Culture Representation: Taking place in in Canada in the late 1910s to early 1920s, the comedic film “The Twentieth Century” features an almost all-white cast of characters (with one Asian) representing the middle-class and wealthy.
Culture Clash: William Lyon Mackenzie King encounters several personal and professional obstacles in his eventual rise to power as prime minister of Canada.
Culture Audience: “The Twentieth Century” will appeal primarily to people who would be interested in very offbeat films that have satirical commentary about Canadian culture and politics.
Catherine St-Laurent and Mikhaïl Ahooja in “The Twentieth Century” (Photo courtesy of Oscilloscope Laboratories)
The unconventional satire “The Twentieth Century” takes a madcap, sometimes gender-bending look at the rise of the political career of William Lyon Mackenzie King, who served as the 10th prime minister of Canada for three non-consecutive terms, from 1921 to 1926; 1926 to 1930; and 1935 to 1948. Viewers don’t have to know any Canadian history to enjoy the movie, although this type of historical knowledge does help. “The Twentieth Century” is not recommended for anyone who isn’t interested in any movie that can be described as “weird.” But for people who are open to seeing a very original and sometimes bizarre retelling of King’s political origins, buckle up for a wild and wooly ride.
Written and directed by Matthew Rankin, “The Twentieth Century” is his feature-film debut, and it makes a bold statement that Rankin doesn’t want to conform to the usual expectations of first-time independent filmmakers. The movie is structured and designed to almost look like a play. Cinematically, “The Twentieth Century” pays homage to the “soft glow” look of movies that were released during the 1910s and 1920s, the era when this story takes place. And the screenplay, which is divided into 10 chapters, goes off in some unexpected tangents that don’t always land well when it comes to comedy, but they’re at least memorable and attempt to show originality.
Dan Beirne portrays King, who goes by the name Mackenzie, as someone who’s not only very ambitious but also a sad sack who’s browbeaten by his domineering mother (played by Louis Negin, in one of several gender-bending roles in the film) into fulfilling her prediction of Mackenzie becoming prime minister of Canada, or at least having a high-ranking position in the Canadian government. In the movie, Beirne looks under the age of 40, when in reality, King (who was a member of the Liberal Party) first became prime minister of Canada at the age of 47. The real King died in 1950, at the age of 75.
Mackenzie’s father (played by Richard Jutras), who is somewhat of an outcast in his own home, lives downstairs while his bedridden, cranky wife lives upstairs. The father’s only companion is a white cockatoo named Giggles, which is an obvious puppet in the movie. Mackenzie has promised his father a prestigious position in the government if Mackenzie rises to a leadership position as planned.
Canada’s colonial histories with the United Kingdom and France are exemplified by the two “loves” of Mackenzie’s life in the story. He falls for a British beauty named Ruby Elliott (played by Catherine St-Laurent), when he first sees her. She’s playing a harp, and Mackenzie has never heard music before. There’s a running joke in the movie that Mackenzie keeps mistakenly calling a harp a “trumpet” because he doesn’t know the difference between the two musical instruments.
Ruby is the daughter of Lord Muto (played by Seán Cullen), the new autocratic governor general of the land. No sooner does Mackenzie try to court Ruby and try to gain clout with Lord Muto, Ruby goes away to fight in the war, which is not named but is presumably World War I. Mackenzie is disappointed that he won’t get to woo Ruby, but he’s got other things that occupy his time until Ruby can return home to Canada.
Although Mackenzie has Ruby very much on his mind, another woman comes into his life who could also become his love interest: a French nurse named Ernestine Lapointe (played by Sarianne Cormier), who works for Mackenzie’s mother but is fired when his mother gets very irritated with Nurse Lapointe for a petty mistake. Ernestine Lapointe is a character that is an obvious nod to King’s real-life political aide Ernest Lapointe. Ernestine is immediately smitten with Mackenzie, but it takes a while for him to warm up to her.
Throughout the story, Mackenzie checks in with a sick, bedridden child named Charlotte (played by Satine Scarlett Montaz), who is in a large hospital room with other sick, bedridden children. At the beginning of the movie, Charlotte asks Mackenzie if he will outlaw tuberculosis when he becomes the leader of Canada. He promises her that he will. Although it’s not stated in the movie, these hospital patients could be part of the 1918 influenza pandemic, which was going on at the time this movie takes place.
While Ruby is away at war, Mackenzie enters a political competition for a “test of leadership.” The challenges include ribbon cutting; leg wrestling; waiting your turn; being blindfolded and identifying smells; urinating in snow and spelling out your name in the snow while urinating; endurance tickling; and clubbing of baby seals. (Real animals are not used in the movie.)
Mackenzie ends up tied for second place with Arthur Meighen (played by Brent Skagford), who becomes his political rival for the rest of the movie, as Meighen (another former Canadian prime minister) was a rival to King in real life. The person who won the competition is Henry Albert “Bert” Harper (played by Mikhaïl Ahooja), who cedes his candidacy and recommends that Mackenzie be declared the winner, but the judge in charge refuses this request. In real life, Harper was a journalist who became an ally of King’s.
And now for the really weird stuff: Mackenzie has a shoe fetish. There are some scenes where he masturbates while inhaling into a shoe. For whatever reason, every shoe that he masturbates to looks like a woman’s work ankle boot.
Mackenzie hates seeing shoes that are randomly placed somewhere. When a female neighbor places her work shoes in the hallway, he complains about it being “unsanitary.” And in another scene, when a female construction worker drops one of her shoes near Mackenzie and asks him to return the shoe by tossing it back up to her, he instead runs away with the shoe and masturbates to it.
There’s a character named Dr. Milton Wakefield (played by Kee Chan), who gives Mackenzie a cactus plant. This cactus eventually grows so large that it almost reaches the ceiling of Mackenzie’s bedroom. And every time Mackenzie masturbates and climaxes, the cactus erupts with liquid substances that won’t be described in this review.
In real life, there’s a Canadian politician named Milton Wakefield, who was the Saskatchewan Party member of the Legislative Assembly of Saskatchewan for the constituency of Lloydminster from 1999 to 2007, long after King died. There seems to be no plausible explanation for why there’s a character named Milton Wakefield in the story and why this character is interacting with King, because in real life, King died when Wakefield (who was born in 1939 or 1940) was a child.
One of the more memorable characters in the movie is Lady Violet (played by Emmanuel Schwartz), who is Lord Muto’s eldest daughter and Ruby’s sister. There’s a scene at a dinner party where Lord Muto attempts to play matchmaker with Violet and Mackenzie. Violet is brutally sarcastic and very jaded. She says lines like, “Canada is just one failed orgasm after another.”
Throughout the movie, Rankin keeps a very off-kilter tone that will thrill viewers who like unique wackiness but will turn off viewers who just don’t see the point of many of the movie’s scenes. Beirne carries the movie with a lot of admirable gusto, while the rest of the cast members give fairly good performances. “The Twentieth Century” is not a satire that makes any meaningful political statements about Canada. However, it does have enough oddball unpredictability, sly metaphors and eye-catching visuals that make it hard to look away.
Oscilloscope Laboratories released “The Twentieth Century” in select U.S. cinemas on November 20, 2020. The movie’s release date on digital and VOD is December 11, 2020.
Culture Representation: Taking place in the United States and France, the comedy/drama film “The Climb” has an all-white cast of characters representing the middle-class.
Culture Clash: Two men, who are longtime best friends, have ups and downs in their relationship, which is often affected by jealousy and personal rivalries.
Culture Audience: “The Climb” will appeal primarily to people who like seeing low-budget films that take a bittersweet and comical look at a close male friendship.
Kyle Marvin, Michael Angelo Covino and Gayle Rankin in “The Climb” (Photo by Zach Kuperstein/Sony Pictures Classics)
“The Climb” is the type of dramedy movie that doesn’t really get made much anymore: It’s about two regular guys and their longtime friendship, with the movie taking place over the course of about 10 years. That’s it. There’s no real gimmick or hook, although there’s the predictable love triangle that threatens to permanently ruin their relationship. “The Climb” isn’t a barrier-breaking movie, but it has moments that are mostly relatable, even if they might teeter at times on the brink of absurd.
The two American friends at the center of “The Climb” are portrayed by the real-life pals who wrote the movie: “The Climb” director/co-writer Michael Angelo Covino plays Mike, while “The Climb” co-writer Kyle Marvin plays Kyle. “The Climb” is based on Covino and Marvin’s short film of the same name. Their real-life friendship helps with their acting in the movie, which at times is a tad amateurish, but it still has that underlying authenticity that shines through the acting. The ages of the Mike and Kyle characters aren’t stated in the movie, but it appears that the story is about the lives of these two characters from their late 20s to late 30s.
“The Climb” is not biographical, although in the production notes for “The Climb,” Covino and Marvin say that elements of their personalities are reflected in the characters that they portray in the movie. As Covino states in the production notes: “In the movie, there are heightened, extreme versions of traits we both have that aren’t necessarily our best traits—I’m not that big of an asshole, and Kyle is not that big of a pushover.”
It’s apparent from the first scene in “The Climb” that the character of Mike is the dominant “alpha male” in the friendship, while Kyle is the passive “beta male.” Mike and Kyle are riding bicycles up a rigorous incline in the French Alps. They’re supposed to be bike riding for “fun,” but it’s clear from all the strenuous effort put into their bike riding that there’s a silent competition between them to see who’s the better and stronger cyclist during this ride.
The friendly rivalry mood is broken when Mike tells Kyle that he has slept with Kyle’s fiancée, who is a French woman named Ava (played by Judith Godrèche). Mike downplays this affair by saying that it happened three years before Kyle and Ava began dating, but Kyle is still understandably shocked and upset that this secret is just now being revealed. And then Mike eventually admits that he slept with Ava after she and Kyle became a couple.
Mike has a tendency to be bossy and arrogant, because he always likes to be in control of a situation. He tells Kyle to keep pedaling, even after Kyle has heard this upsetting news about Mike and Ava’s affair. Mike also has a quick temper, because during this bike ride, he gets into a road-rage incident that lands him in the hospital. Shortly after Mike confesses to Kyle about the affair, a car drives up behind them on the road, and the car’s driver beeps the horn impatiently because Kyle and Mike are blocking the car’s way.
Mike’s response is to yell at the driver to drive around him and Kyle. The driver complies by driving past the two friends, but Mike won’t let things go, and he chases after the car on his bike. To Mike and Kyle’s surprise, the driver reacts by getting out of the car and beating up Mike, who is no match for the fighting skills of the driver. You’d think that Mike would be humbled by this experience. But no.
At the hospital, Ava shows up to visit. Although she seems to feel guilty that Kyle knows that she cheated on him with his best friend, Mike tries to shrug off everything and acts like Kyle will eventually get over it. Viewers will get the impression that a big part of Mike’s attraction to Ava is because she’s with Kyle, and Mike gets some kind of selfish and competitive pleasure out of being able to sleep with his best friend’s lover.
At any rate, Mike and Ava admit that don’t want to stay away from each other and they start to passionately kiss in Mike’s hospital room. And guess who walks by and sees them right at that moment? Kyle, of course.
The movie then fast-forwards to a funeral in the United States. The funeral has taken place an untold number of years later, perhaps three or four years after that scene in the hospital. It’s revealed that the funeral is for Ava, whose cause of death is not mentioned in the movie. In the years since Kyle found out that Ava and Mike had an affair behind his back, Mike and Kyle’s friendship soured. Ava and Mike got married, and then she died.
At the funeral, Mike and Kyle have obviously not seen each other for quite some time. Their “reunion” is awkward, to say the least. And then at the funeral, a hot-tempered Mike gets into a physical fight with a local gravedigger over the burial of Ava. Kyle, who has a “peacemaker” type of personality, intervenes in the fight and is able to stop it before things get really ugly. Mike then tells Kyle that he’s sorry about the affair with Ava. And it looks like Kyle and Mike sort of reconcile.
Since breaking up with Ava, Kyle moved on to another love: a no-nonsense, opinionated woman named Marissa (played by Gayle Rankin), who is the dominant one in the relationship. It’s never stated exactly how long Marissa and Kyle have been dating each other after his relationship with Ava ended, but Kyle and Marissa have known each other since high school and one thing is clear: Kyle’s mother Suzi (played by Talia Balsam), who is also strong-willed and domineering, doesn’t like Marissa. Kyle’s father Jim (played by George Wendt) is as easygoing as Suzi is uptight.
Kyle seems afraid to stand up to his mother, because when viewers first see Marissa and Kyle together, they are in the basement at Jim and Suzi’s house, and Marissa is giving Kyle a pep talk where they both practice saying “no” to Suzi. The family has gathered for Thanksgiving dinner. And it’s where Kyle and Marissa make a big announcement: They’re engaged to be married.
Suzi isn’t thrilled, but there’s nothing she can do about it. And then she tells Kyle something that makes him uncomfortable: She’s invited Mike over for the family’s upcoming Christmas dinner because Mike “has no family.” It’s never explained in the movie why Mike has no family members.
Mike is now a bitter and lonely widower who drinks heavily. He once had an athletic body, but his toned physique is gone, and now he has a flabby “beer gut” and an unkempt beard. And when he shows up at the Christmas dinner, he gets drunk and embarrasses himself. You know what that means in movies like this: A Christmas tree, a Christmas gift or fill-in-the-blank will be unlucky enough to be in the path of destruction of the drunk person.
