Tag: Amy Poehler

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Now Playing July 12-18: Nic Cage Kills

Maika Monroe wonders what it all means in Longlegs. (Courtesy Neon)

Looks like a busy weekend at the movies — which is good, because it’s gonna be a hot one.

Longlegs

The great Nicholas Cage stars as a serial killer motivated by his devotion to Satan. Maika Monroe (of It Follows fame) is Lee Harker, an FBI agent assigned to catch him. Blair Underwood (of Krush Groove fame) is her partner, and Alicia Witt (of Dune and Twin Peaks fame) is her mom. Writer/director Osgood Perkins is not super famous yet, but his dad is Anthony Perkins of Psycho fame. 

Fly Me To The Moon 

Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum star as NASA’s PR director and launch director for the Apollo 11 mission. His job is to get the astronauts to the moon. Her job is to fake the moon landing if the astronauts fail. This film probably sounded like a good idea at the time. 

MaXXXine

Ti West and Mia Goth’s trilogy of twentieth century terror concludes with a slam-bang finale. Read my full review.

A Quiet Place: Day One

Lupita Nyong’o leads this hit prequel to 2018’s alien invasion movie. She plays Sam, a terminally ill cancer patient who witnesses the silent alien invasion in New York City. Can Sam and her cat Frodo survive the mass slaughter? Djimon Housou reprises his role as Henri from A Quiet Place Part II. 

Despicable Me 4

You know those oval yellow Minons your batty aunty and drunk uncle are always sharing memes about? They’re from the Despicable Me franchise. And guess what? They made another one!

Kinds of Kindness

Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone follow the Academy Award-winning Poor Things with a triptych of stories about debasing yourself for the benefit of others. Read my full review.

Inside Out 2

The movie of the summer is all about anxiety, and it couldn’t be more timely. Amy Poehler reprises her voice role as Joy, whose hold on the mind of her 13-year-old charge Riley (Kensington Tallman) is jarred loose by Anxiety (Maya Hawke), just a a pivotal hockey game threatens her self image.  

The Bikeriders

Director Jeff Nichols’ gritty portrait of Midwestern biker gangs stars Austin Butler and Tom Hardy looking mighty manly. Read my full review.

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Now Playing June 28-July 4: Kindness, Quiet, and Hindu Gods

Best Actress winner Emma Stone stars in Yorgos Lanthimos' Kinds of Kindness. (Courtesy Searchlight Pictures)

There’s plenty of great stuff on the big screen in Memphis, so quit doomscrolling and go see a movie this weekend.

Kinds of Kindness

Best Actress winner Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, and director Yorgos Lanthimos reunite for another absurdist comedy after the triumph of 2023’s Poor Things. They are joined by Jesse Plemons (whose performance earned him a Best Actor nod at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival), Margaret Qualley, and Hong Chau for a triptych of intertwined stories about love, death, and healing. 

A Quiet Place: Day One

The third film in the series goes back to the beginning, which is the end of civilization. Blind space monsters with extremely sensitive hearing land on Earth and start eating up all the tasty people. That’s not so yummy for Lupita Nyong’o, a New Yorker who witnesses the invasion, and must escape very quietly. But don’t worry, she’s got a plan.

Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1

Kevin Costner directs Kevin Costner in this epic tale — a saga if you will — of American expansion in the West during the pre- and post-Civil War period. Expect horses, hats, and guns from this highly punctuated title. 

Inside Out 2

This brilliant sequel is the biggest box office hit of the year. Head emotion Joy (Amy Poehler) must keep her human Riley (Kensington Tallman) on track as the ravages of puberty take hold, and a new emotion named Anxiety (Maya Hawke) arrives at headquarters. Beautifully animated with stealthily profound screenplay, Inside Out 2 is a must-see. (Read my full review, which, spoiler alert, borders on the rapturous.)

Kalki 2898 AD

Malco has been getting a lot of Indian movies over the last couple of years. This one promises to be different. It’s not a Bollywood song-and-dance film, as much as we love them. Kalki 2898 is the most expensive film ever made in India, weighing in at an impressive $6 billion rupees (approximately $72 million). It’s a sci fi epic inspired by Hindu mythology which is intended to kick off a Marvel-style cinematic universe. And it looks pretty cool.

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Sundance 2022: Truth is Better Than Fiction

Aubrey Plaza breaks bad in Emily The Criminal.

 

The good part about having a virtual Sundance pass is the wealth of great films it provides. The bad news is that, since you’re not fully immersed in the Park City bubble, real life goes on, and you may not get to watch everything that looks good. I’ve certainly been feeling that tension over the last week, and trying to be judicious with my picks. That means skipping everything that will be shown this weekend at Crosstown Theater as part of Indie Memphis’ satelite screening program. 

A still from “What Travelers Are Saying About Jornada Del Muerto” by Hope Tucker.

