Tag: Nick Offerman

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Film Features Film/TV

Now Playing: Boy Kills World, Zendaya Plays Tennis

Zendaya stars as Tashi Duncan in Challengers.

A couple of premieres takes on all comers at the box office this weekend, including interesting holdovers and a couple of notable anniversary re-releases.

Challengers

Zendaya stars as Tashi Duncan, a teenage tennis whiz who must rebuild her life after she suffers a career-ending injury. She reinvents herself as a coach and marries Art (Mike Faist), a fellow tennis champion, and coaches him to success in the pros. But when Art’s career takes a turn for the worse, he must face off against his arch rival Patrick (Josh O’Connor), who just so happens to be Tashi’s ex. Fireworks, both personal and professional, ensue. 

Boy Kills World

Bill Skarsgård, who you might remember as Pennywise from It, stars as Boy, who is actually a man. The Boy-man’s family is murdered by Famke Janssen, who was the best Jean Gray in any X-Men movie, but I digress. Rendered deaf and mute by the attack, Boy is rescued by a mysterious shaman (revered stuntman Yayan Ruhian) and taught the means for revenge. Bob’s Burgers’ H. Jon Benjamin provides the voice in Boy’s head. 

Civil War

Alex Garland’s searing cautionary tale about an America at war with itself is an unexpected hit. Kirsten Dunst stars as Lee, a journalist on a mission to get from New York City to Washington, D.C., to interview the President (Nick Offerman) before the White House falls to the Western Forces. In this clip, Lee and her partner Joel (Wagner Moura) try to buy some gas in West Virginia.

Alien 

Ridley Scott’s seminal sci fi horror film returns to theaters for a victory lap on its 45th anniversary. Sigourney Weaver’s star-making turn as Ripley set the standard for tough-girl protagonists for decades. The alien xenomorphs will be the most terrifying screen monster you’ll see this, or any other, year. Take a look at the original trailer from 1979, which causes 21st century horror trailers to hide behind the couch.

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Film Features Film/TV

Knight Of Cups

When you regret the past, do you stare pensively at oceans while wearing Giorgio Armani? When you feel melancholy, do you express it by lounging in expensive apartments while burning through relationships with a series of models? When you think, is it only metaphorically, in terms like “Because I stumbled down the road like a drunk, it doesn’t mean it was the wrong one”? If so, Terrence Malick’s film Knight of Cups accurately describes your inner state, but everyone else it might leave cold.

Malick has always been interested in the strangeness of internal thought. The childlike killers in Badlands or the beatific soldier in The Thin Red Line were extremely specific characters even as their minds rambled into abstract philosophy and poetry. By contrast, Knight of Cups‘ Rick (Christian Bale) is a man without qualities, who only stares and looks sad. The film details his Hollywood mid-life crisis with all the heft of an ad for clothing. Its beautiful landscapes look like a luxury car is about to pull up. The phrases that populate its inner monologues are so perversely scrubbed of anything approaching detail that they read like platitudes. Skilled actors show up and start to fill in that detail but are drowned out by wind or surf or their own voiceovers, which are phrases like  “I was afraid when I was young. Afraid of life,” repeated without context. The intent seems to be to replace the day-to-day with the timeless, but it’s bland.

Christian Bale looks sad in Malick’s Knight of Cups.

Bale thinks of himself as a knight from a childhood story about one who was bewitched and forgot his quest. Interspersed with his thoughts are those of his father, brother, and girlfriends, as well as John Gielgud reading Pilgrim’s Progress and Ben Kingsley reading Biblical apocrypha and the Persian medieval philosopher Suhrawardi. Beneath these run a never-ending array of interactions with women between chapter headings named after tarot cards. Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (The Revenant) constantly moves the camera, floating up and down bodies, away from and towards faces, in an effort to give static scenes excitement and interest. Many of the actors are comedians (Dan Harmon, Nick Offerman) or crusty old pros (Brian Dennehy, Armin Mueller-Stahl) who would be interesting to hear speak, but have little audible dialogue. We see their raw emoting under ambient noise and classical music. Comedian Thomas Lennon has described the process: He was thrown into a scene with Christian Bale with no explanation and told to improv.

