It's A Live: SATURDAY NIGHT

I suppose it’s fitting that a movie set behind the scenes of Saturday Night Live’s first episode is only fitfully funny, but coasts along on a combination of high spirits, energetic impersonations, and its musical guest. That’s the typical SNL experience. Is there a television program with a bigger disparity between its cultural importance and its actual potential week-to-week quality? Nonetheless, the sheer number of talented performers and writers who’ve cycled through the show over the course of 50 seasons is staggering, and the hit-and-miss quality is nonetheless an essential part of the appeal. It puts the variety in variety show, turning up occasional fun even long past its semi-countercultural origins. What other show can go whole episodes, or seasons, or decades, in decline and still have people wondering what they’ll do next? With Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night, the movie is primarily interested in that creative chaos that somehow, inevitably, makes it on air. He gets a little extra charge of dramatic tension by setting it on the show’s first night. Will it even get on the air, in its amorphous, evolving form where no one quite knows what it’ll even be or become, when the actors and executives are nervous, before it’s codified and corporatized into cultural expectations? That we know it does saps the movie of some of that charge, but he makes up for it by letting his events—heightened extrapolations of real showbiz lore—play out in real time. It’s a flurry of activity as producer and co-creator Lorne Michaels races from room to room—a pretty convincing recreation of the famous studio—as creatives of all departments clash and scurry as the ticking clock of showtime draws nearer.

In each scene we are met with broad performances of recognizable figures, as if to suggest in a fan’s shorthand that they’re just as much cartoons off screen as on. With an Andy Kaufman, the unknowability could be a point; with a Belushi or Chase or Aykroyd or Henson (or or or…) they’re just a flavoring in a large dish. They're all energetic and amused performances, even though no one gets to be characterized beyond a little shtick and a few tics, each member just one fluttering piece of a larger swirling ensemble juggled and scrambled in a frenzy right up until the show must go on. (I wondered what someone unfamiliar with SNL would make of all this unexplained commotion.) It’s all of a piece with Reitman’s typical approach to faking verisimilitude. His films’ ideas of reality are often communicated through movie language more than reality itself. Here he gives the proceedings a kind of studied glossy shagginess that uses shaky-cam, high-grain, whip-pan, roaming camerawork to sell energy and excitement and reality, even as its cast bites into thinly written characters with performative gusto. It’s all smiling recognition and tickling good intentions, bathed in hindsight. Meanwhile a jazzy Jon Batiste score chugs along in bits and riffs until blasting into a screaming-sax impersonation of the show’s theme song after the film’s predictable final line. Reitman’s superficial vision doesn’t ultimately claim to understand the people involved or the show’s place in culture—there’s the classic oral history co-written by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales for that—but makes up for it in pleasant tone. The let’s-put-on-a-show momentum keep things brisk and amiable and the inevitable triumphant climax sends it out on a high note.

The Last Laugh: JOKER: FOLIE À DEUX

Todd Phillips’ Joker: Folie à Deux puts his own Joker on trial and declares it guilty. That makes for a pretty interesting gambit, but awfully hollow results. Still, I admired its commitment to putting the biggest supervillain on the stand to ask its audience: why do you even like this guy? He’s a narcissistic murderer and seeing him in something approaching our reality—in a news show interview, in a courtroom, surrounded by normal folks in a serious setting while looking a clown—has a frisson of discomfort. Such glum intent makes sense flowing from the 2019 origin story that took the usual flamboyant clown we see fighting Batman into something closer to a believable scenario. There he was a street performer on whom abuse had been piled for decades leaving him lonely, harassed, mentally disturbed, and violently delusional. By the time he became a serial killer in a loud suit, dancing down the street caked in makeup, and taking a loaded gun onto the set of a late night show, he was a scary, and weirdly compelling, blend of inchoate ideas about what makes people a danger to themselves and others. That that movie flirted with turning him into a kind of folk hero—Travis Bickle meets Bernie Goetz, fitting reference points for a movie so self-consciously vintage—added to the queasy-making mood. Batman’s most famous foe often has that sort of outlaw nihilistic appeal in other projects. As much as Jack Nicholson or Heath Ledger’s Jokers are clearly villainous, there’s also that chaotic charisma that makes them appealing to watch. But Joaquin Phoenix’s emaciated oddity is so pathetic and repellant in Phillips’ vision that it’s hard to square the antihero his film’s world percolates with. Same, too, its feints at moral complexity that just reads as simple sensationalism.

