Tag: Will Forte

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Film Features Film/TV

Now Playing in Memphis: Ira Sachs’ Passages, Wesley Snipes Strips, and a Double Shot of Tiffany Haddish

It’s a crowded weekend for new releases, so let’s get right to it. Blue Beetle is almost as old as Batman — so old, he once starred in a radio serial — but he never took off like the Bats. His current incarnation is Jamie Reyes, a Mexican-American undergrad who finds an alien robot scarab, and, well, just watch.

Memphis expat auteur Ira Sachs’ latest is his most controversial work to date. Passages is a film about a love triangle between a charismatic rogue film director (Franz Rogowski), his longsuffering printmaker husband (Ben Whishaw) and a meek school teacher (Adèle Exarchopoulos) that earned an NC-17 rating from the MPA for reasons that Ira Sachs explains in this interview I did with his for this week’s Memphis Flyer. This is one of the year’s best films so far, so don’t sleep on it.

Sure, dogs are great. But wouldn’t they be greater if they could talk? Sure they would. But let me up the ante for you: What if dogs could talk, and they talked dirty?

Uh huh. Now I got your attention. Will Ferrell, Will Forte, Jamie Foxx (that’s Academy Award-winning actor Jamie Foxx to you), and Randall Park are dirty, dirty dogs that talk in Strays. Since this is the Flyer, we’re running the red band trailer, so put on your headphones unless you want your boss to overhear and fire you.

Wesley Snipes is a national treasure who doesn’t get enough work because most Hollywood producers are weak and fearful. That’s why he’s producing his own joint with fellow under-appreciated talent Tiffany Haddish. Back on the Strip brings together a crackerjack cast, including JB Smoove and Bill Bellamy, to tell the story of Merlin (Spence Moore II), a wannabe magician who discovers his real talent is as a male stripper. Snipes co-stars as “Mr. Big.”

In a shocking twist, Tiffany Haddish’s film is opening against a film co-starring Tiffany Haddish. This one is Landscape With Invisible Hand, based on the science fiction novel by M.T. Anderson. When aliens come to earth, things go on pretty much as normal. A new social media niche opens up because the aliens don’t understand human emotion. They will pay people who are in love to livestream their lives, which are apparently very entertaining to the loveless blobs. But what happens when two livestreamers fall out of love? Litigation, apparently.

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Film Features Film/TV

Good Boys

Few films of the 21st century have had as long a shadow as Superbad. Written by high school friends Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, it was a huge hit in 2007, launching one of the young century’s premiere comedy teams and spawning a legion of imitators. In it, the two high school protagonists (named Seth and Evan) try to score some booze for a party that takes on almost mythical status for them as they run from the cops (Rogen and Bill Hader, in star-making turns) and try to live up to the impossible standards of coolness they have developed in their heads.

Superbad is itself part of the legacy of Freaks and Geeks, the millennial high school TV series created by Paul Feig where Rogen, James Franco, and a number of other actors such as Lizzy Caplan got their start. Together, the show and the movie took the Hughesian vision of American high school as a rigid caste system of the rich, the popular, the athletic, the nerdy, the poor, and the slutty and adapted it to the new realities on the ground. Just as Animal House inspired countless numbers of frat party comedies, every coming-of-age comedy since Superbad worth its salt has been based around young misfits on a quixotic quest for fun.

Ain’t misbehavin’ — (l-r) Keith L. Williams, Brady Noon, and Jacob Tremblay are Good Boys.

Produced by Rogen and Goldberg and penned by former writers for The Office, Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg, Good Boys transports the formula from high school to middle school. Max (Jacob Tremblay), Thor (Brady Noon), and Lucas (Keith L. Williams) are a trio of besties who call themselves the Beanbag Boys. The neighbors have grown up together and, until now, have been perfectly content to sprawl out on their comfy beanbags and play Magic: The Gathering. But they’re nearing puberty, and nature is calling; the film opens with Max getting busted by his father (Will Forte) for masturbating.

Max’s first crush is a girl named Brixlee (Millie Davis), and he’s been making a ceramic necklace in art class for her as a gift. After following her to a skate park, the Beanbag Boys improbably manage to wangle an invitation to a party at the home of cool kid Soren (Izaac Wang). Brixlee will be there, Soren tells Max — and there will be kissing.

The central conceit of Superbad is that Seth and Evan are aware of the world of college parties and grown-up kicks, and they’re trying to force their way into it. In Good Boys, our young protagonists are completely clueless. All they know about sex is from playground talk and health teachers. When they want to know how to do kissing right and not engage in “sensual harassment,” they resort to searching the web for “prob,” and then for porn. But their lurid, traumatizing searches come up empty because “nobody even kissed — at least not on the lips!”

That’s just the beginning of the trio’s descent into low-grade vice that unfolds naturally over the day of the party, as the trio tries to prove, in Max’s inspiring words, “Are we fifth graders — or are we sixth graders!?” The key to this kind of comedy is getting the characters right and balancing the comedy beats with enough genuine peril so that the stakes drive the conflict forward without much laughter-killing real danger. On the character front, the film succeeds. The Beanbag Boys fit together naturally. Tremblay, who got his start opposite Brie Larson in Room, seems destined for leading-man status in a decade or so. Williams gets a laugh for crying through a choir rehearsal of “Walking on Sunshine” after finding out his parents are divorcing. Noon is a musical theater nerd who must reclaim his enthusiasm for singing in the face of bullying. At times, the sixth grade dynamic seems to be more Hogwarts than Shermer, Illinois, with Atticus (Chance Hurstfield) and his scooter gang playing the roles of Draco Malfoy and the Slytherins.

The script has its high points as well. The boys’ attempt to spy on teenage neighbors Hannah (Molly Gordon) and Lily (Midori Francis) leads to what must be the best drone-based comedy sequence ever put to film. But the film has the misfortune of being released only a few months after Booksmart, and it simply isn’t in the same league as that coming-of-age comedy masterpiece. The Beanbag Boys’ painful naiveté works for a while but becomes a one-note joke as the film wears on. Good Boys knows how to successfully apply the Superbad formula but never manages to rise above it.

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Film Features Film/TV

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.