comedy

Hits (2015)

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twostar

Earlier this year, when I was complaining about the Academy Awards’ most recent Best Picture winner (Birdman), as people often do, I said “Pitch black misanthropy has worked for comedies like Happiness & Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in the past, but those movies are also, you know, funny. When a film hates all of humanity and only roughly 20% of its jokes land, it’s a remarkably dire experience. Just ask That’s My Boy or Nothing but Trouble. […] If you’re going to believe yourself to be above everyone & everything, you probably should at least succeed in the most basic requirements of your genre.” I still believe that to be true, but my resolve on the subject was somewhat tested by cult comedian David Cross’ directorial debut Hits. Hits was just as misanthropic as Birdman, lashing out at so many different kinds of people that there was seemingly no one left that it didn’t hate, but it was at least occasionally funny, something I didn’t find while watching Birdman. I’m not sure how to consolidate those two reactions & the resulting experience was more discomfort than anything.

“Based on a true story that hasn’t happened yet,” Hits employs a hugely talented cast (including Matt Walsh, David Koechner, Amy Sedaris, and Michael Cera) to attack basically everyone living in America. From right wing, small town yokels who drive big trucks & dream of being interviewed by Ellen Degeneris to mushy, liberal big city “citiots” who sell “feminist theory onesies” & artisanal cardboard, Hits hates everyone. It’s a scathing view of modern American culture where small town men are macho Tea Party dolts, big city liberals are effeminate hipsters, and women are obsessed with conceiving children or selling a sex tape as a means to become famous. Everything is scathing in Hits, but the film can be occasionally funny in its way. How can it not be? There’s too much comedic talent involved for all of the jokes to fall flat. It’s just hard to shake the feeling that the whole thing is hopelessly mean. For example, when a talentless white rapper is embarrassed by his peers (and then the world at large) on YouTube, the movie asks you to laugh. Instead, I felt bad for a teenager being bullied online. Maybe I’ve taken the anti-online bullying sentiment of The DUFF & Unfriended a little too close to heart. Or maybe I’m just not the bitter, hateful person Hits wants me to be.

I think the main problem with Hits’ hateful humor is that no one in the film ever seems even remotely like a real person. The idea of parodying modern Americans’ thirst for Internet fame could play well for black comedy, but when everything feels as fake and two dimensional as it does here, the idea just comes off as cheaply mean. What David Cross loses sight of in Hits is that every personality type depicted in the film, from bleeding heart liberals to secretly racist small town yokels, are actually real people. There’s no humanity in this hateful worldview . . . just hate. Sometimes its hate can be amusing, but without any sign that there’s anything worth being positive about in the world, and with the idea that everything is hopeless & cheap, Hits fails to mean much of anything. Instead, “like a wounded animal, it lashes out at every target within reach.” Even though it’s a lot less expensive & visually ambitious, Hits has what I’ll probably refer to as Birdman Syndrome from now on. The two films have very little in common structurally, but it’s easy to imagine them bitterly complaining to one another in a late night barroom about how the world has gone to shit. Hits just has the slight advantage of being the funnier of the vitriolic pair.

-Brandon Ledet

Apartment Troubles (2015)

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three star

Apartment Troubles is billed as a comedy, which makes sense in some ways. It certainly has a few cameos from comedians of note in it (specifically Jeffrey Tambor, Will Forte, and Megan Mullally). It’s got some typical indie comedy quirks, right down to the struggling artist profession of the protagonists & the CoCoRosie song on the soundtrack. It’s even got some great jokes from time to time, especially from Mullally, who is a hoot as a wealthy drunk who is really into gigantic wine glasses. On the other hand, it’s not an overwhelmingly funny movie, but more of a low-stakes drama that aims more for humorous melancholy than knee-slapping quips & gags. Apartment Troubles might be dressed up like a comedy, but it’s more quietly sad than anything.

The story begins with two NYC roommates confronted with eviction & the sudden death of a pet. As an aspiring actress & a visual artist with wealthy parents, the pair occupies a strange space between well-to-do & dead broke. These are people who can take a private jet to vacation in Los Angeles on a whim, but have to claim that they’re not eating because they’re “cleansing”, when the truth is they can’t afford food. While in LA, the two best friends start to bicker & rub each other the wrong way like an old married couple. At the beginning of the film they’re comfortable enough to ask for the shirt literally off each other’s backs (“Can I wear the shirt that you’re wearing?”), but by the end they’re sickened by each other’s mere presence (“If I feel your breath on my skin for one more minute, I’m going to vomit.”). It’s definitely easier to read this progression as a somber break-up story (between friends) than a riotous indie comedy.

