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.
Justin Kirk and Jennifer Prediger in HOLLYWOOD FRINGE. Photo courtesy of Sleeper Cell Films.
Hollywood Fringe is about a married couple of hopeful creatives (Justin Kirk and Jennifer Prediger). They have been pitching their projects to Hollywood execs in futility; (she’s turned forty and her mom still helps with their rent). Popular interest in their experimental theater performances has been (ahem) limited. They give themselves one last chance to make it – but when a studio buys their idea for a series, things don’t go as planned…
We’re used to seeing Hollywood execs lampooned as tasteless capitalist barbarians who always reach for the lowest common denominator, and Hollywood Fringe does skewer the suits. But nobody gets a pass from writer and co-director Wyatt McDill and co-director Megan Huber. The funniest bits send up the artistes for projects that are overly obscure, overly precious or both. And even an impoverished artist on the lowest rung of showbiz can get a comeuppance for White privilege.
The added dimension in Hollywood Fringe is the dynamic of a married couple working in the same competitive industry and often in the same creative projects.
Led by Prediger and Kirk (Mitchell’s boss Charlie Bingham in Modern Family), the entire cast is excellent. Given that the actors live in the world that they get to send up, they must have had a blast shooting Hollywood Fringe.
Filmmakers Megan Huber and Wyatt McDill returned to Cinequest with a complete change of pace from last year’s inventively constructed thriller 3 Day Weekend. No strangers to the Hollywood fringe milieu, Huber and McGill shot some of the scenes in their own Los Feliz apartment.
Hollywood Fringe made my Best of Cinequest 2021 as the best comedy I’ve seen in the fest. You can stream it during the festival for only $3.99 at Cinequest’s online Cinejoy.
The inoffensive but unsatisfying On the Rocks, which can technically be described as a romantic comedy, wastes of the talents of Sofia Coppola, Bill Murry and Rashida Jones.
Laura (Rashida Jones) suspects that her husband Dean (Marlon Wayans), the striving CEO of a startup, is cheating on her. Her father Felix (Bill Murray), a worldly art dealer and serial womanizer, encourages her to stalk Dean, and propels them into increasingly crazy dad-daughter escapades.
The problem is that the suspicious wife plot is so tired that not even the considerable talents of Murray and Jones can make it sparkle. From Shakespeare through Howard Hawks to I Love Lucy, we’ve seen comedies based on mistaken perceptions, so we should expect SOME new element or nuance. This is, after all, from the writer-director of The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation. The dad-daughter issues in On the Rocks just aren’t enough.
I did enjoy the character of Felix, for whom wordly is a gross understatement. Completely at home with the billionaire class, he also knows every cop, concierge and maître d’, and glides smoothly among all of them with charm and craftiness. He also can’t resist hitting on anybody without a visible Adam’s apple.
Murray is winning as Felix, but he can’t elevate the predictable screenplay. As we watched On the Rocks, I said to The Wife, “I’ve always said that I could watch Blil Murray reading the phone book, but this IS Bill Murray reading the phone book.”
In the indie comedy Lucky Grandma, an elderly woman resists leaving her apartment in New York City’s Chinatown to join her son’s family in the burbs, Her plan is to invest her savings on a wild night in a New Jersey casino, but she falls into an ill-gotten treasure, running afoul of a murderous Chinatown gang that wants their loot back.
Tsai Chin (the mother in The Joy Luck Club) plays Grandma as a crusty curmudgeon who believes that the best defense is always a good offense.
Hsiao-Yuan Ha, a massive Taiwanese-born (just under 6’7″) actor, is winning as Grandma’s amiable mercenary bodyguard.
Lucky Grandma is the first feature for Asian-American female filmmakers, director Sasie Sealy and her co-writer Angela Cheng.
There’s not that much to Lucky Grandma except for Tsai Chin’s tour de grouch performance and the Chinatown setting. Lucky Grandma is moderately entertaining and is streaming on Amazon.
Drawn from the experience of writer/director Karen Maine’s own youth, the sweet coming of age comedy Yes, God, Yes, aims pointed jabs at religious hypocrisy. Bobbing in a sea of peer pressure, Catholic high schooler Alice (Natalia Dyer) heads off with the popular kids to a four-day retreat.
The retreat center is buried in the woods, and the retreat itself has some cultish aspects, with overly smiley/huggy teen youth leaders squeezing out highly personal confessions Authority-with-a-capital-A is present in the form of the high school’s stern young priest. The entire program is designed to make kids feel guilty about their normal, healthy feelings and to scare them from doing what everyone does naturally.
Amusing throughout, this is not a broad comedy, and there aren’t many guffaws. Instead, it’s a piercing satire based on arch observation of human behavior. The moment where Alice is able to leverage an adult’s hypocrisy against him is very satisfying,
The ironic title, of course, is something someone cries while literally coming a age.
Susan Blackwell is a low-profile character actor who just shows up and steals movies, as she did in last year’s Auggie. In Yes, God, Yes, she’s the character Gina, who owns a lesbian bar and rides a motorcycle, and it’s another great performance.
