Comedy

Swiss Army Man: A Story of Adventure, Friendship, and Farts

Jeremy BeckReviews
Paul Dano and Daniel Radcliffe in "Swiss Army Man"

“The big bucks are in dick and fart jokes,” Ben Affleck’s character memorably quipped in Chasing Amy. Something tells me that he wasn’t thinking of Swiss Army Man, an aggressively absurd, surprisingly saccharine comedy from the writer-director team of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (aka Daniels). This bizarre movie, with its gigantic premise and diminutive budget, does not possess a commercial bone in its proudly misshapen body. But for all its surface weirdness and gross-out humor, Swiss Army Man proves to be a fairly conventional story of isolation and redemption, with broad themes that would fit snugly inside a Disney film. It’s standard self-help shtick, only with more farts and boners.

The source of both is Manny (Daniel Radcliffe, continuing to do his utmost to distance himself from his signature screen persona), a waterlogged corpse whom we first see washing up on a remote beach. His arrival interrupts the attempted suicide of Hank (Paul Dano), a bearded loner who, believing himself to be marooned on this tiny spit of land, has given in to despair. Manny is hardly a good candidate to improve his circumstances, given that he is dead. But in death, he has acquired a peculiar superpower: He can pass gas on command, and his flatulence is so powerful that he can serve as a sort of catatonic motorboat. And so, Hank straddles Manny’s lifeless body, pulls down his pants, and rides him off toward the mainland “like a jet ski”. (If only Manny had appeared off the coast of Mexico instead of California, he would have made poor Blake Lively’s life a whole lot easier.) Read More

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The Lobster: Looking for Love as the Clock Ticks Down

Jeremy BeckReviews
Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz in "The Lobster"

Early in The Lobster, the deadpan, depraved, deeply romantic black comedy from Yorgos Lanthimos, a woman discusses the unsuitable hypothetical couplings of various animals. She notes, for example, that a wolf and a penguin could never live in harmony. “That would be absurd,” she scoffs. Fair enough. But when it comes to Lanthimos, absurdity is relative. The Greek director’s prior film, Alps, followed a four-person troupe of bizarre ambulance-chasers who waited for people to die, then impersonated the deceased for the bereaved’s benefit (in return for a fee). Before that he made Dogtooth, a nightmarish study of three home-schooled teenagers who had no names, learned a false language, and regarded house cats as ferocious beasts to be decapitated on sight. Dogtooth was consistently fascinating, Alps intermittently so, but both depicted their human grotesqueries so persuasively that they were easier to admire than adore. The Lobster is different, even as it’s more of the same. It retains the hypnotic surrealism of Lanthimos’ earlier work, but it also possesses something even more startling: a heart.

All of Lanthimos’ films operate on multiple levels, working as tidy, intimately scaled pieces of off-kilter esoterica while also asking big, loaded questions about social customs and human relationships. Here, he’s exploring the freighted topic of love. That’s hardly a novel hook for a movie, but The Lobster is less interested in defining love than in examining how we view it as a symbol of status. And so it inquires: Are married people truly happy? Are single people really alone? When we claim that we are in love, what do we mean? Is coupledom a shield against the sadness of isolation, or is it a prison that suppresses freedom and individuality? And if you get caught masturbating, shouldn’t you be forced to stick your hand in a burning-hot toaster? Read More

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The Nice Guys: Reluctant Heroes Shoot Off Their Mouths, Their Pistols

Jeremy BeckReviews
Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling in Shane Black's "The Nice Guys"

Shane Black loves misfits. His screenplay for Lethal Weapon spawned countless derivative buddy-cop movies, but its heart lay in the fragile eccentricity that made Mel Gibson’s Martin Riggs such a dashing and dangerous hero. His script for The Last Boy Scout paired two fallen losers—a disgraced ex-Secret Service agent (Bruce Willis) and a former football star (Damon Wayans)—then watched with glee as they stumbled into a ludicrous plot involving illegal sports gambling. And Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, his directorial debut, starred Robert Downey Jr. as a hapless unemployed actor whose motor-mouthed speech was exceeded in speed only by the bullets whizzing past him. All three movies indulge in hard-boiled genre thrills—double-crosses, overbaked conspiracies, larger-than-life villains—but they’re elevated by a writer’s true love for his characters and his words. Now, Black is back with The Nice Guys, a caper-comedy that both exposes the director’s worst tendencies and showcases his unique brilliance.

