Part of the fun of attending Fantastic Fest are the Secret Screenings, which aren’t announced until right before the film rolls. This year there were leaks, whispers and rumors galore, with the most rampant one being that we were going to get treat to Oliver Stone’s W, which sadly didn’t happen. It was have been great to see this on a week that ended with an Obama/McCain debate.
Instead, the secret screenings included The Brothers Bloom, Appaloosa, RocknRolla, and the surprise dark horse in the bunch, Role Models. It definitely sticks out among the entire Fantastic Fest lineup like the Sesame Street “One of these things is not like the others,” and it joins Kevin Smith’s Zack & Miri as the only other raunchy comedy in the Fest. The film stars Paul Rudd and Seann William Scott, and is directed by comedian David Wain, best known for Wet Hot American Summer and The Ten. Check out the review and the interview with Wain and Rudd below.
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Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, a riveting documentary airing June 9 at 9:00pm on HBO, digs into the facts of Polanski’s notorious case around his sexual misconduct with a 13 year old, and how the justice system failed them both. The Promotion–opening tonight–looks like a comedy but is more an unnerving lightning rod for middle class anxiety, a darkly comic portrayal of what the American Dream has become. People expecting John C. Reilly and Seann William Scott to be foolproof laugh material will be surprised.
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FilmCouch #73 - Be careful what you laugh at
Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, The Promotion
The Promotion is such an insightfully hilarious and beautifully bittersweet movie about the American and human spirits that I wish Steven Conrad had always been directing his scripts. Conrad previously wrote The Weather Man and The Pursuit of Happyness, both of which can be felt here as less evolved ancestors; structurally they’re quite the same, while The Promotion shares some of the offbeat tone of Weather Man and a lot of the heart of Happyness. But there’s a story in The Promotion that is far more universal, relatable and familiar, which makes this one much, much funnier and much, much more sympathetic.
And certainly Conrad’s ability to balance the sweet and the salty, as a director, is responsible for most of the film’s success. One scene in particular exemplifies the movie best: John C. Reilly, as the new-to-Chicago “Richard”, sits opposite four supermarket executives, interviewing for a promotion to be a full-on store manager, and he’s just had to defend how his Canadian-ness caused him to miss an employee prank. Conrad keeps a close-up shot on Reilly as the actor fluctuates expressions that communicate, non-verbally, a plea of innocence, then ignorance, then stupidity, then insanity, then doubt, then back to innocence again. The combination of comedy and pathos that comes out of this lengthy close-up and perfectly tuned performance, which is broken up by a couple reversals to the executives and which is permitted more time and attention than most films nowadays allow any single moment, is the most brilliantly thoughtful thing I’ve seen done in this kind of movie in a very long time.
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