The exception was the short film “What Travelers Are Saying About Jornada Del Muerto,” the short film by Memphian Hope Tucker, which will screen Saturday, January 29, at Crosstown. It’s essentially montage of shots from the Trinity test site in Alamogordo, New Mexico, where the first atomic bomb was detonated in 1945, overlaid with online reviews from people who visited as tourists. You know me, I love the experimental stuff, and this one certainly scratched that itch.

Colin Farrel in After Yang (Image courtesy Sundance Institute)

Through happenstance, I watched two films in a row that dealt with the thorny question of our relationship with artificial intelligence. The first was After Yang, which was one of the first films I added to my schedule when the Sundance website went live. Mononym-ed director Kogonada adopted a short story from Alexander Weinstein that recalls the Brian Aldiss classic “Supertoys Last All Summer Long,” which became Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence. When Jake (Colin Ferrel) and Kyra (Jodi Turner-Smith) adopted a daughter Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja) from China, they wanted to make sure she felt connected to her roots, so they purchased Yang (Justin H. Min), an android who would be a surrogate older brother. Now, Mika is four years old, and Yang is a trusted part of the family. But when he suddenly malfunctions (in a great scene that shows the family competing in an online dance game), Jake runs into trouble. He bought Yang as a refurb from a fly-by-night store that isn’t there any more, and the manufacturer won’t honor the warranty. When he consults a gray market android repair service, he uncovers the secrets of Yang’s past, and the independent existence his “son” had hidden from him. 

After Yang looks great, and the underlying story is strong, but it only has one speed. Ferrel and Turner-Smith are both more than capable, but they are reserved to the point of flatness. The film is interesting, but more admired than loved by me. 

David Earl and Charles Hayward in Brian and Charles (Courtesy Sundance Institute)

The other half of my inadvertent A.I. double bill took an entirely different approach. Brian and Charles by Welsh director Jim Archer is a comedy about an eccentric inventor (David Earl, who shares a writing credit on the film) who is tired of developing the egg belt and pinecone bag, and decides to swing for the fences by building a robot. He succeeds beyond his wildest dream, and his creation dubs itself Charles. Brian is an unlikely Dr. Frankenstein, and he throws himself into parenting his creation, who progresses to toddler stage very quickly. Brian wants to shield Charles from the dangers he knows come with being an outsider, but the robot wants to explore and see the world. Their little household is thrown into crisis when Brian’s jerky neighbors discover Charles and steal him to work on their farm. 

Brian and Charles is charming, with a pair of good performances by the leads and a well-attuned screenplay. But the jokes never rise above the chuckle level, and the indie film quirk level is set to “cloying.” Still, I enjoyed both After Yang and Brian and Charles for their thoughtfulness. 

Aubrey Plaza breaks bad in Emily the Criminal. (Courtesy Sundance Institute)

Aubrey Plaza was the driving force behind Emily the Criminal, as she found the screenplay by John Patton Ford and spearheaded the production by agreeing to take on the title character. Emily is struggling as a caterer in Los Angeles, even though she has a degree that would qualify her for high-paying advertising jobs. She has a DUI on her record, because she was the least-wasted person in her friend group that went to a music festival, and had the bad luck of getting pulled over when she tried to drive everyone home. One of those friends (Megalyn Echikunwoke) is trying to help her get a good job out of guilt, but nobody wants to hire a felon. Meanwhile, a co-worker steers Emily toward a lucrative freelance opportunity: working as a “dummy shopper” using stolen credit card information to buy big screen TVs, which are then sold on the black market. Emily quickly learns that she can make a killing crime-ing, but she’s torn between the promise of the straight life and going full Walter White — especially since her natural talents seem to lean toward breaking bad. 

Plaza, like many who started out in comedy, is an incredibly good actor when she turns her timing and control toward drama. Ford’s screenplay is a finely honed machine, and the jittery camerawork works perfectly, especially in a harrowing scene where Emily has to brazen her way through a car heist while surrounded by gangsters twice her size. You can be forgiven if you get a strong Uncut Gems vibe from Emily the Criminal, but I loved this film. 

Maika Monroe gets paranoid in Watcher by Chloe Okuno. (Courtesy Sundance Institute)

Another strong entry in the narrative category is Watcher by director Chloe Okuno. A slick, Hitchcock-by-way-of-De Palma riff on Rear Window, the film is driven by some ace production design (one thing this Sundance has in abundance is great-looking interiors) and a charismatic performance by lead Maika Monroe as Julia, a newlywed who abandons her acting career to move to Romania with her husband, where she finds mostly ennui with a side order of menacing peeping tom. 