The flaws of this disposable, delightful film are obvious. It’s too long, its action is dull, its violence is pointless, and its plotting is simultaneously overcomplicated and undercooked. With a different director, these deficiencies might be crippling, but with Black (who shares scripting duties here with Anthony Bagarozzi), they’re trivial. You don’t watch The Nice Guys to see what happens next. You watch The Nice Guys to hang out with the nice guys. Read More

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Everybody Wants Some!!: College Ballplayers, Hazed and Amused

Jeremy BeckReviews
Blake Jenner, Glen Powell, Temple Baker, and Tyler Hoechlin in Richard Linklater's "Everybody Wants Some!!"

Ah, college. Remember your freshman year, when all you did was guzzle beer, smoke pot, and bang hot girls? Sadly, neither do I. But whether Everybody Wants Some!!—the fun, effortless, secretly sweet new film from cinema’s slacker emeritus, Richard Linklater—is a clandestine autobiography of its director’s misspent youth or a fantasy of testosterone-laced revelry, it doesn’t much matter. This movie is such a relaxed pleasure, jocks and nerds alike will find its embrace to be irresistible. It’s wreathed in a halcyon glow, but it never dreams of suggesting that the past was better. That would constitute a judgment, and there’s none of that here.

There isn’t all that of much of anything, unless you count warmth, intelligence, and continuous humor. This absence of substance—not to be confused with illicit substances, which flow freely—comes as no surprise. Linklater has made a career out of what might be called epic minimalism, compressing grand, sweeping stories into spare, economical packages. Three years ago, he delivered Before Midnight, the concluding chapter of a trilogy that somehow traced the entire trajectory of a single (and singular) relationship by way of three seemingly mundane single-day episodes. Then he gave us Boyhood, the outrageously ambitious account of a child’s maturation, filmed in discrete stages over the span of a dozen years. One of the remarkable things about Boyhood was that it was defiantly unremarkable, eschewing typical story beats in favor of quiet character moments and thoughtful exploration. Read More

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Deadpool: A Wisecracking Superhero Takes Aim at Bad Guys, and a Genre

Jeremy BeckReviews
Ryan Reynolds as a smartass superhero in "Deadpool"

There’s truth in advertising, and then there are the opening credits to Deadpool. Soundtracked to Juice Newton’s ’80s ballad “Angel of the Morning”, the camera pans and pulls slowly through a frozen still of interrupted carnage, and amid the suspended bullets and geysers of spurting blood, there peeks out a People Magazine cover. In that 2010 issue, People named Ryan Reynolds the sexiest man alive, so this would seem to be an opportune time for the title sequence to announce Reynolds’s presence in this madcap meta movie. Instead, the credits read, “Starring: God’s Perfect Idiot,” followed by other trivializing labels that summarize the remaining cast members: “a hot chick,” “a British villain,” “the comic relief,” “a CGI character.” The sequence concludes by informing us that Deadpool was produced by “asshats”, written by “the real heroes here”, and directed by “an overpaid tool”.

Is this anarchically funny or pitifully defensive? Who says it can’t be both? An ultraviolent superhero origin story filtered through the self-aware parody of send-ups like 21 Jump Street, Deadpool seeks to eviscerate the formula that pervades the Marvel Cinematic Universe while simultaneously hewing to that very template. (For the record, Deadpool is a Marvel production but is not formally associated with the MCU.) This means that it comes wrapped in a shield of protective irony that makes it virtually impervious to criticism. That is, how do you judge a pointless comic-book movie that so clearly knows it’s a pointless comic-book movie? Many MCU pictures are like schoolyard bullies, browbeating their mass audiences into submission through brute force. Deadpool is more like the class clown; accuse it of being stupid, and it’s likely to retort, “I know you are, but what am I?” Read More

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