And I Pity Any Girl Who Isn't Me Today

Year: 2018

Director: Abby Kohn & Marc Silverstein

Cast: Amy Schumer, Rory Scovel, Michelle Williams

Run Time: 1 hour 50 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Maybe I just shouldn't watch trailers anymore. I had to be dragged to see Blockers, a movie I really liked but which seemed at first glance like a reductive, sex-negative trawl through a slurry of wasted time and anal insertion jokes. And now we have I Feel Pretty, which seemed like a grotesque gauntlet of Amy Schumer body-shaming. It's not not that, but it's likewise much better than it has any right to be. Go figure, I guess.

There's still no way in hell anybody is getting me to watch Super Troupers 2 though.

So, in I Feel Pretty, Renee (Amy Schumer) works for the beauty company Lily LeClaire. Specifically, the web department. She doesn't even get to have her office in the company's glorious high rise, most likely because she's not a wafer-thin model who would break her diet by drinking a full bottle of water. When CEO Avery LeClaire (Michelle Williams) begrudgingly agrees to develop a diffusion line for lower-end stores like Target or Kohl's, she realizes she needs a consultant who's a "regular" girl.

Meanwhile, Renee hasn't had the confidence to apply for an open receptionist position in the main office. Until... she hits her head during a spin class and suddenly sees herself as unspeakably hot. With her newfound confidence, she gets the job, she gets herself a guy (Rory Scovel), and she learns that the true beauty is the friends she made along the way or whatever.

Look, I enjoyed it, but it's not sticking around in my brain any longer than it needs to.

Now I'm just warning you right here, this is gonna be a real short review. In the rich tradition of modern comedy movies, I Feel Pretty is almost totally devoid of any filmmaking beyond setting up a camera, blasting the set with lights, and rolling as soon as the stars can be coerced from their trailers. At the very least we're not buried beneath a pile of endless improvisational riffing, but as far as having actual "movie" qualities to discuss, I Feel Pretty is just as shallow as its fashionplate characters.

And while I Feel Pretty is funny, what more can you really say than that? There are jokes. More of them made me laugh than didn't. A lot of this is thanks to the cast. Amy Schumer can be abrasive, but she does always deliver, and Rory Scovel is an excellent foil for her in one of his first major film roles (he's been kicking around TV and the comedy scene for some time now, and he deserves every scrap of rom-com love interest he can get his hands on). Michelle Williams tries to steal the show and nails her character's tics and cartoonish squeak of a voice, but she is in almost exactly the same role as Tilda Swinton in that other Schumer feature Trainwreck, and nobody can do Tilda like Tilda.

Plus, it's cheating if you share a scene with Naomi Campbell, because an unplugged toaster would look charismatic and Oscar-worthy next to her.

It's a good thing the laughs keep coming too, because the concept here gets extremely wonky at times. It's never entirely clear what exactly is going on in Renee's head, let alone how exactly everyone else in her life has managed to tiptoe around her delusions. At times, it even forgets about the central conceit entirely, merely opting to run Renee through a truncated version of Anne Hathaway's arc in Devil Wears Prada.

But honestly, the further it can get from that gimmick and the more character-centric comedy it can squeeze in, the better. This is a solid enough romantic comedy that it could stand up on its own without the weird metaphysical/psychosexual(?) plot it tangles itself up in. If this was Trainwreck Part 2 it would be just as funny, so maybe it didn't need to happen this way. Nevertheless, it did, and it's totally fine. We'll just have to leave it at that, I suppose.

TL;DR: I Feel Pretty is a surprisingly decent, if conceptually inconsistent movie.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 705

Amazing Amy

Year: 2015

Director: Judd Apatow

Cast: Amy Schumer, Bill Hader, LeBron James

Run Time: 2 hours 5 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Fall to your trembling knees, peasants! The great Judd Apatow has returned to the director’s chair at long last, after a long period of cinematic drought, in which hardly any overgrown manchildren were foisted upon an unsuspecting public! Perhaps you detect a hint of irreverence here. It might interest you to know that I feel the man peaked as a director with The 40-Year-Old Virgin. It’s all downhill from here, folks.