In a void, Apartment Troubles is a pretty okay, low-key movie with some memorable performances in its fleeting Jeffrey Tambor, Will Forte, and Megan Mullally cameos. However it’s difficult not to draw comparisons to other emotionally-stunted NYC twentysomethings media that have been produced lately. If nothing else, I found myself wishing that I was watching Appropriate Behavior a second time instead. I realize this kind of direct comparison is completely unfair & it’s something I already said while reviewing the recent break-up drama X/Y, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Appropriate Behavior was something really special. Apartment Troubles is from the same funny-melancholy NYC break-up wheelhouse, but feels just okay at best. It’s the kind of film that’s pleasant, but destined for lazy afternoon Netflix viewing rather than the big accolades I’m hoping Appropriate Behavior garners.

-Brandon Ledet

The DUFF (2015)

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fourstar

Every time a teen clique comedy is released it suffers by comparison to the towering examples that came before it. By now it’s pretty much been accepted that Heathers was the genre’s prime example of the 1980s, Clueless ruled the 90s, and Mean Girls stole the heart of the 2000s. But what of the current decade? What’s the 2010’s link in that evolutionary chain? Who will step up & take the teen clique torch? Although it’s received little love since its release I was pretty enamored with the 2013 sex comedy The To Do List. It was smart, crass, and above all hilarious, but that doesn’t seem like the exact logical choice. Set in the summer after high school (in the 90s), The To Do List was more concerned with the sexual self-discovery of one character instead of the hierarchal structure of an entire student body. If anything The To Do List was a descendent of the raunchy teen sex comedy, following films like Porky’s & American Pie, and probably the best example of that genre yet. So what of the teen clique flick?

Enter The DUFF. Much like with Heathers, Clueless, and Mean Girls, The DUFF’s main concern is how petty & mean-spirited high school hierarchies can be and just how easily they can be broken down. The only problem with its secession in that chain of teen clique media is that it is very conscious of updating the genre for the 2010s, instead of letting the connection happen naturally. Using cultural markers like YouTube, Instagram, and Tumblr, The DUFF is seemingly dating itself in its own time period on purpose. It also intentionally looks back & borrows so many tropes from high school teen comedies of the past that I’m tempted to say it’s doing it for a laugh. Not only is the protagonist tutoring The Hot Guy in exchange for a makeover that will reveal that their really is a beautiful girl under all the geekery, but there’s also a Big Dance at the end, the Hot Guy totally falls for her, AND she’s writing a big expose about the entire experience for the school paper. Instead of aping just one teen comedy trope, The DUFF goes all in and tries to capture every single one it can.

That’s not to say that the film isn’t funny or original in its own right. With a little help from the always-dependable Allison Janney & the frequently funny Ken Jeong, The DUFF star Mae Whitman has found herself a breakout role here. She is just so damn funny in this movie. After years of watching Whitman kill it in small background roles, (literally fading into the background in the case of Arrested Development), it’s refreshing to see her get so much screen time here. And she owns it. Even with all of the high school movie clichés determining a rigid structure for the film, Whitman finds a way to make it work. A lot of people will be understandably turned off by the idea of the wonderfully talented Whitman starring in a film with a title that translates to “The Designated Ugly Fat Friend”, but the term is treated as an ugly thing within the film and Whitman does not take that shit lying down. When it’s revealed that she is the DUFF of her social circle, less because she is “fat” or “ugly” (she’s not and the movie doesn’t try to make her out to be) and more because she’s a B-Movie dork who’s obsessed with folks like Vincent Price & Bela Lugosi, she strikes back. She breaks off from her group & attempts to find herself with the help of her dumb, hot jock neighbor & eventual love interest.