The sequel starts with him in prison, occasionally beaten by guards while awaiting trial. The course of the movie follows that trial, as his lawyer (Catherine Keener) tries to get him an insanity defense, while District Attorney Harvey Dent (Harry Lawtey) seems to have a slam-dunk case since the Joker himself can’t help but work against his own best interests. It’s in his nature. He’s also in love with a toxic fan, Harley Quinn (Lady Gaga), a psychiatrist with a flair for the dramatic. She’s fueling his delusions with her own. As the movie winds its way through testimony that recaps the first film’s crimes, Joker drifts into fantasy sequences in which he romances Harley through musical numbers set to slow, jazzy covers from the Great American Songbook done up like MGM dream ballets and 70s variety show numbers. As I go through the film’s component parts it sounds pretty good: a prison movie, a courtroom drama, a tragic romance, a dark musical, and all with recognizable comic book names. Yet in practice, the thing is a blend of fascinating and dull. Every choice is striking and theoretically interesting, with lots of neat work with smoke and spotlights in the cinematography and an eerie sound design. But cumulatively the whole project says nothing much. It loses even a loose sense of psychology as it edges closer to growing outsized without ever quite getting there, stranded stylistically stifled between something uncomfortable and small and something more epic and excessive. It simply stretches thinly over two-and-a-half hours, losing a sense of Joker’s complexity in its repetitions and never bringing Harley into as clear focus, despite Gaga’s great look and tone. For some reason, she’s all rising action, and never gets to pop off like Phoenix did the last time around. I kept imagining a Harley Quinn movie as committed to her as the first Joker movie was to him. And I liked the idea of a comic book movie (atypical of that genre as these are) entirely focused on the immediate consequences of the previous one. But, despite the best efforts of the cast and craftspeople, the movie never develops into anything more than an extended epilogue to the first, letting its potential drain away.

Robot Dreams: TRANSFORMERS ONE andTHE WILD ROBOT

It’s difficult to care about the Transformers as characters. They’re alien robots that turn into cars. We need them to come to Earth to make any sense. That at least gives them human characters to provide a sense of scale and stakes. When stuck on their own planet and left to their own devices, it tends to be just a bunch of boring nonsense. So here we are with Transformers One, a thinly-plotted prequel that intends to tell us how heroic Optimus Prime and villainous Megatron started out friends and then had a falling out that led them to war across the galaxy for centuries. I guess I never wondered that before. Unlike the enormous live-action efforts from Michael Bay that brought this toy franchise to the big screen—and, for my money, made it entertaining for once—this is a computer-animated family film that plays like a cheaper, smaller effort all around. It’s an eyesore, blandly designed in simple, smooth surfaces, dreary dull colors, and a limited emotional range. Its short runtime—not quite 100 minutes before credits—is as padded as the characters are thin. Every scene is flatly expository, dully trudging through three basic bits of plot information, the first two usually bits of exposition repeated from the previous scene. The leads are given functional chipper voice performances from Chris Hemsworth and Brian Tyree Henry. They seem to actually believe this Saturday Morning cartoon-level emoting asked for them. The rest of the Transformers are voiced by recognizable celebrities and given grating one-note personalities that exist to drive the dreary cliches forward. It’s about a plot by a cheery robot overlord to keep the vast working class robots down. Not a bad idea in theory, but in function it takes most of the movie to click into place and then ends with a tease for a theoretical conflict with the real Big Bad next time. Ah, well, nevertheless. By the time the robots learn how to transform, there’s a modest charge of visual candy to the swooshing and clicking. But that’s too little, too late. It’s another one of those meager brand deposits that thinks its audience is so eager, or so desperate, for more, they’d sit through a whole movie of preamble with the vague promise of getting to the good stuff in another movie entirely.

