If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

When the credits rolled on “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” I noticed that Josh Safdie, of the erstwhile Safdie Brothers, served as one of the producers. That felt right to me because the preceding 114 minutes felt like an unrelenting, claustrophobic, close-up heavy Safdie-like joint. That is not to divest writer/director Mary Bronstein of her auteurist imprint. Bronstein made “Yeast” in 2008, back when the Safdies were just starting out, and it, too, was an unrelenting, claustrophobic, close-up heavy joint. I say all this to contextualize what you go through in watching “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” which is not about addicts, or petty criminals, or a fanatical table tennis player, but a mother, the hardest job in the world. That’s sort of what Bronstein’s movie is, a dramatic thriller about motherhood, starring Rose Byrne as Linda, taking care of a young daughter with a feeding disorder that necessitates virtual round-the-clock care. Bronstein chooses never to show Linda’s daughter in a full shot, reducing her almost entirely to a voice. That choice is disorienting and effective, as if taking the notion of an unbreakable bond between mother and daughter and shattering it, amplified through the frequently intense close-ups of Linda and the cacophonous, unrelenting sound of her daughter’s voice, evoking the strange feeling of loneliness that comes on from never ever having the chance to be alone.

Linda is virtually on her own as a caretaker because her husband Charles is a ship captain who is always away at sea. Stop and think about that for a second. It’s funny, albeit in the darkest way possible and as such, indicative of the darkly comical streak coursing through “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” one furthered in Linda’s occupation as a therapist, dispensing psychoanalysis even as both the script and Byrne cultivate the air of someone who looks like she’s on the couch even while she’s in the chair. She finds herself treating a new mother, Caroline (Danielle Macdonald), suffering from postpartum depression and an absent husband, and who thinks Linda is failing to meet her needs just as Linda herself receives treatment from a colleague (Conan O’Brien) who she is convinced is failing to meet her needs. A rare foray into legitimate acting, O’Brien is quite good, though in so many ways, Bronstein helps to sculpt his performance. By yoking the movie so resolutely to Linda’s point-of-view, it is difficult to surmise her reliability as a narrator, and how much her colleague’s brusque, even dismissive, attitude is the reality of what is occurring of merely her perception. “What is it you’re so sure I can’t help you with?” he asks at one point, a breathtaking moment that feels like a moment where we might be seeing him unadorned…but we can’t be sure.

That unreliability extends to the hole that opens in the ceiling of Linda’s apartment, flooding the place, and forcing her and her daughter to evacuate to a seedy motel. She keeps returning to the apartment, anyway, transfixed by the hole, and whether this is pure symbolism or something more supernatural is a question that Bronstein is content to leave unexplained. Those dueling sensations coalesce in Byrne’s mesmerizing turn, in equal measure conveying realism and madness, comedy and horror, and inviting as much disdain as empathy; you don’t necessarily like the destructive decisions she’s making even if you understand why she’s making them. Whether you take the conclusion to be real or imaginary, it can’t help but feel telegraphed, from a thousand movies before it as much as “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” nodding toward it the whole way. It also doesn’t much matter because Byrne sweeps you up and carries you along, making it feel as if Linda herself is being swept along by some unstoppable current, increasingly unable to fight against it, as if no longer living life but left wholly at its mercy. 

Juliet, Naked

In “First Reformed”, as a Reverend suffering a health crisis and a crisis of faith, Ethan Hawke gave a beautifully modulated performance, conveying a placid exterior meant to mask an anguished interior, understanding that his character’s torment never made itself visible, not until the very end, glimpsed merely in voiceover. In “Juliet, Naked”, on the other hand, as Tucker Crowe, a cult singer-songwriter who has not so much fallen on hard times as fallen off the grid, leaving a trail of divorces and children in his wake, Hawke lets it all hang out. He’s grown his hair shaggy and put on serious paunch, seriously accentuating it with his ratty t-shirts and posture, sort of thrusting the paunch out as he walks, take it or leave it, he seems to be saying, which brings home the way he plays the entire part. He is not someone who’s made peace, necessarily, but who has figured out how to just sort of ride the waves of life, doing so with alternate bemusement and struggle, someone who hardly seems to believe he was this other person so long ago yet simultaneously fesses up to the scars he left. A phone call Tucker makes to the daughter he’s never met is a familiar moment that feels new given how Hawke gives his character an earnest if bittersweet respect for his daughter’s wishes.

