the 1300s but the potty-mouthed nuns speak as though it was 2017. Aubrey Plaza is particularly funny as an unceasingly fierce nun with a knife-to-the-throat fetish and a secret life as a witch.
There are lots of low-grade laughs in The Little Hours, including an ancient nun so intent on her embroidery that she is oblivious to enthusiastic sex in the same room and communion made more challenging by a priest’s palsied hand. Comedy stalwarts John C. Reilly, Nick Offerman, Fred Armisen and Molly Shannon all sparkle.
