comedy

Same territory as TV Glow, a few years further on, and I think I liked it more. Gillian Anderson plays Billy big, with velvet, fur and a Southern draw. She’s great. Hannah Einbinder underplays Kris against her, which is right as two Billys would have been too much. Alex G is back for a third Schoenbrun score, which I’ve been listening to and enjoying for the past few weeks. One of the cues is called ‘Slasher Climax’, which is, well… let’s just say the central theme of this film took me longer to work out than I’d care to admit.

This is our family’s collective vote for best animated film of the last decade or so. Very fun and stands up to repeated watches.

The biblical rain today suggests that summer is over, so my run through a handful or so of John Cusack films ends with it, on the film I’ve seen more than perhaps any other.

Watching Cusack in order suggests some connections I hadn’t gone looking for, mostly around moral compromise and concession. David Shayne in Bullets Over Broadway concedes his way down one compromise at a time, and pays for it. Buck Weaver in Eight Men Out concedes nothing and is ruined anyway. Runaway Jury‘s Nick Easter turns up with the con already written and walks out clean. Martin Blank does the worst thing any of them do, announces he’s stopping, and nobody argues (or even really appears to be listening).

Even the reunion corridor scene (fantastic choreography, btw!) doesn’t hold him to it. Debi refuses every justification he offers, he ends up admitting he got good at the job and then came to like it, and the admission expires the moment the scene does.

Nothing about what Martin does accumulates, or is left owing, which is presumably how I’ve managed however many viewings this is. The film has never once asked me to reach a verdict on a contract killer. I find that… restful, which I doubt reflects well on me.

A VHS staple, seen a hundred times. I first watched it as a teenager, around the time I was getting into the Clash; given how much of my taste Lloyd Dobler and Martin Blank went on to shape, I’m amazed I never started kickboxing.

I’ve rewatched a bunch of John Cusack films this summer and the running thread has been something like moral compromise. That doesn’t work here. Lloyd has no angle and nothing to trade. It belongs to James Court instead, secretly up to no good and justifying it in a terrible, burdensome way. John Mahoney never lets him stop believing his excuse, right through the prison visit. I miss him a lot. Such a talented actor.

Ione Skye is good, though this is Lloyd’s film. Romantic without ever tipping into sentimentality. The boombox got the glory and the memes but the last scene is the best in the film. The pair of them, future undecided, waiting to take off.

Relatively well reviewed, and I don’t understand why. “A love letter to Hollywood’s golden era”, perhaps, but only for its first half; once the talkies arrive it decamps to fifties sci-fi and a save-the-world blob plot. The references are real enough (Muybridge’s horse, Keaton’s collapsing house front, some Lovecraft) but recognising one isn’t the same as the film doing anything with it. And the voice work is mostly phoned in. Not Jesse Eisenberg, who does well as a robot who appears for no reason. Trey Parker just does Cartman, in a children’s film, because nobody seems to have asked him not to.

Obsession, loneliness and grief, all routed through parochial matters: a visitor centre, a walking tour, a few plaqued rocks that a historically Important man once sat on to think. I don’t quite know what it’s like to build a life around something that disappears overnight, but Peter Mullan’s Kenneth gives me a strong sense of it. It runs with comedy and sadness at the same time rather than alternating between them and, similarly, Gazelle Twin’s score keeps a low hum of unease where otherwise there might be whimsy. A curious little film with lots to like about it, and a last act that goes somewhere I wasn’t expecting, shifting what was in balance more clearly over to one side.

The cultural awareness class demonstrating an appropriate slow dance to Hot Chocolate is the best joke in the film, and it happens in the first five minutes. The deadpan continues after that, but relatively thinly, and I spent much of the runtime waiting for it to come back at strength. Otherwise: humanising; at times uplifting; quite beautifully shot.

I probably watch this a little more than once a decade, often enough to see the clothes date further each time while the motivations don’t really move at all. JD would be on Twitter now, and he’d be annoyingly good at it. Winona looks superb and plays Veronica with more precision than the part needs. Slater’s Jack Nicholson impression is fine once you accept it for what it is. The satire only works because it’s brutal. Its target isn’t school so much as everything school is a rehearsal for. The lines survive brilliantly: “my teenage angst has a body count.”

One oddity. In the final act, I’ve always noticed that a part of David Newman’s score sounds lifted from Super Metroid, released six years later. Still no idea what to do with that.

This review may contain spoilers.

This sat on my watchlist for forever without me knowing anything about it: the plot, the cast, the genre. That served me well. The high concept is the good bit. The score is genuinely unnerving, and the course title cards (breadless bread plate; R.I.P. Jeremy) are funnier than most of the dialogue. Nicholas Hoult is very good as Tyler, whose foodie devotion curdles into something much worse.

