New comedies and other home movie watching fun
I often wonder if a movie I watch at home has to clear a lower bar than a movie I see at the theater.
72 Hours, a new Netflix comedy starring Kevin Hart, feels like it might have been excruciating to watch in a theater. Viewed at home, where I can pause to get a popcorn refill, it is merely very bad — so, evidence of lower bar? Or did I just suffer less?
Hart, who is 47 in real life, plays 40-year-old Joe, a marketing executive gunning for a promotion but failing to wow the room with his latest vodka commercial, which has “how do you do, fellow kids” stink lines wafting off it. How do I pitch to Gen Z? thinks this millennial. Coincidentally, that very day he was also accidentally included in a group chat of 20something dudes headed to Miami for a bachelor party. Because he Venmoed them some drinking money after making fun of their posts, they off-handedly invited him to come along. Failing at work and in a dumb fight with his girlfriend (Teyana Taylor, who I hope was paid really well), Joe decides that he will indeed show up for this stranger’s party weekend, offering to upgrade their rental house and overall experience in exchange for their including him. The bros — groom-to-be Mason (Mason Gooding), his “this is all he’s got in his life right now” buddy Nick (Marcello Hernández), the mourning-a-breakup Hunter (Ben Marshall) and good-natured dummy Freshman (Kam Patterson) — think it’s all very weird but they decide to go with it to have someone pay for a limo.
The movie also piles on gangsters, a subplot where Joe is forced to do cocaine and turns into a Scarface knock-off and a gang of girl criminals posing as a bachelorette party. It feels like someone felt the core comedy situation here wasn’t working so they added on a dozen other things. Which also don’t work.
Here are the “at home” points that I might have been too annoyed to award at a theater: Marcello Hernández is inherently funny and even though this movie doesn’t give him much of a character, he does get a few good lines in. Fun line readings, limited though they are, are doled out to most of the group of bros. Also, maybe one in 10 of the “Millennials versus Zoomers” jokes is a “ha, cute” level of funny.
I feel like the vanity of Kevin Hart — or maybe the writers’ desires to keep him a hero — gets in the way. Born in 1979, real life Hart is a younger Gen X person. Why not have him play his actual age, or older even, to widen the cultural divide? Or why not have him play a younger millennial, experiencing that first existentially painful taste of not being on trend? Why not make him more desperate — the movie doesn’t really go as hard as it could on the weirdness of Joe and his situation. I don’t know that weirding up the movie would have fixed all its problems but it probably couldn’t have made it worse.
For an example of what the tartness of an unself-aware weirdo can bring to a comedy, check out The Dink, on Apple TV, which stars Jake Johnson playing the New Girl’s Nick Miller variant that he does so well.
Here, he is Dusty Boyd, a one-time tennis star whose career ended in his teens after an injury. Now working as a pro at the tennis club his father Chuck (Ed Harris) manages, Dusty is still trying to dine out on his old glories, with fellow employee PJ (Aaron Chen) serving as just enough of a hype man to keep his delusion going. But then Dusty reinjures his wrist and is sent to a doctor (Ben Stiller in a fun cameo part) who suggests Dusty play pickleball to help recover. Dusty, like his father, thinks pickleball is a dorky, not-a-sport endeavor — even though the pickleball crowd (led by Patton Oswalt) is demanding more court space at the club. Dusty plays his first doubles game against retired ladies Gail (Cleo King, who puts extra mustard on her part) and Judy (Lynne Marie Stewart) with his partner Candace (Mary Steenburgen), a woman he first met when he kicked her out of the club for hitting her pickleball into the tennis courts. He hates the game and thinks it’s stupid and, of course, jumps at the chance for a rematch. He also strikes up a friendship with Candace, who is recently divorced and trying to figure things out and is willing to meet him for late night pickleball when he needs some mind-clearing competition.
Even Candace, who admits that, post-divorce, she bought a snake and unsuccessfully attempted pottery, gets to be weird here and I think that helps with this pretty standard sports story that leads up to a big game and a sort of redemption. This movie is lightweight and not terribly taxing but enjoyable enough.
April release The Devil Wears Prada 2 (rent or purchase and as of July 29 streaming on Hulu and Disney+) is a meatier watch. Andy Sacks (Anne Hathaway) did in fact become the important serious journalist she wanted to be back in the 2006 original. And, like so many important serious journalists these days, she gets laid off from her newspaper, in her case via text while accepting a journalism award, giving her an opportunity to go viral tearfully proclaiming that journalism still matters. Meanwhile, Runway magazine, the Vogue-stand-in where she worked her first post-college job, is dealing with a scandal related to a recent story about a fashion brand that turned out to be running a sweatshop. Needing some of Andy’s integrity shine, Runway’s parent company boss, still Irv (Tibor Feldman) from the last movie, hires her to be the features editor — a fact Runway editor Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) learns on Andy’s first day of work.
