Tag: comedy

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Sausage Party

You know those movies where the premise is so out-there that you say “Wow, these guys must have been really high when they came up with THAT one!”? That’s usually a sarcastic joke, but in the case of Sausage Party, it’s almost certainly true. America’s Stoner in Chief Seth Rogen, who reportedly worked for eight years to get this film made, gives away the secret to its creation in the middle of the second act, when Druggie, voiced by James Franco, gains the ability to communicate with inanimate objects after injecting a solution of bath salts. “Everybody told me not to do this,” he says. “But I’m going to do it anyway.”

One can easily imagine Rogen and his partner in crime Evan Goldberg pitching the idea of a movie about talking supermarket food items to their crew of Hollywood’s Most Blunted over bong hits and nachos. I’m sure many, many people told them not to do it, because it’s one of those ideas that sounds great when you’re stoned but doesn’t survive contact with the “real world.” But these grasshoppers have pulled off an unlikely coup by bringing their bonged-out vision to the screen and making it work.

Rogen is the voice of Frank, a hot dog who, like everyone . . . I mean, everything … in the Shopwell big box grocery store lives more or less contentedly in his cozy packaging with seven other bro-dogs. Everything the products know about the world inside and outside the supermarket comes from a song they sing ritualistically each morning, which provides the film with its first opportunity to mock animation conventions. The big opening production number delivers the same world-building information as “Circle of Life” from The Lion King, only with a lot more casual cursing. The song tells them the people shopping in the Shopwell are benevolent gods who choose the most worthy among the products and take them away into an eternal paradise. Those who are not found pure and worthy are condemned to be thrown into the trash by Darren (Paul Rudd), the pimpled stock boy who roams the aisles seeking whom he may devour.

Frank and his mates are feeling pretty good about their chances for ascension into paradise, because they’re prominently placed on the 4th of July special rack next to a pack of buns that is home to Frank’s would-be girlfriend Brenda Bunsen (Kristen Wiig). But the day before the big 4th of July sale, a bottle of Honey Mustard (Danny McBride) is returned to the store, and he tells the foodstuff a harrowing tale of gods who mercilessly mutilate and devour the food. When Frank and Brenda try to save Honey Mustard from suicide, they cause a catastrophic cart collision that plays out like every urban disaster movie since 9/11.

Turns out, when your characters are talking food, you can skewer a lot of sacred cows. Our heroes are accompanied by two refugees from the ethnic food aisle: Sammy Bagel Jr. (Edward Norton) talks like a Woody Allen character, and Lavash (David Krumholtz) is a Persian flatbread. The quest forces the two rival carbohydrates to put aside their differences and work together. The other member of the party is a lesbian taco played by Selma Hayek. The villain is, naturally, a Douche, played with psychotic gusto by Nick Kroll.

In a year plagued by some of the worst screenwriting in recent memory, the script, credited to four writers including Rogen and Goldberg, is surprisingly tight. Co-directors Conrad Vernon and Greg Tiernan are two veteran animators with only a handful of directoiral credits between them. They have fun staging one hilarious set piece after another. Pixar has been the dominant animation studio for a generation, but there have been surprisingly few Pixar parodies. Sausage Party is among the first to stake out that ground, riffing on Ratatouille and Toy Story. But their ultimate achievement is a climactic pansexual food orgy that really must be seen to be believed.

Just in case the words “pansexual food orgy” didn’t clue you in, this is one animated film that is not for children. Fans of the Rogen/Goldberg flavor of raunchy comedy, however, will find that Sausage Party is the duo’s greatest achievement.

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Keanu

I didn’t know we were looking, but I think we may have found our Martin and Lewis.

Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis started out on the radio, and during the early days of television they were the go-to guys for good-natured, mass-market humor. Dean was the baby-faced crooner, and Jerry was the manic comic savant. They were funny, but their humor was not particularly barbed or boundary pushing like their then lesser-known contemporary, Lenny Bruce.

Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele hosted five seasons of sketch comedy on Comedy Central, which is the 21st century equivalent of starting out on radio. Their good-natured, character-based humor hit a chord with Key’s Luthor, President Obama’s “anger translator,” who said what Obama is really thinking underneath his diplomatic exterior.

It’s Keanu, starring Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele and an adorable kitten named Keanu.

Keanu is Key and Peele’s first joint outing since the comedy duo’s show ended last September. The premise is the first joke. Like Keanu Reeves’ 2014 vehicle John Wick, the incident that sets off the plot is a home invasion that results in violence towards animals. In Keanu’s case, it was a beagle named Daisy. In Peele’s case, it’s a cat named Keanu. Peele plays Rell, a schlubby L.A. loser who just got dumped by his girlfriend when he finds the cute little kitten on his doorstep. Unbeknownst to him and his cousin Clarence (Key), the kitten belonged to a drug lord who was just whacked by the Allentown Boys, a pair of assassins — also played by Key and Peele — based on the Cousins from Breaking Bad.

When Clarence’s wife and daughter go out of town a couple of weeks later, Rell convinces him to go out for a night on the town — which to Rell means seeing a Liam Neeson movie and heading back to his apartment to smoke some weed. But when they arrive at the apartment, they find it has been trashed, and little Keanu is missing. Rell enlists Clarence on a mission to retrieve the cat, first by shaking down his next-door weed dealer Hulka (Will Forte). Their investigation leads them to the 17th Street Blips, a bunch of gangbangers so tough they were kicked out of both the Bloods and the Crips. After bluffing their way into the gang’s strip club headquarters, they find that Keanu is in the hands of their leader, Cheddar (Method Man), who has renamed the feline “New Jack” and dressed him in a do-rag and gold chain. Our heroes are mistaken for the Allentown Boys and sent by the gang boss on a high-stakes ride-along with the rest of the gang, which includes Hi-C (Tiffany Haddish), a flinty, but beautiful, gang captain who catches Rell’s eye. Their mission is to deliver a shipment of a new drug called Holy Shit, which is said to be so potent as to have the effect of “smoking crack with God.” If they succeed in their mission, Cheddar promises to return Keanu as a sign of respect. Lies stack upon lies, and the two nerdy friends find themselves pulled deeper into the criminal world.

Key and Peele’s frantic code switching between nerdy everymen and harder-than-thou gangsters is the best part of Keanu. Key, the taller and more imposing of the two, is especially good when he turns his voice down to a menacing growl to explain to his heavily armed charges why George Michael was an original gangster. The pair’s chemistry, carefully cultivated across five seasons of TV, translates well to the big screen. They have a lot of fun with contemporary action movie cliches, such as the duct tape bandage that magically fixes a horrendous wound, and the seemingly normal guy who, in a fit of rage, becomes a killing machine. The real Keanu Reeves even has a cameo as the voice of his namesake kitten during a Holy Shit-induced drug trip.

Realism and character consistency aren’t priorities for director Peter Atencio, who concentrates on foregrounding his stars’ personas. The result has its moments of good fun, but like many before them who have discovered the difficulty of making the comic transition from small screen to big screen, Key and Peele’s first venture into the movies seems ultimately disposable.

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Full Frontal With Samantha Bee

For many, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart was an island of television sanity in the W era. For others, it was just proof of how smug liberals are. But there’s no denying the show’s lasting impact on TV comedy. It’s most famous alumni are The Two Steves: Colbert and Carell. After batting cleanup for Stewart on Comedy Central for years, Colbert is currently killing it in David Letterman’s former slot on CBS. Carell, on the other hand, abandoned topical comedy for The Office and, later, movie stardom, most recently as a high strung financial analyst in The Big Short.

To replace Stewart, The Daily Show brought in outsider Trevor Noah, who so far has been holding the brand together, and little more. But two Daily Show alums are taking the old formula and running with it. John Oliver was the leading candidate for Stewart’s chair until HBO snapped him up in 2013. He’s tweaked the formula, dropping the fake news deadpan, with decent results. But both the Daily and Oliver are going to be hard pressed to keep up with Full Frontal With Samantha Bee.

