Corner Office (3/5 Stars)

Certain styles and moods are pleasures within themselves. For instance, the plot in a Raymond Chandler novel doesn’t really need to make sense in order to enjoy the writing. As long as Raymond marks his word in his inimitable style, I’m all for the reading. The man can describe a room. This is why certain authors can find themselves writing about the same types of characters doing the same things over and over again. It doesn’t quite matter what the characters do, but how they do it.

“Corner Office”, a drama directed by Joachim Back and written by Tedd Kupper is based on a short story by Jonas Karlsson. I expect the short story read like a Chandler novel and that this movie is a fine adaptation of it. It wouldn’t have been an easy thing to accomplish. Like a Chandler novel, I expect the best parts of the source material was introspective, descriptive, and contemplative. To keep the interesting parts would likely require plenty of voiceover and a deliberate pace.

This the movie accomplishes through the fine choreography of events by Back and Kupper. The movie stars Jon Hamm as Orson, a serious office worker, who spends most of his day (and movie) in voiceover describing himself and his office to the viewer. His office is weird and Orson is weirder. It is unclear what product and/or service the office provides. Nothing beyond the gray office park is ever shown in the movie. The weather is winter and workers toil under fluorescent lights. The pleasure in this movie is hearing Orson describe it, which is at turns insightful and disturbing.

Most of what Jon Hamm is physically doing is nonverbal. He performs actions and looks at things while his voiceover presents the narrative. One has to remind oneself that the performance is split up between days on set in costume and days out of costume in the voiceover booth because Jon Hamm’s performance and Back’s editing of it is so seamless and effective.

Jon Hamm is at once incorrectly cast and a perfect choice. In the drab office scenes, he never quite hides his generally handsome figure, glasses, mustache, and bulky winter clothes notwithstanding. The lighting is bad but not bad enough to hide Don Draper. In the Corner Office, where Orson is well lit and is transformed into a confident persona, Jon Hamm is as good as he has ever been in a room.

What is the Corner Office? It is described in one scene by Jon Hamm to a company psychiatrist in phrases that fall like poetry (if I could find the quote online, I would put it here). The problem is that no one else at the office thinks it exists. The movie does a good job of putting off the decision as to whether it exists or not till the very end of the film. Even then, it may have been better to keep it ambiguous. Ultimately, I didn’t care about who was crazy. Like Orson, I just really liked spending time in the space. Like a good cup of tea and a Chandler novel on a rainy day, it was relaxing.

Looking up “Corner Office” online, one finds that it premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in June 2022, but was released theatrically only in August of 2023. That sounds like not that many people liked it but because it had a recognizable star, it had to eventually get released. I know of no theaters that actually showed it and I live in New York City. At the same moment “Corner Office” was released theatrically, it also became available on demand. I saw it on a plane, which I can confirm, is one of the worst places to watch a movie. I guess I should be happy I got to see it at all. Back in the day, one could read Roger Ebert’s column, which reviewed six or seven movies a week, and be fairly confident that you were aware of every movie you needed to be aware of (just aware, not actually see) to have general knowledge of movie culture. Now the amount of movies has ballooned and the ubiquitous Roger Ebert is gone and won’t be replaced. Even Netflix’s DVD library, which could be counted on for giving the viewer a comprehensive idea of what movies were out there, is gone. Movie libraries are being divvied up between different streaming platforms, which by their nature, can’t support as large a selection as a physical library of DVDs can. So smaller, older movies will inevitably be left out. Where they can be found once the initial on demand period has ended, I don’t know. “Corner Office” won’t be coming out on DVD.

A movie like “Corner Office” is not for everyone and shouldn’t be seen by everyone. It is a small movie for a small audience. The problem lies in how difficult it is for the people who want to see it to find it. And this problem appears to be getting much worse for movie culture in general.

Bad Times at the El Royale (4/5 Stars)

1968 in all its terrifying glory

Welcome to the El Royale. A classic party hotel near Lake Tahoe on the border of California and Nevada. I mean right on the border. The border runs right through the hotel and neatly divides the rooms available into California and Nevada rooms. There are a lot of available rooms. The hotel recently lost its liquor license and with it all of its regular customers.

