Tag Archives: Jennifer Coolidge

Swan Song

Cast: Udo Kier, Jennifer Coolidge, Linda Evans, Michael Urie

Director: Todd Stephens

Writer: Todd Stephens

There’s a particular kind of actor, recognised and beloved by many, who spend decades-long careers just outside of the spotlight. Harry Dean Stanton was such an actor, whose career spanned six decades of supporting roles in hundreds of movies and shows, each one of which was made better by his presence, and only a couple of leading roles, both of them spectacular. He was 90-years-old when he made Lucky, and he couldn’t have asked for a better swan song. The profile also fits Udo Kier, a German actor who has appeared in over two hundred films and has worked with the likes of Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Dario Argento, Gus Van Sant, and, perhaps most notably, Lars Von Trier. At one point or another, you’ve seen Kier in something and been struck by his piercing gaze. Swan Song, directed by Todd Stephens, is a film that affords Kier a long overdue lead role so that he may show off the full range of his talents as an performer. It’s not the role you might have imagined for an actor who has so often been called upon to be menacing and unhinged, but he has always been a transformative performer and, whatever one thinks of the quality of this feature, is to be sure a worthy showcase for a singular screen presence.

Kier plays Pat Pitsenbarger, a real-life figure who was dubbed the ‘Liberace of Sandusky’, where Stephens is from. He’s a retired hairdresser now living a listless existence in a old folks’ home. While his hidden stash of cigarettes betrays a mischievous streak, he mostly looks like he’s just about given up and is simply spending his days wasting away. That is until lawyer Walter Shanrock (Tom Bloom) drops in for an unexpected visit, informing him that Rita Parker Sloan (Linda Evans), Pat’s most beloved client from his heyday, has died and that her last will and testament stipulated that he, and he alone, should be the one to do her hair and makeup for her final rest. Pat refuses at first, evidently there is a history of slights and grudges that he is still holding on to, but soon changes his mind in the face of the irrepressible boredom he otherwise faces as well as the prospect of performing one final hurrah. He escapes his nursing home and goes hunting for the beauty products and equipment he will need with the loose change in his pocket. The quest will lead many old familiar roads in a town that has mostly forgotten about him. Those that he knew during his glory days are either dead, like his partner David, or they’ve moved on, like his protégé Dee Dee (Jennifer Coolidge).

Pat is a curious specimen, made all the curiouser for being played by Udo Kier. Sundusky, Ohio, is a rural American town deep in a county that leans Republican, and in strolls this 70-year-old man with a German accent wearing a mint-green women’s suit and navy blue fedora with all the confidence and nonchalance of a movie star walking down Hollywood Boulevard. How such a man ever found his footing in such a place, we don’t know nor do we need to know. These kinds of small communities have their ways of finding their local characters. What we do learn is that for many happy years, Pat was the star beautician, the man all the women and wealth and status came to for their hairstyling needs. He was also a leading figure in the gay community, who co-founded a bar that became a refuge for his people at a time when they were desperately needed and where he performed his drag routine every Saturday night. Now, there is barely anyone who remembers him. His house, the one he wasn’t legally allowed to inherit when his partner died, was torn down, the bar is being sold so it can turned into a craft beer pub (“Where will people dance?” he asks disbelievingly), and his favourite commodities (cigarettes, clothing, hair products) are no longer in style. Little has changed on the surface, but it’s a completely different place.

The story is a digressive one that works best when focusing on the small details. Pat is especially focused on getting his hands on Vivante, a hairspray that was Rita’s favourite but has long since been discontinued. Pat walks into a Black hairdressers in search of it, loath as he is to go to Dee Dee’s where he is more likely to find some, and the scene that follows is demonstrative of how dismissive most people initially towards the curious old man who stands out like a sore thumb until they see how compelling he really is. It’s not just Pat though, it’s Kier in all of his distinctiveness. He’s the kind of actor who will give a line reading that nobody else would ever think to deliver. There’s nobody else who looks, moves, or emotes quite like he does. He visits David’s grave in one scene, the first time he’s ever seen it in person, and you’re suddenly caught off guard by his sudden powerful evocation of grief, not in a demonstrative sense but in the way it sneaks up on you when you weren’t prepared for it. Later on we see Pat recapture some of the old glory, strutting down the drag bar stage with a chandelier atop his head while lip-syncing to Robyn, and we see that his capacity for joy is just as potent. It is a truly remarkable performance.