The rest of the movie follows Mike and Kyle as they mend their friendship and adjust to new dynamics in their relationship after Kyle and Marissa become parents to a son named Otis, and then Kyle and Marissa get married. Mike is the type of guy who isn’t used to being a lonely bachelor, so he has some jealousy over Kyle falling in love and making Marissa a top priority in his personal life. Will Mike try to sabotage Kyle and Marissa’s relationship?
Things aren’t completely rosy in Kyle and Marissa’s relationship. After Mike comes back into Kyle’s life, Marissa often feels like a “third wheel” when Mike and Kyle hang out together. And there are hints that Marissa might not be in love with Kyle as much as he’s in love with her.
Although “The Climb” has some slightly amusing moments, one of the biggest issues that people might have with this movie is that it doesn’t give much background information on Kyle and Mike. Backstories for these two friends would go a long way in explaining why Kyle puts up with so much of Mike’s obnoxiousness. The movie never really answers this question: Why does Kyle show so much loyalty to Mike, who doesn’t show much loyalty in return?
Some people stay friends with someone longer than they should because they’ve known each other since childhood or because family or money matters would make it awkward or inconvenient to end the friendship. But there’s really no reason for Kyle to keep Mike in his life. They don’t work together, they don’t seem to have much in common except for a shared interest in sporting activities, and they both have very different outlooks and priorities in life.
Someone as selfish and toxic as Mike is an example of that old cliché: “With friends like these, who needs enemies?” But Mike isn’t a complete villain. He has a charming side to him and is the type of person who knows how to exploit people’s weaknesses, which is why Kyle is easily manipulated by Mike.
Still, the movie skimps on a lot of details. During the course of the several years of the friendship that’s shown on screen, it’s not really made clear what Kyle and Mike do for a living. (They’re obviously middle-class.) Mike’s home life as a widower is also a big mystery. Whenever Mike and Kyle are hanging out together, they’re usually at Kyle’s place or they’re out doing some activity together, such as bike riding or skiing.
Covino’s direction of the movie can best be described as “good but not great,” because the tone sometime veers into sitcom-ish territory. A more naturalistic comedic tone works better for the movie and should have been the overall consistent approach to the film. For example, there are a few things that happen during Kyle and Marissa’s wedding ceremony that are just a little too over-the-top, like a TV comedy that’s desperate for a “laugh track” moment.
The movie is divided into seven chapters with titles such as “I’m Sorry,” “Let Go,” “Thanks,” “It’s Broken,” “Fight On,” “Grow Up” and “Fine.” It’s an interesting creative choice, but because there are huge blocks of time missing from the story, structuring the movie like a book with chapters just calls more attention to these omissions and how many questions are left unanswered. (For example, viewers never get to see what kind of marriage that Ava and Mike had.)
The cinematography by Zach Kuperstein makes much of the story engaging. During the Christmas dinner scene, there’s a memorably long tracking shot that works really well, with the camera placed outside but viewers still being able to hear what’s inside. And the scenes with outdoor activities give viewers an immersive sense of being right there with the actors. (It helps to see this movie on the biggest screen possible.)
Above all, the banter between Kyle and Mike is the main reason to watch “The Climb,” because they have the type of friendship that will make people wonder how long it’s going to last and if there’s anything that Mike will do that Kyle wouldn’t be able to forgive. There are issues of masculinity and maturity that are just underneath the surface in almost everything they say or do. Kyle might be the “wimp” and the more easily manipulated one of this duo, but Mike has a lot of growing up to do. Viewers might have different answers on whether Mike or Kyle is the more co-dependent one in the relationship.
As for the women in the movie (namely, Marissa and Suzi, since Ava is barely in the film), they mainly exist to show that Kyle has outspoken women in his life whom he loves but they can also hurt him deeply. It’s too bad the movie doesn’t give Mike any context for how and why he acts the way that he does. It’s not necessarily about making him more likable, but it would give viewers more insight into his personality flaws.
There are vague inferences that Mike’s romantic relationships are often based in chaos. But because the movie shows almost nothing of Mike’s life except when it relates to Kyle, there’s a missed opportunity to show Mike as a more well-rounded human being instead of someone who exists to hang out with Kyle and to sometimes push Kyle’s emotional buttons. It would’ve been interesting for the movie to further explore how Mike’s mother or other women might have influenced his outlook on male/female relationships.
Despite some of the problems in story’s structure and character development, “The Climb” has an unpretentious, almost goofy tone that will endear it to people who want to see a good movie about male friendship without making it about over-aggerated machismo or slapstick buffoonery. There’s a familiarity to a lot of the movie’s material, but Covino and Marvin make a notable impression as “everyday guys” without being generic. “The Climb” is a movie about a friendship that’s more like “chosen family,” even when that choice sometimes get in the way of happiness.
Sony Pictures Classics released “The Climb” in select U.S. cinemas on November 13, 2020.
Culture Representation: Taking place in the fictional U.S. city of Blissfield, the horror comedy “Freaky” has a predominantly white cast of characters (with a few African Americans) representing the middle-class.
Culture Clash: A 17-year-old girl and a middle-aged serial killer swap bodies in a freak magical spell accident.
Culture Audience: “Freaky” will appeal primarily to people who like teen-oriented horror with adult humor and who have a high tolerance for bloody gore.
Kathryn Newton, Celeste O’Connor and Misha Osherovich in “Freaky” (Photo courtesy of Universal Pictures)
The horror comedy “Freaky” is a zany and often-raucous ride that puts a gruesome but memorable spin on the body-swapping concept. The entire premise of the movie is “Freaky Friday” meets “Friday the 13th.” Directed by Christopher Landon (who co-wrote the screenplay with Michael Kennedy), “Freaky” delivers as many laughs as it does explicitly brutal scares with all of the violent murders that happen throughout the entire story.
“Freaky” also cleverly lampoons many of the clichés and over-used tropes in teen comedies and horror movies. “Freaky” is from Blumhouse Productions, the same production company behind Landon-directed horror flicks “Happy Death Day” and “Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones.” Blumhouse movies have been “hit or miss,” in terms of quality. “Freaky” is a definite hit.
The movie begins in the fictional U.S. city of Blissfield, with four teenagers hanging out and partying at night at the upper-middle-class home of one of the teens. The house belongs to the parents of Ginny (played by Kelly Lamor Wilson), who looks like a popular blonde cheerleader type. Ginny’s parents are away on a trip, which is why Ginny and her friends have the house to themselves. The other three teenagers at the house are Ginny’s boyfriend Evan (played by Mitchell Hoog); Sandra (played by Emily Holder); and Isaac (played by Nicholas Stargel). Evan and Isaac are athletic types, while Sandra is a sensible brunette type.
It’s Wednesday, November 11. While the teens are gathered in the living room and drinking alcohol, they start talking about the urban legend of the the Blissfield Butcher, also known as The Butcher, a mysterious serial killer who began murdering people, especially teenagers during homecoming season, back in the 1990s. This serial killer, who seems to have stopped his murder spree in the 2000s, was never caught.
Is he dead? Is he in prison for another crime? Or did he just disappear and become a law-abiding citizen? No one seems to know, but the teens have a laugh at how “geriatric” the killer would be if he were still alive. It’s at this point that horror aficionados know that the killer will be somewhere in the house and ready to go on a rampage.
Sure enough, The Butcher (played by Vince Vaughn) has somehow snuck in the house. (He wears a mask, just like a prototypical serial killer such as Jason Vorhees from the “Friday the 13th” movies or Michael Myers from “Halloween” movies.) And one by one, The Butcher kills all four teenagers, who each have vicious deaths. The Butcher ambushes Isaac in a wine cellar and rams a wine bottle down his throat. The killer then traps Sandra in a bathroom and repeatedly slams a toilet seat on her head, in order to beat her to death.
The Butcher than chases Evan onto to the home’s tennis court, breaks a tennis racket in two, and uses both ends to simultaneously stab Evan on both sides of his head. As for Jenny, she manages to hide and elude the killer for a while, but he eventually finds her and impales her on the wall of the living room. That gives you an idea of how over-the-top the murders are. And The Butcher has stolen a rare dagger in a glass case that’s in the living room.
The next day (Thursday the November 12), a widowed mother and her two daughters, who all live in the same house, are gathered around the dining table for breakfast. Coral Kessler (played by Katie Finneran), who’s a sales clerk at a department store called Discount Bonanza, has been a widow for about a year. (It’s never stated how her husband died.) Coral’s older daughter Charlene Kessler (played by Dana Drori) is in her 20s and is a police officer in Blissfield. Carol’s younger daughter Millie Kessler (played by Kathryn Newton) is 17 years old and a senior at Blissfield Valley High School.
There’s tension in the household because Charlene disapproves of how Coral has been overprotective of Millie and has been using Millie as an emotional crutch. Coral has also been drinking heavily and tries to keep it a secret, but her daughters know that Coral has been drinking so much that she sometimes passes out. Coral goes to great lengths to hide her depression by putting on a falsely chipper demeanor.
Blissfield Valley High School is having a homecoming dance, but Millie tells Charlene that she won’t be there. Why? Because Millie and Coral made plans to see a regional production of “Wicked” together. Coral thinks that homecoming dances are just excuses for teenagers to get drunk or cause mischief, so she’d rather have Millie be safe and keep her company. Charlene thinks it’s pathetic that Coral won’t let Millie have any fun in ways that teenagers in high school are supposed to have fun.
Millie’s two best friends at her school are smart and outspoken Nyla Chones (played by Celeste O’Connor) and openly gay and sassy Josh Detmer (played by Misha Osherovich), who think that Millie is also missing out on a lot of fun by catering to Coral’s needs over her own. Millie is very introverted and too shy to do anything about her crush on a fellow student named Booker (played by Uriah Shelton), who sits next to her in their woodworking class.
The instructor of the woodworking class is Mr. Fletcher (played by Alan Ruck), who belittles Millie any chance that he gets. Every teen-oriented horror movie seems to have clique of bullies. In “Freaky,” there’s not one but two of these cliques.
The “mean girls” clique is led by a queen bee named Ryler (played by Melissa Collazo), who corners Millie at her locker to make snide comments about Millie’s discount clothes. Ryler is a stereotypical, conceited snob who cares more designer labels and other superficial things instead of someone’s character. She’s also a gossip who like to get “dirt” on other people and use it to her advantage.
The “bullying jocks” clique—Phil (played by Magnus Diehl), Squi (Tim Johnson) and Brett (played by Ezra Sexton)—make sexist and crude comments about Millie. (One of them says they would only have sex with Millie if she had a paper bag over her head.) Booker is a friend to these lunkheads, but he doesn’t participate in bullying Millie. However, Booker doesn’t exactly stop his pals from making mean-spirited comments to Millie either.
Early on in the movie, before Millie goes through a transformation, certain students at the school make offhand comments implying that Millie a mousy plain Jane. It’s a little hard to believe, given that Newton looks like a pretty Hollywood actress throughout the entire movie. The way that some of the mean girls treat her, you’d think that she comes to school in rags, but Millie’s wardrobe isn’t out of the ordinary.
It isn’t long before news spreads all over the high school about the four murdered teens who were killed the night before. However, the homecoming football game that night isn’t about to be cancelled. Millie is a beaver mascot for the school’s football team, the Blissfield Valley Beavers. It’s a thankless job and she gets no respect for it. In fact, some of the “cool kids” make fun of Millie when she wears the costume.
We get it. Millie is bullied by a lot of people at school. And that means when a serial killer inhabits her body, watch out.
The body swap happens after the football game, when everyone has gone home and Millie is stuck on a bench outside the football field, waiting for her mother to pick her up. Coral hasn’t been answering Millie’s calls and text messages because she’s passed out drunk. It’s late at night, there’s a killer on the loose, and Millie is getting scared because her phone battery has died. Right before her phone stopped working, Millie was able to call home and talk briefly with her sister Charlene, who had just arrived at the house and told Millie that their mother was passed out drunk again.
It’s now past midnight. And it’s Friday the 13th. And then, just like a typical serial killer in a slasher movie, The Butcher appears from out of nowhere and chases after Millie. He catches up to her in the football field and stabs her in the shoulder with the dagger that he stole. The heavens open up and some strange mystical things happen because that particular dagger has been used.
By this time, The Butcher has his mask off and is about to kill Millie. Just then, Charlene shows up (because she knew that Millie needed a ride home) and sees Millie being attacked. Charlene fires her gun, the killer runs away, but the dagger is accidentally left behind. The dagger is brought to the police station as evidence.
The next morning, Millie wakes up in her bed. It must be the fastest recovery ever from a stab wound. There’s no mention of Millie ever being in a hospital to get the wound treated. Maybe that’s because the hospital would’ve found out the same thing that this person who’s woken up in Millie’s bedroom has found out: Although the body looks like Millie’s, the person inside the body is the Blissfield Butcher. Likewise, Millie has now discovered that she is in the body of the Blissfield Butcher, who lives in a creepy loft-like place that’s filled with morbid-looking souvenirs and decorations.
