Check out my review, online at Phoenix Magazine, of Judd Apatow's comedy classic The 40-Year-Old Virgin...
...now getting a re-release in the multiplexes in celebration its 20th anniversary, if you can believe that.
Showing posts with label CATHERINE KEENER. Show all posts
Showing posts with label CATHERINE KEENER. Show all posts
Friday, August 22, 2025
Thursday, November 26, 2020
A BUBBLING CROODS
Opening today:
The Croods: A New Age--2013's The Croods, an animated feature about a primitive nomadic family struggling to survive, and about the father struggling to adapt to his daughter growing up, was, as I recall, a sweet, mildly amusing film, but nothing that screamed for a sequel. So I was almost as surprised when this one showed up, seven years later, as I was by 2016's Zoolander 2, a decade and a half after the 2001 original.
I was even more surprised that A New Age is better than the original; more imaginative, thematically and visually more interesting.
Once again the central characters are dad Grug, voiced by Nicholas Cage, and his daughter Eep, voiced by Emma Stone. The other Croods are Grug's wife Ugga (Catherine Keener), son Thunk (Clark Duke), younger daughter Theep (Randy Thom) and the formidable Gran (Cloris Leachman), Ugga's bewigged mom. Traveling with them is Guy (Ryan Reynolds), a rather advanced young man who is Eep's love interest and Grug's nemesis. Eep and Guy are starting to talk about striking out on their own.
The movie takes a startling turn when Grug, looking for a stable new homeland to prevent this breakaway, leads his family straight to...a wall. Sure enough, this movie turns into a flexible allegory for both the immigrant experience and the class mobility experience, seen mostly from the point of view of the aspirant have nots rather than the defensive haves.
The wall demarcates the estate of the Bettermans, hubby Phil (Peter Dinklage), wife Hope (Lesley Mann) and daughter Dawn (Kelly Marie Tran), upscale types with amenities like privacy and beds and windows; staring out of the latter is as addictive to young Thunk as television or smartphone screens are in our time. It turns out that the Bettermans knew Guy as a child, and feel duty bound to reclaim him from the Croods.
This sort of thing is trenchant enough, and happily the satire, if it even rises to the level of the term, remains good-natured and unpretentious. But in the final third of The New Age we learn why eating the copious bananas around the Betterman compound is taboo, and after that the movie pretty much goes, well, bananas. It's quite frenetic all the way through, come to that; feverish slapstick sequences are edited to pop hits, and the fanciful fauna we're shown is seriously weird, ranging from pet sloths to a giant sabertooth cat to land sharks to "punch monkeys," so named for exactly the reason you'd guess. There are even multi-eyed spider-wolf hybrids.
The New Age isn't especially deep, but it's admirably freewheeling and festive and heartfelt. It also has a rather rousing cover of "I Think I Love You," performed by Tenacious D, under the end credits.
Friday, February 24, 2017
GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER 2
Opening this weekend:
Get Out—Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), a young, gifted and black art photographer in New York City, goes upstate for a weekend in the country with his white girlfriend of four months, Rose (Allison Williams), to meet the affluent parents. Dad (Bradley Whitford) is a neurosurgeon, Mom (Catherine Keener) is a hypnotherapist, creepy brother (Caleb Landry Jones) is a med student.
They seem, initially, like nice folks, a little awkward and self-conscious about Chris’s race, but well-intentioned, even compensatorily over-friendly. But small weirdnesses crop up at once, first with the mannered, inauthentic behavior of the family’s black domestic help (Marcus Henderson and Betty Gabriel) and of another black man who shows up at a party (Lakieth Stanfield), and then with other hints of the sinister.
To say much more would be to give away too much about this horror tale, written and directed by Jordan Peele (half of the comedy team of Key & Peele) in his directorial debut. Suffice to say that it’s a splendidly successful, witty shocker, in large part because Peele is disciplined about playing by the rules, using the theme of racial unease to generate terror along a wonderfully old-fashioned, Ira-Levin-ish Gothic structure.