We learn about Tucker through the eyes of Duncan (Chris O’Dowd) a professor whose real job, so to speak, is Tucker Crowe, overseeing a Tucker Crowe fan group and running a web site entirely dedicated to their favorite recording artist, not just his music but his personal life and all the attending conspiracy theories. When Duncan receives an acoustic recording of Tucker’s most cherished album – called Juliet, Naked – as the movie opens, the Tucker enthusiast gushes about it online, to which his long-suffering girlfriend, Annie (Rose Byrne), perhaps having just suffered long enough, or perhaps genuinely not caring for the recording, or perhaps both, types a reply of pointed disagreement, peeving her generally inattentive boyfriend. Tucker, however, lurking online, sees Annie’s comment, emails her, and sparks a “You’ve Got Mail”-ish friendship that teases blooming into something more.

This is where we should stipulate that “Juliet, Naked” is based on a book by Nick Hornby, that longtime chronicler of music-obsessed manboys. Yet Hornby did not write the script. It was a screenplay by committee, including two women, beginning with Tamara Jenkins (and Jim Taylor) and concluding with Evgenia Peretz. That’s crucial. If normally Duncan would be the principal character, here he and his boorish behavior take a backseat, moving out of his house with Annie and essentially out of movie too when he cheats on Annie with a colleague whose appreciation for Tucker is more attractive to him than the actual colleague. It essentially moves Duncan out of the movie too, though he tries worming his way back in, never successfully, his late film plea to Annie functioning as deliberate desperation rather than enlightenment, a moment Byrne brilliantly plays not with any kind of creeping reassessment but self-evident truth that she’s already moved on.

If Hawke’s character bears similarity to his own life, in so much as he too has long been grappling with the after-effects of divorce, so does Byrne’s, her career too often marked by mere Love Interest roles where she is afforded one funny line for every four-to-five funny lines of the male lead, if she is allowed one funny line at all. “Juliet, Naked”, however, is Annie’s movie as much as Tucker’s, as if director Jesse Peretz saw this as an opportunity to see “High Fidelity” through the eyes of Laura. Byrne runs with the role, mining pathos from comedy and comedy from pathos, playing Annie not as someone trying to find herself but as someone who already has a solid sense of who she is and now is trying to figure out where she fits into this suddenly brand-new world.

Annie and Tucker’s ensuing relationship is never exactly unpredictable, evinced in his one-song keyboard concert where he is reluctantly re-enlisted to embrace his musical roots, which Hawke at least plays with an admirable sheepishness acknowledging the inherent schmaltz, but neither does it compulsively trend toward neat resolution. Annie and Tucker enjoy one another’s company, and that company makes them happy, but they also don’t submit to the myth that this happiness alone makes them complete. They need space to figure things out, and even as the movie winds up, they still haven’t figured everything out, only found the wherewithal to give it a go, standing, I realize now, in stark contrast to that rigid dictum what’s-his-name, that little green dude, espoused about how you only do or not. Nope, little dude, sometimes there is a try.

Unwinding with Rayna

Yesterday was a long day, and it was a long week and a half before yesterday, and so let's all just take a moment to unwind by watching Rose Byrne be funnier than anyone in a movie in 3 to 5 years.

Spy

Although “Spy” emanates from the mind of Paul Feig its opening scenes evoke Nancy Meyers. Susan Cooper (Melissa McCarthy), CIA bureaucrat in the vermin-infested offices of Langley, her desk covered in post-its like she’s an insurance adjustor at Allied, talks a suave Americanized version of 007, expositorily named Bradley Fine (Jude Law), through the paces at a glamorous locale. As he offs the bad guys of whom she keeps him expertly abreast, their dynamic falls into place. He ribs, she swoons, and when the mission ends and they have dinner, it becomes clear that she lusts for him though these feelings will never be reciprocated. It’s like she's Kate Winslet in “The Holiday” and he’s Rufus Sewell. But rather than house swapping and meeting a new man to unburden her emotions, Cooper’s vacation takes the form of a black-op, as she graduates from analyst to agent.

