A SIMPLE FAVOR (2018) (B) - Don't overthink this one. Just let Paul Feig ("The Heat," "Spy") do his pop-pulp thing with a juicy whodunit and a couple of stars who commit to the bit. This comic thriller feels like it's in everyone's wheelhouse, even if it's not the most cogent film to come along.
Anna Kendrick stars as Stephanie, a dweeby lifestyle mommy vlogger who gets mixed up with a sly and devious fellow mom, Emily (Blake Lively), who grooms Stephanie for some sort of plot she is cooking up. They establish a pecking order of alpha (Emily) and nerd (Stephanie), as if they were back in high school. Emily eventually asks for that one simple favor -- requesting that Stephanie pick up Emily's son after school. But then Emily disappears without a word.
As days go by, Stephanie quickly falls for Emily's drab hunky husband, Sean (Henry Golding), in such an improbable plot twist a viewer might bail out at that point. But feel free to roll your eyes and stick with it. Stephanie will eventually go on a hunt through Emily's past -- another silly diversion that provides the next exit ramp. This unsatisfying detour -- cooked up by writers Jessica Sharzer and Darcey Bell -- traffics in horror tropes and makes the final third drag. Throw in a soundtrack inexplicably filled with French pop tunes, and this whole production is a bit of a head-scratcher.
But Kendrick is a powerful lead here, and she plays off Lively's domineering character especially well. Lively, with her striking looks, savors her juicy bad-girl role so much that she practically drools through her scenes. This film shouldn't work, but it was clever enough that I couldn't turn it off.
MOVIEPASS, MOVIECRASH (B+) - An early entry for 2024's "Fyre"
Award -- a term we'll use for documentaries about entertaining tech-bro
hedge-fund stock-run scams that sound too good to be true -- is this
HBO-Max romp about the MoviePass craze of the late teens, in which the
company thought it could offer unlimited theater passes for only $9.99
per month and somehow not go out of business.
This is confident, workmanlike filmmaking from Muta'Ali ("Cassius X: Becoming Ali"), who does a great job of constructing the narrative and separating out his good guys from the bad guys. When looking for an explanation for the inexplicable, it comes down to Capitalism 101: Greed is good (for some). Of course, there was no way that MoviePass could survive very long by allowing people to see a movie a day each month for barely the cost of one movie.
The company's founder, Stacey Spikes, and his main ally on the board, Hamet Watt, were following the drug dealer's business model -- get people hooked and then start raising the price. But the board brought in a couple of veteran venture capitalists who voraciously pumped the stock price with exponential growth of the customer base (at that unsustainable bargain-basement rate). That would be Mitch Lowe, a former Netflix vulture, and Ted Farnsworth, a cunning stock manipulator, both of whom refused to yield on the monthly fee, insisting that they could make up the revenue elsewhere, through marketing deals with cinema operator and through the sale of users' data. Essential color is added by another key board member -- who enabled the tragic situation -- and a MoviePass user (who revels in the glory days of essentially free unlimited movies).
As you'd expect (or perhaps remember), the new guys burned through millions and took over the company from Spikes and Watt. It just so happens that the founding guys are black and the interlopers were old-boy white guys, so Muta'Ali's film has a built-in plot conflict to exploit. He unpeels the layers of the story like a pro, and the narrative is fascinating from beginning to end.
BONUS TRACK
From the closing credits of "Favor," No Small Children with the "Munsters" romp "Laisse Tomber Les Filles":
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