“Bad Times at the El Royale” is a nice compact story that uses some old tricks of the trade to confine its characters in time and place. These tricks of the trade (I won’t get into too many details) will feel like familiar tropes of horror and mystery stories. For instance, many horror movies requires that all the characters stay in the same place so as to limit the chance of escape. Mystery movies limit the amount of characters so as to help flush out a culprit. “Bad Times at the El Royale” is not a horror or a mystery movie. What it does is use the above tropes to gather and force a suspicious and varied group of characters to interact with each (sometimes violently) within the course of one day/night. Like most great writing, the writer/director Drew Goddard imposes these constraints through the reasonable choices of his characters. The movie acts at many points like a very good play with areas of extended conversations that never get tired punctuated with reveals and reversals.

The movie is divided into chapters based on the rooms that each of the characters originally let. There is Laramie Seymour Sullivan (Jon Hamm), a sociable southern traveling salesman, intent on taking the Honeymoon Suite he can finally afford since no-one uses the hotel anymore. There is Father Daniel Flynn (Jeff Bridges) in town to visit an old acquaintance. There is Darlene Sweet (Cynthia Erivo) a “Wall of Sound” backup singer in town for a gig in Reno. There is a surly woman (Dakota Johnson) who won’t give her name. And finally there is the Royale’s one and only employee Miles Miller (Lewis Pullman) a meek lad who doesn’t seem to be particularly good at anything. No-one is as they seem and some reveals as to who they actually are always good, and sometimes great (particularly the first and last reveals). By the end, it seems the Drew Goddard has decided to lump all the outrages of 1968 into one day/night at this one hotel. We have government conspiracies, Manson-like cultists, Vietnam trauma, and mafia schemes. Darlene Sweet is the most exact reference, obviously referring to the real life Darlene Love of Six Feet to Stardom replete with an obvious Phil Spector-like creepy manager. Her story is the most straight-forward in that she is actually who she says she is. Her character more than pulls her weight though by providing the music’s soundtrack, great acapella versions of “Wall of Sound” doo-wop music. If you love that sound like I do there will be long stretches of this movie you will find particularly enjoyable.

Chris Hemsworth shows up without a shirt half-way through though I won’t be able to tell you why. Jeff Bridges’ performance is great too though the scene he is particularly memorable in I can’t give away either. Several people die. A couple of other people get rich. Everyone in the audience has fun.

Drew Goddard has only one other writer/director credit to his name Cabin in the Woods (He is a prolific producer and writer though of TV shows like Lost). I have not seen that one but I heard, and now believe, that it is was made by a man who knows his stock characters inside and out. More than anything, that is what “Bad Times at the El Royale” is. It is a genre piece from a certain period of time with recognizable characters. Drew Goddard mixes it all up and makes it interesting again. Weirdly it is an original script, though the material really could not be more adapted.

Bridesmaids (5/5 Stars)

“Why can’t you just be happy for me and talk about me behind my back like a normal person!?!?”

Shouts the bride-to-be Lillian, played by Maya Rudolph, to her ex-best friend Annie, played by Kristen Wiig, at her bridal shower. There has been a seething conflict brewing between the bridesmaids, Annie and Helen, played by Rose Byrne, underneath all of the polite smiles and passive-aggressive I-hope-once-I-get-to-know-you-I’ll-like-you-better mannerisms. Annie is Lillian’s best friend since childhood. She is a failure at business (her bakery went out of business), at love (her current boyfriend considers them to be nothing but fuck-buddies), at home (her roommates are really weird and consider her the weird one), and everything else. Helen, the wife of the groom’s boss, is very rich, always beautiful, extremely organized and although she has only known Lillian for a couple months, seems determined to become her new best friend. Compounding things are Annie’s many failures at organizing the pre-wedding events from serious mishaps at the bridal dress fitting to a bachelorette party in Vegas that goes awry much earlier than you would think is possible. At one point, Annie is fired as the maid of honor and Helen is put in charge of planning the Bridal Shower. And what a shower it is. It’s just so goddamn infuriatingly perfect. So perfect in fact that at one exceedingly over the top moment that Annie would have loved to provide but couldn’t because she is poor and that Helen does provide because she is rich, Annie finally snaps and angrily exclaims, “You have got to be fucking kidding me!” What follows is a completely truthful/inappropriate tirade directed at the ex-best friend who has sold her out and a crowd of shocked party guests capped off with Annie running into the backyard to destroy the larger than life party decorations, which, it should be noted, she isn’t particularly good at doing either. That description unjustly summarizes one of the funniest scenes I have ever seen in a movie and more than anything should solidify Kristen Wiig as a bona fide movie star. The level of comedic ecstasy achieved in this movie is on the level of the best comedies ever made. The key to getting to that high level of superior comedy basically consists of finding a way for the characters to do outrageous things in ridiculous situations while still staying true to reality and the reasonable character motivations. That takes not only a large amount of creativity but also an in-depth understanding of human nature. This movie has both in spades. If this won’t be the best comedy of the year, it will definitely be one of the best. In my opinion, it should be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar.