A far better animated family film about a robot is DreamWorks’ The Wild Robot. That studio has been experimenting with style for the last several years, finding fresher textures and designs than the usual rounded, plasticky Hollywood CG look. The Trolls sequels have terrains of felt and yarn, Ruby Gillman Teenage Kraken has noodly arms and legs, Puss in Boots 2 has sketchy hand-drawn embellishments and painterly backdrops. Those films look neat, even if they’re not always entirely successful unto themselves. Leave it to Chris Sanders, co-director and writer of Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon, to paint with a specific brush. His movies are unusually distinctive animated studio product—personal, emotional, with a relaxed approach and comfortable emotionality. He builds characters with heartfelt presences and compelling dilemmas in quickly-drawn worlds bursting with lovely visual touches. His latest is no different. It has a soft watercolor look painted over the wire-frame animation, a dappling of primary colors dancing in the light over figures that move with precision. This makes its central interplay between nature and machine all the more vivid. The Wild Robot of the title is a missing personal assistant—think something the Jetsons might’ve ordered if Miyazaki was an Apple engineer—with a silver ball body, a pair of big, round, blue eyes, and telescoping arms and legs. She wanders around chirpily offering to help in a smoothly artificial Lupita Nyong'o performance. But because she’s crash-landed on a wilderness island, she finds a job for which she’s not prepared: adopted mother for an orphaned baby goose. The movie has a gentle cartooniness that marries its futuristic implications with old-fashioned wildlife gags around a morbid mother possum and a sneaky loner fox and gossipy geese and more. And on this charming smallness it builds a lovely allegory for motherhood—of kindness, protectiveness, cooperation, resourcefulness, self-sacrifice, unconditional love. It might threaten to sound too simple and formulaic—Bambi meets WALL-E with design inspiration from French impressionists; oh, wait, that sounds incredible. And then there’s a scene in which the bird's taking flight, flying fast, soaring higher and higher as the sun sets in the sky and its robot mother races to keep him in sight, and, look, I’m not made of stone. Here’s a movie that looks sensational, moves quickly, feels light and sprightly and funny and warm. It has gags and action and sentimentality. And then the tears flow.

The Power Broker: MEGALOPOLIS

How small our imaginations and expectations have grown as a culture if we have no room to accommodate something as grand and singular—for better and for worse—as Megalopolis. Francis Ford Coppola’s first film in over a decade, a passion project he partially financed himself, is a long, rambling, sometimes hallucinatory narrative set among the powerful in a city that’s somehow simultaneously modern New York and ancient Rome—New Rome. It’s a warped funhouse mirror of our present’s problems, and a cockeyed rearview mirror of problems we’ve had since ancient times. It’s a big swing, full of ungainly ideas and vivid juxtapositions. You’ll never quite guess what you’ll be seeing or hearing next. This has been greeted with sighs by some who seem preemptively exasperated by the financial folly the project represents. It’s so uncommercial they say; it’s so unusual and confused and messy. Others seem to greet it with schadenfreude, somehow gleeful at the supposed downfall of a once-great filmmaker. They seem to find it laughable that a master director in his mid-80s would dare try to make something bold and wild and weird—something so unmistakably his own, every idiosyncratic idea honestly intended. Indeed, this is a movie that’ll challenge conceptions of conventionality. It’s too direct and flat and ungainly to be called a mainstream narrative. It’s full of posturing and speechifying, theatrical symbolism and pulp philosophy, thudding narration and aloofly schematic emotionality. But it’s also too arch and vulgar and full of wriggly low humor and with passages of bewildering narrative density to be purely schematic art film. It refuses to fit neatly into any box other than, perhaps, this: a modern Francis Ford Coppola experience.

