SIFF Advance: STRESS POSITIONS

Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B-

It’s possible I might decide Stress Positions absolutely sticks the landing if I watch it, like, five more times. That’s not likely to happen so I don’t know what to tell you. Except, I suppose, that I feel like, in the end, its narrative conceit went way over my head.

It’s too bad. Director, co-writer, and costar Theda Hammel was at the SIFF screening I attended, and in the post-screening Q&A, she very quickly revealed herself to be whip smart, and ready to answer unusually incisive audience questions with surprising specifics of intention. It’s clear that nothing that happens in this film is an accident, and the intersecting narratives and changing points of view were deeply intentional. For all I know, Hammel could find this very review (I hope not) and deduce that I am an idiot who just didn’t get her art. In that case, she’d be half right.

For a “covid movie” (a pretty reductive way of referring to it, actually), there’s a lot going on here. It’s a movie contextualized by Millennials who came of age in between two era-defining catastrophes: 9/11 and, nineteen years later, the covid-19 pandemic. Hammel finds a way for her characters to refer to this directly by saying ignorant things about Bahlul (Qaher Harhash), the 19-year-old model recovering from a broken leg in the Brooklyn apartment basement of his White uncle Terry (John Early, giving perhaps the best performance I’ve seen him do in anything).

These relationships get sort of convoluted: Bahlul’s mother is Terry’s sister, but we never see her face, only blurry images from behind in flashbacks narrated by Bahlul. There’s a pointed image of her blond hair peaking out from under her head scarf, evidently after she emigrated to Morocco and had a child with a man there. We never fully meet the sister (Bahlul’s mom) or even see Bahlul’s father; we only meet Bahlul, a beautiful young man, often casually lounging around (recovering) in bed or on a couch shirtless, or sometimes in his underwear. This becomes a frequent topic of conversation among Terry’s friends, none of whom seem like great people, which Terry is understandably exasperated by, though his inclination to hide the young man from them, evidently for fear of them exoticizing him, is less understandable.

There’s a lot of voiceover narration in Stress Positions, divided between Bahlul, and Terry’s friend Karla, played by Theda Hammel. It’s relevant to note that both Hammel and the character she plays are trans women, and Karla comes over to the apartment and brings some influence on the impressionable Bahlul. Qaher Harhash is himself an actual model, incidentally, although I cannot find anything online to indicate his sexuality—he certainly read as “queer boy” to me onscreen, but that has no bearing on Harhash himself. Much is made among the characters that Bahlul is straight; whether he is also trans, it seems, Stress Positions leaves open for discussion.

There’s a kind of refreshing irreverence to Stress Positions, sometimes to the point that some might consider taboo. Hammel treats it all very casually, from when Karla says “Tell him your friend who used to be a man says hi,” to one exchange between two cisgender men in which one refers to all the “trannies” who live in the building. It would be a lot easier to get uncomfortable with that if not for the fact that a trans woman directed and wrote the film, notwithstanding a word now widely regarded as a slur being put into the mouth of a cisgender character.

There’s certainly something fun about this depiction of a group of people who have no particularly bigoted attitudes toward each other’s fluid differences of sexuality and gender (ignorance is another story), but are still all messy. They may have no fucks to give about matters that Boomers have spent decades giving themselves aneurysms over, but that doesn’t mean they know what the hell they’re talking about at any given time either. In particular, conversations about Bahlul being a brown person has all the White characters telling on themselves, not understanding the myriad nuances of the Muslim world, the Middle East, and where the two do or do not intersect.

This is especially the case with Terry, a character who provides by far the most comic entertainment, a guy who exudes and attracts chaos (all while Bahlul hangs out calmly in his leg cast), more than once throwing out his back when something startles him and he trips or falls in the kitchen while cooking. Terry is the guy who thinks of himself as a model progressive, while often betraying his own ignorance, particularly when it comes to his nephew’s multi-ethnic heritage. (A couple of funny scenes have characters, including Terry, queuing up a YouTube video called “What Is the Middle East?”)

Terry is also deeply paranoid about covid, this story unfolding in the summer of 2020—in Brooklyn, no less, where covid cases were catastrophic in a way few other places in the U.S. ever got. I have mixed feelings about Terry’s paranoia played as excess, because he actually has a point when he says, “We wouldn’t need a curfew if you all just stayed home.” Yet, he still lets Karla in when she comes to help after he throws his back out, and keeps bringing Coco, the weirdly voyeuristic landlady from upstairs (another trans woman, played by Rebecca F. Wright), inside to fix the Internet even though he’s constantly admonishing her to put her mask on.

There’s a curious element, an odd sort of vibe, about Stress Positions taking place during the height of the pandemic. There was a period where people clearly did not want obvious covid references in their entertainment, as they preferred to use that to escape from it. Now it’s four years on, and people are still getting covid, but it’s no longer the global catastrophe it once was. The audience at the screening last night seemed entertained by the comic references to an era we’re all glad is behind us, but I have no idea whether non-festival audiences will be as into it.

