The Fractured Mirror

The Fractured Mirror entry: The Bubble (2022)
almost 2 years ago – Sun, Nov 20, 2022 at 08:13:12 PM

The Bubble (2022)

In 2022 writer and director Judd Apatow tested audience’s patience with The Bubble, a poorly received ensemble comedy about filmmaking, always a subject of more interest to movie-makers than movie fans, set during the pandemic, a subject many are eager to ignore, forget and/or escape, and prominently involving TikTok dancing and his real-life daughter. TikTok dancing is embarrassing in every context, including the original, but it is particularly cringe-worthy here.

Apatow took inspiration for his aimless laugher in the cast of Jurassic World: Dominion staying together in a hotel during the pandemic. Apatow’s Netflix flop imagines the sexed-up misadventures of the cast and crew of Cliff Beasts 6, a big-budget, special effects intensive blockbuster sequel being filmed during the height of COVID.

The troubled production brings together a motley assembling of actors, actresses and one TikTok superstar with one hundred million followers under the direction of indie wunderkind turned cog in the machine Darren Eigan (Fred Armisen). Pedro Pascal plays bad boy Dieter Bravo, a man of many addictions and compulsions, primarily sexual and pharmaceutical in nature. David Duchovny is Dustin Mulray, the self-appointed guardian of the franchise’s soul while Iris Apatow is Krystal Kris, the aforementioned TikTok superstar and attractive mediocrity.

The Bubble plays like Tropic Thunder Lite, with the satire and outrageousness dialed down and the edges sanded off. The talented cast generates a steady stream of mild chuckles but this is meandering and shapeless even by Apatow’s lenient standards. The Bubble ends on a uniquely unsatisfying note by lazily patting itself on the back for even trying to distract the masses during a perilous time and unconvincingly positing that what we’ve just watched is so inherently entertaining that if a movie were to be made about it it’d be an automatic smash.

The shooting of Cliff Beasts 6 stretches interminably, to near-Heaven’s Gate/Apocalypse Now-level lengths. The same is not entirely true of The Bubble but it’s never clear why, as a goofy, lightweight comedy about nothing much in particular, this needs more than two hours to go nowhere.

The Fractured Mirror entry: Showgirl in Hollywood (1930)
almost 2 years ago – Tue, Nov 08, 2022 at 08:37:57 PM

Showgirl in Hollywood (1930) (FM)

Ambitious career gal Dixie Dugan was a multi-media force in the late 1920s and early 1930s and a fixture of the funny pages for decades afterwards. Dixie was introduced in the 1928 novel Show Girl, which was followed the next year by Hollywood Girl. The motion picture business came calling when Show Girl was brought to the big screen under that title the year it came out and legendary director Melvyn LeRoy adapted Hollywood Girl in 1930 as Showgirl in Hollywood. By that point Dugan had begun a thirty-seven year run as a comic strip that would last until 1966. Though the comic strip version of Dugan was modeled on silent screen siren Louise Brooks she was played in Show Girl and Showgirl in Hollywood by big-eyed beauty Alice White.

Showgirl in Hollywood opens with the disastrous close of a show written by earnest young scribe Jimmy Doyle (Jack Mulhall) and starring Dixie Dugan. The frustrated actress proves an easy mark for the sleazy charm of Frank Buelow (John Miljan), an incorrigible cad of a filmmaker who seems to have gotten into the business in order to manipulate beautiful, vulnerable young women professionally, romantically and sexually.

The devious director tricks his would-be protege into sabotaging her nascent career with diva antics and unreasonable demands, much to Jimmy’s aggravation. Showgirl in Hollywood portrays the film business in a crucial time of transition with bracing honesty. In a heartbreaking subplot, Dixie befriends Donny Harris (Blanche Sweet), a tragic actress who is driven to attempt suicide because her husband is a flagrant adulterer but also because Hollywood seemingly only has thankless grandma roles for actresses like her who have committed the unforgivable crime of being thirty-two. Showgirl in Hollywood goes to some very grim, uncompromising places but pulls back with a happy ending that feels like a cop out. LeRoy’s pre-code talkie is nevertheless a slickly appealing combination of dark show-biz melodrama and ebullient musical comedy.

The Fractured Mirror entry: Starry Eyes (2014)
almost 2 years ago – Sun, Oct 30, 2022 at 10:15:49 PM

Starry Eyes (2014) (FM)

Being a beautiful actress in Hollywood looking for that all-important big break is a waking nightmare full of monsters and sinister vibes even before evil cults and mass murder enter the equation in the 2014 shocker Starry Eyes. The hideous ghost of the still living (but just barely) Harvey Weinstein, preeminent show-business ghoul, haunts this trenchant exploration of the vulnerability and terrifying powerlessness that comes with being just another wannabe in a city where up and comers will do anything for a shot at even the kind of degrading roles they’d probably regret if they actually got them.

