Double Deutch: VOICEMAILS FOR ISABELLE and GAIL DAUGHTRY AND THE CELEBRITY SEX PASS

Here’s an interesting case study in modern movie distribution. Sony has two comedies starring Zoey Deutch this summer. You might recognize her from supporting roles in Zombieland: Double Tap or Juror #2 or Nouvelle Vague or from confusing her with Haley Lu Richardson. She can make for a sweet and believable center of a movie when given the chance. Of her two starring roles this year, one’s in a straightforward romantic comedy with a traditional blend of charm and sentiment. It’s sturdy crowd-pleasing, pushing all the right buttons. The other’s in an arch alt-comedy riff that transposes The Wizard of Oz into a goofy R-rated joke. It’s deliberately niche, a cult item at best. Which one has been sent straight to Netflix via Sony’s deal with the streamer, and which hit theaters through their boutique Sony Pictures Classics label? Both could’ve found an audience on the big screen. But it’s strange to find the broadly appealing picture is the one you can play from the couch right now. 

If you did you’d find Voicemails for Isabelle is a reasonably effective version of its kind. Deutch plays an aspiring chef trying to survive a tough kitchen run by Nick Offerman. She calls her sister all the time to share the details of her life. They’ve done that since childhood since the younger girl is housebound with an illness and lives vicariously through her big sister’s adventures. When the sister dies, Deutch keeps calling, but the number has been reassigned to the new phone of a yuppie (Nick Robinson) who falls in love with the mystery caller. So he doesn’t message her to let her know it’s now a wrong number just to continue eavesdropping on her life. Eventually he has to meet her. From the premise you can already see the broad strokes of where the plot will go—manipulated Meet Cute to dating montages to revelation to reconciliation. The leads are charming with some sweet chemistry. It gives just enough sparkle to the familiar beats. But where the movie really lifts above routine is the sister relationship, fleshed out in early flashbacks and then lingering throughout the movie as a glossy but honest expression of grief and mourning. Writer-director Leah McKendrick has a light and often routine movie here, with pop music and little quips throughout. It tilts toward glossy phoniness, but remains sensitive with attention to the sisters. It’s the most believable relationship in the movie, and hits hard when gone. That makes the lightness of the surrounding movie all the more of an uplift, and a fantasy. 

Far stranger, though, is Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass. Writer-director David Wain’s penchant for absurdity and vulgarity is an acquired taste. I quite like his loopy rom-com parody They Came Together, commune satire Wanderlust, and his raunchy man-child comedy Role Models. This one isn’t in that league.  Maybe it’s the ugly digital look, and awkward combination of high-concept winking, sitcom punchlines, and occasional violence and flatulence.(Maybe it’s the severe lack of Paul Rudd, the star of all those earlier pictures.) Regardless I found Gail Daughtry more theoretically funny than actually funny, with the kind of humor you watch silently registering the technical forms of the jokes while rarely rising to level of actual enjoyment. Deutch plays Gail, our Dorothy. The red shoes are a tip off. She’s a naive Kansan hairdresser about to marry a dopey guy next door. They jokingly discuss the hoary concept of the celebrity sex pass. He has a crush on Jennifer Aniston. She’s hot for Jon Hamm. Well, turns out the fiancé actually goes and hooks up with Aniston, which really gets Gail mad. When she’s off on a work trip to L.A. her buddy (Miles Gutierrez-Riley) convinces her to seek out Hamm and do the deed. True to Oz, she meets a collection of misfits on her trip: an absent-minded agent-in-training (Ben Wang), a paparazzo whose heart’s not in it (Ken Marino), and a cowardly John Slattery. There’s also a wicked mob boss (Sabrina Impacciatore) and her flunkies. The whole tone is pitched at a preposterous broad shtick, like a straight John Waters. The actors are committed to the straight-faced absurdity, and there are a few real laughs along the way. (I liked the assistant whose only threat is that he’ll “make you sick!”) But it’s so conceptual and airless that it never fully comes to life. 