I haven’t even mentioned the fact that Terry has a husband, who has found a new man and served him divorce papers. We actually meet Leo (John Roberts) later in the film, at one of the “social distanced” parties held in the apartment backyard that is shockingly large for a New York City apartment. And his presence gets intertwined with Bahlul, who has already been narratively intertwined with Terry, and Karla, and Karla’s partner Vanessa (Amy Zimmer) who wrote a book in Karla’s voice—it’s a whole thing—and even, at lest in terms of narrative structure, with Ronald the GrubHub delivery guy (Faheem Ali), who himself intersects problematically with Karla.

I’d ask if you were able to follow all that, except it’s unclear to me if it even matters. I’ll tell you this: there are countless scenes in Stress Positions with crackling dialogue, well delivered, a sequence of conversations I could have listened to indefinitely, almost as if written by Richard Linklater if he were a messy queer Millennial. I really, really enjoyed the experience of this movie. I just didn’t quite understand the layers of turns it took in the end.

You might feel like Terry here by the time the movie ends.

Overall: B+

THE FALL GUY

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B
Editing: B

The Fall Guy is a lot of fun. I might even agree with the assessment that it’s delightful. It’s also relatively forgettable, but how important is that? This is a movie that merely aims to entertain while you’re there, and it meets that aim.

There’s a line fairly early on, about the movie the actors are making: it doesn’t have to be realistic, it’s just a movie. It felt like it was giving its own audience permission not to get too nitpicky, and just sit back and enjoy the ride.

I, of course, have nits to pick. It takes a bit longer than really needed in order for the story to really get going. The Fall Guy is the kind of movie that could have been a tight ninety minutes, in which case I would have been left with it in much higher regard. There was no reason for this to be 126 minutes long, which provides too many opportunities for the narrative to sag a bit.

Once the story finally does get going, stuntman Colt Seavers (Ryan Gosling) gets drugged at a club. There follows a fight sequence that is uniquely weird, a character in the scene itself name-checking the psychedelic sequence in Dumbo, a perfectly apt reference. A running gag involves visions of a unicorn. I’d have loved it if this movie had taken the cosmic-comic vibe of this sequence and stretched it through the whole story.

Maybe I just expect too much of a movie like this. The Fall Guy is perfectly serviceable entertainment. You could call it a romantic action comedy, a fairly rare thing to be done all that successfully. Colt gets injured on the job while endlessly flirting with a cinematographer, Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt), quits the job and disappears for a year, gets convinced by producer Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham) to return as stuntman on a blockbuster science fiction romance epic on which Jody is now the director. The primary tension is whether these two can overcome Jody’s resentment for Colt disappearing and Colt’s regret for not staying in touch.

In other words, the stakes never get all that high. Not even when Gail asks Colt to go look for the movie’s missing star, Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), but without letting Jody know he’s going it, let alone that he’s doing it to keep the studio from pulling the plug on the production. Granted, the stakes kick up a notch when Colt goes to Tom’s house and finds a fellow stunt man dead in ice in his bathtub.

Most of what follows is just a bunch of action sequences, actors playing the stunt performers who are, ironically, often replaced onscreen by actual stunt performers. A lot of them are genuinely entertaining to watch, particularly a fight sequence in Tom’s apartment between Colt and Tom’s girlfriend (Teresa Palmer), where they wind up using movie props as weapons; a dog who only understands commands in French and takes rides along on a car chase; and a climactic sequence in which three people fighting in an out of control helicopter over a recording device veers a bit into screwball comedy territory. The car chase across the Sydney Harbour Bridge could have been rendered a bit more convincingly real.

When The Fall Guy is firing on all cylinders, it really works, mostly due to the undeniable chemistry between Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt. It should be noted that there is some irony in casting Aaron Taylor-Johnson as the hot movie star and Gosling as—well, as the fall guy, the one whose face you’re not supposed to want to see in the movie he’s working on. I mean, come on. Taylor-Johnson is plenty handsome but he’s got nothing on Gosling. Of course, The Fall Guy is the real movie here and Ryan Gosling is the actual star. Oh right, I almost forgot again: it doesn’t have to be realistic, it’s a movie.

It’s just too bad when a solid-B movie could have been markedly better with just some minor adjustments, a tighter polish. I’m convinced this is the real reason behind the film’s underperforming box office—a light action comedy never needs to run longer than two hours. I never got bored, but I did feel like some minor but key thing was missing. Perhaps it was an editor. A shorter film would have been more tightly packed with what are genuinely good action sequences, but as it is, there are too many stretches without much in the way of action.

There is a slightly pointed bit of dialogue about how there’s no Oscar for stunt performers. It’s saying something that, if there were one, The Fall Guy would not likely win it. I’ve seen better stunts in better movies, but this is still pretty fun—the best we’ve got in the genre at the moment.

How great the shot is, is up for debate.

ABIGAIL

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+
Special Effects: B

The marketers of Abigail are kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place. Do they lure us all in with what the film appears to be about in its first half and let audiences get a wild surprise with the massive—and undeniably entertaining—turn it takes, or do they completely spoil the twist in all of the marketing? Well, if you’ve seen the trailer to this film, you know they chose the latter. Going with the former actually worked with some films once upon a time: think The Crying Game (its deeply problematic content being beside the point I am making here) or The Sixth Sense. Unfortunately, we don’t live in that world anymore.

