May 22
By Ray Pride
“Hysteria,” in the description of Tanya Wexler, is a hybrid comedy, like Richard Curtis sneaking a vibrator into a Merchant-Ivory production “with maybe a little Jane Austen flair in the plotting, maybe, if we’re lucky.”
Set in London 1880, “Hysteria” fashions a fanciful history of the invention of the electro-mechanical vibrator. Hugh Dancy plays an upstart young doctor, who meets London’s leading specialist in women’s medicine (Jonathan Pryce), who also has two daughters, one dutiful and demure (Felicity Jones), and the other a progressive social reformer (Maggie Gyllenhaal). Let the culture-clash comedy and romantic roundelays begin. Read the rest of this entry »
May 15
RECOMMENDED
Snort-out-loud funny and offensive in every conceivable way, “The Dictator” cheerfully cons its audience into cheering on a genocidal totalitarian in his quest to deter the nascent tide of democracy in his fictional kingdom. British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen’s made a career out of his singular brand of “documentary” ridicule of simpletons of a right-wing, usually Southern U.S. persuasion, through fictional alter egos, Ali G, Borat and Brüno. He’s gotten a pass on borderline classist cruelty because he was so self-demeaning in the process, willing to lower himself beneath his victims’ level and, well, who doesn’t love to feel superior to those rightwing nutjobs who seem to control American discourse, right? But his shtick became all too familiar once he migrated from television to feature films, and his second go, “Brüno,” was greeted with Bronx cheers even from his basest base. Read the rest of this entry »
May 09
By Ray Pride
Even with an early image of forbidden splatter that would never make it into even a conversation about an idea of the possibility of a studio-made picture, there’s a strange calm to Bobcat Goldthwait’s fierce black comedy “God Bless America.” It’s surely the year’s only movie that evokes the highway of Capra’s “It Happened One Night,” the fulminations of “Network” and the fumes of Gaspar Noé’s “I Stand Alone.”
As Frank, an everyman figure in Syracuse, New York, thrown to the wind, Joel Murray is supremely calm. And when he speaks? He’s just a guy making sense. His life and work are falling down around him, he’s getting headaches, he’s worried about whether he may be terminally ill and everything he sees on television seems like a terrible hallucination of a world, and country, gone wrong. It’s mild compared to your everyday online comment section, but it’s rarely portrayed in contemporary movie comedies. After getting fired, Frank buys a gun and sets out to stalk celebrities, and quickly enough, an equally pissed-off teenager (Tara Lynne Barr) attaches herself to his crusade. (“Did you just kill Chloe? Awesome.”) Read the rest of this entry »
May 09
Serial Mom seeks sooth. Kathleen Turner is a dynamo lighting up Anne Renton’s “The Perfect Family,” a Catholic-oriented “let’s-put-on-a-show!”-scaled comedy of modest range. As a suburban mother who covets the local Catholic Woman of the Year plaque, Turner gives the material her all, even when the material is maddeningly shallow or internally contradictory. Conflict ensues with her “nonconformist” family, including a lesbian daughter (Emily Deschanel) and a philandering son (Jason Ritter), and her husband is a recovering alcoholic. Let the interpersonal eamy-squeamies ensue! Read the rest of this entry »
Apr 25
Peter Lord
By Ray Pride
Beaming fifteen-inch figures stand at rubbery attention in front of a roaring fake fire in a cleared-out hotel bar. Peter Lord, director of “The Pirates! Band Of Misfits” and co-owner of Aardman films, is not impressed.
“It’s a rubbish fire,” he says, “Rubbish,” as we sit before the audience of the Pirate Captain, various cohorts and a squishy little Dodo, the most agreeable of the lot from “The Pirates! Band of Misfits,” the animated eighteenth-century-set seafaring send-up from Aardman. During the 3D stop-motion action, which was produced on actual scale sets, I wondered if there would be a squeezable bath toy based on this little fellow. Now I make the mistake of reaching for the Dodo, and neither of us can get it back on its extinct feet. Read the rest of this entry »
Apr 25
Taika Waititi. Photo by Ray Pride.
RECOMMENDED
New Zealand filmmaker Taika Waititi relaxes the quirk a tad after his first feature, “Eagle Vs. Shark,” (2007) the memorably eccentric comic love story that introduced Jemaine Clement, one half of “Flight of the Conchords” to the larger world. Waititi claims a mild strain of autobiography—”true and imagined memories”—in the 1980s-set coming-of-age story, “Boy,” (2010), based on his Oscar-nominated short, “Two Cars, One Night,” and which became his home country’s highest-grossing film. Waititi’s deadpan comedy about a Michael Jackson-and-E.T.-obsessed eleven-year-old boy, named “Boy,” in gorgeous rural Waihau Bay (ripe with the tall greenery of cannabis) isn’t as extravagantly strange as “Eagle Vs. Shark,” but his affable comic rhythms are his beguiling own. Read the rest of this entry »
Apr 25
Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away…. There was a young screenwriter named Lawrence Kasdan. Co-writer on “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “The Empire Strikes Back,” screenwriter of “The Bodyguard,” his directorial career began under George Lucas’ wing with neo-noir “Body Heat” in 1981, and then he made “The Big Chill,” his 1983 remix of John Sayles’ “Return of the Secaucus Seven.” Some thought he spoke for the entire generation of Baby Boomers. Now Kasdan is sixty-three, and he hasn’t directed a movie since the lamentable 2003 Stephen King adaptation, “Dreamcatcher,” and his time away shows in the movie’s daring inconsequence. “Darling Companion” is a generational statement as well, more AARP than “Arf!”, for a post-middle-age demographic the movie industry could possibly profit from addressing, of citizens tending to senior whose attention tends to wander and who like going to the movies because it’s warm in there and dark and it’s okay if you fall asleep. Read the rest of this entry »
By Ray Pride
