Zombieland brings several nice touches. Our young heroes (Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin – very early in their careers) band together with the a master zombie killer (Woody Harrelson). The zombie killer’s astonishing skills and unwholesome enthusiasm are very funny. After many close calls, the group finds shelter in Bill Murray’s LA mansion where Bill Murray (playing himself) is surviving by impersonating a zombie. The climax is a showdown in an amusement park where the zombies have cornered the heroes.
Zombieland is also on my list of Woody Harrelson’s Overlooked Gems. It’s available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
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 Conderacy 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 to denying the Union victory in the Civil War and 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 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 Lynn Shelton herself.
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.
In Mindy Kaling’s very smart comedy Late Night, Emma Thompson plays Katherine Newberry, the host of late night television talk show that has become, along with Katherine herself, an institution; the problem is that institutions tend to get stale, and networks eventually dump stale shows.
A woman in an almost all-male niche, Katherine has achieved by being brusque and exacting (and Emma Thompson nails the part). But is she still genuine? And is she still even trying? Katherine brings the inexperienced striver Molly Patel (Kaling) into her writers’ room as a diversity hire – and Molly can tell her the truths that others fear to tell Katherine.
Late Night skewers male privilege and affluent class privilege, and takes on slut shaming, too. Kaling has spent time as the only woman or only POC in writers’ rooms, and she clearly knows of what she writes. Kaling doesn’t pull any punches, but the wit makes it an easy, and perhaps instructive, watch for any audience.
It’s also worth watching Late Night for a secondary thread – the relationship between Katherine and her husband (John Lithgow). It’s such an authentic portrayal of a longtime partnership, based on affection and trust – the only venue in which Katherine allows herself to be vulnerable. Lithgow’s performance is powerful and heartbreaking.
The best joke involves Katherine Newberry coining the word, “catharticissistic”, a witticism that convulsed The Wife, but totally escaped the Millennial woman seated next to her.
Amy Ryan plays the network CEO, and at first we think it’s going to be a stereotypical the-suits-trample-the-creatives character. But Ryan’s CEO is the age and gender peer who calls Katherine on her shit. Ryan’s performance sparkles.
Ike Barinholz is ickily superb as the shallow, gross-out comic pegged to replace Katherine. Denis O’Hare is also excellent as Katherine’s loyal but enabling producer.
I haven’t been a big fan of Kaling’s performances, but Late Night is her triumph as a writer. This is a comedy with laughs and social criticism. And the supporting turns by John Lithgow and Amy Ryan are special,
Engaging characters can take a light comedy a long way. (And light comedy can take social commentary a long way, too.) That’s the case with Neto Villalobos’ amiable comedy Helmet Heads (Cascos Nomados).
Mancha (Arturo Parda) buzzes around San Jose, Costa Rica, as a motorcycle delivery driver and canoodles with his girlfriend Clara (Daniela Mora). Mancha hangs out with his buddies from work. Clara tends a pack of 700 wild dogs on a mountainside outside the city. There’s a job crisis at Mancha’s employer, and Clara is moving to another town – so Mancha faces some choices.
The core of Helmet Heads is the bro-buddy camaraderie of the drivers. They all know each other by nicknames (and not their real names). “Mancha” means “Stain” and refers to the protagonist’s prominent facial birthmark. I especially loved the ever-blissed out Chito, the bombastic Gordo and the conveniently/inconveniently diabetic Gato. I was surprised to learn that most of the cast are non-actors and some are motorcycle delivery drivers.
Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose. These guys, especially Mancha, value their independence, but Helmet Heads reminds us – usually slyly – that their place in Costa Rica’s society is insecure, even fragile. Even with the social comment, Helmet Heads is pretty funny throughout.
There is also a sex scene unlike any I’ve seen. The sex is conventional, but the setting is not.
[Oddly, I flashed on another motorcycle messenger movie, the 1981 French thriller Diva, even though that is an entirely dissimilar movie – sleeker production values, a Hitchcock homage, an iconic chase through the Paris Metro, etc.]
I saw Helmet Heads at Cinema Club Silicon Valley, with a post screening Q&A with director Neto Villalobos.. I’ll let you know when and if Helmet Heads can be streamed.
Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever in BOOKSMART Credit: Francois Duhamel / Annapurna Pictures
In Olivia Wilde,’s wildly successful comedy Booksmart, Molly (Beanie Feldstein) and Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) play super-achieving kids who have followed every rule and refused to be distracted by high school frivolity; appalled to learn that their more conventionally fun-loving classmates have also gotten admitted to elite colleges, Molly and Amy decide to consume four years of teen fun in one night of graduation parties. This is an entirely fresh take on the coming of age film, and a high school graduation party romp like you’ve never seen.
