Culture Representation: Taking place in an unnamed city in China, the comedy film “Nothing Can’t Be Undone by a HotPot” features an all-Asian cast of character representing the working-class, middle-class and wealthy.
Culture Clash: Four mahjong players decide to rob a corrupt government official and find more trouble than they anticipated.
Culture Audience: “Nothing Can’t Be Undone by a HotPot” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of the movie’s headliners and wacky crime capers full of plot holes and irritating characters.
Tian Yu in “Nothing Can’t Be Undone by a HotPot” (Photo courtesy of China Lion Film Distribution)
“Nothing Can’t Be Undone by a HotPot” actually becomes “undone” fairly early on in the movie when it becomes obvious that this is a story that is jumping from one messy plot hole to the next. This crime comedy about four mahjong players who get caught up in theft and kidnapping has too many gimmicky distractions. Manic editing, bizarre sound effects, and constant shouting from the movie’s characters add up to very little substance.
Directed by Ding Sheng, “Nothing Can’t Be Undone by a HotPot” was co-written by Ding, Hang Wang and Xiaonan Xiu. The movie takes place in an unnamed city in China at a small venue called the Nine Cakes Theater, which offers unusual entertainment: Customers can play mahjong while watching a stage play.
Jiu Bing (played by Yu Qian) is the elderly owner of the Nine Cakes Theater, where he lives with his wife, who does the cooking for the theater. Bing is a mahjong enthusiast. It’s one of the few bright spots in his life because his livelihood is in jeopardy: The neighborhood where the Nine Cakes Theater is located is about to be demolished for a new property development.
The government director in charge of this deal is Fu Yu (played by Tian Yu), who took bribes from business owners with the promise to stop this demolishment. However, It was all a lie from Director Fu. He kept all of the bribes, which were paid in cash. Bing lost about ¥200,000 (which is a little more than $28,000 in U.S. dollars in 2024) in this bribery scam.
Bing has connected with three other mahjong enthusiasts online. In one of the last nights that he expects the Nine Cakes Theater to be open, he has invited these three other mahjong enthusiasts to play mahjong with him in the theater’s back storage room. It will be the first time that all four of them will be meeting each other in person.
The four mahjong players don’t know each other’s real names. When they meet in person, they think up code names for each other. Bing gives himself the code name Nine Cakes. Fa Cai (played by Ailei Yu) is a gruff ex-convict in his 30s who gives himself the code name Fortune. Yao Ji (played by Yang Mi) is a seemingly mild-mannered and shy woman in her 20s who gives herself the code name Chicken. Qi Wan (played by Li Jiu Xiao) is a restless delivery guy in his 20s who gives himself the code name Seventy Thousand.
The four mahjong players start talking about their lives. Bing reveals how Director Fu stole his money and says he wants to get his money back. Bing has assumed that Director Fu hasn’t spent the money, in order to avoid suspicion, and probably has the money stashed somewhere near Director Fu.
It just so happens that Bing recently found out through a plumber friend who did some work in Director Fu’s home that Director Fu has a hidden compartment in his bathroom. Ex-convict Cai says he’s good at picking locks, so he says they should break into Director Fu’s home, find the cash and steal it. Bing insists he only wants to get the ¥200,000 that was stolen from him, and if they find more cash, the other three players can do what they want with it.
Faster than you can say “ridiculous and sloppy segue,” somehow Cai, Ji and Wan are able to sneak into Drector Fu’s home, find the cash in the bathroom and leave without getting caught. The movie never explains how they knew no one would be home. As already revealed in the movie’s trailer, this motley crew ends up finding a lot more than money ¥200,000 in Director Fu’s hidden stash of cash in a suitcase.
They bring the suitcase full of cash back to the theatre storage room. But there’s another suitcase from Director Fu’s home that ends up in the storage room and yields an even bigger surprise: the body of Director Fu. But (as already revealed in the trailer), he’s not dead but unconscious. The four mahjong players decide to hold him captive until they figure out what to do next, which involves a lot of yelling and arguing with manipulative Director Fu and each other.
As they are panicking and getting to fights in the storage room, a play is taking place on stage. A running joke in the movie is an actor from the play (who’s in elaborate costumes and masks) keeps interrupting the shenanigans that happen in this storage room. As the four mahjong players get deeper into some crime problems, they try to hide their misdeeds from the actor who keeps wanting to see what’s going on in the storage room.
“Nothing Can’t Be Undone by a HotPot” seems like a “make things up as you go along” movie. It actually doesn’t come as much of a surprise that all four of these strangers have a unique connection to Director Fu besides this robbery and kidnapping. The “reveals” are all very contrived and never convincing. The acting performances in this movie can best be described as “shrill” and “obnoxious”—as is the movie’s musical score that is more likely to cause annoyance than build suspense. The cadence of the movie is deliberately off-kilter in unappealing ways.
“Nothing Can’t Be Undone by a HotPot” gets its title because it’s something that Wan/Seventy Thousand says a few times in the movie. During this long-winded ordeal in the storage room, a hotpot of food (with lingering closeups of the food) is always cooking nearby. Even if you haven’t seen the trailer, you can easily predict what happens when a pot of hot food is in a room with quarreling people. “Nothing Can’t Be Undone by a HotPot” might have been better as a short film, but it still wouldn’t erase the movie’s problems of having a flimsy plot with hollow characters.
China Lion Film Distribution released “Nothing Can’t Be Undone by a HotPot” in select U.S. cinemas on May 10, 2024. The movie was released in China on May 1, 2024.
Culture Representation: Taking place in Atlanta, the comedy film “Not Another Church Movie” features a predominantly African American cast of characters (with some white people) representing the working-class and middle-class.
Culture Clash: Jack-of-all-trades Taylor Pherry (a parody of Tyler Perry) tries to launch a career as a screenwriter.
Culture Audience: “Not Another Church Movie” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of Tyler Perry, but even his fans will be turned off by this pointless and obnoxious movie.
Jamie Foxx in “Not Another Church Movie” (Photo courtesy of Briarcliff Entertainment)
If you think most of Tyler Perry’s movies are bad, they look like masterpieces compared to “Not Another Church Movie,” which is a painfully unfunny and trashy parody of Tyler Perry and his movies. Any money spent on this horrid junk is money that is wasted.
Written and directed by Johnny Mack, “Not Another Church Movie” is nothing but abysmally written skits thrown together, in a feeble attempt to look like real movie plot. Mack makes his feature-film directorial debut with “Not Another Church Movie.” His previous experience has been in television, as a writer for BET’s “Real Husbands of Hollywood” and several BET Awards ceremonies.
That might explain why “Not Another Church Movie” looks like a rejected sitcom idea or a vapid joke at a third-rate awards show. It might explain the movie’s low quality, but it doesn’t excuse it. There are many children who are amateur comedians on social media who are lot funnier and smarter than “Not Another Church Movie,” which is nothing but bottom-of-the-barrel dreck.
Don’t let some of the celebrity names in the cast fool you into thinking “Not Another Church Movie” is worth watching. This isn’t the first bad movie for any of these celebrities, but it’s one of their worst. “Not Another Church Movie” is also a “bait and switch” fraud because the biggest stars in the movie—Jamie Foxx, Mickey Rourke and Vivica A. Fox—are in the film for less than five minutes each. “Not Another Church Movie” is terrible on every single level and is a humiliating failure for everyone involved.
The movie’s so-called “plot” is that a “jack of all trades” character named Taylor Pherry (played by Kevin Daniels), who lives in Atlanta, decides to become a screenwriter, while various mishaps and annoyances happen to him and to people who know him. (“Not Another Church Movie” was filmed in Georgia.) A running joke that quickly gets tiresome is that the “p” in Pherry is silent, so Taylor constantly has to tell people how to correctly pronounce his last name.
“Not Another Church Movie” opens with a scene showing Taylor as a successful filmmaker, while the rest of the movie shows how he got to where he is. Taylor proudly tells viewers that before he became a filmmaker, he held several day jobs at the same time, including being a public defender, a surgeon and a pizza delivery person. It’s a dull parody of how the real Perry struggled for years in various jobs before he became a hit filmmaker.
Meanwhile, a rich and famous TV talk show host named Hoprah Windfall (played by Luc Ashley), who’s a parody of Oprah Winfrey, announces to her studio audience that even though her latest movie was a flop, she still has her wealth. Hoprah says she’s ready to retire from her talk show. She’s gotten a little tired of her protégés Dr. Bill and Dr. Loz (in other words, Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz), so she’s looking for a new protégé to be her next “pet project” and possibly her successor.
And that’s where Taylor supposedly will conveniently fit into the story, except Hoprah disappears for most of the movie. Instead, “Not Another Church Movie” becomes an annoying hodgepodge of messy ideas thrown together. And the results are not funny at all.
“Not Another Church Movie” is a low point in the career of Oscar-winning actor Foxx, who portrays a buffoonish, motorcycle-riding character named God, who is supposed to help Hoprah search for her successor. God is the one who tells Taylor to become a writer. The only other things that this God character does is ride his motorycle and has boardroom meetings in the clouds with 10 sycophant angels. During these meetings, God (wearing a very cheap-looking wig) tells horrible racial jokes.
At least Foxx has scenes where he’s actually in the same room as some cast members. Rourke plays the Devil like someone in a stupor reading wall graffiti. It’s obvious that Rourke did all of his acting for the movie without any other cast members there. He’s just “dropped” into the movie with some very sloppy visual effects that try to make the Devil look like he can suddenly appear wherever he wants. This Devil character should have been one of the funniest characters in the movie, but he just utters a bunch of forgettable lines, like an incoherent drunk person who’s incapable of saying more than six sentences in a row.
Taylor’s aunt is MaDude (also played by Daniels), who is a parody of Perry’s sassy and elderly Madea character. MaDude’s brother is a grouch named Moe Himms (played by Wayne Stamps), a parody of Perry’s Joe Simmons character in the “Madea” movies. Mo Himms’ only purpose in “Not Another Church Movie” is to insult MaDude and pass gas for idiotic fart jokes. MaDude and Moe Himms bicker a lot in several unfunny scenes throughout the film.