Lucy and Desi (Courtesy Sundance Institute)

The nonfiction films continue to be very strong this year. Lucy and Desi is a passion project for Amy Poehler. Given full access to the Desilu archives and the couple’s personal effects by daughter Luci Arnaz Luckinbill, Poehler’s film goes a lot more in-depth into Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz’s unlikely and historic relationship, and explores the couple’s unrivaled legacy of television innovation more than the recent biopic starring Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem (which was infected with a terminal case of Sorkin-ism). 

The Janes (Courtesy Sundance Institute)

The best doc I saw at Sundance is also superior to the fictionalized version of the story. The Janes from directors Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes is the story of the Chicago-area feminist collective which provided illegal abortions in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The clearly told doc features some incredible interviews with people on both sides of the issue, including the policemen who ultimately busted the Janes in 1972. The cast of characters, it turns out, were much more interesting in real life, and the film’s stories of the day to day, cloak and dagger proceedings of the group, and the darkly funny story of how it all came apart, just exposes what an incredible missed opportunity its Sundance selection Call Jane was. The Janes is an HBO production that will premiere on the company’s streaming service later this year, and it is not to be missed. 

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Russian Doll

Natasha Lyonne in Russian Doll

Groundhog Day has become a touchstone of American comedy. It’s the go-to example of a film that can be both funny and philosophically profound. It’s telling that, while the film is so ingrained our culture that “Groundhog Day” has entered military slang for repetitive duty, no one has really tried to emulate it. Sure, time loops show up again and again in sci fi, but the comedians have left it alone. The tone is just too delicate, and the talents of Bill Murray and Harold Ramis too intimidating.

Russian Doll dares to riff on Groundhog Day, and your TV screen is all the better for it. Natasha Lyonne, who started out as a kid on Pee Wee’s Playhouse and has lately been an anchor of Orange Is The New Black, worked on the idea for ten years, enlisting Amy Poehler and writer Leslye Headland to bring it to fruition. Lyonne’s performance as Nadia Vulvokov, a self-destructive software engineer whom we meet in the bathroom at her 36th birthday party. The details of that party, thrown by her friend Maxine (Greta Lee) in her sprawling Manhattan loft, will become ingrained in her mind as she lives it over and over.

Lyonne’s performance is a revelation. Maybe that’s a weird thing to say about someone who has had such a varied career, but Nadia is an instant classic take on a caustic New Yorker. It’s extremely difficult to get that “magnificent bastard” chemistry just right, as the failure mode is “unsympathetic jerk”, which is why it’s remarkable that Lyonne’s Nadia is in the same league as Bill Murray’s Phil Conners. Murray’s speciality was the charming rake, and in Groundhog Day, he took it to the next level by gradually breaking down his character’s defenses until basic brokenness was all that remained. Nadia follows a similar trajectory, only she does it with all of the cultural expectations of niceness attached to being a woman—in other words, like Ginger Rogers, she does it backwards, and in heels.

I’m not going to say much about the plot, because deciphering the situation along with Nadia is half of Russian Doll’s deliciousness. But it’s already inspired dozens of different takes and interpretations, ranging from a metaphor for drug addiction and mental illness to an allegory of the gentrification of Downtown Manhattan. What’s important is, the writing is complex enough to support multiple interpretations, and it’s engaging enough to make you want to come up with your own.

In an era of streaming bloat, where stories can take unnecessary hours to unfold, Russian Doll’s episodes are 30 minutes each, and edited tight as a drum. The red herrings and thematic curlicues all seem relevant and necessary. And just when you think the writers have painted themselves into a corner, they they open another trapdoor and escape. Peeling back Russian Doll’s layers is the first great TV experience of 2019.

Russian Doll

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The Year in Film 2015

It’s fashionable to complain about how bad Hollywood movies have become. But from the perspective of a critic who has to watch it all go down, it’s simply not the case. At any given time in 2015, there was at least one good film in theaters in Memphis—it just may not have been the most heavily promoted one. So here’s my list of awards for a crowded, eventful year.

Worst Picture: Pixels

I watched a lot of crap this year, like the incoherent Terminator Genysis, the sociopathic San Andreas, the vomitous fanwank Furious 7, and the misbegotten Secret in Their Eyes. But those movies were just bad. Pixels not only sucked, it was mean-spirited, toxic, and ugly. Adam Sandler, it’s been a good run, but it’s time to retire.

Actually, I take that back. It hasn’t been a good run.

Most Divisive: Inherent Vice

Technically a 2014 release, Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s ode to the lost world of California hippiedom didn’t play in Memphis until January. Its long takes and dense dialogue spun a powerful spell. But it wasn’t for everyone. Many people responded with either a “WTF?” or a visceral hatred. Such strongly split opinions are usually a sign of artistic success; you either loved it or hated it, but you won’t forget it.

Best Performances: Brie Larson and Jacob Tremblay, Room

Room is an inventive, harrowing, and beautiful work on every level, but the film’s most extraordinary element is the chemistry between Brie Larson and 9-year-old Jacob Tremblay, who play a mother and son held hostage by a sexual abuser. Larson’s been good in Short Term 12 and Trainwreck, but this is her real breakthrough performance. As for Tremblay, here’s hoping we’ve just gotten a taste of things to come.