“Spy” turns on Cooper’s beloved Fine being murdered at the devious hands of Rayna Boyanov (Rose Byrne), a Bulgarian villain with a beehive of hair and an icy superiority complex who knows the location of a superbad nuke that another superbad dude wants. Since Rayna knows the identity of all CIA operatives, Cooper is put in the field under increasingly stereotypical secret identities, like a companionless loser with ten cats. Rather than stick to the personas the CIA has engendered for her, however, Susan rebels, dressing how she wants, acting and saying what she wants, putting a brush to the easel of her self in the midst of a Spy Game and painting with abandon. Her BFF, Nancy, back at basecamp, played by Miranda Hart with miraculous comic timing, distills all of “Spy” down to its essence when she cries “I cannot condone your sexy but reckless actions!” They can’t, maybe, but we can.

The hook in these movies is typically that an agent has gone rogue or is playing by his/her own rules. Cooper, however, isn’t playing by her own rules so much as writing a whole new set of them as she goes. You might recall McCarthy’s previous vehicle “The Heat”, a film in which she and Sandra Bullock are a pair of star crossed cops made to prove themselves professionally to doubtful fellow officers. There is no such proving ground in “Spy.” Ridiculing such cinematic sexism are Cooper’s fellow male undercover cohorts, Aldo (Peter Serafinowicz), an Italian operative who seemingly treats every female’s body as his personal playground, and, even better, Rick Ford, a chauvinist blowhard played with gleeful relish by Jason Statham as a kind of funhouse mirror version of every other character he’s ever played. He’s vigilantly insistent on hanging around against orders to save the day, only to continually make a mess that Cooper has to clean up.

McCarthy's characters typically come intact from moment one going eighty-five in a sixty-five. Here, however, her character morphs from a decided timidity to her characteristic ferocity. That awakening is tied, wonderfully, weirdly, to her relationship with Rayna. The latter, surrounded by a gaggle of obligatorily incompetent henchmen, winds up employing the deep cover Cooper as her personal bodyguard, a plot twist that generally makes no sense schematically but works like gangbusters emotionally. Repartee in spy movies often is packed with debonair double entendres, yet the dialogue here is an avalanche of obscene insults, as if the two of them are bonding strictly by giving one another shit. They’re like a wicked feminist spin on the buddy cops who somehow get along even though they don’t, and their antagonistic give-and-take is how Cooper finds her secret agent woman sea legs. Her and Rayna's final moment on screen contains a couple curse words but also a couple smiles, like they both know they’ll never quite encounter such an impeccable foil again.

Rose Byrne effortlessly embodies drolly hilarious haughtiness, and Miranda Hart deftly accentuates every scene in which she appears, but the film is undoubtedly McCarthy’s. The stable of remarkable performers in “Spy” orbit entirely around her, and her performance carves out authenticity from absolute absurdity. “Spy” is a violent film, perhaps surprisingly so given its caricatural nature; yet, in a way, “Spy” treats violence more knowingly than any standard issue frowning somber action drama. When a knife goes through a hand, and it does, it’s not nothing-to-see-here, it’s holy-gods-I-can’t-believe-that-just-happened. Neither can Cooper, and that brings her down to our level.

One death is so grisly that Cooper instantly combusts into projectile vomit, the finest use of an otherwise outmoded gag I can recall. She barfs and then she gets right back to beating in people’s skulls and cracking wise. The film is exaggerated, she’s palpable, and together they sing in beautiful foulmouthed harmony.

