LDP and Jr. were both battling some bugs this weekend, so that meant it was spent lying back and watching some flicks.
Smile (2022) is...alright, I guess? I don't know. We tried watching it three nights in a row (Wednesday through Friday night) because we heard how good the second one is, and we wanted to see the first to set the barometer, but I just kept falling asleep. It isn't outright bad, and featured fine performances by lead Sosie Bacon and support Kevin Gallner, but it just never got out of second gear. A whole load of nothing happens, JUMP SCARE, freak out, JUMP SCARE, repeat. A premise like this, where the protagonist's sanity is called into question, could've used a lot more of some nightmarish imagery and clever direction. 5/10
Luckily, Smile 2 (2024) delivers, overall. Starting to just a few days after the first, we jump right into the build to pop singer Skye Riley's (Naomi Scott) comeback tour, fresh off of a year long hiatus due to a drug-induced car accident that claimed the life of her boyfriend. She's cursed in a similar fashion to Rose (Bacon) in the first, but this entry decides to go quite a bit heavier into the insanity angle. Scott delivers a hell of a performance here, as she continues losing her grip on reality, and they explore the nature of the curse much better. In the end, it brings into question whether or not the entire second half of the movie even happened or was a pained hallucination, and that finale was outright insane.
I can't give it a heaping ton of praise, though, because 2h7m is too steep a runtime for something that still relies on jump scares for the majority of it. What I will say, though, is that writer/director Parker Finn's follow-up is such an improvement that I'm looking forward to what he does next. He has something great in him, I can feel it, and it'll just take some prodding to get it out. 6.5/10
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To wash that down, we cruised on with the biopic of legendary humorist Doug Kenney in A Futile and Stupid Gesture (2018), the brilliant comic mind that took the Harvard Lampoon and turned it into the National Lampoon, revolutionizing the voice of American comedy in the process. This is so jam packed with witty barbs and clever bending of the fourth wall that it's easy to lose sight of how the story ends, made the better by having comic character actor legend Martin Mull play the "today" version of Doug and Will Forte delivering a career highlight as Doug how he was. Even the fact that none of the actors playing the Lampoon crew look like their real life counterparts is a punchline in this.
FOOD FIGHT!!! 7.5/10
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To spin off of that, we went with Saturday Night (2024), a romanticized retelling of the 90 minutes before the debut of SNL. With this, I think we're starting to really see the fleshing out of the Jason Reitman/Gil Kenan team, in that they're pining nostalgic for an era of American comedy that the late Ivan Reitman had such a hand in creating, that so many people Jason likely could've called "uncle" or "aunt" in his youth made famous. It's not great, but it's entertaining, and no doubt has some considerable veracity to how events really unfolded that evening.
Plagued by almost everything that could go wrong doing so, Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) navigates the chaos that could make or break his career.
This paired nicely with Futile, as so many of the early SNL writers and actors worked for the Lampoon beforehand, and captures some of the chaos that has legendarily unfolded before the cameras go live on a staple of television. 7/10.
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Now to stop laughing, we get Azazel Jacobs's exploration of grief and family drams in His Three Daughters (2023), where three sisters (Carrie Coon, Natasha Lyonne, and Elizabeth Olsen) are forced together as their father dies in hospice care. Old wounds are reopened, some are healed, and the frustration of dealing with unresolved bullshit comes to the forefront.
This one hit home, for many reasons. My sister and I had these arguments. My aunts and my father had these arguments. My mother and her siblings, too. Any of us that aren't only children will, eventually. And the ending is spot the fuck on. There's no major Hollywood "and then we all lived happy," just the sense that life goes on, and maybe we learned to be a little kinder to each other the next we speak, or maybe we didn't. 7.5/10