Now, Trainwreck is certainly the most intriguing recent film of his directorial oeuvre for two reasons: 1) The script was not written by himself, and 2) the script was written by and stars a woman, Amy Schumer, 2015’s red-hot comedian. Both of these things are a first for Apatow and I respect his branching out.

Probably as a reaction to the heavy-duty misogynist accusations I leveled against him naught but last Monday. He works fast.

In Trainwreck, Amy (Amy Schumer) is a commitment-phobic purveyor of harlotry. While she sleeps her way through the Manhattan phone book, her job at a bro-y magazine sends her to interview Aaron (Bill Hader), a well-to-do sports physician. Despite her congenital hatred of sports and monogamy, they begin to fall in love of all things. How will these two crazy kids ever make it work?

Trainwreck pretty closely adheres to the Apatow ill-adjusted manchild formula, just copy-pasting a vagina where applicable. It’s well-worn territory and it falls prey to the exact same pitfalls as every other of his films, but with a new voice at the wheel of the script, at least the jokes feel fresh.

Though it must have taken years to clear out the odor of stale pot fumes.

“Yes, that’s all fine and dandy,” you say, tapping your well-manicured fingernails on your desk, “But here’s the important thing: Is Trainwreck funny?”

If you’re really in a hurry, I’ll give it to you straight: Yes. And your cuticles look great.

Alright, now that we’ve got those pushy, well-groomed bastards taken care of, let’s dive into things in a little more detail, shall we? There are a lot of laugh-out-loud funny moments in Trainwreck, some irreverent, some ribald, some just plain surreal, but the two funniest people in the film –Schumer and Hader – are woefully underserved by the script, Hader especially. His considerable talents are poured into what must be the Guinness world record holder for most skim milk, white bread, boring ass straight man role ever conceived, and Schumer keeps on forcing herself into prototypical rom-com scenarios, only occasionally managing to convince us that she isn’t enjoying herself.

The real standouts of the film are a variety of Apatowian fringe regulars (including my BFF Randall Park) and three utterly shocking, bewildering, and unrestrainedly hilarious, left-field performances from (in ascending order) John Cena, LeBron James, and Tilda “Motherf***ing Space Queen” Swinton. Cena pulls out all the stops in a fearless turn as Amy’s clueless musclehead boyfriend, James effortlessly switches between intimidating mountain lion and doe-eyed screwball as Aaron’s best friend, an Swinton is sharp as a tack and unrecognizable with laceratingly perfect comic timing as Amy’s acid-tongued boss.

Thus, in typical Judd fashion, does the comedy seep in from around the edges of the film instead of naturally flowing from the center. It’s a flawed, herky-jerky delivery system but it gets results.

Kind of like when I go bowling.

So, yes, Trainwreck is funny, which is pretty essential for any comedy (It’s nuggets of cinematic wisdom like this that keep my avid readers coming back). But when the film lunges toward treacly emotion, it stumbles. Much like Katherine Heigl in Knocked Up before her, Schumer proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that she has the acting chops to pull off the dramatic scenes that are handed to her on a silver platter, but fails to satisfactorily answer the question of why they’re there in the first place. Their sheer profusion bites into Trainwreck like a rabid dog, tearing its pacing to shreds and rendering its tight, generic plot periodically aimless, hopelessly unspooling past the two-hour mark.

Brevity is the soul of wit, and 125 minutes is the soul of making my damn bladder implode. If nobody gets on Apatow about his grotesquely overlong comedy run times soon, I’m going to have to go vigilante and sneak into his editing bay with a giant electromagnet to cull what I possibly can. But hey, Trainwreck is an alright time at the movies, even if it’s a longer one than you may have bargained for.

TL;DR: Trainwreck is overlong and generic, but features some terrific, out-of-left-field performances from unexpected actors.

Rating: 6/10

Should I Spend Money On This? Sure, grab a matinee. Movie theaters have free air conditioning.

Word Count: 806