The meanness of the film’s title matches the meanness of high school in a lot of ways & the script has a smart way of making light of it. Whitman isn’t the only DUFF in the film. There are also goth DUFFs, car DUFFs, and all kinds of DUFFs really. Once the protagonist discovers what she’s believes herself to be seen as, she starts to see other DUFFs everywhere. Her path to self-discovery may be a mere collection of throwback genre clichés, but it’s a tried & true formula that mostly serves as a platform for an onslaught of hilarious jokes. Sure, Whitman gets a makeover she didn’t need (including a straight-faced trying-on-clothes-at-the-mall montage), but she also threatens to murder & castrate anyone who tries to block her path to getting the life & the boy she wants. She’s bullied online, threatened by peers, and told to accept her place, but none of it kills her spirit. In the long run it’s hard to tell if The DUFF will be remembered as a decedent of the Heathers & Mean Girls pedigree (it certainly didn’t make a huge splash at the box office) or of admirable, but lesser teen clique fare like She’s All That & Ten Things I Hate About You, but it’s an easy pick for the best candidate at least since 2010’s Easy A.

-Brandon Ledet

Welcome to Me (2015)

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fourstar

A few years back there were frequently broadcast infomercials advertising a strange novelty product called The Perfect Polly. Polly, in case you somehow don’t remember, was a small plastic bird that would sing & move its head whenever prompted by its motion-activated sensors. The commercial was memorably amusing in the way infomercials sometimes are, especially in its assertions that Polly was a life-like substitute for real parakeets (it wasn’t), but there was more to it than that. It was also deeply sad. A lot of the ad consisted of lonely-looking people, mostly the elderly, interacting with the plastic bird as if it were their only friend in the world. As the narrator cheerily chirps, “By the window or on the shelf, with Perfect Polly you’re never by yourself!” the tone is decidedly dark. It makes total sense, then, the first image you see in the dark comedy Welcome to Me is a television playing the Perfect Polly ad in a lonely woman’s apartment.

An unmedicated recluse with borderline personality disorder, Welcome to Me’s protagonist Alice Klieg spends most of her days memorizing VHS recordings of old Oprah broadcasts alone in her apartment. She has a surprisingly strong support group that includes her parents, her ex-husband & his lover, and an unbelievably selfless best friend, but Alice is still for the most part alone in the world. This changes when she wins the lottery through a magical turn of events (the numbers on her winning ticket are announced in their exact sequence) and rashly decides to spend her new-found fortune by producing her own Oprah-like talk show at a local television station. The station is more than happy to oblige (read: take advantage of) her. Alice’s ambitions are realized and her own self-obsessed talk show, also titled Welcome to Me, begins to snowball in terms of scale & production costs. Described by her mother as an “emotional exhibitionist”, Alice uses the platform to recreate & interact with emotionally traumatic events from her past as well as offer a charmingly blunt brand of TMI like the tidbit, “I’ve been using masturbation as a sedative since 1991.” At first it’s expected that people will react to Alice’s exhibitionism like a jokey, Tim & Eric type of programming, but instead her brutal honesty cuts through the laughter and leaves her audiences stunned, especially by the time she’s cathartically performing veterinary surgeries live on the air.

Much like the Pretty Polly ad that kicks it all off, Welcome to Me starts off as oddly amusing, then goes pitch black in tone, then brings it back around to find a surprisingly strong balance between the two. Kristen Wiig’s central role as Alice might be her greatest performance on record, building off of her usual awkward brand of humor, but tempering it with a nuance that makes Alice deeply empathetic (kind of the way Melissa McCarthy’s schtick culminated in something special with last year’s Tammy). It helps that Wiig is surrounded by a stacked cast of character actors here. Produced by Will Ferrell & Adam McKay, Welcome to Me features supporting roles from Linda Cardellini, Wes Bentley, Jason Marsden, Tim Robbins, Alan Tudyk, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and a delightfully crass Joan Cusack as a no-nonsense television producer. In lesser hands the film could’ve devolved into empty, pointless indie quirk, but instead a much darker sense of humor is struck here and it’s one that hits a lot closer to home than you’d expect, given some of Kristen Wiig’s past work, which is often hilarious, but not always this touching.