Some of the worst scenes in the movie take place at the courthouse where rude and incompetent Judge Loreal (played by Fox)—who hates men and white people—presides over family law cases and criminal cases. A truly atrocious sequence takes place during a divorce trial where a man named Darnell (played by T’Shaun Barrett) brings three blonde women named Karen to the courtroom. Darnell announces that they are his mistresses, and they gave him money for his legal fees “because that’s what white women do.” Darnell also collectively calls these Karens the “KKK.”
Darnell’s estranged wife Ellen (played by Brittney Jefferson) is Taylor’s cousin. Ellen and Darnell are going through a bitter divorce. Taylor is Ellen’s divorce attorney. Even though Darnell treats Ellen badly and wants the divorce, Ellen pathetically wants Darnell to get back together with her. The judge awards half of Darnell’s assets to Ellen, which leads to a deplorable scene of MaDude showing up to the former couple’s home with a chainsaw. You can easily predict what happens next.
Several of Perry’s movies are spoofed and/or namechecked in “Not Another Church Movie.” The 2007 film “Daddy’s Little Girls” is parodied with several moronic scenes featuring a single father named Monte Carlo (played by Lamorne Morris), who is raising three underage girls: Not Precious (played by Zaleigh Jackson), Less Precious (played by Kennedy Weston) and Least Precious (played by Zoë Parks), who don’t talk much in their scenes.
Many of Perry’s movies (take your pick) are about single women struggling to find true love and getting involved with the wrong men. Those moves are parodied too. A newly divorced Ellen gets back into the dating scene and meets a vain loser named Tallahassee (also played by Barrett), a one-joke character who is obsessed with how he looks, especially his painted-on, rock-hard abdomen. Tallahassee drives a truck for his small business called Tally Hoes Moving and Storage. That’s all you need to know about what type of obnoxious character Tallahassee is.
Taylor has a colleague who is a successful district attorney named Julie (played by Kearia Schroeder), who needs a car driver. Taylor recommends Monte for the job, and Monte is quickly hired. Monte is rude to Julie on the job, by calling her names like “sugar tits,” “stupid” and “bitch.” In this loathsome and misogynistic movie, Julie doesn’t fire Monte and does nothing about these insults. The filmmakers of “Not Another Church Movie” want the audience to think all of this is hilarious.
Taylor has a family member named Beverly (played by Kyla Pratt), a middle-aged single mother who is financially struggling. Her teenage son Michael (played by Jaden L. Miller) has grown up not knowing who his father is, but he finds out in the movie. Beverly is so broke, she flashes her breasts at a bus driver named Tyrone (played by Pierre Edwards) so that she can get a free ride on the bus. (There is no nudity in “Not Another Church Movie,” but the movie uses the “joke” of a woman flashing naked body parts more than once.)
Perry’s 2009 film “Madea Goes to Jail” is imitated with a sequence where MaDude gets in a car chase with police and ends up getting arrested. Guess who’s the judge in her courtroom appearance. There are also a few silly scenes parodying 2016’s “Boo! A Madea Halloween” and the even-worse 2017 sequel “Boo 2! A Madea Halloween.”
Perry’s 2008 film “Meet the Browns” (which spawned a TV series of the same name) is spoofed with the married characters Flora Black (played by Tisha Campbell) and Mr. Black (played by Yves B. Claude), who are mindless stereotypes. Flora has an artificially large behind that is literally the butt of some of the movie’s awful jokes. Mr. Black is supposed to be so stupid, he accidentally sets himself on fire at a family cookout. Jasmine Guy has a weird and out-of-place cameo in the movie as a cleaning lady named Miss Mildew.
“Not Another Church Movie” is so unfocused, it also spoofs the Oscar-nominated 1991 drama “Boyz n the Hood,” which is about three teenage friends affected by gang violence in South Central Los Angeles. Needless to say, the only awards that are suitable for “Not Another Church Movie” are Razzie Awards because it’s by far one of the worst films of the year. And for a movie called “Not Another Church Movie,” hardly any of it takes place in a church. The only real church scene is at the end. The end of “Not Another Church Movie” can’t come soon enough for any viewer who endures this onslaught of foul filmmaking.
Briarcliff Entertainment released “Not Another Church Movie” in U.S. cinemas on May 10, 2024.
Culture Representation: Taking place in Pakistan, the comedy film “Babylicious” features almost all-South Asia cast of characters (with one white person) representing the working-class, middle-class and wealthy.
Culture Clash: A lovelorn bachelor, who has been dumped by his fiancée, goes to extreme measures to try to get back together with her before she marries someone else.
Culture Audience: “Babylicious” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of the movie’s headliners and ridiculously cheesy romantic comedies.
Shehzeen Rahat and Shehroz Sabzwari in “Babylicious” (Photo courtesy of Coconut Entertainment)
“Babylicious” should be renamed “Bloated and Atrocious.” This overly long romantic comedy is an onslaught of terrible, over-exaggerated acting in a problematic story about a bachelor going to extremes to win back an ex-girlfriend. There’s nothing truly romantic about this train-wreck movie, which essentially tells viewers that stalking and telling big lies are the best ways to win someone’s heart.
Written and directed by Essa Khan, “Babylicous” (which takes place in an unnamed city in Pakistan in 2023) has a very simple and weak plot that is stretched to the breaking point about halfway through this 130-minute junkpile film. It’s a one-joke movie about a graduate student named Omar (played by Shehroz Sabzwari), who is desperate to get back together with his former fiancée Sabiha (played by Syra Yousuf), who has become engaged to another man for an arranged marriage. (Sabzwari and Yousuf and an ex-couple in real life.)
In the beginning of “Babylicious,” Omar and Sabiha are engaged and acting very lovey-dovey in a field, where they snuggle and declare their devotion to each other. Omar’s nickname for Sabiha is Babylicious. Omar and Sabiha have been dating each other for about 15 months. But within the first 15 minutes of the movie, Sabiha has dumped Omar because her parents (who don’t approve of Omar) think they can find a better man for her to marry.
Sabiha’s new fiancé is Nabeel (played by Ankur Rathee), who is tall, confident, successful and affluent—everything Omar is not. Sabiha seems to like Nabeel and seems eager to marry him. But does she love Nabeel? Sabiha, who describes herself as “difficult” in the beginning of the movie, has gotten tired of Omar being financially unstable and indecisive about future plans, such as where he and Sabiha will live after they get married. There’s more to it than Omar’s income level. It has to do with his lack of boundaries in courting Sabiha.
How pathetic is Omar? It’s revealed later in the movie that when Omar and Sabiha were a couple, Omar asked Sabiha’s mother (played by Anita Camphor) for money to take Sabiha out on dates. (All of the parents in this movie do not have names.) Sabiha’s older brother Haris (played by Aamir Qureshi) also strongly dislikes Omar. Omar’s own parents (played by Adnan Jaffar and Laila Wasti) don’t seem to like him very much either. They think he’s a foolish dreamer.
Omar has a goal to open a building complex that he wants to call Sabiha Mahal (like the Taj Mahal), which he envisions as having a museum, a souvenir shop and a cantina. Omar wants Sabiha Mahal to be a romantic place to visit and an ideal location for marriage proposals. He even has a miniature model of the building that he likes showing to people. A middle-aged man named John (played by Shafqat Khan) is the building planner and Omar’s occasional awkward sidekick. John is an odd character who really didn’t need to be in this awful movie.
Omar’s two best friends are just as buffoonish as Omar is. Aadi (played by Aadi Adeal Amjad, also known as Aadi Amjad) is a misogynistic creep who thinks that any woman who pays attention to him could be his next girlfriend. Nido (played by Mohi Abro) is a nerdy wimp who is dominated by his rude fiancée Annie (played by Sabeena Syed), who is very materialistic and shallow.
There’s a terrible, not-funny-at-all segment of the movie where Aadi meets a woman who has been his online crush—only to find out that she’s a sex worker. Aadi (who has a chubby body size) shows how much of a hypocrite he is because he is disgusted that she is a plus-sized woman—she’s not fat, but she’s not thin either. Aadi was expecting her to look like a thin model.
Omar and Nido are with Aadi during this first meeting with the sex worker, who has shown up with her scowling pimp, who expects the men to pay for her services. One of the three pals ends up having sex with her, but doesn’t want his other two friends to tell this secret. There are no sex scenes in “Babylicious,” but there are some curse words used throughout the movie.
Omar does increasingly desperate things to try to get Sabiha to get back together with him. Most of Omar’s schemes involve stalking Sabiha. Expect to see many scenes of Omar showing up unannounced and uninvited to places where Sabiha is.
One of the first things that Omar does is enlist the help of Sabiha’s best friend Arwa (played by Shehzeen Rahat), who feels inferior to Sabiha in every way and is envious of Sabiha. Omar and Arwa pretend to start dating each other to make Sabiha jealous. But this scheme doesn’t go as planned.
Omar and Arwa pose for a fake photo where they look like they’re a couple. They post the photo on social media. And Sabiha ends up “liking” the photo. Sabiha also tells Omar directly and indirectly that she doesn’t want to get back together with him, but he won’t take no for an answer. There are repetitive montage scenes of Omar pouting and moping all by himself, in this movie’s ineffective attempt to make viewers feel sorry for him.
Arwa has her own issues when it comes to her love life. She rarely dates, and she lives with her single mother (played by Ayesha Mirza), who constantly shames Arwa for not being married. Arwa’s mother warns Arwa that Arwa could end up as an old and lonely spinster, as if being an elderly, unmarried woman is some type of crime. And so, when Omar and Arwa start hanging out together, Arwa’s mother mistakenly assumes that Omar wants to date Arwa, which leads to a few cringeworthy scenes of Arwa’s mother gushing over Omar like she has a crush on him as a potential son-in-law.
It all goes from bad to worse in “Babylicious,” which includes Omar deciding to use black magic to cast a spell on Sabiha. He convinces Arwa to get something that has Sabiha’s DNA (such as hair, blood or a fingernail) to be used for the black magic ritual. “Babylicious” is so stupid, Arwa doesn’t do the logical thing of going to Sabiha’s house and secretly getting a strand of Sabiha’s hair from a hairbrush. Instead, Arwa has to try to make Sabiha bleed or pull a strand of hair during Sabiha’s engagement party.
