Tag: Allison Williams

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Film Features Film/TV

M3GAN

Say goodbye to Chucky and hello to M3GAN.

Just before M3GAN kills her first human, the annoying neighbor Celia (Lori Dungey) asks, “What are you?”

M3GAN pauses. “I’ve been asking myself that same question,” she says, before blasting Celia in the face with a pressure washer.

Technically speaking, M3GAN is the first Model 3 Generative ANdroid, created by Gemma (Allison Williams), a roboticist working for the toy company Funki. Gemma is under pressure to update Funki’s Furby-like flagship toy, but M3GAN is her passion project — not so much a talking doll as a fully realized android companion for a middle-schooler, what Douglas Adams would call “your plastic pal who’s fun to be with.”

When her niece Cady (Violet McGraw) is orphaned in a car crash, Gemma, an unapologetic career woman, is forced to take a crash course in single parenting. Ever the technologist, she sees the situation as an opportunity to test out her invention. After a late-night crunch session, she introduces Cady to M3GAN. They bond immediately, thanks to M3GAN’s reactive learning software protocols.

One of the things I love about a well-made horror film is how it plays with the information imbalance between the audience and the characters. We all know that we bought a ticket to a killer robot movie, but Gemma doesn’t know she’s inventing a killer robot. When she boasts that M3GAN is programmed to prevent Cady from all harm physical and emotional, then teaches the robot what death is, then offhandedly remarks that she didn’t have time to install the parental controls, we know what’s coming next.

But it is M3GAN’s question — “What am I?” — that shows M3GAN is smarter than a killer doll movie from the makers of Annabelle has any right to be. Screenwriter Akela Cooper crafts a dilemma for her monster that is straight out of Isaac Asimov. Gemma thinks of her creation only as a robot, but to Cady, she’s a real girl — a best friend to sing along to pop songs with, a friend who is also an excellent therapist. At one point, a tech says M3GAN is not sentient because her speech is just a “curated word salad” designed to create the illusion of meaning in the listener. But when Gemma’s boss David (Ronny Chieng) asks for “a list of things I can say to the board to make me sound intelligent,” no one questions his personhood. And after all, M3GAN’s belief that she can take better care of Cady is not delusional, since Gemma objectively sucks as a caregiver. It’s just that M3GAN’s vision of parental responsibility comes with a high body count.

Director Gerard Johnstone and producers James Wan and Jason Blum perform a tonal tightrope walk worthy of John Carpenter. They admit the premise is a little silly with a few sly winks at the audience; then they reel you in. Allison Williams is pitch-perfect, pivoting from likable to cold on a dime, as the scene requires. The character of M3GAN is constructed with puppetry, Jenna Davis’ delightfully unhinged voice work, and an inspired physical performance by 12-year-old dancer Amie Donald.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go work on my “M3GAN was right!” memes.

M3GAN
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Film Features Film/TV

Get Out

In his 1983 HBO comedy special, Delirious, Eddie Murphy had a bit about why the protagonists of horror movies are always white. Black people, he said, would just run at the first sign of supernatural trouble. He imagined a black couple inserted into the Amityville Horror scenario, buying a house that turned out to be haunted. “Oh, baby, this is beautiful. We got a chandelier up here, kids outside playing, the neighborhood is beautiful. …”

Then a spectral voice whispers “Get oooout.”

“Too bad we can’t stay!”

I don’t know if that’s where Jordan Peele got the name for his killer new horror flick, Get Out, but it makes sense. Both Murphy and Peele are black comedy geniuses in the vein of Richard Pryor, so Peele almost certainly remembers Murphy’s routine. Get Out runs with Murphy’s basic premise — that the black guy is never the protagonist in mainstream horror movies — and teases out the full implications. On the surface, the joke is that white people act stupid in horror movies, and that black people would be smarter in those situations. Ha ha, my team is better than your team. But the deeper joke is that white people are so swaddled in privilege, they can’t imagine anything bad could really happen to them when the house whispers “Get out!,” but black people, who get the shaft every day, are rightfully more paranoid.

Allison Williams and Daniel Kaluuya star in Jordan Peele’s new horror film, Get Out.

For the younger crowd reading, yes, Eddie Murphy was once a cutting-edge stand-up comedian with something to say, not just the Nutty Professor. Peele is in the same place in his career that Eddie Murphy was in 1983: trying to successfully manage a transition from TV to the movies. Murphy morphed into an action-comedy leading man, while Peele seems much more interested in being behind the camera. If Get Out is any indication, this is a wise move.

I’m a firm believer that if you can do comedy, you can do anything. Comedy is just technically harder than drama; so much depends on precise timing, crisp delivery, and a perfect reveal. These are also the tools of horror, so I wonder why it’s taken so long to see a comedian make the genre move. Peele is going to be the biggest boost for the horror comedy genre since the coming of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead. But Raimi’s idea of horror comedy is anarchic slapstick, while Peele is following his own race relations muse.

Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) is getting ready for a trip to rural New York to meet his girlfriend Rose’s (Allison Williams) parents. Since Chris is black and Rose is white, his friend, Rod (LilRel Howery), warns him to not to go. Obviously, this upper-class white girl’s parents are going to freak out when they find out she’s dating a black guy. But Chris and Rose are quite smitten with each other, and he feels like he’s got to get over this hurdle in their relationship. Besides, Rose urges, her parents are totally cool. Her dad, Dean (Bradley Whitford), is a doctor, and her mom, Missy (Catherine Keener), is a psychotherapist. They’re educated professionals, so they’re naturally liberals. Dean, Rose assures Chris, would have voted for a third term of Obama if he could! Later, when Dean repeats the same line to Chris, it sounds rehearsed — one of the many red flags that slowly raise Chris’ paranoia level past the “GET OUT!” threshold. Turns out, Rod was right: Chris shouldn’t have gone home to meet the parents, but not for the reason Rod thought. He envisioned a nightmare weekend of microagressions and racist sneers for Chris. Instead, our hero finds himself in a nest of gaslighting hypno-slavers with dashes of Re-Animator and Being John Malkovich for existential seasoning.

From the John Carpenter references (Rose’s last name is Armitage, which was Carpenter’s pen name for They Live) to the finely tuned tonal clashes that make an innocuous garden party into a skin-crawling creepshow, Peele shows his total control of the proceedings. By working on both the level of social satire and scary horror flick, Get Out is one of the finest directorial debuts in recent memory.

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

“Broad City” and “Girls” Vie For The Voice Of A Generation

Abbi Jacobson and Illana Glazer of Broad City

It is unfair that Broad City and Girls are so often mentioned in the same breath because the two shows’ differences are many, while their similarities are surface-level. Both are half-hour comedies about white, female friends in their mid-twenties as they navigate sex, jobs and friendship in New York City. Both are written, directed and acted by their female creators. And both are saddled, time and again, with defining Who Young Women Are for the dry sponge of baby-boomer-run media. With both series debuting new seasons this month (Girls on its 5th and Broad City on its 3rd), we should ready ourselves yet again for an endless puddling of comparative lit devoted to the shows, in the mediocre company of which we can count this blog.

Despite their skin-deep similarities, Broad City and Girls are different species. It’s easy to love Broad City and hate Girls. It’s fun to watch Broad City while, at times, it almost physically hurts to watch the self-defeating character machinations of the women and men on Girls. And while Lena Dunham’s sea-change of an HBO show tends to garner criticism for its white, middle class myopia, Broad City gets a critical pass, even a critical hi-five.

Broad City, a Comedy Central production, takes the classic plot approach pitting its odd couple leads against an episode-defining event. One of the show’s inaugural episodes follows Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer as they try to raise money to go to a Lil Wayne concert, navigating everything from Craigslist to the Q Train to make it happen. In its newest episode, Abbi and Ilana struggle to make it to a former roommate’s art opening, encountering rabid warehouse sales, a circus school graduation, and a moving porta potty along the way. The structure is predictable but the take is fresh — the show’s humor is expertly patched together from whatever was on Twitter last week and the fucked up story your friend from college told you about her crush. In this new episode as in the past two seasons, they pull it off.

Formally, Broad City is the “Frogger” episode of Seinfeld taken to its logical conclusion. Nothing ever happens. It doesn’t matter if George Costanza gets Frogger across the street or not. It doesn’t matter if circus school is in session. It is less about the characters, lovable as they are, than it is about the weird fabric of New York City. This bodes well for the series longevity, so long as the writing stays good.

But the by-the-book approach of Broad City also somewhat limits what I cringe at calling the “radical potential” of a show like Broad City, because, at the end of the day, this is a complex portrait of being young and loving weed and hating your job in New York City, but it’s a simple draft of what female friendship looks like.

Allison Williams, Jemina Kirke, Lena Dunham, and Zosia Mamet of Girls

Girls— frequently intolerable, unkind to its characters, caricatural, too white, set in New York City but never on the subway (this really annoys me) — nonetheless stakes a more difficult claim. It still seeks, and has always sought, to expand the category of what kinds of female relationships, bodies and emotions can be shown on mainstream television. In its 5th season, we meet Marnie (Allison Williams) on her wedding day, neurotically over-directing her doomed nuptials with chronically selfish boyfriend, Desi (Ebon Moss-Bachrach.) (If you don’t want spoilers, stop reading here.) Hannah is on hand, acting surly: “She has been so inappropriate and unsupportive of me all day,” Marnie complains to Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet), while Jessa (Jemima Kirke) flirts with danger in the form of Hannah’s ex, Adam (Adam Driver). The episode switches lithely between the women’s wedding preparations and the men’s. The writing is good: “This conversation sounds like a fucking E. E. Cummings poem,” rails the series current hero, Ray, when Adam and Hannah’s new boyfriend engage in a long-form, male emotion-grunting session. 

As far as episodes go, the newest is far from the most challenging. Girls cut its teeth on crack, nudity, awkward sex, alcoholism, BDSM and (perhaps most offensive) painfully unlikeable characters. None of that here. The biggest success of the first episode of the 5th season of Girls is that we have the same characters, improbably intact, that we started out with years ago. They have changed the way real people change — subtly. They have not been good friends to each other, but they have not been entirely bad friends to each other. Instead, the quartet of women proves something that is very true but too rarely portrayed, which is that sometimes your best friends are not the people you most like, but the ones you end up with. And that is okay.

Yes: With the start of these new seasons, I still feel some aversion to watching Girls and I like watching Broad City. Both are good shows. Neither offers a good five point summary of what is means to Be Female and In Your Twenties Today (take note, think-piece editors of the world.) They aren’t really even comparable, except that when both premiere new episodes next week, I have to say — despite how much fun Broad City is, I’ll probably watch Girls first.