DON'T THINK TWICE: You Only Laugh Once

Director: Mike Birbiglia
Writer: Mike Birbiglia
Cast: Keegan-Michael Key, Gillian Jacobs, Mike Birbiglia, Kate Micucci, Chris Gethard, Tami Sagher
Runtime: 92 mins.
2016

I expected Don't Think Twice to be a goofy little movie. It's a film about improv, so I anticipated a lot of funny jokes and a fair amount of charisma. What I did not expect was for this film to be emotionally devastating.

The story follows six comedians who together make up a successful improv troupe called The Commune. Unfortunately, their venue is closing down, so The Commune as they know it will either have to adapt or die. This means something different to each of the characters, as they all have their own personal drama to contend with. Jack (Keegan Michael-Key) is driven to transcend the improv community by becoming a member of Weekend Live, a transitional process which alienates him from his friends. Sam (Gillian Jacobs) has the potential to be on the same trajectory as Jack, whom she has been dating for a while, but she is in danger of squandering that potential because she feels uncertain about her path. Miles (Mike Birbiglia), on the other hand, does not have that same potential, and refuses to admit it to himself despite continuous failed attempts to rise up in the comedy world. Bill (Chris Gethard) is mourning the death of his father and trying to find renewed meaning in life. Allison (Kate Micucci) dreams of publishing graphic novels, but fears appraisal of her work. And Lindsay (Tami Sagher), whose wealthy parents preclude her from ever having to work a real job, is in a weed-scented rut.

Alone, any one of these narratives would make for a functional if not original film about artistic aspirations. Birbiglia is careful about showing us, sometimes subtly and sometimes not, every step of these characters' journeys, and every arc is dramatically sound. But the real beauty of the film comes from the intertwining of these arcs. Everyone's personal drama feeds back into the group dynamic and significantly affects the way that The Commune, the seventh character, develops. With each character's personal baggage influencing the trajectory of the group, it almost feels like a low-stakes Avengers movie, except that Don't Think Twice is so personal and earnest that the stakes feel far higher than any superhero shenanigans.

THE NICE GUYS: Black Is the New Black

Director: Shane Black
Writers: Shane Black, Anthony Bagarozzi
Cast: Russell Crowe, Ryan Gosling, Angourie Rice, Matt Bomer, Margaret Qualley
Runtime: 116 mins.
2016

The worst thing I can say about The Nice Guys is that it's no Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, writer/director Shane Black's other neo-noir comedy. That film, one of my favorite meta-narrative movies, may upstage Black's latest directorial effort, but by any other reasonable metric The Nice Guys is a rousing success.

Beginning with a hauntingly beautiful scene of a child discovering a dead porn star in the wreckage of a mangled car, The Nice Guys firmly establishes itself in the seventies. Our heroes are Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe), a bruiser for hire who gets embroiled in detective work despite his better judgment, and Holland March (Ryan Gosling), an inept P.I. who mostly coasts by on alcohol and exploiting the elderly. The other major player is Holly March (Angourie Rice), Holland's hypercompetent daughter, only the most recent in the storied line of child actors in Shane Black action movies who manage not to be annoying at all, but are in fact quite charming. I'm going to cut off the plot summary hardly before it's even started, as I cannot remember much about the twisty narrative details. Though in this case, that's no detriment; the joy of The Nice Guys has little to do with its plot intrigue, instead putting all the eggs in the bounteous basket of how delightful Crowe and Gosling are to watch bounce off each other for an hour and a half.

They both bring their A+ game. Between this and Noah, it's great to see Crowe in the midst of a career resurgence. He's cribbing from John Goodman here, playing Healy as paunchy but vivacious. Plus, Crowe is capable of selling the hell out of the movie's isolated moments of tragedy. Meanwhile, I have been a Gosling advocate for years (Drive, Only God Forgives, Crazy, Stupid, Love, Half Nelson, Lars and the Real Girl, etc. etc.), but he manages to shift into a new tier of talent in The Nice Guys, at least comedically. His physical comedy is far more committed than anything we could reasonably expect from a Hollywood A-lister. Black likes to beat the hell out of his characters, and Gosling sells every painful mishap.

All things considered, The Nice Guys is an exemplary if somewhat traditional noir. It may not transcend its own structure like the aforementioned Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, but The Nice Guys sees a cavalcade of tremendous talents at the top of their game, knocking it out of the park as if it were routine to do so.