But, let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that you are reading this and have never heard of this film, never seen any trailers for it. Do yourself a favor and just go to this movie, sight unseen. Or, make a note of it for when it becomes available on a streamer. I genuinely envy anyone who manages that experience. I enjoyed this film, but almost certainly would have enjoyed it a great deal more had the twist been the schlocky surprise it was meant to be.

If I don’t want to spoil it here, however, what else can I say about this movie? Well, here’s perhaps the most pertinent point: it was co-directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, the duo who previously gave us Ready or Not (2019) and Scream VI (2023). If you have seen those films, that should give you a pretty good sense of what Abigail is like—you may not want to have the twist spoiled, but you probably want to know the genre, which is horror with a healthy sprinkling of comedy. And, there’s a lot of blood, of nearly cartoonish proportions. So if you’re looking for a tear jerker drama or a romantic comedy, this movie probably isn’t for you.

Here’s the biggest drawback of Abigail. What we’re led to believe the film is about in its first half, during which a team of specialized criminals abduct a rich man’s ballerina daughter (a genuinely fantastic Alisha Weir, as the title character) for ransom, just isn’t especially compelling. In order to keep the twist secret, marketers would have to lead us to believe this is all the movie is about—along with, perhaps, the part where the criminals all find themselves trapped inside the house they’ve taken Abigail to. I suppose trailers could have said something like, “It’s not the job they thought it was” and throw in a few clips of gushing blood without showing exactly what’s causing it. These people should have hired me to be on their marketing team.

All I can say is: I will be keeping a lookout for the streaming release of Abigail, with the intent of showing it to my husband, sight unseen. That will be fun. And if by some miracle you don’t already know what this movie is about, just take my word for it: the turn is worth waiting for. The characters, while fairly stock, are genuinely fun as performed by Melissa Barrera as a former army medic and recovering addict; Dan Stevens as a former detective; Freaky’s Kathryn Newton as a hacker; William Catlett as a marine sniper; Kevin Durand as the “muscle”; and the late Angus Cloud as the sociopathic driver. The movie would be nothing, of course, without the delightful performance of Alisha Weir as Abigail, but I’d rather you just watch the movie to find out why.

Suffice it to say that Abigail is excessive in all the right ways, never takes itself too seriously (although an arguably unnecessary subplot regarding the former medic and her estranged young son comes close), and offers all the cartoonish violence you could ask for. Classic cinema this is not, but it delivered on everything I wanted it to be and that I came for.

Just wait until you see what she’s looking at.

Overall: B

WICKED LITTLE LETTERS

Directing: B-
Acting: B+
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B

Well, I’m going to stay on brand and go right to the race discussion—or rather, the odd point of view that Wicked Little Letters seems to have that there is no need to have one. One might try to argue that this film’s director (Thea Sharrock) and its producers had their heart in the right place, casting key characters in 1920s Littlehampton, England with actors of color, but I would counter that this was wildly misguided. Not so much because it gives dipshit conservatives ammunition in their stupid arguments against “color blind casting,” but because race is never even acknowledged in the film, thereby creating the sense that, while sexism plays a significant part in this story, somehow this was some kind of racial utopia, where skin color meant nothing to anyone. This is tantamount to revisionist history.

And what’s the point of that? This is no reflection on the actors, who are lovely—particularly Anjana Vasan as “Woman Police Officer Gladys Moss,” and Malachi Kirby as Bill, boyfriend to Rose (Jessie Buckley), the woman accused of sending profane letters to people all over the town, but particularly to her self-righteous neighbor, Edith (Olivia Colman). I mean, I’m genuinely glad these actors of color are getting work. I just wish they would get offered roles that made more sense: it isn’t hard to find out that, in the real life story on which this film is based, both of these people were actually White. Because in all likelihood, in 1920s small-town England, such people would be.

This deliberate choice to ignore race in a story steeped in sexism and misogyny is always irritating. It’s the exact same problem that existed in the Hulu adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, which ignored race in a dystopian near-future. In what universe would this ever be the case? Willful ignorance of intersectionality only serves to further White feminism, which serves no one.

So, that is the major flaw in Wicked Little Letters, and it is a pretty glaring, consistently distracting one—if you approach a movie like this with critical thinking, anyway. This is a small movie that carries no such expectation, but I hesitate to regard that as a good excuse.

All that aside—and admittedly, for me it’s a pretty big aside—Wicked Little Letters is a genuinely charming watch, with solid performances, particularly among its two leads, Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley. both of who already have well established track records as stellar performers. In this case, Colman’s Edith is a middle-aged, never-married woman living a deeply repressed life with her parents and particularly under the thumb of her oppressive father, Edward (Timothy Spall). Buckley’s Rose is the free-spirited, foul-mouthed young mother and widow who moves in next door.

