An aphorism claims that, while dying is easy, comedy is hard. Writing about the genre is no less difficult. I’m not just talking about the peril of ruining jokes by explaining them. I’m also bemoaning the challenge of translating physical reactions—giggles, winces, hoots and howls—into descriptive assessments. The purest analysis of comedy is also the most tautological: The reason it was funny is that it made me laugh.
With the possible exception of horror (hello Obsession!), comedy is the format that most benefits from theatrical exhibition. Even as their quantity has dwindled (often migrating to Netflix), jokefests benefit from collective appreciation—the cascades of laughter that ripple through the audience. We may be sitting alone, but we watch them together. Read More
Miranda Priestly may be the world’s worst boss, but there’s a reason for her viciousness. She’s a genius, a visionary, and she mistreats her employees not out of sadism or malice but because they are impeding her divine greatness. She is unconquerable—or so we thought. The Devil Wears Prada 2, the intriguing and maddening sequel to the 2006 adaptation of Lauren Weisberger’s novel, finds Miranda locked in battle—not just for the future of her company, Runway, but for the soul of an entire industry—and she seems to be losing the war. Her chief adversary isn’t a rival editor or a meddlesome underling but a more pitiless, insidious force: private equity.
Eddies of irony swirl around Prada 2, not least that a mercenary brand extension to a 20-year-old property purports to extol the virtues of old-fashioned creativity. But the screenplay, by Aline Brosh McKenna, deserves partial credit for grappling with genuine ideas, rather than simply drafting off of its predecessor’s legacy. Consider the movie’s opening scene, which finds Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway), Miranda’s former assistant who fled Runway for more fulfilling pastures, accepting an award for her hard-hitting reporting at the fictional New York Vanguard. At first, such feting of journalism feels horribly self-congratulatory and dated—what is this, Sweet Smell of Success?—but just as Andy’s name is called, she and the rest of her noble colleagues receive a text informing them of their mass firing. She might as well sell that trophy for rent money, if only anyone would buy it. Read More
It’s a classic meet-cute. He spies her in a coffee shop reading a book. He has to talk to her, so he quickly googles the novel and approaches her with some canned, cheesy material about how much it spoke to him. He keeps stumbling over his words, panicking when she refuses to engage, only for her to startle and remove an unseen AirPod from her left ear. “I’m deaf in this one,” she explains, and he starts to melt, realizing she didn’t hear a damn thing he said, but then she throws him an unexpected lifeline: “Do you want to start again?”
This is the delightful opening scene of The Drama, a bewitching and provocative movie that initially unfolds as a storybook romantic comedy. Emma (Zendaya) and Charlie (Robert Pattinson) are the perfect couple: smart, attractive, blessed with verbal and physical chemistry. Their courtship checks all of the boxes, in particular a magical first kiss that would be the envy of Jane Austen. It’s now the week of their wedding, and we learn the details of their fairy-tale engagement as Charlie runs a draft of his speech past his best man, Mike (Mamoudou Athie), who’s so moved he starts crying. Everything is so light and sweet and charming, you wonder if Kristoffer Borgli, the film’s writer and director, somehow got the title wrong. He didn’t. Read More
The novelist Andy Weir specializes in “hard” science-fiction, embroidering his stories with mathematical precision and analytic rigor. He’s a best-selling author whom you might also call a serious writer. The filmmakers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, by contrast, have built their success on silliness, making droll animated yarns (Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, The LEGO Movie) and the spoofy Jump Street pictures. They seem unlikely candidates to translate Weir’s brainy acumen to the screen. But while Project Hail Mary, which Lord and Miller have adapted from Weir’s 2021 book (via a screenplay by Drew Goddard), may be a blend of durable genres—part space opera, part survival saga, part buddy comedy—it isn’t a jumble of tones. Instead, the directing duo has applied their quippy instincts with warmth and sincerity, resulting in a crowd-pleasing movie that’s both playful and earnest. Call it hardy har har sci-fi.
This doesn’t mean Project Hail Mary is a model of discipline. It’s long, sappy, and choppy, with set pieces that are more intriguing than eye-popping. But it’s nonetheless coherent, and its humor works in tandem with both its muscular ambition and its abiding sweetness. Read More
Rachel McAdams is a babe. It’s been over two decades since she broke out with the one-two summer punch of Mean Girls (where she played a scholastic queen bee) and The Notebook (where she portrayed the object of Ryan Gosling’s eternal devotion), and her wholesome sex appeal hasn’t waned a bit. Even when she tamps down her natural vivacity—as a dogged spy in A Most Wanted Man, as a subjugated housewife in Disobedience—her spark of glamour remains irrepressible. So it’s both a stretch and a joke that Send Help finds McAdams playing Linda Liddle, a socially maladroit office drone with stringy hair, a prominent pimple on her chin, and an even larger mole on her cheek. As her onomatopoetic surname suggests, Linda is meek, weak, and mousy. If Regina George didn’t terrorize her in high school, it’s only because Linda was too small to be noticed.
Less total loser than thankless nobody, Linda works in the accounting strategy and planning department of a generic firm, where her rigorous calculations get co-opted by her dismissive male superiors. (The screenplay, by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, intentionally keeps her job’s details vague.) She may know numbers, but her personality is radioactive; when she tries to invite herself to a planned karaoke outing, her coworkers stare at her like she’s speaking an alien language. Linda’s fumbling is especially unfortunate given that she’s desperate to impress her new boss, a preening hotshot named Bradley (Dylan O’Brien) with custom loafers, a private putting machine, and a lifelong membership in the boys’ club. He seems approachable enough (“Open door policy!”), but he’s an oily prick who wants nothing to do with her; when she traps him by her cubicle, his face goes through several stages of agony as he gradually resolves to wipe a smudge of tuna fish off her lip. There’s no possible scenario where Bradley would truly value Linda. Is there? Read More