That din you hear when the mind fills up as the film unspools is the noise of every Coppola movie happening at once. Here’s a man who directed a little bit of everything: from a Warner Brothers musical to a 3D nudist movie, from a scrappy Corman horror picture to lavish all-star literary adaptations, from epic, luxuriously filmic period pieces to tiny, high-contrast experimental digital indies. Here’s a career that stretches the whole breadth and scope of American movies from the end of the studio system to whatever we call now. With Megalopolis, he’s giving it all back to us at once in one heterogeneous mixture. It’s the family saga of The Godfather and the special effects extravaganza of Dracula and the artifice of One from the Heart and the resourcefulness of a Dementia 13 and the self-portraiture of Tucker and the deeply personal superimpositions of Twixt and the scope of Apocalypse Now and the slapdash comedy of You’re a Big Boy Now and so on. But it’s also a mad jumble of other inspirations or comparison points—a carousing Felliniesque city of appetites; a Fritz Lang Metropolis of big, blocky metaphors; a Cecil B. DeMille epic of Golden Idols and fallen angels; a Star Wars prequel of green-screen politics and emotional constipation; a hodgepodge of anachronisms like Julie Taymor’s Titus; a Richard Kelly dystopia of disordered modernity. It’s filmed in an unreal honeyed glaze, with characters who pontificate and pronounce more than dialogue, and a storyline that’s a work of grubby modern scheming scandal and prejudice shot through with a vaguely classical sense of stakes and design.

We meet a troubled artist: an arrogant city planner (Adam Driver) who dreams of building a better future with glowing sci-fi public transit and a fabulous downtown bustling with life. That he might need to demolish areas of New Rome makes some forces upset. (He’s Robert Moses meets Hippodamus of Miletus.) Driver plays up the sanctimony and impetuous ego and the troubled, druggy, playboy image he both indulges and resists. And he’s just one of many in a powerful web of family and entanglements. His lover (Nathalie Emmanuel) is the daughter of the loathed Mayor (Giancarlo Esposito). His Machiavellian party-boy cousin (Shia LaBeouf) is the troubled son of the city’s sleazy top banker (Jon Voight). Even his driver (Laurence Fishburne) has an important role: he’s a witness and a philosopher—a historian behind the wheel who narrates, sometimes in phrases chiseled in stone. There’s also a sneaky TV personality named Wow Platinum who plays up her shamelessness (Aubrey Plaza) and a pop star who plays up her purity (Grace VanderWaal). They’re all Power Brokers, trying to grow their influence and leave legacies, consolidate power, or use theirs to build a future. The figures strut like Roman politicos—with laurels and robes for Senators and Vestal Virgins alike—and appear on talk shows or in City Hall. They shout pseudo-Shakespearian speeches—and sometimes the real thing—through bullhorns and microphones and show up for chariot races in Madison Square Garden. It’s boldly iconographic, and interpersonally messy, high culture and low conflict colliding and kaleidoscoping, often enveloping and maddening.