3.5 / 5  BLOBS

THE LOBSTER: Love in the Time of Anomie

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
Writers: Yorgos Lanthimos, Efthymis Filippou
Cast: Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, Lea Seydoux, John C. Reilly, Ben Whishaw, Jessica Barden, Ariane Labed, Angeliki Papoulia
Runtime: 119 mins.
2016

The Lobster follows protagonist David (Colin Farrell) through his stay at The Hotel, a resort with one central purpose: to help its tenants find love and stable relationships with each other. Those who fail to find a partner by the end of their stay will be turned into an animal of their choosing. Life at the resort is rigorously structured, from the No Masturbation rule, to the strict meal and dance times, to the staged presentations about the superiority of couplehood, to the daily morning routine that involves a maid grinding on the male tenants' laps until they become hard--but not a moment longer. Everything about the place is meant to maximize the romantic desire and viability of its occupants; everything except the hunting of the Loners, that is.

Every day the tenants get on a bus with tranquilizer rifles in hand and head into the woods to hunt radicals who have defected from The Hotel and chosen an aggressively single lifestyle together. If you capture a Loner, one day is added to the duration of your stay. At first David participates clumsily in the hunt, but as his time runs out his relationship with the Loners becomes more complex.

If you were to go into The Lobster expecting some sort of sci-fi thriller, you would be mistaken. If you were to go in expecting a romantic comedy of sorts, you would also be mistaken. In fact, if you were to go into this movie expecting anything in particular, there's a significant chance of you walking away feeling frustrated or unsatisfied. The Lobster is so singular in its presentation that it doesn't fit into any boxes we typically stuff movies into. The closest comparison I can draw is that it is something like an extremely perverse version of a Wes Anderson movie, but even that fails at capturing what The Lobster is up to.

HAIL, CAESAR!: Das Capitol

Directors: Ethan and Joel Coen
Writers: Joel and Ethan Coen
Cast: Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Alden Ehrenreich, Ralph Fiennes, Scarlett Johansson, Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand, Channing Tatum, Jonah Hill, Veronica Osorio, Heather Goldenhersh, Alison Pill, Max Baker
Runtime: 106 mins.
2016

Hail, Caesar! is a dumb movie about dumb movies. As such, it never reaches the level of profundity of the Coen Bros.' long list of masterpieces, or even the escalating zaniness of their former comedic output like The Big Lebowski. If one were forced to rank their oeuvre, Hail, Caesar! has got to come in pretty low on the list, but the good news is that it doesn't aspire to be at the tippy top. I suspect that if seasoned filmmakers like the Coens tried to make their best-movie-ever every time they set anything to film, they would get burned out fast. Hail, Caeser! is clearly a screw around movie for everyone involved, and it ends up being a passionate and glorious one at that.

If you were to be so inclined to suggest that this movie has a plot, it would surround the activities of Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), a 1950's Hollywood fixer whose job it is to keep the aptly named Capitol Pictures up and running. He's not a creative, he just keeps the creatives functioning like cogs in a well-oiled machine. He has received an offer for a more stable job with reasonable work hours and far less stress, and this offer occupies his mind during the events of the film, which amount to a particularly trying few days for Mannix. His big movie star Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) has been kidnapped by a group of shady communists who call themselves The Future, the media is circling like vultures, and there are a laundry list of other on-and-off-set troubles that Mannix must aggressively manage. In the end, is the creation of Hollywood blockbuster films worth all the trouble?

CATCH ME IF YOU CAN: A Bucket of Cream

Every other day leading up to the release of his new movie Bridge of Spies, we will be dissecting a film in Steven Spielberg's oeuvre. I've picked ten movies spanning the length of Spielberg's career, five of which I have seen and five of which I haven't. This week is Catch Me If You Can, which is as far as I can tell the closest thing we have to a Spielberg comedy that works.

Other Reviews in this Series: Duel, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1941, Empire of the Sun, Amistad, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, War of the Worlds, Munich, Lincoln

Other Spielberg Reviews: Jaws, Jurassic Park, The Lost World, Bridge of Spies

Director: Steven Spielberg
Writer: Jeff Nathanson
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hanks, Christopher Walken, Amy Adams, Martin Sheen, Nathalie Baye
Runtime: 141 mins.
2002

The common conception is that modern Spielberg is lesser than vintage Spielberg. Granted, since 1993 Spielberg has only made two instant classics*. His output of the past two decades has been largely glossed over by the public and left out of critical conversations about Spielberg the Artist. Maybe it's no coincidence that 1993 was around the time that Spielberg made yet another conscious decision to move away from genre fare and towards more grounded socially conscious efforts.