Neighbors

It’s a thin line between youth and middle-age, and the line becomes literal in “Neighbors” when a married couple with an infant daughter wake one morning to find a fraternity moving in next door. Yet it does not simply become a variation of old people yelling at young people to get off their lawn, but rather a raunch-prone illumination of the adage that youth is wasted on the young, and that only too late do adults realize this adage isn’t stock-in-trade but sheer blinding truth. Well, at least in theory. Because there is also a thin line between subversive and stupid, between making a statement and setting up gags, and “Neighbors” straddles that line throughout, if not expertly as least sufficiently. It can be dumb but never as dumb as its premise implies, often becoming a sharp and even unsettling story of what happens when the springtime of our lives becomes a withered summer.

The opening ten minutes of “Neighbors” is a salvo of first-time parent struggle as Mac (Seth Rogen) and Kelly (Rose Byrne) cope with responsibility and repetition. So when Delta Psi materializes one house over and puts tapper to keg, their child-rearing instincts assume the worst while another part of them cannot help but be aroused at the idea of youthful reinvigoration. The frat’s President is Teddy, played by Zac Efron as if Stan Gable were Achilles, who is not smart enough to have any future plans but is wily enough to entrap the couple next door by using their longing for days gone by against them. Mac and Kelly want these supposed students to behave but don’t want to appear uncool. So they try a peace offering and when that fails they try calling the cops, and that fails too. They take their case to the Dean (Lisa Kudrow), and while once upon a time Deans were only out to curb the kids' enthusiasm, it appears they've also turned on the grown-ups who will soon be paying to send their kids to college.

Teddy and the boys issue a declaration of war and Mac and Kelly quickly follow suit. Hijinks ensue. They are quite often of an expectant shock and awe variety, but every now and then a moment rises to prove that R-rated comedy can yield brutal honesty. Consider Rose Byrne’s bout with nudity. This isn’t mud wrestling, this is motherhood, up front and out loud. Still, it’s not hard to detect the Teddys of the multiplex texting their bros in its aftermath: “Rose Byrne’s boobs!”

Rogen has long subscribed to a silver screen persona of the Man Boy, sort of a Peter Pan slacker – grown up, but not really, still choosing to put – in the parlance of our times and of the film – bros before hos. Rogen and others of Judd Apatow Delta Phi have been taken to task for this seeming refusal to mature, and while “Neighbors” was directed by Nicholas Stoller and written by Andrew J. Cohen and Brendan O'Brien, a reactionary tone via Rogen is detectable. His character isn’t just about to have a kid, he has a kid, and a square job to support it. That, and as an actor Rogen finally shows the willingness to cede center stage to the lady, the incredibly talented and terribly underrated comedienne Byrne, who earns a priceless monologue explaining that she doesn’t simply want to be the Supportive Spouse of so many god-awful rom-coms come before. He disagrees, crying: “We can’t both be Kevin James!” But they can. They can, Hollywood. They are co-conspirators, fellow agents of their own awakening, and their domestic strife emerges as the film's heart.

 
Of course, whenever the script gets stuck, and it does, it simply resorts to improv or more neighborly pranks. Eventually those pranks escalate into somewhat violent and ethically questionable territory, and perhaps that is why the film just sort of forgets about the baby’s existence as it builds to the outrageous climax. The baby tethers these parents to reality and, in turn, the parents tether us to reality and at a certain point "Neighbors", which admittedly is catering to future frat pledges as much as the we-have-a-mortgage crowd, must jettison reality to exist as a suitable box-office earner for its studio overlords. "Growth is good but never overrides buffoonery in a certain type of film," states Hollywood Code Section 612.117 4(c).

At one point Teddy provides an overview of his frat's history, from the fortuitous invention of beer pong on down to the Toga Party which, of course, was born from the "Animal House", a film that inspired Judd Apatow and all his cinematic offspring, including those that helmed "Neighbors". They grow up, they move on, but they are brothers for life, bound in spirit to Bluto and Delta Tau Chi.