Chewbacca

Best Performance By A Nonhuman: Chewbacca

Star Wars: The Force Awakens returned the Mother of All Franchises to cultural prominence after years in the prequel wilderness. Newcomers like Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver joined the returned cast of the Orig Trig Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher in turning in good performances. Lawrence Kasdan’s script gave Chewbacca a lot more to do, and Peter Mayhew rose to the occasion with a surprisingly expressive performance. Let the Wookiee win.

Best Memphis Movie: The Keepers

Joann Self Selvidge and Sara Kaye Larson’s film about the people who keep the Memphis Zoo running ran away with Indie Memphis this year, selling out multiple shows and winning Best Hometowner Feature. Four years in the making, it’s a rarity in 21st century film: a patient verité portrait whose only agenda is compassion and wonder.

Best Conversation Starter: But for the Grace

In 2001, Memphis welcomed Sudanese refugee Emmanuel A. Amido. This year, he rewarded our hospitality with But for the Grace. The thoughtful film is a frank examination of race relations in America seen through the lens of religion. The Indie Memphis Audience Award winner sparked an intense Q&A session after its premiere screening that followed the filmmaker out into the lobby. It’s a timely reminder of the power of film to illuminate social change.

Best Comedy: What We Do in the Shadows

What happens when a group of vampire roommates stop being polite and start getting real? Flight of the Conchords‘ Jemaine Clement and Eagle vs Shark‘s Taika Waititi codirected this deadpan masterpiece that applied the This Is Spinal Tap formula to the Twilight set. Their stellar cast’s enthusiasm and commitment to the gags made for the most biting comedy of the year.

Best Animation: Inside Out

The strongest Pixar film since Wall-E had heavy competition in the form of the Irish lullaby Song of the Sea, but ultimately, Inside Out was the year’s emotional favorite. It wasn’t just the combination of voice talent Amy Poehler, Bill Hader, Lewis Black, Mindy Kaling, and Phyllis Smith with the outstanding character design of Joy, Fear, Anger, Disgust, and Sadness that made director Pete Docter’s film crackle, it was the way the entire carefully crafted package came together to deliver a message of acceptance and understanding for kids and adults who are wrestling with their feelings in a hard and changing world.

It Follows

Best Horror: It Follows

The best horror films are the ones that do a lot with a little, and It Follows is a sterling example of the breed. Director David Robert Mitchell’s second feature is a model of economy that sets up its simple premise with a single opening shot that tracks a desperate young woman running from an invisible tormentor. But there’s no escaping from the past here, only delaying the inevitable by spreading the curse of sex and death.

Teenage Dreams: Dope and The Diary of a Teenage Girl

2015 saw a pair of excellent coming-of-age films. Dope, written and directed by Rick Famuyiwa, introduced actor Shameik Moore as Malcolm, a hapless nerd who learns to stand up for himself in the rough-and-tumble neighborhood of Inglewood, California. Somewhere between Risky Business and Do the Right Thing, it brought the teen comedy into the multicultural moment.

Similarly, Marielle Heller’s graphic novel adaptation The Diary of a Teenage Girl introduced British actress Bel Powley to American audiences, and took a completely different course than Dope. It’s a frank, sometimes painful exploration of teenage sexual awakening that cuts the harrowing plot with moments of magical realist reverie provided by a beautiful mix of animation and live action.

Immortal Music: Straight Outta Compton and Love & Mercy

The two best musical biopics of the year couldn’t have been more different. Straight Outta Compton was director F. Gary Gray’s straightforward story of N.W.A., depending on the performances of Jason Mitchell as Eazy-E, Corey Hawkins as Dr. Dre, and O’Shea Jackson Jr. playing his own father, Ice Cube, for its explosive impact. That it was a huge hit with audiences proved that this was the epic hip-hop movie the nation has been waiting for.

Director Bill Pohlad’s dreamlike Love & Mercy, on the other hand, used innovative structure and intricate sound design to tell the story of Brian Wilson’s rise to greatness and subsequent fall into insanity. In a better world, Paul Dano and John Cusack would share a Best Actor nomination for their tag-team portrayal of the Beach Boys resident genius.

Sicario

Best Cinematography: Sicario

From Benicio del Toro’s chilling stare to the twisty, timely screenplay, everything about director Denis Villeneuve’s drug-war epic crackles with life. But it’s Roger Deakins’ transcendent cinematography that cements its greatness. Deakins paints the bleak landscapes of the Southwest with subtle variations of color, and films an entire sequence in infrared with more beauty than most shooters can manage in visible light. If you want to see a master at the top of his game, look no further.