Things that actors and models do when told to interact with no script include: playing with dogs, drawing in the sand, breaking chairs, breaking TVs, chasing each other with plants, making out in an empty bathtub, jumping in pools, aerial dance, ice sculpture, ballet, putting their feet in the other’s mouth, and crying. Malick is excited about beaches, water, highway interchanges, children playing, models, and helicopters. Images of these recur and recur. My favorite shot is of a pelican that Bale and Wes Bentley momentarily follow on a pier. The camera stays on it for a few seconds, and its face has a lot of character.

The shots of expressways and cities at night recall Solaris and Koyaanisqatsi, two films which make the purely visual enthralling. Malick should follow his interest into the impressionistic and grandiose.

The funniest thing here is that Rick is a screenwriter in a film in desperate need of one. Or it would be funny, had I not learned that online. Despite the fact that Rick is often seen on film sets, the viewer is not able to discern his job.

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Film Features Film/TV

Me And Earl And The Dying Girl

I have to admit I’m conflicted about Me and Earl and the Dying Girl.

On the one hand, Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s debut as a feature director is genuinely fun. The film, which was based on a young adult novel by Jesse Andrews, who also wrote the film’s script, pulled off a rare feat earlier this year when it won both the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival.

The “Me” in the title is Greg (Thomas Mann), a film-obsessed teenager. High school is hell, of course, and by his senior year, he’s got his survival strategy well-figured out. He’s mapped out, in detail, all of the cliques and social groups, and has painstakingly maintained identities in all of them. He’s like high school Sweden: He has no enemies, but the cost of neutrality is a lack of friends. He won’t even admit that his actual best friend Earl (RJ Cyler) is his friend at all: He calls him a “co-worker”, because the hobby through which they have bonded is creating homemade parodies of classic movies. Their movies, which sport titles such as The Seven Seals, A Sockwork Orange, and Death In Tennis, bring to mind the “sweded” films of Michel Gondry’s 2008 Be Kind Rewind. The occasional glimpse of Greg and Earl’s work is just one of the fun formal tricks Gomez-Rejon plays.

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

Greg’s pretty content to drift through a life avoiding hassles; after all, who needs friends when you’ve got a killer Werner Herzog impression? But his ironic detachment hits an iceberg when his mother (Connie Britton) forces him out of his room to spend time with Rachel (Olivia Cooke), a girl in his senior class who has just been diagnosed with leukemia. Cheering up a dying girl is dangerously close to actual friendship, so Greg is reluctant, but Mom insists, and so he’s soon navigating past Rachel’s white wine-swilling mother Denise (Molly Shannon) to hang out with Rachel in her attic room.

This is only Gomez-Rejon’s second feature, after last year’s remake of The Town That Dreaded Sundown, but he’s hardly a greenhorn. He’s a veteran of TV’s American Horror Story and Glee who has worked as a second unit director for movies such as Argo. He guides Mann through a fantastic lead performance. The supporting cast is full of great turns, such as Nick Offerman as Greg’s Dad and Jon Bernthal as the tattooed history teacher Mr. McCarthy. Gomez-Rejon and Andrews adapt the novel’s first person perspective into a voice-over narration. Little stop-motion animation bits give insight into Greg’s state of mind as he and Earl set out to make a movie for Rachel, the filmmaking duo’s sole fan.

But about three-quarters of the way through the movie, I had one of those moments when you realize that, even though Ferris Bueller is a funny guy you’re supposed to root for, he’s also kind of a sociopath. For most of its running time, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is one of those movies where all of the other characters only exist to teach the protagonist a lesson. Earl is basically a Magical Negro character in the Bagger Vance mode. Rachel is only defined by her advancing illness. Viewing everyone around you only as a prop in your story is not only a bad way to go through life, but also bad writing.

Ultimately, I think the movie redeems itself. Its first-person perspective is in the first word of the title: “Me,” and the “Me” in this case is a clueless 17-year-old boy. In the voice-over, Greg outs himself as an unreliable narrator, and little details throughout the movie show that the people around him know that he’s being a jerk, even when he can’t see it himself. Rachel is ultimately revealed to be a much deeper person than Greg could see, and it’s Earl who finally delivers a much-needed gut punch to his friend. Gomez-Rejon and Andrews walk a thin line between deploying and subverting tired tropes, but their message is ultimately one of empathy, which makes Me and Earl and the Dying Girl worthwhile.

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Film Features Film/TV

“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.