Tag: comedy

Screening Room: ‘Fantasy Life’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - Festivals, Film - New1 Comment

I reviewed Fantasy Life for Slant Magazine:

Writer-director Matthew Shear’s Fantasy Life is an initially familiar-feeling rom-com about urbane yet nerve-rattled characters that eventually, but just barely, transcends expectations. A law school dropout who appears constantly shell-shocked by the concussions of everyday life, Sam (Shear) is first seen getting fired from his impossibly bleak office job before having a panic attack at a bookstore. With seemingly few prospects, he takes on a job as a manny for the children of a wealthy couple, Dianne (Amanda Peet) and David (Alessandro Nivola). Sam almost immediately falls headlong for Dianne, an ex-actor suffering from different but similarly debilitating and career-stifling mental health issues…

Here is the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie’

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(Courtesy of Neon)

I reviewed the new Matt Johnson film Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie for PopMatters:

For those who enjoy or get past Johnson’s clowning, Nirvanna is a deftly intricate mockumentary about friendship, celebrity, and the trap of nostalgia shot like a sci-fi nerd’s YouTube paean to Back to the Future, all wrapped inside a love letter to Toronto. Johnson and co-writer Jay McCarroll play slightly tweaked versions of themselves, much like Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan self-spoofed themselves in The Trip series…

It opens tomorrow. Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Is This Thing On?’

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Bradley Cooper’s third film, Is This Thing On?, just closed out the New York Film Festival. I reviewed for Slant Magazine:

When Alex (Will Arnett), the disgruntled protagonist of Bradley Cooper’s comic drama Is This Thing On?, first stalks onto the stage of New York’s Comedy Cellar, he doesn’t have a single joke to tell. All he has is the story of his recent separation from his wife, Tess (Laura Dern). The silence echoes at first, his breathing loud and suggesting an incipient panic attack. But Alex eventually gets a few laughs with some self-deprecating comments helped along by his comedically hangdog persona. Getting a solid round of applause on leaving the stage, Alex looks like a soon-to-be gambling addict who’s just won his first jackpot…

Is This Thing On? will open later in the year. Here’s the trailer:

TV Room: ‘Mountainhead’

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Jesse Armstrong’s new movie Mountainhead premieres on HBO May 31. I reviewed it for Slant Magazine:

By following Succession with another acid-singed comedy about a slightly different subset of 0.01 percenters, Armstrong is sticking to a kind of satire he knows well. Mountainhead’s tech bros have many pathologies familiar from the Roy family in Succession, but even though just two years have passed since that show’s finale, the landscape of wealth and power mapped by Armstrong has changed immensely—though it feels more like devolution than progress. Vicious and powerful as the Roys were, the bros of Mountainhead would have annihilated that old-tech clan’s business and net worth with the flick of an algorithm, followed by laughter…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Between the Temples’

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Jason Schwartzman and Carol Kane in Between the Temples (Sony Pictures Classics)

The new comedy Between the Temples opens later this week in limited release. Find it if you can.

My review is at PopMatters:

There is an honesty to Nathan Silver’s Between the Temples which belies the stylistic flourishes and alt-comedy sensibility. Moment after moment provides grist for some great epiphany or cute punchline that never quite comes. That is not to say it”s a comedy without laughs; “Can we have a shotgun bat mitzvah?” feels like a contender for one of the year’s best snort-funny lines. No film where a rabbi (TV Funhouse and Triumph the Insult Comic Dog creator Robert Smigel) putts golf balls into a shofar can be accused of taking itself too seriously…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World’

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The new film from Radu Jude (Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn) is opening in limited release this Friday. Do what you have to do, but find it. Nothing else like it in theaters right now.

My review is at PopMatters:

As the title of Radu Jude’s new film suggests, things end not with a bang but a whimper. In the case of Romania, the country whose legacy of corruption and exploitation has been a favored topic of Jude and other Romanian New Wave filmmakers, it is presented as collapsing with an undignified slide into lethargy, misdirected rage, and social media clowning. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is an absurdist and occasionally hilarious comedy. It also leaves you with the sensation of witnessing a slow-motion catastrophe where the worst has yet to happen…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: Sundance Review of ‘A Real Pain’

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Jesse Eisenberg’s second movie as writer/director, A Real Pain, just premiered at Sundance. It was picked up for distribution by Searchlight, and is very worth finding once it gets released.

My review is at Slant Magazine:

There’s enough pain on display in Jesse Eisenberg’s crackling comedy A Real Pain to keep numerous therapists busy for years. It’s a cavalcade of angst and agony, from the familial to the historical, with an occasionally quite bleak assessment of the human condition. Nevertheless, it’s also levitated by a truly joyful sense of humor that puts up a good fight against the story’s darker moments without trying to joke them into irrelevance…

Reader’s Corner: ‘Outrageous’

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Have you heard that everyone is too easily offended these days? That way back when you could make a gag about whatever you wanted and nobody got upset? Kliph Nesteroff’s buzzy and fun (if a little all over the place) Outrageous: A History of Showbiz and the Culture Wars shows how false that narrative is.

I reviewed Outrageous for PopMatters:

American comedy and show business have been mired in anger and pushback from the jump. Much of Outrageous echoes what we see today. That’s especially the case regarding anger about how you supposedly “can’t say anything anymore”. Nesteroff doesn’t make overt comparisons to cancel culture, even explaining in the introduction that he is not going to delve into “social media age” controversies (Dave Chappelle). He doesn’t have to make the comparison because it’s right there…

Writer’s Desk: What Lenny Said

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Since Lenny Bruce was a comic, he wasn’t really considered a writer. But that’s all comics do is write, even if they never put pen to paper. Every bit of their act is crafted, molded, sweated over, and knocked into shape by a grisly process they call “working it out” and your average writer just calls “editing.”

