'Too Late' Review: Stand-Up Comics Must Survive Getting Eaten Alive
Monstrous bosses have been in the news quite a bit recently, but luckily, we haven’t gotten any stories of Hollywood execs eating human flesh… yet. Without giving too much away (although I kind of just did), having a monster of a boss serves as the narrative jumping-off point for Too Late. Director D.W. Thomas (in her debut feature) takes on this fraught subject matter by running the genre gamut from romantic comedy to body horror to social satire.
Alyssa Limperis stars as Violet, an overworked assistant and aspiring comedian. Violet is at her boss’s beck and call day and night, recruiting fresh talent for his comedy showcase “Too Late,” all while promoting her own small scale stand-up show and writing her own material on the side. Known mainly for her online character sketches, Limperis carries the movie in every direction it wants to go while keeping it all grounded.
The supporting cast is rounded out with comedy talent, including a small part for world-famous funny-man Fred Armisen, and Ron Lynch, who makes a meal of his role (so to speak) as Violet’s monster-boss Bob Devore. The other standouts are Violet’s love interest, the up-and-coming stand-up Jimmy Rhodes, played by Will Weldon, and her best friend Belinda, played by Jenny Zigrino.
Visually, the filmmakers immerse us in the nighttime world of stand-up comedy, keeping things sufficiently spooky and dark with the occasional bright flash of neon from a theater marquee. Coupled with the moody cinematography, the superb special makeup effects provide some legit scares. This joyful ode to low-budget genre filmmaking packs a lot in to 80 minutes. If you want some scary summer fun, check out Too Late.
80 minutes. 'Too Late' will be distributed by Gravitas Ventures, and starts playing in select theaters and On Demand this Friday, June 25.
Leave it to David Cross to Bring Us The Catharsis We Need, in 'The Dark Divide'
I’ll get the obvious question out of the way first after I tell you that The Dark Divide is about a lepidopterist (that’s a butterfly and moth guy) played by David Cross (that’s the guy who plays Tobias on Arrested Development) who goes on a month-long expedition in a vast expanse of Pacific Northwest wilderness as he processes his grief for his late wife. The question is: how much of David Cross’s screen-time does he spend in his tighty whities? That would be about 30 percent. The next question is: what are the chances this movie will make you cry? I’d say much higher than 30 percent.
The movie’s two biggest performances are its biggest standouts. First, Debra Messing, as Thea, the aforementioned lepidopterist Dr. Robert Pyle’s wife, who battles cancer and whose death inspires her husband’s expedition. Her role is not particularly complicated, but it’s quite a difficult acting challenge to pull off. The depth that she provides in her performance lets us understand the depth of meaning that goes into Bob’s journey in the woods. And next, of course, David Cross as Dr. Pyle. He’s in nearly every frame of the movie and doesn’t hit a false note. I was struck by his utter lack of self-consciousness (exhibit A: tighty whities), which extends from the heart-wrenching scenes he shares with Messing, to the scenes where he has to carry a lot of meaning in his body and wordlessly on his densely bearded face as he struggles against the forest.
A journey of self-discovery in nature is always a good bet, for me at least. But The Dark Divide takes on many more layers of meaning given, uh, the world we’re living in right now. It’s a movie about living through something difficult, something that seems impossible at times. It got me thinking about catharsis, which I know is a little English 201 but stay with me: it is because of how difficult and emotionally draining something is that makes the relief of getting through it feel so powerful. I feel like that’s something good to keep in mind as we all continue to live through this wild, possibly Bigfoot-infested, Gifford Pinchot National Forest of a life.
Distributed by Strike Back Studios, REI Co-op Studios, and the National Wildlife Federation, The Dark Divide is available on VOD today.
'Feels Good Man' Review: More Than Just a Frog Meme Gone Bad
Quick Take: Feels Good Man is an entertaining and informative documentary that sneaks in an emotional story of perseverance in the face of our crazy, meme-obsessed online world.
