Comedy Archives - Page 3 of 19

American Fiction: By Book or by Crook

January 19, 2024January 18, 2024 Jeremy BeckReviews

Writing is a task infected with misery and failure: an endless cycle of staring at a blank screen, deleting reams of gibberish, and questioning your life choices. (Am I speaking hypothetically? Reader, I am not.) So it was with a mixture of envy and disbelief that I watched Thelonious Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), better known for obvious reasons as Monk, sit at his desk and confidently compose an entire novel in what appeared to be a single night. What’s his next trick, building Rome?

Not that Monk is an especially successful artist. The flailing hero of American Fiction, Monk is a mythological scholar whose fearsome intellect has failed to translate into financial security or critical renown. (When he appears at a book panel, he scratches a missing vowel onto the placard that misspelled his name.) His latest text, a meticulous analysis of Aeschylus’ The Persians, hasn’t attracted the slightest nibble from publishers, given that it’s miles removed from the zeitgeist. “They want a Black book,” explains his agent, Arthur (John Ortiz). Monk’s frustrated response—“I’m Black, and it’s my book”—betrays not only his stubbornness, but his woeful ignorance of consumer demand. Read More

Anyone But You: A Plague on Both Your Spouses

December 29, 2023December 29, 2023 Jeremy BeckReviews

Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney in Anyone But You

They say mature movies are supposed to challenge audiences, so here’s a test for you: Can you accept the contrivances of Anyone But You as frivolous eccentricities rather than shopworn clichés? If so, then you’re likely to enjoy it. Stripped of its tortured machinery, it functions as a sweet and playful romantic comedy starring two indecently attractive people who—in another universe where box-office success hinges more on actorly charisma than intellectual property—might have the potential to age into movie stars. I did my best to meet it on its terms. But some terms are harder to accept than others.

It takes all of five minutes, before the opening credits even roll, for Anyone But You to announce that it will operate according to the cruel whims of rom-com illogic. The alphabetically adjacent pair of Bea and Ben (played by Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell, respectively) meet cute at a coffee shop, and following some bathroom shenanigans in which Bea struggles with a hand dryer, they spend a magical day and night together before falling asleep in each other’s arms. It’s true love! Yet for reasons known only to the screenwriters (Ilana Wolpert and Will Gluck, the latter of whom also directs), Bea sneaks out the following morning; she instantly realizes her mistake, but upon her return she overhears a wounded Ben assassinating her character to a friend. As a result of this symmetrical misunderstanding, these would-be lovers become less star-crossed than simply and irrevocably cross. Read More

Poor Things: Pride of Frankenstein

December 21, 2023December 22, 2023 Jeremy BeckReviews

Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo in Poor Things

Poor Things opens at a stately manor in Victorian London, where chickens bark, pigs quack, and legless horses draw steam-powered carriages. These hybridized bastardizations are the work of Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), a brilliant surgeon with scars on his face and curiosity in his heart. When he isn’t tutoring pompous medical students or belching out his farts through a contraption that turns gas into floating spheres, God (as he prefers to be called) toils in his vast private laboratory, concocting unholy experiments in his ongoing quest to investigate and bend the laws of nature. God wields his scalpel with such rigorous dispassion—a blend of mighty intelligence and clinical precision—that you might be tempted to perceive him as a proxy for Yorgos Lanthimos, the movie’s director and cinema’s preeminent scholar of human oddity. But that reading disserves Poor Things, which finds Lanthimos applying his craft with generosity as well as exactitude. God’s creations are perverse; Lanthimos has manufactured a miracle.

In doing so, he has sacrificed none of his talent for arresting imagery (not to mention caustic comedy). From its very first shot—that of a pregnant woman in a blue dress on a bridge, flinging herself to the icy waters below—Poor Things routinely marries the ghastly and the gorgeous. The production design, by Shona Heath and James Price, concocts environments of terrible wonder, like the airborne trams that slice through a smoggy metropolis or the yellow Escheresque staircase that crumbles in midair. (Even the black-and-white title cards that divide the picture into discrete chapters ripple with dazzling eccentricity.) The costumes, by Holly Waddington, are a resplendent array of gowns and bodices, despite every male character wanting to tear them to shreds. And the cinematographer Robbie Ryan, who also shot Lanthimos’ The Favourite, features bursts of bold color yet repeatedly contorts the frame into his singular fisheye style; at times he even shrinks the canvas to a small circle, as though we’re squinting through a peephole at all of the movie’s beautiful grotesqueries. Read More

Dumb Money: The Smarts of the Deal

September 29, 2023September 28, 2023 Jeremy BeckReviews

Pitching her coworker on the viability of a specific stock she heard about on YouTube, a middle-class nurse named Jenny (America Ferrera) argues that the bandana-clad weirdo she saw promoting the investment is unusually trustworthy: “You can see his whole balance sheet!” Jenny may not have scrutinized the data displayed in that Excel file, but in her view, its mere disclosure is a signal of expertise and a gesture of transparency. The actual numbers are irrelevant; what matters is what the nerd says about them.

Writ large, this didactic illustration functions as an apt metaphor for the entire stock market, in which tangible value is inextricably tangled with theoretical perception. Shares of stock aren’t worth anything in the literal sense; their value derives from a manufactured number—a figure whose calculation appears at the end of a byzantine maze of trades, estimations, and symbols—which we have all accepted to carry meaning. No movie has better illuminated this capitalist fiction than J.C. Chandor’s Margin Call, in which Jeremy Irons says of our financial system, “It’s just money, it’s made up.” Dumb Money, the new docudrama from Craig Gillespie, is not so insightful or incisive, but it does persuasively recognize the absurd whims and fateful caprices that catapult some investors into fortune and plunge others into poverty. Read More

Bottoms: Top Queer

September 8, 2023September 10, 2023 Jeremy BeckReviews

Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri in Bottoms

Justifying your own unpopularity is harder than it used to be. In the past, the ostracized heroes at the center of coming-of-age stories could take solace in the recognition that their tormentors were either stupid or bigoted; the bullying they faced was simply a consequence of the ruling class failing to perceive their true worth. But the nerds of Booksmart discovered that their partying brethren were also headed to the Ivy League, and now the losers of Bottoms can’t attribute the everyday cruelty they experience to insecurity or small-mindedness. “They don’t hate us because we’re gay,” Josie (Ayo Edebiri) says with gloomy honesty to her best friend, PJ (Rachel Sennott), as they watch a jock congratulate an effeminate actor on his performance in the school musical. “They hate us because we’re ugly and untalented.”

That assessment is unduly self-deprecating, though the wardrobe department has joined forces with Edebiri’s lack of vanity to make Josie look as frumpy as possible. (The first time we see her, she’s trying to stack multiple baseball caps atop her haywire afro.) But it’s crucial for Bottoms to establish its heroines’ putative undesirability in order to lay the groundwork for its story of improbable triumph and feminist upheaval. Directed by Emma Seligman from a script she wrote with Sennott, it’s an affirming movie that tells the tale of a marginalized sect rising up against its oppressors, claiming a measure of power and upending the entrenched social order. In related news, it’s about punching cheerleaders in the face. Read More