Horror Comedies: Bodies Bodies Bodies & The Invitation

Summer is always the season when the funny horror films are released. And since funny horror is the only horror I'm truly interested in, I enjoyed watching the following two films. Which are both written and directed by women - if this is how women have now decided to make their mark behind the camera in Hollywood, sign me right up.

Bodies Bodies Bodies: What a raucous ride. It's hard to write a review of this movie because so much of what happens makes sense only when you get to the very final scene of the film and realize exactly how freaking insane the past hour and a half has been. So all I can say is, please go watch the movie so we can then discuss in spoilerific detail everything that happened. But fine, you want more details? Here they are.

The movie follows a group of rich, young Gen Z-ers (and a random older guy played by Lee Pace) who are all at a house party getting drunk and drugged out of their minds. When a thunderstorm hits, they have to resort to indoor activities and decide to play a murder mystery game. The game quickly goes nowhere. But then, one of the characters dies and their game quickly turns into reality. One by one, bodies start accumulating and everyone is pointing fingers at each other, no longer sure who to trust. Everyone seems to have a potential for hidden motive or just plain psychopathic tendencies, but they are also a bunch of young people attuned to therapy speak who still find the time to bitch at each other about how no one respects the hard work they are doing on their podcast and the stress of maintaining a Google Calendar.

Directed by Halina Reijn and written by Sarah DeLappe from a story by Kristen Roupenian, this movie is a funny, briskly-plotted satire of privileged young kids, and that final scene just ties everything up with a perfect bow. Everything is shot wonderfully, especially once there’s a blackout and everyone is exploring the house aided only by the flashlights on their phones or the eerie light of their glowstick necklace and bracelets. And there’s a banging soundtrack to boot. The cast is phenomenal, featuring people like Amandla Stenberg, Maria Bakalova (that's Borat's daughter!), Pete Davidson, and my fave, from Shiva Baby, Rachel Sennott. This movie feels like being at a rave but you won’t leave with a hangover, and isn’t that just the best endorsement?

The Invitation: This is a movie about a young Black American woman, Evie (Nathalie Emmanuel), who takes a DNA test and discovers she has some very white, rich cousins who live across the pond in England. They are delighted to find her, and convince her to fly over for a family wedding so she can instantly meet all the family and become reacquainted with her English roots. When she arrives, there is a very hot lord of the manor, Walter De Ville (Thomas Doherty), who thankfully is not related to her and so is potentially up for some romantic shenanigans. And the manor itself is a sprawling country estate that even Mr. Darcy would approve of. What could possibly go wrong?

Welp, a lot, it turns out. Something mysterious is transpiring in this house and this family is entirely too eager to welcome Evie into the family, for reasons that will proceed to become horrifically clear. If you’ve seen the trailer, you already know what you’re going to get with this movie so perhaps the secret is to go into it cold so you can enjoy some more twists and turns. 

This movie is essentially a combination of Ready or Not and Get Out. Both of which are far superior films that I would exhort you to watch ahead of this one. But this movie is perfectly fine. Written by Blair Butler and directed by Jessica M. Thompson, it certainly feels rather formulaic and nothing took place on screen that I hadn’t already seen coming from a mile away (though again, not sure how much of that is the fault of the trailer), but it was still a fun summer movie, and a breezy way to get some of your horror jollies for the season.

August TV Round-Up: Loot, The Sandman, A League of Their Own

The advent of streaming services has meant that summer can be just as busy a time for watching new TV shows as the fall. I spent my summer vacation catching up on a boatload of new shows and they were all excellent in their own special ways. So whether you have Apple TV+, Netflix, and/or Amazon Prime, I've got something for you.

Loot: Created by Alan Yang and Matt Hubbard, and starring Maya Rudolph, this show has major comedy pedigree. It tells the story of Molly Wells (Rudolph), a woman who was married to one of the world's richest men, but then discovers he is cheating, divorces him, and gets half of his money, turning her into one of the world's wealthiest women. After facing numerous PR disasters, she realizes that what she needs to do with this money is to start working with the charitable foundation she and her husband started eons ago but were never really involved with, and use her billions to do some good in the world. It's basically a story about MacKenzie Scott, except in this case, Molly is still a rather clueless rich woman who is going to need a lot of hand-holding along the road to becoming a noble philanthropist.

The supporting cast on this show is truly excellent, including Joel Kim Booster as Molly's assistant, who is mildly horrified that she doesn't want to do rich people things all the time, and then Michaela Jae Rodriguez, Ron Funches, and Nat Faxon (who seems to be in everything these days) as the folks who work at the non-profit and are quiet, unassuming, good people who take a lot of pride in their work. They have to teach Molly how to be better at charity, but she also is able to find ways to make their lives easier and give them more of a chance to stretch out their wings and achieve their dreams. It's a cute show with a fantastic cast, and every episode features new permutations of characters getting together and forming unlikely alliances. It's a classic comedy with a lot of heart and I look forward to seeing how it evolves over upcoming seasons.