When Millie finds out that she now looks like The Butcher, she goes to school to tell Josh and Nyla about the transformation. Nyla and Josh are predictably freaked out and don’t believe it first. There’s a big chase scene where they think The Butcher is trying to kill them. A police sketch of the serial-killer suspect, which was presumably based on Charlene’s eyewitness description, has been shown in the media and it’s a pretty good composite drawing of The Butcher.
While Josh and Nyla run through a school hallway to try to escape what they think is The Butcher, Josh shouts to Nyla, “You’re black! I’m gay! We are so dead!” It’s snarky commentary on the stereotype of someone from a minority group dying first in a horror movie.
Millie ends up convincing Josh and Nyla that she really is in The Butcher’s body, by telling them things only Millie would know. Through basic research, the three pals find out something important about the dagger that was used in the attack on Millie: The dagger is an ancient Aztec artifact called The Dola, which was used in ritual sacrifices. If two souls swap bodies while The Dola is being used, the souls have 24 hours to get back in the correct bodies—using The Dola in the same way that it was used when the souls were transferred—or else they will be trapped in the wrong bodies forever.
And so begins the race against time to get the The Dola dagger. The expected hijinks ensue about mistaken identity. And because the two people in this body-swapping comedy are of opposite genders, there are the predictable gags about male/female body parts and sexually suggestive situations that happen with people who don’t know about the body swap.
Because so much of “Freaky” has a lot of teen slang and of-the-moment technology, the movie is eventually going to look very dated. But the performances from the cast will make “Freaky” a crowd-pleaser for generations to come. Newton and Vaughn are hilarious to watch as they inhabit the personalities of Millie and The Butcher who are trapped in the wrong bodies. The humor goes a long way in taking some of the disturbing edge off of the horrific murders that are depicted in the movie.
Meanwhile, Osherovich is a total scene stealer who has some of the best lines in the movie. Some people might take issue with how his Josh character might be perceived as a flamboyant gay stereotype. However, Osherovich brings a lot of authenticity and respect to the role, which shows what it’s like to be a teenager who’s proud to be gay. Rather than being marginal tokens, Josh and Nyla actually do a lot of heroic things in the movie.
“Freaky” does a great balancing act of embracing horror clichés in a satirical way while rejecting other horror clichés in a defiant way. And there are a few surprisingly sweet sentimental moments. “Freaky” has some plot holes and very predictable scenes, but that doesn’t take away from how well the cast members portray these characters under the competent direction of Landon. The violence in the movie is cruel, but the movie has an underlying message of tolerance in showing how people shouldn’t be judged by their appearances alone.
Universal Pictures released “Freaky” in U.S. cinemas on November 13, 2020.
Culture Representation: Taking place in an unnamed desert area of the United States, the comedy film “The Planters” features a racially diverse cast (white, Asian and Latino) representing the middle-class.
Culture Clash: Two women with opposite personalities form an unlikely friendship and end up living together while dealing with personal struggles.
Culture Audience: “The Planters” will appeal primarily to people who like very quirky comedies that have underlying meanings and symbolism.
Phil Parolisi and Alexandra Kotcheff in “The Planters” (Photo courtesy of 1091 Pictures)
If you’re the type of person who thinks comedy has to be about a constant stream of jokes or slapstick situations, then “The Planters” won’t be your type of movie. Instead, the very quirky and off-kilter “The Planters” has a story that tends to wander but there are definite clues that the movie has a deeper meaning than just some people acting strangely. It’s not a movie for everyone, but it’s a highly original film that should please fans of people who like Wes Anderson-type of comedies that are filled with eccentric characters.
Alexandra Kotcheff and Hannah Leder (who have been friends in real life since childhood) are the stars, directors, writers, cinematographers and two of the producers of “The Planters,” which was filmed on location in a desert community near California’s Salton Sea. As has been widely reported in press coverage of “The Planters,” Kotcheff and Leder filmed the movie over 127 non-consecutive days without a film crew on the set. In other words, Kotcheff and Leder also did the movie’s production design, costume design, hair and makeup.
In “The Planters,” Kotcheff plays Martha Plant, a solemn bachelorette who lives in isolation. She is grieving the loss of her adoptive parents, who died a year earlier. Who or what caused their death is revealed later in the movie. Martha, who has a very deadpan demeanor, is the narrator of the story.
Martha has two sources of income: She works as a telemarketer for a company that sells air-conditioning units (it’s a job she hates) and as a “planter,” someone who plants tin candy dishes that are filled with random “treasures” in the desert. Martha explains in a voiceover narration that anonymous people, whom she’s never met, pay her for this planter job, which she’s been doing since she was 11. Because of this planter job, Martha has empty candy tins all over her modest house.
Martha’s employers for the planter job are unknown to her, and “I’d like to keep it that way,” says Martha, who adds, “They compensate me in cash. We never meet, but we both win. It’s the highlight of my day … I bury treasure for the lucky person who gets to it first.” And sometimes, that lucky person is Martha.
In an early scene in the movie, Martha digs up a candy tin and finds a $10 bill. Martha quips aloud about Alexander Hamilton (the United States’ first secretary treasurer), whose portrait is on the $10 bill: “Not my favorite president, but I’ll take it.” Apparently, Martha doesn’t know that Hamilton was never president of the United States.
Within seconds of of finding this $10 bill, a strange woman comes hurtling down a nearby desert hill and crashes into Martha. This woman’s name is Sadie Mayflower (played by Hannah Leder), and she’s been released from a psychiatric institution that’s shutting down and has discharged all of its nonviolent patients. Sadie has multiple personalities. Her alternate personalities are a 4-year-old girl named Emma and a woman named Angie, who’s a jaded partier.
Even though Martha and Sadie meet under awkward circumstances, Martha decides to invite Sadie into her home and give Sadie a place to stay. There’s a recurring visual throughout the movie of Martha pulling Sadie in a small wagon whenever they venture outside. Sadie is a very religious Christian, while non-religious Martha tells Sadie, “I’m not really into that stuff.”
Whereas Martha is very stoic, introverted and closed-off from her emotions, Sadie is very effusive, outgoing and is always talking about how she feels. Their initial impressions of each other is that they each think the other person is kind of weird. Martha tries to find out where Sadie came from, and that’s how Martha discovers that Sadie’s previous home was a psychiatric institution. However, Martha still doesn’t hesitate to let Sadie stay with her, which is an indication that Martha is a lot lonelier than she would like to admit.
Sadie tells Martha that her fiancé Carl recently dumped her because he found out that Sadie has been having sex since she was 12 years old. Apparently, that made Sadie too “impure” for Carl. Meanwhile, Martha opens up to Sadie about her childhood, by telling her that although her adoptive parents were great, she was adopted because her birth mother left her in a trash can.
Not long after Martha lets Sadie into her home, they visit a church, where an elderly caretaker named Jésus (played by Pepe Serna) looks at Sadie in a lecherous way. When he hears that Sadie doesn’t have a permanent home, Jésus invites her to live in the back room of the church. Martha immediately speaks for Sadie and flatly refuses Jésus’ offer. Martha seems a little too possessive over someone she just met. But it’s clear later in the story that Martha likes Sadie as company, even if Sadie sometimes gets on Martha’s nerves.
Throughout the movie, Sadie has religious visions that only she can see. The oddball nature of “The Planters” shows these visions as stop-motion animation with clay figures. (Sam Barnett did the animation for the film.) In one vision, Sadie opens up a candy tin that’s in Martha’s house. Inside, she sees three Christ-like figures on crucifixes. One of them is talking to the others, and he says, “You can’t get to really know a girl speed dating. You really need at least an hour face-to-face to find out who she really is.”
The three figurines look up with startled expressions and see Sadie staring at them, and they immediately stop the conversation. Sadie closes the tin quickly and tells Martha what she saw. Martha is skeptical when Sadie tells her about these visions, which also include scenarios and people described in the Bible, such as Noah’s Ark and Moses.
The rest of the movie also involves some hijinks over Martha possibly losing her telemarketing job. Martha’s boss suddenly calls and tells her that for the past two years, she’s only sold four air conditioning units. He tells her that if she doesn’t sell 30 units in the next two weeks, she’ll be fired. It’s a jolt to Martha that motivates her as she begins to understand how aimless her life had been. It’s not that she wants to keep the job, but now she feels she has something to prove.
The movie gets a lot of mileage out of the angry and occasionally hilarious reactions that Martha gets from people she calls as a telemarketer. Sadie begins to sit in on these calls (Martha uses a speaker phone), and they both find out that Sadie’s more outgoing personality gives Sadie better skills than Martha has to connect with customers. Sadie ends up trying to help Martha reach her sales goal by the deadline. Sadie also helps Martha by becoming a “planter” too.
A “third wheel” becomes a part of the budding friendship between Martha and Sadie. His name is Richard Cox (played by Phil Parolisi), a homeless sad sack who meets Martha and Sadie and ends up tagging along with them. There are other various random people go come and go in the story.
On the surface, “The Planters” is a very strange movie where not a whole lot makes much sense. However, the movie is obviously an allegory for the origins of humanity and ancient or religious stories that have been passed on for generations. Martha and Sadie represent the two sides of Mother Earth (or Eve, if you have Judeo-Christian beliefs) and the idea that the first human created was female.
The movie’s Jésus character who’s the church caretaker represents the Christian religion and how it entices people who are looking for emotional shelter and guidance. And the Richard Cox character is a symbol for patriarchy. His name gives it away: Richard Cox, who could be nicknamed Dick Cox.
Even if people don’t want to think too deeply about the symbolism and metaphors in “The Planters,” the movie is entertaining for the contrasting performances of Kotcheff and Leder, who do an impressive job with all the responsibilities they handled for this low-budget independent film. Singer/songwriter Phil Danyen has some memorable original music in the film’s eclectic soundtrack, particularly the disco-inspired and insanely catchy song “Can’t Stand the Heat,” which plays in the main part of the movie and over the closing credits.
“The Planters” is not the type of movie that will be considered a classic. But for people who are open to seeing a movie that’s unpredictable, original and definitely wacky, then “The Planters” fits that description perfectly.
1091 Pictures released “The Planters” in select U.S. cinemas on October 9, 2020. The movie’s digital and VOD release date is December 8, 2020.
Culture Representation: Taking place in Italy and Canada, the comedy/drama film “From the Vine” features a predominantly white cast (with one African American) representing the middle-class and working-class.
Culture Clash: Feeling guilt and sentiment about the death of his grandfather (who passed away in the 1960s), a lawyer/auto executive who’s close to retirement age upends his comfortable life in Canada to re-open a vineyard in Italy that was owned by his grandfather.
Culture Audience: “From the Vine” will appeal primarily to people who don’t mind seeing predictable movies that are filled with broad stereotypes of Italian machismo and men who go through a midlife crisis.
Wendy Crewson, Tony Nappo, Paula Brancati, Tony Nardi and Franco Lo Presti in “From the Vine” (Photo courtesy of Samuel Goldwyn Films)
At times, there seems to be a misguided school of thought that the older someone gets, the ruder and more selfish that person is allowed to become, and people are just supposed to excuse obnoxiousness from a senior citizen. The reality is that there should be no age limit on politeness. But don’t tell that to the filmmakers of “From the Vine,” who try to make all the unpleasant old and middle-aged men in the movie look like charming eccentrics. It’s a weak premise for a movie that has a very anemic plot. Unlike the vintage wine that’s supposed to be in the movie, the film’s moldy humor does not get better with age.
Directed by Sean Cisterna, “From the Vine” was written by Willem Wennekers as an adaptation of Kenneth Canio Cancellara’s 2010 novel “Finding Marco.” The story in the movie is essentially about a man going through an “approaching retirement” crisis who decides to turn his life upside down, travel to Italy to rediscover his Italian roots, and re-open a vineyard that used to be owned and operated by his late grandfather. The man at the center of the story is Marco “Mark” Gentile (played by Joe Pantoliano), who gives a brief summary of his life in the first few minutes of the movie.
Mark, who is in his early 60s when this story takes place around 2010, was born in Acerenza, Italy, and moved to the United States with his widowed mother in the mid-1960s, when he was an adolescent. Mark’s father died before he was born. Mark got a law degree and married a Canadian graphic artist named Marina, who convinced him to permanently move to Canada. “Big fucking mistake,” Mark says bitterly in the movie. Mark and Marina have one child together named Laura.
Even though Mark has a law degree, he’s been working for the past seven years as a management executive at a corporation called Santius Automotive, which was owned by a somewhat bombastic mogul named Gordon Welsh (played by Frank Moore), who is dead but is seen in one of Mark’s many flashbacks in the movie. Mark calls Gordon a “friend and mentor.” It was Gordon’s decision to promote Mark to president/CEO of Santius Automotive.
Before Gordon died, Mark made a promise to him to make Santius automobiles more environmentally responsible, even if it would cost the company more money to do it. At a presentation meeting with investors to make the company’s annual projection plans for the coming year, Mark has prepared a presentation that would have these environmentally responsible goals and budgets. However, a sour-faced lower-ranking executive named Barbara Cavendish (played by Sonia Dhillon Tully) informs Mark shortly before the presentation that his plan is unacceptable because his proposed changes are too expensive.