The film opens with what is identified as the “19th letter,” addressed to Edith and read by her parents, all of them sitting at their dining table. They are all convinced, with no more evidence than her general demeanor, that Rose sent it. Soon enough, Edith is giving an official statement to the police, and that is how we get half-truths from Edith about some backstory, where these two women actually spend some time as friends, but then fell out after Rose head-butt a man at Edward’s birthday party. I could have used a little more about how the two women got from there to here, as this backstory gets a bit glossed over, robbing them both of some character dimension.

Wicked Little Letters starts with a title card reading, This is more true than you’d think. Mmm, after seeing how it was cast, maybe not. The “mystery” of who is actually writing the letters becomes clear rather early on, henceforth focusing on where Edith and Rose go from there. For what they are, they do both make compelling characters, a great deal of which can be credited to the actors. I did enjoy the extensive amount of time spent on long strings of increasingly creative profanity. Even the end credits are seen over script appearing on letter papers, with phrases like “ten cocks a week minimum.” So that’s fun.

This is a movie that could have been a lot better with the right guidance, but some of its production choices are baffling. I can’t even fault the writer (Jonny Sweet), as his script makes no reference to ethnicity whatsoever—because why would it? In the end, it’s a charming story that did not aim for fantasy but kind of landed there.

These bitches

Overall: B

PROBLEMISTA

Directing: B
Acting: A-
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B
Editing: B

Problemista is a kind of movie that takes some time to win you over. I spent the first several scenes unable to decide how I felt about it, as a young El Salvadorian immigrant named Alejandro (Julio Torres) found himself in the tentative employ of a manically eccentric art dealer named Elizabeth (Tilda Swinton), in the desperate hope of getting a work sponsorship so he won’t be deported.

If Tilda Swinton can be relied on for anything, it’s that she’ll play a part wildly different from any other part she’s ever played. She practically invented “disappearing into a role,” and it’s almost like magic how you instantly forget it’s her you’re even looking at. Here, she wholly embodies Elizabeth and her high strung emotional distractions, to a degree that she is genuinely annoying, and when another character says to Alejandro, “I don’t know how you put up with her,” you’re already wondering the same thing. The even more impressive magic trick is how, by the end of Problemista, you are emotionally invested in Elizabeth in spite of all this.

Swinton is the perfectly cast actor who is just the right size star for this size of a movie, but it’s even more important that we discuss Julio Torres, who not only plays the lead part in this movie, but he also wrote and directed it. I was not very familiar with Torres before seeing this movie, but have heard of some of his other projects: Los Espookys, the Spanish-language comedy on HBO; My Favorite Shapes, his comedy special on the same channel. This guy has been around a few years—and he is nothing at all like Alejandro in Problemista.

It would seem that Julio Torres and Tilda Swinton are a match made in oddball heaven. They have wildly different energies, and yet they have chemistry. Alejandro is very mild-mannered and struggles to assert himself; Elizabeth is oppressively assertive. She never quite crosses over into bitch territory, though; all it takes to rein her in is someone who knows how to speak to her in just the right way.

Here’s my one major note for Torres. The way Alejandro walks is . . . a choice. A rather baffling one, honestly: he moseys forward with something between a shuffle and a hop, little tiny almost-bounces with each step. What the hell is that about? Torres’s performance is stellar otherwise, but having Alejandro walk everywhere in this manner was legitimately distracting.

Problemista is clearly intended as both a charmer and a comedy. and although I got a few legitimate chuckles out of it, it’s much more the former than the latter. There are production design choices that contribute to this, little fantasy vignettes casting Elizabeth as a monster and Alejandro as a hero in a fairy tale for him to conquer, both of them wearing decidedly low-rent costumes. It’s like Problemista is actively trying to charm us by calling out its own low budget—and somehow, it succeeds.

Granted, some things in Problemista work better than others. Rza as Bobby, Elizabeth’s cryogenically frozen artist husband whose painting subjects are exclusively eggs draped with different colored cloths (depending on the painting), isn’t quite as indelible a performance. In fact, I wasn’t super keen on the whole “FreezeCorp” thing where that’s how Elizabeth and Alejandro meet, where Alejandro loses his latest desperate attempt at employment. On the other hand, it does create a setup for the swing at the very end that pays off rather amusingly.

I suppose that’s the best phrase for this movie: rather amusing. Not hilarious, not dramatic (Elizabeth’s theatrics notwithstanding), not particularly moving—but rather amusing. It’s also a singular vision, I’ll give it that much. And sometimes a rather amusing, singular vision is all we need.

A diaspora of people exceeding the expectations of the small world they inhabit.

Overall: B

THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF MAGICAL NEGROES

Directing: B-
Acting: B+
Writing: C+
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-

There were multiple ironies to my experience watching The American Society of Magical Negroes, starting with the fact that the theater I went to see it at started to show the wrong film at first. After deeply confusing those of us in the audience with this very film’s trailer playing amongst all the others before the feature started, they then played American Fiction—a vastly superior film in every way imaginable.

Eventually, once the correct film was playing, after some time I registered another irony. This is a film about Black people whose literally magical job is to ease the discomfort of White people. And this film is so blandly inoffensive, with a premise with great potential to be effectively biting, it plays as though the movie itself exists to ease the discomfort of White viewers.

