The new comedy She’s Funny That Way from 75-year-old master filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich is a light-hearted diversion about the unlikely career path of an escort-turned-screen actress (Imogene Poots). Bogdanovich is responsible for the screwball comedy masterpiece What’s Up Doc? and the grossly under-rated comedy romance They All Laughed. So he knows knows how to choreograph mad cap moments. There’s also an unexpected cameo at the very end, along with very funny end credits.
Along with Poots, Bogdanovich has attracted a top tier cast: Owen Wilson, Rhys Ifans, Will Forte and Kathryn Hahn. It’s especially welcome to see survivors of Bogdanovich’s 1970s oeuvre – Cybill Shepherd, Tatum O’Neal and Austin Pendleton.
But the real revelation here – and the main reason to see the movie – is Jennifer Aniston’s turn as the most emotionally unhealthy therapist conceivable. It’s written as an extreme character – absolutely no boundaries, utterly self-absorbed, dangerously resentful and completely unprofessional. But Aniston’s performance is so full throttle that the audience delights every time her character comes on-screen.
She’s Funny That Way is just fluff, but it’s well-crafted fluff. It’s is now available to stream from Amazon Instant Video, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
The romantic comedy Digging for Fire is a reflection on that moment when two people who have loved each other have become so consumed by day-to-day child rearing that they have lost heir way as a couple. She’s (Rosemarie DeWitt) fed up and drops the three-year-old with her parents, hoping for a wild weekend with girlfriends while he (Jake Johnson) does the taxes. Of course, he invites his guy buddies over for a bro-bacchanal. Things don’t go exactly as planned for either of them, and their separate weekends morph into adventures that challenge their marriage and trigger some self-examination.
Writer-director Joe Swanberg has a gift for creating characters that act like real people – and NOT like they know they are characters in a romantic comedy. Swanberg created the 2013 Drinking Buddies, a film I found to be “an unusually genuine romantic comedy” and the first Mumblecore movie that I’ve ever liked.
DeWitt and Johnson are very good, and Brie Larson is outstanding as a good time girl who is more – and looking for more – than she seems. Digging for Fire also features Anna Kendrick (against type as an uninhibited party girl) and Sam Rockwell (who has made playing an unreliable character into its own art form). We also see almost everyone who has been in an independent film: Mike Birbiglia, Chris Messina, Melanie Lynsky, Sam Elliott, Judith Light and Jane Adams. Orlando Bloom even drops in as a boor at a bar (albeit an upscale bar).
Two thing for sure: Joe Swanberg’s characters are never predictable and he is definitely a romantic. Digging for Fire is available for streaming from Amazon, Vudu, You Tube and Google Play.
Sam Elliiott and Blythe Danner in I’LL SEE YOU IN MY DREAMS
The gentle, thoughtful and altogether fresh dramedy I’ll See You in My Dreams is centered on 72-year-old Carol (Blythe Danner), a widow of 21 years living a life of benign routine. Every day, she rises at 6 AM in her modest but nicely appointed LA house, reads by the pool, hosts her gal pals from the nearby retirement community for cards and is in bed by 11 PM to watch TV with her elderly canine companion. It’s not a bad life, but it’s an unadventuresome one.
Then some things happen that give her an opportunity to choose to take some chances. In short order, she has to put down her dog and deal with an unwelcome rodent. Her friends (Rhea Perlman, June Squibb and Mary Kay Place) suggest that she try speed dating. She opens her social life, developing a friendship with a much younger man (Martin Starr – Gilfoyle in Silicon Valley) and being courted by a dashing man of her own age (Sam Elliott).
What happens is sometimes funny, sometimes sad and always authentic. This is NOT a formulaic geezer comedy, but a story about venturing outside one’s comfort zone – with all the attendant vulnerability – to seek some life rewards. Carol may be 72, but she is still at a place in her life where she can grow and be challenged. I’ll See You in My Dreams proves that coming of age films are not just for the young.
I saw I’ll See You in My Dreams at the Camera Cinema Club, at which director, editor and co-writer Brett Haley was interviewed. Haley said that he and co-writer Marc Basch wanted to “avoid the obvious joke of older people doing what younger people do”. Instead, they intended to make a movie “about love, loss and that you can’t get through life unscathed – and that’s okay”. Haley and Basch certainly succeeded in creating a film about “living life without the fear of loss”.
Danner sparkles in the role (and gets to nail a karaoke rendition of Cry Me a River). Always special when playing solid-valued but rascally guys, Elliott still retains his magnetism.
We don’t often get to see realistic movies about people in their early 70s, but I’ll See You in My Dreams respects its protagonist Carol by putting her in plausible situations. Neither farcical nor mawkish, I’ll See You in My Dreams is a surefire audience pleaser.
