An arty documentary about the art-film producer of many classics, "The Storms of Jeremy Thomas."
An experimental documentary that uses PR stills from famous movies to contemplate the nostalgia wrought by Hollywood, "Still Film."
A cheeky look at Mike Veeck, a son of the great Major League Baseball showman Bill Veeck, "The Saint of Second Chances."
A fresh release of the 2004 debut feature from the Iranian master, Asghar Farhadi ("A Separation," "The Past"), "Dancing in the Dust."
We'll give Kitty Green ("The Assistant") a second chance, as she re-teams with Julia Garner for another tale of young women coping with male chauvinists, "The Royal Hotel."
We signed up for a free month of Hulu to catch up on our queue. Here are three documentaries about unique characters.
DEREK DELGAUDIO: IN & OF ITSELF (2021) (B) - Your patience may vary, but this is one long feature-length sleight-of-hand without much of a payoff besides an obvious trick by a magician who emotionally manipulates his audience for 90 minutes. It starts out promising but just suffocates in gimmickry.
DelGaudio is a magician's magician, a former con man and card cheat who developed an intricate stage show that ran in New York for many months and eventually was filmed by Frank Oz for this documentary. DelGaudio has a baby face and an obsequious demeanor, and he mines his alleged youthful traumas to craft a meandering narrative about a mythic character who defied odds by winning many games of Russian roulette.
The previews for this are misleading. The trailer shows audience member expressing awe and bafflement at DelGaudio's great predictive powers. But all that emotional cholesterol is packed into the final third. Before that, DelGaudio shows off some neat tricks -- his handling of a deck of cards is mesmerizing; he makes a brick disappear. Cool.
But this gets maudlin pretty quick. He yanks our chains with a sob story about his hometown's homophobia over his mother coming out as gay. He takes long pauses for distant stares, meant to convey inner tormoil. (He cries at one point.) The camera casually lands fleetingly on random celebrities -- Bill Gates, Marina Abramovic, David Blaine -- purporting to grant credibility and gravitas on the proceedings.
And then there are two tricks at the end, and if you think about them for more than five minutes, you can probably figure out how the schemes were carried out. In the end, it all feels ironically soulless, hoodwinking the willing participants in the audience.
FOR MADMEN ONLY: THE STORIES OF DEL CLOSE (2021) (B) - This sloppy, shambling look back at the life of the zen-master of improvisation, Del Close, gets by on pluck and charm, with a dash of rebellion. Close is the legendary inventor of the Harold, a radical reimagining of the art of improvisation, a method that launched a generation of comics who predominate today.
Director Heather Ross takes her cue from the irreverent guru and tosses in a variety of ideas and schemes to get her narrative across. One tack is to imagine some of Close's bizarre brainstorming sessions (he also created a graphic novel) with droll re-creations staring James Urbaniak as Close, supported by comics like Matt Walsh and Lauren Lapkus.
We also hear from Close in clips and voice archives. There's a fun reveal from Bob Odenkirk, who interviewed Close back in the '80s for a college newspaper. Other talking heads and acolytes include Adam McKay, Ike Barinholtz, David Pasquesi ("Veep"), Dave Thomas ("SCTV"), Jason Sudeikis ("SNL") and, with perhaps the fondest connection to Close, Tim Meadows, another "SNL" alum. Michaela Watkins narrates.
There is an air of you-had-to-be-there about the whole production. I enjoyed seeing the familiar faces from the stages of Chicago's Second City theater back in the '80s. Who knows if this is a particularly accurate biography of a pivotal figure in the history of improv. The man, addled at times by drugs, was never the most reliable narrator. This slap-dash tribute seems to do him justice.
THE AMAZING JOHNATHAN DOCUMENTARY (2019) (C) - This more-meta-than-meta commentary on the life of a con man is only modestly entertaining and frustratingly repetitive. It tells the uninteresting story of Jonathan Szeles, who had a moment back in the '80s and '90s as the comic magician/provocateur known as the Amazing Johnathan. He was known for gruesome gags like piercing his tongue, spooning out his eyeball or sawing through his forearm. Yuk-yuk.