He’s Still Got It: Bridge of Spies

While marvelling about Bridge of Spies‘ performances, composition, and general artistic unity, I said “Why can’t all films be this well put together?”

To which the Flyer‘s Chris Davis replied, “Are you really asking why all directors can’t be as good as Steven Spielberg?”

Well, yeah, I am.

Hot Topic: Journalism

Journalism was the subject of four films this year, two good and two not so much. True Story saw Jonah Hill and James Franco get serious, but it was a dud. Truth told the story of Dan Rather and Mary Mapes’ fall from the top-of-the-TV-news tower, but its commitment to truth was questionable. The End of the Tour was a compelling portrait of the late author David Foster Wallace through the eyes of a scribe assigned to profile him. But the best of the bunch was Spotlight, the story of how the Boston Catholic pedophile priest scandal was uncovered, starring Michael Keaton and Mark Ruffalo. There’s a good chance you’ll be seeing Spotlight all over the Oscars this year.

Had To Be There: The Walk

Robert Zemeckis’ film starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Philippe Petit, the Frenchman who tightrope-walked between the twin towers of the World Trade Center, was a hot mess. But the extended sequence of the feat itself was among the best uses of 3-D I’ve ever seen. The film flopped, and its real power simply won’t translate to home video, no matter how big your screen is, but on the big screen at the Paradiso, it was a stunning experience.

MVP: Samuel L. Jackson

First, he came back from the grave as Nick Fury to anchor Joss Whedon’s underrated Avengers: Age of Ultron. Then he channeled Rufus Thomas to provide a one-man Greek chorus for Spike Lee’s wild musical polemic Chi-Raq. He rounds out the year with a powerhouse performance in Quentin Tarantino’s widescreen western The Hateful Eight. Is it too late for him to run for president?

Best Documentary: Best of Enemies

Memphis writer/director Robert Gordon teamed up with Twenty Feet From Stardom director Morgan Neville to create this intellectual epic. With masterful editing of copious archival footage, they make a compelling case that the 1968 televised debate between William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal laid out the political battleground for the next 40 years and changed television news forever. In a year full of good documentaries, none were more well-executed or important than this historic tour de force.

Best Picture: Mad Max: Fury Road

From the time the first trailers hit, it was obvious that 2015 would belong to one film. I’m not talking about The Force Awakens. I’m talking about Mad Max: Fury Road. Rarely has a single film rocked the body while engaging the mind like George Miller’s supreme symphony of crashing cars and heavy metal guitars. Charlize Theron’s performance as Imperator Furiosa will go down in history next to Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven and Sigourney Weaver in Alien as one of the greatest action turns of all time. The scene where she meets Max, played by Tom Hardy, may be the single best fight scene in cinema history. Miller worked on this film for 17 years, and it shows in every lovingly detailed frame. Destined to be studied for decades, Fury Road rides immortal, shiny, and chrome.

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Wet Hot American Summer: First Day Of Camp

When I first watched the 2001 film Wet Hot American Summer, I only responded to the unexpected pang in Michael Showalter’s romantic plot and the non-sequitur trip-to-town sequence. But my 25 subsequent viewings had a Lebowski-ian effect. Everything bloomed with dry confidence. Mundane teen movie staples turned first from deadpan parody into casual emotional violence, then into reassuring absurdity. The charm was in how the movie knew when and when not to try. There were “rake gags,” where a bit went on so long it became hilariously absurd. There were moments where a key prop, stunt, or exit was left out or drastically undercut, which called attention to the ridiculousness of the actors’ histrionics. (In the update, for example, a toxic waste spill is represented by a Day-Glo green puddle.) There was also the comedic freedom of unrestrained expression without consequence. Horniness, despair, and aggression were deployed for comedic effect and then forgotten a minute later. In addition to playing with tropes, writer Showalter and director David Wain were arguing that human emotions are mechanical, that they come along regardless of whether or not there is a prop or plot to excuse their expression. Teens (and the adults playing them) flail and scream because their conditioning tells them to, then rationalize a grandiose reason later.

Postmodern prequel with an all-star cast

Fourteen years later, as a Netflix series, Wet Hot is very successful at mimicking the beats and rhythms of the original, from the bright grass greens to the absurdist, Brechtian schtick. It is a prequel, set on the first day of the camp, whereas the first one took place on the last day. Showalter, now conspicuously overweight, bewigged, and 45, is playing an even younger teenager, whose lovelorn crushes are even more about entitlement and possession. He is specifically labeled “a nice guy” who can’t deal with the fact his quasi-girlfriend (Lake Bell) wants to sleep with a visiting Israeli (Wain), who has wonderful patter: “The tongue in the mouth, it can mean so many things … This is the true meaning of community, of kibbutz.”