In an audacious, Fangoria Chainsaw Award-nominated performance, Alex Essoe gets deep inside the tormented psyche of Sarah, an ambitious young actress unhappily biding her time as a waitress at a tater tots-themed Hooters knockoff called Big Taters managed by a mustachioed, wonderfully creepy Pat Healy. Everywhere Sarah goes she’s ogled and objectified by a world that sees her as interchangeable with all of the other beautiful, hopeless dreamers who get off the bus from the heartland every day.

So when Sarah is sexually propositioned by an unnervingly avuncular producer she at first resists but later relents out of hopelessness and desperation. When Sarah succumbs to temptation, the movie makes an abrupt tonal shift from being a chilly, atmospheric mood piece about how Hollywood treats starlets with a casual cruelty that would horrify even veteran slashers to being an all-out bloodbath as the protagonist goes from hero to villain. Starry Eyes gets visceral in the most literal possible sense as it trades in low-key social commentary of its early scenes for an all-out tinsel town massacre.

Starry Eyes begins more strongly than it ends but it’s nevertheless a memorable, uncompromising look at how sometimes making it in Hollywood isn’t murder but rather something much worse and infinitely more evil.

The Fractured Mirror: He's Way More Famous Than You (2012)
about 2 years ago – Thu, Oct 27, 2022 at 08:05:40 PM

He’s Way More Famous Than You (2012) (FM)

Haley Pfeiffer plays a hopefully extremely fictionalized version of herself as the messiest of hot messes in the crazed 2012 broad comedy He’s Way More Famous Than You. In a fearless performance, Pfeiffer is vulgar. She’s crude. She’s sexual in a way that makes everyone around her deeply uncomfortable. She’s a drunken, narcissistic hurricane of id and ego. And those are her more admirable qualities.

The daughter of legendary satirist Jules Pfeiffer and second generation screenwriter begins He’s Way More Famous Than You in a state of personal and professional free-fall. Her boyfriend and agent both dump her and her alcoholism is out of control.

The struggling actress sees fame and movie stardom as her salvation. So she tries to terrorize her way to success by bullying the famous people in her orbit into financing, appearing in, and directing an unwatchable short film she’s convinced will be her comeback vehicle.

He’s Way More Famous Than You is a little movie with a big, bawdy, balls-out and borderline feral lead performance that goes too far and then just keeps on going. Pfeiffer roped Ben Stiller, Natasha Lyonne and Ralph Macchio into this insanity as fictionalized versions of themselves but no one makes as strong an impression as Pfeiffer’s The Squid and the Whale costar Jesse Eisenberg, who is very famous and consequently treated as a golden God.

It’s not unusual for celebrities to play self-deprecating versions of themselves onscreen but few, if any, go as far as Pfeiffer does here in portraying herself as a massive train wreck we can’t look away from no matter how hard we try.

The Fractured Mirror entry: Supporting Characters (2012)
about 2 years ago – Mon, Oct 24, 2022 at 08:31:13 PM

I've been fortunate to see a bunch of films that have pleasantly surprised me for this book/project. This is one of them. Really enjoyed it. Very slight but very fun. 

Supporting Characters (2012) (FM)

Daniel Schechter’s charming if aimless 2012 show-biz comedy Supporting Characters suggests a mumblecore take on Albert Brooks’ Modern Romance in its wry depiction of two cutters who are consummate professionals in the editing room but clueless and overwhelmed in the ways of love.

Mumblecore staple Alex Karpovsky and Tarik Lowe, who co-wrote the screenplay with Schechter, have terrific chemistry as Nick and Darryl respectively, the aforementioned movie world professionals. They’re friends as well as professional partners working on an awful-looking fantasy movie for hilariously clueless director Adrian (Kevin Corrigan, delightful as always), who doesn’t seem to know what he wants but is certain that the editors aren’t giving it to him.

Supporting Characters has the low energy and low stakes endemic to Mumblecore. Will our heroes use their gifts to make a terrible-looking movie slightly better and continue to collaborate? Will Nick’s serious relationship survive his flirtation with Jamie (Arielle Kebbel), the sexy, pothead leading lady of the abysmal movie they’re editing? Finally, will Darryl make a success of his faltering relationship with Liana (Melonie Diaz) or will she reject not just his marriage proposal but their relationship as a whole?

Thankfully Supporting Characters also has unexpected and very welcome diversity in a rare black mumblecore leading man in the charismatic and likable Lowe and a genuinely funny and engaging screenplay that’s only moderately self-indulgent and navel-gazing.

Supporting Characters meanders nowhere in particular and doesn’t have much of an ending or a third act but at least it shuffles aimlessly in a thoroughly enjoyable fashion.