comedy

TULLY: insightful, compelling and, finally, magical

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Charlize Theron stars in Jason Reitman’s TULLY. Courtesy of SFFILM.

The compelling dark comedy Tully stars Charlize Theron, is written by Diablo Cody and directed by Jason Reitman. Those three combined on the underrated game-changing comedy Young Adult, and Tully is another very singular film.

Theron plays Marlo, a mom who has just given birth to her third child.  Her oldest kid has intense special needs and a newborn brings another level of obligation.  Marlo develops a serious case of depression.  To ease the burden, she gets a night nurse named Tully; Tully has an otherworldly quality which brings relief and respite to Marlo.  And then there’s a major plot twist…

Theron is a fearless actress – not afraid to glam down, She gained fifty pounds for this role (not as big a glam down as for Monster). In Young Adult, she was game to play a thoroughly dislikable character. Here she plays a real Mom, not a Perfect Mom. In real life, caregiving can take its toll, and that’s what we see here.

Mackenzie Davis brings a magical quality to the character of Tully.  Ron Livingston is very good as a loving but clueless husband; ill-equipped to recognize, let alone deal with Marlo’s depression.

Tully was featured at the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM) (although I missed it because I was at the Leave No Trace screening);  Theron and Reitman attended the SFFILM screening, and, from all reports,  Theron wowed the crowd.

Tully is an excellent and insightful film.  It’s a dark comedy and NOT A LIGHT MOVIE – after all, with all its laughs, it’s about postpartum depression.

QUALITY PROBLEMS: a screwball comedy for the sandwich generation

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QUALITY PROBLEMS
Brooke Purdy in QUALITY PROBLEMS

The remarkably successful dramedy Quality Problems plunges us into a contemporary world that most of us in the sandwich generation recognize – a life so busy that the relative importance of our stress-inducers can blur. Something like the cake for your kid’s birthday party can seem as important as paying the bills or dealing with an aging parent. Until cancer reshuffles the deck. Quality Problems‘ insights in navigating modern life are accessible because it’s so damn funny.

Bailey (Brooke Purdy) and Drew (Doug Purdy) are a couple in their early forties with two school-age kids. Each is comfortable taking on one child-rearing or domestic task while handing off a competing responsibility to their partner. Each knows – and accepts – what the partner is – or is NOT – good at. Both have wicked senses of humor, and they are affectionate and even playful. Their relationship has weathered the usual financial and parental challenges, along with an episode where Bailey beat back breast cancer.

Brooke Purdy wrote the screenplay and also co-directed with Doug Purdy. The breezy banter between characters is often flat-out hilarious. This is not sitcom-grade humor, it’s much closer to a Hawksian screwball comedy. The characters deal with cancer and parental dementia with a dark humor that is realistic and funny.

Bailey’s single neighbor and bestie Paula (Jenica Bergere) is an essential member of the family’s support structure, but Paula and Drew loathe each other. Chained together because of their attachment to Bailey and the kids, every interaction sparks a new round of insults. This isn’t good-natured teasing – the jibes, in particular about his job and her reproductive health, are aimed to hurt. The Paula-Drew relationship adds some edginess to the mix and contributes to the film’s authenticity.

Watch for an uncredited cameo by the prolific and versatile character actor Alfred Molina (Raiders of the Lost Ark, Love Is Strange). Veteran Chris Mulkey is excellent as Bailey’s dad, who is sinking into dementia.

Quality Problems is the directing debut for Brooke and Doug Purdy, and I attended its world premiere at Cinequest.  Quality Problems can now be streamed from Amazon Prime, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

DVD/Stream of the Week: YOUNG ADULT – comedy game-changer

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Charlize Theron in YOUNG ADULT

This weekend, Charlize Theron stars in Tully, from screenwriter Diablo Cody (Juno) and director Jason Reitman (Thank You for Smoking, Juno, Up in the Air).  Seven years ago, in Young Adult, this same team challenged the current mode of comedy itself. They turned many comic conventions on their heads in this nastily dark comedy, and Young Adult was on my list of Best Movies of 2011.