On the one hand, The American Society of Magical Negroes just can’t win. It triggers the Fox News set by quite directly suggesting the most dangerous animal on the planet is “White people.” Then it rankles leftists by having its Black protagonist risk everything by falling in love with a White woman. (Sort of. We’ll get back to that.)

And here is where we get into the fundamental difference between The American Society of Magical Negroes and American Fiction. American Fiction didn’t give any of its White characters a pass. This movie, by contrast, wants us to think it’s highlighting the absurdity of the myth of the “Magical Negro,” and then gives its White characters a pass at every turn. There’s an impassioned speech near the end, delivered by Justice Smith as Aren, a new recruit for the Society of the film’s title, explaining to his coworker Jason (Drew Tarver) what it’s like for him to live in this country as a Black person. And—spoiler alert!—a minor light goes on in Jason’s head, showing a definitively contrived, if small, step toward White understanding. Except to present all this in the context of literal fantasy genre filmmaking rather undermines the message we’re meant to get from this movie.

This is a film of endlessly missed opportunities. It doesn’t even play with the concept of a “Magical Negro” as a historic stereotype specifically in literature, cinema, and television, where Black supporting characters reliably come to the aid of White main characters. Instead, while trying to convince us it’s using the concept subversively, it’s just continuing the tradition of its use. The only difference is that now, the protagonist of the film is the Black supporting character, and the White main characters are its target audience. The oddest thing about this movie is that it’s like a low-rent Harry Potter but with an undercooked premise and a lead actor who is actually more charismatic and talented than Daniel Radcliffe.

Because this is the one major strength of The American Society of Magical Negroes: the winning cast. Justice Smith embodies his character wonderfully, playing both awkward and increasingly confident with equal skill. David Alan Grier exudes warmth as Aren’s mentor, and Michaela Watkins is a welcome presence, if relatively inconsequential, as his boss. An-Li Bogan has great chemistry with Smith as the love interest for whom Aren ultimately risks everything. The story here rather lacks focus and suffers from uneven tonality, but the cast alone makes up for a lot, and together make this movie watchable, if ultimately forgettable.

A particularly curious element of this film is the multiracial ethnicities of both its protagonist and his love interest. Aren even mentions at one point that his mother was White, yet never offers any clarity on what must be unique to that experience, distinct from either being White or having two Black parents. Lizzie is briefly referred to as “ethnic” but never clarified beyond that—evidently we are to understand that, as a matter of fact, she is not a White woman. At least not fully: she’s Asian and White. But, given that Jason makes a comment about not realizing she’s “ethnic,” it would seem she’s “White enough.”

It may be that I’m splitting hairs here, and overdoing the parsing of ethnic heritage in characters—except that this movie is quite literally asking for it. It seems to give White women a pass in particular, in the end offering Lizzie a last-minute “twist” that underlines the role of women in society as “supportive wives and girlfriends.” This is incongruously problematic on its own, as it creates a a false equivalency between the otherwise very real struggles of women, including White women—something that has its place in film for sure, just not this one and not in this way—and Black people experiencing racism.

The American Society of Magical Negroes has some genuine charms (including Nicole Byer as the Society’s president), but it ultimately fails at what it aims to be, and struggles to clarify its point of view. Everything it aspires to, American Fiction achieves with ingenious finesse. I recommend you just watch that movie instead.

We’re meant to learn how White people are more dangerous than sharks, except this movie has no bite.

Overall: B-

DRIVE-AWAY DOLLS

Directing: C
Acting: B
Writing: C+
Cinematography: B-
Editing: C-

Here’s a protip: if you go to the movies a lot, and you see the same trailer before every single one of those movies, that’s a move that smacks of desperation. This is doubly the case if the movie in question opens in February, otherwise known as “Dumpuary,” the month when studios dump their movies they know aren’t going to work. And they they market the shit out of it (Argylle, anyone?), hoping to maximize opening weekend receipts before bad word of mouth can tank it.

Why did I even bother going to see Drive-Away Dolls then, you might wonder? Well, this one has relatively mixed, almost teetering into positive, reviews. And more importantly, it’s directed and co-written by Ethan Coen, writing with his wife and longtime collaborator Tricia Cooke. And Ethan Coen, along with his brother Joel, have long been among my all-time favorite directors—when they are working together. In 2021, Joel branched off on his own to bring us The Tragedy of Macbeth—he went highbrow, while Ethan went decidedly lowbrow. The secret to their success has historically been a unique blend of the two. It’s clear that these two just aren’t as great apart as they are together. Unfortunately, Drive-Away Dolls doesn’t quite work.

I wish I could tell you that Drive-Away Dolls were the “proudly unimportant lesbian comedy” that it was reportedly intended to be. It’s the perfect time for such a thing. This movie, however, could have been a tight, hilarious, 30-minute film short, which Ethan Coen managed to turn into the longest 84-minute movie I’ve ever sat through. How do you make a movie with interstitial scenes that feel like filler? Coen pulls off a genuinely dull magic trick. To be fair, in the end these psychedelic interludes—one of which inexplicably renders a twirling pizza with its toppings floating away—prove to be crucial to the plot. That doesn’t change how inessential and overlong they feel in the moment.