I’ll admit, I’m pretty burned out on political TV comedy. But Bee’s opening monolog instantly won me over. Where Noah is a little bland, and Oliver channelling everyone’s favorite Addreall addled British exchange student roommate, Bee is relaxed, confident, and looks like she’s actually having fun in front of the audience. It seems the two primary skills of the liberal political comedian are effectively channeling exasperation and articulating a lot of words clearly and quickly, and Bee can do both through a smile that seems genuine.

On this week’s show, which aired last night, she held a focus group for Trump supporters, with a promise to “actually treat them nicely”—which included an after-focus group party complete with live entertainment and “Welcome Trump Supporters” sign. After two decades of increasingly hostile partisan warfare intensified by information bubbles that isolate audiences and feed them only the news they agree with, this little bit of cultural exchange borders on a revolutionary act. Bee defanged the rancor by being respectful of her opponents, while still wringing laughs from the distance between their opinions. In this season of political anxiety, Bee might be the comedy remedy you’ve been looking for, and the true heir to Stewart’s chair. 

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Amy Schumer Live At The Apollo

Amy Schumer Live at the Apollo (2015; dir. Chris Rock)—The title of Amy Schumer’s second stand-up special hints at a kind of unpredictable, potentially hostile collision between performer and audience not unlike the 2012 Late Show with David Letterman episode where Dave performed to an empty Ed Sullivan theater while Hurricane Sandy raged, or the 1997 Late Night with Conan O’ Brien episode where Conan did his show in front of a studio audience comprised entirely of grade-school kids. Schumer didn’t do her act on Amateur Night; in fact, I’m not sure there’s a single paying customer of color in any of the numerous crowd shots.

So instead of edgy, unpredictable performance art we get a pretty good show from a pretty good comedian still on a serious roll. Schumer is much more relaxed and conversational this time around; the disarming, shock-value-heavy “good girl who says ghastly things” part of her act has largely disappeared. And thanks to her work on Comedy Central’s Inside Amy Schumer, she’s more comfortable dropping into different characters for a snarky line or gesture than she once was. Her continuing growth as a physical comedian is also one of the show’s many highlights.

Mostly Sex Stuff, Schumer’s first special, improved after multiple viewings; Live at the Apollo improves after the first 30 minutes and keeps getting better all the way to the end. Her okay bits are about massage parlors and her awkward adolescence. Her good bits are about low-hanging fruit like beauty pageants and dumb Family Feud contestants. Her great bits are about food and sex, two topics where guilt and shame and pleasure are layered on top of each other like hoagie ingredients or fatigued swingers. The food stuff includes her admission that she’s never forgotten to eat lunch; the sex stuff includes her own discomfort with being labeled a sex comic (“I feel like a guy could get up here and literally pull his dick out and everybody would be like, ‘He’s a thinker!’”). She closes with a riotous and humane disquisition about the humiliating sex positions dreamt up by lonesome horndogs and performed by no one that’s funnier than most of Trainwreck.

Grade: A

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Throwback August: Friday

We’re up to 1995 in our Throwback August series, and that means it’s Friday.

The current king of the multiplex is Straight Outta Compton, the story of hip hop pioneers NWA. See this week’s Memphis Flyer for a full review of the movie that has smashed box office expectations at every turn. That film was produced, in part, by NWA founding member Ice Cube, and directed by F. Gary Gray. When we last see Cube, he’s writing on a hilariously out-of-date laptop on the screenplay of Friday, the project that launched both of their film careers.

Friday is often referred to as a cult classic, but I’m not sure that’s accurate, because that cult would extend to virtually everyone who has had a DVD player in the last twenty years. It did 9 times its $3.5 million budget at the box office, and made a whole lot more than that on home video. There’s no doubt, however, that it is an under recognized classic of the 90s indie film revolution.

