Comedy

Joy Ride: Girls Quip

Jeremy BeckReviews
Sabria Wu, Ashley Park, Sherry Cola, and Stephanie Hsu in Joy Ride

During one of the more outlandish moments in Everything Everywhere All at Once, Stephanie Hsu watches in horror as an adversary attempts to plug a curiously shaped office plaque into his anus. Now in Joy Ride, the new road-trip comedy from Adele Lim, Hsu has transitioned from observer to participant; at one point, circumstances conspire such that she must shove eight plastic baggies filled with cocaine up her own ass.

The sight of a newly minted Oscar nominee frantically thrusting narcotics inside her asshole operates both as its own joke and as the setup for a subsequent, cleverly delayed punch line. (Remember, whenever a character says that the occurrence of a certain event makes her horny, you can be damn sure that event will take place—and in the most compromising scenario possible.) It also encapsulates the movie’s maximalist approach to comedy. Every orifice gets its own moment in Joy Ride, as do K-pop enthusiasts, martial-arts soap operas, Cardi B, projectile vomit, vaginal tattoos, and former NBA All-Star Baron Davis. It’s a lot, and it isn’t ashamed of its own muchness. Read More

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Asteroid City: Turn That Town Upside-Down

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jason Schwartzman and Jake Ryan in Asteroid City

During a quiet moment in Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, a journalist played by Jeffrey Wright bristles when a television interviewer asks him why he’s written so frequently about food. “Never ask a man why,” he grumbles. Wright returns in Anderson’s new feature, the strange and beguiling Asteroid City (he plays a gruff military general with the onomatopoetic name of Grif Gibson), but his reporter’s distaste for contemplation has been left behind. Instead, the characters in this movie are constantly pondering questions of meaning and motive. Why does a photographer injure himself in a burst of frustration? Why does a brainy teenager constantly invite others to dare him to perform perilous stunts? Why does an alien suddenly appear in the middle of the desert? And above all: Why are we here?

“Here” is a matter of perspective in Asteroid City, which again finds Anderson indulging his penchant for nesting tales within tales, art within artifices. Simply telling an entertaining story is no longer sufficient for him, if it ever was; even Rushmore, his breakout second film released a quarter-century ago, found its amateur-playwright hero obsessed with substantiating his own legend. As it happens, that enterprising yearner was the screen debut of Jason Schwartzman, who stars here as Augie Steenbeck, a gifted photographer with four children, a recently deceased wife, and multiple types of baggage. Schwartzman, with his thin frame and bookish demeanor, is a natural fit for the famously fastidious Anderson (this is their eighth feature-length collaboration), but Augie is a departure, armed with a corncob pipe, a tanned complexion, and a masculine beard that’s so sharply manicured, you wonder if it’s a prosthesis. Read More

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Quick Hits: No Hard Feelings; Elemental; Extraction 2

Jeremy BeckReviews
Chris Hemsworth in Extraction 2; Leah Lewis in Elemental; Jennifer Lawrence in No Hard Feelings

No Hard Feelings. Like most movie stars, Jennifer Lawrence tends to play the hero. She’s showcased plenty of range in her leading roles—as a resourceful vagrant (Winter’s Bone), as an intrepid messiah (the Hunger Games pictures), as a striving innovator (the underrated Joy), as a frantic parent (mother!)—but she invariably lays claim to your sympathy, wielding a winning combination of innocence and resolve. So what’s intriguing about No Hard Feelings, the new comedy from Gene Stupnitsky (Good Boys), is that it finds Lawrence playing a woman who’s selfish, vengeful, and kind of mean. Her character, Maddie, isn’t exactly a villain, but the closest she gets to traditional heroism comes when she’s outracing the cops who are primed to suspend her license, all while a teenager is clinging to the hood of her car.

Maddie’s acrimony isn’t entirely without cause. She’s behind on the property taxes for her beloved Montauk home, and her primary source of income (driving for Uber) vaporizes after her ex-boyfriend, scorned from her prior ghosting, repos her car. She also resents the seasonal influx of wealthy tourists and the creep of gentrification they represent. But Maddie’s bitterness runs deeper than circumstantial irritation, and the trick of Lawrence’s performance is that she has the courage to make the character unlikable while simultaneously depicting her as a figure of nigh-mythical desirability. Read More

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Quick Hits: You Hurt My Feelings; The Starling Girl

Jeremy BeckReviews
Eliza Scanlen in The Starling Girl; Julia Louis-Dreyfus in Your Hurt My Feelings

The characters in a Nicole Holofcener picture always have problems, but they tend to be cute problems—like how Catherine Keener can’t decide how to donate her wealth in Please Give, or how James Gandolfini is incapable of whispering in Enough Said. This doesn’t make their emotional confusion or existential despair any less real; it’s just that their floundering is undergirded by a bedrock of professional success and academic sophistication. So what’s interesting about You Hurt My Feelings, Holofcener’s latest look at privileged people, is that while this sense of accomplishment remains firmly in place, it’s also questionably earned. The heroes of this movie all live in nice Manhattan homes and hold impressive jobs, yet they don’t seem to actually be good at anything.

Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) is a published author who teaches a creative writing course, but her memoir didn’t sell and she’s yet to land a second book deal; her students are shocked to learn that she’s a real writer. Her husband, Don (Tobias Menzies), is a therapist who’s been practicing for decades, yet his patients are constantly complaining that he never actually helps them. (Whenever he’s with a client, he hangs a shabby “In Session” sign on his door.) Their son, Eliot (Owen Teague), works at a weed dispensary and is perpetually drafting a play that’s never close to being finished. Beth’s sister, Sarah (Michaela Watkins), is an interior decorator who seems to only have one client—a woman who never approves of her banal fixture suggestions. Sarah’s husband, Mark (Arian Moayed), is a struggling actor who’s yet to receive his big break. Read More

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From the Vault: The Italian Job, 20 Years Later

Jeremy BeckReviews
Mark Wahlberg, Charlize Theron, and Jason Statham in The Italian Job

[EDITOR’S NOTE: In 2003, long before MovieManifesto.com existed, I spent my summer as a 20-year-old college kid writing as many movie reviews as I could. My goal was to compile them all into a website, possibly hosted by Tripod or Geocities, which would surely impress all of the women in my dorm. That never happened—neither the compiling nor the impressing—but the reviews still exist. So, now that I am a wildly successful critic actually have a website, I’ll be publishing those reviews on the respective date of each movie’s 20th anniversary. Against my better judgment, these pieces remain unedited from their original form. I apologize for the quality of the writing; I am less remorseful about the character of my 20-year-old opinions.]

The Italian Job showcases the continued emergence of one of cinema’s newest sub-genres: the heist remake. In 1999, John McTiernan delivered The Thomas Crown Affair, a more erotic but less involving film than its 1968 predecessor. Two years ago, Steven Soderbergh’s wildly successful update of Ocean’s Eleven (originally starring Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack in 1960) wowed audiences with its high-profile cast and elaborate set pieces. Now, F. Gary Gray brings us a modernized version of The Italian Job, the 1969 caper featuring Michael Caine. Read More

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