linda cardellini

Dead Man on Campus (1998)

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TW: Suicide, throughout

When recently writing about middling campus thriller The Curve, several people commented that they thought that film was called Dead Man on Campus; in fact, The Curve was previously titled Dead Man’s Curve and its title was changed to avoid just that confusion. Both came out in 1998, both feature a serious scholarship student paired with a perpetually manic roommate, and both feature plots that are predicated on the urban legend that the roommate(s) of any college student who commits suicide automatically passes their classes that semester. Whereas The Curve was rarely intentionally funny and attempted a kind of campus noir that fails to be compelling, Dead Man on Campus is an outright comedy, from the creative team that would four years later release a personal favorite, Pumpkin. Pumpkin director Anthony Abrams is on the writing side this time, co-penning this one with future Pumpkin co-writer Adam Larson Broder and Michael Traeger. This one errs a little broader than Pumpkin‘s melodrama satire but has a lot of the same semi-sequitur one-liners, slapstick treated with unblinking stoicism, and invoked tonal whiplash. 

Josh (Tom Everett Scott) is an incoming student attending a prestigious northeastern university on a scholarship, on a pre-med track with a heavy, difficult course load. In the dorms, he’s placed into a suite with non-stop party machine Cooper (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) and hair-trigger Catholic rage jock Kyle (Jason Segel). Kyle pairs off with a girl he meets at a party (Linda Cardellini) and moves in with her, leaving Josh and Cooper with a spare room. Josh loses some of his academic focus when Cooper introduces him to Rachel (Poppy Montgomery), a creative writing student with whom he hits it off, and Cooper’s lackadaisical attitude rubs off on Josh a little too hard. By midterms, both are failing, with doomed prospects on the horizon: Josh will lose his scholarship and drop out of school, and Cooper’s father will stop paying his tuition and force him to start at an entry level position in the family custodial business. Cooper, upon hearing the urban legend about automatic A grades for the roommates of students who take their own life, forces Josh to accompany him to break into the library and review the school charter to see if this rule actually exists, and, upon learning that it does, hatches a scheme to use Josh’s student job at the housing office to file paperwork to move a suicidal person into the vacant room and wait things out, possibly even pushing over a domino or two. Josh is initially horrified, but is ultimately convinced to join in, and they set their sights on a few prospects: untameable frat moron Cliff (Lochlyn Munro), paranoid Unabomber-esque Buckley (Randy Pearlstein), and depressed British goth rocker Matt (Corey Page). 

Like Pumpkin, Dead Man on Campus is a tasteless movie, but I have an appetite for tasteless movies, especially ones that are as willing to go all in like this one does. Through a modern lens, it’s insensitive (and may even have been so for the time), but its insensitivity reads more as irreverence than edginess, and at times it verges on prescience … for the most part. The film’s weakest link is the first contender that the boys select; he’s loud, brash, oversexed, dim-witted, and within the already wacky reality of the film, he stands out as a particularly poorly placed element, like he dropped in from National Lampoon’s Van Wilder. It’s a pretty small role, but Alyson Hannigan is here as one of Rachel’s roommates, and Cliff immediately asks “Which one is for [him]?” from among the women, getting so amped up to share a bong with her that he lights her hair on fire (Hannigan has her longer ‘do from Buffy seasons 1 and 2 here), and it feels like it’s presaging some of the indignities that she’ll experience over the course of the American Pie movies, but less funny (or that she’ll find herself in in Date Movie, but funnier). In a film that’s mostly raucous and only occasionally raunchy, Cliff’s scenes are the weakest. Gosselaar toes the line with Cooper; he’s also obnoxious, but it’s more moderate. It’s as if Gosselaar is aping the title character of Parker Lewis Can’t Lose but can’t quite break free from Saved by the Bell‘s Zack and ends up annoying, but there’s a certain Bugs Bunny-esque playfulness to his frenetic energy that keeps him from crossing the line into being too annoying. 