Here’s something I hope you’ll all agree with: Nazis are bad. I don’t like them, and I don’t want to be associated with them. If, somehow against my will, I ever was associated with them, and something I wrote or made was twisted by racists and bigots and alt-right trolls for their own hateful ends, that would be pretty much the bummer of a lifetime. Well, unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened to cartoonist Matt Furie, the subject of Arthur Jones’s new documentary Feels Good Man. One moment, Furie’s drawing a fun and goofy cartoon frog and calling him Pepe. A few years later (seemingly out of nowhere if you weren’t following the minute-to-minute happenings of 4chan) Pepe is put on the Anti-Defamation League’s official list of hate symbols. So, Furie is left with no choice but to fight back against the evil and gross forces that took his character away from him.
I was sold on Feels Good Man when the filmmakers interview John Michael Greer, an occultist. He says that if you really want to wrap your head around the rise of the alt-right in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election, you have to understand a little thing called “meme magic.” Sounds about as reasonable as any other explanation. The filmmakers do an adept job of contextualizing the politics surrounding the Pepe controversy without losing sight of how it all affects Furie, the emotional center of the story.
Feels Good Man is a success because its character study of Matt Furie doubles as an instructive guide on how to fight right-wing extremism. Furie is such a loveable figure because it is clear he wants so badly just to be a good person. This simple motivation is enough for him to get involved and stay involved in the fight against the online trolls, amoral political opportunists, and all-around bad people who made Pepe a symbol of hate.
At the end of the film, to sum up whether or not Pepe will ever be able to return to his intended place in the universe (simply an innocuous and friendly stoner frog), my main man Greer leaves us with a parting shot of mystical wisdom: “You can’t put the genie back in the bottle, but you can send it somewhere else.” For Matt Furie’s sake, and for all of our sake, I hope the magic man is right.
Distributed by Ready Fictions, Feels Good Man is available on-demand this Friday, September 4, 2020.
'Run This Town' is a Biting Political Thriller for the Millennial Generation
Writer-director Ricky Tollman’s feature debut Run This Town is a political thriller mixed with biting commentary on the state of the millennial generation.
Set in 2013 Toronto, the story centers on the lead up to the explosive substance abuse scandal that ensnared the controversial Mayor, Rob Ford.
Tollman’s film explores how the millennial generation navigates the halls of power in politics and media. Rob Ford (Damian Lewis, unrecognizable under prosthetic makeup), as a sort of dumb-politics John the Baptist presaging Donald Trump, makes for the perfect fulcrum for a millennial-focused political-scandal movie. The film’s performances illustrate how familiar millennial archetypes make compromises with, and are compromised by, the structures that allow a Rob Ford to come to power in the first place.
The plot focuses primarily on Bram (Ben Platt), an eager but slightly incompetent young journalist interning at a Toronto newspaper. With his eyes on something bigger than the best-brunch-spot listicles he’s being assigned, Bram, by sheer dumb-luck, ends up getting a tip that there might be something strange going on in the Mayor’s office. Kamal (Mena Massoud), an immigrant working for the virulently anti-immigrant Ford, is the Mayor’s Special Assistant and the ringleader of the young political staffers, including the hyper-competent Ashley (Nina Dobrev). The staffers are shown to be doing the actual work of governing the city—all while putting out the fires started by PR nightmare Mayor Ford.
The stories of Bram, Kamal, and Ashley represent the ways that the ambitions of their generation are undercut by their elders and institutional forces beyond their control. Whether it’s the pernicious incompetence and vitriolic political leadership of Rob Ford, or the explosive growth of clickbait “journalism”— unstoppable despite the best efforts of Bram’s editor Judith (Jennifer Ehle)— the deck is in so many ways stacked against the young people in Tollman’s film.
RUN THIS TOWN (2020)
Starring Ben Platt, Mena Massoud, Nina Dobrev, Scott Speedman, Jennifer Ehle, Damian Lewis
Directed by Ricky Tollman
Written by Ricky Tollman
Distributed by Oscilloscope, Twitter, Quiver. 99 minutes. Opening this Friday at the Laemmle Monica Film Center and On Demand.