Outside of Kier’s sublime turn, the movie is rather straightforward and occasionally vapid. The dialogue is very on the nose, stating outright in plain English what Kier has already done a formidable job of conveying with his multifaceted expressions, which makes the film feel more ordinary and obvious than what I feel like Stephens was going for. There is a recurring motif of Pat conversing with his departed acquaintances, appear before him as apparitions, and the effect is clumsy. Those scenes have none of the weight to them that Pat’s reunion with Dee Dee does; they trade snide jabs that amuse at first, but then after a while you start to feel the strain of their shared history come forth and their rapport gives way to something more bittersweet. There’s bitterness on both sides, but you can tell that these two once loved each other (I’ve never realised before what a good dramatic actress Coolidge can be with the right material). It’s in moments like that where the film really shines, and no aspect shines brighter than Kier, so full of life in every frame that you cannot help but be struck with awe. With his face at the centre (and what a face), he far and away outshines whatever lesser aspects might have detracted from a less impressive star. Whatever else viewers do or don’t take away from it, Swan Song shall always be an Udo Kier film.

★★★★

Promising Young Woman

Cast: Carey Mulligan, Bo Burnham, Alison Brie, Clancy Brown, Jennifer Coolidge, Laverne Cox, Connie Britton

Director: Emerald Fennell

Writer: Emerald Fennell

If you’ve seen any of the advertising for Promising Young Woman, you’ll probably go in expecting a 70’s style rape-revenge exploitation fantasy flick. And the thing about this film is that it’s not not that. Promising Young Woman is decidedly a rape-revenge fantasy, but one that subverts both the revenge and the fantasy. It’s about a woman trying to correct a gross injustice that should never have happened and should definitely never have been allowed to remain unpunished and forgotten, but it understands that the justice she seeks is one that isn’t obtainable for most victims and survivors of sexual assault, not with the world the way it is today, and that even then revenge seldom brings people the catharsis that they seek. It’s a rape-revenge story made for 2020, where the #MeToo movement has propelled sexual harassment and sexual assault into an issue that can no longer be dismissed or ignored, but where the structures and cultures that allow and enable sexual predators to exploit women without consequence remain unchanged. It doesn’t entirely stick the landing, but then what movie could in a world where the themes of patriarchal oppression and sexual violence it attempts to examine remain contentious, messy, and unresolved matters? Like it or hate it, it is a testament to Fennell’s film that it cannot be treated with indifference, something that far too many women’s stories have met.

The movie’s heroine is Cassie (Carey Mulligan), the namesake of a Trojan priestess cursed to know the future but to never have her prophecies believed. The details are kept vague, but we piece together that she was once a medical student who dropped out following the rape and death of her best friend Nina (it is implied that she took her own life after her case was dropped by the authorities). Since then Cassie has worked in a low-paying café job while living with her parents Stanley (Clancy Brown) and Susan (Jennifer Coolidge) and, at age thirty, shows no intent or interest in moving on with her life. Instead she has devoted herself towards enacting a revenge of sorts, even if only a symbolic or nominal one. Every other night, she’ll get dressed and made up and go to some bar or club where she’ll act leglessly drunk, so drunk that some nice guy will eventually swing by to check in on her. This inevitably ends up with her in the guy’s home where he plainly, fully intends to take advantage of the beautiful woman who can barely remain conscious or string a sentence together. That’s when she’ll switch gears and ask in her most innocently threatening voice “What are you doing?” What happens next is better seen than explained, but viewers who expect divine bloody fury akin to I Spit on Your Grave should brace for disappointment.