Played by Charlize Theron, the main character is stunningly non-empathetic, utterly self-absorbed and thoroughly unpleasant. She was the prom goddess in her small town high school, and has moved to the city for a job with a hint of prestige. With a failed marriage, a looming career crisis and no friends, she’s drinking too much and is in a bad place. So she decides to return to her hometown and get her old boyfriend (Patrick Wilson) back – despite the fact that he’s gloriously contented with his wife and newborn infant.

Naturally, social disasters ensue. Along the way, the story probes the issues of happiness and self-appraisal.

Patton Oswalt and Charlize Theron in YOUNG ADULT

Patton Oswalt is wonderful as someone the protagonist regarded as a lower form of life in high school, but who becomes her only companion and truth teller.

Young Adult is inventive and very funny. Its cynicism reminds me of a Ben Hecht or Billy Wilder screenplay (high praise). Note: This is NOT a film for someone expecting a light comedy. Young Adult is available on DVD from Redbox and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

DVD/Stream of the Week: THE FIREMEN’S BALL

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THE FIREMEN’S BALL

As a tribute to the great director Miloš Forman, who just died at age 86, this week’s video pick is Forman’s 1967 Czech comedy The Firemen’s Ball.  Forman came of age in Communist Czechoslovakia, and the prevalent thread in his films was the challenging, even mocking, of authority.  That’s what The Firemen’s Ball is all about.

It’s a comedy of errors set during the annual ball of a small town fire brigade. It’s an obligatory occasion, and everyone is just going through the motions. No one is willing or able to do what they are supposed to be doing, whether it is protecting the raffle prizes or even putting out fires. The film eviscerated the moral bankruptcy of the Communist society.

The bumbling old farts on the ball committee try to put on a beauty contest, and they shanghai a bunch of young women in attendance and parade them around the committee room to prep them for the pageant.  The Wife was offended by the sexism of the scene, but she didn’t stick around to see the committee get their comeuppance when the contestants themselves blow up the Big Announcement and turn the committee members into objects of ridicule.  Stick with it – the whole movie is only 73 minutes long.

In his youth, Forman lived through the Nazis, who he described as evil, and the Communists, who he described as absurd.  Indeed, the Czech ruling Politburo did recognizer themselves in The Firemen’s Ball’s bumbling firemen’s ball committee, and they concocted a pretext to ban the film in Czechoslovakia.

The Firemen’s Ball (which is also sometimes listed as The Fireman’s Ball) can be streamed from Amazon Prime and rented on DVD from Netflix. It’s only one hour, thirteen minutes long, and it’s a hoot.

THE FIREMEN’S BALL

THE DEATH OF STALIN: gallows humor from the highest of scaffolds

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Jason Isaacs and Steve Buscemi in THE DEATH OF STALIN

One might not expect the death of Josef Stalin and the subsequent maneuvering of his cronies to make for a savagely funny movie, but that is exactly what writer-director Armando Ianucci has accomplished in in The Death of Stalin.  In his Veep and In the Loop, Ianucci has proved himself an expert in mocking the ambition, venality and flattery of those reaching for power.  In The Death of Stalin, he adds terror to his quiver of motivations, and the result is darkly hilarious.

Serving Stalin was a high-wire act.  By the end of Stalin’s Great Terror, everyone still standing in the Soviet leadership had survived by flattering Stalin and by loyally carrying out every Stalin command, no matter how misguided and/or murderous.  Given that the slightest misstep – or even a wholly imagined fragment of Stalin’s paranoia – could lead to a summary bullet-in-the-head, this was no small achievement.  These may have been the most powerful men at the very top of a superpower, but they have all been traumatized into extreme caution by years of fear.

For example, when Stalin suffers a cerebral hemorrhage and falls to the floor, his guards are afraid to burst into his room.  When Stalin is discovered on the floor by his housekeeper, the regime’s top leaders gather around him and decide on next steps.  The first question is whether to call a doctor, because they fear that if Stalin wakes up and finds that someone else has made a decision, he will have them executed.  (Once they get past that, they must work around the fact that Stalin has already killed or exiled all the competent doctors in Moscow.)