*These classics being Saving Private Ryan and Lincoln.

So we come to Catch Me If You Can, a movie that passed through the hands of many directors and actors before landing with the team most capable of making it. At twenty-seven years old, DiCaprio was the perfect candidate to portray Frank Abagnale, famed real-life scam artist wunderkind. Abagnale was ten years younger than DiCaprio when he went on his check fraud spree, but DiCaprio convincingly portrays a heightened adolescent innocence for the first twenty minutes of the film. DiCaprio then spends the next two hours brilliantly subverting and exploiting that appearance of innocence, which makes this one of the most pivotal roles in Leo's career; before Catch Me he had been stuck in a bit of a Titanic rut and, as Spielberg predicted would happen at the time, Catch Me catapulted Leo into a series of roles that cemented him in the top echelon of Hollywood talent.

1941: Spielberg's Flop

Every other day leading up to the release of his new movie Bridge of Spies, we will be dissecting a film in Steven Spielberg's oeuvre. I've picked ten movies spanning the length of Spielberg's career, five of which I have seen and five of which I haven't. Here we examine 1941, that rarest of rarities: an outright bad film by Steven Spielberg.

Other Reviews in this Series: Duel, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Empire of the Sun, Amistad, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Catch Me If You Can, War of the Worlds, Munich, Lincoln

Other Spielberg Reviews: Jaws, Jurassic Park, The Lost World, Bridge of Spies

(If you haven't already, check out my new archive in the corner ---->)

Disclaimer: I watched the extended director's cut, so take any complaints about the length of this film with a grain of salt.

Director: Steven Spielberg
Writers: Robert Zemeckis, Bob Gale, John Milius
Cast: Bobby Di Cicco, Dan Aykroyd, Ned Beatty, John Belushi, Lorraine Gary, Murray Hamilton, Christopher Lee, Tim Matheson, Toshiro Mifune, Warren Oates, Robert Stack, Treat Williams, Nancy Allen, John Candy, Eddie Deezen, Perry Lang, Frank McRae, Slim Pickens
Runtime: 118 mins. (directors cut: 145 mins)
1979

1941 is great, but not funny.
-Stanley Kubrick

Humor is a magical elixir. It's like practicing alchemy except sometimes it actually works. Professional improvisers, comedians, Sunday comics writers*, and comic filmmakers have dedicated whole careers to seeking out that elixir, and trying to capture its magic consistently. So what is it that makes a movie funny?

*maybe not

In the wake of the massive success of Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Spielberg decided the answer is excess. 1941 is a movie about California in the fallout following the attack on Pearl Harbor. Everybody is convinced that the Japanese are going to invade Californian soil, and the attack could strike at any moment. The movie is a wide-ranging survey of mostly military characters who mostly react with panic or bravado until their paths mostly cross in one of several of the movies climaxes. Everything in 1941 is built for bombast. The special effects are spectacular, the gags are enormous (often involving heavy machinery of war), and the cast boasts a great many of the comedic stars of the '70s. It's a cavalcade of tomfoolery.

It's also overlong, oversaturated, and not very funny.

THE VISIT: Va-ca-tion Had to Get Away

Director: M. Night Shyamalan
Writer: M. Night Shyamalan
Cast: Olivia DeJonge, Ed Oxenbould, Deanna Dunagan, Peter McRobbie, Kathryn Hahn
Runtime: 94 mins.
2015

This is truly a momentous day.

M. Night Shyamalan has made a new movie. Already this sounds like a very bad idea. I don't like to dogpile on easy targets, but I feel uniquely qualified to do so in this case. M. Night Shyamalan was my first ever favorite director. In the budding years of my cinephilia, I discovered the value of choosing a "favorite director" at the same time I was discovering Shyamalan's body of work. The Village was the first scary movie I'd ever seen, and the shocking moments of blood red imagery are still imprinted on my memory. From there I worked through The Sixth Sense, Signs, and Unbreakable, and I loved them all. Shyamalan's deliberate pacing, eye for the unsettling, and twisty plots all had significant appeal to my adolescent brain.