The one genuinely good thing in this movie is Beanie Feldstein, in a supporting role as a cop ex-girlfriend of one of the two protagonists. The leads, Margaret Qualley as Jamie the thick-accented Texan living in Philadelphia and Geraldine Viswanathan as Marian the repressed bookworm friend, have genuine charisma. They are also both straight women playing lesbians, and Feldstein feels a little like “legit lesbian cred” getting tossed in there for us queer audience members actually paying attention to these things.

(The original title was supposed to be Drive-Away Dykes, and then it got sanitized. And while it’s entirely possible either of the two leads could identify as queer, they are hardly the kind of out-lesbian actors that would have been more appropriately cast in the roles. Furthermore, and I did not realize this when first writing this review and am having to go back and edit a bit, Ethan and Tricia are essentially in a polyamorous relationship, still married to each other but both with other partners, and Tricia partnered with a woman. This would seem to give the film more “queer cred” than I initially assumed, but here’s the thing: it really changes nothing about how this film comes across.)

Feldstein, who was truly wonderful in Bookstmart (in which, ironically, she plays a straight girl best friends with a lesbian), really needs to be cast as the lead in another comedy that’s actually good. It’s what she deserves. It’s what we all deserve.

Should I tell you anything about the plot? It doesn’t matter, you don’t need to see this movie, but whatever. “Drive-away” is a term for drivers for hire who take a rental car from one location to another. Jamie and Marian take a quasi-spontaneous getaway, from Philadelphia to Tallahassee, by means of such a job—and wind up taking someone else’s job by accident, thereby also making off with the horrifying and/or hilarious contents of a hat box and a metal briefcase stashed in the trunk.

Coen apparently called in a lot of favors, because the cast of characters Jamie and Marion encounter on this road trip is truly stacked with stars: Pedro Pascal in a shockingly small part; Colman Domingo as the leader of the trio on Jamie and Marion’s tail; Bill Camp as the car rental clerk; Matt Damon as a Florida senator. For some reason, this movie is set in 1999, maybe so that the many questions Jamie asks at Florida businesses about whether they support queer people won’t feel too politically charged. Except, of course, this movie still exists in 2024, and the references stick out to the point of distraction, especially considering how little it has to do with the actual story.

Which brings us back to that “proudly unimportant” bit. Even proudly unimportant movies should aspire to something better than pointless at best and tedious at worst. More than once I thought while watching this movie, What are we doing? For most of its time, it’s just killing time. And a movie that is just killing time feels like an eternity—not what you want for what’s supposed to be a breezy, quirky comedy. To be fair, it did get a couple of good laughs out of me, especially one visual gag involing a dildo. It comes along far too late, after I grew exasperated with this movie’s inability to settle on a tone.

A collective less than the sum of its lesbian parts.

Overall: C+

LISA FRANKENSTEIN

Directing: B-
Acting: B-
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-

The funniest thing about Lisa Frankenstein is its release date, nestled up against Valentine’s Day as though it’s a sweet romance. This is a romance between an eighties teen and a reanimated corpse.

It is amusing that Diablo Cody, who wrote the script, has a mind as bent as one that thinks up the absurdist, gross-out gags that are sprinkled throughout this film. Cody lives to defy stereotypes. Lisa Frankenstein was also directed by Zelda Williams, daughter of Robin Williams, setting the story the year she was born (1989). If this and her previous film, Kappa Kappa Die (2020) are any indication, she has a real taste for old-school camp. (There are even cop characters named Officer John, and Officer Waters.)

But, nailing the tone in a film like this is the real tricky part, and Williams doesn’t quite make it. We get introduced to our young heroine, Lisa (a lovely Kathryn Newton), her blithely affectionate stepsister Taffy (a bubbly Liza Soberano), her indifferent dad (Joe Chrest) and her weirdly cruel stepmother (Carla Gugino, chewing the contrived scenery), and establish ourselves in their slighty off-kilter world for just a bit too long before we ever even meet “The Creature.”

“The Creature” is played by Riverdale’s Cole Sprouse, who apparently took months of mime lessons for months to prepare for this role, in which he has (mostly) no lines. He does a fine job for what it is, but I’m not sure he couldn’t have done just as good a job without so much effort. He’s playing a man dead for at least a century or two, and Lisa Frankenstein does very little to explain his reanimation—Lisa is just a high school kid with a crush on the bust of his tombstone, who wishes to “be with him,” and then a sudden burst of lightning results in him showing up at her house.

This is a deliberate lack of depth, of course; it’s very much the point. Lisa Frankenstein is a cross between Heathers, Beetlejuice, and Mommy Dearest, but minus the depth, the cleverness, or the biting satire. Lisa Frankenstein has some cleverness, to be fair, and it’s all in service of camp, to varying degrees of success. I enjoyed it most when its humor is darkest, as with a great gag involving what amounts to a penis transplant.

