Comedy

Hail, Caesar! Give Me That Old-Time Hollywood, with Smirking Sincerity

Jeremy BeckReviews
George Clooney as Baird Whitlock in the Coen Brothers "Hail, Caesar!"

There is quite a bit going on in the latest eccentric movie by Joel and Ethan Coen, beginning with its title. It is called Hail, Caesar!, and it is about the making of a sword-and-sandal epic called Hail, Caesar!, which comes complete with a subtitle, “A Tale of the Christ.” Students of Hollywood history will recognize that caption as the same one affixed to Ben-Hur, the Charlton Heston-starring colossus that seized 11 Oscars in 1959, but the Coen Brothers are interested in more than just nostalgic homage. Early in Hail, Caesar!—the real one, not the fake one, though it is occasionally difficult to distinguish the two—producer Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin, fighting trim) assembles a quartet of religious cognoscenti and beseeches them to tell him if the script for his big-budget behemoth could possibly offend members of their respective faiths. This leads to a predictably funny whirligig of insults and confusion—the rabbi in attendance is constantly denigrating the views of his Christian brethren, while the minister insists that the film’s chariot-jumping scenes are narratively dubious—but the on-screen collision between religion and cinema is hardly incidental. For the Coens, filmmaking isn’t just a vocation. It’s God’s work.

But what about for Eddie? As Hail, Caesar! opens, he is experiencing a crisis of faith, one that has him rushing to the confessional at regular 24-hour intervals. Eddie is the fixer for Capitol Pictures, one of those titanic Old Hollywood studios that churns out star-powered, machine-authorized hits in the vein of Cecil B. DeMille blockbusters, Busby Berkeley musicals, and John Ford westerns (plus plenty of junk, too). He’s wrung out, exhausted from the endless hours and disturbed by the seedier aspects of his job. That doesn’t stop him from working. After we first see him unburdening himself to an apathetic priest, he hightails it to the Hollywood Hills and slaps around one of his stars, berating her for posing for naughty photos (the studio owns her glamorous likeness, you see) and sending her to rehab to dry out. Then it’s off to the back lot to wrangle obstinate directors, soothe haughty starlets, and divert nosy gossip columnists, the latter of whom are always sniffing out the latest scandal. This is to say nothing of the pictures themselves, many of which are behind schedule; when Eddie finally finds a moment to review the most recent dailies of Hail, Caesar!, he discovers that one of its major set pieces is interrupted by a title card reading, “Divine Presence to be shot.” Read More

Read more

Trainwreck: She’s a Downtown Girl, Living in a Man’s World

Jeremy BeckReviews
Amy Schumer and Bill Hader find love in "Trainwreck"

They may both tower over the modern comedy world, but Judd Apatow and Amy Schumer aren’t very much alike. Apatow’s works, particularly The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, are best known for the overgrown man-children at their center, but they’re also curiously wholesome and sweet. He relies heavily on crudity and profanity, but he does so in the service of a romantic ideal—the notion that love can conquer all obstacles and generate true happiness—that is pure, cornball formula. But Schumer is a deconstructionist. She has ascended to the apex of the comedy landscape precisely because of the way she obliterates formula, exposing stereotypes and upheaving convention. Trainwreck, which Apatow directed from a script written by Schumer, is the funny, fascinating, and somewhat frustrating attempt to reconcile these two disparate voices into a unified song. Like its protagonist, it is often at war with itself. And, like its protagonist, it is vulgar, confused, warmhearted, and generally a hoot to hang out with.

Schumer plays Amy (in case you doubted the story’s autobiographical bona fides), an unapologetically promiscuous boozehound whom one might call a slut or a female stud, depending on one’s level of sexism or enlightenment. The idea that women can be funny, frisky, and lewd should hardly have been a revelation in 2011, but it was novel enough to turn Bridesmaids (which Apatow produced) from a well-made, modest comedy into an outright phenomenon. Now, Trainwreck extends that sense of gender liberation to the bedroom. That’s where we first meet Amy, tumbling between the sheets with an anonymous schmo, extracting pleasure from him before feigning sleep to avoid the obligation to reciprocate. “Don’t judge me, fuckers,” she admonishes via voiceover. It’s an odd plea, given that she spends most of the movie judging herself. Read More

Read more

Magic Mike XXL: Forget Your Day Job, It’s Time to Party

Jeremy BeckReviews
Channing Tatum and co. are back for "Magic Mike XXL"

A few months ago, I saw a movie about an inveterate warrior who gets pulled back into a turbulent conflict, and who uses his ingenuity and physical prowess to triumph in battle. A few days ago, I saw another movie with a similar storyline, about a legendary figure who grudgingly returns to the battlegrounds of his past, relying on both his cunning and his skill to achieve immortality. And while the two films are undeniably different—Mad Max: Fury Road is about a life-or-death struggle set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, whereas Magic Mike XXL is about a stripper performing in Myrtle Beach—their dissimilarities, from a filmmaking perspective, are almost incidental. The traits that made Mad Max: Fury Road such a sensation—the no-holds-barred attitude, the revelatory practical stunt work, the palpable swagger—apply with equal force to XXL. Both worship at the altar of cinematic excess, and both thrill their audiences with their verve and dexterity. It makes little difference that, while Max faces a hail of bullets, Mike is bombarded with “a tsunami of dollar bills”.

