Comedy

Amsterdam: Dutch Ado About Nothing

Jeremy BeckReviews
Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, and John David Washington in Amsterdam

Throughout Amsterdam, things break: an ugly teapot, a bird’s egg, a man’s optic nerve, a loveless marriage. Yet because it’s the work of David O. Russell, the movie views such destruction not with sadness but with opportunity. A grinning carny barker whose attractions are warped and trampled human feelings, Russell savors goofy misfits, with their thwarted dreams and foiled scams. He likes to break things—and people—apart so that he can put them back together.

He doesn’t always succeed. Russell’s career is wildly uneven, not to mention polarizing; survey critics, and you’re unlikely to find consensus on his three best films. (For the record, they are Three Kings, Silver Linings Playbook, and American Hustle.) Amsterdam, Russell’s first feature in seven years, showcases the director at his best and worst; it’s full of vibrant verve and stylish flair and ragged writing and quite a bit of nonsense. (His last picture, Joy, was similarly bumpy, suggesting that he’s grown consistently inconsistent.) In fact, the main characters here repeatedly improvise what they call “a nonsense song,” coming together to warble an off-key melody accompanied by incomprehensible lyrics, and it works handily as metaphor for the movie itself: meandering and patchy, yet oddly charming and full of life. Read More

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Convention Center: Bros, Blonde, and Smile

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Billy Eichner in Bros, Sosie Bacon in Smile, Ana de Armas in Blonde

Not every movie needs to be revolutionary. Genres are durable in part because filmmakers have gradually honed reliable formulae, the passage of time sanding down eons of cinematic experimentation into sturdy templates. Predictability can be dispiriting, but the successful execution of a familiar blueprint can also be satisfying. This past weekend saw three different movies tackle three very different genres, and though none can be mistaken for each other, they all operate with a certain degree of conventionality. Not coincidentally, they’re all watchable while also struggling to break free from the shackles of expectations.

Few movies are more visibly conscious of their place within an established genre than Bros. How conscious? It’s a romantic comedy co-written by Billy Eichner that opens with a character played by Billy Eichner recounting a pitch session in which a studio mogul urges him to write a romantic comedy. The hook, the suit explains, will be that the film will center on gay men but will otherwise follow the standard rom-com playbook, thereby perpetuating the message that “love is love.” Eichner’s character, Bobby, isn’t having it. “Love is not love,” he insists. Gay people are different; you can’t just magically flip the characters’ sexual orientation and expect everything else to cleanly lock into place. Read More

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Honk for Jesus, Save Your Soul: The Sour of Prayer

Jeremy BeckReviews
Regina Hall and Sterling K. Brown in Honk for Jesus, Save Your Soul

In one of his incisive bits about religion, George Carlin observed that God “always needs money.” The implication is that the deity’s clerics are also in permanent want of funds, but the main characters of Honk for Jesus, Save Your Soul—Lee-Curtis Childs (Sterling K. Brown), a captivating Southern Baptist preacher, and Trinitie (Regina Hall), his publicly steadfast wife—aren’t hurting for cash. They live in a luxurious mansion outside of Atlanta, they drive a Cadillac Escalade, and their closets are filled with Prada. (Lee-Curtis’ gold watch gleams so brightly, you half-expect him to tell someone that it “cost more than your car.”) No, what this power couple really craves—what they desire beyond favorable clippings in the press or dollar bills in the collection plate—is an audience.

They used to have one; with Trinitie seated at his side in a gold-enameled throne, Lee-Curtis would routinely preach to upwards of 5,000 disciples at Wander to Greater Paths, their so-called “megachurch.” But then something happened—something initially alluded to only as “misconduct”—and now they bustle about in their Georgia Xanadu, breathlessly plotting their reemergence. Honk for Jesus, which is the feature debut of writer-director Adamma Ebo (based on her short film), chronicles the Childses’ painstaking attempt to reacquire their congregation (and their relevance), even as it also gradually unveils the scandal that led to their downfall. Read More

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Bodies Bodies Bodies: Youngs Full of Air

Jeremy BeckReviews
The cast of Bodies Bodies Bodies: Amandla Stenberg, Maria Bakalova, Chase Sui Wonders, and Rachel Sennott

The murder mystery gets a modern makeover in Bodies Bodies Bodies, the slick, enjoyable, somewhat obnoxious thriller from Halina Reijn. As the title suggests, corpses slowly stack up over the course of the movie, though the bloodshed is less a sign of inhuman evil than a natural consequence of characters lacking access to wifi. After all, when you can’t check your Instagram account, what else is there to do but kill people? Adapting a witty, smirky screenplay by Sarah DeLappe, Reijn has crafted a confident and provocative picture in which new-age brashness nestles up against cinematic classicism. It’s Agatha Christie on TikTok.

The setting, quite delectably, is a dark and stormy night. Seven attractive young people pile into a mansion in upstate New York, not that far from where Clue took place. This privileged septet has assembled, in advance of the landfall of a hurricane, for an evening of revelry—a bawdy, corrosive cocktail spiked with sex and drugs and jealousy. Before long, one of them is dead, resulting in a hectic, bloody night full of paranoia, finger-pointing, and violence. Whaddya need, a GPS-powered roadmap? Read More

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Vengeance: The Lone Star Bait

Jeremy BeckReviews
Boyd Holbrook and B.J. Novak in Vengeance

When the American version of The Office began, it presented B.J. Novak’s character Ryan as a thoroughly normal guy who happened to wander into a horribly dysfunctional workplace. (In the very first episode, he sits by helplessly as Michael plays a pointlessly cruel prank on Pam.) If he could at times appear above it all, that was simply a matter of relativity; he was superior by virtue of being average. Yet as the series progressed and the characters gained dimension, Ryan’s bemusement curdled into smugness, and Novak gradually revealed the character’s face—generically handsome, with darting blue eyes and topped by wig-worthy hair—to be a mask that camouflaged his selfishness and cruelty. If Michael Scott was the terrible boss who secretly had a heart of gold, Ryan Howard was the reverse—a superficially nice guy who was actually a complete jerk.

Vengeance, Novak’s first feature as writer-director, interrogates that same arrogance with a curious mixture of irony and sincerity. He casts himself as Ben Manalowitz, a smarmy and vapid New York writer who’s quick to tell you that he “went to school in Boston.” Ben has aspirations of breaking into the podcast scene, but when we first meet him on the terrace of a poshly appointed loft, he’s more preoccupied with defending his singlehood, pontificating with a friend (played by John Mayer?!) about how their rigorous lack of commitment is really an advanced form of human evolution. Later that evening, he reconnects with a past hookup whom he’s stored in his phone as, “Random House Party”; when she enters his apartment, he asks her (to her bafflement), “How’s the book business?” Real prince. Read More

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