Debuting at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Spree is the latest dark comedy to set its sights on our social media-obsessed culture, zeroing in on the influencers who make a living displaying their “authentic” lives to rabid followers. While the film’s satirical spin may not offer intricate nuances to the subject matter, it delivers a breathless thrill ride with a deliciously sinister spin.
Spree follows Kurt Kunkle (Joe Keery), a wannabe influencer who’s spent years of his life striving for fame. Dissatisfied with his progress, Kurt sets a plan to draw new viewers in from his job as a ride-share driver, with his obsession for attention leading down a deadly path.
While many are likely to compare Spree to other psychotic thrillers (Nightcrawler, American Psycho, and Jokercome to mind), this film thankfully develops its own voice from its familiar trappings. Indie craftsman Eugene Kotlyarenko pushes the envelope with a pulsating sense of tension and pace, embracing a handheld camerawork style that fittingly encapsulates its subject matter while being conveyed with aplomb technical ability (genuinely happy to see the long-awaited revival of the found footage subgenre, with the film featuring a succinct combination of phone, dashboard, and security cameras that never feels gimmicky). Spree’s relentless 93 minute running time rarely lets up, portraying Kurt’s dizzying mission by properly escalating the mania at hand.
For as twisted Spree gets, Kotlyarenko’s script never forgets its finite sense of purpose. His searing portrait of the social media generation aptly criticizes the vapid behavior that drives people, observing how many promote themselves for clicks and followers over substantive dynamics. A well-incorporated satirical bend often mines laugh-out-loud moments from these portrayals, as Kotlyarenko flexes an astute understanding of how our culture operates (most the biggest laughs come from the minute details, whether it’s Kurt’s testing vapes in his try-hard vlogs or his bizarre EDM SoundCloud playlist).
The comedic first half quickly turns dour as Kurt’s victims expand past cringe-worthy millennial types, with the writer/director thankfully taking to task the deplorable extremes many undertake to reach worldwide fame. I particularly enjoyed the film’s criticism of self-entitled loners who blame their failures on the world around them, serving as a prime reflection of the white privilege that motivated several recent mass murders. These tonalities could feel desperate in the wrong hands, yet Joe Keery’s energetic performance ties the material together seamlessly. As Kurt, Keery unearths a demented lust for attention that’s always grounded in a sense of humanity, never allowing the character to drift into caricature territory.
Spree is always captivating to watch, yet I can’t help feeling some of its dramatic potential was left untapped. Kotlyarenko’s script can read as sanctimonious at times, spelling out its intended message with third act speeches that have the characters turn into ciphers for the screenwriter. I also wish the film did more to give Kurt’s character an arc, with a quick opening montage failing to display his transition from an earnest creator to a deranged killer (it’s clear the character is a byproduct of his conditions, but those elements come off as mere window dressing).
Spree’s abrasive style offers a darkly alluring condemnation of influencer culture driven by a career-best performance from Joe Keery.
While watching his initial batch of movies, you see a specific pattern emerging. His neurotic quirks are pretty evident, but it is his trademark Woody Allen appearance that really takes off. Sure, it is not as distinct and defined as Charlie Chaplin’s bowler hat, cane, and moustache. But Woody Allen’s messy crusty hair and glasses have become as much part of his personality as has his ticks. And unlike Chaplin, Allen’s look was pretty much part of his actual persona.
It is pretty much in full display in all its glory in Play it Again Sam, a movie that he did not direct but wrote and was based on his hit Broadway show playing around the same his first movie Take the Money and Run released. The play also marked Diane Keaton’s first collaboration with Woody Allen and was the beginning of their long and illustrious association.
The film is about Allan Felix, who idolizes Humphrey Bogart and recently went through a messy divorce. His feelings of inadequacy also come from his sexual relationship with his ex-wife or lack of it. Also complicating things is his self-pity at how he thinks he will never be able to match up to the suave coolness of Rick, Bogart’s character from Casablanca, a movie he also idolizes.
His best friend Tony and his wife, Dick, and Linda (Tony Roberts and Diane Keaton, reprising their roles from the Broadway play), tries to set him up with multiple other ladies. Eventually, he realizes he has fallen in love with Linda and decides to pursue her. All this complicates things for everyone involved as the movie bizarrely plays out like Casablanca, right down to the climax involving the three and Bogart thrown in for good measure at an airstrip.