The second and third contenders that the boys select are much better suited to the film’s tone. Conspiracy theorist Buckley is a lot of fun, down to the choices in set dressing (his dorm room is adorned with black and white posters of … himself). Even though this film is from the pre-9/11 time when conspiracy theories were just some nonsense that your older stoner friend would prattle on about and not matters of legislation in a crumbling empire, Buckley manages to spout some ideas that wouldn’t be unreasonable to hear (from morons) in this day and age; notably, he believes that he is being stalked by Bill Gates, who wants to steal the rest of his brain (having already stolen half of it when Buckley fell asleep in a Gateway store). The way that Josh and Cooper convince him to move in with them, which includes Josh dressing up in a hazmat suit and spraying water on the plants outside of Buckley’s first dorm building, hits the right level of absurdity, and it’s a welcome change after suffering through the Cliff portions. All of the boys’ interactions with third contender Matt are even funnier once it’s revealed that his suicidal ideology is all an act to seem more mysterious as a tragic musician, and I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of making fun of self-flagellating college-aged artists. Some sample lyrics for Kiss My Ass, Matt’s band, include the utterly self-satisfied lines “My words are my sperm/Spewing forth my tragic germ/I’m dying to kiss you/I soil the tissue.” That’s art, baby. 

The movie is not without other weaknesses outside of Cliff. Things get a little saccharine at the climax, and it’s not handled as deftly as it would be later in Pumpkin; just compare any of the maudlin-to-the-point-of-ridicule scenes that make up that film’s finale with the mostly-played-straight conclusion to this one. The romance between Josh and Rachel also feels a bit tacked-on, and Poppy Montgomery is largely wasted in a shallow role. That Josh could fall into drinking and partying without the temptation to spend time with her makes it so that she could largely be excised from the plot, especially as her later actions—giving Josh a copy of her short story to read and then being disappointed that he didn’t—do nothing to put more pressure on Josh than he is already under. It’s ridiculous that she’s third billed and is less memorable than Hannigan, who at least has a later role in the film when she arrives at a party in a ridiculous wig. Still, if you saw The Curve and thought it would work better as an irreverent comedy, or if you’re itching for something in the vein of Pumpkin and are willing to accept the diet cola version, this one’s out there waiting for you. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Capone (2020)

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I’m not sure that Josh Trank bounced back from his career-imploding misfire Fant4stic (2015) with a better film, but he’s certainly returning to the scene with a more memorable & entertaining one. Trank’s misshapen Al Capone biopic stands alone in a genre defined only one other film to date: Venom (2018), by which I mean it’s a tragically bland nothing of a movie that Tom Hardy’s bizarro performance transforms into a riotous good time through sheer force of will. Trank wrote, directed, and edited Capone himself, so you think you’d be able to credit some of the film’s entertainment value to his guiding hand. Yet, his dialogue, direction, and editing choices are all so aggressively uninteresting that it’s a miracle any audience could sit through the entire picture without slipping into a coma. Tom Hardy alone is the source of that miracle, and it’s his batshit performance that transforms Capone into something truly remarkable, even if just remarkably laughable.

Capone covers only the final year of the notorious gangster’s life, which he spent under house arrest while left senile by neurosyphilis at the age of 48. Trank attempts to use this syphilitic madness as a device that allows the narrative to surreally drift through time & space as Capone’s mind wanders through his own memories, feeling immense guilt over the violence he commissioned at the height of his Chicago crime boss days. There’s no sense of purpose or immersive atmosphere to these drifts through Capone’s subconscious, though. When the movie’s over you’re left pondering if it had anything to say about violence, guilt, syphilis, Capone, or anything at all. The movie has no discernible reason to exist except in giving Tom Hardy the freedom to run wild in the titular role. Luckily for Trank, Hardy more than makes up for any & all filmmaking deficiencies by turning Capone into a one-man freak show. Against all odds, the film truly is a spectacle.