The Devil Wears Prada 2 is a delightfully catty, well-attended, beautiful-to-look-at funeral for a beloved friend, is how I felt watching it. Stanley Tucci and Emily Blunt return (as does Tracie Thoms as Andy’s freebie-bag loving friend) and we get newcomers Justin Theroux and B.J. Novak as two different flavors of modern monsters; Lucy Liu and Kenneth Branagh as two different flavors of decency, and Simone Ashley, Caleb Hearon and Helen J. Shen as Kids Today. And everybody is great and fun to watch and does just enough without doing too much. There are some lovely clothes and some good jokes and a nice visual gag about the two belts that looked so different. But throughout I felt an ache at the passing of magazines and newspapers and the desperate condition of those who are left. The constant attempts to save Runway are aimed at saving something that several characters say is a shell of itself — in the real world it would probably be some kind of bi-monthly-ish affair that might still have a September issue but also put out issues labeled just “Winter.”
There is a nice Hollywood spin on this story that, like a lottery ticket and its “maybe it will be me,” feels both fantastical and just plausible enough that, you know, it could happen. And it feels nice watching a fairy tale ending that is actually more about the joys of a career making a print product and female friendship than a romance. On one level, I enjoyed this movie and had a good time watching it. On another level, sniff.
Remarkably Bright Creatures is another movie I avoided seeing when it came out on Netflix in May, largely because My Octopus Teacher and its Oscar win over better documentaries had me wary of schmoopy octopus movies. And, make no mistake, this is a schmoopy octopus movie, but I rather enjoyed its gentle weepy drama and the performances by Sally Field and Lewis Pullman — and Alfred Molina, voicing the octopus Marcellus, who isn’t particularly impressed with his human captors. He does have some fondness for Tova (Field), the woman who works nights cleaning the aquarium where he lives, giving a proper shine to his tank and talking to him all the while. When she injures her ankle putting Marcellus back in his tank — he likes to squidge out of his tank and wander around, eating some of the other exhibited marine life — the aquarium hires Cameron (Pullman) to fill in. Cameron is passing through town looking for the father he never met. When his van, where he is also sleeping, breaks down, he’s eager for the temp work to pay the repair bill. Tova is at first not impressed with Cameron’s mediocre cleaning skills but she teaches him the “right way” to do the job and introduces him to Marcellus, who also begins to have an irritated fondness for Cameron. Humans with their clumsy interpersonal skills are, Marcellus tells us, rather a dense bunch.
This movie is very pleasant, which I know sounds like faint praise but when paired with the lovely Pacific Northwest scenery and the very beautiful cabin-like home Tova lives in makes for a nice relaxing bit of chillout.
After many weeks in theaters, May release Backrooms is nearing $400 million in worldwide box office and is now available for rent or purchase. This A24 horror-I-guess movie has many claims to fame including its less than $10 million reported production cost and its director, Kane Parsons, who was 20 at the time of its release, according to Wikipedia. And all of that is great, sincerely, both for film now, with this summer’s hopeful box office and the constant need for some non-IP wins, and for the future, since it will encourage production companies and studios to keep taking the occasional chance on weird stuff. About the movie itself, my feelings are more complicated.
Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the depressed owner of a furniture store who is drinking his way through a divorce, finds a portal to somewhere one night in his store in the 1990s. When he walks through a particular spot in his store’s seemingly solid wall, he finds himself in another room, a mostly empty room with a pile of furniture at its center. That room leads to other rooms, all mostly empty, like a hastily abandoned office space that might still have a desk or a sofa or a stop sign or a cardboard cutout of a caveman that seems to be playing a recording of people speaking multiple languages — you know, normal stuff. The rooms are all lit by fluorescent lights giving off a kind of depressing brightness but that also flicker as he walks through hallways and into new rooms, some of which have tiny doors or slanted floors that at first seem like tricks of perspective. When he hears and almost sees what seems to be another being, he runs back to his store and apparently returns often enough that he is able to draw a map of this new space.
When he tells his therapist Mary (Renate Reinsve) about all this, her unbelieving reaction spurs Clark to bring his employee Kat (Lukita Maxwell) and her boyfriend, Bobby (Finn Bennett), who has a video camera, to the store to witness and record what he is seeing.