It’s so much: political intrigue swamps idealistic agendas; a nuclear satellite is crashing to earth; a Deep Fake makes a phony scandal; there’s a new element that allows for fantastic creations; there are assassinations and uprisings and parades and concerts and telethons and press conferences—including an actual question from the audience, if you’re so lucky—and hostile takeovers and sex jokes and incestuous allusions and off-screen murder mysteries and cross-dressing and magical realism and tearful confessions and oddball line-readings and elaborate sets and gloriously fake backdrops and split-screens and montages and a score somewhere between a flourish of brass and an electronic pulse. It has computer-generated visions and concept art paintings and historical footage—like Hitler and 9/11—and flubbed lines and living statues and spinning newspaper headlines and a rewritten Pledge of Allegiance. Does it have clear politics? No, but it has the suggestion of them. Does it have philosophical perspective or insight? Sort of. All of that is a strange stew of half-formed impulses informed by its historical mishmash and a host of name-dropped oddities, like a scene in which a father and daughter bond by quoting Marcus Aurelius, or when a man arrogantly refers to his “Emersonian mind.” It certainly has style. It’s freed of the idea of telling a coherent story or legibly tracking character’s motivations or building conventional setups and payoffs. We’re left with a balance of the banal and the transcendent, as its enormous cast is full of figures who drift in and out of focus with the thematic web ultimately a justification for its metatextual melancholic hope in amorphous striving. Here’s where someone might exasperatedly ask: but is it good? Well, that’s complicated. It’s certainly nothing less than exactly what it wants to be. The result is disorienting, befuddling filmmaking. It’s not easy to recommend, but it’s hard to forget. I watched it knowing that I’ll be thinking about it forever.

Stealing Beauty: THE SUBSTANCE

Look what beauty standards can do to a body. The more desperately one clings to youthful beauty, the faster it slips away. It’s not news that Hollywood’s visual appeal can do great damage to its sex symbols who, as their brief moment of youthful beauty fades, often see their careers follow. We know this. But it’s nonetheless a lesson we have to keep learning. No wonder Taylor Swift named her song “Clara Bow,” a narrative about this very cycle, after one of the first It Girls of the screen. You know the story. As critic Farran Smith Nehme wrote in defense of Kim Novak, whose elderly appearance on the Oscars in 2014 led to some sadly predictable snark about her artificially smooth expression: couldn’t we have some sympathy for the pressures one faces in just such a moment? After a career of being known for your looks, how difficult must it be to face the harsh glow of the stage lights, and the viewing public’s scorn knowing we haven’t the cultural space for appreciating the natural changing beauty of age. She must have been “worried constantly that no matter how you looked, it wasn’t good enough.” Don’t they all. With every new generation of stars, we seem to find belatedly, and sometimes posthumously, a new sense of grace and understanding for the plight of the old. And then we turn around and let the cycle grind up the fresh meat all the same. Time will be kinder to them in retrospect, too.

That idea of a fading star doing damage to herself to further her youthful glow is the concept animating the wild and propulsive and insular new horror picture The Substance, a hard-charging work of showbiz satire that builds and builds until it erupts in gore on its way to a creature feature ending that’s both dripping in viscera and in despair. Set in a simple simulacrum of Hollywood, it stars Demi Moore as an aging actress who’s been hosting a fitness program for years. She’s on the verge of getting replaced by a newer, younger host when she turns to an underground experimental drug—a thick neon-green liquid that’s among the most potent symbolic horror concoctions this side of Larry Cohen’s The Stuff—that’ll reactivate her cells and unleash a newer, younger self. There’s a sadness immediately present as we see a woman desperately clinging to a youthful beauty because she has no greater ambition than that. Her talent or artistic endeavors are in the past, if they ever existed, simply because she’s been part of a business that’s made her only business her charisma, her screen presence, her sex appeal. When that’s all you’ve been paid to give for years and years, no wonder it’s all you want. She needs it to maintain her lavish, empty lifestyle. Moore plays this hollowed-out dissatisfaction with a weary resignation. When she meets with her producer (Dennis Quaid)—a sneering faux-cheery objectifier, wiggling a flaccid shrimp as he talks with his mouth full as he tells her she’s too old to keep hosting—she stares at him with buried outrage burning up into ugly agreement. Yes, she thinks, if only she could be young again.

