Tag: Julia Louis-Dreyfus

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Onward

It’s strange to contemplate how Dungeons & Dragons has conquered the world. The game began in the early 1970s in a Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, hobby shop. Gary Gygax, Dave Arneson, and the shop’s owner, Jeff Perren, were avid wargamers who created sets of rules to govern battles between brigades of miniature army men. During one game set in medieval times, someone (exactly who is the source of much controversy and a few lawsuits) had the idea that, instead of controlling whole armies, they could try playing as individual heroes. Gygax added rules for using magic and fantastic monsters to fight and published the first edition of Dungeons & Dragons in 1974.

For a game that has been described as combining “the charm of a Pentagon briefing with the excitement of double-entry bookkeeping,” the nerdy hobby spread like wildfire. By 2017, after the game’s fifth edition was released, there were an estimated 15 million players in the United States. But D&D’s legacy goes far beyond the tabletop. The basic concepts introduced by the game — characters defined by a set of skills and statistics whose success or failure is based on random rolls of the dice, and who gather treasure and useful items as they gain experience and advance in level — underlies video games from The Legend of Zelda to Call Of Duty to Grand Theft Auto. But I think D&D’s greatest cultural contribution was the creation of the “generic fantasy setting.”

Tom Holland and Chris Pratt voice the Lightfoot brothers.

J.R.R. Tolkien had taken a scholarly approach to creating Middle Earth, using elements of myth and legend from Northern European antiquity. His numerous imitators were much less rigorous about who they stole from, and Gygax read all of them, gleaning their best ideas and combining them into one syncretic setting. Everything from Shrek to Game of Thrones to Skyrim seems to take place in variants of the D&D world.

Pixar’s newest picture Onward takes the generic fantasy setting as its jumping-off point. “Long ago, the world was full of wonder!” the opening narration exclaims. Bearded wizards in pointy hats palled around with pegasus-unicorns. But magic is famously not user-friendly, so some spoilsport had to go and invent technology, and now the elves and trolls and centaurs live in a world that looks like a Northern California suburb. It’s elf Ian Lightfoot’s (voiced by Tom Holland) 16th birthday, and he’s an awkward nerd who can’t get anyone to come to his party except his big brother Barley (Chris Pratt) and his mom Laurel (Julia Louis-Dreyfus). The boys’ father died when they were very young, but Laurel reveals that he left a gift for them to be delivered when Ian turned 16. It turns out that accountant dad was secretly a wizard, and his legacy is a magic staff, a Phoenix jewel, and a spell that would bring him back to life for one day only, so he could meet the children he left behind.

Barley is an avid player of Quests of Yore, a D&D-equivalent game that, in this world, is strictly historically accurate. He tries and fails to make the spell work. But when Ian tries, his latent magical powers activate, and he succeeds. Well, he partially succeeds — meaning he brings back just the lower half of his father. The brothers have 24 hours to complete the spell and materialize the rest of dad.

Directed by Dan Scanlon, a longtime Pixar staffer who wrote and directed 2013’s Monsters University, Onward never fails to be fun and engaging. But I think the Pixar label actually hurts Onward. Had this come from any other creative team, it would be hailed as a fantastic film. But since it’s Pixar, it invites comparisons to masterpieces such as Toy Story 2.

Onward is a beautiful piece of animation, even if it doesn’t quite rise to the level of Coco. It features a relationship between two brothers that feels deep and real, even if it doesn’t reach Inside Out‘s depths of psychological insight. Its action sequences are thrilling, particularly the climax where our heroes fight a magic dragon assembled from the rubble of technological society, but they never touch the complexity of The Incredibles.

Onward does have one element superior to its Pixar equivalents: Guinevere, Barley’s custom van airbrushed with a fantasy scene of a pegasus, has more personality than the cars from Cars, and even though it never talks, it still gets a heroic moment inspired by Mad Max: Fury Road.

Like Corey (Octavia Spencer), the manticore restaurateur who has to answer to her investors, we’ve become jaded to Pixar’s techno-magic and worn down by Disney’s domination. But don’t let that discourage you from taking up Onward‘s magic quest.

Onward
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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

Last Words

Sometimes the big screen is actually smaller.

Enough Said, the latest low-key comedy-of-manners-and-morals indie from accomplished writer-director Nicole Holofcener (Please Give, Friends With Money), pairs two television icons — The Sopranos‘ James Gandolfini and Seinfeld‘s (and, okay, Veep‘s) Julia Louis-Dreyfus — in more delicate, human-scale roles than the ones that made them famous.

Louis-Dreyfus is Eva, a self-employed masseuse, and Gandolfini is Albert, curator of a television history museum. They are each entering middle age a divorced, single, shared-custody parent of a soon-to-be-college-bound daughter.

When Eva and Albert meet at a party, it’s not love at first sight. She doesn’t even find the balding, overweight Albert attractive. But each feels their options shrinking, and a dutiful first date yields some real if very tentative chemistry.

Eva’s doubts are magnified by her relationship with a new client she meets the same night she meets Albert, an alluring but severe poet played by Holofcener regular Catherine Keener, against whose opinions and pronouncements Eva measures her fledgling relationship with Albert. There’s a plot contrivance binding these relationships that feels a little unnecessary. But it’s a conceit a lesser film would build its whole world upon. Here, it’s closer to something that just happens.

Enough Said gives Gandolfini and Louis-Dreyfus each, rather shockingly, their only really good lead film roles, and they make a fetching, deeply relatable couple.

There’s extra poignancy, of course, in Gandolfini’s performance. The actor died this summer, at age 51. This appears to be his penultimate performance, and his final lead, and discussions of Albert’s weight and health carry an unintended extra sting. If it wasn’t already apparent that Gandolfini was one of the best actors of his generation — and his towering Tony Soprano pretty much answers that — playing so far against type, and so beautifully, provides added evidence. Playing a sheepish fifty-something single guy made even more self-conscious as a result of an unhappy marriage, Gandolfini gives a warm, sensitive, immensely satisfying performance. It’s a glimpse at an alternate career that now will never be, as a savior for real-world, grown folks’ rom-coms.

And Louis-Dreyfus not only carries her half of the romantic main plot but also is equally fine in a subplot that could have easily bloomed into its own film, about the mutually needy relationship she develops with her daughter’s neglected best friend.

Though far from flawless, this is a fine film about such underexplored topics as middle-aged courtship and middle-aged sex, about how making peace with others’ (perceived) imperfections can be less about settling than about generosity and wisdom.

Enough Said

Opens Friday, September 27th

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