The way it manages to draw parallels with Casablanca is pretty amusing. How slavishly it adapts Casablanca might be a hindrance for some, but you can’t help but smile how it manages to draw from the classic so well.
While watching the film, it also surprises you at how straight it plays out. After the relative kookiness of his first two movies, Take the money and run and Bananas, it nice to see a linear film from Allen like this one. It’s conventional structure and straightforward nature also probably came from the original Broadway play.
Though Allen didn’t direct the film, it has his stamp all over it. The dream sequence in Italian where he imagines his friend Tony coming to kill him in an Italian bakery seems so much his own creation and could have come from any of his movies. Also, his constant flights of fancy when he gets nervous wand he gets relationship advice from Humprhey Bogart is textbook Allen.
But calling it a Woody Allen movie is unfair to the movie’s director Herbert Ross. He is a guy who went on to direct many classics and also had a very long and fruitful collaboration with Neil Simon, another legendary writer known more for his comic creations.
My favorite scene in the movie is when the lady Dick and Linda managed to set up for him on a date, comes to his house with them. His attempts at carefully curating books, music, and other props and littering them across his place to make him look suave are hilarious. lt would hit the nerve of anyone who has ever tried to impress someone by pretending to be more appealing and interesting than they are.
To sum up, Play it Again, Sam, is Woody Allen’s beatify ode to Casablanca. In the climax, when Allen repeats Bogart’s famous, “getting on the plane” speech verbatim, Linda gets impressed and says its beautiful, oblivious to the fact that it was a line from a movie. Prompting Allen to admit, “It’s from Casablanca. … I’ve waited my whole life to say it!” It was an actor playing dress up and playing out parallels to his favorite movie. Isn’t that what we all secretly want to do?
While watching his initial batch of movies, you see a specific pattern emerging. His neurotic quirks are pretty evident, but it is his trademark Woody Allen appearance that really takes off. Sure, it is not as distinct and defined as Charlie Chaplin’s bowler hat, cane, and mustache. But Woody Allen’s messy crusty hair and glasses have become as much part of his personality as has his ticks. And unlike Chaplin, Allen’s look was pretty much part of his actual persona.
It is pretty much in full display in all its glory in Play it Again Sam, a movie that he did not direct but wrote and was based on his hit Broadway show playing around the same his first movie Take the Money and Run released. The play also marked Diane Keaton’s first collaboration with Woody Allen and was the beginning of their long and illustrious association.
The film is about Allan Felix, who idolizes Humphrey Bogart and recently went through a messy divorce. His feelings of inadequacy also come from his sexual relationship with his ex-wife or lack of it. Also complicating things is his self-pity at how he thinks he will never be able to match up to the suave coolness of Rick, Bogart’s character from Casablanca, a movie he also idolizes.
His best friend Tony and his wife, Dick, and Linda (Tony Roberts and Diane Keaton, reprising their roles from the Broadway play), tries to set him up with multiple other ladies. Eventually, he realizes he has fallen in love with Linda and decides to pursue her. All this complicates things for everyone involved as the movie bizarrely plays out like Casablanca, right down to the climax involving the three and Bogart thrown in for good measure at an airstrip.
The way it manages to draw parallels with Casablanca is pretty amusing. How slavishly it adapts Casablanca might be a hindrance for some, but you can’t help but smile how it manages to draw from the classic so well.
While watching the film, it also surprises you at how straight it plays out. After the relative kookiness of his first two movies, Take the money and run and Bananas, it nice to see a linear film from Allen like this one. It’s conventional structure and straightforward nature also probably came from the original Broadway play.
Though Allen didn’t direct the film, it has his stamp all over it. The dream sequence in Italian where he imagines his friend Tony coming to kill him in an Italian bakery seems so much his own creation and could have come from any of his movies. Also, his constant flights of fancy when he gets nervous wand he gets relationship advice from HumphreyBogart is textbook Allen.
But calling it a Woody Allen movie is unfair to the movie’s director Herbert Ross. He is a guy who went on to direct many classics and also had a very long and fruitful collaboration with Neil Simon, another legendary writer known more for his comic creations.
My favorite scene in the movie is when the lady Dick and Linda managed to set up for him on a date, comes to his house with them. His attempts at carefully curating books, music, and other props and littering them across his place to make him look suave are hilarious. lt would hit the nerve of anyone who has ever tried to impress someone by pretending to be more appealing and interesting than they are.
