comedy

THE LOBSTER: the movie disappointment of the year

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Colin Farrell in THE LOBSTER
Colin Farrell in THE LOBSTER

The Lobster, which is supposed to be a dark comedy, won the Jury Prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, along with acclaim at the Toronto and Sundance fests, so I had been eagerly awaiting it for just over twelve months.  I had liked Director Yorgos Lanthimos’ Greek absurdist film Dogtooth.  Unfortunately, The Lobster is a disagreeable misfire, which makes it the biggest movie disappointment of the year.

The Lobster takes place in an imagined world that looks like ours, but where being single is the worst status possible.  Single people go to a woodsy resort hotel, where they are under a time limit to find a partner or be turned into the animal of their choice. After all, in the city, they are challenged by law enforcement to produce their most important form of identification – the certificate that proves they are in a couple.  Guests at the resort go on daily hunts in the forest, where they shoot escaped single people  – the Loners – with tranquilizer darts.  (The Loners have their own monstrous leader (Lea Seydoux) and harsh rules.)

If a guest finds a partner, they enjoy a double room for two weeks and then a holiday on a yacht.  The hotel manager (Olivia Colman) drily announces,  that if the new relationship  becomes troubled, “We will assign you children. That always helps.”

It’s all very deadpan.  As the cast earnestly complies with ever more absurd rules at the hotel, The Lobster is darkly funny.

But then, The Lobster runs off its rails.  We lose the drollery and find our way in a survivalist love story with Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz, and then, into a what is essentially a horror ending.  Inside all this mess is an allegory about society putting obstacles in the way of our reaching happiness through a love match.  But it stops being funny, and starts becoming tedious and uncomfortable.

Colin Farrell leads a fine cast with Weisz, Colman, Seydoux and James C. Reilly.  The failings of The Lobster are not their fault.

The first third of the The Lobster is amusing, and I hung hopefully with the second third.  The final third is dark, without much, if any, leavening humor, and the last fifteen minutes is almost unwatchable.  Stay away.

 

LOVE & FRIENDSHIP: new heights for manipulation and twittery

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Chloe Sevigny and Kate Beckinsale in LOVE & FRIENDSHIP
Chloe Sevigny and Kate Beckinsale in LOVE & FRIENDSHIP

Based on Jane Austen’s Lady Susan, the sharply witty Love & Friendship centers on the unabashedly amoral efforts by Lady Susan Vernon (Kate Beckinsale) to get exactly what she wants despite lack of resources and position.

Love & Friendship is filled with the 19th century version of “snappy dialogue” – old-fashioned wit.  Mark Twain would have loved this movie.  Much of the comes from Lady Susan’s clueless sense of entitlement and her unashamed and outrageous manipulation of the other characters.  An unabashed moocher and deadbeat, she finds that, because her daughter’s school fees are “too high to even consider paying, it is actually an economy”.

It’s a pleasing turn from Kate Beckinsale at age 42, who has so often played ornamental movie roles.  She first came to our attention at age 20 as the beauteous Hero in Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing, and broke through at age 23 by dominating the British indie Shooting Fish.  After playing a bunch of less interesting roles, it’s great to see get a chance to really act in Love & Friendship.

Love & Friendship’s director is Whit Stillman, who debuted with two delightful indies from the world of old money Northeastern preppies. Metropolitan and Barcelona were talky and perceptive explorations of human nature, set in what usually is a less accessible and less sympathetic social set. (Unfortunately, he most recently made the dreadful Damsels in Distress with the always execrable Greta Gerwig.)

Right from the get-go, Stillman lets us know that he’s not taking this too seriously with  self-mocking character introductions.  In another nice touch, Stillman clads some of the male characters in noticeably ill-fitting clothes – something you never see in a movie from this period. It’s funny – and authentic, when you think about it.

In the funniest moments of the film, the enthusiastically dim Sir James Martin (Tom Bennett) takes twittery to new heights.  Bennett, a British TV actor previously unknown to me, is quite a revelation.  It’s always nice to see Chloe Sevigny, too, and she’s here playing Lasy Susan’s equally amoral American friend.

Although I did not see it there, Love & Friendship was the opening night feature of the 59th San Francisco Film Festival, and folks were still praising it in festival lines a week later.

DOUGH: light, fluffy and empty

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DOUGH
DOUGH

The British comedy Dough treads the familiar territory of the mismatched buddy movie, specifically the Old Guy/Young Guy type.  Dough is distinguished from the rest of the genre by a culture clash element and the eminent actor Jonathan Pryce.  The story is set in contemporary London and the Old Guy is an Orthodox Jewish bakeshop owner (Pryce) and the Young Guy is a Muslim African refugee drug dealer (Jerome Holder).

