Young people have fun in 'Sh*thouse' and 'Broken Hearts Gallery'

No Content for Old Men

with Matt Craig

Hey movie lovers!

As always, you can find a podcast version of this newsletter on Apple or Spotify. Thank you so much for listening and spreading the word!

In this week's newsletter: Brace yourselves, we're talking about the state of romantic comedies in 2020. I found two recent releases that represent the high water marks for the year. Then I rounded up some really awesome streaming suggestions for you, including a two-week warning before Mank drops on Netflix. In this week's "Trailer Watch," it's a star-studded take on race relations from Regina King.

Word Count: 669 words
Reading time: 4 minutes

Sh*thouse / The Broken Hearts Gallery

We're in the infancy of a romantic comedy revival.

I, for one, am very excited about it, but I'll be the first to tell you that a lot of the entries have been...disappointing. For every one like Set It Up, there's multiple like Lovebirds, Yesterday, and Last Christmas , all of which failed to hit some or all of the very specific tenants of the genre: a great meet-cute, effervescent leads, hilarious friends on the side, a main plot that isn't a total drag, a break-up that's believable, and a grand gesture that makes you reach for the tissue box.

This week's two examples show how to do rom-coms right, though they go about it in completely different ways. The Broken Hearts Gallery is a glossy studio project with little regard for the constraints of reality. Sh*thouse is a shoestring indie with revelatory authenticity. Which do you prefer?

Sh*thouse, which I've also seen hilariously called S#!%house and S---house, is the finished product of a college kid messing around with some friends during spring break. The title suggests a trashy frat house party movie, but 23-year-old Cooper Raiff wrote, directed and starred in this heartfelt look at a coming-of-age millennial. It's an autobiographical tale of a college freshman struggling with being far away from home. He meets an attractive sophomore RA, and the two spend a night together talking and coming to grips with the identity crisis that is young adulthood.

The comparisons to Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise are obvious, and Raiff shows Linklater's preternatural ability to capture the vibe and interactions of college students with shocking clarity (probably because he was one while making this). Comparison gets a bit closer with Linklater's Everybody Wants Some!, another collegiate romp, except that a layer of millennial anxiety replaces the macho dude culture of '80s Texas college athletics.

The most apt comparison might be to the work of indie king Mark Duplass, who has long stripped away all artifice in his movies to plumb the depths of human emotion. Which is ironic, because it was Duplass who made this movie happen. Raiff tweeted Duplass a link of his makeshift student version, and Duplass was impressed enough to arrange the financing for the movie to be done right.

Discovering a new talent is always very exciting, and this is an impressive debut for Raiff. He has a keen eye for specificity in writing, and I can't wait to see where he goes from here.

Natalie Krinsky, on the other hand, has been known as a sharp writer since all the way back in 2002, when the New York Times wrote an article about her brash and ultra-popular "Sex in the City"-inspired sex column in her college newspaper at Yale. After writing credits on "90210," "Grey's Anatomy" and "Gossip Girl," she seems well positioned to take the reigns on The Broken Hearts Gallery, a rom-com where the female is given the heroic arc usually reserved for the male in the relationship.

Geraldine Viswanathan is Krinsky's perfect avatar, playing a young woman who always wears her heart on her sleeve. She wins the movie with her mix of comedic timing and charisma.

And this movie checks all the boxes. The meet-cute is excellent, the supporting friends are hilarious, there are multiple montages, and the grand gesture is sappy enough to give Love Actually a run for its money.

This movie was designed wholly for audience pleasure. It really has no interest in making, ya know, narrative sense. Characters might sit in the middle of the road on a couch because it looks cool, and supporting characters are cartoonishly simple because it's funny. On three separate occasions there's a dance montage to stand in for the passage of time. And come on, Roy Choi is in this movie as a chef named "Randy Choi," for no reason other than it makes us go 'oh my gosh that's Roy Choi I love him!'

It's a shot of straight serotonin.

And in 2020, I really appreciated that.

Streaming Suggestions!

Something New

Industry (HBO Max): You could be forgiven for thinking this show about a bunch of 20-somethings grinding through a trial program at a London banking house to be a documentary, as I did when I saw the trailer. It shares some of that gritty vérité style, but it's elevated by the excellent direction of Lena Dunham (showrunner and star of HBO hit "Girls"). While it can be jargon-heavy and unapologetic about subject knowledge, it's a fascinating look at class distinction, ambition, capitalism, and perhaps most interesting to me, how small team dynamics affect performance within a large company.

Something Old

Citizen Kane (1941, HBO Max): Consider this your two week warning! I'll be posting this recommendation next week as well. David Fincher's Mank will go up on Netflix on Dec. 4, which promises to be one of the very best movies of the year. It's about the making of Citizen Kane, which many consider to be the greatest movie ever made. So it stands to reason that you're going to want to watch, or rewatch, the original for the best experience. It's homework, if you consider having to watch the greatest movie ever made really such a burden. The great Mark Harris wrote about why Citizen Kane is as watchable now as it was in the '40s.

Something to Stream

Wildlife (Netflix): Think about how many movies there are about the father-son relationship. When's the last time you saw a really good movie about a mother-son combo? Well I've got one for you, directed by the actor Paul Dano (There Will Be Blood, Swiss Army Man), written by Dano and the actor Zoe Kazan (The Big Sick), and brought home by stellar performances from Carey Mulligan and Jake Gyllenhaal. You see a lot of movies about the '60s, but few set in rural Montana, where wildfires are raging (hmm, some things never change). It also delicately approaches the topic of lower-middle class, which I appreciate because in most cases that is stretched into movies about utter poverty, and the movie doesn't judge its characters for what they do in the face of true need. It's a really touching movie, severely underrated in the year it came out (2018). Check it out, you won't be disappointed.

Trailer Watch: One Night in Miami

Reigning Emmy AND Academy Award-winning actress Regina King cashed in her chips to direct this stage play adaptation about a fictionalized meeting of Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown and Sam Cooke in a Miami hotel room in 1964. Considering her well-established history telling powerful stories about race in America, many people consider this to be an awards contender. Even if it isn't, there simply aren't many movies that provide parts this juicy for a quartet of rising stars: Kingsley Ben-Adir ("High Fidelity" and "Peaky Blinders") as Malcolm X, Leslie Odom Jr. ("Hamilton") as Sam Cooke, Aldis Hodge (Straight Outta Compton) as Jim Brown, and Eli Goree ('Riverdale") as Cassius Clay. Coming January 15th to Amazon Prime Video!