Then came the downfall. I eagerly awaited Lady in the Water, only to be a bit baffled and disappointed by the circlejerking peculiarity of the narrative. After that The Happening was announced. M. Night finally makes an R-rated horror movie! It's about mass suicide! My interest was piqued and I was rooting for it so hard.

We all know how that story goes.

WHY DON'T YOU PLAY IN HELL?: Mankind's Greatest Achievement

Director: Sion Sono
Writer: Sion Sono
Cast: Fumi Nikaido, Jun Kunimura, Shin'ichi Tsutsumi, Hiroki Hasegawa, Gen Hoshino, Tomochika, Itsuji Itao, Tak Sakaguchi
Runtime: 129 mins.
2014 (USA)

Where to begin?

Why Don't You Play in Hell? is about a squad of childhood filmmaker friends called the Fuck Bombers, led by a charismatic figure whose goal in life is to make one truly great piece of cinema that will resonate for generations.

But Why Don't You Play in Hell? is also about a young actress who is running away from her responsibilities, trying to find her place in the world, and committing twisted acts of violence against those who get in her way.

Then again, Why Don't You Play in Hell? is actually about two rival yakuza gangs whose leaders are both obsessed with the aforementioned actress. They come to blows over this obsession, and to resolve old rivalries, and to make one truly excellent movie.

More than anything though, Why Don't You Play in Hell? is about a strange toothpaste commercial that knits the plot, characters, and themes together into a satisfying whole.

What I'm trying to tell you is that Hell? is a movie that deliberately defies any sort of concise and sensible summary, so I'm going to stop trying.

TRAINWRECK: Sliding Softly into the Station

Director: Judd Apatow
Writer: Amy Schumer
Cast: Amy Schumer, Bill Hader, Brie Larson, Vanessa Bayer, Tilda Swinton, Mike Birbiglia, John Cena, LeBron James
Runtime: 125 mins.
2015

Lord knows a female-led, female-written comedy that involves a heaping helping of sex positivity is de facto refreshing. Let's keep that in mind moving forward.

The opening scene of Trainwreck is a sepia-tinted portrayal of a father informing his two daughters that he and their mother will be getting a divorce. The joke is that he tries to explain to the children that he got caught sleeping around both in a language they can understand, and in a way that makes them sympathetic to him. The staging of the scene--the driveway in front of the house, dusk, what looks like heat lightning in the distance--deepens the humor with a sense of melancholy. The scene is funny, weighty, and a perfect prologue to the boozy devil-may-care attitude of our main character, Amy (Amy Schumer), while also providing context for the more conservative settled-down behavior of her sister Kim (Brie Larson).

The rest of the film never matches the jokey melancholy of that first scene.

ANT-MAN: Smalling with Style

Director: Peyton Reed
Writers: Adam McKay, Paul Rudd, Edgar Wright, Joe Cornish
Cast: Paul Rudd, Michael Douglas, Evangeline Lilly, Corey Stoll, Michael Pena, David Dastmalchian, T.I.
Runtime: 117 mins.
2015

[Ant-Man is notorious for its behind the scenes history and drama. I'm not going to tackle any of that right now because it's overdone, and because I want to treat the movie well enough to criticize it based on its own merits and pitfalls--what is on the screen above all else.]

Ant-Man is not an especially well-written movie. I want to set this notion on the table and dine upon it first, because I'll have nicer things to say later on.

The story mostly follows charming everyman Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) who also happens to be a cat burglar and father to a small girl. His daughter Cassie (Abby Ryder Fortson) is in the custody of Lang's ex-wife Maggie (Judy Greer) and her policeman boyfriend Paxton (Bobby Cannavale). Scott isn't a lost cause; everybody loves him, even the bosses who fire him, but Maggie forbids him from seeing his daughter until he pulls his act together and starts ponying up on child support.

Meanwhile, Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) is trying really hard to keep the technology he secretly invented many years ago--a suit that allows you to shrink to the size of an ant--out of the wrong hands. Those oh so wrong hands belong to Darren Cross (Corey Stoll) who is about to have his own breakthrough with a weaponized shrinking mass producible suit he calls the Yellowjacket. So it is that Pym sets the pieces in motion for a heist, and he knows the perfect guy for the job.