The main characters are thrown together uncomfortably in the bakeshop, which is inexorably dying until Young Guy accidentally launches a new product line when he drops marijuana into the dough.  Suddenly business begins to boom, and all would be well but for two villains, a reptilian business rival and a scary skinhead drug lord.

Jonathan Pryce and Holder act as well as they can with this material, as does the sprightly Pauline Collins (Shirley Valentine).  But you’ve seen every one of Dough’s plot developments in a movie before.  The villains and the physical comedy are WAY too broad.  Overall, Dough is better than the average sitcom on broadcast TV, but pretty banal.

Light, fluffy and empty, Dough is the Twinkie of movies. I don’t choose to eat Twinkies myself, but I understand that sometimes you might want one.

SFIFF: LEAF BLOWER

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LEAF BLOWER. Photo courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society.
LEAF BLOWER. Photo courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society.

Leaf Blower is an amiable Mexican slice-of-life comedy.  Three young guys are drifting rudderless though their adolescences, doing what teenage males do – wasting time, busting each others balls and achieving new heights of social awkwardness and sexual frustration.  Its first screening at the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF) is on April 24, and director Alejandro Iglesias Mendizábal is expected to attend.

In his promising first feature, director and co-writer Iglesias Mendizábal has created an entirely character-driven portrait of male teen friendship and restlessness.  After all, the only real plot is whether they will find the keys that one of them dropped into a pile of leaves.   But we want to keep watching these guys to see what happens to them, and it’s all pretty funny.

  • Ruben (Alejandro Guerrero) is too cool for school.  He’s sure that he’s the only one in charge of his life – he just doesn’t know where he wants to go.  So he masks his indecision and avoidance by brooding.
  • Lucas (Fabrizio Santini) is nervous and a little hyper, but his bossy girlfriend totally paralyzes him with dread.  He’s always a day late and a peso short, the kind of guy who is stuck wearing his dirty soccer uniform to a funeral.
  • Emilio (Francisco Rueda) is constrained by his status as the fat kid (and I was a fat kid, so I relate).  Self-isolated, he yearns to be more social, but then counterproductively comforts himself with more and more calories.

All three are sexually awakened but inept.   Only Lucas has a girlfriend, and she causes him to sigh painfully every time his cellphone rings.  Ruben and Emilio are so intimidated by females that they’re too scared to even borrow a rake from one.

Come to think about it, Leaf Blower is not a pure coming of age movie because its characters don’t seem to grow or change as a result of their experiences.  It’s more of a “being-of-age” movie because they just are who they are.  Perceptive and observational, Leaf Blower is pretty far away from the American Pie kind of teen comedy.

The 59th San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF) runs through May 5. Throughout the fest, I’ll be linking more festival coverage to my SFFIF 2016 page, including both features and movie recommendations. Follow me on Twitter for the very latest coverage.

Cinequest: STAYING ALIVE

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STAYING ALIVE
STAYING ALIVE

The Swedish comedy Staying Alive treads the now familiar ground of An Unmarried Woman – a woman’s husband has traded her in for a newer model, leaving her to address the challenges of self-identity, parenting, sexuality and economic survival in an post-marriage environment.  Staying Alive has two things going for it – an appealing performance by its lead actress, Agnes Kittelsen, and some bawdy, broad humor from her bestie.

Staying Alive is mildly enjoyable entertainment, but there’s really no other reason for this film to have been made.

 

Cinequest: REMEMBER ME

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Remember Me_Still

Remember Me is an odd couple comedy about two mismatched cousins who visit their grandparents just as the old man dies so they have to take grandma (the great Rita Moreno) off on a road trip to the old folks home. Remember Me is written and directed by Steve Goldbloom, who also stars as the more professionally successful and reserved cousin; Joel Kelly Dauten plays the wild man cousin, banging around between failed fantasies. Both guys are emotionally stunted in their own ways.

The dead grandpa situation is very funny, and there’s a witty joke about the Goldbloom character’s day job as a guy who reads news stories about wars in the Third World for NPR (without ever leaving the US to cover a story). But these two immature thirty-year-olds just aren’t interesting enough to carry a feature film.

Rita Moreno is very good, but this is a one of those man-child-coming-of-age movies.  That subgenre is getting tiresome, as was Remember Me.