“Babylicious” also has a time-wasting subplot of several jewelers going after Omar and trying to beat him up. (Don’t ask.) Comedian/media personality Salman Saqib (also known as Mani) has a supporting role as himself in the movie. The action scenes in “Babylicious” are completely ludicrous and badly staged, with Omar suddenly getting superhuman abilities, with no explanation.
“Babylicious” has sloppy film editing, obnoxious characters (depicted with equally obnoxious acting performances), and no good reason to root for Omar and Sabiha to get back together. By the end of this horrible film, viewers won’t care about any of these characters and probably won’t ever want to see them again.
Coconut Entertainment released “Babylicious” in select U.S. cinemas on April 26, 2024. The movie was released in Pakistan on June 27, 2023.
Culture Representation: Taking place in Sydney and briefly in Los Angeles, the action comedy film “The Fall Guy” (based loosely on the 1981 to 1986 TV series of the same name) features a predominantly white cast of characters (with a few African Americans and Asians) representing the working-class, middle-class and wealthy.
Culture Clash: A stunt double gets involved in a crime mystery while he tries to rekindle a romance that he had with the director of his current movie.
Culture Audience: “The Fall Guy” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of the movie’s headliners and over-the-top action comedies that are predictable but have entertaining performances.
Teresa Palmer and Aaron Taylor-Johnson in “The Fall Guy” (Photo by Eric Laciste/Universal Pictures)
Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt are a great comedic duo and should have had more scenes together in “The Fall Guy.” Their collaborative scenes are the best parts of this uneven action comedy that is over-the-top but doesn’t take itself too seriously. The movie has a crime mystery that often gets overshadowed by the silly and bombastic stunt scenes in the film that don’t have much suspense. However, “The Fall Guy” doesn’t pretend to be anything but breezy entertainment with cartoonish violence and a little bit of an amusing romance.
Directed by David Leitch and written by Drew Pearce, “The Fall Guy” is based loosely on the 1981 to 1986 TV series of the same name. The TV series was an action drama, starring Lee Majors as the title character: a heroic stuntman. “The Fall Guy” movie released in 2024 is very much a tongue-in-cheek comedy that pokes fun at the movie industry and celebrity culture. “The Fall Guy” had its world premiere at the 2024 SXSW Film and TV Festival.
The movie’s title character is Colt Seavers (played by Gosling), an insecure and sensitive stuntman. For years, Colt has worked as a stunt double for an arrogant actor named Tom Ryder (played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson), who takes Colt for granted. Colt’s career and personal life become derailed after a stunt he was responsible for went very wrong on a movie starring Tom. An ashamed Colt then quit the movie business and then went to work as a parking valet at a restaurant in his hometown of Los Angeles.
Colt has another reason to be miserable: He is sad because of the end of an intense fling he had on the movie set with a sarcastically witty camera operator named Jody Moreno (played by Blunt), who seemed to have strong romantic feelings for him too. However, after Colt’s embarrassing stunt mishap that resulted in Colt quitting the movie business, he abruptly cut off contact with Jody. She interpreted it as Colt harshly dumping her.
One day, Colt gets an urgent call from fast-talking movie producer Gail Meyer (played by Hannah Waddingham), who insists that Colt go back to work as a stuntman for a sci-fi action movie called “Metalstorm,” starring Tom as a character named Space Cowboy. Tom’s real-life lover Iggy Starr (played by Teresa Palmer) has the role of Space Cowboy’s love interest in the movie. “Metalstorm” (which is being filmed in Sydney, Australia) also happens to be Jody’s feature-film directorial debut.
Gail says that Jody requested Colt for this job. But when Colt arrives on the “Metalstorm” movie set, he finds out that this request was a lie. Needless to say, Jody is very upset that Colt will be Tom’s stunt double for “Metalstorm.” Jody huffs to Gail about Colt: “I didn’t approve him!” Jody demands that they find someone else to replace Colt. Gail responds, “We literally have no one else.”
Also on the “Metalstorm” movie set is Dan Tucker (played by Winston Duke), who is Colt’s stunt coordinator and best friend. Dan becomes Colt’s sidekick in a lot of shenanigans that happen in the movie. When Tom goes missing, Colt is ordered by Gail to find Tom. Stephanie Hsu has a small and somewhat thankless role as Tom’s personal assistant Alma Milan. Colt also meets Tom’s drug dealer Doone (played by Matuse), who gives an unwitting Colt a drink spiked with a hallucinogenic drug. Colt hallucinates unicorns in a comedy gag that goes on for a bit too long.
During the search for Tom, Colt goes to Tom’s hotel room and finds a dead man in an ice-filled bathtub, The rest of “The Fall Guy” is a combination of a crime mystery and exaggerated action scenes, with plenty of explosions, car chases and violent fights. Colt and Jody have the expected love/hate banter, where they both don’t want to fully admit how much their breakup hurt them. Their relationship goes exactly where you expect it to go. (Watch the end credits for some “surprise” cameos.)
“The Fall Guy” can get a bit annoying at how it seems to be a little too enamored with its stunt scenes, at the expense of developing the more interesting relationship between Colt and Jody. Colt and Jody trade snappy quips, but the movie isn’t completely convincing when it comes to showing how this would-be couple’s feelings are supposed to evolve over time. The jokes in “The Fall Guy” are hit and miss and elevated by the headlining stars’ comedic talent. It’s the type of movie that could have been better but also could have been a whole lot worse.
Universal Pictures will release “The Fall Guy” in U.S. cinemas on May 3, 2024.
Culture Representation: Taking place in New York City in the summer of 2020, the comedy film “Stress Positions” features a predominantly white cast of characters (with a few black people, Middle Eastern people and Latin people) representing the working-class and middle-class.
Culture Clash: A gay man, who’s in the midst of a bitter divorce, is visited by his young adult nephew, who temporarily stays with him, as the nephew’s presence becomes a source of gossip and intrigue with the man’s best friend and other people in his social circle.
Culture Audience: “Stress Positions” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in movies about the middle-class queer community in 2020s New York City, but this movie has a lot of unrealistic and silly dialogue.
Qaher Harhash in “Stress Positions” (Photo courtesy of Neon)
“Stress Positions” is the type of aimless and smug indie comedy that exists so the movie’s characters can aggravate each other and annoy viewers. The movie’s diverse LGBTQ representation deserves better than this incoherent story. It isn’t until the last 15 minutes that “Stress Positions” finally gets around to a part of the story that should have happened earlier. But by then, it’s too late to save this pretentious mess.
Written and directed by Theda Hammel, “Stress Positions” is Hammel’s feature-film directorial debut. She is also a co-star in the movie, where she portrays a gossipy and demanding transgender woman, who starts off as a supporting character and then turns into a co-lead character. (Hammel is a transgender woman in real life.) “Stress Positions” had its world premiere at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.
The movie is unfocused and confused about which character’s perspective has the story’s main point of view. One person narrates the first half of the movie, while another person narrates the second half of the movie. It gives the impression that Hammel’s screenplay writing was such a jumbled process, she didn’t bother to make the screenplay more cohesive because she also directed the movie. Maybe another writer/director could have salvaged this story into something that was more entertaining to watch, because the movie’s concept had potential to be made into a much better film than “Stress Positions.”
“Stress Positions” takes place in New York City’s Brooklyn borough in the summer of 2020, the period of time when COVID-19 infection rates were among the city’s highest of that year. The narrrator for the first half of the film is a transgender woman named Karla (played by Hammel), who says in the beginning of the movie that Terry Goon (played by John Early), who also lives in Brooklyn, is her best friend from college. Karla explains that Terry is a homemaker who’s in the middle of a bitter divorce from his husband Leo, who used to be Terry’s boss when Terry was an intern. (Leo’s occupation is not mentioned.)
Leo left Terry for another man and has been encouraging Terry to also find a new love. In the meantime, because Terry can’t afford his own place, he’s been staying in the former spouses’ apartment until the divorce is final. Karla also mentions in the voiceover that Terry has very limited work experience, because he quit his internship to become a homemaker in the longtime relationship that Terry had with Leo.
Terry is very high-strung, but the COVID-19 pandemic and the divorce have made him even more stressed-out and jumpy. Terry is so paranoid about getting infected with COVID-19, he sometimes wears a gas mask inside his house if he’s around people he doesn’t know are infected or not. Terry also makes an unexpected house guest wear a gas mask sometimes.
Terry’s unexpected house guest is his nephew Bahlul (played by Qaher Harhash), who has an American mother (Terry’s sister) and a Moroccan father. Bahlul was born in the United States but was raised in Morocco. Bahlul has done work as a model. He has arrived at Terry’s place with a broken left leg that was injured in a scooter accident. Therefore, Bahlul is mostly seen recovering in a bed, on a sofa or in a wheelchair.
Bahlul says his mother sent Bahlul to Terry’s place for a very good reason. As soon as Bahlul says this, you know exactly where this movie is going to go, since almost everyone in Terry’s socal circle is a member of the LGBTQ community. The only neighbors shown in this somewhat shabby walk-up apartment building are also queer. When Karla first meets Bahlul, he doesn’t say what his sexuality is, but she asks him if he’s ever dressed as a woman because he would make an attractive-looking woman.
Karla identifies as a transgender female lesbian. Her live-in girlfriend is a sarcastic and jaded author named Vanessa Ravel (played by Amy Zimmer), who is a politically active progressive feminist. Vanessa is somewhat self-conscious about originally being from suburban Larchmont, New York, because this suburb doesn’t fit her current image of being an urban hipster. Vanessa is also frustrated because she hasn’t been able to finish her second book. Vanessa’s first book is a novel called “Paulette,” whose title character was mainly inspired by Karla.
Karla has mixed feelings about the book. One the one hand, Karla brags to people that Vanessa wrote a book about her, and Karla sometimes autographs copies of “Paulette.” On the other hand, Karla feels resentment that Vanessa used her as the basis of the book, which apparently depicts Paulette as an unlikable character. Maybe the truth is a little to close for Karla’s comfort because Karla really is unlikable.