Kaluuya, a Brit, easily pulls us into his gradually-rising paranoia and makes us root for Chris. The white actors are flawless, from the subtlety of Williams, Whitford, Keener and Stephen Root as a blind gallery owner to the ripe caricature of the unwholesome party guests. And the wide-eyed servants, with their stilted unctuousness, can raise the hairs on your neck. There’s overt comic relief, too, in the form of the ebullient LilRey Howery as Chris’s worried TSA agent pal.
Best of all, while Get Out is sincerely meant to scare, Peele still brings his comic sensibility into play here. There are well-crafted jolts and jumps, and the climactic clashes are conventionally gruesome, but the movie never loses a sense of audience-pleasing fun. Peele connects the film not only to classic horror templates but also to hardwired racial beliefs, both black and white. The plot partly hinges, for instance, on the familiar white conviction, recently displayed by our president, that all black people know each other.
Opening at Sonora Cinema at Desert Sky Mall:
You're Killing Me Susana—Eligio is a Mexico City soap actor who likes to stay out late, drink, and fool around with women from the set. One morning he wakes up to find his stunning writer wife Susana (Veronica Echegui) absent from bed and apartment. Her clothes are absent from the closet, too.
Stunned and shaken—he thought they were doing great—Eligio traces Susana to a writer's workshop at a college in Iowa. He drops everything and follows her there, where he finds her involved with a virile, silent Polish poet.
From here on, You're Killing Me Susana (Me Estas Matando Susana), directed by Roberto Sneider from a Jose Agustin novel, becomes both a romantic comedy with serious overtones and a spiky look at U.S. culture through an outsider's eyes. In both functions it's charged up by the performance of Gael Garcia Bernal—probably best known to U.S. audiences as the young Che Guevara in The Motorcycle Diaries—as Eligio.
With his insolent sexual confidence and persistent (if mostly ineffectual) machismo, Eligio is the sort who can smirk at his own infidelities yet throw wailing, floor-pounding tantrums at Susana's without seeming to notice the incongruity. The breathtaking Echegui makes you see how the combination of Eligio's oppressive selfishness and his unshakable lovability could make sneaking away while he's asleep seem like the only escape.
This wry, absorbing, unpredictable movie can truly be called a comedy-drama, deftly tipping from near-farcical to poignant without losing its balance, on either side of the hyphen.
Get Out—Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), a young, gifted and black art photographer in New York City, goes upstate for a weekend in the country with his white girlfriend of four months, Rose (Allison Williams), to meet the affluent parents. Dad (Bradley Whitford) is a neurosurgeon, Mom (Catherine Keener) is a hypnotherapist, creepy brother (Caleb Landry Jones) is a med student.
They seem, initially, like nice folks, a little awkward and self-conscious about Chris’s race, but well-intentioned, even compensatorily over-friendly. But small weirdnesses crop up at once, first with the mannered, inauthentic behavior of the family’s black domestic help (Marcus Henderson and Betty Gabriel) and of another black man who shows up at a party (Lakieth Stanfield), and then with other hints of the sinister.
To say much more would be to give away too much about this horror tale, written and directed by Jordan Peele (half of the comedy team of Key & Peele) in his directorial debut. Suffice to say that it’s a splendidly successful, witty shocker, in large part because Peele is disciplined about playing by the rules, using the theme of racial unease to generate terror along a wonderfully old-fashioned, Ira-Levin-ish Gothic structure.
Kaluuya, a Brit, easily pulls us into his gradually-rising paranoia and makes us root for Chris. The white actors are flawless, from the subtlety of Williams, Whitford, Keener and Stephen Root as a blind gallery owner to the ripe caricature of the unwholesome party guests. And the wide-eyed servants, with their stilted unctuousness, can raise the hairs on your neck. There’s overt comic relief, too, in the form of the ebullient LilRey Howery as Chris’s worried TSA agent pal.