But the guests are thin, one sin apiece, dealt with accordingly, and the film never bothers to explain why an entire kitchen would agree to do what it does for its chef’s grievance; “because people worship chefs” is weak. Jeremy is where I stopped extending credit. Margot’s way out—she’s a service worker, therefore exempt—is the same shortcut. Slowik’s complaint is that presentation has swallowed the food; the film proves him right more thoroughly than it means to.

Saw this at the cinema in 1999 and, I think, never since. Memory had filed it as Rashomon-adjacent, with unreliable narrators and contradiction; on reflection the three strands complete each other rather than compete. A different and altogether gentler trick. Mostly it’s a time capsule of faces I then assumed were headed for bigger things: Scott Wolf, Desmond Askew, Taye Diggs. A very young Melissa McCarthy turns up briefly. And obviously Sarah Polley, whose subsequent career rather outstrips the material here. Watchable, propulsive, thoroughly of its moment. And I say that as someone who considers the turn of the millennium to be a few years ago, not twenty-six.

Umpteenth rewatch and the nostalgia has gone recursive on me. Linklater made this in 1993, looking back mid-70s he half-remembered and half-invented. I’m now looking back thirty-odd years to a film that was already looking back, which means the object of my longing is itself an act of longing. Turtles all the way down!

I was reading Svetlana Boym last week and she’d call this the reflective kind of nostalgia: not trying to restore anything, just steeping in the ache of it, aware the ‘76 on screen never quite existed and that my own first watch has been smoothed by the same process. I get older, the film stays the same age.

What holds up is how little happens, and of course how completely that’s the point. It’s a last-day-of-school film where the freedom on offer is mostly the freedom to drive around. Nobody’s having the time of their lives; they’re circling the parking lot waiting for lives to start, which at seventeen is exactly what it feels like.

Segel and Weaving are clearly having the time of their lives, trading insults with the ease of a couple who’ve had years to sharpen them. The best running gag is physical: injuries accrue and stay, so by the closing stretch Segel genuinely looks like a man who’s been through everything the film has put him through. War of the Roses crossed with cartoon splatter, and mostly a delight. Less charming is the mid-film swerve into a rape threat played for tension. It doesn’t land, and the film would lose nothing without it. Plenty of fun regardless.

Cusack, in the Allen role, plays David Shayne, a playwright certain of his own genius, and spends the film discovering he isn’t the best writer in the room. That honour goes to Palminteri’s mobster bodyguard, who keeps improving the script from the wings. Cusack plays the straight man to all the noise and never begs for sympathy.

Playing moral compromise is something Cusack has always been good at. Shayne trades his principles one small concession at a time, and Cusack maps that slide without softening it or asking you to forgive him. It foreshadows the negotiated conscience he’d later bring to Grosse Pointe Blank.

Mixed feelings about Woody Allen, clearly, but this is one of my favourites of his.

Three stories, each with a flicker of something that never quite holds. Jarmusch’s deadpan usually finds the warmth under the stillness; here the stillness is mostly just… still. Whatever thread runs through them (family as obligation? as performance?) is far too faint.

It was today I realised that this and The Other Guys are different films. Cleverly written, sharply directed, and Gosling is, as ever, a delight. Keith David and Kim Basinger perhaps a little wasted.

I can see exactly why people love this. It hands you a version of your seventeen-year-old self and asks you to forgive her, which is a generous trick. The complaints land too. Lady Bird is a brat, and the world Gerwig builds around her is conspicuously white and insulated in ways that are never interrogated. But Ronan and Metcalf are excellent, the latter astonishing at times. Gerwig directs tightly. Other directors would have added at least 15 minutes of exposition.

I really do like this a lot. About as good as these things get (not intended to be faint praise). Half a star bump.

Cooper’s least showy film and for me his best. The stand-up scenes could have been a vanity exercise for everyone involved; instead they’re the most honest stretch of the film. I’ve enjoyed Arnett’s bluster for years but he’s doing something else here and it suits him. Dern matches him scene for scene and then some, especially in the back half once Tess stops absorbing and starts pushing back. They feel like two people who have actually been married. I really enjoyed this.

I remember this arriving in 1990, though only as a soundtrack and a general early-60s mood; the film itself never registered. Winona Ryder anchors it completely. Charlotte’s neuroses are pitched exactly right, and the voiceover prayers are the best thing here. Ricci, in her first film, is unnervingly assured. Cher is a natural, somehow both warmer and colder than I expected and with less screen time too. She was forty-four playing a woman of about thirty-one, which no amount of presence quite sells, but it matters much less than it should. Bob Hoskins is charm in a cardigan and flat cap. The whole thing is far sweeter and stranger than its reputation suggested to me.