Karla is overly intrusive, rude, racist and xenophobic. Before Karla meets Bahlul and finds out that he is Terry’s nephew, she describes Bahlul as a “little brown kid” to Leo and wrongfully assumes that Bahlul is Terry’s lover. Whenever Karla meets people who aren’t white, Karla asks where they are from, because she expects them to give an answer that describes what their ethnicity is. If the person says that they are from somewhere in the United States, she asks the person where their family is from, to find out the family’s ethnicity or country of origin.
Karla does this type of interrogation when she meets a Grubhub delivery guy named Ronald (played by Faheem Ali), who delivers some Greek food to Karla one evening. Karla and Ronald strike up a flirtation. And it soon becomes clear that maybe Karla isn’t quite the “lesbian” that she says she is. Ronald’s bicycle becomes a pointless subplot in the movie.
The big “event” in “Stress Positions” is a Fourth of July barbecue party hosted by Terry in the apartment building’s tiny back courtyard. The movie doesn’t really explain how Terry goes from being so fearful of getting infected with COVID-19 that he wears a gas masks to Terry hosting an intimate gathering when COVID-19 infection rates are high, there’s no COVID-19 vaccine available at this point in time, and people won’t be wearing masks at this party. Two of the party guests are Terry’s obnoxious, cocaine-snorting, soon-to-be-ex-husband Leo (played by John Roberts) and Leo’s fiancé Hamadou (played by Davidson Obennebo), who politely asks Terry to sign the divorce papers so that they can all get on with their lives.
Terry (who has some slapstick scenes where he falls down more than once in the kitchen) is a stereotypical neurotic New Yorker. However, Terry’s story arc fades into the background as Karla and Bahlul (who is the narrator in the second half of the movie) have storylines that take over and dominate the movie. As Terry, Early clearly has the best comedic skills in the “Stress Positions” cast, so it’s a mistake that his talents are somewhat sidelined in the movie.
Bahlul talks mostly about his childhood in his tedious voiceovers, in which he comments on his mother almost as much as he talks about himself. (Bahlul is obviously a “mama’s boy.”) Even with all this talk, very little is revealed about who Bahlul is as a person, except when he tells Karla he’d like to write a book. Karla advises Bahlul to have more life experiences that he could put in a book.
“Stress Positions” has an irritating attitude that seems to say, “Showing a bunch of eccentric New York characters will be enough to make a good movie.” One of these eccentrics is Coco (played by Rebecca F. Wright), a mute upstairs neighbor who lives alone and appears to be a drag queen. Terry tells Ronald at one point in the story: “Coco’s not trans. She’s mentally ill.” Coco has only one pivotal scene in the film. Otherwise, she’s just in the movie to so a catty snob like Terry can make snide remarks about her.
“Stress Positions” will probably find a certain number of fans who automatically want to gush over anything that can be described as “quirky indie filmmaking,” while ignoring huge flaws in the filmmaking. (A lot of the movie has amateurish dialogue and unimpressive technical production.) The truth is that if you take away the underrepresented “diversity” in “Stress Positions,” it’s just another poorly made beginner film that is often dull. The identities of the characters are not reasons enough to care when their personalities and the story are so hollow.
Neon released “Stress Positions” in New York City on April 19, 2024, with an expansion to more U.S. cinemas on April 26, 2024.
Culture Representation: Taking place in the Indian cities of Mumbai and Ooty, the dramatic film “Do Aur Do Pyaar” (a remake of the 2017 movie “The Lovers”) features an all-Asian cast of characters representing the working-class and middle-class.
Culture Clash: A husband and a wife—who are bored with each other and are contemplating divorceafter 12 years of marriage—each has a lover, but then the spouses rekindle the passion in their marriage, which makes their lovers jealous and suspicious.
Culture Audience: “Do Aur Do Pyaar” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of the movie’s headliners and romantic dramedies that have realistic depictions of messy relationships among adults.
Pratik Gandhi and Vidya Balan in “Do Aur Do Pyaar” (Photo courtesy of AA Films)
“Do Aur Do Pyaar” is a mature and non-judgmental look at a husband and a wife who each has a lover outside the marriage. This emotionally complex remake of 2017’s “The Lovers” has more drama than comedy and admirably does not have a stale, formulaic plot. However, with a total running time of 137 minutes, “Do Aur Do Pyaar” is a little too long for what the movie ultimately shows what happens to the story’s entangled relationships by the end of the film.
Shirsha Guha Thakurta makes her feature-film directorial debut with “Do Aur Do Pyaar,” which has an adapted screenplay written by Suprotim Sengupta, Amrita Bagchi and Eisha Chopra. Thankfully, “Do Aur Do Pyaar” (which means “two plus two is love” in Hindi) is not a complete copy of the American movie “The Lovers”—the overall concept is the same, but many of the elements for the plot and characters are very different. “Do Aur Do Pyaar” takes place mostly in Mumbai (where a few of the characters still refer to the city as Bombay) and partially in Ooty, India.
In “Do Aur Do Pyaar,” the married couple are Kavya Ganeshan (played by Vidya Balan) and her husband Anirudh “Ani” Banerjee (played by Pratik Gandhi), who are both 38 years old and have been married for 12 years. Kavya is a dentist who thinks of herself as a strong and opinionated independent woman. Ani, who works at a cork factory, is the more passive partner in this marriage.
The movie has some flashbacks, but most of the story goes back and forth between showing the present-day relationships between Kavya and Ani and their extramarital lovers. Kavya and Ani have lost a lot of love for each other because they were never that passionately in love in the first place. They seemed to have a “friends with benefits” relationship that turned into marriage when Kavya proposed to Ani, who accepted the marriage proposal because Kavya’s job as a dentist had financial security. Kavya and Ani eloped, which has repercussions for Kavya later in the story.
Before Kavya and Ani got married, Ani was dating an aspiring actress named Nora (played by Ileana D’Cruz), and they continued to see each other after Ani got married. However, Nora has become very impatient because she thinks Ani is long overdue to get a divorce and fully commit to Nora. Even though they all live in Mumbai, Nora has not met Kavya in person when the story begins. For much of the story, Kavya does not know about Nora, who uses the alias Rosie, the name of a ghost character that Nora auditioned for in an acting job.
Kavya’s lover is an international photographer named Vikram, nicknamed Vik (played by Sendhil Ramamurthy), who is of Indian heritage but he grew up in the United States. Vikram used to live in New York City, but he moved to Mumbai to be closer to Kavya, who is often called Kavs by Ani and Vikram. Vikram is very much in love with Kavya and knows that Kavya is married.
Because Vikram’s job requires him to do a lot of traveling, it’s been easier for Kavya to keep her extramarital affair separate from her marriage than Ani has been able to keep his affair separate from his marriage. Still, Vikram is also showing signs that he wants Kavya to eventually choose between him or Ani. Kavya has been able to keep her affair a secret from Ani.
Kavya told Ani before they got married that she does not want to have children. It’s mentioned at one point in the movie that Kavya had an abortion during the marriage, and Ani knows about the abortion. However, there’s a scene later in the movie when Ani seems to doubt his decision to not become a parent, even though he knows Kavya won’t change her mind about not having children. As already shown in the trailers for “Do Aur Do Pyaar,” Nora (who is about five or six years younger than Kavya) has an argument with Ani when she blurts out that she thinks she might be pregnant.
In “The Lovers,” Tracy Letts and Debra Winger portray the unhappily married husband and wife who have lovers outside the marriage. In “The Lovers,” much of the plot is about the spouses getting a visit from their adult son and the son’s girlfriend. It’s a tension-filled visit because the son knows that his parents’ marriage is falling apart, but he is surprised to see during the visit that his parents are actually affectionate with each other. Meanwhile, the lovers of the spouses become increasingly insecure.
In “Do Aur Do Pyaar,” the drama from outside relatives comes from Kavya’s Ooty-based family, which is the only family shown in the movie. Kavya has “daddy issues” with her domineering father Venkat (played by Thalaivasal Vijay), who doesn’t approve of the marriage, for various reasons, including because Venkat thinks that Ani’s caste is “beneath” Kavya’s caste. Venkat is still angry that Kavya and Ani eloped before Venkat had a chance to meet Ani. Kavya’s mother Savitri (played by Rekha Kudligi) doesn’t say much and tries to keep the peace when Kavya and Venkat argue with each other.
When the father of Venkat dies, Kavya and Ani apprehensively go to Ooty for the funeral. At this point, Kayva had already visited a divorce lawyer in Mumbai, and Kavya was ready to serve divorce papers to Ani. However, they both agree to pretend to her family that Kavya and Ani have a happy marriage. There are various aunts, uncles and cousins at the funeral, but they do not any real bearing on the overall plot. The only family member who has a significant role is Kavya’s father Venkat.
Kavya and Ani feel like outsiders in the family, which creates a bond between Ani and Kavya and rekindles their passion for each other. They start having sex again. (The sex scenes in the movie are very tame, and there is no nudity.) Ani and Kavya also become friends again, after a long period of time of treating each other like barely tolerated roommates.
Naturally, Kavya and Ani have to navigate how this unexpected change in their marriage will affect the relationships they have with their respective lovers. Kavya and Ani now feel like they’re “cheating” on their lovers, who are both under the impression that Kavya and Ani will soon start divorce proceedings. As Kavya and Ani make excuses not to end the marriage, their lovers get jealous and start raising the stakes in these love entanglements.
Kavya (who can be demanding and hypocritical) could easily have been the movie’s biggest “villain,” if she had been written or performed a different way. However, there are no “villains” in this story—just people caught up in love relationships that confuse them when feelings change over time. “Do Aur Do Pyaar” also authentically shows that what people want out of love, marriage and other relationships can start out one way and end up a different way, based on a variety of circumstances.
Kavya represents the type of woman who wants to be liberated from conventional ideas of how a wife should be but she also wants to be loved on her own terms. She struggles with this often-difficult balance in her personal life. As someone who is a high achiever and craves her father’s approval the most, Kavya has some deep-seated issues that have nothing to do with Ani. Because Kavya is the only character who is shown to have a family, she is the only character where viewers get a sense that having a failed marriage will be a big stigma for Kavya in her family.