The film Friday most closely resembles is Kevin Smith’s Clerks, which made its way to theaters in 1994. Cube stars as Craig Jones, a young Los Angeles man who just lost his job, despite it being his day off—shades of Dante Hicks’s complaint that “I’m not even supposed to be here!” in Clerks. Inspired by Smith, Cube and Gray use a loose, episodic structure to create what is essentially a comedy of manners. Craig and his friend Smokey (Chris Tucker) hang out on his front porch and watch the neighborhood go by, painting a finely observed portrait of a predominantly black Los Angeles neighborhood. Like the underemployed slackers in Clerks, Craig and Smokey are lovable, lower-class losers. But since they live in the hood, the stakes are higher for them than for Dante, Jay, and Silent Bob. The Clerks are trying to get a date and find meaning in shit jobs. Between stoner gags, Craig and Smokey are dodging murderous drug dealers and trying not to get killed.

The other film influence bubbling up in Friday is Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing. There’s a not-so-subtle anti-gun violence message in Cube’s script, but when it veers from observational humor into full on Mookie should-he or shouldn’t-he start the riot territory in the end, it seems forced and lacks Lee’s gravitas. Twenty years later, in Straight Outta Compton, Cube’s attempts at social commentary are much more effective.

Cube is a natural actor, completely confident on screen and not afraid to show vulnerability. Chris Tucker’s deliciously over-the-top performance is somewhere between pantomime and break dancing. By the time Rush Hour rolled around in 1998, his schtick would become tiresome, but here, he’s exactly the hyperactive friend Craig needs.

Throwback August: Friday (2)

There are some other great performances, such as the late Bernie Mac as the jive talking Pastor Clever and John Witherspoon’s immortal take as the Craig’s vulgar, food-obsessed father. But besides Anna May Horsford as Craig’s mother, female roles are thin—a fault Straight Outta Compton shares.

The heart of the indie movement is that the art of filmmaking should not and can not be contained by access to capital. Cube took that emerging ethos and ran with it hard. If you can scrounge up a camera, a light kit, and some friends, there’s nothing stopping you from making your own version of Friday right now. Since the digital revolution, which would begin to be felt three years after Friday, you’ll even have it easier than Cube and Gray. But don’t be surprised if your movie isn’t as good as Friday, because hey, you’re not Ice Cube. 

Throwback August: Friday

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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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Trainwreck vs. Ant-Man

Last weekend’s box office race involved two seeming opposites: Marvel’s Ant-Man and Trainwreck, the collaboration between comedy titans Amy Schumer and Judd Apatow. But after a Sunday double feature of the two films, I was struck by their similarities and what they say about the current risk-averse environment in Hollywood.

Ant-Man stars Paul Rudd as Scott Lang, a former electrical engineer whom we first meet as he is being released from San Quentin, where he was doing time for a Robin-Hood robbery of his corrupt former employer. His wife Maggie (Judy Greer) has divorced him and is living with their daughter, Cassie (Abby Ryder Fortson) and her new boyfriend, Paxton (Bobby Cannavale). Scott tries to go straight, but after he’s fired from his job at Baskin-Robbins, in one of the more creative product placement sequences in recent memory, he takes his friend Luis (Michael Peña) up on his idea to break into a Victorian mansion and clean out a mysterious basement vault.

But, as the comic book fates would have it, the mansion is the home of one Dr. Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), an old-school superscientist who discovered a way to reduce the space between atoms and thus shrink himself down to the size of an insect. For years, he and his wife operated in secret as a superteam of Ant-Man and the Wasp. After a desperate mission for S.H.I.E.L.D. to stop World War III, she disappeared into subatomic space, and he took off his supersuit and vowed to keep the world-changing and potentially dangerous technology under wraps.

Under Pym’s tutelage, Scott sets out to stop the scientist’s former protegee Darren Cross (Corey Stoll) from selling his own version of the shrinking technology to the evil forces of Hydra by stealing a high-tech Iron Man-type suit called the Yellowjacket.