So, to summarise, Cassie spends her nights placing herself in vulnerable, compromising positions with predatory men without an apparent means of protecting herself or anybody else knowing where she is, something that no woman in her right mind would ever dream of doing. This is where the revenge angle starts turning on its head. As satisfying as it is to watch Cassie take these would-be rapists, played by famous nerdy nice guys such as Adam Brody and Christopher Mintz-Plasse, down a peg, the film understands that what she’s doing is reckless, ill-conceived, and ultimately ineffective in the face of the ingrained systemic injustices she’s fighting. Yet what else can she do? It’s not like the police or the courts are going to do anything. Mulligan is terrific playing the emotional devastation that Cassie has suffered and has since learnt to channel into cool, cold-blooded rage. She never screams or seethes because she knows that all she has to do to scare these guys is smile innocently yet knowingly in her unapologetically girlish way and ask the questions that she knows will illicit the feeble excuses that even they know are bullshit. “I thought we had a connection” says one to the woman he thought was nearly comatose a minute before. “Why do you bitches have to ruin everything?” says another in an attempt to spin the blame. And, of course, there’s always the ever-classic “I’m a nice guy”.

There are tonal clashes and even mixed messages throughout Promising Young Woman, but then that sort of comes part and parcel when delving into this territory, at least to an extent. As popular media is slowly (very slowly) moving past the point where depictions of rape are employed purely as gratuitous scenes of titillating degradation or as rhetorical devices in the backstories of vengeful (usually male) heroes, the critical question of how to thoughtfully and sensitively handle depictions and stories of rape remains an open one. There are no on-screen portrayals of rape in this film, but there are several stomach-churning scenes of attempted rape and misogyny and one horrendously unflinching moment of violence being inflicted on a woman. But of course these are ideas that should turn one’s stomach and leave one feeling horrified. The pertinent question isn’t so much whether these kinds of scenes should be depicted in cinema, but rather to what end? Fennell wades into a lot of troubling territory throughout, but it’s plain to see that she isn’t doing so for the sake of it; she’s making a point. She’s defiantly and confidently making a point about how willing people today, perpetrators, witnesses, and enablers alike, still are to buy into the same prevailing patriarchal narrative to avoid confronting uncomfortable truths. Phrases such as “she was into it”, “he said-she said”, and “we were just kids” are uttered and shown to be the flimsy excuses that they are.

But that doesn’t make Cassie some badass ‘yaas queen!’ warrior woman hellbent on her righteously vengeful rampage. Rape culture is complicated and the level of grief, trauma, and damage brought about is not easily processed. While we sympathise with Cassie’s pain and anger, agree with her grievances, and perhaps even root for her to succeed, her methods and motivations still give us pause. When an old classmate Ryan (Bo Burnham) mentions that the guy responsible for destroying the life of her friend Nina is back home and getting married, this initiates a plan to get back at him and all those who witnessed or else turned a blind eye to his crime. To this end, Cassie does some pretty heinous, if not outright reprehensible, things that can feel less vindictive than they do malignant. When she acts against her targets, which include two women played by Alison Brie and Connie Brtton (the casting in this film is so good!), there’s a sense that she isn’t so much righting wrongs as she is perpetuating those same wrongs. There are moments when Cassie feels less sure about the rightness of her actions, especially in one scene (albeit a clumsily written and performed one) where she meets a former lawyer played by Alfred Molina. When she sees what effect her vengeance has on her victims and how petty and cruel they all seem even given the grievous nature of their crime, she wonders whether what she does is even worth it.

