Sir Michael Caine and Aubrey Plaza in BEST SELLERS. Photo courtesy of Screen Media Films.
Michael Caine and Aubrey Plaza star in the breezy comedy Best Sellers. Plaza plays Lucy Stanbridge, who has inherited a publishing company on the verge of insolvency. She discovers one remaining possible lifeline – the company is still owed one book by a famous author in its stable. Unfortunately, that author is Harris Shaw (Caine), an anti-social, elderly alcoholic.
Harris Shaw’s anti-sociability is anything but passive, which challenges Lucy as she drags a manuscript out of him and takes him, brimming with hostility, on a book tour.
Just when the audience is settled in for a madcap, odd-couple-on-the-road comedy, Best Sellers adds a topical layer. Harris Shaw’s bad public behavior is so extreme that, instead of sabotaging the book’s marketing campaign, it makes him a viral sensation on social media. In an even more wickedly funny turn, Shaw’s sudden popularity is with consumers who do not buy books; “you should be selling t-shirts”, mutters one fan.
Both Sir Michael Caine and Aubrey Plaza (Parks and Recreation) are funny here, in roles that do not challenge them. In particular, the character of Lucy isn’t written to take advantage of Plaza’s capacity to be simultaneously funny and dangerous (Black Bear).
Best Sellers is the first feature for director Lina Roessler. Although Lucy and Harris develop a friendship and face Harris’ end of life, Roessler manages to keep Best Sellers from becoming pretentious or maudlin.
Best Sellers opens September 17 in theaters and on VOD.
Photo caption: THE UNKNOWN SAINT. Photo courtesy of The Match Factory.
Here’s the premise of the crime comedy The Unknown Saint: a thief is being hunted down in the vast Moroccan desert. Just before capture, he buries his loot on a sandy hilltop and disguises it to look like a grave. After serving time in prison, he returns to dig up his loot. But he finds that some people, believing the “grave” to be that of a saint, have built a mausoleum over the grave. Even worse, an entire village has sprung up to support pilgrimage commerce, and the shrine is guarded around the clock.
The thief (Younes Bouab) starts plotting to sneak in and dig up the loot, but he’s got to overcome, among other obstacles, the night watchman’s canine corps. It doesn’t help when he brings in an accomplice so stupid that he doesn’t get that his prison nickname of “Ahmed the Brain” is ironic. And he is surprised when he is not the only nighttime tomb raider.
The thief has to wait in a village filled with eccentrics and small timers on the hustle. The dispensary has a bored young doctor, an aged nurse with a wicked sense of humor, and a waiting room full of “patients” putting on a charade of medical need.
Younes Bouab in THE UNKNOWN SAINT. Photo courtesy of The Match Factory.
The Unknown Saint is relentlessly deadpan, as all the characters plunge ahead with profound cynicism or earnest absurdity, with at least one critic likening it to Fargo. It’s all very, very funny, especially an unexpected triumph of dog dentistry involving the town barber.
The Unknown Saint is the first feature for writer-director Alaa Eddine Aljem, and it is an auspicious debut. Aljem knows how to use the vastness of the desert to express human futility and how to wring laughs out of human foibles.
The Unknown Saint is Morocco’s submission for this year’s Best International Feature Oscar. The Unknown Saint is streaming from Netflix.
A very young Pedro Almodóvar’s 1980 Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls Like Mom. This is early Almodovar – zany and ribald, even transgressive. The filmmaking craft is very rough (and very low budget), but Almodóvar’s signature energy and vibrant colors are already there. Fun rock music sets the tone from the get go in the title credits.
The humor is outrageous, embracing that of the very first American gross-out comedies (The Groove Tube and The Kentucky Fried Movie) and taking a step (or a few) farther:
A penis-measuring contest as a party game;
The question of whether a cop’s wife can become a punk band’s groupie;
Panties that turn farts into perfume;
Cops baited into a narc raid on a plastic marijuana plant;
Perhaps the dirtiest pop pseudopunk song ever: I love you because you’re dirty; Filthy slutty and servile.
The protagonist starts out as the party girl Pepi, but the story evolves to center around Luci, the wife of a brutish cop. As Luci is debased by more and more characters, becoming a human piñata, it is revealed that she is a masochist who actually is attracted to and pleasured by the meanest behavior. [SPOILER: There’s even a Golden Shower early in this story thread.]