Ant-Man is not as good as this year’s other Marvel offering, Avengers: Age Of Ultron, but it scores points for originality. Written by Attack the Block‘s Joe Cornish and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World‘s Edgar Wright, who was originally slated to direct, the film tries — and mostly succeeds — to combine an Ocean‘s Eleven-style heist flick with a superhero story in the same tonal range as Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman. It’s burdened with the traditional origin-story baggage, but the sequence where Scott discovers the powers of the Ant-Man supersuit by shrinking himself in the bathtub and fleeing running water, hostile insects, and a vacuum cleaner is another triumph for special effects wizards Industrial Light & Magic. Rudd, a veteran of many Apatow comedies, including Knocked Up, is exactly the right guy to sell the mix of comedy and superheroics, and some sparks fly with furtive love interest Evangeline Lilly as Pym’s double agent daughter Hope van Dyne. For the sections of its 117-minute running time when it’s focusing on its core plot, Ant-Man is a good time at the movies.

For Trainwreck, Amy Schumer’s vehicle for transforming basic cable stardom into a feature film career, she surrounded herself with some very heavy hitters. First and foremost is Apatow, the producer, director, and writer with his fingers in everything from The 40-Year-Old Virgin to Girls. The pair execute Schumer’s first feature-length screenplay with verve. Schumer stars as Amy, a New York magazine journalist who is basically a fleshed-out version of her public persona. In a sharp inversion of the usual romantic comedy formula, she is a quick-witted, commitment-phobic hookup artist dating a hunky man-bimbo named Steven (John Cena), who just wants to get married, settle down, and raise a basketball team’s worth of sons in a house in the country. Soon after her chronic infidelity torpedoes her relationship, she is assigned to write about a prominent sports doctor named Aaron (Bill Hader), who counts LeBron James among his patients. The two hit it off, and she soon violates her “never sleep over” rule with him.

If this were a traditional Rom-Com, and Amy’s character were male and played by, say, Tim Meadows (who is one of the dozens of comedic talents who have cameos), I would be calling him a ladies man. Schumer is practically daring people to expose the double standard by calling her a slut. Her effortless performance proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that she has chops to carry a feature film. Apatow is savvy enough to give her a long leash, giving her scenes time to breathe, selecting some choice improvs, and letting barrages of comic exchanges live in two-shots. Hadler finds himself in the unfamiliar role of the straight man to Schumer’s cutup, but he acquits himself well in what is essentially the Meg Ryan role from When Harry Met Sally. Practically everyone in the film’s supporting hoard of comics and sports figures also gives a good turn. Tilda Swinton is stiletto sharp as Dianna, Amy’s conscience-free magazine editor boss. Dave Attell is consistently funny as a homeless man who acts as Amy’s Greek chorus. Daniel Radcliffe and Marisa Tomei slay as the leads in a black-and-white art film called The Dogwalker that the film’s characters keep trying to watch. Matthew Broderick, Marv Albert, and tennis superstar Chris Evert share a funny scene. But the biggest surprise is LeBron James, who shines with confidence and humor every time he’s on the screen. For the sections of its 124-minute running time that it focuses on Amy’s romantic foibles, Trainwreck is a good time at the movies.

But that’s the rub for both Ant-Man and Trainwreck. They both spend way too much time straying from what an M.B.A. would call their “core competencies.” In the case of Ant-Man, the distractions are twofold. First is the now-predictable, awkward shoehorning of scenes intended to connect the film to the larger cinematic universe. As his first test, Pym assigns Scott to steal a technological bauble from a S.H.I.E.L.D warehouse, prompting a superclash between Ant-Man and fellow Marvel C-lister Falcon (Anthony Mackie). The allegedly vital piece of equipment is never mentioned again.

Second is the turgid subplot involving Scott’s efforts to reconnect with his daughter Cassie, and her would-be stepfather Paxton’s attempts to put him back in jail. When Scott is having trouble using Pym’s ant-control technology, Hope tells him to concentrate on how much he wants to reunite with his daughter. The moment rings completely false in context: If you’re trying to talk to ants, shouldn’t you be concentrating on ants? The intention seems to be to make Scott a more sympathetic character, but Rudd’s quick-quipping charisma makes that unnecessary. Why spend the time on flimsy sentiment when we can be playing to Ant-Man’s strengths?