-Brandon Ledet

Russell Madness (2015)

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russell mania

fourstar

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Once upon a time Air Bud (known by his friends as “Buddy”) was merely a simple golden retriever with an inordinate talent for playing basketball. Not to be pigeonholed, Buddy gradually proved himself to be more of a canine Bo Jackson than just a run-of-the-mill basketball-playing dog, and found formidable careers in football, soccer, baseball, and volleyball. Even more impressive, Buddy found a way to extend his career beyond the playing field, a struggle that a lot of athletes fail to overcome, and has established a second life as a big-time movie executive. At first, Buddy made his film production choices based solely on nepotism, and released six vanity projects starring his own puppies, in what has been labeled as the Air Buddies series. Now, after seven years of straight-to-DVD movies that featured his offspring venturing into unlikely territory like space travel & supernatural crime fighting, Air Bud has finally gotten back to his roots: sports movies. Branching off from his work with Disney and rebranding his film productions as Air Bud Entertainment, Buddy has finally released his first film that does not feature his own progeny: a pro wrestling comedy called Russell Madness. As evidenced by the film’s prominence on the Air Bud entertainment website & this picture of Buddy working hard as a big time movie executive, he could not be prouder of the results.

As the title indicates, Russell Madness strays from Air Bud Entertainment’s usual preference for golden retriever protagonists by casting a Jack Russell terrier in the titular role of a rescued pound dog who finds fame & fortune in an unexpected pro wrestling career. As the title does not indicate, but as you can see in the film’s trailer, the character’s wrestling name is actually “Russell Mania”, not “Russell Madness”. The phrase “Russell Mania” is repeated constantly throughout the film, echoed even in Russell’s killer entrance music (a vital asset to any pro wrestler), but the phrase “Russell Madness” isn’t uttered even once. Why the name change, you ask? As a shrewd business dog, Air Bud was obviously side-stepping any potential legal conflicts with references to the WWE’s WrestleMania brand, dog-based puns or not. That doesn’t mean that WWE got the last laugh here. Oh, no. Air Bud Entertainment not only kept all of the verbal “Russell Mania” references in its debut feature, but also found more subversive ways to criticize the “sports entertainment” giant that robbed them of their movie’s intended title.

Although Russell Madness does not refer to the WWE directly, again thanks to Buddy’s shrewd business sense, its main conflict is built around a WWE surrogate. In the movie’s folklore, all local & regional wrestling promotions were eaten up by an amoral juggernaut that built its empire by violating long-respected business treaties of non-competition. If this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s exactly how the WWE rose to prominence in the early 80s. Russell Madness even named its fake wrestling promotion the Wrestlers United Federation, or WUF. This not only serves as a reference to WWE’s past as the WWF, but also finds room for another stellar dog pun (“woof”, for those following along), of which there are plenty.  Now that’s efficiency! Just in case that wasn’t enough to drive the point home, a Vince McMahon stand-in, Mick Vaugn (played by Cliff from Cheers), is the evil capitalist head of WUF & makes constant references to his business as more “entertainment” than wrestling. He even goes so far as to ruin the illusion of the “sport”’ by suggesting that (gasp!) the results are fixed and the performers are (double gasp!) only in it for the money.

This little slice of pro wrestling history (with a talking, wrasslin’ dog added for flavor) may seem like familiar territory for even the least committed of marks, but to a child it sounds like ancient history. When the father figure of Russell’s adoptive family recaps the WUF takeover of his own father’s business as a bedtime story, he starts, “Back in his heyday, in a time called ‘The 80s’ . . . “ and instead of imagining the world thirty years ago, his kid (played by one of Mad Men‘s many Bobby Drapers) imagines a sort of dust-covered vaudevillian aesthetic that places the events about a century back. Indeed, even the Ferraro Family Wrestling (an Italian slant on the Guerreros?) arena looks like an ancient vaudevillian theater (that’s in incredible shape for a supposedly blighted building) or as the dad puts it, “midcentury guido”. There’s no denying that this one classy joint, especially once Russell’s family cleans it up & revives the old Ferraro family business. Once again, the comparison between the charming, warmhearted wrestling indies and the cold, mammoth WUF is made clear in how much more character the old-timey digs have than the blue-lit corporate arenas.