Thanks to Balan’s standout performance, the movie is able to show the nuances of these two love triangles in ways that do not reduce Kavya to being the “shrew wife.” Neither is Nora a stereotype of a “homewrecking mistress.” Ani and Vikram are also not Lotharios who callously use women as sexual conquests. In fact, in “Do Aur Do Pyaar,” the men make considerable efforts to be sincerely romantic to their partners. Kavya is actually the most selfish one out of all four of these lovers.
One of the best things about “Do Aur Do Pyaar” is that it shows how important timing is when it comes to having healthy love relationships that last and how feelings for a lover can run hot, cold or somewhere in between, depending on the people and circumstances. The movie doesn’t need to lecture about the damaging consequences of lying and cheating in relationships, because guilt also has an effect on people who secretly do things to harm the people who are close to them. The movie pokes some fun at the absurd lengths that some people will go to in hiding an extramarital affair.
Unfortunately, “Do Aur Do Pyaar” falls very short in telling or showing viewers anything about the backstories for Ani, Nora and Vikram. Gandhi as Ani does a very good job of balancing comedy and drama in his performance, but very little or nothing is told about his family or relationship history. D’Cruz and Ramamurthy are stuck playing underdeveloped characters and can only do so much with these limitations. Vikram in particular is a character where almost nothing substantial is revealed about him from the beginning to the end of the movie.
The movie could have done more to show that Kavya, Ani, Nora and Vikram have friends. And only Kavya is shown interacting with a co-worker who has a name in the movie. There’s an amusing scene where Kavya and her co-worker Lata (played by Hitha Chandrashekhar) clean a female patient’s teeth while talking to each other about sex and using the term “hit the jackpot” instead of saying “have an orgasm.” At other times, some of the movie’s dialogue resembles a very trite soap opera. For example, in the last third of the film, Vikram has an emotional monologue that is utterly cliché.
Despite some of the movie’s flaws, “Do Aur Do Pyaar” should keep most viewers interested in finding out what will happen to the tangled relationships in the story. The movie is most accurate in showing how these situations do not always have easy solutions, and people cannot just turn off emotions like a faucet. As it stands, “Do Aur Do Pyaar” is a worthy watch for people who want to see adult relationships portrayed in ways that are closer to real life than the trite and often-unrealistic scenarios that are in most movies about romance.
AA Films released “Do Aur Do Pyaar” in select U.S. and in India on April 19, 2024.
Culture Representation: Taking place in an unnamed U.S. city, the sci-fi/fantasy/comedy film “Villains Inc.” features a predominantly white cast of characters (with a few African Americans) representing the working-class, middle-class and wealthy.
Culture Clash: Three bumbling villains and an “intern” who’s under “techno hypnosis” try to take over the world with a convoluted plan.
Culture Audience: “Villains Inc.” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in watching silly, low-budget comedies that are easily forgotten.
Trey Warner in “Villains Inc.” (Photo courtesy of Purdie Distribution)
Incoherent and unappealing, “Villains Inc.” looks like an amateur sketch comedy idea stretched into a messy feature-length movie. It’s a witless story about irksome villains and a shallow superhero who are as incompetent as this film. Don’t try to make sense of what you’re watching in “Villains Inc.,” because even the characters in the movie don’t really know what they’re doing.
Directed by Jeremy Warner, “Villains Inc.” (formerly titled “Villains Incorporated”) was co-written by Warner, Jason Gray and Matt Moen, who all have small and inconsequential acting roles in the movie. The story in “Villains” is so convoluted yet empty, it’s like watching people getting lost in a maze that they made for themselves. What makes everything worse is that “Villains Inc.” has a very off-putting smug tone, as if the filmmakers think the movie is funnier than it really is.
“Villains Inc.” is about three villains who think they are underappreciated for being “lowly” assistant villains to their more powerful boss. They don’t want to be overshadowed and want the fame and power they think they deserve. And so, these three misfit villains decide to team up and take over the world. Along the way, they enlist the help of an “intern,” whose mind is controlled by “techno hypnotism.” It sounds like a potentially good idea for a madcap comedy, but the way the story is told in this movie, it just becomes time-wasting, frequently dull garbage.
“Villains Inc.” takes place in an unnamed U.S. state but was actually filmed in Utah. A scene early on in the movie shows that the U.S. Constitution in this story has added a 28th Amendment that makes superpowers a human right. There is nothing in “Villains Inc.” that comes close to being an entertaining story about people with superpowers.
The leader of this villainous trio is talkative and annoying Beatrix Bennington (played by Mallory Everton), who comes up with a nonsensical plan for world domination. Beatrix wants to open a chain of stores called Killer Petco, where pets will be sold to the world’s most powerful villains. The pets will be secretly trained to kill their villain owners. Through fine-print clauses on the Killer Petco sales contracts, the dead villains’ assets will be inherited by Beatrix and her cohorts.
Beatrix’s sidekicks are dimwitted Harold (played by Colin Mochrie) and pessimistic Cain (played by Jason Gray), who is the one most likely to doubt that Beatrix’s plans will succeed. The movie’s opening scenes shows that Beatrix, Harold and Cain feel liberated after they watch their boss Winter General (played by Gabe Casdorph) die in a fight with a lunkhead Superman-like character named Captain Justice (played by Trey Warner), who pops in and out of the story at inexplicable moments.
Beatrix, Harold and Cain try unsuccessfully to profit from their boss’ death by attempting to gain access to his power and wealth. Instead, this bungling trio is forced to do tasks assigned to them by a villain employment agency, where they interact with a sassy unnamed agent (played by GloZell Green), who thinks Beatrix, Harold and Cain are idiots. Some of the tasks the trio is forced to do include poison testing, holding up target practice signs, and being night security guards, electricians and lab technicians.
There are moronic scenes where Beatrix goes through a villain “tryout” course and lies about having superpowers. Whether or not her lie gets exposed is supposed to be a big part of the story. Beatrix, Harold and Cain eventually cross paths with the aforementioned intern: a naïve flunky named Alex (played by Billy Mann), who becomes available after his previous villain boss Megadeath (played by Matthew Meese) is killed.
There are almost no laugh-out-loud moments in “Villains Inc.,” which careens from scene to scene with not much interesting happening. Everton gives a committed performance where she tries to be funny in every scene that she’s in, but the other cast members just go through the motions with unimpressive performances. The people who might enjoy this dreadful film the most are people who are too intoxicated to care what they’re watching.
Purdie Distribution released “Villains Inc.” in select U.S. cinemas on April 19, 2024.
Culture Representation: Taking place in Los Angeles, the comedy film “Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead” (a remake of the 1991 film of the same name) features a predominantly African American cast of characters (with some white people) representing the working-class, middle-class and wealthy.
Culture Clash: Four siblings under the age of 18 go unsupervised after their widowed mother goes away on a two-month trip, the kids’ babysitter dies, and the eldest sibling lies about her age and qualifications to get jobs when the kids run out of money.
Culture Audience: “Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of the original movie and are interested in watching an unimaginative remake with no surprises.
Simone Joy Jones and Nicole Richie in “Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead” (Photo courtesy of Iconic Events)
“Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead” is comatose with a lack of imagination. This unnecessary remake of the 1991 film is in many ways worse than the original film because the remake adds terrible racial jokes and more moronic scenarios. The acting performances from the cast is very uneven, ranging from mediocre to painfully bad.
Directed by Wade Allain-Marcus and written by Chuck Hayward, the 2024 remake of “Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead” is based on the 1991 movie of the same name. Christina Applegate starred in the original 1991 movie, which was directed by Stephen Herek and was written by Neil Landau and Tara Ison. This unimpressive reboot is geared to adults (even though the central characters are children) and is more vulgar than the original 1991 version, due to more cursing and more explicit depictions of drug use, mostly marijuana. However, the 2024 version of “Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead” doesn’t do a very good job of using this adult-oriented tone by making anything edgy or clever. Instead, it rehashes the original movie in tired and lazy ways that are definitely not improvements from the original.
In the 2024 remake of “Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead,” there are four siblings at the center of the story, instead of five siblings that were in the original 1991 movie. The eldest child, who is the chief protagonist, is a 17-year-old girl who has recently graduated from high school. With few exceptions, the names of the main characters and prominent supporting characters are the same in the original and in the remake of “Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead.”
In the 2024 remake of “Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead” (which is a production from BET Studios), most of the updates are references to social media that didn’t exist in 1991. However, the overall concept is the same in both movies: The kid siblings are left alone for two months because their single mother is away on a retreat vacation during the summer season. The eldest sibling is resentful because she wanted to take a summer vacation with her friends, but she now has to spend the summer with her younger siblings.
A cranky and strict elderly babysitter has been hired to look after the children and live in the house with them, but she unexpectedly dies of natural causes just a few days after she arrives. The kids get rid of the babysitter’s body and keep the death a secret because they don’t want their mother to cut her vacation short and because the kids want to be unsupervised for the two months that their mother will be away. The comedic situations in the movie have mostly to do with what happens because the kids are keeping this secret.
Through a series of circumstances, the siblings run out of the money that their mother left for the babysitter to spend on the children. They decide the eldest child is the most likely to earn the most money by getting a job. The eldest child pretends to be about 10 years older than she really is and creates false qualifications in order to get a job at a fashion apparel company, where she has a demanding boss who is dating a sleazy marketing executive at the company.
The eldest sibling also has a situation where her love life overlaps with her work life: She starts dating a guy who’s close to her age, and she finds out later that he is the younger brother of the woman who is her enemy at her job. The teen imposter employee doesn’t want her new boyfriend and his sister to find out that she knows both of them. Many hijinks ensue as the amateur teen con artist struggles to keep up several charades while trying to maintain a stable household.
In the 2024 remake of “Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead” (which takes place and was filmed in the Los Angeles area, just like the 1991 original movie), the protagonist siblings are 17-year-old Tanya Crandell (played by Simone Joy Jones), who is outgoing and resourceful; stoner skateboarder Kenny Crandell (played by Donielle T. Hansley Jr.), who’s about 15 or 16; angsty technology whiz Melissa Crandall (played by Ayaamii Sledge), who’s about 13 or 14; and nerdy intellectual Zack Crandell (played by Carter Young), who’s about 11 or 12. Their widowed mother (played by Patricia “Ms. Pat” Williams) doesn’t have a first name in the movie. Tanya, who is set to go to Howard University in the fall, had planned a summer vacation in Spain with friends, but she’s now had to cancel her vacation to stay home with her younger siblings.