The Sandman: All I can say is that after making my way through ten episodes of this show, I will absolutely need to pick up the graphic novels and immerse myself in that world. I have always loved Neil Gaiman's work and have read every novel he's written, but I never managed to make my way to The Sandman. Now, with this show, Netflix has forced my hand. With its lush cinematography and epic production and costume design, this is a series that absolutely captures your imagination from the start and never lets go. 

The cast, led by Tom Sturridge as Morpheus, the King of Dreams, is phenomenal, and many of your favorites will put in an appearance as iconic characters from the books. Each episode feels like a standalone, with its own genre and machinations at play, but they all string together to make a compelling and exciting story as Morpheus tries to figure out why he was imprisoned, where all his tools have disappeared off to, and what to do to rebuild his kingdom. It's brimming with quests, and mythology, and fantastical lore, and if you've ever loved any other Gaiman fare, you are certain to love this too.

A League of Their Own: As soon as I finished watching the eight episodes of this show's first season, I had to rewatch the 1992 movie. And once I was done, I went, "Yup, the show is definitely an improvement." Created by Will Graham and Abbi Jacobson (who also stars), this show follows the creation of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League in 1943 to replace men's baseball since all the men were being recruited as World War II soldiers. But instead of Tom Hanks being the star as the drunk and belligerent manager of one of the teams, the Rockford Peaches, the focus of this show is on the Peaches themselves and how all these disparate women come together to make a team despite their many differences. Though, eventually, many of them do discover they have one thing in common - they are very gay.

This show is so fantastically queer and magnificent. You've got the repressed Carson (Jacobson), who is married but then upon meeting chic teammate Greta (D'Arcy Carden), realizes that perhaps this might be the thing she has been missing all along. There are other characters who are much more comfortable with their sexuality, though are still, of course, very closeted as society would permit no such thing in this era. There are struggles with various chaperones and men telling them to be more feminine and to look pretty, when all they want to do is play ball. And there's also a wonderful storyline with Max Chapman (Chante Adams), a Black woman who desperately wants to join the league but is denied because of Jim Crow laws and ceaseless racism. Her journey, not just as a Black woman, but as a Black queer woman, takes on a whole life of its own, and it is simply wonderful to watch this honest depiction of how people can struggle with queer identity, coming out to family, friends, strangers, lovers, and eventually finding their place in the world. 

This show is beautifully shot, with impeccable production design, and every episode is scripted with precision and verve. These actors are all delivering home runs (both literally and metaphorically!) and by the end of these eight episodes, you will be ready for baseball season to come back around again. Let's Go Peaches!

August Movie Round-Up: Bullet Train, Emily the Criminal, Laal Singh Chaddha

Summer has delivered a plethora of varied movies as is its wont, so if you’re looking for some action, thrills, or Bollywood goodness, read on for some quick recommendations of what to check out at your local theater.

Bullet Train: Written by Zac Olkewicz and directed by David Leitch, based on a novel by Kotato Isaka, this movie delivers everything you would expect from the trailer. It’s a high-octane action comedy with a Japanese manga sensibility, and everything devolves into a lot of violence and gore. There are several rival killers who have descended upon this one bullet train traveling to Kyoto, and everyone is on different overlapping missions that mean that things get very complicated very fast. 

At the center of it is "Ladybug" (played by a wonderfully hapless Brad Pitt) who is returning to work after a hiatus and was promised this would be an easy job where all he has to do is retrieve a briefcase, nothing else. Welp, life is never that easy, and that briefcase leads to myriad complications where the man simply cannot seem to get off this train.

This is your typical summer popcorn movie. It’s loud and brash, it boasts a great cast, the story is compelling enough to keep things moving ahead, and you won’t get too bored. Will you remember anything after you’re done? No. But are there enough twists and turns and does it look quite pretty for the two hours that you’re strapped in for the ride? You bet.

Emily the Criminal: Written and directed by John Patton Ford and starring Aubrey Plaza (who also produced the film), this is a taut thriller about what it means to be poor in America and how easy it is to fall through the cracks. Emily is a young woman who amassed a mountain of student debt and then couldn’t even finish college because she had to take care off a sick relative. She loves art, but absolutely cannot earn a paycheck that way so has to struggle at a minimum-wage job with a catering company to try and make ends meet. She has a black mark on her record because she was arrested when she was younger, which means that she now fails every background check when she applies for corporate gigs so is stuck in this vortex of poverty that seems absolutely inescapable. Until a colleague gives her a mysterious number and tells her to text it if she wants to make $200 for an hour’s worth of lightly illegal activity. 