A general rule in the movie business if you are a talented actor but aren’t getting good roles is you should take the initiative and write your own material. For years now, Kristen Wiig has been a virtuoso performer on Saturday Night Live, but unlike so many other great SNL alumni, she has been relegated to supporting characters in feature length movies of inferior comedians. Here, following the advice of producer Judd Apatow and with the partnership of Annie Mumolo, she has co-written her own screenplay. (You can see the fictional and real Annie sitting next to each other in the airplane scene.) This screenplay is perfect. Or should I say, Kristen’s performance makes it perfect. So many of the laughs in this movie would not exist if Kristen Wiig had not delivered the lines. She has an incredibly impressive ability to squeeze the utmost amount of humor out of a single phrase. Even most of her whispers get laughs in this movie. Sometimes she doesn’t say anything at all and simply employs her eyes and facial expressions to tell the joke. How many comedians can you think of who can do that? (I’m judging you, Seth Rogen.) That ability it especially important in this story because so much of it involves situations in which it would be rude for a character to complain about anything out loud lest it would ruin the experience for the bride. To be realistic then, Kristen has to convey her character’s enormous frustration with true subtlety. It is flat out brilliant the way she can say one thing and at the same time so clearly convey to the audience that she means something else entirely. And when the character finally gets loud, Kristen knocks that sort of thing out of the park too. Not to mention her ability to do great physical comedy, something most actresses aren’t even willing to try. In my opinion again, this is an Oscar caliber performance and she should at least be nominated.

Surrounding Kristen Wiig is a very good ensemble. Maya Rudolph as the bride has mastered the art of the straight character. When things get crazy she rightly underplays the social awkwardness in order to keep the scene going even farther. When things get fun she looks like she is definitely enjoying herself, which naturally suggests that the audience should too. The other bridesmaids include Rita, played by Wendi Mcloven-Covey, a blunt and frank long-married woman with three teenage boys. Rita is looking forward to the bachelorette party more than anything else. Then there is Becca, played by Ellie Kemper, who is young, naïve, and recently married. She and her husband went to Disney World for their honeymoon and haven’t been with anyone else. The wildcard is Megan, played by Melissa McCarthy, a short very stout and manly woman. She brings up the idea of a Fight Club themed Bridal Shower. All of these characters are so well defined and have such different comedic styles that the group scenes play effortlessly. No matter where they are or what anyone says, somebody in the group is going to feel out of their element or disagree or be offended on some level. When they talk in a group, it’s just one joke after another. Rita and Becca work wonderfully together. Finally, there is Helen, who is played by Rose Byrne. I was reminded of Russell Brand’s character in “Forgetting Sarah Marshall.” Here you have a character that could have been so easily given no depth and made solely to be hated. Instead, similar to so many other great Judd Apatow productions, even the antagonist in this story is made to be deliberately sympathetic. There aren’t any real bad guys in this movie and, above all, in the midst of all the raunchy scatological humor there is a core of emotional honesty. The relationships, whether between Annie and Lillian or Annie and Helen or Annie the two love interests in the movie, (the jerk played by the dashing Jon Hamm and the nice guy played by Andy O’Dowd) are sincere and affecting. These are characters you can truly care about. Well, everyone except Jon Hamm.

