Comedy

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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Long Shot: Love and Laughs on the Campaign Trail

Jeremy BeckReviews
Seth Rogen and Charlize Theron in "Long Shot".

A romantic fantasy in more ways than one, Long Shot is a beauty-and-the-beast love story that simultaneously aspires to work as a thorny quasi-satire of contemporary politics. It aims not only to tell a crowd-pleasing tale of sweetness and levity, but also to impart a valuable message to the American electorate. This is a laudable idea, one with a rich cinematic history; Aaron Sorkin fans will fondly remember The American President, while film enthusiasts of a different generation may recall Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. But to borrow language from the political realm, Long Shot is a smoke-and-mirrors candidate, spouting handsome rhetoric but skimping on actual, meaningful substance. When the pairing of Seth Rogen and Charlize Theron is one of the more credible ideas on screen, you have perpetrated a fraud on the moviegoing public.

Have I gone too far? Maybe. If you approach Long Shot while wearing a certain set of blinders—if you ignore its poisonous ideas and its philosophical sloppiness—you may perceive it as a harmless little rom-com, a passably diverting use of two hours. The acting is quite good, not only from the leads but also the supporting cast, in particular June Diane Raphael as a dubious staffer and O’Shea Jackson Jr. as a loyal confidant. The script, by Dan Sterling (The Interview) and Liz Hannah (The Post), isn’t nearly as hilarious as it thinks it is, but it features its share of clever lines, while the direction, by Jonathan Levine (50/50), includes the occasional visual flourish amid the forgettable point-and-shoot mundanity. Theron gets to do a spit take and simulate rolling on molly, while Rogen, best known for his verbal dexterity, receives an opportunity to showcase his gifts as a physical comedian. It is an avowed cinematic truth that watching a man fall down a flight of stairs is always funny, as is seeing him spurt bodily fluids in unintended places. Read More

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A Simple Favor: Sipping Martinis with a Twist. Lots of Twists.

Jeremy BeckReviews
Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively in "A Simple Favor"

Anna Kendrick looks nice. I don’t mean that she’s attractive (though of course she is); I mean that, with her soft-blue eyes and small build and delicate features, she presents as a decent, wholesome person. That innate tenderness has served her well in films like 50/50, End of Watch, and The Accountant, where she’s quietly elevated the material around her with unassuming grace. A Simple Favor, the gleefully absurd, indecently entertaining new comedy-mystery from Paul Feig, efficiently exploits Kendrick’s inherent geniality while also cannily subverting it. Her character, a single mom and moderately popular suburban vlogger named Stephanie, is sugary-sweet and aggressively eager—she’s always volunteering for multiple PTA assignments (her surname is literally Smothers)—but her helping hand has an iron grip. Her dainty exterior camouflages a mettle of steel, arousing your suspicion that she has something to hide.

But really, who doesn’t? One of the many pleasures of A Simple Favor, which is as much an amateur detective yarn as a pointed comedy of manners, lies in teasing us with misdirection and insinuation, encouraging us to anticipate its inevitable twists and turns. It’s being marketed as coming from Feig’s “darker side”, which is misleading on a few counts. To begin with, the former Freaks and Geeks showrunner is no stranger to troubling themes; even his more straightforward comedies, like Bridesmaids and Spy, carry undercurrents of sadness and pain. But more centrally, labeling this movie dark is false advertising. A Simple Favor may traffic in deception, seduction, and murder, but none of that changes the fact that, at its core, it’s a total fucking hoot. Read More

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