The scope widens to include spies and undercover reporters, but it’s basically the same as other work by Showalter and Wain, like Wainy Days and Stella. The huge cast (Amy Poehler, Bradley Cooper, H. Jon Benjamin) is supported by ringers (Michael Cera, Jon Hamm). The core players from comedy troupe The State are true to form, if less fresh-faced. They still make familiar Hollywood devices feel dumb and unnatural, while grounding them in feelings of longing, rejection, and the sense of otherness.

On first viewing, it’s a little too dry. Comedy that comes from character more than unbridled absurdity is better. I enjoyed another recent online show involving idiots yelling, Other Space, more for this reason. Wet Hot American Summer: First Day Of Camp is a fine example of a postmodern prequel, but it’s still a prequel, with all the expectations and emotional baggage that entails.

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Inside Out

Whenever I hear about a new Pixar movie, I get excited. Maybe Cars 2 wasn’t up to the incredibly high standards the studio set with The Incredibles and Wall-E, but it’s still more entertaining than 90 percent of movie-like products extruded every year. Months ago, when I heard about Inside Out, I was a little dubious. The concept of personifying the dueling voices in your head as you debate how to get through life was tried in a short-lived TV series from the 1990s called Herman’s Head, not to mention the infamous sperm paratrooper sequence in Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex, But Were Afraid To Ask. Could the crack troops at Pixar successfully mine this hackneyed premise, or was this going to be another Monsters University misfire?

You betcha they could! Inside Out is wall-to-wall brilliance that will be spoken of alongside Toy Story and Up as the best of Pixar’s legacy.

The little girl whose head we’re inside is named Riley (voiced by Kaitlyn Dias) She’s being piloted from a cerebral control room by a team of emotions led by Joy (Amy Poehler). Riley’s reactions to the events of her life are determined by a running debate between Joy, Fear (Bill Hader), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Disgust (Mindy Kaling), and Anger (Lewis Black, obviously). Things are going along fine for the happy 11-year-old until her family moves from small-town Minnesota to San Francisco. The family encounters irksome but predictable, problems adjusting to the new environment. The moving van with all of their possessions gets lost. The house they move into isn’t as nice as the one they left behind. People in San Francisco put broccoli on pizza.

Riley

Riley’s bridge crew works to keep her on track with Joy at the helm, but as things get hairy, the emotions find themselves on a sinking ship. An accident throws Joy and Sadness out of Headquarters, leaving Fear, Disgust, and Anger alone to run the show. As Riley’s young life starts spiraling out of control, the opposites Joy and Sadness must work together to find their way through her memories and unconscious mind and return to the control room.

Pixar veteran Pete Docter is Inside Out‘s ostensible mastermind, but in the famously collaborative Pixar spirit, he shares his director’s credit with animator Ronaldo Del Carmen. Their work visualizing abstract psychological concepts is creative, fun, and illuminating. Both Riley’s drab, everyday existence in San Francisco and the riot of color and shapes in her head are perfectly rendered, and the stories told in both environments complement and inform each other. Every detail has been thought through and perfectly executed. There are references to Chuck Jones, Hayao Miyazaki, and early Disney collaborator Ub Iwerks, as Sadness and Joy travel through Imagination Land and the experimental Abstract Thought chamber. There’s not a false note anywhere in the talented voice cast, but Poehler and Richard Kind, who plays Riley’s long-neglected imaginary friend Bing Bong are the two standouts. There’s even a Frank Oz voice cameo!

Like classic Looney Tunes, Inside Out is ostensibly directed at kids, but speaks even deeper volumes to adults. It’s funny and exciting, and its lessons go down easy. Significantly, the film posits that the worst case scenario is not a mind consumed with sadness, but one that can no longer feel anything. Joy’s ultimate embrace of the other emotions to create a richer life experience for Riley is both moving and sharply observed. Docter also takes the occasional aside to look at the emotional debates going on in the minds of characters other than Riley to emphasize that everyone has his or her own struggle. Its central theme of staying aware of the different emotional and cognitive forces pulling you to and fro as you go through life seems like an extremely valuable lesson for children. Frankly, it’s pretty valuable to me, too. Inside Out is a movie I wish I had seen a long time ago.

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“Parks and Recreation”: The Final Goodbye

“Previously on” the Flyer‘s TV review page: Contemporary scripted TV is our equivalent of masterpieces of fine art. Our museums and galleries are HBO, AMC, Showtime, the basic networks, FX, and Netflix. The Sopranos is a Caravaggio; Breaking Bad is Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Triumph of Death; Mad Men is an Edward Hopper.

NBC’s Parks and Recreation is a Keith Haring: an energetic, animate, joyous pop dance — a celebration of life with social commentary encoded in the brushwork.

Haring’s work: a celebration of life with social commentary in the brushwork

At the heart of Parks and Recreation are Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler) and Ron Swanson (Nick Offerman), the deputy director and director, respectively, of the parks and rec department in the fictional small town of Pawnee, Indiana. A most cheerful, well-intentioned, and indefatigable soul, Leslie serves the town she loves with a civil-service glee rarely found in nature — she wants to help everybody. A political feminist, she displays photos of the likes of Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright in her office.