To sum up, Play it Again, Sam, is Woody Allen’s beatify ode to Casablanca. In the climax, when Allen repeats Bogart’s famous, “getting on the plane” speech verbatim, Linda gets impressed and says its beautiful, oblivious to the fact that it was a line from a movie. Prompting Allen to admit, “It’s from Casablanca. … I’ve waited my whole life to say it!” It was an actor playing dress up and playing out parallels to his favorite movie. Isn’t that what we all secretly want to do?
A struggling laborer named Herschel Greenbaum (Seth Rogen) immigrates to America in 1919 with dreams of building a better life for his beloved family. One day, while working at his factory job, he falls into a vat of pickles and is brined for 100 years. The brine preserves him perfectly and when he emerges in present-day Brooklyn, he finds that he hasn’t aged a day. But when he seeks out his family, he is troubled to learn that his only surviving relative is his great-grandson, Ben Greenbaum (also played by Rogen), a mild-mannered computer coder whom Herschel can’t even begin to understand.
An American Pickle is a movie that caught my attention the moment I saw a commercial for it while watching television the other night. Up until that commercial aired, I had not heard a single thing about it which surprised me because I am genuinely a fan of Rogen’s work. Yes, he has had his fair share of duds over the years, but the same can be said about a lot of actors.
While it’s definitely not without its missteps, Brandon Trost’s An American Pickle is a fascinatingly strange movie that you just can’t help but appreciate. It’s not one of the best movies of the year or anything – not even close – but it is most certainly one of the strangest and most ambitious so far.
Apparently Rogen had the idea for this film as far back as 2007 but wasn’t able to get it made until now and I’m glad he finally did. This movie was quite entertaining from beginning to end even if it didn’t have a ton of meat on the script. Like with most movies, I didn’t go into An American Pickle knowing anything about it as I only saw that one commercial. I literally just knew it was a new Seth Rogen movie and that was it, and I’m glad I went in as blind as I did.
A large majority of this story plays out like some sort of weird, trippy episode of Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasmor something. It has that sort of sitcom-esque feel but not in a bad way. It was actually kind of fascinating to see the story of a man who was alive one-hundred years ago suddenly wake up in present-day America after being preserved for such a long time and have to adapt to modern life.
We see him do things like dance to music for the first time in a century, we see him get his mind blown by how easy it is to make a cup of coffee nowadays. He is absolutely shocked to hear about something called a taxi and has to learn how it operates and what it does. Have we seen this done before? Sure. But the way Trost approaches this story was fresh and funny. On top of all of this, Rogen is just great in the film as well. I was truly stunned to see how well he managed to pull off two completely different performances and was quite happy to see how much he committed to each of them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBC0pTh6GDM
One of the strongest aspects of the film is the dynamic between Rogen’s two characters Herschel and Ben. Herschel is absolutely the definition of an old-timer, for obvious reasons. Ben is a computer programmer who has spent the past five years working on a product called Boop Bop which rates companies on ethics. It doesn’t take long at all for the two of them to realize that they have nothing in common which is when the arguing and fights start to happen. The duality and polar-opposite characters of Ben and Herschel actually made for some of the most interesting and entertaining characters of the year so far. It was deeply funny to see how these men had to deal with one another during one scene and then the next.
If I had to pinpoint the biggest problem with An American Pickle, it would have to be that the film never really fully commits to its outlandish concept. What I mean is that screenwriter Simon Rich doesn’t go nearly as deep into this story as he could have. There are a lot of wild things that happen throughout the course of the film, but sadly, we don’t really get a lot of insight into them. One moment, in particular, shows a group of citizens incredibly angry at Herschel and it’s supposed to be a sad scene where the audience is supposed to feel extremely bad for him. The problem is that we never see how it affects Herschel himself. He just kind of eats up all the complaints and moves on.
There are a lot of themes that the film tries to tackle and it doesn’t really do any of them justice. At least, not one-hundred percent. It makes attempts at touching on capitalism, cancel culture, and religious values but doesn’t go deep enough. It’s all relatively surface-level stuff which was quite disappointing to see. Had this film went for it and actually told a compelling story with layers, this might have been one of the best and most surprising movies of the year. But what we got is a funny and entertaining movie with not a lot of substance or messages to take away from it. With some movies, that’s okay. An American Pickle is one of those movies. It’s funny and shockingly fun to watch, but just know that this isn’t going to be a heavily deep experience.