In the 1991 original movie, the mother was going on a vacation retreat for relaxing self-care and so she could have this free time to herself. The 2024 remake plays into “angry black woman” negative stereotyping by showing the mother having an irate and violent meltdown at her office job. (She pushes down a heavy piece of furniture while losing her temper in a conference room meeting before she quits the job.) As a result, this volatile mother decides she’s going on a two-month retreat (to Thailand) to work on her anger management issues. The awful racial stereotyping doesn’t stop there, as there are unnecessary and not-funny-at-all racist and sexist jokes polluting the movie, including people saying the “n” word and black females being called “bitch.”
The black people aren’t the only ones who look bad in the 2024 remake. The white babysitter who’s been hired to babysit the Crandell siblings is a blatant racist, who is depicted as a conservative, Bible-carrying Christian. Her name is Mrs. Sturak (played by June Squibb), who shows herself to be mean-spirited and oppressive after the children’s mother leaves for the retreat. Mrs. Sturak is the type of racist who says things such as, “Hip-hop ruined the blacks.” Mrs. Sturak also shoots a gun outside and tells the Crandell kids: “I know how to discipline you. I watch Madea [Tyler Perry] movies.”
Tanya and Kenny decide to rebel and have a house party. They lie to Mrs. Sturak and say that it’s really a gathering of a Bible study group where Christian hip-hop will be played. Kenny (who is cliché of a pothead) invites a lot of his druggie friends, so the party predictably becomes a loud and raucous bash. Mrs. Sturak sees the chaos and looks like she’s about to have a heart attack, but she doesn’t do anything about the party, which doesn’t make sense since she’s the type of person who would call the police to break up the party.
The next morning, the Crandell kids find out that Mrs. Sturak died in her sleep. It’s a slightly different lead-up than the original 1991 movie, where there was no house party to upset Mrs. Sturak. In the 1991 movie, the kids just found out one morning that she was dead in her bed. The way that the kids handle disposing the body is also different in both films.
In the original 1991 movie, the kids drove Mrs. Sturak’s body to a mortuary and anonymously dropped off the corpse in a trunk at the front door, with a note saying that she died of natural causes. In the 2024 movie, the body disposal problem is handled in a way that’s even worse. Melissa says, “It’s not 1991. There are cameras everywhere,” which is the movie’s flimsy way of explaining why they don’t drop the body off at a mortuary.
First, the Crandell kids decide to put Mrs. Sturak’s body in a spare refrigerator in the garage. The movie is so stupid, it leads to an awkward scene where a cop just happens to be passing by the house’s open garage door and asks the kids what they are doing and why they are unsupervised. Kenny is able to talk the cop out of investigating further by saying their mother is out for a few hours at a spa appointment.
The plan for the body disposal then switches to putting Mrs. Sturak’s body in Mrs. Sturak’s car, driving the car to a remote lake at night, and then pushing the car into the lake. Not only is this a more complicated solution, but it also now makes this illegal body disposal an even worse crime than it was in the first movie. And the filmmakers would like viewers to forget that security cameras on the street still work at night.
Mrs. Sturak apparently had no one in her life who cared about her because, in both movies, no one comes looking for or reports her missing during the entire story. Every time the Crandell kids’ mother calls to check up on the kids (which isn’t very often), they tell their mother that Mrs. Sturak is not available to talk on the phone because she’s out doing an errand. In real life, most parents would then start to wonder why the babysitter is leaving the kids alone every time they call, or the parents would ask the babysitter to return the call and would get suspicious if the babysitter doesn’t call back. But movies like this aren’t concerned with those realistic details.
When the Crandell kids run out of cash, Tanya gets a job as a rideshare driver. While doing this job, she meets a customer in his late teens named Bryan (played by Miles Fowler), who books Tanya to drop him off and pick him up at what appears to be a wedding or engagement party. Bryan is an aspiring architect who has recently graduated from high school and has plans to attend Syracuse University in the fall.
During their time together, Bryan and Tanya have romantic chemistry and they end up dating each other, even though there’s nothing in the movie to show that they have a relationship built on honesty from Tanya. Tanya leads Bryan to believe that she’s older than 17. The minimum age to be a rideshare driver is 18 years old, which is why Bryan assumes Tanya is at least 18. Tanya also tells Bryan many lies, some through omission.
When Bryan asks Tanya why she’s so evasive about certain personal details throughout their relationship, Tayna is very abrupt and defensive to Bryan. Their conversations are also fairly shallow and uninteresting. When Bryan asks Tanya what her favorite building is, she answers, “The Grove,” which is a shopping center in Los Angeles. Bryan is an attentive and romantic boyfriend. Tanya is very self-absorbed and not as intelligent and charismatic as Sue Ellen Crandell (the eldest sibling, played by Applegate) in the original 1991 movie.
The rideshare job is Tanya’s first job. She’s shocked at how much of her payment is reduced by commissions, taxes and expenses. With help from Zack, Tanya does some math and figures out that she won’t be able to make enough money as a rideshare driver to feed a household of four people, so she quits the rideshare job.
In the original 1991 movie, Sue Ellen initially had a job at a fast-food restaurant, but she quit not just because of the low wages but also because she disliked the creepy boss and she hated doing the messy food work in the back rooms. Sue Ellen meets her love interest Bryan (played by Josh Charles) because he works at the same fast-food joint. Bryan also drives the restaurant’s delivery truck, which becomes a running gag in the movie when the Crandell car gets stolen by drag queens, and Sue Ellen often has to get rides from Bryan in this gaudy fast-food truck.
A turning point comes in both movies when the eldest Crandell sibling sees an ad for a job opening as a receptionist for a fashion company that sells low-priced apparel. In both movies, she fabricates a résumé to apply for the job. In the 1991 movie, she does it on her own. In the 2024 version, Tanya gets help from her more tech-savvy sister Melissa, who also creates fake social media profiles for Tanya.
Both movies show how the teen imposter gets hired immediately at the company—not as a receptionist but as the administrative assistant to a high-ranking company executive named Rose Lindsey. That’s because this executive is impressed by the qualifications listed on the résumé, and the executive doesn’t like the receptionist who expected to get promoted to this administrative assistant job. In both movies, the receptionist is very rude to the teen imposter when they first meet. The receptionist (who is Bryan’s older sister) becomes the teen imposter’s bitter rival when she finds out that this newcomer got the job that the receptionist wanted.
In the 2024 remake of “Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead,” the receptionist Caroline (played by Lantha Richardson) is a two-dimensional “villain,” although Richardson has fairly good comedic timing in some of the scenes. Caroline’s office sidekick is openly gay Bruce (played by Gus Kenworthy), who doesn’t want to get involved in Caroline’s scheming, unlike the 1991 movie’s Bruce character(played by David Duchovny), who was Caroline’s cohort with a dislike for Sue Ellen because Sue Ellen doesn’t let Bruce talk down to her. Kenworthy has a small role in the 2024 movie, but he and Richardson are two of the few cast members in the movie who give consistently capable performances.
The same can’t be said for Nicole Richie, who has the role of Rose Lindsey, the hard-driving CEO of Libra, a fast-fashion company whose target audience consists of teenage girls. Richie delivers her lines stiffly in too many scenes. You never forget that Richie is acting, unlike Joanna Cassidy, who had a more natural and convincing performance as Rose Lindsey in the original 1991 movie.
The 2024 remake of “Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead” has several references to the original 1991 movie. At one point, it’s revealed that Tanya’s middle names are Sue Ellen. There’s a scene in the remake where Kenny, Melissa and Zack are watching TV in their living room, and the movie they are watching is the original “Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead.”
And there is the not-too-surprising cameos from some of the original “Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead” cast members. Cassidy makes a very brief appearance toward the end of the movie, in a scene where she introduces herself as Joan to Richie’s Rose character. This cameo appearance from Cassidy is so quick (less than one minute) and has no bearing or effect on the overall story, so it’s not spoiler information to say that she’s in the movie. Other cast members from the 1991 movie who make very brief cameos as different characters in the 2024 remake are Keith Coogan (who was stoner Kenny in the original movie) and Danielle Harris (who was tomboy Melissa in the original movie), whose appearances in the 2024 remake are also unimportant to the plot.
One of the reasons why the 2024 remake of “Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead” doesn’t work very well is because the movie’s plot is too outdated. In 1991, it would be much easier for an underage teenager to fake an identity to get this type of job. Nowadays, this type of fakery would be much easier to expose—especially since Tanya used her real name and went to a high school in the same area where she got the job. The 2024 movie tries to address these issues by showing Caroline finding out fairly early on that Tanya lied about her qualifications. However, Rose doesn’t seem to care when Caroline tells Rose because Rose genuinely likes Tanya and wants Tanya to succeed.
As for the underage issue, which is more of a legal issue for the company, the original 1991 movie handled it better. In the 1991 movie, someone on the job finds out Sue Ellen’s real age by temporarily taking her driver’s license from Sue Ellen’s unattended purse and making a photo copy of the driver’s license. In the 2024 movie, it’s discovered that Tanya lied about her age when someone finds her high school yearbook, which actually doesn’t prove she’s underage because someone could be 18 or 19 (or even older, in some cases) when they graduate from high school.
Another issue that is handled in a sloppier way in the 2024 movie is a subplot about the younger Crandell siblings gong on a spending spree to buy things they don’t need (such as high-end home entertainment equipment) by using the company’s expense account that the eldest Crandall sibling has access to through her job. In the 1991 movie, the money was from a petty cash account, with the cash kept in a drawer where Sue Ellen had the keys and could write fake receipts to cover up the taken cash. Sue Ellen took the cash home to buy groceries and had the intention to replace the stolen cash (before anyone noticed the missing cash) with money that she was expecting from her next paychecks.
In the 2024 movie, Tanya is given a company credit card that is used by her younger siblings for the spending sprees. Using a credit card instead of cash would actually make it harder to cover up the purchases that the Crandell kids bought by using the stolen money. But the filmmakers of the 2024 remake of “Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead” don’t care about those details because this movie treats viewers like idiots.