FRANK: Something Perishable

Director: Lenny Abrahamson
Writers: Jon Ronson, Peter Straughan
Cast: Michael Fassbender, Domhnall Gleeson, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Scoot McNairy, Francois Civil, Carla Azar
Runtime: 95 mins.
2014

You think you know Frank. Just as our protagonist makes the mistake of believe he understands Frank's potential, Frank's desires, and worst of all Frank himself, you begin watching this film with a sense of superiority--or at least a sense of superior perspective. As the film opens on a young man desperately seeking inspiration but only coming up with a few facile snippets of pop fancy, you understand exactly where this must be going. This story is a Kunstlerroman--the development to maturity of an artist--with zany indie trappings. When our protagonist Jon (Domnhall Gleeson) joins a strange band called the Soronprfbs that jars him out of his sense of normalcy, you predict that this band will be the key to unlocking his nascent potential.

You've made a mistake. You couldn't be more wrong.

DUMMY: Hollywood's Hand Up Ventriloquism's Butt

In which a ventriloquist's dummy is creepy for one scene and a ventriloquist is creepy for most.

Director: Greg Pritikin

Writer: Greg Pritikin

Cast: Adrien Brody, Milla Jovovich, Vera Farmiga, Illeana Douglas, Jessica Walter, Ron Liebman, Jared Harris

Runtime: 91 mins.

2002

More than anything, Dummy feels like a movie that is unstuck from reality. Temporally speaking, there is little to suggest that the movie was released in 2002. The protagonist is the sort of bumbling man-child living-with-his-parents figure to whom we've grown accustomed in the late 00s and early 10s, but Brody plays the character with a docile earnestness that feels more at home in the 50s. The broad, almost interesting yet still firmly conservative nature of the comedy feels more at home in the 90s, when that sort of thing proliferated. The punk rock sensibilities and screw-the-man attitude displayed by Milla Jovovich's character (and sometimes the movie's tone) are ripped straight from the 80s, while some of the outfits--namely those of Illeana Douglas's character--make you want to sigh, "That's the 70s for you." Cover all this over with a simultaneous love for old-fashioned 20s (or 50s) showmanship and 30s (or 60s) deconstruction of said showmanship, and you get what amounts to a weird niche 2002 comedy picture about an awkward fellow and the dummy that he uses to try to get laid, though the movie would never be so courageous as to put it in those terms.

You can call me out on my awfully vague characterizations of decades that I didn't live through, but the point stands that Dummy suffers from what you could call a confused identity.

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY: Hooked on a Feeling

Director: James Gunn
Writers: James Gunn, Nicole Perlman
Cast: Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Bradley Cooper, Vin Diesel, Dave Bautista, Lee Pace, Michael Rooker, John C. Reilly, Glenn Close, Benicio Del Toro, Karen Gillan, Djimon Hounsou, Sean Gunn
Runtime: 121 mins.
2014

First the numbers.

Guardians of the Galaxy grossed $94 million in its opening weekend. The only 2014 movies to have bigger opening weekends were Transformers: Age of Extinction at $100 million and Captain America: The Winter Soldier at $95 million. More notable is the fact that Guardians managed to accomplish these numbers in August; compared to the triad of May-June-July, August box office numbers are usually slight. In fact, Guardians shattered the previous August opening weekend record, which belonged to The Bourne Ultimatum at $69.3 million. That's a solid $25 million margin.

Perhaps most notable of all, Guardians managed to achieve these astronomical numbers despite not being a sequel or a well-known property. Ticket buyers generally flock to the familiar. Take a look at all the other movies mentioned in the previous paragraph: The Winter Soldier, Ultimatum, and Age of Extinction are the second, third, and fourth movies of their respective franchises. Not only that, but two of them feature well-known protagonists who have achieved widespread cultural penetration over the course of decades, and the third features the protagonist of a series of very popular Ludlum novels. My point is that this cume represents an unprecedented level of financial success for a movie starring characters that almost nobody (including myself) had heard of a year ago. Even The Amazing Spider-Man 2 made less opening weekend cash despite featuring one of the most recognizable characters in pop culture. Part of that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe brand, and part of it is Disney's (impressive) marketing campaign. But I have to believe that a lot of this bottled magic has to do with the movie itself. Guardians of the Galaxy has energy, and it has soul; these qualities bleed through the advertisements, critical acclaim, and word-of-mouth.

So now that we are finished parsing the soulless numbers, let's talk about soul.