10 Most Un-Summery Summer Movies To See This Summer

The Summer Movie Season Of 2013 was, to this fan of the artsy-fartsy, hipstery doo-dah, the greatest Summer Movie Season Of All-Time, and I’m not exaggerating. It was the Summer Movie Season of Sofia and Greta and Brit-B-Brit and Jesse & Celine and Sarah Polley’s Family and the ladies of “20 Feet From Stardom” and the righteous tentpole majesty of “White House Down” – #notashamed – and Lake Bell getting hers. It was The Summer Movie Season that literally concluded on the last weekend of August by granting me My Favorite Film Of The Year. I genuinely had no idea summer movies could be so grand.

Alas, ‘tis now the Summer Movie Season Of 2014, and circumstances have swung considerably. Consulting the releases over the course of the next few months leaves me despondent with a forecast of further melancholy. Superheroes and more superheroes and more superheroes and giant robots and ninja turtles and Adam Sandler (but I repeat myself) and extra “Expendables” on top of the original “Expendables” who seem to completely contradict their own name by CONTINUALLY SHOWING UP FOR MORE MOVIES and refusing to extend an invite to Angelina Jolie because they TOTALLY KNOW SHE'D SHOW THEM UP and Lake Bell being rewarded for writing, directing and starring in one of the 2013’s best films by being arm candy for Jon Hamm in “Million Dollar Arm” because HOLLYWOOD LITERALLY HAS NO IDEA WHAT TO DO WITH WOMEN UNLESS THEY JUST DO IT THEIR DAMN SELVES. (Breathing into a bag.)

Lake Bell: "Okay. So. I had this idea for a really intense chamber piece where three women-"  Hollywood: "Woah. Hold yer horses there, Lake. We were thinking, what if instead you were the Love Interest in 'Million Dollar Arm' and we put you in a Sari?"

This is what we do, right? We moan. We groan. We gripe. Movies suck. They don’t make ‘em like they used to. Hollywood is awful. Earth is evil. The Universe is just a big fat poopy head. I’m playing right into the stereotype of the jaded film critic. Like those fussy dudes at The New Yorker, right? Everyone hates those guys cuz they hate everything. Except Richard Brody wrote the following: “The year 2013 has been an amazing one for movies, though maybe every year is an amazing year for movies if one is ready to be amazed by movies.” And it’s amazing how many people who probably think the film critics at The New Yorker hate everything are more than likely never ready to be amazed by the movies. They are more than likely ready to point out how that ketchup bottle wasn’t in the previous shot and now it is and this movie is LIES!!!!!!!!!!

Well, I want to be amazed. I do. And so I stopped with the woe-is-me and then I started looking around, and I started finding all sorts of potential diamonds in the sweaty, humidified, summery rough. Here then is the most un-summery summer movie preview on the Internet. Though I should advise, the majority of these films might not make to your town right away, if they make it to your own (heck, my town) at all. Nevertheless. (Release dates and release areas are noted in parentheses to give you a better understanding of what you’re not going to be able to see in which case you may have to go see “X Men: Days Of Future Past In The Present Indicative Tense”.)

10 Most Un-Summery Summer Movies To See This Summer 

God’s Pocket (May 9, limited release)

Even if this hadn't turned out to be one of Philip Seymour Hoffman's last efforts, I'd still have been gung-ho to see it. 

The Immigrant (May 16 in NY and LA)

In certain circles, this is as big as “The Dark Knight Rises.” Perhaps you’re not in those circles, perhaps you’re not even aware those circles exist, and that’s fine. But I’m in those circles. And I’m FREAKING OUT! 

The Love Punch (May 23, limited)

Pierce Brosnan and Emma Thompson are a retired couple out to get what’s owed them. “Jonathan! Bring me my green light!” 

Night Moves (May 30, limited)

It’s the latest from the hella realist Kelly Reichardt, an eco-thriller, and the buzz on the festival circuit last year was considerable if not deafening. Also, it provides me the perfect excuse to offer two "30 Rock" hyperlinks in a row (with a Katy Perry hyperlink tossed in just because). #ThisIsHowWeDo 

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 We interrupt this listicle to bring you The Godzilla Reboot (Reboot) Cast Power Rankings! Because This Godzilla Cast Is SO COOL! 