In both movies, Rose is openly dating a co-worker marketing executive named Gus, who is a and playboy. John Getz had the role of Gus in the 1991 movie. Jermaine Fowler (no relation to Miles Fowler) is Gus in the 2024 movie, which makes Gus one of Rose’s subordinates. Rose considers herself to be an independent, liberated woman who doesn’t feel the need to get married. However, Rose and Gus have decided to have a monogamous relationship. Rose hopes that Gus will eventually ask her to live together.
This is what the 2024 movie is trying to pass off as “comedic lines of dialogue”: Gus tells Tanya that he’s “VP [vice president] of pleasing Rose.” Rose tells Tanya in a separate private conversation why she’s dating Gus, who’s about 10 years younger than Rose: “Always date younger men—[they have] more stamina, less opinions.” She also compares Gus to being like a foster puppy if they live together. Rose seems to be fond of Gus, but only because of the sex that they’re having and the control she thinks she has in the relationship.
Because Gus is a serial cheater, he predictably tries to make moves on Tanya, who rebuffs his advances. Tanya also sees Gus kissing another woman, and Tanya handles it in a way that’s kind of cringeworthy. In the 1991 movie, Gus is much more aggressive and blatant with his sexual harassment, which Sue Ellen handles with a certain amount of grit and maturity that people might not expect from a 17-year-old. The 2024 version “Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead,” in this #MeToo era, plays it very safe when it comes to sexual harassment issues.
Instead, the movie is much more “in your face” with obnoxious racist comments that the movie is trying to pass off as jokes but often miss the mark. There’s a scene early in the 2024 movie, where Kenny says a ridiculous comment that he and his siblings get to have the whole house to themselves like “white kids”—as if black kids are never home alone. The movie briefly acknowledges that the Crandells have middle-class privileges, but then it’s back to the unfunny racist jokes.
In the original 1991 movie, the clothing company was called General Apparel West, selling drab worker uniforms. The 2024 movie mentions environmental and social issues that the general public is much more conscious of for fashion companies in the 21st century, compared to 1991—such as sustainable manufacturing, vegan clothing and using underpaid sweatshop workers. However, these buzzwords in the movie are just empty window dressing to a recycled movie plot that doesn’t do anything creative.
Jones does a serviceable job as Tanya, but she is never convincing as a teenager when Tanya is at home and doesn’t have to lie about being older. As for the younger kids, the 2024 version of “Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead” makes the same mistake that a lot of bad comedies do, by making pre-teen kids or kids in their early teens talk like smart aleck adults, which just makes their dialogue sound even phonier. That’s what the movie does with Melissa and (to a certain extent) Zack. (Kenny is still an underachieving stoner in both movies.) At least the kids in the 1991 “Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead” talked like genuine children appropriate to their respective ages.
One of the worst things about the 2024 version of “Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead” is how the issue is resolved regarding Tanya covering up her secret double life from Bryan. The 1991 version had much more realistic portrayals of how Bryan was affected by his girlfriend’s secrets and lies. The 2024 version literally resolves the issue in less than a minute in a such a superficial way, it’s really insulting to Bryan and to audiences watching this dreck.
Even worse is the last scene of the 2024 version of “Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead,” which is changed from the 1991 movie. Without giving away too many details, the 2024 version shows the Crandell mother’s reaction to certain information. Her reaction is heinous and plays once again into negative stereotyping of black people. The original 1991 “Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead” wasn’t a very good movie, but at least the movie had better acting and more authenticity in showing some very absurd situations involving children.
Iconic Events released “Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead” in select U.S. cinemas on April 12, 2024. BET+ will premiere the movie on May 16, 2024.
Culture Representation: Taking place in California and various parts of Europe, the comedy/drama film “The Idea of You” (based on the novel of the same name) features a predominantly white cast of characters (with some black people and Asians) representing the working-class, middle-class and wealthy.
Culture Clash: A divorced American mother, who is an art-gallery owner and who turns 40 years old in the story, has a controversial romance with a British pop star, who is 16 years younger than she is.
Culture Audience: “The Idea of You” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of the movie’s headliners and well-acted movies about romances where there’s a big age gap between the love partners.
Ella Rubin and Anne Hathaway in “The Idea of You (Photo by Alisha Wetherill/Amazon Content Services)
“The Idea of You” is utterly formulaic, but the movie benefits from Anne Hathaway’s radiant and realistic performance as a divorced mother in love with a pop star who is 16 years younger than she is. Nicholas Galitzine also shines as a charismatic charmer. One of the refreshing things about the movie is that it doesn’t try to pretend that the two lovers at the center of the story are meant to be married soul mates who will live happily ever after. This movie is a celebration of living in the moment and embracing happiness where you can find it.
Directed by Michael Showalter, “The Idea of You” is written by Showalter and Jennifer Westfeldt. The screenplay is adapted from Robinne Lee’s 2017 novel of the same name. Fans of the book might want to know that although the movie’s overall plot is the same as the book, the ending of the movie is different from the book’s ending. The tone of the movie is also more comedic than the much more serious tone of book. “The Idea of You” had its world premiere at the 2024 SXSW Film and TV Festival.
In “The Idea of You,” Solène Marchand (played by Hathaway), who turns 40 years old during this story, is the owner of a successful and progressive art gallery called Marchand Collective, in Los Angeles’ Silver Lake district. Solène is a divorced mother of a vivacious 17-year-old daughter named Izzy (played by Ella Rubin), who is in her third year at Campbell High School. Solène has primary custody of Izzy, while Solène’s ex-husband Daniel (played Reid Scott) has visitation rights. Daniel is a lawyer who is married to his second wife Eva (played by Perry Mattfeld), a lawyer who’s about 15 years younger than Daniel.
The movie begins in the spring season. Izzy and her two close teenage schoolmates—flamboyant Zeke (played by Jordan Aaron Hall) and mild-mannered Georgia (played by Mathilda Gianopoulos)—are planning to go to the annual Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, California, which is about 129 miles southeast of Los Angeles. Daniel has promised to drive Izzy and her pals to the festival and be their chaperone. During this weekend excursion while Izzy is away, Solène plans to take a camping trip by herself. Solène has friends, but her life mostly revolves around her job and Izzy.
On the day that Daniel is supposed to take Izzy, Zeke and Georgia to Coachella, Daniel finds out that he has to go to Houston on a sudden business trip. Daniel persuades a reluctant Solène to be the Coachella chaperone. Daniel already bought the festival VIP tickets, as well as a VIP meet-and-greet experience for August Moon, a superstar pop singing group performing at Coachella.
August Moon used to be Izzy’s favorite group when she was in seventh grade. Izzy feels that she now outgrown August Moon, which has a “teen idol” boy band image. Izzy is now into more “serious” music, not teenybopper pop. The fact that Daniel doesn’t know Izzy’s current taste in music (and didn’t care to find out) is an indication of how he’s out-of-touch with who Izzy currently is. By contrast, Solène knows Izzy very well because they are very close. Solène and Izzy are sometimes mistaken as sisters. Izzy is at a stage in her life when she wants to assert her independence from her parents.
At Coachella, Izzy and her pals go somewhere to see a performance, while Solène is by herself in a VIP lounge area. She asks someone where the nearest restroom is, and she’s pointed in the direction of some unmarked trailers. And here comes the “meet cute” moment. Solène accidentally goes in the trailer of Hayes Campbell (played by Galitzine), the British lead singer of August Moon.
Hayes is in the locked restroom when Solène knocks on the door, just as he is leaving the restroom. They both look startled to see each other there. Hayes doesn’t ask who Solène is and what she’s doing there. When Solène comes out of the restroom, she sees Hayes lounging right near the restroom door. She makes a snarky comment to Hayes that if he’s one of these ASMR people who likes to listen to people urinate, it’s a privacy violation. It’s Hayes informs Solène that this is his private trailer.
And when he introduces himself as Hayes Campbell from August Moon, it’s Solène’s turn to be embarrassed. She tells him that she’s at the festival with her daughter Izzy, who used to be a fan of August Moon. Hayes seems a little embarrassed to hear this information but doesn’t take it as an insult. Solène explains that Solène’s ex-husband bought August Moon meet-and-greet passes for Solène, Izzy and Izzy’s two friends, so she will probably see Hayes later. By now, it’s obvious that Hayes is attracted to Solène, and she’s feeling the same way but trying to hide it.
The conversation between Solène and Hayes is cut short because he has to go on stage soon for August Moon’s performance. August Moon is portrayed in the movie as being very much like One Direction, but with much more generic songs than One Direction. Just like One Direction, the five members of August Moon didn’t know each other before auditioning to be in the group.
But unlike One Direction, the members of August Moon don’t all come from European countries. Hayes lives in London. Hayes’ closest friend in August Moon is Oliver (played by Raymond Cham Jr.), an outgoing American. Hayes describes the other August Moon members to Solène this way: Oliver has “swagger”; Rory (played by Dakota Adan) is the “Aussie rebel”; Adrian (played by Jaiden Anthony) has a heartthrob smile; and Simon (played by Viktor White) is a “brooding poet.”
Hayes might describe Rory as the group’s heartthrob, but the reality is that Hayes is the member of August Moon who gets the most “heartthrob” attention. (Hayes is August Moon’s version of Harry Styles from One Direction.) In other words, anyone who dates Hayes will get a massive amount of scrutiny from fans and the media. You know where all of this is going, of course. Luckily for Solène, Rory was always Izzy’s favorite member of August Moon.
Solène, Izzy, Zeke and Georgia are in the audience during August Moon’s Coachella performance. Izzy and her pals are mainly there for nostalgia reasons, not because they are huge fans of the group. Hayes changes the rehearsed set by singing “Closer to You” and adding a dedication before the song by saying, “I met someone today.” Solène is close enough to the stage for Hayes to make eye contact with her and to let her know that he’s dedicating the song to her. (Galitzine does his own singing in the movie and on the soundtrack album.)
Solène is aware that most of the fans in the audience would love to have this type of attention, but she feels a mixture of embarrassment and flattery. Later at the meet-and-greet event with August Moon, Hayes flirts with Solène some more. Solène doesn’t think of it as more than harmless flirting that will go nowhere.