Of course, I don’t want to downplay the comedy by upholding the dramatic stuff. It should be mentioned just how well this movie constructs gags and conversations with humorous payoffs. One example of many includes a scene at the engagement party where Annie and Helen give speeches about how great the bride is. Annie goes first. Helen gives a better speech. Annie decides to tack on an epilogue to hers. Helen comes right back. This happens a couple more times and includes a great laugh dealing with just how many microphones there are in the room. The tug-of-war goes on in more elaborate fashion until right before the scene starts to feel really awkward. Then the movie snatches victory out of the jaws of defeat by ending it with a speech that turns into a song that turns into a duet. This conveniently spares both participants from embarrassment because the crowd logically thinks the entire competition was planned between the two. Another example involves how Annie loses her sales job in a jewelry store. A 12-year-old girl walks in and wants to buy a “Best Friends Forever” bracelet as a present for a friend. Annie, deeply distressed by that time in the movie, suggests that the word “forever” might be pushing it. The girl rightly suggests that Annie’s loser life is her own loser business. A whisper fight ensues and how it ends, well, let me just say I never ever thought a situation in which the C-word was directed at a 12-year-old girl could be so funny.

Dare I say that “Bridesmaids” is an important movie. If you take a look at most of the broad comedies out in the movie marketplace you will notice that they are almost exclusively anchored by male comedians. The few women who do anchor comedies, like say Katherine Heigl, Jennifer Aniston, or Anna Faris, usually do not find themselves in truly funny movies. This has quite a lot to do with the way movies confine the way that nearly all women look and act. To be more specific the general rule is that the main female character in a movie has to be beautiful all the time. This may be fine in drama but it hardly ever works in comedy. This is because the work of comedians is based in so many ways on self-degradation. “Bridesmaids” is a special movie in that it enables actresses to not wear makeup, curse up a storm, act awkward in conversation, act awkward physically, make disastrous embarrassing mistakes, be immature, and even, from time to time, be disgusting. That’s a good thing comedically speaking. It may seem odd that I would be arguing to allow women to degrade themselves in movies, but may I please point out that we certainly allow men to do it without any qualms whatsoever. Think of all the many lead actors in broad comedies that are not abnormally good looking or have incredible flaws. When a movie casts men of ample gut, like say Kevin James, Jack Black, John Candy, Vince Vaughn, or Chris Farley, in romantic leads in broad comedies, it essentially means that the movie is making a bet that the audience will accept that person romantically despite their appearance based in part on their personalities. Movies are very rarely willing to make the same bet with women comedians. To rephrase a classic Nora Ephron conversation between otherwise good-natured men from “When Harry Met Sally,” to say a woman has a good personality means nothing more than she is an ugly woman.

That type of attitude is precisely why the average Katherine Heigl/Jennifer Aniston Rom-Com will never be as funny as “Bridesmaids.” There are some jokes you just cannot do with makeup on. There is a very funny scene in “Bridesmaids” where the women eat at a Brazilian restaurant right before getting fitted for dresses. Everyone but Helen, who didn’t eat the meat at the restaurant because she is a vegetarian, gets food poisoning. And as the rest of the group is throwing up in the bathroom, the prideful Annie will not admit that she too is sick, as that would prove her inability to choose a good restaurant. Helen pressures her. Annie stubbornly sticks to her story even as she turns a sickly pale and lines of sweat start running down her face. Does Kristen Wiig look sexy in this scene? No way in hell. Is the scene funny? It’s hilarious. The big question of course is whether the audience will accept Kristen Wiig as a romantic interest even though she is a brave enough comedian to allow herself to be ugly. I hope so. If there is any woman that can become the first female comedic movie star it is Kristen Wiig. I hope that this movie makes a ton of money and becomes the first in Wiig’s hopefully illustrious career.

Surely some people who read this may comment that there are plenty of great female comedians on television. I surely agree. I intend to make a distinction between television and feature length films. Television broke this barrier at least fifty years ago when it allowed Lucille Ball to flex her comedic muscles in order to get drunk on cough syrup and eat an assembly line’s worth of chocolate. Since then, the vast majority of great female comedians from Carol Burnett, Mary Tyler Moore, Roseanne to recently Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, Sarah Silverman, and Tina Fey have found their home on television. In fact, it should be noted that the majority of the cast in “Bridesmaids” have done their best work on television. Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph are both from “Saturday Night Live.” Wendi McLendon-Covey is from “Reno 9-11.” Ellie Kemper is from “The Office.” Melissa McCarthy can be found on "Mike and Molly." The only bridesmaid who is best known from movies here is Rose Byrne (aka the abnormally beautiful one). Rose, by the way, is not a comedian and is not so funny in this movie, although she does get much funnier as her character is more developed and her perfect hair gets out of place. I don't believe that is a coincidence. 