State of the Arts: NOUVELLE VAGUE and BLUE MOON

It’s rare to know in the moment that you’re in the middle of an inflection point in the history of an art form. It usually just looks like creative people hanging around. How nice, then, that two new movies about such moments come to us from Richard Linklater. In movies as diverse as Slacker and Dazed and Confused and School of Rock and Boyhood he’s proven himself one of our finest observers of the dynamics of a hangout. It comes in handy in Nouvelle Vague, a movie about the 1959 making of Jean-Luc Godard’s classic debut feature Breathless, an early landmark in the French New Wave cinema of the mid-20th century. That movie is characterized by a breezy spontaneity, with a blend of pop genre shorthand with a man on the run from the law, and formal and narrative innovations like jump cuts and improvisatory location shooting. So it’s a little ironic that Linklater puts a lot of period piece effort into meticulously bringing such looseness to specific recreated life. But the movie is a warm love letter to this style and mode of filmmaking, shooting in textured black and white photography in a squared-off aspect ratio, with fuzzy French language tracks and English subtitles burned into the print in that soft analogue style. 

The story itself, gently draped over the prep, filming, and post-production of the film in question, gives us a Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) who spouts off theories of filmmaking, almost grinning from behind his sunglasses and puffs of cigarette smoke, drawing creative collaborators toward him with a oddly inscrutable charisma while befuddling the more buttoned-up financiers. He’s surrounded by a crew of fellow film critics turned filmmakers, and Linklater affectionately stuffs the frame and fills sequences with actors inhabiting all manner of bold named French film notables of the time. (Zoey Deutch and Aubry Dullin do an especially uncanny Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo.) The cast of characters universally speak in epigrammatic aphorisms, often featuring famous quotes that’ll be recognizable to anyone who has read the many volumes documenting this moment in cinema history. But this isn’t a closed-off picture for the die hards only. It has too much movie love, and a willingness to wave in newcomers and old pros alike to explore this period more. The fact that we know how this whole story turns out somehow doesn’t spoil the fun of seeing it play out. 

For all the focus on his writerly details as a screenwriter, Linklater is underrated for his director’s ability to shift his form to fit the subject. As such, it’s a continual unfolding delight to see Blue Moon feel as comfortably theatrical as Nouvelle Vague is specifically filmic. It feels effervescently like a play, even as its camera and editing takes us cleanly and cinematically through its confined space. It’s a form fitting for a movie about Broadway songwriter Lorenz Hart set entirely on Oklahoma!’s opening night in 1943. Hart was famously creatively paired with Richard Rodgers, who left him behind to work on this Okie musical with Oscar Hammerstein II. What Hart suspects this night, and which we know from the weight of history, is that Lorenz and Hart are old news, while Rodgers and Hammerstein were about to be the great new thing. The former made the kind of light, clever, cheeky patter that lent an air of elegance and mid-Atlantic sophistication to the early 20th century stage. The latter would make the big, sturdy, sweeping spectacle musicals of the mid-century. Linklater’s movie is perched perfectly on this pivot point, and has just the right person from which to view it. This is a story of the muse (perhaps literally, in the form of an ambitious co-ed played by Margaret Qualley) leaving one man, and finding companionship with another, told from the perspective of the man slowly feeling his opportunities slipping away.

Ethan Hawke plays Lorenz in a nearly nonstop monologue at the hotel bar waiting for the after party. He only pauses to take in fleeting dialogue in exchanges with characters who float in and out of his pity party. He’s flirtatious, he’s coy, he’s confessional, he’s vulgar and jealous and an overflowing font of allusions and amusements. He’s living his life like it’s a stage for soliloquizing, and those he interacts with are mere supporting parts for him to practice witticisms upon at best, mere audience for his genius at worst. And yet all this razzle-dazzle verbal dexterity is clearly compensating for deeply felt inadequacies (he's literally smaller in the frame than anyone) and other psychological ambiguities. The entrance of his former writing partner (Andrew Scott) sheds new light on their working relationship, its tensions and creativity, and we watch as one man’s neediness and the other’s kindness push and pull, two orbits briefly intersecting one last time as they’re about to diverge. Here’s the world as a stage where every man must play a part, and his a sad one. But the movie is not a mere sad-clown slice-of-biopic-life. It’s an insightful, melancholic character study buoyed along with a diegetic old school show tunes piano score and a clever, intelligent screenplay, the kind that’s studded with great punchlines that never quite puncture the melancholic core. We know that in a few months he’ll be dead and Rodgers will be better than ever. In some way, he suspects it, too. 

Animal House: EVERYBODY WANTS SOME!!