Shortly after her 40th birthday party (where Solène met some incompatible bachelors), she gets a surprise when Hayes shows up at her art gallery and buys everything in it. Hayes flatters Solène and continues to flirt with her. His vocabulary is pretty limited—he tells Solène, “I think you’re smart and hot”—but she finds his attention pretty irresistible. She agrees to spend time with him but says she’s not looking to “date” him.
Hayes has some time in Los Angeles before August Moon begins a European tour. Hayes and Solène go on some platonic dates, but their attraction to each other grows after they open up to each other about their personal lives. Solène, who studied art history in college, tells Hayes that she and Daniel met when she moved from the East Coast to Los Angeles because she couldn’t afford to be an artist in New York.
Solène and Daniel got married after they became parents to Izzy. Solène is candid about how she has a hard time believing in love because she thought she had a solid marriage before Daniel left her for Eva, who was a junior attorney at his law firm at the time. Solène (who is no longer in love with Daniel) was the last person in their social circle to find out about Daniel’s infidelity. Solène and Daniel got divorced about three years ago.
As for Hayes (who is an only child), he mentions that his parents split up when he was young, he was raised by his mother, and his father was mostly absent from Hayes’ life. Hayes’ mother is now remarried (Hayes doesn’t say when she got remarried), but Hayes is not close to his stepfather, whom Hayes describes as traditional and boring. Hayes doesn’t go into details about how his mother’s current marriage has affected him.
Hayes’ biological father didn’t reconnect with Hayes until after Hayes became rich and famous. Hayes has mixed feelings about his father but is open to having his father back in his life, even if it’s a troubled relationship. One of the flaws in “The Idea of You” is that there is absolutely nothing that shows how Hayes is with his family, nor does Solène seem interested in meeting any of his family members.
Hayes essentially begs Solène to go on tour with him in Europe. The tour conveniently happens during the same time that Izzy will be away at summer camp. Solène is hesitant and comes up with all types of excuses not to go on tour with Hayes. One of them is that she’s too old for him. Another is that she can’t take time off from her job. Another is that she doesn’t know if she can handle his lifestyle of intrusion by media and fans, because she is accustomed to being a private person.
But you already know the decision that Solène makes. It’s the start of a hot and heavy affair between Hayes and Solène that’s kept a secret from everyone in Solène’s life except her best friend Tracy (played by Annie Mumolo), who approves of Solène having fun with a younger man. At first, Solène and Hayes tell his entourage that she’s on the tour as Hayes’ “art consultant,” but it isn’t long before Solène and Hayes show public displays of affection with each other on the tour’s private jet and in other places.
Hayes and Solène certainly have a physical attraction to each other. Their mutual emotional attraction is also obvious. But other things in the relationship indicate trouble ahead that have nothing to do with their age differences. For starters, Solène and Hayes both have very different lifestyles and incompatible social circles. In his free time, Hayes only seems to hang out with the other members of August Moon and their groupies. Solène’s friends are mature people in her age group.
Solène and Hayes also live in two different countries. In order for the relationship to last, compromises have to be made. And when someone who isn’t rich and famous is in a relationship with someone who is rich and famous, the wealthy celebrity is usually the one whose partner ends up making the most sacrifices and compromises.
Hathaway does a very good job in expressing the nuances and inner conflicts of someone who considers herself to be an independent feminist but who is caught up in a romance where she is perceived as someone who is very much not an equal to her love partner. As for Hayes, there are hints that he’s been a promiscuous “bad boy” in his recent past, but he’s ready to settle down in a monogamous relationship. However, is Solène “the one”?
“The Idea of You” has the expected sexy scenes (there’s no nudity) of Hayes and Solène in passionate trysts, as well as glamour shots of Hayes and Solène on romantic dates. And then there are the predictable scenes of Solène getting humiliated by people who want her to feel like she’s a predatory “cougar” who’s out of her league. Solène realistically vacillates between feeling shame and feeling defiance over the 16-year age difference between her and Hayes.
However, some things in “The Idea of You” are missing and prevent this movie from looking completely authentic. Hayes and Solène are supposed to be “in love,” and Hayes makes it clear he wants a long-term relationship with Solène. However, Solène and Hayes are never seen talking about they want or don’t want for their futures, in terms of marriage and parenthood. The parenthood issue is especially time-sensitive, since Solène is getting close to the age range when women begin menopause.
It’s also glaringly obvious that Hayes and Solène don’t have much to talk about outside of a few common interests in art or entertainment. The movie shows that because their relationship started off as a secret, it was built on lies of omission that required Solène to betray the trust of her loved ones. The consequences of these lies are shown in the movie. As the character of Solène, Hathaway skillfully expresses a balancing act between Solène’s vulnerabilities and Solène’s strengths. The character of Hayes is much less layered, but that’s probably because Hayes still has some growing up to do.
“The Idea of You” allows viewers to weigh the pros and cons of this couple who have the odds stacked against them in many ways. Solène likes the idea of being “swept off her feet” by a handsome and caring heartthrob, but she also wants the freedom to make her own life decisions without being overshadowed by celebrity trappings. Hayes might not be Mr. Right for Solène, but he’s Mr. Right Now—and sometimes that’s all that’s needed for people at certain times in their lives. “The Idea of You,” for all of its Hollywood movie moments, shows the reality that some love is unpredictable and might not last, but if it makes you a better person, it’s probably worth experiencing.
Prime Video will premiere “The Idea of You” on May 2, 2024.
Culture Representation: Taking place in an unnamed part of the United States, the comedy/drama film “Sasquatch Sunset” features a group of Sasquatch characters that have human and primate characteristics.
Culture Clash: A family of four Sasquatches wander around a wooded area and get into various conflicts and predicaments.
Culture Audience: “Sasquatch Sunset” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of the movie’s headliners and are interested in watching a movie that has nothing but actors pretending to be ape-like animals in a wooded area, with no real story in the movie.
Nathan Zellner in “Sasquatch Sunset” (Photo courtesy of Bleecker Street)
Overrated and vapid, “Sasquatch Sunset” looks like a self-indulgent student film for actors pretending to be Sasquatches. There’s no plot or imagination, just repetitive grunting and intentional gross-out scenes until the movie’s underwhelming ending. Perhaps the best thing about “Sasquatch Sunset” is the competent prosthetic makeup and hairstyling for the Sasquatch characters. (There are no human characters in this movie.) But those are just visual aesthetics that can’t make up for a weak story.
Directed by brothers David Zellner and Nathan Zellner, “Sasquatch Sunset” was written by David Zellner. Nathan Zellner plays one of the movie’s four main Sasquatch characters, which do not have names. There are also no captions that translate what these Sasquatches are saying or thinking. It wouldn’t matter anyway because “Sasquatch Sunset” is so boring, these Sasquatches wouldn’t have anything memorable to say, even if they did speak a human language. (Sasquatches are fictional creatures that have human and primate characteristics. The legend of Bigfoot, which most people think is a hoax, is about a Sasquatch.)
“Sasquatch Sunset” takes place in an unnamed part of the United States but was actually filmed in Humboldt County, California. In 2024, “Sasquatch Sunset” screened at three of the most prominent film festivals in the world: the Sundance Film Festival (where “Sasquatch Sunset” had its world premiere), the Berlin International Film Festival and the SXSW Film and TV Festival. “Sasquatch Sunset” being at these festivals says more about the “Sasquatch Sunset” filmmakers’ film festival connections than it does about the quality of “Sasquatch Sunset.” Ari Aster (writer/director of “Hereditary,” “Midsommar” and “Beau Is Afraid”) is one of the executive producers of “Sasquatch Sunset,” and he has an almost cult-like fan base who thinks he can do no wrong.
Because “Sasquatch Sunset” has no plot or context, viewers are just left to watch a series of disjointed scenes showing the aimless lives of Sasquatches who live in this wooded area. There are several Sasquatches in the movie, but only four are at the center of this flimsy story. A young adult male Sasquatch (played by Jesse Eisenberg) and a young adult female Sasquatch (played by Riley Keough) are a “couple” with a male child Sasquatch (played by Christophe Zajac-Denek) and an older male relative (played by Nathan Zellner), whose biological relationship with the others is never clearly defined. This “senior” relative could be a grandfather or an uncle or a cousin. It doesn’t really matter because all of these characters are empty and become tiresome to watch after a while.
“Sasquatch Sunset” takes place in a year of the life of these Sasquatches, with the change of seasons indicated by captions on screen. If you think it’s fun to watch people pretending to be Sasquatches as they bang a tree with sticks, then this movie is for you. If you think it’s hilarious to watch the kid Sasquatch get his tongue stuck in a turtle, then this movie is for you. If you think it’s appealing to watch Sasquatches urinate, vomit, defecate, have sex, scratch and smell their crotches, throw feces, and commit attempted rape, then this movie is for you.
Viewers will learn nothing about the movie’s characters except that they exist in this wooded area. The female Sasquatch becomes pregnant and gives birth in a storyline that is very predictable and shallow. There are indications that humans lived in this area (an abandoned campsite and an abandoned building), but there’s no explanation for why there are no humans in the story. This movie did not need to have humans in it to make it a worthwhile watch. “Sasquatch Sunset” just needed to have something worth watching.
“Sasquatch Sunset” is an insult to aspiring and talented filmmakers who are looking for a big break because “Sasquatch Sunset” is proof that certain filmmakers who get preference in the industry can get funding to make crappy movies that get into prestigious film festivals, just because these filmmakers have the right connections and want to cultivate an image of having “indie cred” by making incoherent garbage. Meanwhile, these filmmakers are over-praised by certain people who think this praise makes them look like cool, or they’re just too afraid of being independent thinkers in a fawning group of ingratiators. Maybe “Sasquatch Sunset” will appeal to people who like to be “under the influence” of whatever substance when they watch movies, because this clouded judgment might overlook all the things that are wrong about this stupid and dull movie. “Sasquatch Sunset” is also an insult to viewers who can see through this sham and who know that this dreadful and sloppy movie is a waste of time for anyone looking for a good story.
Bleecker Street will release “Sasquatch Sunset” in select U.S. cinemas on April 12, 2024, with an expansion to more U.S. cinemas on April 19, 2024.