I don’t want to seem like a feminist in bringing this sort of thing up. (Quite frankly, the more I think about this sort of thing the more I'm inclined to think requiring an -ism to be treated equally is itself demeaning) I am much more comfortable saying it as a person who considers comedy to be a hobby and passion. To the studios I would argue that there is plenty of money to be made by giving talented female comedians like Kristen Wiig leading roles that allow imperfect looks and behavior. There are plenty of profitable comedies that are directed entirely at male audiences. The same should be able to be done conversely. “Bridesmaids” might be a very clear example of that.  

Sucker Punch (4/5 Stars)

Zach Snyder, director of “300” and “Watchmen,” tries out his writing chops for the first time with “Sucker Punch,” a story about a wrongly committed girl who attempts an insane asylum escape. Well actually there is five of them and they’re prostitutes in a bordello and um…The whole escape thing involves fighting World War I, giant mechanical samurais, a dragon…and it all takes place at or in uh…imagination land…you know what? I’ll get back to that. “Sucker Punch” lives up to its title. It is a totally unpredictable unapologetic excess of heightened emotion, ultra violence, and stylistic overindulgence. You can arguably say that “Sucker Punch” is a bad movie but that's sort of like remarking that Opera isn’t realistic enough. I will say this though about Snyder. I’ve always had the feeling while watching his movies that I was witnessing something unmistakably new. If “Sucker Punch” is folly, it is at least my favorite kind. An ambitious one.

The movie starts with your average worst-case scenario. A woman dies. She leaves her entire estate to her two daughters. The evil stepfather gets enraged and with largely incestuous overtones attacks his kids. The older daughter, a girl named Baby Doll, played by Emily Browning, runs to get a gun but returns to late. Her sister has been murdered. The evil stepfather frames Baby Doll and gets her committed to an insane asylum. He then bribes the sadistic operator, played by Oscar Isaac, to have Baby Doll lobotomized within the week.

At this point, the movie becomes a completely different parallel movie, whereupon it seems that Baby Doll imagines herself to be a prostitute in a bordello, who is to be sold to a character called the High Roller within the week. She enlists the help of four other fellow prostitutes, Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), Rocket (Jena Malone), Amber (Jamie Chung), and Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens) to plan an escape. They will need a map, a cigarette lighter, a knife, and a key. The plan is for Baby Doll to put on a highly entertaining burlesque act that will distract all the men in order for the others to steal the items.

I left something out. In the asylum story, there is a psychiatrist (Carla Gugino) who has the inmates perform their sad stories on a theater stage as a sort of therapy. In the bordello, she is a madame who runs the burlesque show. When Baby Doll starts dancing (or supposedly acting out therapy in the first storyline) the movie switches over into battle scenes, which include the five girls donning salacious battle-rattle and fighting various armies for the items. They have to kill Zombie Germans stationed in World War I trenches for the map, a fire-breathing dragon for the fire, and so on. Throughout most of this you can sort of tell what is actually happening in the other story-lines although you may have some very good questions. Like for instance, why is this woman imagining herself in a so very male fantasy world. Or who is the Scott Glenn character, a wise entity that shows up only in the battle fantasies to intone enjoyably ridiculous advice, supposed to be in reality, whatever that is.

The best answer I think is that the several story-worlds have less to do with plot or logic and much more to do with giving Snyder an excuse to zealously indulge into what could perhaps be called an “artistic vision.” I’m guessing he worked backward with a thought process like this: How can I get a team of scantily clad women to battle World War I zombies, medieval dragons, and science fiction robots, all in the same movie? Well, it can totally be in the imagination of a stripper on a mission. That would provide the excuse for putting them in full makeup and revealing outfits the entire time. But wait, what type of stripper would be crazy enough to imagine all that? Well, perhaps if the stripper was but the schizophrenic alter ego of a truly insane woman. But wait, what would make someone be that bat shit crazy? Aha! I’ll have her father kill her sister and frame her for it! Break out the champagne! I’m going to start up the drawings for the gigantic samurai robots!