Well, now Johnathan is an unrepentant meth addict and claims to be dying of heart disease, although he's several years into a one-year death sentence when director Ben Berman shows up to start filming. That's not the only illusion Johnathan has up his sleeve. Over the course of the film, at least one other film crew is revealed to be competing with Berman.
By the one-third mark, the filmmaker starts to lose interest in Johnathan and gets wrapped into his own existential crisis, wondering if he's been hoodwinked and how he should proceed. The rest of the film is mostly Berman kvetching about his dilemma. And boy, is it not interesting. (He drags his parents into this for counseling.) So now we're stuck with a zero as the intended subject and a dud of a filmmaker. You'll probably stick around to find out how it turns out, but you won't be bowled over. You're better off not getting suckered into it in the first place.
(Extra credit for the most inappropriately tone-deaf use of Erik Satie's "Gymnopedies" ever; no, I don't think it was used ironically.)
BONUS TRACK
From the closing credits of the Del Close documentary, Mika Miko with "Jogging Song":
THE ELEPHANT 6 RECORDING CO. (A) - What a gleeful immersion into the DIY music and art scene of Athens, Ga., in the 1990s which spawned the Elephant 6 collection, a faux record label that launched Apples in Stereo, Neutral Milk Hotel, Elf Power and others. Newcomer Chad Stockfleth commits himself to a years-long deep dive into archival footage, balanced with modern reminiscences, to paint a masterful portrait of a bunch of creative outsider artists who came together at a magical time of low-fi recordings.
The presentation is endlessly entertaining, borrowing heavily from the shaggy videos the various bands made to accompany their record releases. Robert Schneider, the founder of Apples in Stereo (and the Elephant 6 Recording collective), emerges as a visionary and genius (he went on the become a mathematician), as well as a profoundly charming, upbeat personality. He is described by multiple people as the Brian Wilson of the collaborative, shepherding various bands through a prolonged Summer of Love in the late '90s that foundered as the millennium arrived. (The collective burned out quickly, and a comparison is made to the heady '60s turning into the grim '70s.) The Guardian has called them "psych-pop utopians."
You don't necessarily need to be a fan of the music here -- heavy on trippy fuzz-pop and folkie noodling. (I favored Apples in Stereo over the frustrating Neutral Milk Hotel, a yin-yang with a passing echo of the Guided by Voices/Flaming Lips dichotomy (GBV!) or the Dandy Warhols/Brian Jonestown Massacre rivalry (a draw).) However, the film makes a great case in support of the output of most of the bands here, including Olivia Tremor Control, Elf Power, Of Montreal, the Minders, and Circulatory System. Each band stands tall as having something to offer.
Schneider went to high school in Louisiana with Jeff Mangum (Neutral Milk Hotel's tragic hero) and Olivia founders Bill Doss and Will Cullen Hart, the Lennon-McCartney of the collective. (Andrew Rieger and Elf Power maybe constituted the George Harrison.) Doss and Cullen Hart, in both archival and modern footage, demonstrate a passionate devotion to writing music, almost to an obsessive extent, capturing their endless ideas on piles of cassette tapes. While the others went to Athens, Schneider headed to Denver, but he still became the leader of the collective. He scavenged 4-track recording devices, and a ragtag studio took shape in a formerly abandoned building in Denver, dubbed Pet Sounds. (The affinity for 4-tracks was inspired by the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper" standard.)
This really is a heartfelt origin story. Most of the principals, such as Apples drummer Hilarie Sidney, take part as talking heads, and they all are smart and interesting, full of pithy quotes. As Laura Carter of Elf Power notes early in the film, the carrying out the mission was as simple as "call in sick to work, take a bunch of downers and play our spacey music." Schneider recalls an experiment on one song that involved multiple tape loops and the gradual slowing down of the sound to the point of creating some ethereal, other-worldly drone that brought the studio's cats flocking toward the speakers. "Having the cats wander into the room," he explains, "that felt like success."
