Brooks' Brother

Year: 2018

Director: John Francis Daley & Jonathan Goldstein

Cast: Jason Bateman, Rachel McAdams, Kyle Chandler 

Run Time: 1 hour 40 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

It's not groundbreaking to point out that there has been a dearth of imagination when it comes to Hollywood comedies, but seriously. Can we quit it with these titles? Girls Trip. Rough Night. Bridesmaids. Spy. Sisters. Dirty Grandpa. Good or bad, we're not doing these movies any favors with these relentlessly descriptive, boring titles. And let's not forget that on the slate for 2018 are Book Club, Eigth Grade, and Night School. Game Night is saddled with another one of these blah, nothing monikers, and that's no way to treat the best comedy of the first quarter of 2018.

Not that there was much competition for that, but still!

In Game Night, a  group of adult friends have a regular game night every week. So far, so simple. These friends are led by a competitive couple - Max (Jason Bateman) and Annie (Rachel McAdams) - who are having trouble conceiving due to Max's high stress levels. Filling out the ranks are high school sweethearts Kevin (Lamorne Morris) and Michelle (Kylie Bunbury) and empty-headed hunk Ryan (Billy Magnussen). Former game night attendee and monotonously enthusiastic Gary (Jesse Plemons) still lives next door, but he's not invited anymore since his wife left him and he has sunk into a life of solitude, weirdness, and creepy lurking. To complete the pairs, Ryan usually has a rotating coterie of identical bimbos, but this week he brought in a ringer: his intelligent and age-appropriate Irish coworker Sarah (Sharon Horgan).

And oh, what a week to decide to come! It turns out Game Night has a lot in common with that other boringly titled film: The Game. Max's show-off older brother Brooks (Kyle Chandler) is in town and has arranged an interactive role-playing game where one of their number will be kidnapped and the others will have to follow the clues to find him. Unfortunately, Brooks is abducted by actual thugs and the line between game and reality swiftly blurs as they rush to rescue him from what may or may not be an elaborate ruse.

They don't take it as seriously as they maybe should, is the point.

Now, I don't want you to get the wrong impression. I did really like Game Night, but it's not quite the balm to save the bloated corpse that is modern comedy. That's a lot to ask of a movie anyway, but it's far from special enough to have any kind of lasting impact on the culture. It's just a funny movie that'll go in one ear and out the other, causing no harm as it passes through.

But, oh is it funny. This is partially thanks to a tight script that's not so reliant on improv and employs judicious use of callbacks to bring everything full circle into a satisfying whole. But it's mostly thanks to the freaking cast, which is a who's who of comic actors we love and comic actors we have done a disservice to by not having loved for many years already. 

Jason Bateman is the de facto lead here, and he does find a way to keep his normal schtick fresh by honing his timing to a stilleto-sharp point, but as the resident straight man he's easily upstaged by a collection of truly tremendous performances. Rachel McAdams (who has always been great, but who I never particularly recognized for comedy) is a particular standout, for her off-kilter line readings that allow even her most flatly written lines to leap off the screen with surprising energy. 

But honestly, it's impossible to look away from the people on the fringes of this cast. The first is Billy Magnussen, who has certainly learned how to use his impossibly sculpted body as a punchline in his previous roles in Into the Woods and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and somehow takes a one-note "dumb hot guy" role and twists it into something knowing and unique. He finds ways to give unexpected outlets to his dumbness, both physically and vocally. 

If someone could slip my number into the next script he reads, I'd appreciate it.

Lamorne Morris also accomplishes the elevation of what should be a grating stock character, giving his repetitive jokes a rhythm so impeccably tight it always catches you off guard. And then - finally! -there's Jesse Plemons, who should be waited on hand and foot by the Hollywood elite for how much talent he's given the world in his young life. The character he has created here is a work of art, an insurmountable force of gravity that sucks you into its awe-inspiring weirdness. It's so unique that it's very difficult to describe. I shan't exert myself, but suffice it to say that his strained monotone is both keenly disturbing and guffaw-inducing.

But enough about that. Any comedy can assemble a great cast, even if this one is especially, unexpectedly strong. Game Night actually shines as a piece of filmmaking, far more often than is common in this day and age. Although its commitment to its stylistic approach wavers toward the second act, this movie has an exciting aesthetic that mimics board games in a variety of satisfying visual ways, using kinetic editing and what I assume are CGI-altered aerial shots to provide an almost dreamlike atmosphere when transitioning from scene to scene.

And the more that's said about Cliff Martinez's darkly synth-fueled score, the better. I wouldn't have pegged the composer of Drive to be the perfect match for this goofy R-rated comedy, but that's why they don't pay me the big bucks. His music really highlights the surreality of the premise, providing the perfect airy counterpoint to this movie's blend of high concept comedy with jarring jolts of reality.

Game Night does exactly what it needs to do, and it does it with some sense of panache. That's all we really need, isn't it? It won't melt your face off with pure comedy, but it sure is an irresistibly affable film to spend 100 minutes with, and you won't catch me complaining about that for one second.

TL;DR: Game Night is a strong comedy, supported by excellent filmmaking.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 1041

Popcorn Kernels: Best Picture Contenders, Vol. 1

In which I once again attempt to sit through all the nominees for Best Picture, knowing full well that the presence of Darkest Hour shall surely prevent me from accomplishing this goal. Here are two of those efforts.

The Post

Year: 2017
Director: Steven Spielberg
Cast: Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Bob Odenkirk
Run Time: 1 hour 56 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG-13

When the Washington Post gets ahold of the Pentagon Papers, which expose a decade of government secrets, they must decide whether or not to publish them, which could potentially shut down the paper and send them to jail.