Everybody Wants Some!! traps you in the company of a Texas college baseball team on the weekend before classes start for the fall 1980 semester and demands you be charmed by their antics. Luckily, this isn’t some cheap campus comedy with rowdy frat boys bonding while raucously drinking and smugly humping their way through anonymous crowds of young ladies. Or, rather, it’s not only that. It’s written and directed by Richard Linklater, who has become a reliable chronicler of a very particular slice of America – adrift youngsters (Boyhood, Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise), minimum wage workers (Fast Food Nation), underemployed daydream philosophizers (Slacker, Waking Life), aspiring artists (Me and Orson Welles), and oddball misfits (School of Rock, Bernie). Now he takes his shaggy low-key anthropological approach to a collegiate party atmosphere. It proves that if you put together a dumb bro-y college comedy with wit and intelligence it’s a lot more defensible than the usual lowbrow fare the subgenre encourages.

It begins with a freshman pitcher (Blake Jenner) showing up for move-in day at the team houses, ramshackle domiciles off campus donated to the athletic department to help alleviate overcrowding in the dorms. This leaves a baseball teams’ worth of guys bunking together, generating a locker-room competitive energy that never dissipates. He quickly discovers most interactions he has with his new friends will either be part of a game, an inside joke, or a hazing ritual. They’re always “on.” Linklater, never the most plot-based filmmaker around, is content to follow the fresh-faced young man through his weekend, acclimating to the surroundings while getting his bearings with a new group of boisterous guys who he’ll be rooming and playing ball with. We see parties, clubs, bars, and dorms where they’ll hunt for ladies to impress, and hopefully talk into following them back to the house where they’re willing to break coach’s rules against fraternizing upstairs behind closed doors.

Rather than engage with any serious drawbacks to such a lifestyle – in this film hazing is nothing you can’t shrug off, drinking isn’t a problem, and all the women are consenting – Linklater simply soaks the proceedings in a warm bath of nostalgia, through bright and clear simple images and wall-to-wall period music. Here’s an idealized throwback college lifestyle, where partying is consequence free and real life responsibilities only drift in from the sidelines with a distant looming that doesn’t feel too terribly relevant in the moment. That’s for later. College here is in a suspended animation before classes start, before any schedule and any work. It’s freedom to make your own fun as a crucible in which to discover who you really are. We follow the guys to a disco, a country bar, a punk show, a party for theater kids. They change their clothes to fit each occasion, and adapt their teasing patter to the context. Why not try on new aspects of identities? They’re still young.

Linklater brings his usual eye for environs -- it's a convincing 1980 college town atmosphere -- and social types, empathetically cataloguing a variety of guys in the group. There’s a confident competitor (Tyler Hoechlin), a chatterbox smart aleck (Glen Powell), a nice guy (J. Quinton Johnson), a clueless dope (Tanner Kalina), a dazed lunk (Temple Baker), an intense weirdo (Juston Street). In some ways they blur together, a sea of young, (mostly) white, athletic jocks. But there are clear differences among them as well, including the likes of a funny stoner philosophizer (Wyatt Russell) and a sweetly naïve country boy (Will Brittain). The movie’s about their homosocial bonding through loud, competitive, macho posturing (like when one guy picks up an ax like a bat and bets he can chop a pitched ball in two) and fleeting moments of surprising tenderness. They’re establishing pecking orders, creating hierarchies, and discovering who will lead and who will follow. Power shifts and friendships develop in loose hangout scenes with typical Linklater displays of relaxed, casual writing, sharp specificities and fine observation slipping by with how easily it flows.

An occasionally exhausting ramble floating from one vignette to another, Linklater is perhaps a bit too warmly indulgent in portraying their endless partying ways. But the longer the film spends seeing their single-minded pursuits of intoxication, objectification, and competition, it’s possible to see the limitations of such a lifestyle. The second half of the film invites in a welcome feminine presence as our lead strikes up a sweetly adorable budding relationship with a theater major (Zoey Deutch). It’s not like the hookups the others constantly pursue. In fact, he’s a little worried his new roommates’ embarrassing behaviors will ruin his chances with this nice young lady. If college is about finding out what kind of person one wants to be, here’s a movie following a young man’s initial encounters with a sampler of male behaviors. By the end, as he’s drawn out of their sweaty grasp and into flirtatious banter with a possible girlfriend, it’s obvious his learning process has only just begun. Classes are starting, and his whole life is ahead of him. Hopefully he’ll be awake for the frontiers he’s yet to discover.