Barbara gives Mark another presentation that was prepared for him, without his approval and without the environmental changes. Mark is heartsick over presenting this plan that he did not approve, because he knows it would break his promise to Gordon. The movie shows Mark at the podium going through the dilemma in his head over which plan he wants to present.
And then, the next scene is of Mark at his home in the kitchen making a romantic meal for his wife. What happened at the presentation meeting? Although it’s not shown in the movie, Mark couldn’t go through with the plan that was prepared for him, and he quit on the spot. His wife Marina (played by Wendy Crewson) is wondering why Mark is home so early, and when he tells her that he quit his job, she’s understandably upset.
Mark tries to smooth things over with Marina by presenting her with a gift: a first-class, open-ended plane ticket to southern Italy, where Mark’s side of the family is. Mark tells Marina that he’s been thinking a lot of about his late grandfather Canio Gentile, who lived in Italy. Mark lost touch with Canio when Mark was a law student. Sadly, Canio died before Mark could reconnect with him. And so, now that Mark has a lot of free time on his hands, he wants to go to Italy to rediscover his Italian roots.
Things are already rocky in Mark and Marina’s marriage. The passion has gone from their relationship (they sleep in separate bedrooms), and Mark doesn’t respect Marina enough to discuss making big decisions, based on the impulsive way that he quit his job and decided to gallivant off to Italy for an undetermined period of time. Marina is dead-set against the idea. She refuses to go on the trip with Mark and tells him that he shouldn’t go and should instead look for another job. (It’s a big change from the novel, where Mark’s wife gave her blessing for him to go to Italy by himself.)
Mark ends up going to Italy by himself, and it’s revealed later in the story that he just callously up and left Marina without telling her when he was going. She came home to find him gone, with no note or communication over where he would be staying. The only reason why Marina didn’t report him missing was because she knew that Mark had plans to go to Italy. Regardless of the problems in their marriage, it’s an incredibly selfish thing to pull that kind of disappearing act on a spouse. But that isn’t the last self-centered thing that Mark will do in his marriage to Marina.
Meanwhile, Mark’s relationship is also strained with his daughter Laura (played by Paula Brancati, who’s one of the producers of “From the Vine”), who’s in her late 20s or early 30s. Mark has made it clear to Laura that she has disappointed him, ever since she dropped out of his alma mater McGill University in Montreal, and she didn’t tell her parents for about a year. Mark has never really forgiven Laura for that deception, because while she had secretly dropped out of college, he kept sending her money that he thought was going toward her college education.
A flashback to a bitter argument between Laura and Mark shows that, to this day, Laura has never told her parents what she did with her life in the year that she secretly dropped out of college. But now, the tables have turned, and Laura and Marina are the ones angry at Mark for his irresponsible and deceptive actions. Mark eventually contacts Marina and Laura to tell them where he is in Italy, and he asks his wife and daughter to join him there. Marina and Laura adamantly refuse because they don’t want to drop everything to be at Mark’s beck and call for his aimless life in Italy.
In his first few days in Italy, Mark reconnects with a few people he knew in his childhood: Luca (played Marco Leonardi) is a very goofy police officer. Amelia (played by Rita del Piano) works as a manager of a local restaurant. Mark eventually makes his way to Canio’s vineyard, where he had many happy childhood memories.
At the vineyard, Mark meets the groundskeeper for the first time: Marcello (played by Tony Nardi), a gruff-natured man who slowly warms up to Mark over the course of the story. Marcello tells Mark that Canio was like an uncle to him. The vineyard has a middle-aged, unemployed, disheveled squatter named Enzo (played by Tony Nappo), whose only purpose in the movie is to be as annoying as possible. Marcello has unsuccessfully tried to evict Enzo, who reveals later in the story that he’s homeless because he lost his job at a wine barrel factory and his wife dumped him.
Mark visits a church, where he goes to confession and opens up about his hopes and fears about his future. The priest tells Mark to “get over himself” and advises him to do something that’s in service of something other than himself. And faster than you can say “corny plot development,” Mark announces at Amelia’s restaurant that he’s re-opening the vineyard.
The area where Canio used to live is now economically depressed and unemployment is high. And so, even though he has no experience running a vineyard, Mark decides to re-open the vineyard, so that he can help the locals and hopefully make some money if the vineyard is successful. The word gets out around town, and the next time Mark is at the vineyard, several local people (about 25) are waiting outside to ask for a job.
Mark’s way of starting the business is to hire as many local people as he can, even though none of them has experience working at a vineyard either. When Marcello protests and says it’s a bad idea, Mark just dismisses Marcello’s concerns and announces his plan to learn how to operate a vineyard: “We’ll Google it!”
The vineyard has been shut down because the property is 20 years behind on taxes. So what does Mark do to bring the vineyard out of this financial hole? He withdraws all the money from his and Marina’s retirement account and closes the account without telling Marina about it. She only finds out when a bank official contacts her to tell her what happened.
This is the last straw for Marina and Laura, who arrive unannounced in Italy to try to talk some sense into Mark. While Laura has a realistic reaction to her father going off a selfish deep end, Marina’s reaction is ultimately troubling because she lets Mark off too easily. In fact, most of this movie’s problem is that Mark is acting very unstable, but it’s laughed off by most people as Mark just being quirky.
The movie gets worse. Ever since Mark arrives in Italy, he starts hallucinating. He sees his grandfather Canio (played by Dino Becagli), who’s nicknamed Nonno, in the vineyard, as Mark starts having flashbacks to his childhood in Italy. (Michele Stefanile portrays the young Marco.) Mark also starts imagining that inanimate objects are talking to him. For example, the leaves in the grape crops taunt Mark and question his competency.
It’s all supposed to make Mark look sympathetic. It actually makes him look pathetic. People watching this movie will have a hard time getting past the fact that, despite Mark’s hallucinations, he was lucid enough to blow all of his and his wife’s retirement money on this run-down vineyard without even discussing it with her. This self-centered act of deception is essentially glossed over in the movie, which makes constant excuses for the men who behave badly in the film.
Meanwhile, the women in the movie try to act sensibly, but they end up just reacting to whatever the men do. It should come as no surprise that Marcello has a hunky nephew named Gio (played by Franco Lo Presti), who makes eyes at Laura as soon as they meet. You know exactly where this is going to go, since Mark is realistically too old to be operating the vineyard for the next 20 years.
Pantoliano has been playing the kind of “no filter” character who says and does pretty much whatever he pleases, so this role isn’t that much of a stretch for him. He seems to be going through the motions in this role, with no real emotional investment. Because Mark treats his wife like a doormat and not as an equal partner to be respected, a lot of people watching “From the Vine” won’t find a lot to like about Mark, who’s not as good-natured and smart as he likes to think he is.
Brancati is the only one in the cast who brings some realism and depth to her character. Everyone else in the movie is a vaguely written caricature with a lot of cringeworthy dialogue. And the issue of Mark’s mental illness is played for laughs as a cheap gimmick with tacky visual effects. The “jokes” in this movie aren’t very funny, and the movie’s pacing often drags. Even the most die-hard fans of Pantoliano would agree that “From the Vine” is a forgettable blip in his long career as an impressive character actor. The only thing that comes out looking good in the movie is Italy’s gorgeous landscape.
Samuel Goldwyn Films released “From the Vine” on digital and VOD on October 9, 2020.
Culture Representation: Taking place in New York City and in upstate New York, the romantic comedy “A Rainy Day in New York” features a predominantly white cast of characters (with a few Latinos) representing the upper-middle-class and wealthy.
Culture Clash: A college student and his schoolmate girlfriend spend the day in New York City and experience unexpected entanglements with other people.
Culture Audience: “A Rainy Day in New York” will appeal primarily to die-hard fans of writer/director Woody Allen and star Timothée Chalamet, because this movie is clearly not their best work.
Timothée Chalamet and Elle Fanning in “A Rainy Day in New York” (Photo by Jessica Miglio/MPI Media Group)
“A Rainy Day in New York” is writer/director Woody Allen’s very misguided attempt at making a teenage romantic comedy, but the results are as phony and pretentious as many of the characters in the film. Movie aficionados who are familiar with Allen’s work already know that he sticks to certain formulas and themes in his movies. His movies are usually about privileged people in a big city who are preoccupied with their spouses or lovers cheating on them. There’s usually at least one much-older man in the story who makes sexual advances toward a much-younger woman—or the older man at least makes it known that he’s sexually attracted to her. And there’s always jazz in the soundtrack because Allen is a big fan of jazz music.
And even though Allen’s movies usually take place in the racially diverse city of New York, he excludes African Americans and Asians from being in his films in any significant speaking roles. Occasionally, as he did in “A Rainy Day in New York” and in “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” he might have a few Latinos in his films. The elitist and pseudo-intellectual worlds that Allen has in his movies are usually filled with people whining about personal problems that they create for themselves because they are addicted to self-sabotage.
You don’t have to see the poster for “A Rainy Day in New York” to know exactly who’s going to end up together by the end of the story. But until viewers get to that point, they have to sit through about 92 minutes of college-age people in their late teens and early 20s talking as if they’re about 10 years older, with very affected mannerisms. Unfortunately, much of the movie’s screenplay sounds exactly like what it is: dialogue written for young people by a senior citizen who doesn’t know how today’s young people really talk. Even though these young people are supposed to be privileged and well-educated, they still sound like an old person wrote their words for them.
All of the actors in “A Rainy Day in New York” are very talented, but they perform in this movie as if they’re all too self-aware that they’re in one of Allen’s films. And so, they all act is if they’re trying to conjure up the same neuroses and quirks of characters that were in classic Allen films, such as 1977’s “Annie Hall” and 1986’s “Hannah and Her Sisters,” which are considered two of Allen’s best movies.
“A Rainy Day in New York” follows the usual Allen formula of having the male lead character act like how a young Woody Allen would act, by being neurotic and showing some kind of intellectual snobbery. In this case, Timothée Chalamet plays the Allen surrogate with a character whose name is as pompous as his personality: Gatsby Welles.
Gatsby sees himself as quite the rebel because he dropped out of an unnamed prestigious university (presumably an Ivy League university) and is now enrolled in a small liberal-arts college in upstate New York called Yardley College. He likes to sneak off on a semi-regular basis to gamble with older men of dubious occupations. In reality, Gatsby isn’t that rebellious. He’s spoiled, a bit wimpy, and way too impressed with himself for someone who really hasn’t accomplished much and doesn’t know what he wants to do with his life.
Viewers can immediately see how self-absorbed Gatsby can be, but there’s no subtlety at all in this film. Allen over-amplifies Gatsby’s personality because he makes Gatsby have a constant stream of voiceover narration every time Gatsby is on screen. Other characters talk out loud to themselves when they wouldn’t need to do that if Allen trusted the actors enough to express emotions with their faces and body language.
In the opening scene, which takes place on the Yardley campus, Gatsby says in a voiceover: “This is Yardley, which is supposed to be a very good liberal college, which is supposed to be tony enough for my mother, which is total bullshit, because you get ticks [from] walking in the grass.” Gatsby further comments about his mother: “She says I have a high IQ and I’m not living up to my potential, even though last weekend I made 20 grand playing poker.”
Viewers will hear quite a bit about Gatsby’s domineering mother, because Gatsby can’t stop talking about her, even as he tries to avoid her. Gatsby’s parents (played by Cherry Jones and Jonathan Hogan) don’t have names in the movie, but viewers soon learn that Gatsby’s parents and his older brother Hunter (played by Will Rogers) live in New York City. Gatsby’s mother is a high-society influencer who’s presenting her big annual charity gala that Gatsby desperately does not want to attend.
There’s a scene in the last third of “A Rainy Day in New York” where Gatsby and his mother have a heart-to-heart talk, and it’s the best scene in the movie. Jones is fantastic in this role. Her performance is one of the few highlights of this meandering and often-dull film that recycles a lot of the same love-life problems and dilemmas that have been in other films by Allen.
Gatsby has a girlfriend named Ashleigh Enright (played by Elle Fanning), who also attends Yardley. On paper, Gatsby and Ashleigh both seem like a great match for each other. They both come from well-to-do families (Ashleigh’s father owns several banks in Arizona) that are politically conservative and white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Gatsby and Ashleigh are both very intelligent and curious. However, Ashleigh tends to be very giggly, forthright and effervescent, which is in contrast to Gatsby’s more brooding, secretive and angst-filled personality. Ashleigh is a movie buff, while Gatsby is more of a literature enthusiast.
Gatsby and Ashleigh have been dating each other for a few months. He says in a voiceover that he’s in love with Ashleigh and she’s perfect for him. Gatsby also says that Ashleigh is the type of girlfriend his mother would approve of, which is why he plans to introduce Ashleigh to his mother for the first time at the big gala event.
It just so happens that Ashleigh, who’s a journalist for the Yardley student newspaper, has landed an interview with a famous New York City-based film director named Roland Pollard (played by Liev Schreiber), and she couldn’t be more ecstatic about it because she’s been a longtime fan of his. Ashleigh tells Gatsby that she’s going to New York City to interview Roland, so Gatsby decides the time is right to go to the city for a couple of days with Ashleigh and make a romantic trip out of it.
