Comedy

Parasite: Out of the Basement, Climbing the Social Ladder

Jeremy BeckReviews
The family of Bong Joon-ho's "Parasite".

The underground is both a geographic location and a lowly caste in Parasite, the electrifying new movie from Bong Joon-ho. In this tonally shifting and artistically unwavering film—it’s part comedy, part thriller, all silky craft—the social order is upended with mayhem and precision, as the dwellers of the subterrane invade the castles of the aristocracy. Yet Parasite’s ravishing, blood-soaked imagery is complemented by its patience, its humor, and its observational savvy. Consider that it largely transpires in two different homes, whose contrasting layouts illuminate a crucial truth: that some basements are more equal than others.

The film’s title suggests an infestation, though Bong, who also wrote the screenplay with Han Jin-won, plays it coy, leaving open to interpretation just who’s the scourge and who’s the plagued. What’s obvious from the jump, however, is that Parasite is a movie about class. This is nothing new for Bong; in Snowpiercer, he imagined a giant train that separated its inhabitants according to their inherent station, a rigid hierarchy enforced by Tilda Swinton, who brutally reminded the steerage occupants of their lesser status with a chillingly didactic fable featuring the edict, “Be the shoe.” The stratification in Parasite may not be as linear, but it’s still firmly in place, visible to the eye and—as becomes at first amusingly and then grotesquely clear—detectable to the nose. Read More

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The Zombieland and Maleficent Sequels Both Fail, But for Different Reasons

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
The cast of "Zombieland: Double Tap", all clearly terrified of Angelina Jolie.

Asked to describe Claude Rains’ self-regarding police captain in Casablanca, Humphrey Bogart replies, “He’s just like any other man, only more so.” Aside from accurately summing up one half of cinema’s most beautiful friendship, that quip encapsulates what might be called The Law of the Hollywood Sequel. The motion picture industry is big business, so it’s only logical that when a movie makes money, you make another one. And because follow-ups are typically driven more by fan enthusiasm than by creative compulsion, you make the sequel just like the original, only more so: more action, more jokes, more special effects, more stars, more blood.

Last weekend saw the release of two decidedly different sequels which, if not exactly long-awaited, are certainly far-removed from their respective progenitors. Maleficent: Mistress of Evil arrives five years after Robert Stromberg’s surprise smash, which found Angelina Jolie donning pointy black horns and vivid green contact lenses for a reimagining of Disney’s Sleeping Beauty. Five years is an eon by Hollywood standards, but it’s half the interval between Zombieland: Double Tap and its predecessor, whose comic take on the apocalypse won moviegoers’ hearts and wallets a full decade ago. These unusually long gaps might suggest that both sequels are motivated by art rather than commerce—that their creators returned to their universes after significant time away because they’d actually developed exciting new stories rather than because greedy studios recognized an opportunity to cash years-old checks. Read More

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Good Boys: Sex and Drugs and Gender Roles

Jeremy BeckReviews
Brady Noon, Jacob Tremblay, and Keith L. Williams in "Good Boys"

There are multiple levels of storytelling at work in Good Boys, and multiple levels of posturing as well. Directed by Gene Stupnitsky from a script he wrote with Lee Eisenberg, the movie follows three hapless sixth-graders in their desperate attempts to prove their sexual and narcotic bona fides. Their false bravado—one routine boast revolves around taking multiple sips of beer—is reflective of Good Boys itself, which bills itself as a raunchy sex comedy but whose primary focus is aging and friendship. Sure, there are filthy jokes and excruciating embarrassments, but underlying all of the gross-out humor and bawdy mishaps is a foundation of concentrated, sugary sweetness. It’s a gentle lamb dressed up in a horny wolf’s clothing.

“Superbad for tweens” is a simplified but nonetheless accurate logline here, and not just because Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg serve as producers. Much like how that 2007 mainstay used two teens’ frantic efforts as the scaffolding for its poignant exploration of a longtime but quietly fraying relationship, Good Boys wields its “one crazy misadventure” premise to mine tension and pathos. The key difference is that, thanks to their pubescent status, the heroes of Good Boys aren’t just sexually inexperienced; they’re sexually clueless. Read More

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The Dead Don’t Die: A Zombie Comedy, But the Jokes Are DOA

Jeremy BeckReviews
Adam Driver and Bill Murray in Jim Jarmusch's "The Dead Don't Die".

The Dead Don’t Die, the new film from veteran auteur Jim Jarmusch, has been marketed in some circles as a zombie comedy. This description, which could also apply to modern cult hits like Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland, might lead you to believe that the movie is both funny and entertaining. It is neither. In fact, it isn’t really much of anything, beyond maybe a perverse practical joke or perhaps a diabolical social experiment. It’s almost like Jarmusch is trolling his viewers, tantalizing us with the possibility of a top-flight cast, then subjecting us to a parade of bafflingly inert scenes. This isn’t a movie. This is Andy Kaufman reading The Great Gatsby.

If Jarmusch is laughing, he’s the only one. Forced to put a label on the putative comedy of The Dead Don’t Die, I suppose I’d call it meta deadpan, which is already giving it far more credit than it deserves. Actors tend to recite the same lines of dialogue over and over, typically in flat, bored tones. There are lots of references and in-jokes, which try and fail to perform the function of actual jokes. Sometimes people swear; sometimes they yell. Mostly, they exchange mundane observations with a stiffness that masquerades as arch cleverness. Surely the extreme detachment is some sort of feint, right? Guess again. Deadpan humor has rarely felt so lifeless. Read More

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Booksmart: Two Smarties, Determined to Party

Jeremy BeckReviews
Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever in "Booksmart".

Lots of high school movies feature a comic scene set in a bathroom—Lindsay Lohan eating alone in Mean Girls, Eddie Kaye Thomas defecating in American Pie, That Scene in Fast Times at Ridgemont High—but Booksmart, as it does time and again, flips the script. Quietly revising grammatically incorrect graffiti inscribed on a stall, valedictorian Molly (the magnetic Beanie Feldstein) overhears three of her classmates mocking her. Stung but not surprised, Molly emerges dramatically from the stall and unleashes a measured but vindictive riposte, calmly informing her intellectual inferiors that she will one day have the last laugh. Yet as she spins on a heel to leave in triumph, a quiet reply stops her in her tracks; one of her ostensible bullies casually announces that she’s going to Yale. Another will be attending Stanford; the third has already secured a lucrative job at Google. In a split second, Molly’s supposed supremacy—academic, personal, moral—has been flushed down the drain.

Booksmart, the finely cut and completely hilarious directorial debut of Olivia Wilde, is hardly revolutionary. It is instead a proud member of the One Crazy Night genre, a freewheeling, episodic narrative of absurdity, embarrassment, and misadventure. But even as it accumulates belly laughs and imparts familiar lessons, Booksmart simultaneously punctures your assumptions about how movies like this should look and behave. Like Molly, it is smart, energetic, and determined. Yet it is also exactly the kind of film that Molly herself might underestimate, gradually revealing hidden depths that you never suspected were there. Read More

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