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.
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.
Frances McDormand in THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MISSOURI
In Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, a powerful combination of raw emotions and dark hilarity, Frances McDormand plays Mildred, a small town woman consumed by the unsolved murder of her daughter. Mildred doesn’t have the power to solve the murder herself, but she has the power to make everyone else uncomfortable until she finds justice and closure. She buys billboards that personalize the stalled murder investigation, laying the blame on the popular town sheriff (Woody Harrelson). She intends to rile people up, and, boy, does she succeed.
There are consequences, both intended and unintended. In addition to the murder mystery, there are two new whodunits related to the billboards and some violent outbursts by two of the characters. There’s a heartbreaking letter, and two more utterly unexpected letters.
The murder of one’s child is shattering enough, but Mildred also piles guilt on herself. The murder has enraged the entire family, including Mildred’s son (Lucas Hedges of Manchester By the Sea) and her ex-husband (John Hawkes). All three express their rage in different ways. This is a showcase role for McDormand.
Woody Harrelson and Sam Rockwell in THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MISSOURI
This might be Woody Harrelson’s best performance. His sheriff is an island of common sense, decency and levelheadedness in a turbulent sea of upset and idiocy. The character of the sheriff is a remarkably fine father and husband in ways that are fun and interesting to watch. The sheriff is facing his own mortality, and his feelings are hurt unjustly, but we only see glimpses of the pain in Harrelson’s eyes. This is a performance that would have been in the wheelhouse for Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda and Gregory Peck, and Harrelson nails it.
Sam Rockwell plays Dixon, one of the sheriff’s deputies. Dixon is an unfortunate muddle of bad instincts, no impulse control, stupidity, racism and rage. Then he gets an unexpected opportunity for redemption…
Sandy Martin also sparkles as Dixon’s Momma. It’s a very small part, but Martin practically steals the movie with her white trash Svengali. Martin’s 128 screen credits include roles in Transparent,Big Love and as Grandma in Napoleon Dynamite (she’s the one who says Knock it off, Napoleon! Just make yourself a dang quesa-dilluh).
Samara Weaving is really perfect as the inappropriately-young-girlfriend-on-the-rebound of Mildred’s ex. Weaving is drop dead beautiful with a remarkable sense of comic timing and a mastery of deadpan. Fully invested in her character’s goodhearteredness and airheadedness, she reminds me of Margot Robbie and Elizabeth Banks as a comic actor.
Peter Dinklage plays a character that provides comic relief and one important plot point, and he brings an unexpected and profound feeling to the part.
Here’s one thing that is uncommonly great about Three Billboards: the story would have worked with characters of far less dimension, but the roles written by Martin McDonagh and performed by the cast elevates Three Billboards. Mildred could have been only a shrew, the sheriff could have been only a cardboard foil and Dixon could have been only a buffoon. Instead McDormand, Rockwell and Rochwell add layers of complexity to their characters, and Hawkes, Martin, Weaver and Dinklage each contribute more to the mix.
Three Billboards is brilliantly written by director Martin McDonagh. McDonagh’s 2008 In Bruges was either the funniest hit man movie ever or the darkest and most violent buddy comedy ever. Three Billboards shares the same dark/funny flavor. Three Billboards also has a really fine soundtrack with a couple of spaghetti western-inspired cues.
The emotion in Three Billboards is genuine and deeply felt. There are some especially grim moments, peppered with lots of laughs. As I ponder this film, I keep coming back to the characters, the performances and the surprises in the story. Three Billboards in Ebbing, Missouri was an audience favorite on the festival circuit and is a Must See in theaters now.
The droll dark comedy Radio Dreams explores the ambivalence of the immigrant experience through the portrait of a flamboyant misfit, a man who rides the roller coaster of megalomania and despair. That misfit is Hamid Royani (Mohsen Namjoo), the director of programming at an Iranian radio station in the San Francisco Bay Area. Radio Dreams opens tomorrow for a one-week-only run at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco.
Hamid, an author in Iran, is a man of great certainty, with an unwavering sense of intellectual superiority He assumes that everyone should – and will – buy in to his idiosyncratic taste. This results in extremely random radio programming, and Hamid tries to sabotage everything that he finds vulgar (which is everything that might bring more listeners and revenue to the station.)
With his wild mane and indulgent programming, we first think that Hamid is simply batty. But immigrants to the US generally forge new identities, and we come to understand that Hamid has not, perhaps will not, forge that new identity. His despair is real but it’s hard to empathize with – he might be a legitimate literary figure in Iran, but he’s probably a pompous ass over there, too.