There weren’t a lot of people in the theater when I went to see this, maybe twenty people—and yet, in spite of how critical I am of it, oddly, in the smattering of moments I found genuinely funny, I was the only person there laughing. That was an odd experience.

There is a very specific sensibility Zelda Williams is going for here, and mileage will definitely vary depending on what you’re looking for. I suppose it could be said that Lisa Frankenstein delivers on its promise; I just wanted a better promise. Its sort of “camp lite” aesthetic gets tired pretty quickly, and that happens before The Creature even shows up. There’s a physical journey he goes on, getting less and less gross as Lisa, an established seamstress of skill, systematically sews him up. Conversely, Lisa starts off withdrawn and then becomes sexily confident over time, but also oddly selfish, using The Creature for assistance with another boy who is her crush at school. I guess we’re supposed to feel bad for The Creature, except of course, he’s a reanimated corpse. I don’t know about you, but I’ll never have any interest in fucking an undead guy, I don’t care how cute he is.

In the end, Lisa Frankenstein has its fun, if tonally inconsistent, moments. The casting is very much in its favor, and I particularly look forward to seeing Kathryn Newton—who was also fantastic in Freaky (2021)—in other things. They make the most of the slightly undercooked ingredients they have to work with.

I guess it’s not terrible, as meet-cute body horror goes.

Overall: B-

MEAN GIRLS

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B
Editing: B
Music: B

When I saw the original Mean Girls in 2004, I felt even then that it was overrated, an ultimately unsuccessful attempt at being the 21st-century contemporary answer to the 1988 cult classic Heathers. I felt at the time that Heathers was a far superior comedy, with biting humor that Mean Girls lacked. Ironically, not even Heathers has aged especially well from a 2024 vantage point—and it should be noted that Mean Girls was released 16 years after it; this new iteration of Mean Girls is coming out a solid twenty years after the first one. (The Broadway musical adaptation of the 2004 film, on which this new film is based, had its first production in 2017—thirteen years after the movie. Are you following all of this?) These days, surely far fewer viewers of Mean Girls have any idea what Heathers even was than viewers in 2004 did, making Heathers far less relevant to this movie than it was to the 2004 movie.

It’s been so long since even the 2004 film, all that truly matters now is how well the current film works, within a 2024 framework. And I’d say it works . . . fine. I enjoyed this one more than I seemed to enjoy the first film twenty years ago, but not by a wide margin.

I was relieved to find the music catchy, if relatively forgettable. There has been a bit of press about the promotion of all the musicals released in the past couple of months, most notably Wonka, The Color Purple, and Mean Girls: the trailers for all of them were edited so that it was not clear in any of their cases that they are actually musicals. Are promoters afraid audiences aren’t interested in musicals? If so, why they hell are they making them at all? And god knows, Wonka was a genuine hit—with utterly forgettable music throughout—and the 1 p.m. Saturday screening of Mean Girls I went to was far from sold out, but still had a surprisingly robust crowd at it.

I’ll say this: I had a good time, and I can’t imagine ever going out of my way to see Mean Girls, the musical adaptation of a Broadway adaptation of a movie adaptation of a novel originally called Queen Bees and the Wannabees, again. The 2004 film was famously co-written by, and co-starred, Tina Fey, whose profile was much higher at the time than it is today; she also wrote the book (though not the lyrics) for the Broadway musical, and gets sole writing credit for this new film adaptation, while appearing, yet again, as one of the teachers at North Shore High School. To Fey’s credit, the script is updated well to 2020s sensibilities, if possibly a little off the mark when it comes to how high school teenagers actually behave toward each other anymore.

Last year’s Jennifer Lawrence comedy No Hard Feelings felt a little closer to the mark with this, with high school kids much more sophisticated than they used to be, and far less tolerant of bigoted or sexist behavior—granted, these things can easily still be very regional, and bear in mind I have not personally spent any real time inside a high school myself in a solid thirty years. Nevertheless, there is a thematic undercurrent to this Mean Girls which, being based on something twenty years old, feels a bit dated.

I still have a basic complaint about it: Mean Girls doesn’t have mean enough girls in it. It might be more appropriately called Girls Who Hurt Each Other’s Feelings, which is, just as before, the basic, simplistic lesson: girls can be uniquely catty with each other, they fight, and the ones with a genuine conscience ultimately make up.

Fair enough, I suppose, especially for audiences who are, let’s say, adolescents. On the upside, Mean Girls is cast with exceptional performers, with Angourie Rice (first seen as the 13-year-old in The Nice Guys; later the young-adult daughter in the HBO limited series Mare of Easttown) in the part of Cady Heron. Rice fits comfortably in the role of both awkward newcomer and one of the so-called “Plastics,” the clique of vapid popular girls. Reneé Rapp is especially effective as Regina George, the thoughtless leader of the Plastics, her musical numbers consistently the best vocal performances in the film.