Really, your enjoyment of this movie is not going to come from the plot or character development. It will come from your willingness to enjoy stand-alone set pieces of ridiculously outfitted women battling equally ridiculous things. In that aspect, the movie truly delivers. The action scenes are outrageous and innovative. Helpfully, Snyder also has the habit of using slow motion. This allows the viewer to admire the artistic still frame, which in turn stops the action from becoming a Bayesian mish mash of mindless confusion. Outside the battle scenes, there is also plenty to admire in style if not in substance. I especially like the camera angles and the exaggerated details in objects and characters. (The Mayor and Cook were my favorite grotesquely comical caricatures). Plenty of attention is placed on composition, color palette, and atmosphere. Snyder’s use of green screen in every shot allows him the requisite control to stylize every single shot. The voiceovers and serious talk could have been more poetic and Snyder's choice of music isn't very good, but still there is a truly great movie waiting somewhere in Snyder’s style. I hope to someday see it. 

The character development in this movie leaves something to be desired. I don’t think it was a very good idea to name the characters Sweet Pea, Amber, or Baby Doll. Blondie is okay I guess. But really, given what the women are made to do, the only name that makes any sense is Rocket. She’s played by Jena Malone and is appropriately the only actor here that gives off any lasting impression. (Emily Browning on the other hand seems to have been cast solely on her ability to look sad). Jena you may remember from “Donnie Darko” and “Into the Wild” and probably don’t remember from one of my favorite hidden movies, “Cheaters.” She deserves to be on the short list of underrated and perpetually underused actresses. Her presence here lends the team its admittedly limited amount of credibility. 

Two more things. The makers will have you believe that this contains themes of female empowerment. Plenty of critics, including two I highly respect A.O. Scott and Michael Phillips, say it is decisively misogynistic. I disagree with both. It’s neither. It’s a comic book movie and as such it contains a certain style that equally applies to both men and women. The good guys are exaggerated into the maker’s idea of ideal beauty and the bad guys are exaggerated into the maker’s idea of ideal ugliness. I don’t recall anybody saying that the one-dimensional Spartans in “300” with their ridiculously perfect perpetually uncovered abdominals were somehow demeaning to men. They simply commented on how nice the abs looked. That attitude should be applied to the heroines of this movie. It's true, Snyder deals in the objectification of people. But then again so do all comic books, and for that matter anything dealing with fashion, or why not the entire branch of art called Humanism going all the way back to when Michelangelo added all those muscles in the Sistine Chapel for no other reason than he thought the human body was an admirable thing and that there was no harm in making it look its best. Of course beauty is in the eye of the beholder and people may logically be turned off by the presentation of these women (or like me have a preference for one amongst the others), but I don’t think anyone can argue that Snyder, or for that matter his wife/executive producer Deborah Snyder, wasn’t trying to make the team look as gorgeous as he thought possible. There's nothing wrong with that. 

As far as the plenty of "women in danger" material in this movie, I can’t see how you can have an action movie without it. If there isn’t any danger, there isn’t any conflict. The movie might as well have taken place at a shooting range with the bad guys being cardboard cutouts. The test I would think is whether the makers intend the audience to empathize primarily with the women: Do they mean for us to feel scared when they are in danger and to be relieved when they are triumphant? I think the answer to that is obvious in this movie. If the test worked any other way than every movie with a female action star would be automatically exploitative. That would include Ripley, Clarice Starling, and Lisbeth Salandar. Truly we would be missing out by keeping all those fictional women in the movie universe up on their pedestals totally safe all the time.

Having said that, the PG-13 rating is completely absurd, a perfect example of how hypocritical the MPAA can be. Future moviemakers take note. You can kill all you want just as long as there isn’t any blood. You can present sexual violence just as long as there isn’t any nudity. And you can have characters yell "motherfucker" just as long as you cut out the audio for the second half of the word. Of course, the most ridiculous thing is what the MPAA apparently thought was too objectionable to keep in. The credits and trailer show what sort of look to be like the actual burlesque shows that we never get to see in the movie. So apparently murder and near-rape is fine, but a song and dance number that the women seem to be actually enjoying isn’t. Hmm…now is that misogynistic?