The highlight of Radio Dreams is Hamid’s reaction when he is surprised that Miss Iran USA, whom he has dismissed as a bimbo, might have literary chops that rivaling his.
Hamid has concocted a plan to have Afghanistan’s first rock band visit with the members of Metallica on air, and that’s the movie’s MacGuffin. As we wait to see if Metallica will really show up, the foibles of the radio station crew dot Radio Dreams with moments of absurdity. There are the cheesy commercials about unwanted body hair, Hamid’s obsession with hand sanitizer, a radio jungle played live on keyboards EVERY time, a new employee orientation that focuses on international time zones, along with a station intern compelled to take wrestling lessons.
Writer-director Babak Jalali is an adept storyteller. As the movie opens, we are wondering, why do these guys have musical instruments? Why are they talking about Metallica? What’s with the ON AIR sign? Much of the movie unfolds before Hamid Royani emerges as the centerpiece character.
Hamid is played by the well-known Iranian singer-songwriter Mohsen Namjoo, “Iran’s Bob Dylan”. This is only Namjoo’s second feature film as an actor. He’s a compelling figure, and this is a very fine performance.
Except for Namjoo, the cast is made up of Bay Area actors. Masters of the implacable and the stone face, all of the actors do deadpan really, really well.
As befits the mix of reality and absurdism, here’s a podcast by the characters in Radio Dreams. I saw Radio Dreams at the Camera Cinema Club, and Babak Jalali took Q&A after the screening by phone from Belgium.
Radio Dreams is the second feature for Jalali, an Iranian-born filmmaker living and working in Europe. He shot Radio Dreams with a small crew over only 24 days in San Francisco. About 60% of the dialogue was scripted and 40% improvised. The band in the movie, Kabul Dreams, really is Afghanistan’s first rock band, they did get to meet Metallica in real life and the PARS-FM were filmed at a real Iranian radio station in the Bay Area.
Babak Jalali is a promising filmmaker and Radio Dreams is a movie that we haven’t seen before.
The droll dark comedy Radio Dreams explores the ambivalence of the immigrant experience through the portrait of a flamboyant misfit, a man who rides the roller coaster of megalomania and despair. That misfit is Hamid Royani (Mohsen Namjoo), the director of programming at an Iranian radio station in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Hamid, an author in Iran, is a man of great certainty, with an unwavering sense of intellectual superiority He assumes that everyone should – and will – buy in to his idiosyncratic taste. This results in extremely random radio programming, and Hamid tries to sabotage everything that he finds vulgar (which is everything that might bring more listeners and revenue to the station.)
With his wild mane and indulgent programming, we first think that Hamid is simply batty. But immigrants to the US generally forge new identities, and we come to understand that Hamid has not, perhaps will not, forge that new identity. His despair is real but it’s hard to empathize with – he might be a legitimate literary figure in Iran, but he’s probably a pompous ass over there, too.
The highlight of Radio Dreams is Hamid’s reaction when he is surprised that Miss Iran USA, whom he has dismissed as a bimbo, might have literary chops that rivaling his.
Hamid has concocted a plan to have Afghanistan’s first rock band visit with the members of Metallica on air, and that’s the movie’s MacGuffin. As we wait to see if Metallica will really show up, the foibles of the radio station crew dot Radio Dreams with moments of absurdity. There are the cheesy commercials about unwanted body hair, Hamid’s obsession with hand sanitizer, a radio jungle played live on keyboards EVERY time, a new employee orientation that focuses on international time zones, along with a station intern compelled to take wrestling lessons.
Writer-director Babak Jalali is an adept storyteller. As the movie opens, we are wondering, why do these guys have musical instruments? Why are they talking about Metallica? What’s with the ON AIR sign? Much of the movie unfolds before Hamid Royani emerges as the centerpiece character.
Hamid is played by the well-known Iranian singer-songwriter Mohsen Namjoo, “Iran’s Bob Dylan”. This is only Namjoo’s second feature film as an actor. He’s a compelling figure, and this is a very fine performance.
Except for Namjoo, the cast is made up of Bay Area actors. Masters of the implacable and the stone face, all of the actors do deadpan really, really well.
As befits the mix of reality and absurdism, here’s a podcast by the characters in Radio Dreams. I saw Radio Dreams at the Camera Cinema Club, and Babak Jalali took Q&A after the screening by phone from Belgium.