This movie’s real talent is creating mood, putting you in a place not unlike a nightmare, where spatial relationships don’t always make sense and people and objects don’t look correct. In some rooms, furniture doesn’t sit on the floor but more looks like, Star Trek-style, it has transported into it. Half a sofa sticks out of the floor as parts of a chair stick out of the wall. The emptiness and the room-into-room is disconcerting, the furniture is unsettling but then the sense that a not-fully-seen thing might be lurking is terrifying at a core level. It’s a really well constructed, layered kind of terror that this movie sets up. I feel like the movie sort of stops with the set-up; the resolution, such as it is, feels kind of floppy comparatively. But that quiet, slow-motion panic created by wandering through rooms and halls into doors, that’s pretty impressive.
Another vibes-forward movie capturing more of a sense of the world than its literal reality is I Love Boosters, written and directed by Boots Riley and available for rent or purchase after a May theatrical release (that seems tiny, based on its Wikipedia description). Buddies Corvette (Keke Palmer), Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige) are the leaders of a crew of boosters called the Velvet Gang — along with a few other members providing distractions and get-away driving, the ladies steal clothes from a medium high-end chain run by designer Christie Smith (Demi Moore). When selling these clothes at pop-up sales in their neighborhood, the women seem to both be eager to turn a reasonable profit and feel like they’re offering access to fashion to a community that needs it. If Corvette seems a little mopey about the whole thing, perhaps it’s because she also wants to design clothes and Christie isn’t just a mark but also an idol to her. Or she is until Corvette learns some things about Christie, including that, according to Jianhu (Poppy Liu), another woman doing some boosting, the Chinese factory where Christie’s clothes are made treats the workers terribly, constantly increasing the speeds at which they’re expected to work and getting workers sick due to the “sand-basted denim” process. Jianhu is in the booster game for a little righteous revenge and while she doesn’t have a crew she does have a device that can transport all of the items out of the store in seconds.
There is also a supernaturally hot and intense LaKeith Stanfield and a Ponzi-scheme operator played by Don Cheadle and Eiza Gonzalez as a labor organizer, radicalized when her boss (Will Poulter) explains that she must wear Christie Smith clothes for work and their cost will be taken out of her salary.
Its bendy approach to reality and unrestrained use of color make I Love Boosters a treat to watch and also help deliver a rather warm and fuzzy message about people coming together to support friends, coworkers and a wider community to make change. It’s heartwarming, which is unexpected for a movie with a goofy, very R-rated subplot about Stanfield’s character and a delightful spikey performance from Moore.
Female friendship is also at the core of Ride or Die, an eight-episode series released on Prime Video in July and starring Octavia Spencer and Hannah Waddingham. Debbie (Spencer) is the American wife of a British politician who has long put her own career on hold. Her best friend is Judith (Waddingham), a forensic accountant — so she says. Actually, Judith is an assassin trained to have no emotional attachments but who has long nurtured and protected her friendship with Debbie, the one “real” thing in her life. When Judith’s new assignment turns out to involve Debbie’s terrible husband (Jamie Parker), Judith and Debbie soon find themselves on the run from assorted intelligence agencies and the mob, with their friendship on the ropes as Debbie is horrified to learn what Judith actually does.
Waddingham and Spencer have nice long-time friend chemistry — you buy that they can love each other, be mad at each other and work together all at the same time. Debbie might be a civilian but she has useful skills of her own and their work to find their way out of their potentially deadly situation truly is a buddy endeavor. This maybe didn’t need to be a series, might have been more energetic as a movie, but it makes for a nice watch nonetheless.
Released on Prime Video in January, The Wrecking Crew is perfect for when you just need two hours of dumb goofery to cradle you in its beefy tattooed arms. Navy super soldier James (Dave Bautista) and his half-brother cop Jonny (Jason Momoa) annoyedly reunite in Hawaii after years of estrangement when their father, a private detective, dies in suspicious circumstances. Through their bickering and with the help of their cousin Nani (Frankie Adams), James’ wife Leila (Roimata Fox), Jonny’s ex Valentina (Morena Baccarin) and their father’s assistant Pika (Jacob Batalon), the two anger various mobs to uncover a skeevy plan involving business man Marcus Robichaux (Claes Bang). Explosions, fist fights, shootouts and car smash-ups are sewn together by insults and visual comedy about the size of Momoa and Bautista — and it’s all great. I mean, dumb but great. Momoa is quite skilled at being this kind of a character, mixing in the right bit of silliness with his whole “Hulk smash” deal. He and Bautista, here playing the straight man, work well together, with their “muscle vs. muscle”-ness creating something much lighter and sillier than when they play the muscle men individually.
Featured photo: 72 Hours.