Best of all, while Get Out is sincerely meant to scare, Peele still brings his comic sensibility into play here. There are well-crafted jolts and jumps, and the climactic clashes are conventionally gruesome, but the movie never loses a sense of audience-pleasing fun. Peele connects the film not only to classic horror templates but also to hardwired racial beliefs, both black and white. The plot partly hinges, for instance, on the familiar white conviction, recently displayed by our president, that all black people know each other.
Opening at Sonora Cinema at Desert Sky Mall:
You're Killing Me Susana—Eligio is a Mexico City soap actor who likes to stay out late, drink, and fool around with women from the set. One morning he wakes up to find his stunning writer wife Susana (Veronica Echegui) absent from bed and apartment. Her clothes are absent from the closet, too.
Stunned and shaken—he thought they were doing great—Eligio traces Susana to a writer's workshop at a college in Iowa. He drops everything and follows her there, where he finds her involved with a virile, silent Polish poet.
From here on, You're Killing Me Susana (Me Estas Matando Susana), directed by Roberto Sneider from a Jose Agustin novel, becomes both a romantic comedy with serious overtones and a spiky look at U.S. culture through an outsider's eyes. In both functions it's charged up by the performance of Gael Garcia Bernal—probably best known to U.S. audiences as the young Che Guevara in The Motorcycle Diaries—as Eligio.
With his insolent sexual confidence and persistent (if mostly ineffectual) machismo, Eligio is the sort who can smirk at his own infidelities yet throw wailing, floor-pounding tantrums at Susana's without seeming to notice the incongruity. The breathtaking Echegui makes you see how the combination of Eligio's oppressive selfishness and his unshakable lovability could make sneaking away while he's asleep seem like the only escape.
This wry, absorbing, unpredictable movie can truly be called a comedy-drama, deftly tipping from near-farcical to poignant without losing its balance, on either side of the hyphen.
Friday, February 13, 2015
IN TENS PASSION
Once again Valentine’s Day is upon us, and again I’m going to take it upon
myself to make a few suggestions for romantic video choices. But what is
Valentine’s Day if not a day for sentiment? And what’s more sentimental than an
anniversary? Here, therefore, are three love stories enjoying landmark anniversaries
this year:
30 years old:
Murphy’s Romance—The word “romance” is right there in the title. James Garner represents the title’s other half, Murphy, a mildly curmudgeonly widower who runs an old-school drug store in small-town Arizona (the film was shot in Florence). He falls in love with a much younger newcomer to the community, a broke single mother named Emma (Sally Field), who’s struggling to start a horse farm outside of town. Murphy buys a horse and takes up riding just to be close to her, but soon finds himself competing for her with her irresponsible ex (Brian Kerwin).
Based on a Max Schott tale and directed by Martin Ritt, the film is relaxed, charming and believable, and the stars have a lovely rapport. Garner was nominated for an Oscar for his performance, but he is said to have received an even higher honor: Field supposedly claimed that his was the best onscreen kiss she ever received.
20 years old:
French Kiss—Meg Ryan, as an American living in Canada, follows her doctor fiancé Timothy Hutton to Paris, where he’s wandered away from their engagement after a sultry young Frenchwoman. Ryan’s bags are stolen, but she gains the alliance of the unkempt, shady Frenchman, played Kevin Kline, who sat next to her on the plane. He promises to help her regain the doctor’s affections.
30 years old:
Murphy’s Romance—The word “romance” is right there in the title. James Garner represents the title’s other half, Murphy, a mildly curmudgeonly widower who runs an old-school drug store in small-town Arizona (the film was shot in Florence). He falls in love with a much younger newcomer to the community, a broke single mother named Emma (Sally Field), who’s struggling to start a horse farm outside of town. Murphy buys a horse and takes up riding just to be close to her, but soon finds himself competing for her with her irresponsible ex (Brian Kerwin).
