B+ | Two slackers get stuck in a time loop at a desert wedding. Directed by Max Barbakow Starring Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti Review by Jon Kissel |
For time-loop movies, all live in the shadow of obvious gold standard, Groundhog Day. Howard Ramis’ Bill Murray vehicle is beloved by pretty much everyone, up to and including religious scholars who teach it in universities. Its descendant, Palm Springs, likely won’t be showing up on any syllabi, but it stays true to Groundhog Day’s melding of humor with emotion, slapstick with philosophy. On the other hand, if Ned Ryerson can live in perpetuity, I don’t see why Cristin Milioti fluffing a biker’s mullet can’t also join the pantheon.
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An American Pickle has several ways it could go. In Brandon Trost’s directorial debut, a dual starring role for Seth Rogen as a Jewish immigrant put in pickle brine stasis for a century and reunited with his great-grandson, there’s the natural path of fish out of water comedy that morphs into something more heartfelt once the modern-day eccentricity jokes wear out their welcome. To the film’s credit, this obvious path is eschewed in favor of a comedy of rivals, where both Rogen characters attempt to sabotage each other. Not making easy choices, however, doesn’t make the end result anything worth praising when it’s this clunky. What good is it to go off the beaten path when this new path is filled with lazy observational humor, contrived scenarios, and tired millennial gags?
Brian De Palma, one of 70’s cinema’s greatest pervs, goes oddly mainstream with The Untouchables. Doubly odd in how its script is written by David Mamet of all people, the film seems like two idiosyncratic creators reaching for popular success. They achieved it on the awards circuit and at the box office, but while this movie might have been thrilling in 1987, it’s now rote and almost boring in its predictability and its ridiculousness. The Untouchables has De Palma’s knack for composition and Mamet’s utility with a resonant line, and that’s about it.
John Carpenter’s The Thing, a body horror paranoid thriller with a bleak ending, could only be pitched more directly at this viewer if it was set during the French Revolution. This is a staple of 80’s genre cinema and remains thoroughly watchable almost 40 years after its release. After several viewings, it still prompts winces and cackles, and remains a great film to watch in a group, peering over at the uninitiated to see how they react at certain perfectly pitched surprises. A commercial and critical flop in its own times, The Thing has enjoyed a reevaluation as a beloved cult classic and spawned imitators in film and video games. Carpenter doesn’t sustain perfection in the run-up to a near-perfect ending, but this is still an all-timer horror movie.
In Sergio Leone’s final film set in the American West, he immediately communicates something vital to the setting and to the genre. In the first scene of Once Upon a Time in the West, a trio of goons terrorize a ticket taker and stuff him in a closet while they wait for their prey. The frontier exists in America as this romantic place where society can be reinvented and started anew by anyone with the foresight and will to make their way, but some rules and customs exist for a reason, like the free exchange of goods and services or the entering into a personal transaction with good faith. If everyone in an unsettled environment is remaking the world based on strength of will, the will to dominate will win out. Our introductory goons, in service to another goon who himself is in service to a robber baron railroad tycoon, are imbued with the power to do whatever they want. If they wanted to kill the ticket taker, no one would stop them and no one would pursue them. Once Upon a Time in the West ultimately tells a happy story of the forces of domination being thwarted and the promise of the frontier being fulfilled, but it comes within a pervasive package of corruption that implies this outcome is a rare one. |
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