Gatsby takes charge of their trip. He tells Ashleigh that they’ll be staying at the Pierre Hotel, and he’s made plans for them to have dinner at Daniel, an exclusive, five-star French restaurant. It’s implied that Gatsby is so well-connected that he can easily get reservations at Daniel, which is a restaurant that’s known to take reservations weeks in advance. Gatsby also wants to possibly stay at the Carlyle Hotel, or at least have lunch there, during the trip.
Ashleigh’s meeting with Roland isn’t really an interview as much as it is a talk session where she nervously gushes over him like a fangirl. Based on how Roland’s movies are described, he’s an “auteur” who prefers to direct creatively challenging films instead of crowd-pleasing blockbusters. Roland is flattered that this young reporter knows a lot of about his work, but he’s wracked with insecurities about his latest film. He also mentions to Ashleigh that his ex-wife’s name was Ashley and she also went to Yardley.
Because Ashleigh is so nervous around Roland, she starts babbling some “too much information” personal details to him. For example, she tells him that she starts to hiccup when she’s anxious. “When I’m sexually anxious, I’ll hiccup indefinitely,” she adds. And, of course, that’s a signal that this nervous tick will definitely happen later in the film.
Ashleigh is such a neophyte journalist that when Roland tells her that he’d like to give her a scoop, she naïvely asks, “A scoop of what?” When Roland explains that a “scoop” is a journalist term for exclusive information, she can’t believe her luck that he chose her. Roland says that the “scoop” he wants to give Ashleigh is that he’s not happy with the film he’s working on, and it might be the last film he directs because he’s thinking of quitting the movie business.
Ashleigh is shocked and tells Roland that he shouldn’t quit. Roland invites Ashleigh to go with him to a private screening room to watch a rough cut of the film and to tell him what she thinks of the movie. The only problem for Ashleigh is that the time it would take to watch the movie would conflict with the lunch date that she made with Gatsby.
The offer from Roland is too good to pass up, so Ashleigh apologetically cancels her lunch date with Gatsby and explains why. Gatsby is disappointed, but he understands why Ashleigh wants this opportunity to get a great interview with one of her idols. And so, Gatsby and Ashleigh make plans to meet up later.
Gatsby now has unexpectedly a few spare hours of time where he’s free to do what he wants. He wanders outside the hotel and happens to see a former classmate from high school: a gossipy jerk named Alvin Troller (played by Ben Warheit), who is an elitist snob yet he has no manners. Gatsby isn’t too enthusiastic about seeing Alvin, but they make some small talk where they give updates on what they’ve been doing with their lives and why Gatsby is visiting in the city. Alvin tactlessly insults Gatsby and some other mutual acquaintances who are mentioned in the conversation.
Alvin tells Gatsby that a mutual former classmate from high school is directing a student film outside on a nearby street and that Gatsby should check out what’s going on with this movie if he’s curious. Before they part ways, Alvin tells Gatsby that if he were Gatsby, he’d be nervous about having his girlfriend alone in a room with a powerful movie director. It plants a seed of doubt in Gatsby about what might happen during the interview with Ashleigh and Roland.
When Gatsby arrives on the film set, the former classmate, whose name is Josh (played by Griffin Newman), is happy to see him. Josh convinces a reluctant Gatsby to make a cameo in the movie. Gatsby doesn’t feel comfortable about being in the movie because he tells Josh that he’s not an actor, but Gatsby agrees to the role only because it won’t take long and he won’t have to say any lines. All Gatsby has to do in the scene is kiss a young woman in a car.
And who is this young woman? Her name is Chan (played by Selena Gomez), and she happens to be the younger sister of Gatsby’s ex-girlfriend named Amy, whom Gatsby briefly dated when he was 16. Chan, who is a student at the Fashion Institute of Technology, is dryly sarcastic and comes from the same well-to-do type of family that Gatsby has. Before Gatsby and Chan start filming their kissing scene, Gatsby and Chan exchange the kind of teasing banter that makes it obvious that they’re thinking, “I’m attracted to you but I’m not going to admit it.” And you know what that means for a romantic comedy like this one.
Gatsby and Chan’s kissing in the scene starts off being very awkward. But then, eventually Gatsby and Chan become more relaxed with each other before the director tells them that he has the footage that he wants. Gatsby and Chan go their separate ways. But what do you know, they happen to see each other again when it starts raining and they both end up hailing the same taxi for their second “meet cute” moment. Gatsby and Chan decide to share the taxi ride, and then they have more banter filled with sexual tension.
During their conversations, Gatsby tells Chan that he’s in New York City with his girlfriend Ashleigh because Ashleigh is interviewing Roland Pollard for the Yardley student newspaper. Gatsby somewhat brags about Ashleigh coming from a wealthy family, but Chan shows some East Coast snobbery when she hears that Ashleigh and her family are originally from Arizona. Chan then proceeds to mock Ashleigh, whom she hasn’t even met, with jokes that imply that Chan thinks Ashleigh is an unsophisticated hick, even if Ashleigh’s family is rich.
It should come as no surprise that for the rest of the day, Chan and Gatsby find themselves spending time together, while Ashleigh gets more caught up in hanging out with Roland and his associates. Various hijinks ensue as Gatsby and Ashleigh make plans to meet up multiple times, only to have those plans changed because of a variety of circumstances. It’s all very predictable and formulaic because people who’ve seen enough romantic comedies know exactly what’s going to happen at the end of this movie.
At the screening room to watch the rough cut of Roland’s latest movie, Ashleigh meets Ted Davidoff (played by Jude Law), the screenwriter of the movie. Roland gets so distraught by what he sees in the rough cut that he storms off. Ted and Ashleigh take off in Ted’s car to try and find Roland. During this hunt for Roland, Ted sees his wife Connie (played by Rebecca Hall), who appears to be on a date with Ted’s best friend Larry Lipshitz. Connie told Ted that she was going to be hanging out with one of her female friends, and now Connie has been caught in a lie.
And so, Ashleigh finds herself tagging along and observing some of this marital drama, as Ted tries to find out if Connie is cheating on him or not. And speaking of infidelity, Ashleigh gets caught up in a situation where she has to decide if she’s going to be faithful to Gatsby or not. During the search for Roland, Ashleigh goes to Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens, where she meets and is immediately dazzled by a sex-symbol movie star named Francisco Vega (played by Diego Luna), who’s almost twice the age of Ashleigh.
Francisco, who is in Roland’s latest film, doesn’t waste time in asking Ashleigh out on a dinner date. Francisco says he’s recently broken up with his actress girlfriend Tiffany (played by Suki Waterhouse), and when he and Ashleigh go outside together, they’re surrounded by paparazzi and news cameras. You don’t have to be psychic to know who will eventually see this footage.
During the time that Gatsby and Ashleigh are apart, there’s a minor subplot of Gatsby visiting his older brother Hunter and Hunter’s fiancée Lily (played by Annaleigh Ashford) in their spacious home. The wedding invitations have already been sent out, but Hunter confides in Gatsby that he doesn’t want to marry Lily. Why? Because Hunter says he doesn’t like Lily’s laugh, which Hunter describes as “a cross between Dad’s sister Betty and Lenny from ‘Of Mice and Men.'”
It’s yet one of numerous examples of how superficial, status-conscious and image-obsessed so many people are in this story. And it’s why this so-called romantic comedy isn’t very romantic when almost everyone in the story does not seem capable of loving anyone but themselves. Anyone who doesn’t meet their standard of wealth just isn’t worthy enough of their time.
Chalamet and Fanning do their best to bring some relatable humanity to their roles. But Gatsby is just too conceited and Ashleigh is just too fickle to go beyond the “spoiled rich kid” caricatures that writer/director Allen has constructed for them. Gomez doesn’t have much to do with the character of Chan, whose personality is just an empty shell that only exists to lobby semi-insults back and forth with Gatsby as they pretend they’re not attracted to each other. A good romantic comedy will have audiences rooting for the protagonists, but most of the characters in “A Rainy Day in New York” are so insufferable that audiences will wish these people would just shut up and go away.
MPI Media Group and Signature Entertainment released “A Rainy Day in New York” in select U.S. cinemas on October 9, 2020. The movie’s digital, Blu-ray and DVD release date is November 10, 2020. “A Rainy Day in New York” was released in several countries outside the U.S. in 2019.
Pictured clockwise, from left: Deon Cole, Aisha Tyler, Andrew Santino, Christine Taylor, Kat Dennings, Jack Donnelly, Malin Akerman, Jane Seymour, Ryan Hansen, Mike Rose, Scout Durwood and Rhea Butcher in “Friendsgiving” (Photo courtesy of Saban Films)
Culture Representation: Taking place in Los Angeles, the comedy film “Friendsgiving” has a predominantly white cast of characters (with some African Americans, one Latino and one Asian) representing the middle-class and upper-middle-class.
Culture Clash: A Hollywood actress and her best friend, who are trying to get over big breakups in their respective love lives, plan to spend a quiet Thanksgiving together, but those plans are disrupted by several unexpected guests.
Culture Audience: “Friendsgiving” will appeal primarily to people who like lowbrow comedies that think any jokes about sex, drugs and selfish antics are automatically supposed to be funny.
Pictured clockwise from bottom left: Serenity Reign Brown, Kat Dennings, Christine Taylor, Aisha Tyler, Deon Cole, Everly or Savannah Sucher, Malin Akerman and Jack Donnelly in “Friendsgiving” (Photo courtesy of Saban Films)
When there’s a comedy film about a large, chaotic holiday gathering, how much you might enjoy the film really comes down to one thing: Would you want to spend time with any of these people in real life? “Friendsgiving” swings hard and aims low in this vulgar comedy about mostly self-absorbed people at a Thanksgiving dinner, where the majority of the people weren’t even invited by the host. There are some mildly amusing moments, but “Friendsgiving” is really just a series of crude jokes, as the movie’s characters preen, make mischief, and whine about something that eludes almost everyone in this movie: a happy, long-term, monogamous relationship.
“Friendsgiving” is the first feature film directed by Nicol Paone, who wrote the movie’s vapid screenplay. Paone has a background in stand-up comedy, as an actress and as a writer for Funny or Die. Unfortunately, this movie is written as if everyone is a caricature waiting to spout some foul-mouthed lines that someone would write for a mediocre stand-up comedy act. The good news is that the characters’ personalities are distinctive and you can tell them apart from each other. The bad news is that their personalities are also very shallow.
Set in Los Angeles on Thanksgiving Day, the two central characters of “Friendsgiving” are longtime best friends Abby Barrone (played by Kat Dennings) and Molly (played by Malin Akerman), who have had very different reactions to painful breakups in their love lives. Abby is still recovering from being dumped in January by her ex-girlfriend Maeve, who is a single mother. Molly is a semi-famous Hollywood actress who’s raising a baby son named Eden (played by twins Everly and Savannah Sucher) on her own. Molly’s businessman husband Michael left her because he said he didn’t want to be married to her anymore.
Molly’s impending divorce hasn’t reached the stage of signing divorce papers yet, but she considers herself to be single and available. And she’s already found a new lover: a Brit who’s a cheerful, New Age type of philanthropist named Jeff (played by Jack Donnelly, who’s married to Akerman in real life), whom she’s been dating for only about two weeks. They met when Molly was in London for a press tour for a movie called “Pluto Raiders,” which is described as a basic sci-fi action flick.
Meanwhile, Abby is still wallowing in her breakup misery and has a hard time getting back into the dating pool. Abby doesn’t label her sexuality in the movie, but she mentions that Maeve was the first woman she ever dated, after Abby previously dated only men. In one of several video chats that Abby has with her nosy and opinionated family members—including Abby’s mother (Rose Abdoo) and Abby’s younger sister Barbara (played by Dana DeLorenzo)—Abby is given unsolicited advice on her love life. She is “out of the closet” with her family members, who are a traditional Italian clan on the East Coast, and they seem to think it’s best if Abby settles down and marries a man.
According to the production notes for “Friendsgiving,” the movie is loosely based on Paone’s real-life experiences during one Thanksgiving, when she was mourning a breakup from an ex-girlfriend, while Paone’s best friend was raising a baby after her husband had left her. This shared loneliness and breakup blues sparked the idea for the movie. Paone is openly gay, and she describes Abby as a “gay lady” in the movie.
Although the heart of the movie is about the friendship between Molly and Abby, the story is more focused on Molly. It’s at Molly’s home where the Thanksgiving dinner is held, and Molly is the one whom people seem to want to be around, probably because she’s a fairly successful actress. She lives in a spacious house, but it’s clear that she’s not an A-list actress who can afford any live-in staff. (There’s no nanny in sight.)
The opening scene of “Friendsgiving” gets right to the raunchiness, as Molly is dressed as a dominatrix while she and Jeff are engaged in some light BDSM play. Their sex session is interrupted by a phone call from Molly’s friend Lauren (played by Aisha Tyler), who asks Molly if she, her husband and two kids can come over to Molly’s place for Thanksgiving. Lauren gives a vague explanation that she’s going a little stir-crazy in the home and wants to spend Thanksgiving at Molly’s place, and she offers to bring some food. Molly is too polite to say no.
Meanwhile, Abby is chatting by phone with her mother and sister while doing some last-minute Thanksgiving shopping in a grocery store. There are clues to how obnoxious Abby can be, such as when she guzzles a bottle of wine while shopping. When a store manager tells her that drinking alcohol in an open container is not allowed in the store, Abby refuses his request to stop, and she gets thrown out by security. Before Abby leaves the store, she makes sure to do some damage to the Christmas tree on display.