I’ll See You in My Dreams is available to stream from Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Lola Kirke (right) with the always annoying Greta Gerwig in MISTRESS AMERICA
In director Noah Baumbach’s failed comedy Mistress America, an insecure young college student meets her step-sister-to-be (Greta Gerwig), who turns out to be a human whirlwind, dancing on the razor’s edge between frantic excitement and chaos. The premise of an unsure young person becoming captivated by a high energy and charismatic personality is an interesting one. Unfortunately, the movie fizzles because of the shipwreck of a screenplay (co-written by Baumbach and Gerwig) and another aggravating performance by Gerwig.
In the first half of the film NOT ONE WORD seems genuine, like a real character would have uttered it. Mistress America’s worst misfire is the extended screwball sequence at a house in Connecticut – the cast is just flinging the lines as if in a high school play (until a really good actor, Michael Chernus, shows up as a real character).
No actor could save this screenplay, but Greta Gerwig has the gift of making any movie worse and she does here, too. Gerwig plays the same character in every move because she thinks it’s Cute Kooky like Annie Hall. But she’s neither cute nor kooky – just annoying to the point of loathsomeness. Here, her character is a goofy-clumsy social loser, but just so Smart and Wonderful that she uses words like “autodidact” and “my nemesis”. Gerwig tries to be knowing and ironic, but she’s just cringeworthy, the most embarrassing moment coming when her character explains her own jokey “pretend rewind” gesture.
After the screening, another audience member said that Gerwig’s character is obviously not functional because of a bipolar disorder. Well, I’ll bet that Gerwig didn’t think that her character was ill – just charmingly idiosyncratic.
The other lead is played by Lola Kirke, who is pretty engaging; I’d like to see her acting with a real script. There’s also excellent acting by the veteran Chernus (Higher Ground, Men in Black 3, Captain Phillips, The Messenger, Love & Other Drugs). Jasmine Cephas Jones is stuck in a one-dimensional role as a hyper-jealous girlfriend, but she pulls it off with distinction. Rebecca Henderson is excellent as the bitter woman from Gerwig’s past.
I’m not the audience for Mistress America since I avoid Baumbach and especially Gerwig; I only saw Mistress America because I went to a mystery screening. Now I haven’t liked any Baumbach movie since his initial indie hit The Squid and the Whale in 2005. I have nothing against a naval-gazing filmmaker filling his movie with neurotic New Yorkers. Woody Allen has made over thirty of those and seven or eight are masterpieces. But – as sharp as Woody’s lines are crafted – you believe that this characters have thought them up on their own, not so with Baumbach.
One scene in Mistress America is inspired and true to the characters – a bitter woman confronts the clueless Gerwig character with a grudge from high school. But that wonderful moment isn’t worth the nails-on-the-chalkboard experience of the film as a whole. Skip Mistress America (and any upcoming Baumbach/Gerwig project, too, for that matter).
Joaquin Phoenix and Parker Posey in IRRATIONAL MAN
Woody Allen’s latest, Irrational Man, is about a burn-out who revives his joie de vivre by committing a very grave crime, in the process self-administering a shot of metaphorical adrenaline. That’s all there is in Irrational Man, an entirely plot-driven movie. Skip it.
To be sure, as one would expect with a Woody Allen movie, it is well-acted. Joaquin Phoenix plays the kind of iconoclastic academic whose womanizing and drinking was part of his dashing charm until he sagged into middle age. The ever-lively Parker Posey is a faculty member who is bored with her life and her marriage. Emma Stone plays the precocious but impressionable coed. Besides the cast, the best thing about Irrational Man is the music, especially a wonderfully raucous version of The In Crowd by the Ramsey Lewis Trio.
[SPOILER ALERT: I don’t understand how it’s possible to make a non-exciting movie scene centered around Russian Roulette, but we don’t even momentarily cringe at this one. Maybe it’s the combination of having to explain what Russian Roulette IS (to a character who had somehow made it to college without hearing of Russian Roulette), and then having the ONE CHARACTER who we all know is going to make it to the climax of the movie pull the trigger at the mid-point. Yawn.]
The comedienne (do we still use that word?) Amy Schumer stars in the bawdy comedy Trainwreck as a gal whose childhood trust and intimacy issues have resulted in a chaotic adult life of wall-banging and random guy-banging. She gives promiscuity a bad name. When she finally happens on the perfect guy (Bill Hader), will she sabotage this opportunity? Schumer herself wrote Trainwreck, which was directed by the current king of lowbrow comedy Judd Apatow.
Trainwreck has plenty of LOL moments, and even some shoulder-quaking laughs. But it’s two hours long, and that’s too long to sustain the basic jokes here. Trainwreck has jumped the shark before we get to an improbable celebrity intervention and the Madison Square Garden grand finale.
There are some glimpses of comedic genius here and there, including a brilliant take on the all-night male-female argument – the kind where the woman is amped up in a full-throttle rage and the man keeps fighting to stay awake. Both men and women in the audience were laughing knowingly.
