Jeffrey Wells This isn’t just midly funny, but isn’t that far from the kind of opening-of-the-Oscar-telecast, pre-monologue AI comedy sketch that we might see from Conan O’Brien seven months from now. Except we won’t, of course.
Don’t be fooled! This MC Hammer-like, Addams Family-following Odyssey rap is catchier than ANYTHING in the film itself. It’s obviously not substantive, but it’s catchy:
A week ago I re-watched Judd Apatow and Pete Davidson‘s The King of Staten Island (Universal, 6.12.20), and guess what? It not only holds up like a heavyweight champ but plays even better than it did six years ago.
It’s a rich, whipsmart, fully felt, amusingly perverse, serious-anguish, working-class comedy about a twentysomething layabout stoner and loser (Davidson). It kind of fllounces around at first but eventually pays off like a slot machine.
KOSI cost $35 million to make but earned a measly $2.2 million, but for a good reason. The poor film was bumfucked by Covid and forced to stream instead of start with a theatrical run. I was one of the very few who raved about it, but everyone else (including most of the HE regulars at the time) either ignored it or put it down, and every last one of the dissers was dead wrong or too stupid to get it or both.
Before last week’s viewing I re-read my 6.8.20 review (titled “The Staten Island Funnies“) and it really wound me up and put my head into a good place.
Key paragraph: “I feel I have an understanding of the mindset of guys who feel stalled and are treading water in their mid 20s because I was there. I was trying like hell, but I almost died from lethargy and inertia and creeping depression. Not to the point of driving with my eyes closed, but I was kinda close to that in ‘78.”
Here’s the review. Read it or don’t — I couldn’t care less.
How about spending two hours and 16 minutes with a smart-assed, perpetually stoned flatliner from arguably the most low-rent culture on the Eastern seaboard and certainly the scuzziest borough of New York City, a place so low on the cultural totem pole than even New Jerseyans look down upon it? And at the same time a well-crafted film with heart and honesty and a relatable personality? And which ends…well, hopefully?
You can give the side-eye to Judd Apatow and Pete Davidson‘s The King of Staten Island all you want. You can say it’s too oddball fringe-y, too lower-depths, too submerged on its own weed planet and too caught up in nihilism and arrested development to connect with Joe and Jane Popcorn.
Which I strongly disagree with. Because it’s funny and plain-spoken (if a bit dismaying at times) and it doesn’t back off from an unusual milieu and mentality, and certainly from Pete Davidson‘s “Scott”, a layabout for the ages.
KOSI made me smile and guffaw and even laugh out loud several times (highly unusual for an LQTM-er). And I believed every word of it…every line, emotion, situation, character. It’s peddling sardonic humor that doesn’t feel schticky, although I guess it is. The tone is low-key raw, kinda nervy, certainly unpretentious and 90% bullshit-free.
Okay, it softens up during the final passage, but I welcomed this with open arms. Because a film about wall-to-wall, start-to-finish nihilism would be too much. And the length (136 minutes) doesn’t feel longish but completely necessary and natural.
And it fills out Davidson’s comic persona to the extent that he’s suddenly a completely compelling big-screen presence and (am I allowed to say this?) a movie star. And I loved the supporting turns by Bel Powley (whom I’d never really warmed to before), Bill Burr (whom I admire but have never found screamingly funny as a stand-op), Marisa Tomei and the always authentic Steve Buscemi.
It’s a shame this Universal release is going straight-to-streaming this Friday (6.12), as I’d love to watch it a third time at the Arclight with a couple of hundred know-it-alls and generally, you know, groove with the room.
The script (co-penned by Apatow, Davidson and Dave Sirus) is….what, 75% inspired by Davidson’s own life? Same Staten Island upbringing, same deceased fireman dad (killed in a local apartment fire rather than inside the World Trade Center on 9/11, which actually happened when Pete was 7), same living-with-mom (Marisa Tomei) and getting-ripped-with-loser-friends lifestyle. Quippy and weird and oddly endearing.
The difference is that it imagines how things might have turned out if Davidson hadn’t begun to try stand-up comedy in his mid teens and had stayed in an aimless funk into his mid 20s.
Aside from an unlikely dream of becoming a tattoo artist and an idiotic plan to open a combination tattoo parlor and restaurant, Scott is living a kind of “whatever” lifestyle, smoking weed and poking at this or that pretention, generally hanging back as time flies by and even flirting with stupid suicide, as dramatized in the opening scene.