At this point it’d be fair for you to have a few lingering questions like, sure the arena is swell, but what about the wrasslin’? And how does a dog even wrestle in the first place? And we know about Russell’s entrance music, but what’s his signature move? First of all, Russell can wrestle. Oh boy can he wrestle. He’s a good boy, yes sir. Who’s a good boy? Russell is. That’s right. As a Jack Russell terrier, Russell obviously isn’t going to be dishing out any suplexes or pile-drivers, but he gets by on some surprisingly adept (CGI-assisted) choke holds and rope work. He may not have the height, strength, charisma, body mass, opposable thumbs, or lung capacity normally associated with pro wrestling’s top acts, but Russell uses his light frame’s aerial abilities to their full advantage and he’s got three very important things than many a wrestling legend have made careers out of in the past: novelty, heart, and raw talent. Of course novelty, heart, and raw talent alone won’t make a champion, but Russell finds a great manager in a (talking!) monkey (voiced by Will Sasso!) who has been haunting the Ferraro Family Wrestling arena since it shut down in the 80s, just waiting for a young talent to shape into a wrestling god. With his monkey manager’s help Russell proves himself champion in a sea of lesser opponents that include a mummy, a cave man, a pirate, a clown, an escaped convict, and a California surfer who says things like “Dude, that’s gnarly.” He even has a unique finisher: he pisses on the competition. It’s not a very physically taxing move, but it is wickedly brutal in its own demoralizing way.

If watching a (talking!) Jack Russell terrier fight his way to the top of the pro wrestling world with the help of his (talking!) monkey manager and a family who loves him sounds like a hokey mess to you, please keep in mind that Air Bud Entertainment is primarily made for children. Russell Madness is just one of the many hokey messes of children’s media, but it’s one with fairly deep love & understanding for both the art of pro wrestling & the art of the pun. Comedy workhorse Fred Willard resurrects his clueless sports announcer role from Best in Show here to deliver some of the best puns of the film, including a personal favorite of mine that involves chimney sweeps. That doesn’t mean he gets to have all the fun, though. Russell even gets a good one in himself when he tells the film’s central heel “I’ve got a bone to pick with you.” Of course, there’s some occasionally tedious humor to the movie that will cause many-a-eye roll (Will Sasso’s literal monkeyshines certainly push it), but that’s to be expected in a straight-to-VOD kid’s movie that was greenlit & produced by a retired-athlete golden retriever. What’s more surprising is how much of Russell Madness strangely works. There’s a particular shot of the child protagonist (Bobby Draper IV) enjoying his birthday cake with a life-size cutout of his absent father that has a particularly strong pathos to it. Also, as silly as the idea of a wrestling dog might be to some people, it works surprisingly well at garnering heat for his opponents. What heel behavior could possibly trump beating up a dog for money?

If you can get past the cheap CGI weirdness, the awful little moving mouths on the talking animals (à la The Voices), and the idea that people would somehow be more impressed by a wrestling dog than a talking monkey with managerial skills, you might find yourself enjoying this little wrestling cinema oddity. Personally, I marked out to the point where I was totally on board with even its most ham-fisted messages like “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight; it’s the size of the fight in the dog,” and “The strongest tag team is family.” Film producer “Air Bud” Buddy may not have touched every heart with his tale of a dog who takes the pro wrestling world by storm and finds a family to call his own (or even got the film title he wanted), but he at least touched my heart. I’m actually not entirely convinced that Russell Madness wasn’t made specifically with me in mind & it’s highly likely that it will remain my favorite “bad” movie of 2015. Once again, Buddy took it to the hoop.

-Brandon Ledet

Bulletproof Monk (2003)

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threehalfstar

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There’s a delicate balance at work in Bulletproof Monk (which easily could also have been titled Tibetan Punk! or Monks & Punks) that a lot of lesser films fail to achieve. Judging solely by the basic monks & punks premise and the cheesy early 00s imagery, it’s by all means a bad movie. At the same time, however, it resists nearly all negative criticism by being such a delightfully goofy bad movie that’s very much self-aware in its vapid silliness. In a lot of ways the film sells itself as a action-comedy cash-in on the cultural & financial success of martial arts choreography-fests The Matrix & Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but it also has its own charms as a unique intellectual property, which are mostly dependent on the natural charisma of its costars Yun-Fat Chow (as the monk) and Seann William Scott (as the punk, naturally).