Based on a Max Schott tale and directed by Martin Ritt, the film is relaxed, charming and believable, and the stars have a lovely rapport. Garner was nominated for an Oscar for his performance, but he is said to have received an even higher honor: Field supposedly claimed that his was the best onscreen kiss she ever received.
20 years old:
French Kiss—Meg Ryan, as an American living in Canada, follows her doctor fiancé Timothy Hutton to Paris, where he’s wandered away from their engagement after a sultry young Frenchwoman. Ryan’s bags are stolen, but she gains the alliance of the unkempt, shady Frenchman, played Kevin Kline, who sat next to her on the plane. He promises to help her regain the doctor’s affections.
You can probably guess what happens, but watch the movie
anyway. Ryan gave the best performance to date of her movie career in this one—detailed,
delicately witty—and Kline gave one his best, too. Directed by Lawrence Kasdan
from a carefully-constructed, mature script by Adam Brooks, this may be the
most insufficiently celebrated American love story of the last twenty years.
10 years old:
The 40-Year-Old Virgin—For several years I’ve been telling a
female friend that this film isn’t the crude farce she thinks it is, and that
she’d enjoy it, and she’s repeatedly seemed unconvinced. And she’s not
altogether wrong, perhaps. The film, decidedly not for the kiddies, is full of raunchy gags and
language—indeed, it’s one of the most honest depictions I’ve seen in a
mainstream movie of the way men talk about sex.
It’s also got a lovely romance at its core, expertly played
by Steve Carrell as the fellow who finds himself in the title state and
Catherine Keener as the woman for whom he’s very understandably fallen, and to
whom he’s ashamed to disclose his shocking secret. The large supporting cast
includes Seth Rogen, Paul Rudd and Romany Malco as the coworkers who give Carrell
hilarious, atrocious advice. Along with director Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up, from two years later, this
is one of the best popular American comedies so far this century, and for all
its off-color gags, it casts a surprisingly romantic spell.
Happy Valentine’s Day everybody!
Friday, October 11, 2013
TOM'S CRUISE
The success of Apollo 13 and Cast Away suggests that audiences are willing to invest emotionally in seeing Tom Hanks get home safe. Presumably this is what led to his casting in the title role of Captain Phillips, a thriller about the April 2009 attack, by a ragtag quartet of teenage Somali pirates, on the cargo ship Maersk Alabama, bound from Oman to Kenya. Richard Phillips allowed himself to be the sole hostage in order to get the pirates off the ship in an enclosed lifeboat. A harrowing four-day standoff with the U.S. Navy ensued.
The director is the British action master Paul Greengrass, of United 93 and a couple of the Bourne movies, and he keeps things tense and austere. We aren’t given a lot of insight into the Captain—though we do get a surprising amount about the pirate leader, Abduwali Abdukhadir Muse, and his comrades.
We’re shown Phillips at the beginning, as he leaves his home in Vermont for work, exchanging commonplaces with his wife (Catherine Keener) about how tough the job market their sons will be facing has gotten; these worries are contrasted with the desperate conditions in a Somali coastal town that lead young men to raid huge international ships and demand ransom, most of which goes to faraway warlords.
But after this nod to dramatic irony, the focus is on the nuts and bolts both of mounting and of responding to a pirate attack. Greengrass knows he has us; he doesn’t have to cue our emotions, but his kinetic style quickly builds the suspense to a pretty intense pitch.
Phillips is by no means an uncontroversial figure. Maersk was reportedly sued in 2009 by crewmen alleging that his actions endangered them unnecessarily. This is touched on in the film—after an initial attack on the vessel is successfully repelled, a frightened crewman urges Phillips to flee the waters, and Phillips refuses, noting that this could easily take them into the waters of other pirates, and that anyway they all knew the risks involved in sailing that part of the world. I’m certainly no sailor, but the crewman’s suggestion seemed more sensible to me than the Captain’s dismissal of it.