KOSI reminded me at times of the Last Exit to Brooklyn milieu and the boozy despairing blokes in the British “kitchen sink” dramas of the late ’50s and early ’60s.
Scott is in a friends-with-benefits relationship with longtime friend Kelsey (Powley). His disapproving sister Claire (Maude Apatow) is about to leave for college. And his three bonged-out friends are on the verge of becoming petty felons.
And then mom begins dating a divorced, bald-headed fireman with a rangy moustache (Burr) and Scott is like “what?” And the film becomes a story about an emotionally stalled quipster-stoner trying to break up their relationship. But eventually (and thank God) there’s a way out of that.
In Jack Smight‘s partly comical, mostly appalling Airport 1975, which involves a windshield-shattering collision between a 747 passenger jet and a small Beechcraft Bonanza, Ed Nelson‘s “Major Alexander” is lowered by cable toward the 747’s damaged cockpit. Alas, something goes wrong and the poor guy falls to his death.
If I was the director-writer instead of Smight, I would have Con Air-ed this scene. I would have the camera stay with the terrified, wind-whipped Nelson as he rockets to his terrible fate. I would let the audience know how it feels to stream downward at 200 mph. I would show a CU of Nelson gasping and groaning with his eyes bugging out…”aagghhh!”
I would then cut to a peaceful shot of a father and his son fishing in a small rowboat on a large scenic lake. The father hears a strange hissing sound and starts looking around. The hissing gets louder. A hundred feet away we see a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it human missile slamming into the water and causing a huge splash bomb that soaks father and son. Both turn around with aghast expressions, wondering what just happened.
Sadistic? Come up for air. All those ’70s disaster movies were exercises in sadism. HE’s Nelson-slamming-into the-lake bit would at least be an honest acknowledgement of the grotesque nature of these films.
In the brand-new Other Mommy trailer, the ghostly Jessica Chastain defaults to a common routine in recent horror films like Smile, Smile 2, The Black Phone and Truth or Dare — characters with distorted, exaggerated, evil-doll smiles that signify malicious intent.
Based on Josh Malerman‘s “Incidents Around The House“, John Savage‘s Other Mommy (Universal, 10.9.26) will appeal to low-rent horror fans, as it’s obviously not a serving of elevated horror.
Chastain plays good mommy Ursula as well as the supernatural “other mommy”. The doughy-bodied, salt-and-pepper-bearded Jay Duplass plays good daddy. Arabella Olivia Clark, Dichen Lachman, Arian Moayed and Karen Allen costar.
So what’s the metaphor or real-life echo in this? That real-life mommies can be a bit overbearing at times? That some mommies have split personalities? That some can be so exacting and control-freaky that they seem almost demonic?
Note to Savage: When daddy is scared by something in the kitchen and leaps backward toward a sliding door, the glass won’t shatter because — hello? — sliding-door glass is too thick and heavy. But you don’t care about this stuff, do you? Of course you don’t.
…within the fascist cave of the intolerant “our way or you need to burn in hell” Nolanoids. Step outside the extreme Nolanoid fraternity and the whipsmart Bill Dawes IS the voice of the people.
Not the professional critic scores but those reflecting the sentiments of Joe Popcorn ticket-buyers…
I thought of two famous fellows the instant I saw this LGBTQ-inspired banner on the wall of the Wilton Library earlier today — Orson Welles and 1930s Los Angeles gumshoe Jake Gittes.
For Welles once declared the following: “We’re born alone, we live alone, and we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we’re not alone.”
And halfway through Roman Polanski‘s Chinatown, Ida Sessions (Diane Ladd) calls Gittes (Jack Nicholson) and asks, “Are you alone, Mr. Gittes?” Gittes replies with a question of his own: “Isn’t everybody?”
Chris Nolan‘s Trojan Horse was designed with the beast rearing up on its hind legs with a thick plume-like tail…an absurd fancy. No way would Troy’s Greek enemies have built such an ambitiously conceived and difficult-to-build wooden steed. It was nonetheless constructed this way because Nolan didn’t want his to resemble the Trojan Horses constructed by Wolfgang Petersen and Robert Wise for Troy (’04) and Helen of Troy (’56), respectively. That was the reason — nothing else.