The story begins in a Tibetan monastery where an elderly monk plays right into the classic one-day-from-retirement trope and is brutally murdered in a hailstorm of bullets. What kind of a bastard would murder a kind, old monk, you ask? Why, a Nazi bastard, of course. In addition to the film’s already preposterous buddy dynamic of a Tibetan punk and a New York City punk, Bulletproof Monk also makes room for aging, power-hungry Nazis, a shirtless British rapper named Mr. Funktastic, and the red-hot daughter of a Russian crime lord. It’s a quite silly hodgepodge of mismatched characters, but they have more in common than you’d expect. For instance, both aging Nazis & shirtless British rappers enjoy hanging out in underground smokeshow lairs that split the aesthetic difference between steampunk & Hot Topic. Also, New York City pickpockets who inexplicable live in millionaires’ apartments above adorable single screen cinemas and pious Tibetan monks both share a deep passion for Crouching Tiger-type martial arts & Matrix-era bullet time, which the former learned from the movie theater and the latter from his lifetime dedication to protecting an ancient scroll that’s incredibly important for some reason or another.

The critical consensus at the time of Bulletproof Monk’s release was that it was a disappointing comedy saved from being a total wash solely by the virtues of Chow Yun-Fat’s martial arts skills. I’m not sure if its campy charms have just improved with time or if I’m just more able than most to excuse a movie’s faults sheerly for the purity of its goofy attitude, but it’s hard for me to fault a movie that features Chow Yun-Fat performing gymnastics on a mid-flight helicopter’s landing gear or the line “Lucky for you this crumpet’s come begging for some of my funktastic love.” Seann William Scott is also surprisingly convincing as a no-good punk with a heart of gold and there are some genuinely striking images of him learning/practicing kung fu in front of a movie screen. Bulletproof Monk may have been a disappointing development for Chow Yun-Fat’s fans after the heights of his John Woo collaborations & career-defining performance in the Oscar-winning Crouching Tiger, but for a fan of goofy buddy comedies, bizarre cultural relics, and Nazi war criminals getting their due, it’s quite a treat & surprisingly just as impervious to criticism as it is to bullets.

-Brandon Ledet

Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead (2015)

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twohalfstar

The ads for the recent horror comedy Wyrmood: Road of the Dead had me expecting a low budget, “sweded” version of Mad Max: Road Warrior, not necessarily because it was filmed in Australia or included the word “Road” in its title, but because of the film’s costume design. The characters were shown suited up in makeshift armor composed of protective sporting gear like hockey masks & football pads, as if they were preparing to play some kind of Mad Max-themed organized sport. Unfortunately, that’s not exactly what’s going on here. Instead, Wyrmood apes a completely different genre franchise: Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead trilogy. Had I better prepared myself for the film’s zany zombie comedy tone, I may enjoyed it slightly more than I did, but there’d still be the underlying problem that at this point in time, the world isn’t in any particular need of another straightforward zombie exercise, goofy or not. There are surely still die-hard fans of the genre that will enjoy Wyrmwood for its undead antics, but for everyone else the film has a lot of potential to feel almost entirely pointless.

That’s not to say there aren’t some original concepts in Wyrmwood’s zombie-infested world. There are some entertainingly outlandish ideas about using zombies as an alternative fuel source, a still-alive human who can control the zombies through a telepathic mental connection, and how a person’s blood type can affect their chances of infection, but a few fresh details aren’t really enough to distinguish the film from the run-of-the mill titles of its genre. This more-of-the-same vibe is most apparent during flashbacks to the initial outbreak, a story we’ve all seen told many, many times before. The best chances the film has of standing out on its own as a unique property are in its goofball humor or its incredible costume design, but as mentioned before, even those elements feel familiar to the work of Army of Darkness’ Sam Raimi or Mad Max’s George Miller. The most unique element in the entirety of the film, then, is a mad scientist who schedules disco breaks in his back-of-a-truck laboratory (when he’s not torturing both the alive & the undead), but his presence isn’t of enough consequence to make too big of an impact.

I’m willing to chalk up my disappointment with Wyrmwood as a personal problem and the film’s. I’m sure there are plenty of people for whom another straightforward zombie comedy sounds like a fun-enough endeavor (even with its preference for CGI blood splatter over practical effects). I’ve even enjoyed a few recent ones myself, like the zom-com titles Warm Bodies & Life After Beth, but I felt like those brought a lot more fresh ideas to the table. Wyrmwood is more concerned with having fun than having something interesting to say, which is a generally admirable approach to any genre, but just doesn’t add up to enough here. It would take someone with a certain level of reverence for the inherent charms of the zombie genre to not mind watching more of the same at this point, goofy antics or not. I just didn’t have it in me.