Among Regina’s two main acolytes, I have more mixed feelings about casting a brown woman (Avantika) as the pointedly dumb one. In fact, the supporting cast is fairly diverse, including Auli’i Cravalho (who had voiced the title character in the Disney film Moana) and Jaquel Spivey as the queer kids who first befriend Cady at her new school. But, there’s no getting around the fact that casting the two leads as White girls was no accident, and thus centers Whiteness with all this array of other, diverse characters revolving around them. I love Tina Fey, but this does seem to be a lasting blind spot with her. (One might argue that this particular story doesn’t work the same way if the leads aren’t White, but I would not accept that argument.) Taken in isolation, Mean Girls could be given a pass on this front; the issue is that it’s part of a long established pattern, which not enough people talk about.

Casting considerations aside, Mean Girls is relatively harmless, a pleasant enough time at the movies, a fairly successful capitalization on nostalgia for something that was never that special in the first place. As with its predecessor, Mean Girls comfortably sidesteps a whole lot of potential, leaving us with both a sense of what it could have been, and a satisfying experience of something hovering just one or two steps above mediocrity.

I want to see the movie about the supporting players.

Overall: B

THE BOOK OF CLARENCE

Directing: C+
Acting: A-
Writing: C-
Cinematography: B
Editing: C+

LaKeith Stanfield is great. David Oyelowo is great. Tayana Taylor is great. Omar Sy is great. RJ Cyler is great. Alfre Woodard is great. Anna Diop is great. James McAvoy is fun and Benedict Cumberbatch is a delight. Basically, everyone in this movie is great—jarringly, incongruously. Would that The Book of Clarence were great. Alas.

It begins with great promise, for about five minutes coming in hot with verve and excitement: a chariot race, through “Old Jerusalem”—one that’s just between two racers settling a bet. It’s shot with a knowing urgency, but with a light touch. Drivers get knocked out of their chariot and onto the ground, the camera offering POV shots of them crashing and rolling, an immediately clever and well-executed conceit. The opening titles appear, and they are in an old-school font in an overlay style that evokes old sword-and-sandal epics like Ben-Hur, a knowing reference that will be lost on any of this movie’s younger viewers.

And then . . . within the first ten minutes, The Book of Clarence lost me. It has production value as great as the best that Hollywood has to offer, which writer-director Jeymes Samuel (The Harder They Fall) then uses to spend too much time on characters we struggle to care about, doing little of interest. At a runtime of 129 minutes, this might have been at least slighty improved by shaving off about twenty minutes.

Maybe. The thing is, it’s the story itself that’s the problem. It can’t decide what it wants to be, while performed by exceptional actors who are taking no part in that decision. It starts off irreverent, like it might be sending up the story of Christ, perhaps in the vein of Life of Brian. It then morphs into something surprisingly earnest, about the power of faith, I guess, except it can’t convey its themes coherently. We literally get a crucifixion, complete with blood and whips and dramatic, wailing tears. I found myself imagining Mel Gibson patting himself on the back for liking this movie.

Admittedly, my position here is arguably a little tricky: I am an atheist, just as the titular Clarence (Stanfield) professes to be. It’s easy to see people of faith—who make up the majority of this movie’s potential audience—getting on board with this movie, and staying there, going along with Clarence’s arc of mildly comic selfishness, cynicism, and redemption through genuine miracles. I might become a believer too if I witnessed a miracle, at least one that could be proven not to be a figment of my imagination. So, where’s my miracle? Judging by this film, that’s what it takes to turn a person around. It’s going to take a miracle to turn this mess of a movie into something worth taking seriously. Unfortunately, it shifts from jest to taking itself way too seriously.

Jesus Christ is also a character in this movie, played by Nicholas Pinnock. He spends much of his screen time a faceless shadow under a red hood, like the Ghost of Christmas A.D. Jeymes Samuel gives him far more magical powers than even the Bible ever ascribed to him, making the character the very definition of “extra.” He coexists with Clarence—just as Jesus coexisted with Brian in Life of Brian, incidentally—and as time goes on, it becomes increasingly predictable that he will become a critical factor in Clarence’s story.

The Book of Clarence is an unusual idea conveyed through a majority-Black cast, including Jesus himself, a detail that is rightly incidental. There are some clear racial dynamics at play, with all but one of the White characters being the Roman oppressors. The one exception is the character of a beggar, who is so filthy at the start of the film I didn’t even realize he was White—a visual choice that I suppose skirts the edges of blackface, though that’s not an idea this movie toys with at all, at least not with any clarity.

Clarence decides he wants to try being one of Christ’s apostles, one of which is his own twin brother (also played by Stanfield, except in that case in a very unconvincing beard). When that proves unsuccessful, he decides he’ll just be a Messiah himself. This proves perilous for him when Rome decrees that “all Messiahs” must be crucified. By the time LaKeith Stanfield was being strung up and nailed to a cross, I found myself thinking: What are we doing? Why are we here? I could not come up with a clear answer.

One could argue that The Book of Clarence just isn’t for me, a White guy without any miracles to convince him God exists. My argument is that not even this movie truly knows who it’s for, in spite of a stacked cast who are all deeply committed to the bit—whatever that bit is. There is far smarter, more clever and more authentically expressed emotional arcs out there. Try American Fiction.

Not even LaKeith Stanfield can save this movie.

Overall: C+