Similarly, Trainwreck gets bogged down in a superfluous subplot involving Amy’s sister Kim (Brie Larson) and their father Gordon (Colin Quinn). It starts promisingly enough in the very first scene of the movie when Gordon explains to young Kim and Amy why he and their mother are getting a divorce (“Do you love your doll? How would you like it if you could only play with that one doll for the rest of your life?”). But then, we flash forward to the present day, and Gordon has been admitted to an assisted living facility, which becomes a source of friction between the sisters. Quinn is woefully miscast as a disabled old man, especially when he’s sitting next to veteran actor and actual old man Norman Lloyd. The subplot is seemingly there only for cheap sentiment, and it drags on and on, adding an unacceptable amount of running time to what should be a fleetly paced comedy. As we left the theater, my wife overheard a woman asking her friend how the film was. “I like it okay,” she said. “I thought it was never going to end, though.”

When Ant-Man is kicking pint-sized ass and Amy Schumer is schticking it up, their respective movies crackle with life. Hollywood is filled with smart people, and I can’t believe that an editor didn’t point out that the films could be improved by excising their phony sentimental scenes. So why didn’t these films achieve greatness? I submit it is another symptom of the studio’s increasingly crippling risk aversion. All films must be all things to all audiences to hit the so-called “four quadrants” of old and young, male and female, so raunchy comedies get extraneous schmaltz and lightweight comic book movies get weighed down with irrelevant family drama. Both Ant-Man and Trainwreck end up like rock albums with lackluster songwriting filled with killer guitar solos. They’re entertaining enough but haunted by the greatness that could have been.

Ant-Man
Now showing
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Trainwreck
Now showing
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Dope

Early in Dope, Malcolm (Shameik Moore) gets roped into shuttling messages back and forth between a drug dealer named Dom (Rakim Mayers, aka A$AP Rocky) and a beautiful girl named Nakia (Zoë Kravitz). The scene sums up the protagonist’s predicament: He’s caught between worlds. An opening narration by Forest Whitaker—who also happens to be a producer—identifies Malcolm and his friends Jib (Tony Revolori) and Diggy (Kiersey Clemons) as geeks. But being a brainy kid in the Bottoms neighborhood of Inglewood, California, ain’t easy. For one thing, the usual nerd nemesis, the bully, is much more heavily armed. In addition to the feuding cliques at school, there are also the Crips and Bloods to keep track of. And your carefully researched essay on pinpointing the date of Ice Cube’s “good day” is probably not enough to get you into Harvard.

In his senior year of high school, Malcolm is pretty much resigned to his geeky fate. With graduation coming up and his grades looking good, his Ivy League goals are tantalizingly close. His performance as a messenger with encyclopedic knowledge of 1990s hip-hop endears him to Dom, who invites Malcolm to his birthday party. Malcolm hesitates, but Jib and Diggy want to live a little before heading out for college, so they manage to navigate the doorman and gain entrance to the coolest party any of them have ever seen. Things are going great until a back-room drug deal goes bad. When the bullets stop flying and most of the partygoers have been hauled away to jail, Malcolm discovers that Dom stashed a bunch of MDMA and a gun in his backpack. And so he and his friends are dragged into an underworld of crime and corruption as they try to unload the dope without getting arrested, killed, or missing their SATs.

With Dope, writer/director Rick Famuyiwa has given the teen-movie genre a 21st-century upgrade. He’s wrapped a lot of different strands into the story’s DNA. The most obvious antecedent is Risky Business, Tom Cruise’s 1983 turn as a squeaky-clean prep-school-kid-turned-accidental-pimp. But that movie was set in the lily-white Chicago neighborhood of North Shore. Dope‘s protagonists are a black kid named after Malcolm X, a Hispanic kid who says anscestry.com told him he was 14 percent African, and a black lesbian who slaps their white hacker friend Will (Blake Anderson) every time he says “nigga”. There’s a little bit of Pulp Fiction in the occasional time-bending flashback and the script’s gleeful wordiness, and a little bit of Spike Lee in the occasional fourth-wall breaking. But there’s much about Dope that is new and fresh. Since smartphones became ubiquitous less than a decade ago, the rules storytellers have been following since Shakespeare have had to change. Lack of communication can no longer be used as plot devices. A couple of quick text messages would have saved Romeo and Juliet from suicide, for example. Dope is one of the first movies I’ve seen where the new realities of electronic communication, not to mention Darknet, Bitcoin, and pervasive surveillance, are seamlessly integrated into a non-sci-fi story.