Stream of the Week: GEMMA BOVERY

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Fabrice Luchini and Gemma Arterton in GEMMA BOVERY
Fabrice Luchini and Gemma Arterton in GEMMA BOVERY

In honor of Cinequest, here’s a highlight from last year’s fest. In the delightful dark comedy Gemma Bovery, Fabrice Luchini plays a guy who has left his Type A job in Paris to take over his father’s bakery in a sleepy village in Normandy. He gets new neighbors when a young British couple named Bovery moves in. The young British woman (played by the delectable Gemma Arterton) is named Gemma Bovery, and only the baker notices the similarity to Emma Bovary. But, like the protagonist of Madame Bovary, the young British woman is also married to a Charles, becomes bored and restless and develops a wandering eye. The baker rapidly becomes obsessed with the Flaubert novel being re-enacted before his eyes and soon jumps into the plot himself. Gemma Bovery, which I saw at Cinequest 2015, is a French movie that is mostly in English.

Fabrice Luchini is a treasure of world cinema. No screen actor can deliver a funnier reaction than Luchini, and he’s the master of squeezing laughs out of an awkward moment. For me, his signature role is in the 2004 French Intimate Strangers, in which he plays a tax lawyer with a practice in a Parisian professional office building. A beautiful woman (Sandrine Bonnaire), mistakes Luchini’s office for that of her new shrink, plops herself down and, before he can interrupt, starts unloading her sexual issues. It quickly becomes awkward for him to tell her of the error, and he’s completely entranced with her revelations, so he keeps impersonating her shrink. As they move from appointment to appointment, their relationship takes some unusual twists. It’s a very funny movie, and a great performance.

Gemma Bovery is directed and co-written by Anne Fontaine (The Girl from Monaco, Coco Before Chanel). Fontaine has a taste for offbeat takes on female sexuality, which she aired in the very trashy Adore (Naomi Watts and Robin Wright as Australian cougars who take on each other’s sons as lovers) and the much better Nathalie (wife pays prostitute to seduce her cheating hubby and report back on the details).

Gemma Bovery isn’t as Out There as Nathalie, but it’s just as good. The absurdity of the coincidences in Gemma Bovery makes for a funny situation, which Luchini elevates into a very funny movie. Gemma Bovery is available to stream from Amazon Video (free with Amazon Prime), iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

Cinequest: FRIENDS EFFING FRIENDS EFFING FRIENDS

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FRIENDS EFFING FRIENDS EFFING FRIENDS
FRIENDS EFFING FRIENDS EFFING FRIENDS

In the sex comedy Friends Effing Friends Effing Friends,  several twenty-somethings start hooking up with each other in random combinations, even though some are in relationships.  The sexual entanglements predictably lead to both comic situations and hurt feelings.

Happily, sometimes there is Truth in Advertising, and there is a lots of Effing in Friends Effing Friends Effing Friends.  There’s so much sex that, although it has a real plot and much better acting, it wouldn’t be totally out-of-place on late night Showtime.

The cast is young, appealing and able, and Friends Effing Friends Effing Friends works as  a trifle (and there’s nothing wrong with that).  Its world premiere was at Cinequest.

Cinequest: SEARCH ENGINES

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SEARCH ENGINES
SEARCH ENGINES

The contemporary and topical comedy Search Engines takes on our obsession with   We see an extended family Thanksgiving – and everyone is bowing into that screen-gazing posture.  All the characters are preoccupied by their smart phones as they text, video, read recipes and blog away.  Suddenly, something blocks their coverage, and we see what happens when all the screens go dark.

Search Engines has a promising cast (Daphne Zuniga, Joely Fisher, Natasha Gregson Wagner and even Connie Stevens!), and they all perform well.  The strongest part of Search Engines is its topicality, but as mildly amusing as it is, it just ain’t a knee slapper.

Cinequest: A BEGINNERS GUIDE TO SNUFF

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A BEGINNERS GUIDE TO SNUFF
A BEGINNERS GUIDE TO SNUFF

The shamelessly low brow comedy A Beginners Guide to Snuff features a very dim pair of would-be actors who seek to win a horror movie contest by simulating a snuff film.  What could possibly go wrong?  To get the most realistic performance out of their leading lady, they decide to kidnap her and pretend that they’re going to torture her to death on film.  Their choice of that leading lady (played by Bree Williamson) brings some very unexpected consequences.

Most of the humor in Beginners Guide comes from the dumb and dumber filmmakers and spoof on low-budget horror cinema.  But Williamson’s electric performance, like a shot of adrenaline, animates and elevates the movie whenever she is on-screen.  Her character is so many tiers above the two boobs that she remains in charge even when chained to a table.  On top of that, she has some unanticipated skills and characteristics…

A Beginners Guide to Snuff ends with a particularly inspired trailer for the movie-within-the-movie.  If you’re looking for broad and dark comedy with a sparkling performance by an actress, this is your movie.  World Premiere at Cinequest on March 4, 6 and 11.