This desire is so viscerally literalized here that taking The Substance causes the fresher body to hatch gorily out of the old. A viscous, bloody birth bursts out of her back until the lifeless shell lies bleeding on the bathroom floor while the new beauty (Margaret Qualley) stands dripping on the tile. It’s not a younger self; it’s a self, younger. The new body is shot like a car commercial—overlit poses while the camera swoops tight along aerodynamic curves in close up. The old one is a husk that’s to be kept hooked up to a liquid diet so the patient can switch between bodies to keep the bodies properly balanced. It soon enough becomes a pointed, physicalized Dorian Gray situation, with shades of Jekyll and Hyde, her split personality drawing her toward inevitable doom. Her self-loathing has been embodied. The more she wants, the less she’ll have. Writer-director Coralie Fargeat, of the similarly bloody French thriller Revenge, certainly isn’t pulling punches here, and isn’t hiding her intentions in subtlety. The movie is broad, blunt, obvious, as funny as it is nasty. Its conceit is pulled thinly over a drawn-out scenario that gets only more gross and explicit as it propels itself toward a grotesque ending. I mean that as a compliment. Fargeat frames it all in a bold style that keeps a steady eye—bright frames, clean digital precision, unsettling symmetries, thunderclap symbolism—as it piles on the absurd complications. It become a movie about a frenzied emptiness, a fractured loss of self that leads to desperate measures in an attempt to find something fulfilling, something whole. It drips with contempt for those who’d use an appreciation for the beauty of bodies as an excuse to reduce the humanity of those beauties—and bleeds sympathy for those bodies discarded when the shallow no longer have use for them. As Swift writes: “Beauty is a beast…demanding more / only when your girlish glow flickers just so…”

This is the End: HIS THREE DAUGHTERS

The only way art can accurately portray death is through absence. So says one of the daughters in His Three Daughters, a movie about estranged sisters gathered in the small New York City apartment in which their father is dying. True to its word, he stays in the next room, with only the sound of a heart monitor softly beeping in the background to alert us to his continued presence. Meanwhile the action of the film takes place almost entirely with him off screen. It creates a sense of impending absence looming over the picture. We spend our time in the rest of the apartment with three grown women who aren’t particularly close in their sibling relationships. We get the sense that maybe they were never all that close. Here are sisters who’ve found themselves at very different places in life, living distant lives connected only by the man who raised them, gave them a shared history, and now in his expiring has them back for another time together—the last with him, and maybe the last for the three of them together, too. The trio of performances are a fine-tuned chamber piece of natural discomforts and duty. There’s the frosty older sister (Carrie Coon) who talks about her own distant daughters. There’s the pothead middle sister (Natasha Lyonne) who lives with the old man, took care of him on her own for years, and is now suddenly sidelined by the others. There’s the younger sister (Elizabeth Olsen), with a 3-year-old daughter back home. They sit awkwardly together, tiptoe across a lifetime of conversational land mines, take breaks for solitary phone calls and smokes, reconnect even as they feel bound to sit and wait for a conclusion.

They take turns sitting at their father’s bedside. Hospice nurses come in and out, each time reporting that this looks like the end. When called out for their repetitive negative prognostications, one admits: it’s always been the end. The movie gets the atmosphere of suspended suspense of a deathbed vigil—the tense import weighing down on even the most quotidian of exchanges as all involved wait in the long caesura of activity of an old body slowly shutting down. They wait for…what, exactly? A moment of clarity? A last goodbye? A release? A relief? It brings the sisters together, and finds ways to put stress on all the fragile points of past fractures and current contention in their family bonds. And it brings a fluttering sense of togetherness—unity in disunity, hopeful fresh starts even as their last fixed point of familial obligation is slipping away. Writer-director-editor Azazel Jacobs is always good at tracking the subtle shifts of mood and perspective in intimate character studies. In modest, perceptive dramas with warm, natural comedy and deep reservoirs of melancholy, he draws portraits of sensitive high schoolers (Terri) and middle-aged divorced couples (The Lovers) and rich-blooded eccentrics (French Exit). His latest, shot with warm interior lights against a grainy, autumnal glow, is another in that strong tradition. It's a sad, small, dialogue-driven movie that sometimes risks the obvious, only to speak so directly to a strong, true set of emotions that it finds quiet, heart-rending moments of transcendence. It feels like we really come to know these women—and their father—in this last moment they have together.