With none of the film’s stylistic or narrative elements being compelling enough to get in his way, Tom Hardy is given the greenlight to transform Capone into a series of Nic Cagian stunts. His demented vision of the titular gangster is horrifically grotesque. He mumbles incoherently in a garbled growl more appropriate for a talking trash can than a human being. He dresses in old biddy drag, fires pistols at alligators, belts out his showtunes from The Wizard of Oz, and fires a gold-plated Tommy gun at his friends & family while aimlessly wandering the grounds of his mansion in a soiled diaper. Admittedly, all these stunts were written into the screenplay, so it’s not as if Hardy ad-libbed the film’s saving graces. He’s just responsible for making them fun to watch in a bewildering sideshow act kind of way that we normally only allow Nic Cage to perform. It has got to be the most compelling, amusingly outrageous performance you’ll ever see where a main character pisses, shits, and pukes themselves for the entire runtime while staring directly at the audience with grotesquely bloodshot eyes.

I’m embarrassed by how much fun I had with Capone. By most reasonable metrics, it’s a terrible film, one that’s only dragged down by the eye-rolling decisions made by its commanding auteur. Why hire El-P to produce a score if his work is going to be so anonymous that the audience forgets that factoid immediately after seeing his name in the opening credits? Why cast eternally loveable performers like Linda Cardellini & Kyle MaClachlan just so they can sit around watching Tom Hardy do his thing? Why the fuck do you think the world needs a ~spooky~ rendition of Louis Armstrong’s “Blueberry Hill?” Who is any of this for? It ultimately doesn’t matter. All things considered, this is a much more memorable, entertaining, and overly ambitious take on the pathetic-mobster-geezer-regretting-his-evil-deeds story than the infinitely more competent The Irishman, so it really doesn’t matter how it got there. I would watch Tom Hardy shit his pants on an infinite loop if the results were always going to be this fun.

-Brandon Ledet

A Simple Favor (2018)

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Paul Feig is a strange animal. Freaks and Geeks is classic television, Bridesmaids is certainly popular even though I couldn’t quite get into it, and I’m probably one of the eight people in the world who saw Other Space, and I really, really enjoyed it (I’m still over here waiting for Karan Soni to really and truly break out). Never was Paul Feig’s eccentricity more clear to me than in the recent (all-too-brief) resurgence of The Soup under the Netflix banner as The Joel McHale Show with Joel McHale. Feig, who was a producer of TJMSWJM, appeared in every single episode. There was a lot that was . . . off about TJMSWJM. The Soup‘s recurring characters appeared organically as part of sketches and happened to reappear only if there was a reason or they struck a chord with the audience, while TJMSWJM seemed to be forcing new characters onto the show without any rhyme or reason and segments like “That Happened,” while occasionally funny, were completely tone deaf about who the show’s demographic was and who they wanted to appeal to. If there was one element of The Soup that I would have forsaken when rebooting, it would have been the once-per-episode celebrity appearances; TJMSWJM actually compounded this problem, as each time Feig appeared on screen, the show ground to a halt (although I did get a kick out of him using the money gun in the finale). I like him, I think that he has a great sense of humor, and you’d be hard pressed to find a white man in the business who is so consistently and effectively using his privilege to promote women in the industry, but I also feel that he has the problem that some comedians I know personally have, which is an inability to recognize when something doesn’t quite work. In short, I’m not sure that Feig knows how to kill his darlings.

A Simple Favor is one of his least uneven films. There are still some comedic moments in it that feel very out of place; the worst offender in the film comes at the conclusion, when a comic bit of action happens and a very minor character reappears to say a terrible line, which is then followed by several much-better lines from our main characters. It stands out because, for the most part, the comic timing in the film is pretty perfect, but when it clunks, it clunks hard, in a way that is more noticeable than in some of his other work since this one is much more intricately plotted.