Viewing through today’s lens, the movie violence against women no longer works as comedy, even though the character who is debased is a masochist and the rape that spurs the revenge theme is clearly intended to be broadly comic.
This is Almodóvar having fun being naughty. His most profound work was still two decades in the future: Talk to Her, Bad Education, Broken Embraces.
I watched Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls Like Mom on TCM, and you can stream it from Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu and YouTube.
Pre-mockumentary, Christopher Guest’s first feature as a director was The Big Picture (1989), a pointed satire of modern Hollywood. It’s not as vicious as Robert Altman’s The Player, and not as funny as Guest’s own brilliant mockumentaries, but you can glimpse Guest’s path to realizing his comic genius.
In this cautionary comedy, Nick (Kevin Bacon), a young director, wins a prestigious student film competition and suddenly finds himself Hollywood’s new Bright and Shiny Thing. Movie studios and agents clamor over him, and Nick moves to LA with his architect girlfriend (Emily Longstreth) and cinematographer and best friend (Michael McKean) for his first big movie; all three newcomers are very naive. Nick is soon dazzled by promises of fame and money (and Teri Hatcher’s body), loses his way and betrays his girlfriend and his best friend.
Kevin Bacon and Teri Hatcher in THE BIG PICTURE
Along the way, Nick hires a wacky agent (Martin Short) and encounters a range of Hollywood Suits, and there are lots of funny moments. My favorites are pitches for a beach party sexploitation movie and an Abe and Babe buddy picture (about Abe Lincoln and Babe Ruth).
The cast also includes the always welcome J.T. Walsh and Jennifer Jason Leigh at her most comically kooky (joyously manic but hinting at emotional damage underneath). Watch for John Cleese as the bartender Frankie. And then there’s Teri Hatcher, ravishing even in an unfortunate 1980s hairstyle.
Jennifer Jason Leigh and Kevin Bacon in THE BIG PICTURE
The Big Picture follows Rob Reiner’s 1984 This Is Spinal Tap, which Guest co-wrote and in which he starred in as the dim guitarist Nigel Tufnel, who sets his amp to eleven. In 1996, Guest followed The Big Picture with Waiting for Guffman, which launched his string of mockumentaries – Best in Show (his masterpiece), A Mighty Wind, For Your Consideration and Mascots.
I watched The Big Picture on on Turner Classic Movies, and it streams from Amazon, Vudu and YouTube.
Emily Longstreth and Kevin Bacon in THE BIG PICTURE
In the French comic thriller Mama Weed, Isabelle Huppert plays Patience, a woman beset by money troubles stemming from the care of her aged mother. She embraces an increasingly bizarre and risky solution. Mama Weed starts out droll and blossoms into madcap.
Patience, having been born in colonial Algeria, is fluent in Arabic. Her day job is as the translator for a French police unit that wiretaps Arabic-speaking drug dealers. She learns that the cop are about to take down the son of her mom’s beloved caregiver, and she tips the kid off. That results in her gaining the possession of a ton and a half of somebody else’s hashish. Patience disguises herself, enlists some dimwitted street dealers and seeks to monetize her haul. Did I mention that she is dating her boss on the Narc Squad?
Her own employers are now throwing all their resources toward catching this mysterious new dealer, whom they don’t know is sitting in their midst. The original owners of the hash, a murderous lot, are also hunting her down.
She’s more and more at risk, but the story gets commensurately funnier. She adopts a retired drug-detecting police dog. One of her client drug dealers is ravaged by the Munchies in a kabob shop. Much of the humor is centered on the experience of Arabs and Chinese in contemporary France. One central theme is the cynical principle that money makes world go round.
Mama Weed also recognizes how we value the caregivers who take loving care of our elderly parents; those folks can become more dear than family.
I’ll watch anything with Huppert in it, although it’s hard to top her electrifying performance in Elle.Of course she’s a great actress, having been nominated 16 times for an acting César (France’s Oscar). But here’s her sweet spot – no other actor can portray such outrageous behavior with such implacability as Huppert. She is probably the least hysterical actor in cinema.
Mama Weed opens in theaters in July 16 and on digital on July 23.
In the marvelous Riders of Justice, Mads Mikkelsen plays Markus, a soldier on active duty in the Middle East; when his wife dies in an accident, Markus returns home to tend to their teenage daughter. Then two geeky data scientists show up at his door with an anti-social hacker – and Markus learns that the tragedy may not have been an accident. Markus, a human killing machine, and the three supernerds team up on a quest for revenge.