All of this is curated by Stockfleth with such assuredness that it's surprising to learn it's the first time he has done this. He spent 13 years interviewing participants and culling footage (much of it shot by Lance Bangs), including video of the female members performing an avant-garde piece as Dixie Blood Mustache. The movie is a passion project that pours its heart onto the screen. (It holds its own with Todd Haynes' flashier deep dive into the Velvet Underground.) The only possible flaw is its lack of context and perspective, leaving Elephant 6 detached in time/space from other underground pioneers, like GBV out of Dayton and Conor Oberst's Saddle Creek crew in Omaha. (Pavement does get name-checked as an influence.)
The director, working with Bangs, is meticulous in his presentation; for example he makes sure, knowing that dozens of people are featured, to repeat title cards with names throughout. It's an unabashed, warts-and-all valentine to these zealous, refreshingly humble collaborators who created a scene and are still proud of the earnest sounds they all created together.
BONUS TRACKS
It is tough to grab a representative sampling Elephant 6 recordings. Go seek out the various recordings. Pick one band and let an algorithm carry you along. Here are Apples in Stereo with "Tidal Wave," led off with Hilarie Sidney's propulsive drums:
The Guild Cinema brought Krzysztof Kieslowski's seminal Three-Colors Trilogy to the big screen for some September matinees. A visit with our favorite filmmaker of all time has been long overdue. We soon will also revisit his masterpiece, "Dekalog."
RED (1994) (A-minus) - Kieslowski concludes with a return to his common theme of characters with little in common bonding nonetheless. He also re-installs a strong female lead, Irene Jacob as a young student/model forging an awkward friendship with a retired judge who eavesdrops on his neighbors' telephone calls.
Like "White," this film depends on a slow build. Pay attention early on. I had a little trouble keeping track of the characters. The narrative structure is precise, though. Jacob's Valentine has a jerk of a boyfriend whom we hear only by phone, from England, and she also has a neighbor that she doesn't know about, Auguste (Jean-Pierre Lorit), who is dating Karin (Frederique Feder), who runs a weather-forecasting service by phone. (There are a lot of phone calls in this analog-era movie.) And those are just the side characters.
Valentine hits a dog with her car and tracks down the owner, the grumpy judge (Jean-Louis Trintignant), who tells her to keep the dog. She soon discovers that he is listening in on his neighbors' calls, and he shows no remorse over the hobby. One of the neighbors has a secret gay lover; another is Karin, the weather gal; one man might be trafficking drugs. All the while, a giant billboard of Valentine, swathed in red, hovers over the city (Geneva).
Valentine and the judge share personal stories, and layers of their personalities are revealed. They draw close. The judge faces a reckoning over his invasive habit.
Jacob, who broke through in 1991 in Kieslowski's "The Double Life of Veronique," is a steady but sometimes dull presence here. She often gives off some combination of a pout and a vacant stare; maybe that's intentional, seeing as she's playing a model. But Valentine steadily deepens as Kieslowski patiently builds his puzzle.
If you've seen "Red" before, you know that it builds to a moment of semi-magical realism, a surreal coincidence that brings back characters from the previous two films in the trilogy. (We also get a conclusion to the long-running sight gag of the bent-over old woman struggling to place a bottle into the opening of a recycling container.)
Visually, Kieslowski and cinematographer Piotr Sobocinski play with shading, angles and reflections. In key scenes, interacting characters are set at different heights; that might be a signal or just a neat stylistic flourish. Close-ups of broken glass appear at critical moments, another theme carried over from his previous work.
"Red" feels like one substantial reckoning, a settling of a lifetime of scores for the various characters, notably the judge, and a wish for the future. Kieslowski had announced that it would be his final film. Sadly, he would die two years later at age 54. What he left behind is deeply profound. It's a minor consolation that he wrapped up his career so neatly, sweetly and perfectly.
Note: "Red" is one of the rare films to have a perfect 100% score on Metacritic.
Here are links to the other films in the trilogy: "Blue" and "White."
BONUS TRACK
A snippet of the soundtrack, by Zbigniew Preisner:
The Guild Cinema brought Krzysztof Kieslowski's seminal Three-Colors Trilogy to the big screen for some September matinees. A visit with our favorite filmmaker of all time has been long overdue. We soon will also revisit his masterpiece, "Dekalog."
