Quick Hits: No Hard Feelings; Elemental; Extraction 2

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

Good Boys: Sex and Drugs and Gender Roles

Brady Noon, Jacob Tremblay, and Keith L. Williams in "Good Boys"

There are multiple levels of storytelling at work in Good Boys, and multiple levels of posturing as well. Directed by Gene Stupnitsky from a script he wrote with Lee Eisenberg, the movie follows three hapless sixth-graders in their desperate attempts to prove their sexual and narcotic bona fides. Their false bravado—one routine boast revolves around taking multiple sips of beer—is reflective of Good Boys itself, which bills itself as a raunchy sex comedy but whose primary focus is aging and friendship. Sure, there are filthy jokes and excruciating embarrassments, but underlying all of the gross-out humor and bawdy mishaps is a foundation of concentrated, sugary sweetness. It’s a gentle lamb dressed up in a horny wolf’s clothing.

Superbad for tweens” is a simplified but nonetheless accurate logline here, and not just because Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg serve as producers. Much like how that 2007 mainstay used two teens’ frantic efforts as the scaffolding for its poignant exploration of a longtime but quietly fraying relationship, Good Boys wields its “one crazy misadventure” premise to mine tension and pathos. The key difference is that, thanks to their pubescent status, the heroes of Good Boys aren’t just sexually inexperienced; they’re sexually clueless. Read More