Ayo Edebiri And Rachel Sennott Are The Chosen Ones After Teen Sex Comedy 'Bottoms'
#238: "Bottoms," "Gran Turismo," "Oldboy," "How To Blow Up A Pipeline"
Edition 238:
Hey movie lovers!
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This week: Gen-Z enters center frame again in a new twist on the raunchy high school sex comedy. Then, a racing movie I absolutely hated, a 20-year-old Korean classic I loved, and a reminder to watch one of the year’s best now that it’s on streaming. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” three awards season heavyweights give us their first look.
Bottoms
The golden age of studio comedies has long since past. Now Adam Sandler is doing Netflix movies with his daughters. Will Ferrell is doing voiceover lines for foul-mouthed CGI dogs. Eddie Murphy doesn’t even crack a smile in You People.
One of the most common reasons given for the demise of these movies is the proliferation of comedy on the internet. Need a laugh? Go to YouTube or TikTok, where you can hook your metaphorical arm into a never ending IV-bag of insane stunts, tricks and boundary-pushing humor. Murphy’s Trading Places, for example, now sounds like the premise for a Mr. Beast video (title: “I traded places with a homeless person for $2 million!!”).
If movies must adapt or die, then Bottoms has firmly chosen option one. It’s part of the new wave of Gen-Z sensibility that has begun creeping in to our entertainment, either in dead-eyed apathy for serious movies (The Fallout or “Euphoria”) or in heightened absurdity with comedies (Bodies Bodies Bodies or…well, “Euphoria”).
28-year-old director Emma Seligman has found her muse in Rachel Sennott, star of Bodies as well as Seligman’s breakthrough debut Shiva Baby, now a co-writer of this raunchy high school sex comedy about a pair of self-proclaimed losers who start a fight club in order to pick up girls.
It’s the kind of horned-up premise that we’ve seen many times before (“it’s our last year of high school and our last chance to get laid!” said every teen movie protagonist ever), with the twist being that this time it’s girls pining after girls. Even 12 years after Bridesmaids, there’s a certain humor to be mined from shameless misbehaving females, and the movie teems with a gleeful energy because of it.
In every way, Bottoms forgoes realism in order to push things to their absolute limit. It’s classic internet-era overstimulization. The characters are outlandish, the situations are ridiculous, the violence is bloody, the cringe makes your skin crawl. I can’t help but think that adapting the big silver screen comedy experience into a slightly slicker and more expensive version of what you might see on TikTok cheapens the thrill, but nearly every 10 second clip of this movie would make a funny TikTok (something the movie is no doubt counting on from a marketing perspective).
By the terms of a theater-release comedy movie, this one is very funny, thanks mostly to the dynamite leading performances of Sennott and Ayo Edebiri (better known as Syd from “The Bear,” who might have the highest approval rating of any actor in Hollywood at the moment). I didn’t realize until later that they used to do a Comedy Central sketches together, but it makes sense. Their chemistry and timing are perfect, and while Sennott might be the next great comedy star, it’s Edebiri who shows a deft touch on more sensitive moments. Her career arc — and I don’t say this lightly — is starting to look very Greta Gerwig-ish.
Plus, this movie has the secret weapon. The cheat code. The truth my brother and I repeat over and over to each other. It’s this: add Marshawn Lynch to anything and it instantly gets 100x better.
The former NFL legend is quite simply one of the funniest people on the planet, and I’d call him an incredible actor if I was fully convinced he knew he was acting here as a teacher at the school who becomes the fight club’s faculty advisor. Every single moment he’s on screen was an audible laugh from me and everyone else in my screening.
I’m not exactly sounding the alarm bells at the return of big screen comedies because of this project. If I had to diagnose the reason they don’t make them en masse anymore, it’s because people are content to wait for them to come to streaming. There’s no event-ization, no motivation to go out to the theater. And I don’t think Bottoms changes that. But as August turns into September and the summer heat refuses to go away, you could do much worse than an actually funny comedy at your local theater.
Something New
Gran Turismo (Theaters): I’ve gone back and forth about whether this movie should be considered the worst of the year (so far). It represents everything I don’t like about movies in 2023, and while not wholly incompetent I do think it’s creatively bankrupt. You can’t get any more representative of the dual 2023 trends of movies trying to mimic videogames (John Wick 4, Mission: Impossible 7, Extraction 2) and movies about inanimate brands (Tetris, Hot Cheetos, Air Jordans, Blackberrys, Beanie Babies, Pinball) than this “based on a true story” plot about a Nissan’s promotional stunt to put the best videogame driver behind the wheel of an actual race car.
The whole movie wreaks of corporate sign-offs and proper brand presentation. It’s Sony’s shameless attempt to capitalize on the Formula 1 popularity boom, yet it’s simultaneously not authentic enough with its racing to appeal to the fans of “F1: Drive to Survive” and not compelling enough in its dramatic licenses to match something like Days of Thunder. The plot is a ripoff of Top Gun, and the CGI is so bad I almost think the videogame graphics would be better. Newcomer Archie Madekwe is miscast in the lead role, and while Orlando Bloom looks the part of an F1 principal, he plays it with as much subtlety as a sledgehammer. David Harbour holds the pieces together as best he can but I wince at some of the lines he’s given to read.
This movie really makes you appreciate how good Ford v. Ferrari was.
The fact that it’s doing well at the box office, finally unseating Barbie at No. 1, legitimately discourages me. It goes for the feel-good, inspiring sports movie “hoo-rah!” moments in such a juvenile and obvious way that I can’t believe anyone would fall for its charms. Yet in my theater, as I’m sure others, people were clapping and cheering when our hero inevitably wins by a split-second. We’re better than this people!!
Something Old
Oldboy (2003): This past Sunday was National Cinema Day, which meant that all movie tickets were $4. While most people seemingly rushed out to see Barbie or Oppenheimer again — the two have combined for nearly $900 million domestically — I went to this awesome arthouse theater celebrating the 20-year anniversary of Park Chan Wook’s Korean thriller Oldboy. It’s a difficult story to summarize because of its twisty plot, but think The Count of Monte Cristo, where a guy turns himself into a superhero while wrongly imprisoned then sets out to get his revenge. It’s one of the best movies I’ve seen this year full-stop, a true masterpiece both in its technical construction and in its storytelling. It’s funny, violent, exciting, and emotional all at the same time. A total can’t-miss movie for any cinephile.
Something to Stream
How To Blow Up A Pipeline (Hulu): My No.4 movie of 2023 just hit streaming, and in case you all didn’t read my glowing review from the spring, this tense thriller is about a group of disgruntled young people who decide to bomb a Texas oil pipeline to protest the industry’s effect on climate change. Its title is provocative, but the story works as an edge-of-your-seat adventure more than a treatise on ecoterrorism. It’s the type of movie that puts its director and young ensemble cast on the map for future projects, and at a tight 100 minutes, it’s going to crush it on streaming for years to come.
Trailer Watch: The Killer
Movie SZN is on the horizon! This week we got the first teaser trailer’s for David Fincher’s The Killer, Michael Mann’s Ferrari and Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn. All three should factor prominently into awards season, and are among my most anticipated movies of the year. I’m giving the nod to Fincher’s serial killer thriller starring Michael Fassbender, because his track record with similar stories (Se7en, Zodiac, “Mindhunter”) have produced some of the best stuff of the last 30 years.
The thing I love about the reveals of all three of these movies is that they are “teasers” rather than full trailers. I’ll say it again for the people in the back: MAKE ALL TRAILERS 90 SECONDS!!