WHITE (1994) (B+) - Kieslowski employs a lighter touch, but even his whimsical take on a failed marriage traffics in dark subjects and grim meditations on freedom and death. "White" is the poor middle-child of the trilogy, a slight but at times touching variation on the threaded theme of grief and longing.
Maybe because it has a male lead, this entry feels a bit off, not as compelling as "Red," "Blue" and "The Double Life of Veronique." Here, Karol Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski) has been humiliated in Paris by his beautiful French wife, Dominique (Julie Delpy, in her early 20s); she divorces him for failing to consummate the marriage. Karol is now broke and homeless; stripped of his papers, he strikes up an improbable friendship with another Pole he meets on the street, Mikolaj (Janusz Gajos), and in slapstick fashion, Karol is smuggled back to Poland, where he returns to the salon he ran with his brother, Jurek (a drolly funny Jerzy Stuhr).
Mikolaj has offered Karol thousands of dollars if Karol will kill a person who wants to die, but Karol refuses. Karol takes another job as a bodyguard for a shady agency, and when he overhears the bosses speculating about buying up a swath of land, Karol gets to a few landowners first, and eventually earns a windfall, which he then spins into great wealth. He then puts into motion his ultimate revenge plot against Dominique.
Kieslowski, known as a tender and thoughtful storyteller, not only traffics in dark ideas here, but the film feels a bit choppy, with much of the action backloaded to the end of the film. Karol's transformation also feels rushed. But the narrative is always compelling.
Humor is threaded throughout, and it's often as dry as toast. The build-up of the revenge plot comes off as not merely retributive but also a bit misogynistic. Delpy is not allowed to be very effective here. She pops up only at key junctures. Meantime, every scene centers Zamachowski, as he alters his entire life in order to satisfy his monomanical focus.
When the subject of the trilogy came up with the venue owner, Keif, he asked which one was my favorite, and I said I had to view them again to choose between "Red" and "Blue." He replied, "No one ever picks 'White.'" That's because it's the weakest one. Maybe being saturated in white, it's just not as colorful as the others.
Here are links to the other films: "Blue" and "Red."
The Guild Cinema brought Krzysztof Kieslowski's seminal Three-Colors Trilogy to the big screen for some September matinees. A visit with our favorite filmmaker of all time has been long overdue. We soon will also revisit his masterpiece, "Dekalog."
BLUE (1993) (A) - Juliette Binoche is simply captivating as a woman mourning the death of her husband, a world-renowned classical composer, and their daughter. Her recovery from the accident that killed them is complicated by some revelations about her husband's secret past.
Krzystof Kieslowski is simply a master of morality tales, and his examinations of the human condition burrow deep into a viewer's soul. Here he soaks the screen in blue tones, and it comes off as a revelatory depiction of melancholia rather than a facile, cliched take on sadness. Little touches of blue are everywhere -- a file folder, a candy wrapper, the swimming pool in which Binoche's character, Julie, escapes.
Binoche was known for lighter fare at the time -- "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," "Wuthering Heights" -- but here she emerges as a profound performer who wrings every emotion out of Julie, who seizes the opportunity to make a fresh start in her life amid the gloom. With no time or inclination for tears, Julie simply empties their mansion and disappears for a while to a nondescript apartment (the only memento from her past is a light fixture of blue stringed beads). She bides her time interacting with mice and neighbors. She bonds with Lucille (Charlotte Very), an exotic dancer ostracized by neighbors for her liberal sexual endeavors.
It is hinted early on that Julie might have secretly written her husband's music. That little bombshell never gets addressed head-on or fully examined. Julie does eventually work with her husband's collaborator, Olivier (Benoit Regent), who has always been in love with Julie. Olivier has been quietly tasked with completing her husband's final opus, an anthem dedicated to a united Europe.
Julie, meanwhile, cannot escape the past or the memories of her husband and daughter. A skateboarder who witnessed the car crash tracks down Julie to return to her the necklace (with crucifix) that he found at the scene. A street performer plays familiar airs on a flute, haunting her and inspiring her. Eventually, a figure from her husband's past will appear, and it offers Julie an opportunity to display forgiveness and offer redemption. It ends in a magical moment of graceful storytelling.