Fennell does a splendid job of conveying this ambivalence through her direction. The film is coloured throughout in this bright bubble-gum/candy flavoured aesthetic that is sweet to the point of sickliness. Everything we see and hear, from Cassie’s flowery dresses and wavy blonde hair to the casting of TV boyfriends like Max Greenfield (New Girl) and Chris Powell (Private Practice (and both, incidentally, in Veronica Mars)), and the Paris Hilton-Britney Spears needle drops, speak to a candid, unembarrassed, prevailing girlishness. It all stands at once for a ringing, defiant affirmation of femininity, which is above all what patriarchal rape culture threatens to destroy, but it also plays into the conflicting emotions of the story that unfolds. How can the world be as bright, cheerful, and colourful as it is, when the most beautiful and incredible person that Cassie ever knew has been discarded and forgotten by all except her? The artificiality of the aesthetic also primes the viewer to suspend their disbelief as the film approaches an ending that pushes the boundaries of plausibility, given the reality of how attempts to hold rapists to account for their crimes tend to play out in the real world. Then again, it is a bold and perplexing climax that the film ends on and, like many a perplexing film, how it plays to you is going to be shaped by what kind of movie you think Promising Young Woman is.

There’s much to be said and written about that ending, which can be read as anything from triumphant to tragic to transgressive. Certainly no consensus can be reached on it; it’s too daring and provocative a film for that. Promising Young Woman is not an easy film to watch. It verges often into uncomfortable material, it is often at odds with itself, and its themes cannot be broken neatly into tidy pieces that make it clear what the audience is supposed to feel and take away. While there are parts of the film I didn’t like, they feel too intrinsic to the overall vision in all of its messiness and ambition to be detached from the aspects that I did like. More than that, Promising Young Woman is a film that cannot be dismissed and forgotten about. It’s such a captivating film and it lingers for so long after viewing that one is compelled to have an emotional reaction, even if it’s a negative one. In that way, Promising Young Woman might be the #MeToo movie we’ve been waiting for. It doesn’t offer simplistic solutions, hollow platitudes, or passive chastisement; the film is damning in its condemnation, ferocious in its conviction, and brazen in its boldness. It is every bit as tangled, confounding, and imperfect as the world that necessitated its very existence.

★★★★

Like a Boss

Cast: Tiffany Haddish, Rose Byrne, Jennifer Coolidge, Natasha Rothwell, Billy Porter, Salma Hayek

Director: Miguel Arteta

Writers: Sam Pitman, Adam Cole-Kelly

The more time that goes by, the more bored I get with the slate of big studio American comedies that gets released each year. There was a time, not even as long as a decade ago, when the Hollywood machine would reliably churn out at least a couple of reasonably funny, broadly appealing, traditional comedy films, The Hangover and Bridesmaids for instance, and make a killing at the box office. Nowadays the best comedies being made in the USA are either indies such as The Big Sick and Booksmart or genre films like Thor: Ragnarok and Knives Out. There could be any number of reasons for this slump from the rise of online streaming services and Peak TV to the possibility that the archetypal American comedy is becoming a harder sell in international markets compared to the increasingly popular superhero blockbuster. Judd Apatow, when asked about this topic, has held that audiences always have and always will go to the theatres to watch good movies, so perhaps the real issue is one of quality. That’s a thought I find myself inclined to agree with when watching films such as this. Like a Boss, a Paramount comedy, is yet another of these Hollywood farces that takes on an ensemble of talented actors and has them perform semi-improvised raunchy bits in lieu of actual, substantive jokes. Words can barely describe how bored I am of these kinds of movies, but what the heck I’ll give it a go.