Look, I admitted that Spotlight was good, even though it's preposterous that it won Best Picture. And I dislike the state of the country as much as any reasonable American. But as timely as The Post is, it will never feel like anything other than Spotlight 2 (and in fact, it was co-written by one of the co-writers of Spotlight, if it wasn't already watered down enough for you). And as much as director Steven Spielberg has proven time and again he's a genius, we all have our bad days. The Post is such a huge waste of everyone's time and effort that it's not even funny.

Not that it was meant to be funny. The film finds Spielberg in intensely sober-minded Oscarbait mode, with only one scene (the best scene in the movie, involving a little girl selling lemonade) providing a moment of levity in this grandiose, self-important, completely arid awards season trifle.

The Post has a cruelly inflated sense of its own relevance, tying the problems of the past to current affairs in the most blunt, obvious way possible. Look, I'm all for arguments in favor of the free press, but they don't have to be couched in a series of artless, implacable zooms while characters monologue about how important the themes of the movie are. It hardly pretends to be dialogue, it's just one long essay mummifying an admittedly important historical event.

It's honestly rather clumsy, constantly framing Meryl Streep in drifts of men to pointedly remind you that she's not in a woman's space, all while the dialogue revolves around her being a woman in a man's space. It's very pointedly a message movie, and while shots like that can work - I'm thinking of Clarice Starling in the elevator at Quantico in Silence of the Lambs - it's forced down your throat so hard you start gagging before the fifteen minute mark.

It's just kind of a generally lousy movie, bookended by its worst scenes (a shoehorned-in Saving Private Ryan moment in Vietnam and a hilariously terrible Marvel-esque coda involving the world's worst Richard Nixon impersonator frantically waving his arms like a caffeinated mime and not even attempting to time his movements to the actual Nixon recording posing as dialogue) and endlessly unspooling trite, uninspired dialogue in between ("That picture makes me sad," exclaims Sarah Paulson, hopelessly drowning in a nothing role).

There's just no feeling involved here, it's all lecturing. And considering that The Post contains two of the world's most charismatic movie stars, it's astonishing how this could have even been accomplished. Meryl Streep is fine, as always, but she's snoozing through a role she could play with both hands and feet tied behind her back. And Tom Hanks is acting SO. HARD. But no matter how much he rakishly props his leg up on desks or undoes his sleeves, he's straining through an inexplicable old timey radio host accent that just drips with insincerity.

The Post was never going to be a great movie. It could only have ever been a acceptably Important prestige picture. But the way it fails its actors and the audience so substantially is frankly shocking. The music (John Williams, again visibly bored) seems to actively rebel against the tone of the film, the script is begging for attention yet barely there, and the coterie of strong performers (including, randomly, a handful of comic actors like Zach Woods and David Cross) is given nothing to do but be conduits for a firehose stream of flop sweat. One to miss.

Rating: 4/10

Dunkirk

Year: 2017

Director: Christopher Nolan

Cast: Fionn Whitehead, Tom Hardy, Mark Rylance

Run Time: 1 hour 46 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

We follow a fighter pilot, a civilian ship, and some ground troops through the effort to rescue the British military from the beach at Dunkirk during World War II.

Dunkirk is about as boldly experimental as a big budget blockbuster can get. But the thing is, experimentation leads to failure about half the time. Not that Dunkirk is a failure; what it gets right outweighs what it gets wrong, but its open risk-taking comes with some very odd choices that don't quite work.

For one thing, take the peculiar dilation of time that occurs over the course of the film. One story elapses over a week, one over a day, and one over an hour. The film cuts between these stories simultaneously, and they overlap at certain key moments. But the way they are presented doesn't really allow for any more insight or intrigue than if they had just been shown chronologically. And the landing of a fighter plane is dragged out over the course of what feels like half an hour of excruciatingly long screen time, milked for all it's worth in the film's biggest patch of jingoistic militarism.

Luckily, that doesn't seem to be the prevailing sentiment over the rest of the film. Dunkirk is a film that is above all else about the terror and constant, oppressive violence of war (despite the conspicuously pulled punches of its PG-13 rating), doled out by an omnipresent enemy that is literally never shown, except in the form of bomber planes that whistle by periodically. It eschews character arcs and even dialogue at times (especially in the sequences on the beach, it plays out more like a silent film, which fortunately prevents Harry Styles from screwing anything up) in favor of this all-important, nerve-rattling atmosphere.

And there is absolutely no denying that this is an utterly gorgeous motion picture. Between what are probably some of the best airplane action sequences ever filmed, Nolan provides us bleakly stunning, expansive vistas that blast your corneas with the sheer wideness of devastation and desolation on this beach. The single distracting thing about the visuals is that - at least on the home video release, I can't speak to the theatrical - it has been decided that the aspect ratios switch between the footage shot on 70mm and 65mm. The black bars constantly blotting out the huge screen-filling vistas are hugely distracting and an entirely odd choice.

Much more thoroughly satisfying is the soundscape, which is as harsh and alarming as you would expect any good war picture to be, slashed through with Hans Zimmer's droning, atonal, staccato score that ratchets up the tension to an unbearable degree.

It's a good thing that Dunkirk is so visually and aurally stunning and goes all in on those elements, because most of the dialogue sequences are the worst parts of the movie. Whether its generals dumping piles of exposition on the top of your head or Mark Rylance spouting nothing but affectless patriotic quotes for the better part of an hour, these scenes are generally worth much less of your time than the tense beach sequences - especially a scene where bullets begin to blast through the hull of a ship where stowaway soldiers are waiting for high tide.

I'm not usually a fan of war movies, and I wouldn't say I'd ever want to watch this again, but I'm glad I saw it in the first place. If you've already seen Lady Bird, Get Out, and The Shape of Water, this should certainly be next on your Oscars checklist.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1306