In conventional critical terms, Magic Mike XXL might appear to be a bit thin. It has no real plot to speak of, it is not especially interested in character development, and it is positively disdainful of plausibility. Certainly it lacks the lacerating bite of its predecessor, which benefitted from Steven Soderbergh’s artistry, expertly camouflaging a wolf’s tale of loneliness and manipulation in the sheep’s clothing of glamour and decadence. (For this sequel, Soderbergh has passed directing duties on to his longtime assistant, Gregory Jacobs, though he returns as both cinematographer and editor, working under his usual twin pseudonyms, Peter Andrews and Mary Ann Bernard.) But virtually none of this matters. XXL doesn’t have time for trifling concerns like plot and character, and watching the movie, neither will you. You will be too busy cheering its electric set pieces and succumbing to its infectious spirit of euphoria. Read More

Read more

Dope: A Harvard Wannabe Gets a Thug Life Education

Jeremy BeckReviews
Shameik Moore gets in over his head in "Dope"

An early scene in Dope, Rick Famuyiwa’s highly entertaining mess of a movie, perfectly encapsulates the film’s tone. It features its protagonist, a black high school student named Malcolm (Shameik Moore), fleeing with his two best friends from a pair of Los Angeles gangsters. It’s a frenetic scene, with Malcolm and his pals riding pitiful bicycles while the thugs give chase in a roaring red El Camino. Then, as the desperate teenagers pedal across an overpass, the camera suddenly switches to a static wide-shot, revealing that the overpass is labeled, in austere capital letters, “Thurgood Marshall Justice Plaza.” That level of silent wit—the confidence to quietly slip in a reference to America’s first black Supreme Court Justice in the middle of a frenzied chase sequence—is indicative of Dope‘s sly sense of humor, not to mention its hectic, erratic sensibility. This mélange of styles and tropes is far too chaotic to be a great movie, but it’s precisely that sense of unruliness that makes it so much fun.

Dope initially scans as a lively satire of Boyz N the Hood, John Singleton’s seminal coming-of-age story about black youths growing up on hard streets in hard times. Malcolm, the son of a single mother, lives in The Bottoms, a crime-ridden district of Inglewood. His neighborhood is swimming in drugs and beset by gang violence (the red-clad Bloods are especially prominent), and he’s under constant threat of thievery or worse. Yet Malcolm, contrary to expectation, is neither a reprobate nor a victim. He is instead, as Forest Whitaker’s playful opening voiceover informs us, a geek. He dresses like a goofball, he rocks a ludicrous high-top fade, and he and his aforementioned friends, Jib (Tony Revolori, the lobby boy from The Grand Budapest Hotel) and Diggy (Transparent‘s Kiersey Clemons), are utterly obsessed with ’90s hip-hop culture. His top priority is not avoiding jail or scoring drugs—it’s getting into college, which is why he’s penned a singular application essay entitled, “A Research Thesis to Discover Ice Cube’s Good Day.” Read More

Read more

While We’re Young: Growing Older, But Not Growing Up

Jeremy BeckReviews
Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts start in Noah Baumbach's "While We're Young"

The obvious irony of the title While We’re Young is that it’s a movie singularly fixated on the fear of growing old. Its hero is Josh (Ben Stiller), a fortyish documentary filmmaker who lives a life of relative comfort in New York City but is nevertheless plagued with anxiety, about both the specific utility of his work and his general place in the world. In other words, Josh is a lot like Noah Baumbach, the forty-five-year-old director of this bewitching, frustrating film. Like Josh, While We’re Young is smart, and it posits a number of interesting and worthwhile ideas. And, like Josh, it cannot entirely escape the nagging feeling that it’s just running in place, waiting for something to shake it out of its complacency.

In Baumbach’s recent movies, that something has taken the form of Greta Gerwig, the fearless and funny actress whose luminous, achingly vulnerable performance elevated Frances Ha from a crisply amusing cringe comedy into a startlingly humane coming-of-age story. Before that, Gerwig poured her heart into Greenberg, playing opposite Stiller, who delivered a career-best turn as a prickly and altogether unpleasant neurotic. Sadly, Gerwig is absent this time around, while Stiller reverts to his bland, inoffensive screen presence. His lead performance here isn’t bad so much as polite; an established star, he can coast on familiarity and charm, graciously ceding the spotlight to other, hungrier actors. In While We’re Young, he makes room for the magnetic Adam Driver, who plays Jamie, a boisterous aspiring documentarian who seems to idolize Josh. Read More

Read more