The film is about two besties named Mia (Tiffany Haddish) and Mel (Rose Byrne) who have known each other since elementary school and have been inseparable ever since Mia and her mother took Mel in from her broken home. The two have grown up together, but they haven’t really grown up all that much if you get my meaning. As adults they still live their lives as if it were a non-stop college party; staying up until the early hours, smoking pot, hooking up with young men, you get the idea. In between they run a mildly successful beauty company with their colourful employees Sydney (Jennifer Coolidge) and Barrett (Billy Porter). While the two are more or less happy with their shared life, they could do without the passive-aggressive disapproval of their family-orientated friends and the debt they’ve accumulated could ruin their business if something doesn’t change soon. Enter Claire Luna (Salma Hayek), a fashion and cosmetics mogul with a fake tan, tight dress, and oversized heels, to make them an offer they cannot refuse. Claire wants to acquire Mia&Mel, bring the budding entrepreneurs into her business network, and have them develop a hot new product. Mel is desperate to take her up and save their business, but Mia is less convinced that surrendering sole control of their company is a good idea. They soon agree, unknowingly playing into Claire’s plan to drive them apart and steal their business out from under them.

So that’s the premise for this purported comedy. It isn’t anything substantial but there’s enough there for them to work with that the movie ought not to lack for comic material. Or so I would have thought. Like a Boss barely got so much as a titter out of me because somewhere along the way screenwriters Sam Pitman and Adam Cole-Kelly forgot to write some actual jokes. Following the examples of Neighbours and Bad Moms, this is a movie that mistakes bawdiness for hilarity, obscenity for edginess, and juvenility with trendiness. Simply being vulgar is one thing, some viewers may well find the joke cake styled to look like a baby’s head emerging from a bloody vagina to be funny, but what made the film such a drag was how tediously lame it constantly was. One scene has Mia saying something to the effect of “Don’t worry your pretty little head about it” to Claire. She replies, “My head is not little, it’s just that my breasts are humungous”. Ernst Lubitsch would be rolling in his grave if he could read that line. There’s some potential for comedy there, as there is throughout much of the movie, but the writers don’t seem to care enough to so much as try and be clever or creative about it. All the humour amounts to is a bunch of single entendres delivered by lazy stereotypes with barefaced banality.

Well, not all; there are a couple of slapstick set-pieces as in one scene where Mia accidentally consumes some hot peppers, but they’re so one-note and narrowly-conceived that the actors have to muster superhuman levels of commitment in order to salvage them. Haddish and Byrne, the respective stars of the similarly styled yet infinitely funnier Girls Night and Bridesmaids, do sell you on their ride together/die together BFF chemistry but there’s only so much they can bring to a movie that doesn’t know what to do with them beyond their most surface-level comedic tendencies. Haddish plays the loud and boisterous one and Byrne plays the anxious and insecure one. Together they stumble along this awkward middle ground between being intelligent and talented enough to be competent make-up artists and designers while also being clueless and immature enough that they struggle with some pretty basic tasks. This clumsy characterisation is another reason why few of the ‘jokes’ land. Hayek meanwhile plays a stereotypical boss lady whose accent is made subject to a recurring gag and whose looks, not her confidence, ruthlessness or ambition, are made her defining feature (and not in a self-aware way either). Porter gets the biggest laugh of all in the scene where his character is fired, a “tragic moment” that he milks like the drama queen that he is. These are all actors who are capable of being tremendously funny and they deserve better.

To be honest we all deserve better than Like a Boss, a movie that operates on the assumption that there’s something inherently funny about women behaving as crudely and obnoxiously as stereotypical men. Whether it’s about men, women, or people of other genders, I’m tired of sitting through films that masquerade as comedies while refusing to put any effort into constructing their humour beyond having their characters act like reprobates and fools and spouting expletives and vulgarisms as if they are intrinsically funny in and of themselves. There’s even a cheap attempt made to pass this film off as some sort of coarse testament to the complexity and sanctity of female friendships, but it rings hollow in a movie that treats women as caricatures (for a truly profound and hysterical take on female friendships with Tiffany Haddish, go onto Netflix and watch Tuca & Bertie). This is nothing more and nothing less than the same tired comedy film that the major Hollywood studios continue to spit out year after year because they seemingly cannot think of any other way to make them. In the end it doesn’t really matter how much I like the stars, how harmless the humour is, or how funny these films can be at fleeting moments; American studio comedies have lost their way and I barely have the patience for them any more.

★★