Just as Risky Business made a star out of Cruise, Dope could easily make a star out of Moore. He’s in almost every scene, and he carries Malcolm’s journey from nervous geek to confident college kid with a confidence many more experienced actors would envy. Revolori, last seen as Zero in The Grand Budapest Hotel, and Clemons both nail their parts, as does A$AP Rocky, who could easily make the same leap from rapper to actor that Ludacris did after Hustle & Flow.

My only real criticism of Dope is that it is overstuffed. The opening voice-over seems unnecessary, and soon trails off. There are so many characters and overlapping story lines that some of them feel underdeveloped. But if the worst I can say about your movie is that you have too many ideas, that’s a good place to be. Dope premiered at Sundance alongside another high school movie, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, which scored big at the awards ceremony. Both are fine films, but I think the Sundance voters got it wrong. Dope has the makings of a cult classic that high schoolers will be watching for years to come.

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Spy

I’ve always loved James Bond movies, especially the older ones like Thunderball and From Russia With Love. But these days, when I go back to watch Sean Connery swigging martinis while saving the free world, I can’t help but notice how sexist they read. I wouldn’t say the outdated sexual attitudes ruin the experience, exactly, but it definitely pulls me out of the action for a moment. Maybe that’s why I have a soft spot for George Lazenby’s sole effort, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, where Bond actually falls in love with Diana Rigg instead of bedding women seemingly out of spite.

Melissa McCarthy’s new comedy vehicle takes dead aim at spy game sexism. Written and directed by Paul Feig, Spy is likely to satisfy McCarthy’s growing legion of fans and points the way to a bright future for the breakout star of Bridesmaids. McCarthy is Susan Cooper, a CIA analyst who spends her days in the high-tech basement of Langley whispering advice and intelligence into the satellite-linked earpiece of agent Bradley Fine (Jude Law). But when Fine is killed in a mission to track down a loose nuke, Susan is sent into the field to track down his murderer Rayna Boyanov (Rose Byrne) and retrieve the weapon before terrorists can get ahold of it.

Melissa McCarthy

No one takes Susan seriously, even though she’s clearly very skilled. Wringing comedy out of people misjudging her because of her sex or looks is like hitting softballs to McCarthy. Feig understands what kind of movie he’s making and keeps her, and her point of view, dead center for the entire story. McCarthy has plenty of people to bounce jokes off of: There’s Law, who is his usual impeccable self; Miranda Hart as Nancy, a fellow analyst who is Susan’s frumpy confidante; and Aldo (Peter Serafinowicz), a lecherous Italian agent. But surprisingly, McCarthy’s best sparring partner is Jason Statham as Rick Ford, a rogue agent miffed that the fat girl got the important assignment instead of him. Statham demonstrates masterful comic timing while sending up the kind of hypermasculine roles he usually gets cast in, suggesting there’s a lot more to him than Hollywood has been able to find a use for.

Spy is often funny, but it is not a well-oiled machine. The movie starts slow, only kicking into gear once McCarthy and Statham start trading barbs at about the half hour mark. Scenes run on way too long, as Feig was seemingly determined to keep every one of McCarthy’s remotely funny improvs in the final cut. There are way too many characters, many of whom seem to think they’re much funnier than they actually are. The plot is loose to the point of incoherence — I kept forgetting what the McGuffin was until the late third act reveal of the missing atom bomb made me go “Oh yeah.”