Kieslowski's camera is forever curious. He was a master at angles and perceptions, playing with focus and reflections -- all of which adds to the layers of mood. At times when Julie is confronted with a revelation or key decision, a swell of music rises up, the screen goes black for a few seconds, and then returns again to Julie, simulating an out-of-body experience (or epiphany?) at these critical moments. He takes close-up shots of notes on a score sheet and pans along as the music plays or the chorus blares.
The movie itself is a symphony. A hosanna to the heavens. A rhapsody in blue.
Here are links to the other films: "White" and "Red."
We check out the latest from Christian Petzold (and his lead actress, Paula Beer) as well as his recent film from 2020. See also our reviews of his other one-word titles "Transit," "Phoenix," and "Barbara."
AFIRE (B+) - Director Christian Petzold, for us, is a solid B+ director. His films can meander a bit, lose you for a while, but he always builds to a powerful conclusion. The same pretty much applies to this shaggy-dog story of a shlubby writer who goes off with a friend to a retreat in order to finish his second novel, only to be distracted by a another traveler who was double-booked at the house.
Paula Beer shines, as usual, as Nadja, the free spirit who can't help but be distracting, and who senses the mental block that is afflicting Leon (Thomas Schubert). Among the other distractions -- Leon's pal Felix (Langston Uibel), whose mom double-booked the summer home, is flirting with Nadja's boyfriend (Enno Trebs), and some wildfires are flaring up off beyond the woods.
Petzold takes a long time to delicately place his characters in their precise place in this universe. Schubert is wonderfully understated as the grumpy, arrogant (but insecure) writer, and Beer is light as a feather but fully grounded as a woman who has more going on than it seems. There is plenty of dry humor -- thin walls undermine privacy and sleeping arrangements -- but most of it is laced with melancholy.
After a fairly shocking twist late in the film, Petzold has another fine ending up his sleeve. I wish it had ended five minutes sooner, on a grim note, but a coda provides a serviceable sliver of sunshine and a glimmer of hope. Either way, your patience during the first half will be duly rewarded.
UNDINE (2020) (B-minus) - I get grumpy when there is homework involved, especially when watching a film feels like reading a textbook. Petzold refuses to give any hints as to the mythological backstory to the narrative here, of a mermaid who takes human form, but with some highly restrictive conditions.
Paula Beer holds the center here, too, as Undine, who informs her boyfriend in the opening scene that if he breaks up with her he's going to have to die. But then she takes no steps to make that happen. Instead, she falls in love with sweet Christoph (the always intense Franz Rogowski). Meet-cutes do not get any more twee than this water-logged one, steeped in symbolism. Christoph also happens to be a deep-sea diver who sees Undine's name on an archway deep underwater and has visions of her swimming sadly with a giant catfish of legend. It's often quite dreamy.
Petzold is not only maddeningly obtuse about what he's going for here plotwise, but he also spends large chunks of time watching Undine give tedious lectures to students about the history of Berlin's architecture. Several times. It's frustrating.
It isn't until the final reel that some of the pieces of the plot and unspoken backstory finally play out in a satisfying narrative structure. Petzold plays with time shifts, tosses in a bit of neo-Gothic horror, and then pivots to magical realism in a way that somehow feels earned. It's a shame that it can be such a chore to get to those touching final scenes. Beer and Rogowski, as a couple, are a memorable mismatch made in heaven. It is to their credit that the film just quite seems worth it in the end.
BONUS TRACKS
From a key scene and the closing credits of "Afire," the dreamy "In My Mind" by the Wallners:
From the final scene and credits of "Undine," the plaintive adagio from Johann Sebastian Bach's Concerto in D Minor by Vikingur Olafsson:
Director Craig Gillespie ("I, Tonya," "Lars and the Real Girl") and a solid cast follow in the footsteps of "BlackBerry" for a romp through the GameStop stock spectacle, "Dumb Money."
A wry look at an Afghan immigrant searching for human connection, "Fremont."
We are a fan of Chilean Patricio Guzman's more recent films -- "Nostalgia for the Light," "The Pearl Button" -- so we're curious about his 1971film, newly restored, from the early days of Salvador Allende's brief reign, "The First Year."