In any case, Hanks, to his credit, turns off some of his customary warmth here. His Phillips comes across as something of a humorless, uncommunicative hard-ass. Once the Maersk Alabama has been raided, however, Phillips is also unquestionably depicted as a hero—levelheaded, resourceful, wily, observant, compassionate toward his captors. He never postures or gives in to anger, and he’s a natural, improvisational diplomat. How much this reflects the real person I couldn’t say, but it’s a moving characterization.
The Captain’s antagonist Muse, well played by the acting novice Barkhad Abdi, is also given his due—his courage and daring, however misguided, are fully acknowledged. He’s just a kid, obtusely unable to admit that he’s in over his head, but his Third-Worlder’s proud refusal to cower in shock and awe before the technological and political juggernaut of the West is, if not admirable, at least understandable.
Potently gripping as Captain Phillips is as a procedural thriller—it’s the best in a while—it saves its real punch for the final minutes. After Phillips is through with his ordeal, we see him, bruised and blood-spattered—Mel Gibson will be green with envy when he sees the film—being examined by a Navy doctor, and he simply turns to mush. Hanks shows us what prolonged proximity to violence and terror can actually do to a person, and not only is it some of the best acting he’s ever done, it also serves as a reproach to the action genre—to every movie that ever ended with its hero emerging from chaos and carnage with a smirk and a quip.
The director is the British action master Paul Greengrass, of United 93 and a couple of the Bourne movies, and he keeps things tense and austere. We aren’t given a lot of insight into the Captain—though we do get a surprising amount about the pirate leader, Abduwali Abdukhadir Muse, and his comrades.
We’re shown Phillips at the beginning, as he leaves his home in Vermont for work, exchanging commonplaces with his wife (Catherine Keener) about how tough the job market their sons will be facing has gotten; these worries are contrasted with the desperate conditions in a Somali coastal town that lead young men to raid huge international ships and demand ransom, most of which goes to faraway warlords.
But after this nod to dramatic irony, the focus is on the nuts and bolts both of mounting and of responding to a pirate attack. Greengrass knows he has us; he doesn’t have to cue our emotions, but his kinetic style quickly builds the suspense to a pretty intense pitch.
Phillips is by no means an uncontroversial figure. Maersk was reportedly sued in 2009 by crewmen alleging that his actions endangered them unnecessarily. This is touched on in the film—after an initial attack on the vessel is successfully repelled, a frightened crewman urges Phillips to flee the waters, and Phillips refuses, noting that this could easily take them into the waters of other pirates, and that anyway they all knew the risks involved in sailing that part of the world. I’m certainly no sailor, but the crewman’s suggestion seemed more sensible to me than the Captain’s dismissal of it.
In any case, Hanks, to his credit, turns off some of his customary warmth here. His Phillips comes across as something of a humorless, uncommunicative hard-ass. Once the Maersk Alabama has been raided, however, Phillips is also unquestionably depicted as a hero—levelheaded, resourceful, wily, observant, compassionate toward his captors. He never postures or gives in to anger, and he’s a natural, improvisational diplomat. How much this reflects the real person I couldn’t say, but it’s a moving characterization.
The Captain’s antagonist Muse, well played by the acting novice Barkhad Abdi, is also given his due—his courage and daring, however misguided, are fully acknowledged. He’s just a kid, obtusely unable to admit that he’s in over his head, but his Third-Worlder’s proud refusal to cower in shock and awe before the technological and political juggernaut of the West is, if not admirable, at least understandable.
Potently gripping as Captain Phillips is as a procedural thriller—it’s the best in a while—it saves its real punch for the final minutes. After Phillips is through with his ordeal, we see him, bruised and blood-spattered—Mel Gibson will be green with envy when he sees the film—being examined by a Navy doctor, and he simply turns to mush. Hanks shows us what prolonged proximity to violence and terror can actually do to a person, and not only is it some of the best acting he’s ever done, it also serves as a reproach to the action genre—to every movie that ever ended with its hero emerging from chaos and carnage with a smirk and a quip.
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