But McCarthy overcomes all of that, making the sloppy film watchable by sheer force of charisma alone. She can pack more emotion into an exasperated eye roll than most actresses can into an extended speech. I hope one of these days someone will write a Groundhog Day-level script for McCarthy, and she’ll finally get to create the classic her talent promises. But until then, Spy is a pretty agreeable time at the theater.

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Film Features Film/TV

While We’re Young

So, Generation X is pushing middle age now. It’s okay. Our pop culture has been preparing us for it since the 1980s. The tone of Noah Baumbach’s new film While We’re Young is not that different from Douglas Coupland’s 1991 novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture that appropriated the name of Billy Idol’s first band and applied to us. Coupland’s cast of self-destructive, 20-something slackers had been told all their lives that they didn’t have it as good as their parents, the Baby Boomers. Their internalized, preemptive disappointment often looked like nihilism from the outside, but from the inside, it felt like fighting back with the only tool we had: refusal. The Baby Boomers wanted to change the world for the better, but it didn’t work out like they planned. We decided to opt out of the aspects of America we found stale and rancid. We took our characteristically defeatist motto from Nirvana: “Oh well/Whatever/Nevermind.” If our grandparents who won World War II were the Greatest Generation, we were the Grumpiest Generation.

Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts in While We’re Young

For Ben Stiller’s character Josh, the preemptive disappointment of the 1990s has given way to the muddled malaise of the 2010s. He’s a filmmaker whose first documentary Power Elite was well received by critics but is now available only via VHS tapes for sale on eBay. He’s been working on his follow-up doc for eight years now, but it’s still six hours long, and when he tries to explain what it’s about, he can only say, “It’s about America.” His wife Cornelia (Naomi Watts) is a movie producer who works with her father, a storied documentarian from the film verité days named Leslie Breitbart (Charles Grodin). Josh’s resentment of his father-in-law’s success and his own relative obscurity means they don’t get along very well, but otherwise, he and Cornelia seem to have a pretty good life in Brooklyn. But when their friends Fletcher (The Beastie Boys’ Adam Horovitz) and Marina (Maria Dizzia) have a baby, it brings some of their discontent bubbling to the surface.

That’s when Josh meets Jamie (Adam Driver) while delivering a lecture to indifferent college students, in a scene that recalls Holly Hunter’s ill-fated speech on journalistic integrity in Broadcast News. Jamie is an up-and-coming documentarian who has actually seen Power Elite. The two hit it off, and soon Jamie and his wife Darby (Amanda Seyfried) are hanging out with Josh and Cornelia on the regular, despite their 20-year age difference. Josh and Cornelia find themselves reinvigorated by their new friends, who have a spark of youth they seem to have lost. “They have all the stuff we threw out,” Cornelia says of their vinyl-listening, VHS-watching new besties. “It just looks so much better in their space.”

Naomi Watts in While We’re Young

Baumbach’s been directing arch indie comedies about uncertain slackers since 1995’s Kicking & Screaming, but While We’re Young seems like a welcome departure for the auteur. He first collaborated with Stiller on 2010’s Greenberg, but this time around the tone is more generous and extroverted. Stiller successfully walks (and sometimes pratfalls) the line between sympathetic and jerky, but by the end he seems to have grown — something that doesn’t always happen in a Baumbach film. Watts brilliantly brings depth and charm to a character who, in lesser hands, could come across as underwritten. Crucially, she and Stiller are totally believable as a couple who’ve been together for a while, but who are still in love. Girls co-star Driver just seems to get better and better, and he is great as the younger, hungrier version of Stiller’s Josh. Grodin represents the older, more successful version of Josh, and when it becomes clear that he has more in common with the hustler Jamie than his fussy perfectionism, it only fuels Josh’s resentment and pushes him into greater, more hilarious humiliations. The most surprising performance is by a bearded Horovitz as a wide-eyed new father. Who knew Ad-Rock could act? But that’s the charm of While We’re Young: It starts off as a familiar comedy of postmodern manners before opening up and embracing a wider world. Cheer up, it says to Gen X. Everybody’s in the same boat. Get over yourselves.