Riders of JustIce has been inadequately described as a revenge thriller and an action comedy. It is gloriously satisfying as entertainment, but the more I think about it, Riders of Justice explores grief, revenge and mortality – they’re all in here. And it’s still very, very funny.
The key is that Riders of Justice is so character-driven. At first, Markus and his three compatriots seem to be comic types, but writer-director Anders Thomas Jensen has fleshed them out – each of these men has a personality formed by a trauma.
Markus has the laser focus of a combat commander, which he uses to deflect any contemplation of his feelings – or those of others, including his grief-wracked daughter.
Mathematician Otto (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) is just socially aware enough to recognize how inappropriate his buddies are. His partner Lennart (Lars Brygmann), with 40,000 hours of therapy under his belt, is both psychologically savvy and remarkably devoid of self-awareness or boundaries. The hacker Emmenthaler (Nicolas Bro) really can’t navigate any social interaction. These guys are hilarious from their opening presentation to a bunch of corporate suits, where they present an elaborate mathematical proof that rich people buy Mercedes and poor people drive Hyundais.
Mads Mikkelsen is a favorite of mine. I can’t name a more compelling and versatile screen actor working to day. He has delivered some of the best performances of the past two decades in After the Wedding, The Hunt and Another Round. (And he was the Bond villain with the tears of blood in the 2006 Casino Royale). I recommend this wonderful NYT interview with Mikkelsen, who really used to be professional dancer (who knew?) and touches on his exhilarating dance scene in Another Round.
In Riders of Justice, Mikkelsen takes Markus’ men-don’t talk-about-their-feelings attitude just far enough to set up Jensen’s jokes and to create tension about what’s best for his daughter. It’s extreme, but not cartoonish.
Writer-director Anders Thomas Jensen, who won an Oscar for a 1998 short film, co-wrote Susanne Bier’s Brothers, After the Wedding and In a Better World.Brothers (Brødre) and After the Wedding (Efter brylluppet) are two of the best films of the 2000s; watch the Danish originals, not the putrid American remakes.
Jensen, with his wicked wit at the ready, has also written and directed The Green Butchers, Stealing Rembrandt, Flickering Lights and Men & Chicken.
Riders of Justice is the best movie that I’ve seen so far in 2021. Riders of Justice has slipped out of Bay Area theaters, but is streaming on Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu and YouTube.
Photo caption: Charlie Tahan and Pineapple Tangaroa in DRUNK BUS. Photo courtesy of Filmrise.
In the light and appealing coming of age comedy Drunk Bus, a young slacker (Charlie Tahan) is paralyzed by the disappointment of a breakup. He’s stuck driving the shuttle between a college town’s bars and the dorms (the “Drunk Bus”). One running gag is that he is fixated upon an ex girlfriend that every other man in America would find insufferably frustrating.
He needs someone to shake him up, which is what he gets in the form of a 300-pound Samoan security guy with facial tattoos (Pineapple Tangaroa). It’s all sweet and predictable.
This is the first feature for co-directors John Carlucci and Brandon LaGanke.
I screened Drunk Bus, which had played at the 2020 SXSW, in March at the 2021 Cinequest. It’s now available to stream from Laemmle.
Photo caption: Marc Maron (center) in SWORD OF TRUST
In Lynn Shelton’s brilliant comedy Sword of Trust, Mel (Marc Maron) runs a Birmingham, Alabama, pawnshop with his worthless Millennial assistant Nathaniel (Jon Bass – very funny). Cynthia (Jillian Bell) has returned to Alabama, with her partner Mary (Michaela Watkins), to claim an inheritance that disappointingly turns out to be a single antique sword. But the grandfather’s incoherent letter about the sword fits the Internet ravings of a White supremacist cult called the “Provers” (like “Truthers”), who are hunting for artifacts that “prove” that the Confederacy really won the Civil War. The four resolve to cash in an a windfall by dealing the sword to the scary underground racist cult. Comic situations, naturally, ensue.
There’s plenty of grist for comedy here, and Shelton bores in on the widespread absence of critical thinking that meshes with the Internet to give platforms to crackpot conspiracy theories. From Anti-vaxxers to Truthers, folks are now somehow comfortable with denying scientific or historical fact to fit a narrative that they prefer. In Sword of Trust, that idiocy ranges from denying the Union victory in the Civil War to even the roundness of the Earth.