The Godzilla Reboot (Reboot) Cast Power Rankings

10. Ken Watanabe. I like Watanabe but I feel like this is the one place where they didn't get off the beaten path.

9. Aaron Taylor-Johnson. From Kick Ass to Vronsky to one-third of Blake Lively's ménage à trios to screaming and running away from Godzilla. Dude keeps you guessing. Respect.

8. Sean Bean. Whoops! Sorry! I'm confusing "Godzilla" with "Jupiter Ascending"! But don't you agree that Sean Bean should have been in this as a big game hunter gone rogue trying to tag the beast?

7. David Straithairn. This reminds me, I'd like to see a John Sayles-scripted "Godzilla." I imagine it would focus less on Godzilla itself and more on frustrated Tokyo building contractors. 

6. Victor Rasuk. I do recall watching "Raising Victor Vargas" and wondering: "Hmmm. How would Victor Vargas react to a Godzilla attack?" 

5. Elizabeth Olsen. The most unlikely female lead in a gargantuan summer blockbuster since Sienna Miller starred as Black Mascara, the winsome shit-talking villain of the old Confound Comics whose costume was skinny jeans and runny black mascara and whose superpower was a combination of cigarette-smoke and scotch breath that could paralyze a person. (Or did I dream that?) 

4. Richard T. Jones. Cuz this dude's the starting two-guard on the Oh! I Know That Guy I Just Don't Know His Name! All-Stars. 

3. Juliette Binoche. She's only # 3 because, really, once you act opposite Dane Cook, holding your own against Godzilla seems less like a sell-out than a relief. 

2. Bryan Cranston. If I had one wish this summer movie season it would be that "Godzilla's" ultimate reveal is that Cranston's character is actually Tim Whatley.

1. Sally Hawkins. It's always nice to have a rooting interest in a disaster movie and I am totally hitching my star to Sally's wagon. Survive, Sally. Survive. 

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The Fault In Our Stars (June 6)

It stars the Shailene-ster. What else do you need to know? It’s a mainstream release. It’ll be in your city. Just go. 

Life’s A Breeze (June 13, limited)

This modern-day Irish treasure hunt had a showing at the Siskel Center in March and I had to miss it. I won't miss it this time. By which I mean, I'll wait for it to be released on Netflix and watch it then.

Can A Song Save Your Life? (July 4)

This film, John Carney’s much anticipated follow-up to the stellar “Once”, has been re-titled “Begin Again” because, of course, all summer movie titles are required per Hollywood Law to possess no more than five words lest confused patrons think they’re stumbling into an art film. Cinema Romantico, however, refuses to honor the title “Begin Again” and will continue calling it “Can A Song Save Your Life?”, kind of like how a certain sect of Chicagoans stubbornly refuse to refer to the Sears Tower as the Willis Tower Because bitch, please. Wait. Where was I? Right. “Can A Song Save Your Life?” The reviews have been mixed, but this worries me not. After all, I can verify with 100% clarity that a song can save your life. And not a single person on this earth nor a single alien in the night sky can tell me any different. 

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We interrupt this listicle to ask the most pertinent single question of the Summer Movie Season. That is: How Many Funny Lines Will Rose Byrne Actually Be Allowed To Deliver In "Neighbors"? 

 My guess? One. Well, like, half of one. Maybe. Because maybe they cut her half of one funny line in post. Because they had to make room for Seth Rogen's nineteenth "Hey, everybody! I smoke pot!" joke.

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Land Ho! (July 11, NY and LA)

Aaron Katz’s follow-up to Cinema Romantico’s #1 Movie Of 2011 that earned a few jaw-dropping raves outta Sundance. I will hitchhike to Manhattan to see this if that’s what it comes to. 

Mood Indigo (July 18, limited)

A Michel Gondry film in which Audrey Tatou becomes the literal living embodiment of a Duke Ellington song. Which perfectly fits with my recurring dream where I meet a woman who becomes a literal living embodiment of Kathleen Edwards' "12 Bellevue." 

The Two Faces of January (August 8, limited)

Kirsten Dunst stars. And as a Dunst Completist, I have to see it. To quote Coach Norman Dale, "I apologize for nothing."