What follows is another vortex, but this one spirals into a world of criminality and credit card fraud where Emily can finally spy an opportunity to dig herself out of her current financial situation. Of course, it starts out simple and then turns into an absolute nightmare, and it is a thrill to watch how things play out over 93 minutes. 

Aubrey Plaza is wonderful in this role, filled with a quiet rage and desperation that erupts in epic ways over the course of the movie, while Theo Rossi is great as the Lebanese man who takes her under his wing and has his own immigrant hopes and dreams of this criminal enterprise. It’s a sad movie but a good one, and given the recent news about student debt relief, serves as a worthy reminder of the many ways America’s lack of a social safety net can drive ordinary people to make extraordinarily poor decisions that will haunt them for a lifetime. There's also some epic social commentary about how the lack of debt imbues people with so much privilege that they completely fail to recognize (unpaid internships anyone?). It's a clever, biting film, and well worth a watch the next time you want to rail against capitalism. Which, for me, is all the time.

Laal Singh Chaddha: We all know that I wouldn’t miss Aamir Khan’s latest movie right? This is a remake of Forrest Gump (this is the rare instance where Bollywood actually went through the proper channels and got the rights to a Hollywood movie) so what follows is a three-hour tour of recent Indian history and geography, with two great central performances from Aamir as Laal and Kareena Kapoor Khan, as his best friend (and then maybe something more?), Rupa.

Written by Atul Kulkarni and directed by Advait Chandan, this film takes everything that was memorable about the original and then imbues it with uniquely Indian elements that make it feel fresh and new. Like the original, it is essentially a series of vignettes strung together, but I appreciated the growth of the main characters, particularly the rather harrowing journey that Rupa goes on as a girl who comes from an abusive household and then continues that cycle as an adult woman in the way that so many women unfortunately do. 

I also greatly appreciated the fact that our hero was a Sikh man, as that’s a relative rarity in most Hindi movies. Sikhism plays a significant role in terms of various religious conflicts Laal is subject to as he grows up, but the most poignant moment of the film was when he decides to start wearing a turban again as an older man. There is a beautiful scene set to Ik Omkar where we just watch Laal lovingly and reverently tie his turban around his head and it was a powerful moment that made me tear up and appreciate how this movie took its time about everything. People often complain that Bollywood movies are too long, and this film certainly could have used some more judicious editing. But when I watched that one scene? I was perfectly happy to not change a thing. 

Bollywood Feminism: Masaba Masaba & Darlings

I don't know what's going on over at Netflix India but they have been producing some incredible content featuring Indian women taking control of their lives and not letting men mess them about. One is a dark comedy about domestic violence, while the other is a breezy but heartfelt romp about a fashion designer and her actress mother. Either way, you can't go wrong.

Masaba Masaba: This show is so wonderfully peculiar because it is about the very real fashion designer, Masaba Gupta, and her actress mother, Neena Gupta. Both of whom are playing fictionalized versions of themselves. I find myself constantly perplexed as to whether it is all just a magnificent brand and marketing ploy (Season 2 is literally about Masaba's efforts to increase brand awareness), but this show is so insanely entertaining and colorful and magical that after a while, who cares? Just drink the Kool-Aid and enjoy everything that these women have to say about being women in the world of Mumbai fashion and film. 

Directed by Sonam Nair, this show is a refreshing and bracing look at modern Indian women who are trying to make a name for themselves without the help of any men. Yes, there are lots of messy romantic entanglements, and much soul-searching about how they can "have it all," but ultimately, this is a story where women are the driving force behind every decision and their happiness comes first. Masaba and Neena are clearly having a tremendous amount of fun playing messy versions of themselves (though who knows, maybe this fictionalized Netflix version is neater than the real thing!) and there's a lot of swearing and sleeping around, and a general fearlessness that we rarely get to see from women in Bollywood. 

However, let's not kid ourselves. These two women are extremely unconventional, and they have a lot of social advantages that give them a leg up already to act in this way. But they do a good job of examining all their privileges and showcasing their hard work and efforts to still grapple with big life goals. It's an incredibly funny but also sweet and endearing show, and it has a lot to say about women sticking together and supporting each other through the good times and bad. Plus, let's be real, this show really is a great ad for Masaba's designs - you will immediately want to go shopping once you've watched it.