Sword of Trust is very successful as a comedy, but there’s another, very emotionally powerful story in here. Mel’s ex, Deirdre, drops by the shop in an attempt to extract some cash for a modest ring. It’s clear that Deidre has had a toxic and near-ruinous impact on Mel’s life, an impact that he can’t – and perhaps won’t – escape. This story takes up less than ten minutes, essentially book-ending the sword comedy, but it’s the meat of Maron’s performance and the heartfelt core of the film.
Maron’s performance as Mel is a tour de force. When Mel first sees Diedre, he silently freezes for an instant and takes the long way around the shop to gather himself before reaching the counter. He listens to Deidre’s story with a knowing weariness in his eyes. When Deidre says “I’m good for it” and Mel replies, “No, you’re not”, it is with the quiet certainty of a man scarred. Later, Maron’s Mel relates his own back story, and it’s all the more heartbreaking because of his matter-of-factness. This is one of the best performances of the year.
Lynn Shelton in SWORD OF TRUST
And, Deidre, what a mess! The fidgety desperation just underneath her sad story du jour just nails the manipulative addict. I made a note to look up the actress playing Deidre with such compelling authenticity – and it is director Lynn Shelton herself.
There’s a real life heartbreak, too. Lynne Shelton and Marc Maron were partners, in a relatively early stage of their relationship, when they made this movie in 2019. Within a year, Shelton died suddenly of acute myeloid leukemia. The two were working on another screenplay.
Back to Sword of Trust – the entire cast is good, especially Dan Bakkedahl (Life in Pieces) as the White supremacist kingpin and prolific character actor Toby Huss as his henchman.
Sword of Trust is a very smart and funny comedy with a bonus – a rich and moving character study. You can buy the stream for $12.99 from Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play, and it’s well worth it.
Steven Randazzo (center) in MAKING THE DAY. Photo courtesy of MCM Creative.
In the showbiz comedy Making the Day, a no-longer-in-much-demand character actor (a brilliant Steven Randazzo) struggles to put together the financing for an independent film. Director and co-writer Michael Canzoniero, who is clearly familiar with this problem, begins with the titles “Much inspired by true events. The rest is improvised.”
Our sublimely earnest hero is trying to make a film about his beloved late wife. You just know that, not only is no one going to invest in this film, no one is going to want to see it. But he’s so driven to make his movie that he takes money from a very scary hood (whose primary cinematic interest is in laundering ill-gotten loot).
Things go awry and he needs even more money. A neurotic actress (Juliette Bennett) promises the money if she can star in the movie. Is she going to be ultimately more dangerous to the movie than the mobster? It’s a tossup.
The plot is kind of like an indie movie version of The Producers, only if Zero Mostel’s Max Bialystock were understated and sincere.
The core of Making the Day is the hangdog performance by Randazzo. His character’s sincerity and desperation are so genuine, that he’s the perfect counterpoint to all the screwballs surrounding him.
I screened Making the Day for its world premiere at Cinequest.
The indie comedy Welcome to the Show plunges the characters and the audience into a puzzle. Four college-age guys, always up for a party, blow off Thanksgiving with their parents to party, but the joke is on them.
They score an invitation to The Show, which they assume will be a party; after getting a little high, they sure like being frisked and blindfolded by sexy women, and driven to an undisclosed location. Now they don’t know where they are or what is supposed to be next in this increasingy mysterious experience.
What is being done to them? By whom? Why? And just where the hell are they? Are they in a elaborate party game or inside a piece of performance art? Or is this a prank or something more sinister? They don’t know and neither does the audience.
The surreal experience exhausts them. And, as is fitting for a surreal film, they stumble around completely spent, resembling the iconic walk on the road to nowhere in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.
One of the satisfying running jokes is that, having given up their smart phones at upon admission to The Show, these Millennials are utterly lost without the navigation apps. They have not been air-dropped into the Yukon wilderness, but are in Richmond Virginia, a city with a major river, railroad tracks, highways, landmarks and street signage.
Keegan Garant is the most interesting among a cast of newcomers.
This is the second film for writer-director Dorie Barton, and she resists the temptation to reveal everything to the audience.
I screened Welcome to the Show for its world premiere at Cinequest. You can stream it during the festival for only $3.99 at Cinequest’s online Cinejoy.