Bruce’s writerly output was thin. Too much time on stage and in jail, most likely, not to mention the chasing down of various substances. But he, or at least his spirit, still has advice to give.

Consider this scene from the end of the first episode of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. The title character, an aspiring standup, bails the Bruce character (played with elan by the astounding Luke Kirby) out of jail. Then, eager to know if it’s all worth it (the hours, the pay, the hecklers, the grind), Maisel asks him straight up, “Comedy. Standup. Do you love it?” Bruce responds:

Let’s put it like this: If there was anything else in the entire world that I could possibly do to earn a living, I would. Anything. I’m talking drycleaners to the Klan. Crippled kid portrait painter. Slaughterhouse attendant. If someone said to me, ‘Leonard, you can either eat a guy’s head or do two weeks at the Copa,’ I’d say, ‘Pass the f—— salt.’ It’s a terrible, terrible job. It should not exist. Like cancer. And God…

Asked by Maisel again, “Do you love it?” he shrugs and gives her a cracked madhouse grin.

Every writer knows what he means. It’s awful, this thing we do day in and day out.

But we love it.

Writer’s Desk: What’s the Deal with Writing?

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It would be wonderful to think that all Jerry Seinfeld’s ideas come to him while he’s eating cereal just like that. Perhaps not “wonderful” but maybe “reassuring,” because then it would mean that is how writing might be sometimes for the rest of us.

No such luck:

I still have a writing session every day. It’s another thing that organizes your mind. The coffee goes here. The pad goes here. The notes go here. My writing technique is just: You can’t do anything else. You don’t have to write, but you can’t do anything else. The writing is such an ordeal. That sustains me…

Seinfeld later elaborated on this with Tim Ferris:

…my writing sessions used to be very arduous, very painful, like pushing against the wind in soft, muddy ground with a wheelbarrow full of bricks. And I did it. I had to do it because there’s just, as I mentioned in the book, you either learn to do that or you will die in the ecosystem.

Keep this in mind as you get ready for whatever 2024 is going to bring. The writing will not always be easy. You will probably want to give up. But this is what we signed up for the first time somebody asked us asked us what we wanted to be and we said, “a writer.”

You just have to keep pushing the wheelbarrow.

TV Room: 10 Best ‘Community’ Episodes

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So what were the ten best episodes of Community? Glad you asked! I made a stab at ranking them for Slant:

The most common criticism levied against NBC’s Community during its chaotic and generally acclaimed six-season run was that it was all snark and no heart. It’s a complaint that’s been levied at many self-aware, pop culture-literate works by Gen Xers. But in this case, it was flat-out wrong. Threaded alongside creator Dan Harmon’s meta-sitcom-as-sitcom commentary was a poignant and gut-twisting look at loneliness and purpose that suggested that even being part of a co-dependent hot mess of a friend group was better than navigating life solo…

Final word goes to Troy and Abed:

Screening Room: ‘Somewhere in Queens’

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Directed, co-written by, and starring Ray Romano, Somewhere in Queens is opening this Friday.

My review is at Slant:

Intermittently funny and touching, but ultimately forgettable, Ray Romano’s overcooked family comedy Somewhere in Queens is about a protective couple who can’t quite let their son go. Leo (Romano) and Angie Russo (Laurie Metcalf) fret over nearly everything to do with “Sticks” (Jacob Ward), a gawky and quiet high school basketball star on the verge of graduation, but never quite get around to asking what he wants to do with his life. If there wasn’t an ABC Afterschool Special about this kind of parenting, there should have been…

Here’s the trailer:

TV Room: ‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’

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The last season of Amazon’s highly addictive The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, a screwball comedy as filtered through Mad Men and mid-1960s Broadway farce, starts this Friday.

My review is at Slant:

Through its first four seasons, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel kept an increasing number of plates spinning at a speed that could leave you at once in disbelief and laughter, and always felt on the brink of losing sight of its main story and character. The fifth and final season of the Amazon dramedy is a course correction of sorts, paring back the clamorous side plots that had started taking up too much of the show’s oxygen while retaining its electric spirit…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘There There’

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There There, the latest comedy from Andrew Bujalski (Computer Chess) opens later this week. I reviewed for Slant:

Writer-director Andrew Bujalski’s There There, a funny and cleverly linked series of dramedic vignettes, doesn’t try to hide the stitchwork imposed by pandemic-period production restrictions. Instead, the film leans into them, creating a schizoid atmosphere that underlies and darkens some of the more seemingly straightforward relationship skirmishes and soul-searching soliloquies that fill much of its running time…

Here’s the trailer:

TV Room: ‘Monty Python: A Celebration’

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There is a nifty four-part show on PBS right now called Monty Python: A Celebration. It’s essentially a plus-sized clip show of fantastic Python bits intermixed with various comics like David Cross and Patton Oswalt reminding us why that troupe of fish-slappers and parrot-killers helped set the stage for almost everything interesting in modern comedy.

For some reason, they also asked me to hold forth on the same.

You can find it streaming here. Otherwise, as they say, you can check your local listings.

Lest you forget, Monty Python FAQ, which I co-authored with the good messrs Cogan and Massey, can still be purchased wherever you get your books. Like here. Or here. Maybe here.