An American Pickle may not delve deep enough into its great concept or themes, but it makes up for it with an amazingly funny dual Seth Rogen performance.
Pearl (Larsen Thompson) lives with her mother, Eve (Sarah Carter) and step-father, Anthony (Nestor Carbonell). Then out of the blue one day, Anthony takes a rifle and shoots her mother, Helen and then himself. Now an orphan, Pearl only has her grandmother, Eve (Barbara Williams) to turn to, but Eve has problems with alcohol which leaves Pearl without many options.
Pearl’s only hope is to turn to family friends, but through a little digging the family lawyer finds one of Helen’s ex-boyfriends, Jack Wolf (Anthony LaPaglia) who may also be her real father.
Jack is a suicidal artist with a possible drinking problem, but with very little options, Pearl moves in with the man who may be her real father. Pearl’s exclusive private school has also turned their back on her. Considering the trauma that she has gone through it’s decided that Pearl will have to go to a regular high school.
Luckily that’s where Pearl meets Sylvia (Melissa Macedo) and they soon hit it off and form an unlikely bond despite Sylvia knowing the extent of Pearl’s privilege. Sylvia also meets a dashing young man named Zack (Nighttrain Schickele) and as their romance blossoms, life starts to get better and she finds that a new life may not be all that bad.
Pearl is a movie with a ‘made for TV’ quality that was lucky enough to get a digital and Laemmle Virtual Cinema release. Directed and written by Bobby Roth who’s best known for directing episodes of television’s best-known shows, it seems that on this occasion Roth is out of touch with his chosen subject.
There’s no character development whatsoever, no connection or chemistry among its cast and characters have massive mood swings which make no sense within the relationships they’ve already established, seemingly only done to move the plot along. Even if that means leaving plot threads open.
There are so many things shoved into the plot that they have little time to breathe, whereas the movie could have been served better concentrating on one or two things (Pearl’s real parentage and the trauma of losing her mother for example). However, Pearl makes no attempt at what could have been an emotional, albeit predictable drama leaving it feeling uninspired.
Tapping into the limitless potential of cyber technology, several modern horror films have embraced our new tech wave with inventive results. Efforts like Unfriendedand Searchinghave glued audiences into the normalized view of computer screens, utilizing our habitual web searches as a canvas for lurking scares to be unleashed. While those films showed promise in their experimental nature, Shudder’s latest horror film Host is the first offering to mine potent scares from its lo-fi premise.
Set during the current COVID-19 pandemic, Host follows six friends who decide to bond by performing a seance over Zoom. What was supposed to be an adventurous journey turns sinister when one of the friends tells a fake story about a dead acquaintance, which births an unknown entity that wreaks havoc on the call.
Director Rob Savage accomplishes an impressive feat with his minimalist, made in quarantine horror outing. The amount of preparation to make this production run smoothly was exhaustive (Savage had to coordinate the scares from afar while teaching his cast a variety of stunt techniques), yet none of those challenges appear in the final product. The naturalism Savage creates is an essential asset to the atmosphere built here, grounding his narrative in our current zeitgeist with a seamless effect. The dialogue flows naturally without feeling overwritten, while the unheralded cast offers convincing performances as an accustomed group of friends.
Host succeeds most at delivering the unpretentious thrills that horror fans crave. A truncated 56 minute run time allows for the director to trim the fat and focus on developing a sense of unease from the jump, building a lingering sense of dread that bursts once the set pieces are released. Utilizing a refreshing amount of ingenious practical effects, the scares land with stellar results. Savage’s mixture of creative design work and pertinent timing allows these frames to hit with more impact than most mainstream horror outings, displaying the makeshift spirit that makes the genre so beloved.
Host does a lot to impress, yet it’s clear there’s still some room for refinement. Gemma Hurley, Jed Shepard, and Savage’s screenplay sticks to horror conventions with their supernatural premise, never discovering a fresh direction to take the narrative in. What the film misses deeply is a substantive core, lacking a level of depth that would have made the uneasy horror moments resonate on a grander level (the current-day setting seems like a missed opportunity). Given the circumstances though, it’s an achievement to create a fully-formed film, let alone one with Host’s level of craftsmanship.
Delivering a mixture of creativity and ingenuity to the horror genre, Host marks a promising debut from director Ron Savage.