Booksmart is the directorial debut of actress Olivia Wilde, and was written by Emily Halpern, Sarah Haskins, Susanna Fogel and Katie Silberman. The impact of the all-female creative team, to my eyes, is not in any particular scene or character, but woven throughout. These women have gotten the rare chance to make a movie, brought their talent and fresh eyes to it and knocked it out of the park.
Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever in BOOKSMART
Kaitlyn Dever and Beanie Feldstein are special talents. Dever played one of the most compelling characters in TV’s Justified as Loretta McCready and was excellent in the Lynne Shelton drama Outside In. Feldstein sparkled as the protagonist’s high school best friend in Lady Bird. Here’s a particularly fun NYT interview with Dever and Feldstein.
Others in the relatively underseen cast – especially Diana Silvers, Molly Gordon, Billie Lourd, Austin Crute, Noah Galvin and the skateboarder Victoria Ruesga – bring interesting presences to the film. One wonders if Booksmart will become an American Graffiti/Animal House/Fast Times at Ridgemont High/The Breakfast Club phenomenon, and launch a cohort of movie careers.
Booksmart is smart, funny and a very fulfilling start to 2019’s slate of summer movies.
The romantic comedy Long Shot looked eminently skipable to me until I read Manohla Dargis’ NY Times review, which concluded that the unexpected pairing of Charlize Theron and Seth Rogen worked. We didn’t like it as much as Manohla did, but The Wife and I had a moderately good time.
Charlize Theron and Seth Rogen play folks who grew up next door to each other as kids. Twenty-five years later, he has gone on to become a talented muckraking journalist of minor note and uncertain employability. She has become the US Secretary of State and a presidential hopeful, a glamorous celebrity and the most powerful woman in the world. When their paths cross as adults, the Beauty and the Beast connect, sparks fly and comic stations ensue. The most biting gags send up Rupert Murdoch and Fox News.
The drop-dead-beautiful Theron, of course, won the Best Actress Oscar for playing the not-drop-dead-beautiful serial killer Aileen in Monster. She has also become cinema’s best action star (male or female) with Mad Max: Fury Road and Atomic Blonde. But she’s also made two of the smartest comedies of the century in Young Adult and Tully, both times bravely playing an unsympathetic character. Long Shot is easily within her range, and she’s predictably excellent.
Rogen is always good in a comedy, and he’s fine here, too. Director Jonathan Levine previously directed two even better comedies, 50/50 and Warm Bodies.
This isn’t cinema for the ages, but Long Shot contains plenty of chuckles and several hard guffaws.
The San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM) opens tomorrow, and this week’s video pick comes from the 2014 festival. On its surface, the brilliant comedy Dear White People seems to be about racial identity, but – as writer-director Justin Simien points out – it’s really about personal identity (of which race is an important part). Set at a prestigious private college, Dear White People centers on a group of African-American students navigating the predominantly white college environment.
Each of the four primary characters has adopted a persona – choosing how they want others to view them. Middle class Sam is a fierce Black separatist (despite her White Dad and her eyes for that really nice White boy classmate). Coco, having made it to an elite college from the streets, is driven to succeed socially by ingratiating herself with the popular kids. Kyle, the Dean’s son, is the college BMOC, a traditional paragon, but with passions elsewhere. Lionel is floundering; despite being an African-American gay journalist, he doesn’t fit in with the Black kids, the LGBT community or the journalism clique. All four of their self-identities are challenged by campus events.
This very witty movie is flat-out hilarious. The title comes from Sam’s campus radio show, which features advice like “Dear White People, stop dancing!” and “Dear White People, don’t touch our hair; what are we – a petting zoo?”. While the movie explores serious themes, it does so through raucous character-driven humor. It’s a real treat.
It’s the first feature for writer-director Justin Simien and it’s a stellar debut. Dear White People is on my list of Best Movies of 2014. Dear White People, which has been spun off into a popular Netflix series, is available on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and streaming on Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, and Google Play.
THE HIGH SIGN: Buster Keaton and the Blinking Buzzards flashing the gang sign
The High Sign is 20-minutes of Buster Keaton’s rapid-fire comedy from 1921. Buster plays a young man who cons his way into a job managing an amusement park shooting gallery and inadvertently becomes entangled with a murderous gang of thugs. The plot exists to set up two exquisite comic set pieces. In the first, Keaton sets up an elaborate Rube Goldberg device to trick the boss into believing that Keaton is a master marksman. And the second is a triumph of Keaton’s ingenuity, as the gang members chase him through a cutaway two-story house, complete with trap doors and secret passageways.