Reel Life: THE 4:30 MOVIE

Filmmakers making films about loving film always show you a lot about themselves. Think of
Spielberg’s recent Fabelmans in which the young Steven character has a vision of himself filming a family argument. Here’s a boy who thinks with the camera, and who sees the world through cinema. It’ll make him a wunderkind. And it’ll make him use that skill to create joyously cinematic genre pictures that’ll, in part, interrogate family and how people make them and break them. It’s a whole career in an image—typical of the revealing nature of an auteur’s work, especially in a confident, relaxed Late Style. For Kevin Smith’s version we have The 4:30 Movie, in which the Smith stand-in is a dorky teenager in 1986 (Austin Zajur) who wants nothing more than to sneak into an R-rated movie for a first date with his crush (Siena Agudong). And so we get this: a pretty girl with a wide smile earnestly and affectionately telling a chubby nerd, “wow, you know a lot about movies and TV shows!” Smith, unlike Spielberg, has a pretty one-track mind—sex, weed, pop culture. That’s about it. The end credits of this movie include a long “Thanks” section that includes everything from Little Debbie and Little House on the Prairie to George Lucas and John Hughes. (It’s a succinct syllabus for Kevin Smith Studies.) His preoccupations made for a bit of Gen X freshness with his scrappy indie Clerks back in 1994, what with its minimum wage slackers chattering back and forth about movies or sex acts in amateur cheap-o black and white. But, aside from a few successful fluke attempts at developing a style and deepening his thematic concerns (apocalyptic Catholic fantasy comedy Dogma, sentimental single-father rom-com Jersey Girl, and grungy political horror Red State), Smith’s been stuck in a permanent adolescence ever since, both as a stylist—all flat coverage, bland lighting, and simple staging—and as a writer—all surface-level allusions and references. His previous picture, the dreary and sappy Clerks III, even indulges in recreations of scenes from the first, as its legacy sequel status has the characters in the movie making a movie about their lives, which is a kind of worse Clerks. 

As Smith became a more repetitive niche interest, he dug in deeper into his chatty nerds’ limited imaginations. (Even a couple weirder horror adjacent pitches the past decade play like shaggy podcast anecdotes.) He’s making hangout movies for himself, and his die-hard fans, and his chummy collaborators, keeping his work cheap and lowering expectations. But he enjoys himself and that's what still causes his movies to have little sparkles of idiosyncratic interest. That his latest is comfortably his best in nearly 15 years is a tribute to its breezy smallness that makes his newfound sentiment comfortably quaint. It finds our lead and his buddies hanging out all day at a three-screen movie theater in their hometown while awaiting his crush. We see clips of fake trailers—decent—and some fake movies—pretty sloppy. (There are also tons of jokes in which characters straight-faced say something like “There’ll never be more Star Wars” or “Bill Cosby will always be admired” with dopey historical irony.) Along the way is some silly banter, some stupid antics, and a few funny performers (Justin Long, Rachel Dratch, Sam Richardson, Ken Jeong, Adam Pally, Jason Lee) doing their best with some thin characters. But nothing too outrageous happens, and the lines are never more than passably amusing, and the people are all broad shtick. It’s a genial enough thing, a pleasant, undemanding sit, and sure to please, or at least intrigue, the micro-generation of like-minded nerds for whom Smith remains a figure of note. But it’s ultimately so low-stakes and lacking in narrative and emotional—let alone comedic—juice that it mostly evaporates on contact with dead air between the projector and the audience. It’s a movie for people whose greatest dream is for a pretty girl to admire them merely for their movie knowledge. Hey, we can dream.