-Brandon Ledet

Appropriate Behavior (2015)

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fourhalfstar

It’s difficult to describe Appropriate Behavior without using titles like Broad City & Obvious Child as reference points, but those comparisons truly do the film a disservice, as it’s much more emotionally satisfying than either of those titles (both of which I like very much). True, Appropriate Behavior is yet another raunchy, sex-obsessed comedy-drama centered on a New York City woman-child struggling to figure her shit out, but there’s something uniquely direct & honest about its approach to this aesthetic that distinguishes it from its peers. Its authenticity might have a lot to do with the overall strength of the writer/director/actress Desiree Akhavan, who delivers the material as if she’s lived it before, but what’s really arresting is the crippling, all-too-common sadness that anchors the story. The details of the protagonist’s Shirin’s lifestyle & personality may be specific, but her heartache is universal & familiar.

Shirin is a young, bisexual Brooklynite party girl with a journalism degree & Persian heritage. Not everyone is going to relate to certain aspects of her sex life, such as safe-words, strap-ons, group play and hiding her sexuality from her Iranian-born parents.  However, the film’s central romantic conflict is an about as universal as they come. Appropriate Behavior details the depressing, gradual detangling of two people exiting a long term relationship. The film thankfully doesn’t dwell solely on the couple’s post break-up gloom, but instead adopts a flashback structure that allows it to show the former couple in better times, like in a flirtatious exchange when the first meet where Shirin says, “I find your anger incredibly sexy. I hate so many things too.” When the broken relationship Shirin’s mourning is first detailed it looks too toxic to be worth the heartache. The flashbacks reveal that it was at one time something playful, something worth saving. It allows the film to run through the entire cycle of a romantic tryst from first meeting to fucking to fighting to eventual dissolution.

Although the universal relatability of this cycle is what makes the film affecting, it’s the specificity of Shirin’s world that makes it special. The film’s Brooklyn setting provides a lot of room for lampooning of ludicrous personalities like social justice comedians, Kickstarter gurus, pothead businessmen, and absurdly pretentious performance artists. Shirin’s open, playful sexuality is an invitation into a world of group sex, kink play, and drag queens. Her Persian heritage is a window into both the culture’s familial intimacy & rituals as well as its malignant homophobia. At the center of this Venn diagram is a very relatable Shirin. She calls Brooklyn hipsters out on their nonsense, asking  “What is up with your placid disinterest in everything?” She laughs in the faces of people who take their kink play seriously and finds a way to reconcile her sexuality with her family in a somewhat disheartening “don’t ask, don’t tell” type of equilibrium.  A lot of Shirin’s life goals amount to “a good time”, which is more than understandable for a woman in her twenties.

It’s incredible how much Shirin’s zest for fun shines through when Appropriate Behavior finds her in such a dark time. It’s a familiar balance to anyone who’s experienced true heartbreak: trying to party away the pain like it doesn’t matter, but the superficial hedonism always feeling empty. She pretends like she doesn’t care, but she continuously ends up alone & hurt after the high. No matter your relation to the specifics of Shirin’s background & lifestyle, it’s easy to see yourself in her sadness when she curls up in a ball and says, “I’m going to lie here and forget what it feels like to be loved. Could you please turn off the light?” It’s a sadness that feels like it’s never going to fade, but it always does . . . eventually. Shirin can’t move past it until she gets wrapped up in her own project, a distraction that finally allows her to let go of the past. The thing that saves her? An elaborate fart joke. That’s the exact kind of clash between emotional devastation & goofball irreverence that makes Desiree Akhavan’s debut such a strong, relatable film, even for those worlds apart from her protagonist’s exact circumstances.

-Brandon Ledet

Buzzard (2015)

/ swampflix / 5 Comments

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three star

Slacker culture is surely alive & well in 2015, but there was something unavoidably ubiquitous about 90s MTV slacker culture. Pretty much the definition of a low-stakes drama, Buzzard feels oddly old-fashioned in its portrayal of an apathetic underachiever, Marty, who feels like a cultural relic from a bygone lackadaisical era. Cheaply filmed and intentionally flat in style, Buzzard seemingly cares as little as Marty does, echoing his “It doesn’t matter” mantra with every fiber of its being. Buzzard portrays a world of petty victories & major losses where the odds are stacked so highly against Marty that he really has no incentive to try or care about anything and the movie itself has its own apathetic crisis in the same vein.