To the naked eye, Leslie and Ron could not be more different. He’s a gruff, masculine outdoorsman and devout libertarian who is in charge of Pawnee’s parks department because that’s the best place he can ensure that the citizens will not begin to rely upon government services. Ron would like nothing more than to spend his time self-reliant in the woods with a whittling knife in one hand, a bottle of dark liquor in the other, and a fire at his feet.

What Leslie and Ron lack in shared perspective they make up for in mutual, sometimes begrudging respect. They genuinely like each other and put up with each other’s peculiarities because they are both good people, and they recognize that quality in one another. Their differences are diminutive compared to their commonalities. Writ large, this is the quality that sets Parks and Recreation apart from any other show: a seam-splitting generosity and humanistic altruism for all mankind.

Though considerably political in theme, Parks and Rec is not divisive in delivery. Most anybody anywhere on the left-right spectrum can find something or someone to relate to. But, the positive slant shouldn’t be mistaken for naiveté on the part of the creators, Greg Daniels and Michael Schur. Because, though the show is always looking for the good in people, Pawnee is filled with a rabble of narrow-minded, mean citizens who usually don’t act in their own best interests because they’re too dumb to identify them. This jibes with reality, and so Parks and Recreation is on some levels not just an infinitely enjoyable show but also a counterrevolutionary one in American television. It’s the good twin to the other inarguably great half-hour of the past few decades, Seinfeld. Parks and Rec never tires of trying to find the good in people, even when individuals prove unworthy again and again. Meanwhile, Seinfeld never had anything good to say about anybody.

That Parks and Recreation has maintained its spirit of goodwill toward man despite the coterminous real-world rancorous politics is all the more remarkable; 2009 saw the birth of both Parks and Recreation and the national Tea Party movement. As the axiom goes, “All politics is local.” Parks and Recreation, set in the calcified strata of small-town government and a myopic populace, somehow still manages to make one believe that maybe America is going to be all right, after all.

The terrific Parks and Rec cast prepares for its final season.

The ensemble cast is expertly designed and deployed; no two characters serve the same purpose, and no two inter-character relationships play out the same: Ann Perkins (Rashida Jones), Leslie’s BFF, a pragmatic nurse who wears her beauty uncomfortably; Tom Haverford (Aziz Ansari), a metrosexual serial entrepreneur whose schemes frequently put him in over his head; April Ludgate (Aubrey Plaza), an unexcitable hipster who disdains everything and everybody (with a heart of gold); Andy Dwyer (Chris Pratt), a goofy underachiever who gleefully dives like a puppy into every scenario; Donna Meagle (Retta), a pop culture diva who knows what she likes and usually gets what she wants; Chris Traeger (Rob Lowe), the literally flawless city manager who uses extreme positivity to hide the fact that he’s freaking out about aging; and Jerry Gergich (Jim O’Heir), the oft-abused bureaucratic functionary who can’t get out of his own way.

Last but hardly least is Ben Wyatt (Adam Scott), the love of Leslie’s life, nerdy and competent, deadpan and romantic. The relationship between Ben and Leslie is surpassed in charm only by Leslie’s platonic one with Ron. If every embellishment was stripped away from the show, what would remain are Leslie and Ron — a chaste kind of opposites attract.

Parks and Recreation is the true heir to two of the other greatest half-hours of all time: The Andy Griffith Show and Cheers. All three are regionally attentive, smartly written, finely tuned sitcoms about the family we make out of our friends and loved ones, except Parks and Rec has the added benefit of being able to be more topically adventurous and demographically diverse. Plus, the only true villain in Parks and Recreation, Pawnee’s neighboring town of Eagleton and its residents, is the geospatial mash-up of Mount Pilot and Gary’s Olde Towne Tavern.

The difference is that Cheers and Andy Griffith never made me emotional, whereas Parks and Recreation is so moving it makes me cry on the regular. The show is coming to an end; its seventh season is its last. Perhaps it’s where I am in life or just appreciating where it’s taken me, but this ending is going to make for a tough goodbye.

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TV Review: Veep

CREDIT: Paul Schiraldi

It seems as though not enough has been made about the greatness of Julia Louis-Dreyfus and her current show, Veep, which just completed its third season — if it’s possible that an actress who has won consecutive Emmys for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series could be considered having gone “under the radar.” Louis-Dreyfus is best known for playing Elaine from Seinfeld, the kind of career stele so monumental it threatened to overshadow anything else she’d ever do.

Her performance in Veep as U.S. Vice President Selina Meyer, 14 years after Seinfeld ended, topples that possibility. Meyer may even be a better character than Elaine — though it should be caveated that I’m the kind of revisionist who prefers Futurama to The Simpsons and The Dark Knight Rises to The Dark Knight.

