Sean McElwee
MOVIE REVIEW
Spin Me Round (2022)
The Jeff Baena strolling players, Aubrey Plaza first among equals, return for “Spin Me Round,” a dark screwball farce screened at SXSW in which rich people are always the ones having all the fun. Mr. Baena also returns to Tuscany, where he put Ms. Plaza into a 14th Century convent for “The Little Hours” without changing her comedy one bit; and to black comedy, after 2020’s “Horse Girl” used the director’s same basic style to be serious about mental health and trauma. But the course correction to swap these destinations back and forth in Mr. Baena’s cosmos of unnerving, petulant characters simmering with eccentricity might be only an inch or two.
Continue reading “The Italian Jobs” »
Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
The Little Hours (2017)
Watching Aubrey Plaza shout at people ranks high on my personal list of reasons to turn out for movies, only slightly behind the joys of Tracy Letts being cruel and vindictive. In “The Little Hours” she shouts and swears like a stevedore, a raucous deadpan dynamo restrained by a 14th century nun’s habit and wimple in the same way that a tin can constrains an atom bomb. Jeff Baena’s film transfers a bunch of thoroughly modern comics — Ms. Plaza, Molly Shannon, Nick Offerman, Kate Micucci, several others — to Middle Ages Tuscany with their vocal patterns and wry exasperations intact, for a tale sliced out of Giovanni Boccaccio’s “The Decameron” that drips with frustrated desire and the sins of the flesh. Hit or miss, it’s at least a reminder that American sex comedies weren’t always modern-dress bosses and bridesmaids, or offcuts from the Judd Apatow factory.
Continue reading “Nun of the Above” »
MOVIE REVIEW
The Lego Movie (2014)
Warner Brothers Pictures
Even though Claymation is de rigueur in the realm of stop-motion animation, brickfilms date all the way back to the 1970s. There hasn’t been a prominent example perhaps because the Lego Group unsurprisingly pursued legal action over “The Magic Portal,” a feature-length brickfilm made in the late 1980s. The precedent has been enough to scare off aspiring brickfilm makers since, even though the company seemingly reversed its stance in the early 2000s with the release of Lego Studios kits.
As its title suggests, “The Lego Movie” has the company’s blessing and touts the virtues of the product. The sense of product placement and corporate synergy only deepens with Warner Brothers Animation seizing the opportunity to parade the fleet of the DC Comics characters in its catalog.
Continue reading “A Few Bricks Shy of a Load” »