Abby plans to spend a quiet Thanksgiving with just Molly and Eden. But there would be no “Friendsgiving” movie if that happened. Needless to say, Abby isn’t too pleased when she hears that there will be more people at the Thanksgiving dinner than originally planned. In fact, Abby is furious, and she starts whining about it like a bratty teenager.
Jeff is invited to stay for Thanksgiving dinner too, since Molly figures out that he’s lonely and has nowhere else to go. And of course, since this is a movie that wants to cram in as many jokes as possible about sex and penis sizes, the first time that Jeff and Abby meet, he accidentally walks into the room completely naked. As an embarrassed Jeff covers his genital area, Abby quips, “It’s no big deal. I have one just like it in my top drawer, except mine is bigger.”
It turns out that Lauren invited several people over to Molly’s place for Thanksgiving without checking with Molly first. And then, Molly’s sex-crazed Swedish mother Helen (played by Jane Seymour), who’s on her fifth marriage, shows up unannounced without her current husband. And, much to Molly’s embarrassment, Helen acts exactly how you would think a no-filter “cougar” would act.
In addition to Molly, Abby and Helen, the people who are at this larger-than-expected Thanksgiving dinner include:
Jeff, Molly’s new lover whom Abby begins to compete with in the kitchen and for Molly’s attention.
Lauren, who brings some low-dosage psychedelic mushrooms to share with Abby and Molly. (Molly declines to take any mushrooms, but Lauren and Abby do.)
Dan (played by Deon Cole), Lauren’s husband who is loving and attentive, but Lauren seems bored and restless in their marriage.
Lauren and Dan’s children Lily (played by Serenity Reign Brown), who’s about 8 or 9 years old, and Jack (played by Kenneth Sims), who’s about 5 or 6 years old. The children have no purpose in the movie but to look cute, sit at the kiddie table, and possibly walk in on something “adult” happening.
Gunnar (played by Ryan Hansen), a vain actor who is an ex-boyfriend of Molly’s and whom she broke up with years ago because he cheated on her. Gunnar was invited to the Thanksgiving dinner by Molly’s mother Helen, who thinks Molly and Gunnar should get back together, but Helen didn’t know about Jeff when she invited Gunnar.
Gus (played by Mike Rose), who’s openly gay, single, and lets it be known that he has a brother who’s been missing for years, which has no bearing on this movie at all, but it’s an attempt to give Gus some kind of backstory.
Rick (played by Andrew Santino) and Brianne (played by Christine Taylor), an image-obsessed, materialistic newlywed couple from Orange County who met each other four months ago and have been married for one month. A running gag in the movie is Brianne has recently had some kind of plastic surgery on her mouth, which she can’t move properly.
Claire (played by Chelsea Peretti), a New Age hipster who’s recently become a shaman (or a “shawoman,” as she would prefer to be called) and who can’t stop spouting platitudes about people being in touch with their feelings. And maybe she’s a part-time drug dealer too, because Claire sold the mushrooms that Lauren brought to the party.
There are also three lesbians whom Lauren invited to the party in an attempt to match any of them up with Abby. The lesbians don’t have names in the movie, but they have nicknames in the end credits. The lesbians each give brief monologues to the camera explaining their likes and fetishes when it comes to dating.
The first lesbian to arrive at the dinner is nicknamed Denim (played by Rhea Butcher), and she likes to wear denim and gives off a Tig Notaro vibe. The second lesbian to arrive at the dinner is nicknamed named Palo (played by Scout Durwood), and she’s a neo-hippie who seem likes the type to go to the Burning Man Festival. The third lesbian is nicknamed Civil (played by Brianna Baker), and she’s a left-wing militant feminist.
In addition, comedians Wanda Sykes, Margaret Cho and Fortune Feimster make cameo appearances as Fairy Gay Mothers, in a scene where Abby is having a psychedelic hallucination. The Fairy Gay Mothers give Abby some “Wizard of Oz”-inspired advice, since she is recently out of the closet as a queer woman: “All you have to do is tap your wing-tipped Oxfords three times and say, ‘There’s no place like Home Depot.'”
It’s one of the funniest scenes in the movie, which doesn’t have a lot of very funny scenes. By the way, Sykes is shown on the movie poster for “Friendsgiving.” But it’s misleading to think that she’s in the movie as one of the main stars. She’s barely in the film. Sykes, Cho, and Feimster are only in the Fairy Gay Mother scene, which lasts for only about five minutes. Unfortunately, the characters that are annoying in “Friendsgiving” get much more screen time than this hilarious trio.
Seymour, who’s British in real life, has a questionable Swedish accent for her character of Helen, who is one of the worst people in this group of mostly spoiled and obnoxious egomaniacs. When Molly makes it clear to Helen that she’s not interested in getting back together with Gunnar, Helen declares, “If you won’t have him, I will.” And then Helen proceeds to make a fool out of herself in trying to seduce Gunnar.
Molly is actually one of the more tolerable people in this group, but she shows a lot of bad judgment in quickly letting this group take over her household. Some of these guests thoughtfully brought potluck dishes, but others didn’t. And there’s a scene later in the movie that involves the baby and some irresponsible actions that send Molly and some other people into panic mode. It’s one thing for the adults in this story to act dumb, but it’s not that funny to make it a joke that an innocent child’s safety is put at risk because of some the shenanigans at this party.
Because there are so many guests at this dinner, “Friendsgiving” doesn’t spend a lot of time on character development. Therefore, everything in the movie is as superficial as the characters, which is why the movie has nothing to fall back on except more crude jokes and predictable gags. The overwhelming attitude that all the adults have at this Thanksgiving dinner is: “I’m going to do whatever makes me feel good, even if it hurts other people.”
And it’s why there’s an ill-conceived scene in the movie where Lauren and Abby make out with each other (this isn’t spoiler information, since it’s in the movie’s trailer), and Lauren’s husband Dan finds out and naturally feels hurt by this infidelity. And it’s just so cringeworthy to see Helen try to be sexy with the ex-boyfriend of her daughter. It should come as no surprise later when Helen admits to Molly that her latest marriage is on the rocks, but it’s still no excuse for Helen’s selfish and predatory actions. Someone of Seymour’s talent deserves better than this tacky role, even if she doesn’t exactly master the Swedish accent that she’s supposed to have in the movie.
Dennings has a lot of very good comedic timing, but it’s too bad that a lot of lines she has to deliver make Abby insufferable. Akerman (who is one of the producers of “Friendsgiving”) is solid in her role as Molly, while the supporting actors do an adequate job with their very limited characters. Peretti can bring some chuckles as the spacey-yet-pretentious Claire, but those laughs are few and far in between, since Claire is a one-note character.
A better movie would’ve had less people at this Thanksgiving dinner. For example, the characters of Gus, Rick and Brianne don’t really add anything to the story except stereotypes that aren’t very funny. And speaking of stereotypes that aren’t very funny, here’s an example of some dialogue between the lesbian nicknamed Denim and the lesbian nicknamed Palo. Demin asks Palo, “Do you like basketball?” Palo replies, “I don’t like balls of any kind.”
You get the idea. If “Friendsgiving” were a meal, then it would be a meal that should be skipped because of all the stale cheese that’s being offered.
Saban Films released “Friendsgiving” in select U.S. cinemas, on digital and VOD on October 23, 2020. The movie’s release date on Blu-ray and DVD is October 27, 2020.
Culture Representation: Taking place in Kazakhstan and in various parts of the United States, the comedy film “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” features a predominantly white cast (with some Asians and a few African Americans) representing the middle-class and working-class.
Culture Clash: Borat Sagdiyev, the notorious politically incorrect TV journalist from Kazakhstan, returns to the United States to hep ingratiate Kazakhstan with the Donald Trump administration.
Culture Audience: “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” will appeal to people who like scathing satires on politics and culture, mixed with lowbrow gags that sometime reach gross-out levels.
Maria Bakalova and Sacha Baron Cohen in “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” (Photo courtesy of Amazon Studios)
Just like most sequels, “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” isn’t as good as the original movie, but this satire still has plenty of laugh-out-loud moments that should satisfy people who are fans of Sacha Baron Cohen’s brand of irreverent comedy. Baron Cohen, a British comedian, has made a career out of playing on-camera pranks as various characters. He first reached international fame in the early 2000s with “Da Ali G Show,” which aired on HBO in the United States. But the biggest success so far in Baron Cohen’s career has been the 2006 comedy film “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” which many people consider to be his best creative work.
The first “Borat” movie, which is filmed mockumentary style, introduced the world to Baron Cohen’s character of Borat Sagdiyev, a socially inept and politically incorrect TV journalist from Kazakhstan who traveled to America and played unsuspecting pranks on people while in character. Most of the movie was scripted with actors, while the best parts of the movie did not have actors. However, the success of the first “Borat” movie was a double-edged sword, because Baron Cohen became so famous as Borat, it was difficult to do another “Borat” movie without a lot of people recognizing him dressed as the Borat character.
Now, 14 years since the first “Borat” movie was released, Baron Cohen felt the time was right in 2020 to do a second “Borat” movie, which was partially filmed during the COVID-19 pandemic. “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” takes aim at Donald Trump’s presidential administration by skewering Trump supporters, in addition to tackling hot-button issues, such as racism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, abortion, sexism, human trafficking and the COVID-19 pandemic. The movie also doesn’t let people on the liberal side of the political spectrum off of the hook, as Borat says that Kazakhstan’s leadership believes that former U.S. president Barack Obama “ruined” the United States and is “an evil man who stood against all American values.”
The opening scenes of “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” give a brief summary of what Borat was up to in the 14 years since the first “Borat” movie was released. The first “Borat” movie brought shame to Kazakhstan and caused the country’s economy to suffer. (Exports of potassium and pubis decreased significantly.) Borat was blamed for the decline of Kazakhstan, so he was banned from being a journalist, and he was sentenced to hard labor in a prison camp.
However, is he let out of prison when he is summoned to the presidential palace and finds out in a meeting with Premier Nazarbayev (played by Dani Popescu) that Kazakhstan wants to align itself with the Trump administration and get Trump’s respect. Borat has experience being in America, so he’s chosen to be somewhat of an ambassador to deliver a gift to Trump. However, Borat defecated in front of a Trump hotel the last time he was in America, so Borat is pretty sure he’s won’t get close to Trump.
Therefore, it’s decided the next best thing would be to give a gift to U.S. Vice President Mike Pence, whom Borat describes as such a notorious “pussy hound” that Pence’s wife won’t let Pence be alone in a room with any woman except for her. (It’s a spoof on Pence’s well-known personal policy to not to be alone in a room with a woman who isn’t his wife, in order for him to avoid #MeToo accusations.) Borat is ordered to present Pence with a monkey called Johnny the Monkey, which is Kazakhstan’s minister of culture and No. 1 TV star because this monkey is known for doing pornographic acts on camera.
While he was imprisoned, a neighbor took over Borat’s household and raised his three sons: Huey Lewis “Jeffrey Epstein” Sagdiyev (played by Alin Popa), Bilak Sagdiyev (played by Ion Gheorghe) and Biram Sagdiyev (played by Nicolae Gheorghe), who do not respect Borat. All that’s left for Borat when he comes home are two pigs, a sickly cow and a 15-year-old daughter Tutar Sagdiyev (played by Maria Bakalova), who lives in a filthy pig pen like a farm animal.
Females are considered so unimportant in the household that Borat didn’t even know that he had a daughter until he came home from prison. (Borat’s wife is nowhere to be found in the movie. It’s presumed that she left him.) Throughout the movie, there are parodies of Muslim/Arabic culture that teaches that males are always dominant and superior to females. Tutar thinks it’s normal for herself to be caged up like an animal, so that’s a running gag in the movie.
Borat travels ahead to the United States to wait for the arrival of Johnny the Monkey, which will be sent by crate. And Borat is surprised at some of the new technology that’s become available since the previous time in America. (He thinks smartphones look like “magical calculators.”) Borat isn’t too keen on this technology, so he sticks to using fax machines to communicate with officials back in Kazakhstan. And that’s another running joke in the movie.
The first place Borat goes to during his return to America is Galveston, Texas, where several people recognize him, much to his delight. And he gets a shock when the crate arrives carrying Johnny the Monkey: Borat’s daughter Tutar is in the crate, and she sat on the monkey, so the monkey is now dead. Borat decides the next best thing would be to offer Tutar as a gift to Pence. She undergoes a blonde makeover that makes her look like a woman who could be a Fox News reporter or a cast member of “The Real Housewives of Orange County.”
The rest of the movie involves various hijinks that either show Borat preparing to pimp out his daughter and/or trying to get close to people who are Trump supporters. Some of the people in these scenes are actors, while others are not. Borat visits a bakery shop and asks the owner/manager to put icing on a cake to read “Jews will not replace us,” which is a nod to what the white supremacists chanted during the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
At a pro-life crisis pregnancy center, which is set up for the sole purpose of convincing pregnant females to not have abortions, Borat tells Pastor Jonathan Bright that he has impregnated his daughter Tutar. The pastor’s response is to say that it doesn’t matter how she got pregnant, she can’t terminate the pregnancy: “God is the one who creates life. And he doesn’t make accidents.” The pastor doesn’t seem alarmed by the “incest,” which is a crime that someone in his position would be obligated to report.