The premise of Veep is that the second-most powerful person in the free world, the American VP, a heartbeat away from the presidency, is so unimportant and ineffectual a figure that they are shut out of White House decision-making, assigned humiliating tasks, and roundly ignored except for the occasional political blunder.

Paul Schiraldi

Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Sam Richardson

Louis-Dreyfus is, at the risk of hyperbole, exquisite in the role. She has the right mix of intelligence, polish, and charisma to be believable as an electable politician and attractive running mate but adds to it enough inelegance, foolishness, and insensitivity to prove she doesn’t merit anything greater. Meyers’ political ambition is matched only by her ability to unwittingly thwart it. Parks and Recreation‘s Amy Poehler is the only one in the medium who matches Louis-Dreyfus’ timing, delivery, and chops for physical comedy.

Meyer belittles her staff, cursing to a degree worthy of a sailor’s swear jar — everybody on the show does, actually. But what makes Veep‘s crudeness so endlessly enjoyable is that the characters (i.e., the actors and writers) seem to be constantly searching for the single greatest putdown a scenario can have. Veep‘s style is to keep a scene going past the point of when the critical plot information is conveyed, just to watch characters interact. The dialog is either improvisational or wielded so that it appears organic to the situation. My all-time favorite: Meyer calls the tall, unctuous White House liaison, Jonah (Timothy Simons) a “jolly green jizz-face.”

In addition to Jonah (my favorite character on the show after Meyer), the Veep ensemble is stacked with greatness: chief of staff, Amy (Anna Chlumsky); personal assistant, Gary (Tony Hale); spokesperson, Mike (Matt Walsh); political operative, Dan (Reid Scott); office administrator, Sue (Sufe Bradshaw); prez chief of staff, Ben (Kevin Dunn); strategist, Kent (Gary Cole); and Selina’s daughter, Catherine (Sarah Sutherland). There’s no duplication in personality in the group, except that they are all beloved fools and jackasses.

Veep was created by Armando Iannucci, who directed and co-wrote the amazing political-diplomatic film satire In the Loop. Though Scottish, his ear for bureaucratic idiocy is so strong — or else the notion so universal — he evinces a firm grasp of the farcical machinations and absurd argot spoken inside the Beltway.

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Film Features Film/TV

Fey and Poehler score in big-screen reunion.

It’s funny to go up to the movie-theater counter and say, “One for Baby Mama.” And, fortunately, that’s only the beginning of the fun.

At its most basic, Baby Mama is a fine vehicle to reunite Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, the talented comedians who had great chemistry together on Saturday Night Live a few years back. Fey is Kate Holbrook, a single corporate executive whose biological clock has kicked in. She’s got baby mania, but adoption is going to take years and artificial insemination fails because of a tricky uterus. She opts for having a surrogate mother. In comes Poehler as Angie Ostrowiski, a “white trash” girl who could use the money surrogacy pays.

Fey did not write Baby Mama, and that’s probably a good thing. Though she created and is currently the standout writer and actress on arguably the best show on TV right now, 30 Rock, and though she brought some quality back to SNL while serving as head writer, there is such a thing as too much Tina Fey. Her comedy is a bleach of snark, manic self-doubt, pop-culture aggression, and lily-white squareness, and mixing it with a little water was prudent for a feature-length film.

The “water” in the analogy is Baby Mama writer and first-time director Michael McCullers (Undercover Brother, the two Austin Powers sequels, and SNL). His script is funny and does right by the protagonists, and the film is full of knowing observations about the process of a pregnancy and the fears of the unknown experienced by future parents.

But there’s little doubt Baby Mama was written by a man, and it’s probably no coincidence that the lead character is a woman using a surrogate rather than a woman who’s pregnant herself. When Kate asks Angie what it feels like inside when the baby kicks, Fey’s character at that point isn’t much more than a baby-daddy cliché from any other movie. When Angie answers that it feels like eating a meatball and then the meatball kicks you, it’s a perfectly funny, masculine answer.

It may also be why Baby Mama wanders from the main topics of pregnancy and motherhood so often, showing more interest in how Kate and Angie fit together as characters; why a major subplot delves into the corporate goings-on of the whole-foods company Kate works for; why it wades into the differences between authenticity and well-meaning trendiness; and why it takes the time to observe how class and education are expressed by what culture we consume.

Supporting actors are asked to play just one note each, but it works: Steve Martin as a pony-tailed capitalist hippie; Sigourney Weaver as a woman who’s endlessly fertile even though she’s as old as Sigourney Weaver; Holland Taylor as Kate’s opinionated mother; Maura Tierney as Kate’s serene sister, a mommy herself.

It’s all very good. Heck, even Greg Kinnear comes out looking all right.

Baby Mama

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