A documentary about the long-gone days of direct-to-video soft-core movies, "We Kill for Love."
We considered making these a "Best of Ever" pairing, but neither felt quite like a candidate for the pantheon, back then or now, although they are close.
BASIC INSTINCT (1992) (A-minus) - Sharon Stone and Michael Douglas make for quite the sizzling pair of stars, and director Paul Verhoeven and writer Joe Eszterhas provide the pulp and suspense in an old-fashioned thriller about a haggard cop's investigation of a brutal slaying in San Francisco. It is still breezy and witty and as over-the-top as you'd expect from the notorious team behind "Showgirls" and the writer of "Jagged Edge" and "Flashdance."
In a throwback to the days of film noir, Stone plays Catherine Trammel, a wily author who likes to write books about gruesome acts that have eerie parallels to real life and whose best friends happen to be murderers (research, she claims). When her rock-star boyfriend gets ice-picked to death during a round of hot sex, she is the logical suspect. She famously doesn't wear panties to her interrogation, and passes the audition, running free and soon luring to bed Douglas' Nick Curran, a reckless cop who once shot two people while high on cocaine. When his department rival ends up dead, Nick is suspended, but he doesn't give up the chase.
Their affair gets kinky and torrid (akin to the passion in "Body Heat"), and Nick starts to lose his shit when he finds out that Catherine's next book will be a thinly veiled portrait of him and his checkered past. It helps that she somehow got access to his psychiatric files; she may or may not have had a past with Nick's therapist and occasional bed partner Beth (an indispensable Jeanne Tripplehorn). Nick has a guardian angel in his colleague Gus (a rock-solid George Dzundza), but it does him little good.
The plot thickens, Stone smolders, Douglas spews charisma in all directions, and the twists and turns are delectable. While the topic is noir, the visuals are bright and eye-catching all around the bay. Some scenes border on ridiculous (again, consider the sources), like when Nick gets hit by a car but just gets up and chases after the perp.
Like "Jagged Edge," this one never lets up and never lets you down. It's a throwback to the old-fashioned thrill of watching movies.
THE FRENCH CONNECTION (1971) (A-minus) - In the hangover of the 1960s, this foundational film suffers a little bit from the Sloppy Seventies syndrome, and Gene Hackman has had less hacky performances, but William Friedkin's cops-and-robbers tale of two cities is suspenseful and, at times, riveting.
At the dawn of a dark decade, New York is starting to show its seedy underbelly. Friedkin picks at all of the city's scabs and revels in Hackman's Popeye Doyle, a narcotics detective who doesn't play by the rules and steps on a lot of toes as he follows a hunch about a big heroin shipment due in from Marseilles. Roy Scheider is along for the ride as Doyle's partner (and conscience), Buddy "Cloudy" Russo. They traipse through a Brooklyn world of small-time hoodlums with shady international connections.
There is a lot of international intrigue and subtitles, and Friedkin doesn't bother to lay things out clearly. He employs Altman-like overlapping dialogue, and some conversations get swallowed in incidental noise. This, though, is the movie that perfected the car-chase on the big screen -- a riveting scene in which Doyle carjacks a Pontiac Le Mans and drives it frantically (and recklessly) under a set of el-train tracks in pursuit of a suspect who has hijacked the runaway train above at gunpoint (apparently it's the D through Brooklyn). Another fascinating scene involves cops meticulously dismantling an impounded car suspected of holding the smuggled heroin.
Hackman and Scheider shoulder the story here, but they have critical help from character actors like Fernando Rey as the French mastermind ("Frog One"), Tony Lo Bianco as the American point man Sal Boca, and Eddie Egan as the gruff police captain. Friedkin, who died last month, shuffles everything together in a grim, sloppy caper.
BOTTOMS (A-minus) - This is the gut-busting, crowd-pleasing comedy of summer. Writer-director Emma Seligman and writer-actor Rachel Sennott have created a hyper-speed send-up of high-school comedies, a vulgar mish-mash of genres (ranging from "Breakfast Club" to "Fight Club") with non-stop jokes and two perfect lead performances.