Another scene that’s more staged but was still made to make people feel uncomfortable is when Borat and Tutar attend the Macon Debutante Ball in Macon, Georgia. They end up doing a father-daughter dance together, even though Tutar warned Borat that she was having her menstrual period. And the results are shown in explicit details in the movie.
Of course, the most-talked about scenes in “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” involve those with real-life Trump cronies. Borat crashes the American Conservative Union’s 2020 Conservative Political Action Conference, which happened in February, before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down businesses and events around the world. Borat arrives at the conference dressed in a Ku Klux Klan outfit, and he’s heard saying that he’s one of Trump’s senior advisers:, “I’m Stephen Miller! Sorry I’m late!”
Pence was a speaker at the conference, and during the speech, Borat puts on another disguise, this time as Trump. Borat (in a Trump costume) carries Tutar over his shoulder, caveman-style, and attempts to deliver her to Pence. Borat is thrown out by security, as Pence frowns in disgust from the stage.
Toward the end of the film, Tutar (who poses as a TV journalist) interviews Rudy Giuliani in a hotel suite and gushes over him like a star-struck fan. The interview took place during the COVID-19 pandemic, and there were no masks worn or social distancing for this interview, during which Giuliani spouts a conspiracy theory that COVID-19 is a man-made virus created by China. Borat is in disguise as Tutar’s sound engineer.
Giuliani clearly loves the adoring attention that he’s getting from this attractive young woman. He gets touchy-feely with her and drinks alcohol with her. (Giuliani has gone on record saying that he thought she was old enough to drink alcohol and that he was tricked.)
Later, things get flirtatious in a nearby bedroom, where Giuliani asks Tutar for her phone number and address, and pats her on the back. Tutar then removes Giuliani’s microphone sound pack from underneath his shirt. He lies down on the bed and puts his hand underneath the front of his pants. (Giuliani claims he was just tucking in his shirt.)
And then, all hell breaks loose when Borat storms in the room, wearing a woman’s wig and women’s underwear and shouting, “She’s 15! She’s too old for you! Take me instead!” Borat adds, “I was in prison for many years. I have techniques with my mouth.”
A shocked Giuliani gets up and says, “What’s going on with this guy?,” as he makes a quick exit, and his security people take over. As Giuliani leaves down the hallway, Borat shouts after him, “Rudy, Trump will be disappointed! You are leaving hotel without golden shower!”
But for every memorable scene like that in the movie, there’s another one that’s forgettable, as some of the gags are fairly dull and unimaginative, such as a scene where Borat and Tutar consult with a plastic surgeon named Dr. Charles Wallace. Borat thinks Tutar needs plastic surgery, such as breast enlargements and a nose job, to increase Tutar’s chances of of being accepted as a “sexytime” gift. And the ongoing gag about Borat using fax machines to communicate becomes tiresome very quickly.
There’s a fairly long scripted section in the film where Tutar spends time with a babysitter named Jeanise Jones, who doesn’t bat an eye when Borat drops Tutar off at Jenise’s home with a ball and chain and gives instructions to Jeanise as if Tutar is a dog instead of a human being. Jeanise then gives pep talks that are eye-opening to Tutar, such as telling her that it’s perfectly legal for women to be allowed to drive. Jeanise also tries to talk Tutar out of having plastic surgery, such as breast enlargements and a nose job, by telling Tutar that she doesn’t need the surgery because she’s already an attractive girl.
Even in scenes that aren’t as funny as they could have been, Bakalova proves to be a terrific comedic actress in the role of Tutar. She can hold her own in scenes with Baron Cohen, whereas other actresses in this role might have been too overshadowed by his larger-than-life personality. Tutar has a mixture of naïveté and feistiness that’s entertaining to watch.
Toward the end of the movie, Tom Hanks, who famously caught COVID-19 while he was in Australia, makes a brief cameo as himself, and parodies his COVID-19 experience. There’s also a segment where someone dresses up as a racist “Karen” and fights with a COVID-19 specialist resembling Dr. Anthony Fauci, both in full-body costumes. The “Karen” coughs and spews green bile on the doctor, who’s upset that she’s not wearing a face mask.
Several people are credited with writing the screenplay to “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.” In addition to Baron Cohen, the movie’s other screenwriters are Anthony Hines, Dan Swimer, Peter Baynham, Erica Rivinoja, Dan Mazer, Jena Friedman and Lee Kern. Too many cooks in the kitchen? Possibly.
Borat has become such a familiar character in pop culture, and so pranks in “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” don’t seem as fresh as they were in the first “Borat” movie. However, there are enough moments that poke fun at right-wing and left-wing politics that people of any political persuasion will get some laughs, as long they have some tolerance for crudeness. And if people don’t know by now how vulgar a “Borat” movie can be, they’re even more out-of-touch than Borat in prison.
Prime Video premiered “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” on October 23, 2020.
Culture Representation: Taking place in a fictional U.S. suburban city called Covington, the sci-fi/horror comedy “Spontaneous” features a predominantly white cast (with some African Americans, Asians and Latinos) representing the middle-class.
Culture Clash: Two opposite teenagers fall in love during a mysterious plague that causes people to spontaneously combust.
Culture Audience: “Spontaneous” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in unconventional teen comedies that have many dark themes and gory moments.
Hayley Law and Katherine Langford in “Spontaneous” (Photo courtesy of Paramount Pictures)
The poster for the movie “Spontaneous” makes it look like a typical carefree teen romantic comedy. This movie is definitely not carefree or a typical rom-com. In fact, the second half of the film gets so dark and depressing that unsuspecting viewers might wonder if they if they were duped into seeing the wrong movie. “Spontaneous” might not please people who are looking for a more conventional story, but if people are willing to experience a movie that takes some bold risks in the teen-oriented film genre, then “Spontaneous” is worth watching.
Brian Duffield wrote and directed “Spontaneous,” which is based on the novel of the same title by Aaron Starmer. The movie adeptly manages the difficult challenge of blending science fiction, horror and dark comedy. For the most part, it works. And thanks to a brutally sardonic performance by Katherine Langford, “Spontaneous” could very well become a cult classic for teen films.
In “Spontaneous,” Langford portrays Mara Carlyle, who narrates the story as if she’s looking back on her life several years later. When this story takes place, Mara is a senior at Covington High School in a fictional American suburban city called Covington. Mara doesn’t fall into a lot of movie stereotypes of pretty blondes in high school. She’s not a cheerleader, a star student, a popular girl, a stuck-up rich kid, or a girl who sleeps around. In fact, unlike most teen protagonists in movies, Mara doesn’t have any burning ambitions in life, she’s not obsessing over a crush, and she’s not trying to get anyone’s approval in particular, not even the approval of her best friend.
Mara’s best friend since elementary school is Tess McNulty (played by Hayley Law), who is as sensible and cautious as Mara is unpredictable and impulsive. Mara likes to get high on illegal drugs and get drunk, while Tess doesn’t do drugs and occasionally drinks alcohol, but never to the point where she’s vomiting or out of control. (The movie has several scenes where Mara spends a lot of her time intoxicated.)
Tess is a student who takes school seriously and has plans for college. Mara does just enough to get by academically and doesn’t really know what she wants to do with her life after she graduates from high school. What these two girls have in common is a mutual respect for each other and a plan to eventually live together in a beach house when they’re old.
The movie gets to the “sci-fi/horror” aspect right away, when a student named Katelyn Ogden (played by Mellany Barros), who’s in one of Mara’s classes, suddenly and spontaneously explodes during a class session. There’s blood everywhere in the classroom, everyone runs out of the school screaming in horror, and people are left wondering why this bizarre death happened. As one of the students says later in describing the incident: “It was like a Cronenberg movie.”
Shortly before this incident, Mara had been getting anonymous text messages from a mystery admirer who told her in the messages that Mara has been a crush of this admirer for the past two years. In response, she texts this mystery person with a message saying, “No dick pics.” The secret admirer then texts her a picture of Richard Nixon, with the message, “Sorry, it’s crooked.”
Mara is intrigued and charmed by this person who seems to share her sarcastic sense of humor. While Tess and Mara hang out at a diner together after the “spontaneous combustion” incident, the secret admirer reveals himself. He asks if he could sit with them, and they say yes. Mara almost instantly guesses he’s the secret admirer from the way that he talks and looks at her.
His name is Dylan Hovemeyer (played by Charlie Plummer), who is also a senior at Covington High School. His personality is almost the opposite of Mara’s. Dylan is shy and awkward, while Mara is brash and confident. And although Dylan has pretty much made it clear that he could fall in love with Mara, she’s resistant to even saying the word “love” out loud and isn’t really looking for a serious relationship.
Mara is the type of person who will use illegal drugs or get drunk to escape from her problems or bad thoughts. Because of the trauma of witnessing the explosion firsthand, she decides to take a lot of psychedelic mushrooms in the tea that she’s drinking at the diner. By the time Dylan comes over to Mara and Tess’ table, Mara is flying high. But because she took so many mushrooms, she knows she’s going to get sick, so she asks Dylan to go with her to the diner’s restroom to hold her hair while she vomits.
Mara tells Dylan that she took a bunch of psychedelic mushrooms, so things might get weird. Sure enough, she tells Dylan that she’s seeing several clones of him in the bathroom. And she ends up vomiting a lot, while Dylan dutifully attends to her. Dylan thinks Mara’s hallucinations are kind of funny, and he’s more than happy to cater to Mara.
Mara decides that Dylan has passed an unofficial test of trust, since he saw her in a vulnerable state of intoxication and he didn’t judge her or take advantage of her, so she decides to hang out with him some more. They find out that they have the same taste in 1980s and 1990s rock music. Mara also likes Dylan’s quirks, such as later in movie when he buys a beat-up old milk-delivery/ice-cream truck and Mara thinks it’s one of the coolest vehicles she’s ever seen. Dylan and Mara, who both have no siblings, consider themselves to be outsiders who aren’t understood by very many people.
It should come as no surprise that Mara and Dylan end up dating each other and falling in love. But Mara is the type of girl who wants some independence, and she initially has a hard time admitting that Dylan is her boyfriend. And then there’s the possibility that Dylan will move away because of college. Dylan and Mara’s relationship begins at a time of the school year before students begin finding out which colleges they’ve applied to have accepted or rejected them. Mara and Dylan decide to just make the best of the time that they have together and figure it out as they go along.
On one of their first dates together, Dylan and Mara go to a football game, where on the field, one of the football players spontaneously explodes, which causes the expected bloody mayhem. And so begins a plague in the city where people randomly explode. It could happen to anyone at any time.
The FBI and other government agents descend on the city to investigate. One of those officials is Agent Rosetti (played by Yvonne Orji), who interviews many of the students at the high school, including Mara and Tess. Agent Rosetti is tough but compassionate as she tries to get to the bottom of this mystery. Every time Mara is questioned or interviewed by an authority figures, she gives snarky, unhelpful answers.
The students who were in the classroom of the first explosion are eventually put into a temporary quarantine together, where they go under intense medical exams. Mara predictably hates being confined, and she takes her resentment out on the authority figures. Here’s an example of Mara’s snide way of talking: During an examination with a doctor, the doctor asks Mara, “What do you want to do in college? Mara replies, “Stay alive.”
As more people start to explode in the city, religious conservatives begin flocking to Covington to hold protests because they believe the city’s residents, particularly the teenagers, are cursed by demons. They hold protests with picket signs that say things like, “The Devil Inside Your Children Has Found His Way Out,” “Covington Is Doomed” and “Repent or Perish.” Mara is not religious, but there comes a time when she, like many of the the other survivors, feels survivors’ guilt.
During all of this turmoil, Dylan and Mara become closer. He tells her that one of the reasons why he finally approached her after two years of admiring her from afar was because he doesn’t know how much longer they might have to live. Dylan also opens up about how the death of his father (who passed away from a heart attack) deeply affected him. Dylan, who used to live on a farm, says that after his father died, he would sometimes go in the barn and dance my himself while listen to his father’s favorite music.
“Spontaneous” has moments of sweet sentimentality, but most of the tone for this comedy is acerbic and occasionally it gets very bleak. The movie includes portrayals of overwhelming depression and substance abuse that get to dangerous levels. And unlike a lot of teen-oriented movies, there aren’t necessarily people coming to the rescue to help set any troubled teens down the right path.
Mara can be rude, selfish and irresponsible, but she also has a vulnerable, caring and loyal side that she shows to only a few special people in her life, including her parents. Mara’s parents Charlie (played by Rob Huebel) and Angela (played by Piper Perabo) want to be “cool” with Angela, so they smoke marijuana with her and they’re reluctant to discipline her. When she stays out past curfew time, they worry, but they don’t really punish her, since she’s almost 18 years old.
Some people watching “Spontaneous” might not warm up to Mara because she’s so flawed and has a “no filter” attitude, where she says what she thinks, even though it might be unpleasant or insensitive. On Halloween, when the students go to school wearing costumes, Mara dresses up as the fictional horror character Carrie (the bullied teen in Stephen King’s novel of the same name), who notoriously had a bucket of pig’s blood poured on her at her school prom.