Widowed single mother Stephanie Smothers (Anna Kendrick) is a mommy vlogger whose son Miles befriends his classmate Nicky, which leads to Stephanie entering into an unequal friendship with Emily Nelson (Blake Lively, giving the best performance of her career). Emily is the PR manager for a fashion house that is run by your standard fashion mogul type, and her ultramodern home, huge income, hands-off parenting, hard drinking, and high fashion conflict with Stephanie’s tendency to commit to every school event, her recognition that her late husband’s insurance money will soon run out, and her felt-and-pompom arts and crafts aesthetic (although she does wear this cat study Anthropologie apron, which I recognized because don’t ask, so she’s more “Hollywood broke” than “real world poor”). Emily’s husband Sean (Crazy Rich Asians‘s Henry Golding) is a failed writer who teaches at a local institution, although Stephanie read his only novel as part of her book club years before. As their friendship grows (at least on Stephanie’s part), Emily elicits a dark secret from Stephanie under the guise of compassion and interest before asking her to pick up both boys one afternoon. Then Emily . . . disappears.

The police initially suspect Sean, but his alibi is solid. When evidence starts to point toward suicide, Stephanie refuses to believe it and launches into her own investigation, winding into and out of the lives of such disparate people as Sean’s T.A. (Melissa O’Neil, who I’ve been sorely missing since the unfortunate cancellation of Dark Matter), a painter who was once Emily’s lover (the ever-wonderful Linda Cardellini), and Emily’s dementia-afflicted mother (Jean Smart, always a pleasure). Her investigation leads her to the offices of fashion magnate Dennis Nylon, a Christian summer camp, a burned-out wing of a formerly glorious mansion, and even Emily’s gravesite. Emily–if that’s even her name–was not who she seemed to be. But then again, maybe Stephanie isn’t either . . .

Multiple reviews of A Simple Favor have drawn comparisons to the 2014 thriller Gone Girl, and with good reason, especially given that the film’s marketing seems to place it firmly in the largely humorless thriller genre (if there’s any way to describe Gone Girl, “humorless” is pretty high up there on the list). What appears to be taking audiences by surprise is A Simple Favor‘s comedic lightheartedness amidst all the sociopathy, implied and explicit violence, half-incest, debatable paternity, and arson. There’s a lot going on, but it’s never overwhelming, and if you’ve ever seen one of these movies before then there will be revelations that will lead you say, “Oh, I know where this is going,” and then the film promptly goes there. Regardless, there are still a few surprises buried in its bones, and the performances are strong enough to carry the film even when it seems to be simply following the outline of thrillers of this ilk. As noted above, this is probably the first film in which I’ve really been thrilled by a performance from Lively; I know that her shark movie was well received around these parts, but after Oliver Stone’s Savages I had no interest in another Lively vehicle. She’s really dynamic here, and it’s fantastic.

The only real problems in the film are the moments in which the comedy doesn’t land. Unfortunately, it’s the more ostentatious (and dare I say more Feigian) humor that thuds lifelessly on screen, and unfortunately those moments are more memorable than the praiseworthy subtle humor that’s woven throughout. Still, the actors and the French pop music lift the film when the plot starts to flail, and it would be a mistake to let this curiosity slip into obscurity without giving it a watch.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Grandma’s Boy (2006)

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EPSON MFP image

threehalfstar

(Unrated edition, viewed 9/8/2015)

Starts slow, but delivers consistent lowbrow humor. Predictable, but a solid entry for its genre.

Allen Covert puts in a dopey but lovable performance as Alex, a middle aged video game tester who moves in with his titular Grandma after losing his apartment. He finds himself learning to navigate life with his new elderly roommates (wonderfully fun performances by Doris Roberts, Shirley Jones, and Shirley Knight), the challenges of working with a company of gamers, and his affection for the new project manager, played by Linda Cardellini. Throw in a few gross-out gags, a hefty dose of stoner humor and a cameo by Rob Schneider, and you’ve got the regular Adam Sandler formula.

Grandma’s Boy works pretty well. Interestingly enough, it manages to pull off a convincing bait-and-switch with the main character, Alex. Alex begins the film as a schlubby loser, difficult to like and not easy to root for. By the end of the movie, he’s a goofy, kind protagonist who works hard to keep his Grandma happy, develop his own video game, and win the girl. There isn’t a single other twist in the entire movie, and that’s ok.

I recommend this movie to viewers looking for a stoner flick that’s engaging, if lowbrow, without being thought-provoking. Not a bad pizza night or sick day movie.

-Erin Kinchen