Darlings: This movie stars Alia Bhatt as Badru, a woman who is being physically and verbally abused by her husband, Hamza (Vijay Varma). Theirs was a love marriage, but the man is a violent alcoholic, and Badru is caught up in a vicious cycle, where Hamza beats her for some inconsequential reason, then apologizes and professes his love and that he'll never do it again, she is desperate to believe that he will change and forgives him, and then he beats her again. Her mother, Shamshu (played by the incomparable Shefali Shah), keeps telling Badru to leave Hamza and come back home, warning her that he will never change. And then eventually, things escalate to a point that the two women have to join forces against Hamza and end the cycle.

I know it all sounds terribly grim, and yes, it can be hard to watch at times. But the direction by Jasmeet K. Reen, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Parveez Sheikh, offers a masterclass in how to play with tone. This is the darkest of dark comedies and you will still find yourself chuckling as you watch how things play out. Also, I do want to shout out that this movie features a twist towards the very end that I absolutely did NOT see coming, and it might be one of the most delightful surprises I've experienced in a Bollywood movie. So please watch this film just so we can squee about it together. 

Frankly, the only thing I needed to know about this movie in order to press Play was that it starred Alia Bhatt and Shefali Shah. This is Alia's first foray into producing a film, and if this is the kind of feminist cinema she is interested in, both in front of and behind the camera, I'm very excited for this next chapter in her Bollywood story. This script does a beautiful job of highlighting the difficulties that women face from society at large when they are suffering from abuse and the extreme steps that are often required to escape. The movie can't provide a true solution to the problem, but it shines a much-needed and welcome spotlight on the issue in a way that I hope will capture a broad audience and encourage more women to speak out if they need help. Also, unfortunately, this film could apply to women in any country on the planet; this is a tale as old as time, and you don't need to be a Bollywood fan to find it thoroughly relevant.

Netflix Nibbles: Definition Please & Old Enough!

Are you just blankly staring at your Netflix queue now that you've finished bingeing your way through Stranger Things? Well, I've got a great movie you could watch one afternoon or a Japanese TV show you could dole out to yourself in bite-size installments. Huzzah!

Definition Please: This movie was absolutely made for me. Written and directed by Sujata Day, she also stars as Monica Chowdhury, a Bengali-American woman who found brief fame as an eight-year-old when she won the Scripps National Spelling Bee, but has subsequently failed to live up to all that promise. Yeah, it will hit way too close to home for a lot of Indian-Americans who watch, but oh boy, it's such a funny and wonderful movie about family, identity, and finally doing what's right for you.

I would be hard-pressed to describe the tone of this film. It is very funny, but it also has a sub-plot on mental illness that gets very tense at times, and overall it exudes a slight melancholy. But then a scene will pop with this ridiculous Bengali song and Monica spelling out a word to describe a slow-motion moment she is currently experiencing (I was personally delighted when she called out one of my favorite words, callipygian) and you will chuckle. 

This movie is an incredibly well-realized story of what it's like to be a part of the South Asian diaspora in America. There is a whole scene that takes place in Patel Brothers that manages to feature an ode to Thums Up and every Indian family's love of mangos. There's a scene where Monica's mother is praying at the altar set up in her home, and when Monica shows up to pray, her mother asks if she has showered first. The soundtrack is a desi delight, and every reference feels like something that could only be relevant to those of us in the know. I have no idea how this film translates to a non-desi audience, but I found myself utterly charmed. It's the perfect watch for a lazy afternoon and you'll immediately text all your brown friends to watch it too. I know I did.

Old Enough!: You may have seen the SNL parody, but the show itself is a charm fest. Each episode is about ten minutes long and features a young Japanese child (and when I say young, I mean they are less than five-years-old, often two or three) running an errand for a parent. The errands are varied but usually involve doing some grocery shopping or retrieving/delivering some item that the parent "forgot" to bring to work with them that day. They are followed by camera people and seem blissfully unaware of them, except for the few times you get a kid who just starts pointing out all the cameras and the voiceover narrator gets nervous about how the gig is up. 

This show somehow manages to be both low stakes and extremely high stakes at the same time. These kids are so magical to watch - they are adulting hard core but also suddenly devolving into tears and confusion when things don't go to plan. There was one episode where a kid had bought some apples, but he was carrying so much stuff that he kept dropping the apples and they would roll down a hill. I'm 34, and if this happened to me, I would sit down in the middle of the road and cry, unlike this poor child who diligently kept running after his apples and retrieving them every time. 

This is such a fun show to watch when you need a quick distraction but be forewarned - you could get sucked in real quick. And also start contemplating buying some plane tickets to Japan. Seriously, you cannot go wrong so give it a whirl. And then join me on my quest for some onigiri and to eat all the Japanese food I can find.