ANNETTE

French director Leos Carax (Holy Motors, 2012) has staged a new film—a comical, magical, rollicking, sprawling rock opera—chosen as the opening night feature at Cannes 2021. 

Annette, written by American pop duo Sparks (Ron & Russell Mael), offers sharp twists amidst a comedy of egos in meta mode. “Henry McHenry” (Adam Driver) is an entertainer—two-thirds stand-up comic and one-third performance artist. “Ann Desfranoux” (Marion Cotillard) is a fast-rising star of world-class opera. They meet in a heady whirlwind of paparazzi and favorable reviews. Youthful, successful, and accelerated, they’re soon married. Baby Annette arrives. Now parents, Henry and Ann begin to change in strange ways. The father, in particular, seems to lose his footing. His grasp on morality loosens. 

Director Carax is a master of perspective—of camera, yes, but also of dialogue—moving quickly from first person to second to third. The benefit therefrom is a pleasantly jumbled feel that amplifies Henry’s stream-of-consciousness self-absorption particularly well. Perhaps flowing from the fact that Henry and Ann both perform on stage to live audiences, compositions and staging throughout evoke live theater; an off-Broadway musical, one might say. Carax keeps the story moving along quickly, without sacrificing detail, insight, or mood. 

Both lead actors perform phenomenally, but Cotillard’s skills are subtler. Driver’s Henry is the tour-de-force of his career. As the arrogant comedian losing his marbles on stage, Driver single-handedly performs an argument between Henry and his wife. It’s a magnificent feat of acting, alternating between the overflowing emotions of the two characters. 

Ultimately, the film satisfies in myriad ways, not the least of which are Sparks’ clever lyrics and catchy music. Annette is also a cautionary tale for young lovers who might beget a child only to treat her/him/them as a marionette. The turpentine tears will flow, as Saint Geppetto is my witness. 

the international CRITIQUE rating:

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Dear Streaming Services: It’s About Your Menu “Design”

Yes, I am about to complain about the menus on streaming sites, and I won’t apologize. Because: America. I even let HBO Max know that I’m fed up (details below).

There’s little danger that anyone would mistake what the streaming services do as curation—they’re dumps. One need only look at the “Recently Added” tray. Something like 20 movies, new and old, no rhyme or reason, dumped onto the menu. Do the services think we get a thrill from that, because we don’t.

Netflix, HBO Max, Amazon Prime Video, and the others probably look proudly upon their pages, beaming about the plethora of choices. On every page! Under every category! Note: The industry word for the horizontal sections/categories/genres you see on screen is “trays.”

On Prime Video, the thumbnail (for each movie) is approximately 4.5 x 7 inches, or 0.22 sq. ft. on a 48-inch television screen. That means you can fit a little more than 34 streaming-service thumbnails on a standard movie poster. If your screen is smaller, you can fit many more. And, just for the record, any given screen view on Prime Video boasts 18 movie thumbnails.

It’s all too much too look at. Worse, it diminishes the grandeur and importance of cinema. How can the streaming services make their menus better? I don’t know, it’s definitely above my pay grade. But, would making the thumbnails bigger hurt? I don’t think so, and personally, I don’t need to see 18 choices on every view—of any type of menu, honestly.

I asked WarnerMedia Entertainment’s (HBO Max’s parent company) Communications VP Chris Willard about all this on December 30th, and he told me he’d “get back to [me] after the holidays.” When he did, as promised, Mr. Willard was actually quite helpful, if unmistakably being a good PR man for his company. He relayed that a whopping two-thirds of the time, viewers look for something specific they had in mind before even signing on. “They’re going back to something they were already watching or they’re seeking something in particular,” Willard said. As for the other third, he insisted they’re in the good hands of… HBOMax “curators.” I stand corrected!

V.O.D. Review: Slapped! The Movie

Swingin’ &  Swappin’

Baudy, buddy raunch-com from talented L.A. troupe

By Andres Solar

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: The young Angelino director-writer-producer Alex Magaña is one of the freshest, most intriguing indie voices in Hollywood today. I lauded the potential I saw in his previous V.O.D. piece 29 to Life (2018) right here on these pages.

The good news is that his latest on Amazon Prime, Slapped! The Movie, shows just as much potential, and in totally different aspects of filmmaking. Basically, the list of Magaña’s apparent talents has just doubled in length.

Okay, so I’m going to get the bad news about this most recent V.O.D. release out of the way, because the focus ought to be on what’s coming down the pike (or the Pacific Coast Highway, if you prefer) from the bunch at the helmer’s ACM Films imprint.

I’ll even take it a rare step further and tell you a bit about myself, as a disclaimer of sorts, so highly do I regard this burgeoning filmmaker Magaña. Firstly, Slapped! indicates over and over—as a raunchy buddy comedy with plenty of gross-out humor—that it’s aimed at a late-teens to early-20s audience. Your critic is 51 years old, and I’m certain I would have liked this picture a whole lot more if those digits were reversed. Secondly, for the most part, I review art films. In my own defense, I should say that I watch all kinds of movies, including vulgar comedies, and I happen to love more than a couple of them. But more on that later.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with traveling well-worn trails in movie-making. “It’s very difficult to be original,” the fabulous director and sexploitation queen Doris Wishman (Nude on the Moon, 1961) once told me. Makes sense. So, one hopes that a filmmaker who’s heavily influenced by another (director, film, genre…) will make it their own, thereby rendering the influence of the source material neutral when assessing the overall work.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the case with Slapped!, which the director himself describes as Freaky Friday (1976) meets American Pie (1999). Despite fine acting by the co-leads (Magaña as “Alex” and co-writer Matt Lowe as “Matt”), the “bodily switcheroo” nearly always feels like the old gimmick that it is. More than once while watching, I wished that they had written the film without the Freaky-Friday-for-bros device. The buddy chemistry between Alex and Matt always feels real and deep, so one would like to see them work together again sans the gimmicks.

Next, we look at the comedic aspects themselves, the heart of the debaucherous teen comedy (with the above disclaimer in mind). The attempts at gross-out humor are all misses here. The mere presence of semen and vomit on screen is not enough for laughs. It takes more work than that. For a fairly recent example, look at the successful potty humor of Bridesmaids (2011), and the “dress fitting” scene, in particular. The hilarity there derives from the gross-outs being only one element of the scene. The means, not the end.

There’s also at least one problematic instance of misfiring in the insult comedy department, involving a play on the word “Groupon.” On the other hand, in another scene, the fictional star of a YouTube cooking show says at one point that Sriracha can be substituted for ketchup as “a weird Mexican thing.” Though the latter isn’t hilarious either, here’s the difference: Insult humor only works when a character is doing it. When the movie itself is the source of the insult, the requisite comedic harmlessness vanishes.

Okay, so I’ve already hinted at some of the great stuff in Slapped!, and now I’ll elaborate on it. Magaña, we now know, is a heck of a good actor. So is Lowe, and we also know they work well as a team. Visually, the movie is a step up from 29 to Life. It’s also a bigger film, and it’s promising to see the filmmakers flexing that versatility.

Two scenes, one complex and the other relatively simple, are big standouts. The first and less surprisingly satisfying is a mushroom-trip sequence with fun makeup art, neon set design, and impressive practical & special effects. The second is my favorite, featuring the aforementioned YouTube star “E-Zee” (boldly played by Diana Marie—if ACM folks are reading this: cast her again!) The special effects, combined with Marie’s spicy character make for the best-feeling, funnest scene in the movie.

So, we yet await a film with start-to-finish excellence from Magaña & company. Happily, the talent and skills are all there.

2 of 5 stars