Of course the gang itself, the Blinking Buzzards, is ridiculous, especially when they flash their secret gang sign. There’s also humor in the contrast between the towering gang leader (6′ 3″ Joe Roberts) and the diminutive (5′ 5″) Keaton.
The High Sign is a two-reeler, a 20-minute short film. The conventional wisdom among early movie studio heads was that a comedy could only be sustain audience interest for 20 minutes. Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd would soon dispel that myth.
In fact, The High Sign came just before Keaton unleashed his string of comic masterpiece features: Sherlock, Jr. (1924), The Navigator (1924), Seven Chances (1925), The General (1926), Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928) and The Cameraman (1928). After The Cameraman, Keaton’s new studio took away his creative control, and his career (and personal life) crashed.
I saw The High Sign at Cinequest, accompanied by world-renowned Dennis James on the Mighty Wurlitzer organ, before Steamboat Bill Jr. I recommend Sal Pizarro’s excellent profile of Dennis James in the Mercury News.
Also known as The “High Sign”, the film plays occasionally on Turner Classic Movies and possibly bootleg versions can be streamed on YouTube and Vimeo.
In the amiable comedy The Way You Look Tonight, Peter meets a woman through a dating app, but can’t find her again despite their connection and a torrid one-nighter. Still yearning for his mystery flame, he dates a series of women, but remains unfulfilled. Now, it’s hard to write about this movie without spoiling the hook, but let’s just say that he discovers that a group of people exist with a startling fictional condition.
Indeed, the two funniest sequences are when Peter finds out that he is the last human to find out about this condition and when he attends the support group for the afflicted (of COURSE they have one).
Nick Fink is appealing as Peter and the rest of the cast is uniformly excellent, especially the horde of actresses who play his dates.
Can someone get past appearance – age, race, body type – to connect with a soul mate? The Way You Look Tonight is actually a parable cloaked in a romantic comedy. This is the first feature for writer-director John Cerrito.
Cinequest hosts the world premiere of The Way You Look Tonight
In the winning comedy Vanilla, Elliot (Will Dennis) is stuck in a regimented life of coding software, emerging from his apartment only for gym workouts and food. Kimmie (Kelsea Bauman-Murphy) is a kookie free spirit, but she’s stuck, too, unable to fulfill her aspiration to become a stand-up comic. Events conspire to lead the two into a three-day road trip from New York to New Orleans. Kimmie pitches it to Elliot as a date. But Elliot really sees the chance to reconnect in New Orleans with his ex-girlfriend Samantha, for whom he still pining. What could go wrong?
We have an odd couple on the road, so funny stuff happens – and this is a funny movie. Naturally, the audience is waiting for the two to jump into bed together. But Vanilla is fundamentally a portrait of these two people, both comfortable in their ruts. Elliot is posing as an entrepreneur, and Kimmie is posing as a comedian-in-the-making; something is going to have to shake up these two so each can grow. Kimmie seems utterly intrepid, but we learn that she can be paralyzed by self-consciousness, just like Elliot.
Vanilla is written and directed by its star, Will Dennis, in his first feature film. It’s an impressive debut, rich in character-driven humor.
Dennis understands not to linger on a gag; (Yorgos Lanthimos should pay close attention to this). Dennis has Elliot try to eat a beignet in a bayou tour boat; it only works because it’s the briefest of gags. There’s a montage of bad would-be comics at an open mic night that is brilliant in its understanding of why they think they’re funny and why they’re not. Dennis also works in a random encounter with America’s most earnest fish store guy (Lowell Landes). And “Anyone ever tell you that you have a Natalie Portman thing going on?” becomes a very funny come-on line.
Dennis is very good as Elliot, subtly capturing his unease, judginess and pathetic obsession with Samantha. Bauman-Murphy makes Kimmie’s kookiness, which could easily be annoying, lovable.
Jo Firestone is perfect as Elliot’s ex Samantha. Firestone shows us a glimpse of why Elliot would fall for her, and then a massive dose of why she’s bad for him. Let’s just say that I recognized Samantha (as a friend’s ex-girlfriend, not mine).
The satisfying ending of Vanilla is authentic, true to the characters and NOT what would be expected from a run-of-the-mill rom com.
Cinequest hosts the world premiere of Vanilla, where Silicon Valley audiences will appreciate Elliot’s delusion that his clunky app will go viral – if only users would spend enough time learning it.