However, Mara’s “Carrie” prom dress doesn’t have blood on it, because Mara is aware that it would be in bad taste, given the spontaneous bloody explosions that started with fellow student Katelyn Ogdon. When Dylan (who’s dressed as an Amish person) first sees Mara in the costume, he immediately guesses that she’s dressed as the “Carrie” horror character. Mara loves that Dylan instantly knew what her costume was, but she adds that “Katelyn fucked it up,” as in it was Katelyn’s “fault” that Mara couldn’t wear blood on the dress.
The editing of “Spontaneous” could have been improved somewhat in the last third of the story, when some self-destructive things that Mara does get repetitive and tend to drag down the pacing of the movie. However, the tender romance between Mara and Dylan is very easy to like and is by far the best part of the movie. Langford and Plummer’s chemistry together is warm, funny and absolutely enjoyable to watch. They both give very good performances in the movie—not the type that will win major awards, but the type that will be used as examples of how to act in a genre-bending teen comedy.
“Spontaneous” does not skimp on the gore, so people who are easily nauseated by the sight of blood might want to steer clear of watching this movie. Even without the spontaneous combustion and all the bloody scenes, the message of “Spontaneous” is loud and clear: Life can be messy. You can either be afraid or live each day as if it’s your last.
Paramount Pictures released “Spontaneous” in select U.S. cinemas on October 2, 2020, and on digital and VOD on October 6, 2020.
Culture Representation: Taking place in Scotland, the romantic comedy “Then Came You” features an all-white cast representing the middle-class and upper-class.
Culture Clash: An adventurous American widow who vacations at a Scottish castle inn has frequent tension-filled encounters with the cranky Scottish widower who is the inn’s homebody owner/manager.
Culture Audience: “Then Came You” will appeal primarily to people who like predictable romantic comedies that have a lot of corny and sappy moments.
Elizabeth Hurley and Craig Ferguson in “Then Came You” (Photo courtesy of Vertical Entertainment)
“Then Came You” is the type of formulaic romantic comedy that could have been on the Hallmark Channel, except that “Then Came You” attempts to have a somewhat raunchier tone to the story. Even though the movie has some mild cursing and some vaguely bawdy sex talk, “Then Came You” (directed by Adriana Trigiani) is still as shamelessly cloying and trite as a cheap romance novel. It’s the kind of movie where you know exactly what’s going to happen, just by looking at the movie’s poster or trailer.
Former TV talk-show host Kathie Lee Gifford wrote the screenplay for “Then Came You,” and is a co-writer (with Brett James) of the movie’s original songs. Gifford is also a star and a producer of the movie, which looks like a Gifford vanity project used as an excuse for her to break out into song in every other scene. It should come as no surprise that Gifford’s Annabelle Wilson character in the movie used to be an aspiring singer/actress, just like Gifford was in real life before she became famous as a TV personality.
Annabelle is a fairly recent widow. Years ago, she gave up her dreams to be an entertainer and instead went into business with her husband Fred in Nantucket, Massachusetts, the suburban city where she was born and lived her entire life. Annabelle and Fred, who were married for 32 years and had no children, operated a successful hardware store together. Annabelle sold the business and their marital home after Fred died.
And now, she’s going on an adventurous trip to visit 20 places around the world that are the sites of her and Fred’s favorite movies. Annabelle and Fred were avid movie watchers, and this trip is her way of honoring Fred. Annabelle chose Scotland as the first stop on her trip, because of the 1995 Oscar-winning Scottish war movie “Braveheart,” directed by and starring Mel Gibson. But Annabelle hardly does any sightseeing. It’s obvious she wants to hang out at the inn where she’s staying because she becomes infatuated with the inn’s owner.
The opening scene of “Then Came You” features Annabelle booking her stay at a 400-year-old castle-turned-inn owned by a prickly and sarcastic Scot named Howard Awd (played by Craig Ferguson), a widower who inherited the castle from his father. Howard, who’s about the same age as Annabelle, actually holds the title of lord, but he doesn’t put on pretentious and snobby airs because of this title. He’s the opposite of polished: He’s scruffy, tattooed and is often very uncouth.
How rude is he? When he and Annabelle first meet in person and he tells her that he’s a widower, he describes his late wife as “a miserable sow.” And even though he has the title of lord, Howard isn’t rich. In fact, he’s having trouble keeping the inn financially afloat.
Annabelle and Howard’s first communication with each other is by email correspondence, which is read in voiceovers, when she books her stay at the inn. Before she leaves for Scotland, she looks around at her empty house in Nantucket and says aloud: “I’ve got to make new memories, or the old ones will kill me. And I’m not ready to die yet.” These are the type of spoken lines, for better or worse, that people can expect in this hackneyed movie.
“Then Came You” hits all the same beats of dozens of other romantic comedies where two people who are opposites are very attracted to each other, but it takes them most of the story to do something about the attraction. And usually, there’s a big “obstacle” that keeps this would-be couple from being together when they first meet. In “Then Came You,” the “obstacle” is that Howard is not only engaged, but he’s also getting married just a few days after he and Annabelle meet.
Somehow, Howard doesn’t tell Annabelle this important information until days after they’ve been sort-of flirting with each other in that “I like you but I’m going to act as if I’m annoyed by you” way that would-be couples do in romantic comedies. Their banter is exactly what you would expect: They have petty disagreements because of their opposite personalities and interests (she’s an optimist who loves to travel; he’s a pessimist who’s a homebody), while they try and pretend that there’s no sexual tension between them.
Who is Howard’s fiancée? She is a haughty, self-centered social climber named Clare Hollings (played by Elizabeth Hurley), who has a complicated history with Howard. Clare and Howard dated each other when they were young, but Howard fell in love with and eventually married the woman who was Clare’s best friend and college roommate. After that, Howard and Clare weren’t really in each other’s lives for years, but they reconnected after Howard’s wife died.
Howard tells Annabelle that his marriage to Clare is going to be a marriage of convenience. Clare is marrying Howard because she wants the title of lady, while he will financially benefit from the marriage because Clare has a lot more money than Howard does, and Clare has offered to help save the inn from financial ruin. Annabelle asks Howard if he loves Clare and will be happy in this marriage, but he doesn’t really give her a straightforward answer except to say that he likes Clare enough to be married to her. Annabelle tries not to be judgmental, but it’s very obvious that she thinks the marriage will be a mistake.
Howard’s closest friend is the inn’s somewhat goofy handyman/butler Gavin Ferguson (played by Ford Kiernan), who has made it known that he doesn’t like Clare. Howard has a 29-year-old son named George (played by Calum Chisholm), who also disapproves of Clare—so much so, that George refuses to attend the wedding. When Annabelle meets Clare in person, Clare is predictably dismissive of Annabelle and treats Annabelle as a lower-class guest who isn’t worthy enough to be socializing with Howard. Clare is annoyed that Howard has invited Annabelle to their wedding.
As an example of how unrealistic this movie is, this lavish wedding is supposed to take place at the inn, but there are no signs of the wedding preparations until a day or two before the wedding takes place. These wedding preparations conveniently are shown in the movie only when Howard bothers to tell Annabelle that he’s getting married that weekend. It also doesn’t make sense that a fussy and domineering woman like Clare would allow her wedding to be prepared in such a rushed and haphazard way.
Annabelle tries to hide her disappointment about Howard being engaged to marry another woman, after Howard gave Annabelle the impression that he was a widower who was available. Any self-respecting person would see that Howard hiding his engagement/relationship status shows a lack of honesty and lack of respect to the women involved. It would be a major red flag to anyone who wants a trustworthy partner in the real world. Later in the movie, Howard confesses to Annabelle that he lied when he insulted his late wife: His wife wasn’t a shrew, but she was actually a loving and wonderful person.
But in a corny movie like this one, this type of dishonesty and disrespect is swept under the proverbial rug, all in the name of having a fairytale romance. When Annabelle asks Howard why he didn’t tell her sooner that he was engaged to another woman, he curtly tells Annabelle that because he’s not American like she is, he doesn’t tell people everything about his personal life when he first meets them. It’s an absurd excuse, but Annabelle just accepts it, like the lonely and desperate doormat that she is.
The movie goes out of its way to make some not-very-funny jokes about the differences between Scottish and American cultures. In one part of the movie, Gavin and Annabelle have a little tiff over something, and Gavin calls her “stubborn,” while adding, “And I thought us Scots had a monopoly on that bullshit.” And there’s a running joke in the movie that Annabelle wears over-the-top tartan clothing, in an attempt to try to “fit in” with the Scots, but she just looks like she’s wearing some very bad parody costumes instead of comfortable clothing.
Another sight gag that works better in the movie is Annabelle’s special Whitman’s Sampler chocolate box, which she carries with her everywhere she goes, because her late husband Fred’s favorite movie was the 1994 Oscar-winning drama “Forrest Gump,” starring Tom Hanks as the title character. For people who haven’t seen “Forrest Gump,” it’s explained that the movie’s most famous line is when chocolate-loving Forrest Gump says, “Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get.” But Annabelle doesn’t have chocolates in that Whitman’s Sampler box. The box contains Fred’s ashes.
Howard thinks it’s creepy that Annabelle doesn’t have the ashes in an urn or another traditional container. Annabelle explains that it would be weird to carry an urn with her in public, so she uses the box of chocolates as the container for the ashes so that she won’t get strange reactions from people. As soon as the movie makes a big deal of showing Annabelle being overly attached to her husband’s ashes, you just know it’s going to be an issue at some point in the story.
When Howard asks Annabelle what her favorite movie is, she tells him it’s the 1968 film “Funny Girl,” starring Barbra Streisand. Howard quips that he’s glad her favorite movie isn’t “Psycho,” or else he’d have to keep her away from the shower. Annabelle tells him that’s okay because she prefers baths. This is an example of the “tit-for-tat” banter that takes place between Annabelle and Howard. It’s supposed to be reminiscent of old-school wisecracking romantic comedies, but most of the dialogue in “Then Came You” is just witless and dull.
Some of the dialogue of the film tries to be “edgy,” but it comes off as very juvenile, which is an embarrassment to people who are old enough to know better. In one scene, Annabelle, Howard and Gavin are hanging out together in a parlor at the inn. They are all tipsy from drinking alcohol. Annabelle says that her mother used to tell Annabelle that she was proud of Annabelle for having a lot of “spunk” in her.
Gavin and Howard start giggling, and Annabelle doesn’t understand why they think what she said is so funny. Then they tell her that “spunk” is slang for semen. Annabelle says she’s never heard of that before in her life. However, in the real world there actually are many Americans who know that “spunk” can be slang for semen. It’s yet another poorly written attempt at making a joke out of the differences between American and Scottish cultures.
And there’s some more bad dialogue in the movie, such as when Annabelle asks Howard, “Why are you drunk?” He replies, “Because I’ve had a lot of alcohol.” And then in another scene, a babbling Annabelle says, “You know what the trouble with trouble is? You don’t know you’re in trouble until you’re in trouble.” Annabelle and Howard drink quite a bit of alcohol in the movie, which should come as no surprise to people who know about Gifford and her former “Today” co-host Hoda Kotb and their habit of openly drinking alcohol on their morning TV show.
In addition to the unimpressive dialogue, another cringeworthy thing about the movie is when Annabelle takes it upon herself to help out with plumbing repairs in the inn (which has faulty faucets and sometimes no running water), her repair activities are used as sexual innuendos. When she goes into the basement for the repairs, Annabelle grunts, thrusts and gets wet from the pipe water, as the movie’s soundtrack plays screwball sex comedy music. Annabelle presumably wants to help with the repairs because she has a hardware background, but it’s completely illogical that a guest like Annabelle would volunteer to do such menial and dirty repairs. Unless she’s in a movie where her plumbing repair activity is used as a metaphor for her having sex.
And about Gifford’s singing, which is awkwardly scattered throughout the film: It’s a very “cruise ship performer” style of singing that won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. She sings in the bathtub. She sings at a pub. She sings in front of people who don’t ask her to sing. And there’s a scene where Gifford and co-star Ferguson trade off singing verses of the same song in separate rooms, while she’s in the bathtub and he’s in the shower, as if they think they’re in a Doris Day/Rock Hudson musical.
To the movie’s great credit, “Then Came You” absolutely makes Scotland look gorgeous, thanks to the cinematography of Reynaldo Villalobos. But this isn’t a travelogue video. The movie is a maudlin romantic comedy that’s only as bearable as how much someone is willing to tolerate the schmaltziness of it all. There’s also an unnecessary subplot involving DNA test results.
Gifford tries very hard be “cute” and “sexy” in this movie, but there’s nothing really “cute” or “sexy” about a woman who’s treated like an easily manipulated ditz by a miserable, dishonest man who reluctantly lets her into his heart. There’s a specific audience for this type of outdated romance and this type of cornball movie. If you want a romantic comedy that realistically shows that men don’t have to be jerks and women don’t have to be desperate to fall in love, then you’ll have to look elsewhere, because “Then Came You” panders to the worst rom-com stereotypes.
Vertical Entertainment released “Then Came You” in U.S. cinemas for one night only through Fathom Events on September 30, 2020, and then on digital and VOD on October 2, 2020.