Radio Dreams is the second feature for Jalali, an Iranian-born filmmaker living and working in Europe. He shot Radio Dreams with a small crew over only 24 days in San Francisco. About 60% of the dialogue was scripted and 40% improvised. The band in the movie, Kabul Dreams, really is Afghanistan’s first rock band, they did get to meet Metallica in real life and the PARS-FM were filmed at a real Iranian radio station in the Bay Area.
Babak Jalali is a promising filmmaker and Radio Dreams is a movie that we haven’t seen before.
The San Francisco International Film Festival opens tomorrow night, so this week’s video pick is my favorite film from the 2016 SFIFF. One of the best films of the year, Chevalier is a sly and pointed exploration of male competitiveness, with the moments of drollness and absurdity that we expect in the best of contemporary Greek cinema. Chevalier is also now the Most Overlooked Movie of 2016, and I’m hoping that its popularity explodes now that it’s available on video.
In Chevalier, six guys are taking a holiday week on a yacht in the Aegean Sea. Each has his own stateroom, and the crew includes a chef. They spend their days scuba diving, jet skiing and the like. After a post-dinner game of charades, one suggests that they play Chevalier, a game about “Who is best overall?”. Of course, men tend to be competitive, and their egos are now at stake. The six guys began appraising each other, and their criteria get more and more absurd. “How many fillings do you have?”
In one especially inspired set piece, the guys race each other to construct IKEA bookcases, which results in five phallic towers on the boat’s deck (and one drooping failure). Naturally, some of the guys are obsessed with their own erections, too.
Director Athina Rachel Tsangari is obviously a keen observer of male behavior. Both men and women will enjoy laughing at male behavior taken to extreme. I sure did. Chevalier is perhaps the funniest movie of 2016, and it’s on my list of Best Movies of 2016 – So Far.
I saw Chevalier at the 59th San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF), where I pegged it as the Must See of the fest. (In 2011, Tsangari brought her hilariously offbeat Attenberg to SFIFF.) Unfortunately, in the Bay Area, Chevalier only got a blink-and-you’ve-missed-it release in June. Chevalier is now available to rent on DVD from Netflix and to stream from Netflix Instant, Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Athina Rachel Tsangari, director of CHEVALIER . Photo courtesy of San Francisco Film Society
In the dark, dark Swiss comedy Sweet Girls, the two teenage besties are lazy and unmotivated – even by teenage standards. They will do ANYTHING to avoid an entry-level job that might plunge them into the adult workaday drudgery that they despise. Left to their own devices with a deadline looming, the two take unseemly advantage when an elderly woman dies in their apartment building. Absurdly self-involved, the two start harvesting all the apartment building’s elderly in an absurdly harsh scheme. Think Arsenic and Old Lace and Sweeney Todd.
Both girls are brats of the first order, but Elodie, the ringleader, also has an experience in her past which has scarred her feelings about the geriatric set. Neither is a sympathetic character. The humor here comes from the absurdist plot and from the social satire, which is probably more accessible to a Western European audience.
One of the best films of the year, Chevalier is a sly and pointed exploration of male competitiveness, with the moments of drollness and absurdity that we expect in the best of contemporary Greek cinema. Chevalier is also now the Most Overlooked Movie of 2016, and I’m hoping that its popularity explodes now that it’s available on video.
In Chevalier, six guys are taking a holiday week on a yacht in the Aegean Sea. Each has his own stateroom, and the crew includes a chef. They spend their days scuba diving, jet skiing and the like. After a post-dinner game of charades, one suggests that they play Chevalier, a game about “Who is best overall?”. Of course, men tend to be competitive, and their egos are now at stake. The six guys began appraising each other, and their criteria get more and more absurd. “How many fillings do you have?”
In one especially inspired set piece, the guys race each other to construct IKEA bookcases, which results in five phallic towers on the boat’s deck (and one drooping failure). Naturally, some of the guys are obsessed with their own erections, too.
Director Athina Rachel Tsangari is obviously a keen observer of male behavior. Both men and women will enjoy laughing at male behavior taken to extreme. I sure did. Chevalier is perhaps the funniest movie of 2016, and it’s on my list of Best Movies of 2016 – So Far.
I saw Chevalier at the 59th San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF), where I pegged it as the Must See of the fest. (In 2011, Tsangari brought her hilariously offbeat Attenberg to SFIFF.) Unfortunately, in the Bay Area, Chevalier only got a blink-and-you’ve-missed-it release in June. Chevalier is now available to rent on DVD from Netflix and to stream from Netflix Instant, Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Athina Rachel Tsangari, director of CHEVALIER . Photo courtesy of San Francisco Film Society
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.
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.