Sennott stars as PJ, a frumpy lesbian who schemes with her best friend, Josie (Ayo Edebiri), to create a fight club at school as a way to seduce cheerleaders and thus lose their virginity before graduation. ("Do you want to be the only virgin at Sarah Lawrence?") Edebiri is deft and charming as the good cop to Sennott's bad cop, although it will be Josie who will have some explaining to do when it's time to reveal to her crush how they lied about why they started the fight club. (It wasn't about empowering women -- though, in classic Afterschool Special fashion, that just might the takeaway after all.)
The school and its inhabitants come off as silly and cartoonish, which gives Seligman plenty of ironic cover for just how ridiculous this all plays out. Football players wear their uniforms to school every day -- pads and cleats included -- and the hunky QB Jeff (it says "Jeff" on the back of his jersey) is venerated like a god by teammates and classmates alike. Josie has her eye on Jeff's girlfriend, Isabel (Havana Rose Liu), while PJ has the hots for the willowy, stiff Brittany (Kaia Gerber). PJ and Josie are not shunned because they are gay; they are ostracized because, as the principal announces over the loudspeaker, they are "ugly, untalented gays."
The ringleaders rope a male teacher into being their adviser. He is played with fine deadpan panache by former pro football player Marshawn Lynch, who has a subtle way of having inappropriate conversations with his students. The one who really steals the show is Ruby Cruz as Hazel, the super-eager fight-club secretary who can't wait to escalate things into pyrotechnics. (She's also clueless about her mom having an affair with the star QB -- "I just thought 'Jeff' was her safe word.")
This all sounds flat when translated into words. But the jokes are sharp and don't let up, and the presentation is coy and clever. It takes a simplistic, cliched premise and layers it with subversive ideas about feminism and conformity. Sennott and Edebiri are confident and consistently funny; they have a Laverne & Shirley comfort level together. Early on, there are times when their timing seems a little off, but that might just reflect the looseness with which Seligman put this together. It's almost like a winking insight into what had to have been an improvisational exercise at times. (The outtakes shown during the credits -- another nod to '80s farces -- back up that theory.)
The two stars and Cruz keep their foot on the pedal and don't let up for 91 minutes. Not since "The Wedding Crashers" or "The Hangover" have I laughed so hard so often and nearly fell out of my seat. Some might find this too dumb to abide, but if you can't appreciate low-brow satire, that will be your loss.
MILLIE LIES LOW (B+) - Ana Scotney, a relative newcomer to the big screen, is a tour-de-force as an up-and-coming architecture student who panics before a trip to a dream internship in New York City and instead merely pretends on social media that she made the voyage and is having the time of her life. In reality, she is still in New Zealand, skulking around the streets trying not to blow her cover.
Millie is the pride of Wellington, a local girl making it to the big time, and her image is plastered all over the city as part of a huge marketing campaign (including at the airport where she has her panic attack in the opening scene). But Millie cracks under that pressure, can't bear to admit her failure to fly to New York, and instead fabricates a guerrilla Instagram campaign, mostly via cut-and-paste images, purporting to show her romping around New York. As you might expect, the big lie gets harder and harder to sustain.
Writer-director Michelle Savill is assured in her feature debut, unwinding a character study of a young woman panicking over one snap-decision that could ruin her life. Millie's anxiety is not without foundation; she has a strained relationship with her mom, and there have been whispers going around that Millie's success was built on designs that she plagiarized from her best pal, Carolyn (Jillian Nguyen). Savill (who co-wrote the script with Eli Kent) is sympathetic to Millie but doesn't let her off the hook. It is a layered examination of a young woman battling expectations as she is launched into her career.
The movie also plays small-ball, with charming vignettes of Millie sneaking around (living in a tent on her mom's property, close enough to the house to steal the wi-fi signal). She suffers a mix of small victories and significant indignities during her days of subterfuge. There might be one coincidence too many in service of the narrative -- especially when Millie is in the wrong place at the right time for a big reveal -- but it's not fatal to the film.
Scotney is a revelation as Millie, finding the right mix of humor and desperation. She is gifted at physical comedy, and her face conveys many moods. She resembles Alia Shawkat both visually and talent-wise. She carries this quiet film, creating a few indelible images along the way.