The Wife was raised Catholic, and she enjoyed this film. Yes, God, Yes is available to stream on Virtual Cinema and will be available from the usual VOD platforms after July 2
A community of women in a traditional culture revolt in the delightfully smart and funny Israeli comedy The Women’s Balcony. The balcony in a small Jerusalem synagogue collapses, and the building is condemned. The old rabbi’s wife is seriously injured, and he suffers a trauma-induced psychotic breakdown. Just when it looks like the leaderless congregation will die, a young and charismatic rabbi (Avraham Aviv Alush) appears, enlivens the congregation and repairs the building. But he rebuilds the synagogue WITHOUT the women’s section. Profoundly disrespected, the synagogue’s women strike in protest.
The women live in a culture where males have all the power and religious authority trumps all. The women all have their individually distinct gifts, personalities and rivalries. But they all appreciate the injustice of the situation, and they are really pissed off. They are very creative in finding way to leverage the power that they do have, and the result is very, very funny.
This could have been a very broad comedy (and a Lysistrata knock-off). Instead, it’s richly textured, with an examination of ethical behavior and loving relationships. It’s also dotted with comments on the relations between Israeli Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox and on the importance of food in this culture. It’s the first – and very promising – feature for both director Emil Ben-Shimon and writer Shlomit Nehana.
THE WOMEN’S BALCONY
There are plenty LOL moments, including a scene where one of the congregants masquerades as the demented old rabbi to secure the needed psychotropic meds.
We soon understand that the young rabbi has a very unattractive side – grossly sexist and power-hungry. But he has seduced the men and then cows them by manipulating his religious authority. He’s tearing apart a closely bound community braided together by decades of deep friendship and inter-reliance. The movie turns on whether the men can recognize when his supposed righteousness veers into what is really unethical and, in one pivotal scene with the old rabbi, indecent.
Two of the male characters, deeply in love with their women, step up and do the right thing. This overt comedy has a very a romantic core.
Most of all, The Women’s Balcony is about mature relationships. Most of these couples have been married for decades, especially the couple at the core of the story, Ettie (Evein Hagoel) and Zion (Igal Naor). Ben-Shimon and Nehana prove themselves to be keen and insightful observers of long-lasting relationships.
A righteous man must keep his woman happy. This may not be written in the Holy Scriptures, but it’s damn useful advice. (It also helps, we learn, if he can make a mean fruit salad.) The longer you’ve been married, the funnier you’ll find The Women’s Balcony. You can stream it on Amazon, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
In the Netflix comedy The Lovebirds, Issa Rae and Kumail Nanjiani star as a couple, once passionately in love, who have reached the breaking point. At the very moment that they call it quits, they are plunged into a dire situation – to clear themselves of a murder, they must evade the cops and find The Real Killer.
This is a rom com where the characters have ALREADY met cute. As they endure ever more outrageous indignities, they remember why they fell in love in the first place, despite the other’s foibles. The plot is playful, but the relationship is very truthful.
Rae (Insecure) and Nanjiani (Silicon Valley, The Big Sick), both so appealing, are pitch perfect.
The Lovebirds is successful as a light diversion with plenty of LOL moments, and it’s streaming on Netflix. Here’s the trailer.
This year’s SXSW Film Festival, set to play in March, was cancelled due to COVID-19, but SXSW and Amazon are teaming to showcase over thirty of the films through this Wednesday, May 6. I’ve seen six of them (five shorts and a feature) that I can recommend.
Fate to Face Time is a 7-minute comedy about how any date can lead to misadventure, even a remote one. She’s gone out with him twice and is looking to accelerate things with a surprise FaceTime call, but he may not be that much into her…
We’ve all over-invested in a certain date (and, since teenage years, we’ve all known better, but have done it anyway). Face to Face Time begins as a cringe comedy, but the finale is a howler.
Face to Face Time is written and directed by (and stars) Izzy Shill. As Shill herself notes in the intro, this short is especially timely while we are all sheltering at home and many are dating remotely.
Here are some some more recommendations from Prime’s SXSW 2020 Film Festival Collection:
Quilt Fever – an affectionate documentary abou the Olympics of quilting, held annually in Paducah, Kentucky (who knew? And who knew that there was a Quilting Channel?) (16 minutes.)
No Crying at the Dinner Table – Filmmaker Carol Nguyen recorded separate interviews with her mom, dad and adult sister about losses they have suffered but never talked about, and then shared all three interviews with all three family members. It’s authentic, and it’s a weeper. (16 minutes)
The Voice Inside Your Head – a bizarre comedy is which the inner voice that is stripping you of confidence and self worth is personified in a guy who follows you around all day. (12 minutes).
Daddio – Casey Wilson of SNL wrote, directed and stars in this comic short about how she and her zany dad (Michael McKean) navigated their grief after the death of her mom. (18 minutes.)
Selfie – This French feature film is a collection of astute parodies that comment on digital online culture, from obsession with view/likes on social media to Internet dating to security breaches. Some of the vignettes are smarter and funnier than others. I especially enjoyed the guy who is bragging about how his life is made better by targeted ads (the algorithms really get him!) until he receives a targeted ad for Viagra. (1 hour 48 minutes.)
Search on Amazon for the title of the film – or “SXSW” for the entire menu of 2020 SXSW films on Amazon Prime thru May 6. If you have Amazon Prime, they’re free.
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 Cinema Club Silicon Valley, and Babak Jalali took Q&A after the screening by phone from Belgium. Radio Dreams is available to stream from Amazon, iTunes and kanopy.
