There's a fine line between quirky and stupid. We meet the lead character when he wakes up on the couch next to his blind girlfriend having pissed himself in his sleep. He gets more miserable and less charming after that. I bailed out when he started telling his girlfriend, who is determined to leave this horrible man after 10 years, all the ways he could maim or kill her instead of letting her leave. That's all I needed.
Upright Citizens Brigade hipster-doofus Brett Gelman is the star of this curiosity, which he wrote with his wife at the time, Janicza Bravo, who eventually shook him and did much better as a director with "Zola" last year. Maybe this exercise was a cry for help from a broken relationship. The girlfriend to Gelman's obnoxious theater director Isaac is played by Judy Greer, and I felt sorry for her having to endure this spectacle. The rest of the cast would usually be considered impressive, but they each are trying much too hard to be quirky or outre here: Michael Cera (rocking some wild curly hair); Gillian Jacobs, caught in a loop of thankless scenes; Jeff Garlin, really stretching himself by playing an agent (named Guy Roach, yuk-yuk); and Megan Mullally, doing a British accent for no apparent reason.
This is all dully absurd, and nearly halfway through there seemed to be no promise of a payoff. Apparently this schlub of a character goes on to date Nia Long. Whatever, dude. I like this capsule review from Jessica Kiang at the Playlist: "Lemon is too in love with being oddball to really have any connection to the real, non-quirky world. And so while scene-by scene its absurdism can be drolly amusing, it never coheres into anything more than a series of sketches."
Title: LEMON (2017)
Running Time: 82 MIN
Elapsed Time at Plug Pull: 36 MIN
Portion Watched: 44%
My Age at Time of Viewing: 59 YRS, 4 MOS.
Average Male American Lifespan: 78.8 YRS.
Watched/Did Instead: Read and went to sleep.
Odds of Re-viewing This Title: 55-1
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