Around 5:20 pm on Monday, 4.11, drivers of black, expensive, late-model cars slammed into each other at high speeds near the southwest corner of Fairfax and Willoughby. Look at the decimated auto on the right…totaljunkyard. Who was the bad guy? The one who was speeding, that’s who. Whomever got hurt had presumably been taken to a hospital by the time I got there. Cracked windshield, air bags.
In Senior Year (Netflix, 5.13), Rebel Wilson‘s “Stephanie Conway” awakes from a 20-year coma at age 38 or thereabouts, and decides to return to high school in 2022 to finish her senior year.
You can tell by the lame-ass humor in the trailer (jokes about Madonna vs. Lady Gaga, the relentless Fast and Furious franchise) that the senior creatives were terrified of doing the obvious.
The obvious would have been to create a fish-out-of-water comedy about a woman from 2002 suddenly grappling with woke Stalinism.
Wilson and her colleagues were too scared, in other words, to focus on the horror of Twitter, totalitarian safe spaces, the revolutionary consciousness overhaul brought about by #MeToo, the prohibition of certain terms, the dismissal of nearly all over-40 white males, Variety apologizing to Carey Mulligan for a single sentence in Dennis Harvey‘s review of Promising Young Woman, CRT and equity in schools, trans activists calling the shots (and therefore the triumph of Lia Thomas and the grooming of three-year-olds so they’ll understand the particulars of all the various genders), all people of color regarded as hothouse flowers and given sainthood status, celebrating obesity in underwear ads, etc.
There was a 1989 Cheech and Chong comedy called Rude Awakening — late ’60s hippies hiding in Central America and suddenly returning to the U.S. in the late ’80s and confronted with yuppie culture. Similar.
“Not happening…way too laid back…zero narrative urgency,” I was muttering from the get-go. Basically the sixth episode of White Lotus Thai SERIOUSLY disappoints. Puttering around, way too slow. Things inch along but it’s all “woozy guilty lying aftermath to the big party night” stuff. Glacial pace…waiting, waiting. I was told...
I finally saw Walter Salles' I'm Still Here two days ago in Ojai. It's obviously an absorbing, very well-crafted, fact-based poltical drama, and yes, Fernanda Torres carries the whole thing on her shoulders. Superb actress. Fully deserving of her Best Actress nomination. But as good as it basically is...
After three-plus-years of delay and fiddling around, Bernard McMahon's Becoming Led Zeppelin, an obsequious 2021 doc about the early glory days of arguably the greatest metal-rock band of all time, is opening in IMAX today in roughly 200 theaters. Sony Pictures Classics is distributing. All I can say is, it...
To my great surprise and delight, Christy Hall's Daddio, which I was remiss in not seeing during last year's Telluride Film Festival, is a truly first-rate two-hander -- a pure-dialogue, character-revealing, heart-to-heart talkfest that knows what it's doing and ends sublimely. Yes, it all happens inside a Yellow Cab on...
7:45 pm: Okay, the initial light-hearted section (repartee, wedding, hospital, afterlife Joey Pants, healthy diet) was enjoyable, but Jesus, when and how did Martin Lawrence become Oliver Hardy? He’s funny in that bug-eyed, space-cadet way… 7:55 pm: And now it’s all cartel bad guys, ice-cold vibes, hard bullets, bad business,...
