The Fractured Mirror

The Fractured Mirror entry: Jay and Silent Bob Reboot (2019)
almost 2 years ago – Wed, Nov 23, 2022 at 08:27:29 AM

Jay and Silent Bob Reboot (2019)

Kevin Smith’s 2001 comedy Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back is a self-indulgent vanity project by, for and about Kevin Smith. As a loving, masturbatory tribute to the grubby, lazy world the stoner filmmaker created in his previous movies, it was almost perversely inessential and unnecessary. Yet that somehow did not keep Smith from churning out a follow up nearly two decades later in 2019’s Jay and Silent Bob Reboot.

The world has changed a lot since 2001 and Smith, surprisingly, has changed with it. In many ways Jay and Silent Bob Reboot offers more of the same in terms of gleeful, free-floating profanity, shameless fan service, winking references to Smith’s movies and life and pandering geekiness. Smith, however, shows an admirable eagerness to grow up here and trade in the juvenile brattiness of the earlier film for something more substantive, mature and diverse.

Jay and Silent Bob Reboot is largely about the title doofuses heading to a pop culture convention on the West Coast to keep a Kevin Smith-directed movie exploiting their images from being made but it’s also about Jay learning that he’s a father to Millennium "Milly" Faulken (Harley Quinn Smith), the resentful progeny of his one-time fling Justice (Shannon Elizabeth) and learning to embrace parenthood and responsibility.

It’s hard to say what’s more surprising: that much of this follow-up to a juvenile exercise in puerile raunch is an earnest, joke-free drama about two lost souls coming together as a family or that those scenes are the highlights. As a meta comedy and Hollywood satire this is a total stiff but as an unexpected showcase for the acting chops of Jason Mewes and the director’s daughter this has a lot of corny, sappy charm.

Jay and Silent Bob Reboot is not good or necessary but it is genuine and sweet. That alone is enough to make it infinitely superior to its rancid predecessor.

The Fractured Mirror entry: The Bubble (2022)
about 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)
about 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)
about 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.