Trainwreck does benefit from a superb cast. I always love to see Hader and Brie Larson (good but wasted here). Tilda Swinton bops in for a turn as a supremely confident and self-absorbed boss. Pro wrestler John Cena is very good as the first boyfriend, a bodybuilder with some denial issues of his own. And Daniel Radcliffe and Marisa Tomei are very funny in a profoundly bad movie-within-the-movie.
But the real revelation here is LeBron James,who is playing himself as best friend of Hader’s character, an orthopedic surgeon. LeBron is very, very good – just as good as the real actors. He has an excellent sense of timing and a lot of natural appeal. There aren’t that many movie roles for 6-foot 8-inch black men, but LeBron can definitely act. He’s consistently a joy to watch in Trainwreck.
Amy Schumer delivers a lot of raunchy laughs in Trainwreck, just not two hours worth. It’s definitely not a really good movie, but it will offer an evening of light laughs on home video.
Fabrice Luchini and Gemma Arterton in GEMMA BOVERY
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.
Okay, here’s the first Must See of 2015 – the hilariously dark Argentine comedy Wild Tales. Writer-director Damián Szifron presents a series of individual stories about revenge. It’s now topping my list of Best Movies of 2015 – So Far.
We all feel aggrieved, and Wild Tales explores what happens when rage overcomes the restraints of social order. Think about how instantly angry you can become when some driver cuts you off on the highway – and then how you might fantasize avenging the slight. Indeed, there is story that has the most severe case road rage since Spielberg’s Duel in 1971. Now Wild Tales is dark, and you gotta go with it. The humor comes from the EXTREMES that someone’s resentment can lead to.
One key to the success of Wild Tales is that it is an anthology. In a very wise move, Szifron resisted any impulse to stretch one of the stories into a feature-length movie. Each of the stories is just the right length to extract every laugh and pack a punch. The funniest stories are the opening one set on an airplane and the final one about a wedding.
The acting is uniformly superb. In one story, Oscar Martínez plays a wealthy man in a desperate jam, who buys the help of his shady lawyer fixer (Osmar Núñez) and his longtime household retainer (Germán de Silva) – until their prices get just a little too high. The three actors take what looks like it’s going to a thriller and morph into a (very funny) psychological comedy with a very cynical view of human nature.
One of the middle episodes stars one of my favorite film actors, Ricardo Darín, who I see as the Argentine Joe Mantegna. I suggest that you watch Darín in the brilliant police procedural The Secrets in Their Eyes (on my top ten for 2010), the steamy and seamy Carancho and the wonderful con artist movie Nine Queens.
Wild Tales has been a festival hit (Cannes, Telluride, Toronto and Sundance) around the world and was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Picture Oscar. I saw Wild Tales at Cinequest 2015. It’s now available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu and Xbox Video.
The Swedish comedy The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared is a rich mixture of absurdity and broad physical humor. As a geezer escapes from his nursing home and (slowly) embarks on an adventure, he see flashbacks to his earlier Zelig-like life. As the local police launch a half-hearted (or quarter-hearted) search for him, he happens into a criminal gang’s suitcase of cash and picks up a motley crew of confederates. There are two comedies here – the series of absurd coincidences that put him in the most salient moments of 20th Century history AND the guffaw-inducing chase story. Both comedic threads are satisfying and very funny.
Robert Gustafsson is effective playing the protagonist Allan from ages 18 through 100. I loved Iwar Wiklander as Allan’s partner-in-adventure Julius.
The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared has also edged its way into a four-way tie for 12th place on my list ofLongest Movie Titles. It’s a hoot.
Melissa McCarthy spoofs James Bond-type spy movies in the winning comedy Spy. She plays a put-upon back-of-the-house CIA operative who supports a glamorous super spy (Jude Law). She is extremely skilled, but he gets all the credit for their successes. She is so low self-esteemed that even SHE doesn’t recognize her own competence and achievements. Then circumstances pull her out of the basement at Langley and into the field for an operation – and the joke is on everyone else.
McCarthy carries Spy with her gifts for both verbal and physical comedy. She is so damned appealing, and she represents every one of us who has felt underestimated. And NOBODY delivers a filthy insult with more comic effect.
Law is as suave as he can be. Jason Statham sends up his own scowling action hero roles by playing an agent swaggering with macho braggadocio but who really a buffoon. The villainess is played by Rose Byrne, who broke out as a first-rate movie comedienne in last year’s Neighbors; she’s at least as good in Spy. New York City-born swimsuit model Nargis Fakhri has starred in a few Bollywood movies, and she has a rockin’ action sequence here that indicates that she has a future in mainstream American films.
Spy was written and directed by Paul Feig, the creator of Freaks and Geeks who directed the hit picture that McCarthy stole, Bridesmaids , and the hilarious McCarthy vehicle The Heat. In Spy, he starts us off with a Shirley Bassyesque title song, and then parodies all the conventions of the super spy movie genre, one by one.
Spy sustains its laughs throughout. It’s maybe not quite as funny as The Heat, but it’s a an entertaining diversion, and a great chance to enjoy the unique talent of Melissa McCarthy.