An angry, depressed loser with a go-nowhere job as a temp for a bank, Marty’s petty victories involve eating junk food, listening to metal, jumping on his bed, watching pornos while wearing a Halloween mask, and scamming suckers for small increments of cash. His half-assed scams typically pay off as long as the person on the other end cares as little about the transactions as he does. The problems that Marty faces only get rolling once the people he’s scamming start to care & take notice of his chump-change crimes. Marty amps up the damages of his mistakes as well when his most significant petty victory of all comes to fruition: a homemade Freddy Krueger glove that gives his “nothing matters” attitude some real-life consequences.

If Buzzard was intentionally looking to cultivate the 90s MTV slacker aesthetic it was astute in including outdated cultural markers like Nintendo NES, CD towers, and Freddy Krueger posters & merchandise. Although its ambitions & style feel like little more than a vintage throwback, its themes exploring the isolation of poverty, corporate culture, and poor mental health still resonate. Although it’s unlikely that Marty will ever approach anything that resembles a “successful” life, it’s still satisfying to watch him achieve short-term goals like the construction of his Krueger glove or eating a massive plate of spaghetti in a luxury hotel room. Due to Marty’s (and Buzzard’s) lack of motivation, regard, or enthusiasm for anything, it’s hard to celebrate too much of his life other than with surface-level observations like “Cool Demons t-shirt, dude,” but in a world where he has very little room to achieve much of anything, that line of shallow praise has considerable amount of significance.

-Brandon Ledet

The Voices (2015)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

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twostar

campstamp

Comedy is risky. If you fail to connect with your audience the time you spend together can be brutal. Just ask any stand-up who’s bombed a set. That disconnect between audience & performer can be even more punishing if the material is aggressive. To succeed, a horror comedy has to find humor in sadism & cruelty and it takes a well-balanced, lighthearted tone to pull that off properly. Curiously enough, The Voices fails even though it nails that balance. There’s a playful party vibe to the movie (complete with a conga line) that counteracts its homicidal maniac narrative very well, achieving the exact kind of tonal balance a horror comedy typically needs to succeed. That makes it all the more frustrating that I just didn’t find it funny and, by extension, didn’t enjoy the movie outside of an occasional chuckle.

The main problem for me personally might just be an over-saturation of Ryan Reynolds. There is just so much Reynolds in the movie. He not only plays the central serial killer protagonist, but also provides the voices that the killer hears in his head, voices he attributes to his cat & dog. The idea of a talking cat & dog inspiring the crimes of a crazed killer sound like it could be played laughs rather well, but it just fails to reach anything approaching humor in The Voices. It’s not that I have anything particular against Ryan Reynolds in general. He has a natural smarm to his charisma that makes him an effective cad in films like Adventureland & Waiting, but whenever he’s supposed to be a likeable protagonist I fail to connect. That connection is made even more difficult here by the hurdles of him playing both a murderer of women and house cat with a Scottish accent. There’s some backstory to his killer protagonist’s childhood, which was plagued by an abusive father & a mother who also heard voices (attributed to angels instead of pets in her case), but it does little to make him likeable or his murderous antics amusing. Much of the film plays as if in Tucker & Dale Vs Evil Tucker & Dale turned out to be coldblooded, homicidal bullies but you were supposed to root for them anyway.

The English-language debut of Persepolis-director Marjane Satrapi, The Voices has so much going for it. Saptari provides the film a delicious living-cartoon setting, a playful atmosphere, and Disney-esque hallucinations that made the tonally similar (but much more amusing & less “on the nose”) Miss Meadows enjoyable, but here it’s all for naught. Even the adorably dorky charisma of Anna Kendrick couldn’t save the film from its core problem of being a failed comedy with an unlikeable ham protagonist. When comedies don’t work there’s just no way for an audience to enjoy themselves. I wish I could’ve laughed at the dialogue coming from Reynolds’ talking pets; I wanted to find them hilarious. Instead I was blankly staring at their stupid, little CGI mouths and hoping for the run time to be over quickly. I’m sure there are plenty of people who will be laughing right along with The Voices’ admirable brand of goofy, black humor, but it’ll be a total chore for whoever finds themselves watching in silence, unamused. Trust me.

-Brandon Ledet