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.

HER: Artificial Emotional Intelligence

In which I am uncharacteristically honest and sensitive.

Director: Spike Jonze
Writer: Spike Jonze
Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Scarlett Johansson, Amy Adams, Rooney Mara, Chris Pratt, Olivia Wilde
Runtime: 126 mins.
2013

I try to sound smart on my movie blog. I try to identify and engage with what I deem to be the key aspects of any given movie. I talk about things I know a little bit about, like performance or story. I talk about things I really know nothing about, like sound design or editing or cinematography. I try to be honest. But perhaps more than that I try not to sound stupid or inane.

I do this because I'm afraid of being wrong. That has always been my fear. So I try to make ironclad arguments instead of tossing out a bunch of unsystematic sensory impressions. Sometimes, during the act of watching a movie, I am already formulating what sort of points or narrative I want to craft in a potential future post.

That's probably the right tactic for a movie blog, but it's not the conversation I want to have about Her. The golden rule of criticism should be to approach a piece of art or entertainment on its own terms, and evaluate how successful it is within those parameters. As I was watching Her, it became apparent that the right way to talk about the movie would be to share how it impacted me on a personal level.

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.

OBVIOUS CHILD: Laughing Ladies

Director: Gillian Robespierre
Writer: Gillian Robespierre
Cast: Jenny Slate, Jake Lacy, Gaby Hoffman, Gave Liedman, David Cross, Richard Kind, Polly Draper
Runtime: 84 mins.
2014

"It was nice to be able to enjoy a comedy movie all the way through without once feeling uncomfortable about its treatment of women."

So said one of the friends with whom I saw Obvious Child. Can you imagine that? If every single comedy film you watched made you feel not only uncomfortable, but personally attacked? As if the movie is having a joke at your expense, and you're not invited to laugh? You would have to go into every comedy film with a certain amount of trepidation, or at least wariness. You would feel like you need to become expert at shrugging it off so as not to be the wet blanket of the post-movie discussion of best lines and funniest moments; you would fail at shrugging it off.

I'm not saying that's how it is for everybody, but it's the status quo for a whole lot of women who watch comedies. Luckily there are exceptions. And if I feel like Obvious Child is a breath of fresh air, I can't even conceive how fresh and funny it must feel to its female audience.

DRINKING BUDDIES: Empty Calories

Director: Joe Swanberg
Writer: Joe Swanberg
Cast: Olivia Wilde, Jake Johnson, Anna Kendrick, Ron Livingston, Jason Sudeikis
Runtime: 90 mins.
2013

Critics have embraced Drinking Buddies as an example of mumblecore hitting the mainstream: a mostly improvised romantic comedy that taps into the charming banality of relationships in an understated way that is rare for the often bombastic, overstated medium of film.

I suppose it is that.  Unfortunately, I also found it to be one of the duller movies I've seen in recent memory.