Of course, it would be absurd for Stalin’s inner circle to refrain from calling a doctor for hours and hours.  But it really happened.  So did all of the other key occurrences in the movie, although the events were compressed from the real six months into a three-day movie plot.

This cast is brilliant.  Steve Buscemi is cast as Nikita Kruschev and proves to be an inspired choice.  Jason Isaacs, with a ridiculously broad (but historically accurate) chest full of medals, is especially delightful as Field Marshal Zhukov.   Michael Palin, as Molotov, has one of the best bits as he deadpans political correctness while figuring out whether he can admit that the sudden release of his imprisoned wife is really good news.  Each one of the actors – Simon Russell Beale, Olga Kuryenko, Paddy Considine, Jeffrey Tambor, Andrea Riseborough – gets to shine with Ianucci’s dialogue.

This is gallows humor from the highest of scaffolds.  The Death of Stalin is an insightful exploration of terror – and hilarious, too.

Cinequest: WILD HONEY

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Rusty Schwimmer and Stephnie Weir in WILD HONEY

The talented actress Rusty Schwimmer plays Gabby, that rebellious oldest daughter whose bad choices have left her, at age 49, in a puddle of low self-esteem and underachievement.  Having caught her loser boyfriend cheating, she’s now back living with her hypercritical mom and working out of the bedroom as a phone sex operator.  She connects with an unusually empathetic and reflective customer, and decides to travel across the country to try to meet him.

Schwimmer does as much as possible with the material, and there’s a very appealing performance by Timothy Omundson as her favorite mystery caller.  There’s also a moment at a taco truck,  the funniest and only original moment in Wild Honey, when the Gabby and her sister (Stephnie Weir) two sisters slide into a gibberish language from their childhood.  But there’s not much else we haven’t seen before in Wild Honey, a clunky,  predictable and disappointing film.

Wild Honey premiered at the Austin Film Festival and plays Cinequest 2018.

Cinequest: THREESOMETHING

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Isabelle Chester and Sam Sonenshine in THREESOMETHING

In the cheeky and original comedy Threesomething, Charlie (Sam Sonenshine) and his buddy Isaac (James Morosini) invite Charlies’ friend Zoe (Isabelle Chester) to engage in a three-way sexual encounter.  That pitch alone is one of the funniest three-minute, fifteen-second, openings to a film I’ve seen in years.  But then Threesomething finds the ridiculous moments in both the sex itself and in the all-consuming passion of new infatuation.  After a crisp 72 minutes, Threesomething‘s ending is very fresh and non-formulaic, posing just enough ambiguity about the characters’ futures.

Co-writers Morosini and Sonenshine have identified the comic possibilities within the notion that a threesome is more or less symmetrical. Let me explain it this way.  What if your idea of a threesome is three participants, but it evolves into two participants and a spectator?

Lust and love are such ripe sources of comedy because we humans are most ridiculous when we are the most absorbed and single-minded – and that is definitively the case while having sex.  And everyone’s sexual fantasies and fetishes – even if shared with one’s sexual partner – are laughable or creepy to someone else.  Threesomething reaps the laughs from these situations without being sit-commy.

This is the Are you good? generation.  Threesomething’s commentary on the compulsive over-checking in and over-supportiveness is all very sharply witty.  And over-sharing is the core of Charlie’s relationship with his mother (Dru Mouser, who steals all of her scenes).

Sonenshine is just about perfect in his reactions during the threesome.  He is fantastically gifted at playing both awkward discomfort and contained frustration.

Chester’s performance has several highlights, beginning with Zoe’s takes on the initial proposition and a particularly ill-timed outburst of weeping (inspired).  As the story concludes, watch Chester’s face as Zoe considers and reconsiders how comfortable she really is in her choice of partner(s).

Threesomething is Morosini’s directorial debut and the first feature screenplay for both Morodini and Sonenshine.  Comedy is hard to write, especially comedy as smart and original as this.  Cinequest will host Threesomething’s world premiere.

Cinequest: I HATE YOU

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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.

Cinequest: THE GO-GETTERS

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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.

THE DISASTER ARTIST: deluded incompetence makes for successful comedy

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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!”