Fanged Up: VAMPIRE ACADEMY

Vampire Academy doesn’t seem finished. It feels like the filmmakers gave up on it, like on some fundamental level the story just wasn’t working and instead of taking the time to fix it, they filmed it anyway. The movie is flavorless, unimaginative, and often uncommunicative as it gets tangled up in its own jargon. The story starts with two runaway vampires who are quickly caught and returned to their Vampire Academy where the headmistress is awful disappointed or something. Then it becomes a teen high school movie that’s neither horror nor comedy. It involves sub-Harry Potter schoolyard conspiracies and pseudo-Twilight divisions and hierarchies of vampiric magic and wars between a variety of clans the names of which I could never keep straight despite the movie never missing an opportunity to talk about it. The movie is all tell, no show, and all the worse for it, especially since all that telling left me mostly hopelessly confused. By the time the movie finishes clearing its throat, it manages to bump up against some modest entertainment value for about five minutes. That hardly seems worth it.

We’re introduced to the movie’s taxonomy of vampires with an expositional voiceover reinforced by key terms turning up on screen in bold lettering. There are Dhampir, half-human vampires, Moroi, royal vampires, and Strigoi, who can only be evil, as represented by their paler-than-usual vampire skin and bloodshot eyes. Don’t quiz me on their differences. I only got that far by checking Wikipedia. Our leads, the runaways the story opens upon, are best friends who snuck away from the school for what seems to be a Very Important Reason that remains vague. One is a Dhampir girl (Zoey Deutch) who has some psychic connection to her friend (Lucy Fry), a Moroi who may be in line to be the next Vampire Queen. She can read her friend’s thoughts; it is cool in theory, but in practice involves her essentially watching scenes she’s not in and commenting on them for us to hear.

The head of the school (Olga Kurylenko) begrudgingly lets the girls back into the school on the condition that the Dhampir trains to protect royal pal. From there, class is in session, taking us straight into plot contortions involving a nerdy third wheel (Sarah Hyland), ex-boyfriends (Edward Holdcroft and Ashley Charles), guys with crushes (Dominic Sherwood and Cameron Monaghan), a vindictive catty girl (Sami Gayle), a missing teacher (Claire Foy), a glowering Russian combat trainer (Danila Kozlovsky), and an ill vampire gentleman (Gabriel Byrne). One or more of them may be behind the ominous messages written in blood that turn up to menace our leads. That’s a lot of characters to juggle, too many I’d say, since almost none of them get satisfying introductions or resolutions. They’re just there.

Maybe fans of the young adult book series upon which this is based could make sense of all these characters, with their variety of backstories and motivations. I couldn’t, despite the movie spending so much of its runtime trying to fill me in on the pertinent details. If there was ever a scene not devoted to explicitly explaining its place in the plot, I must’ve missed it. And yet, there’s not a bit of narrative momentum on which to hang all this talk. What curses, powers, magic, histories, grudges, potions, talismans, spells, creatures, bloodlines, and insults are supposed to matter most when they’re all given the same flatlining importance?

Screenwriter Daniel Waters (of Heathers) and his brother, director Mark Waters (of Mean Girls), know a thing or two about staging high school comedies, but here it’s as if they were working from an outline and forgot to flesh out the characters’ personalities and their film’s tone along the way to a finished product. Some attempts at memorable quips – “they looked at me like I was a porcupine in a hot tub” – fall flat since I couldn’t get my bearings in the setting or understand who any of these characters are. Who runs this school? What is at stake? Why should we care? I certainly couldn’t tell you. It’s a shame the filmmakers couldn’t either. It doesn’t help that it’s all shot in a dull haze and edited together with no feeling for spatial coherence.

It’s all a bland blur, endlessly telling us what is happening, why it’s happening, and what the pertinent fantasy gibberish is, and yet still communicating almost nothing about its world or why we should be invested in it. The movie is an uninvolving mishmash of tones, wobbling from snark to snarling danger to snoozy exposition with little sense of impact or understanding of cause and effect. Worldbuilding isn’t easy, all the more because it should look easy, but if after two hours of painfully obvious hard work I couldn’t begin to tell you even the simplest facts about your fantasy world and the plotlines running through it, something has gone disastrously wrong.

I spent the film scowling, wondering if I was simply zoning out during the most important information or if every scene was really skipping away into the next with little concern for pacing or personality. I’m sure it was the latter. It’s telling that only the climactic action – when the characters finally shut up about their powers and dangers and put them to use – comes close to working on any level. More telling is this line of dialogue one girl says to the other after events have gotten largely incomprehensible: “I can’t remember who loves us and who hates us.” If they don't know, what hope did I have?