Getting "Inside the Actors Studio"

This is a late tribute to a television program that fell off of my radar some time ago.  "Inside the Actors Studio" was once the flagship program of the Bravo network, back when they were trying to be a more classy arts channel, before the "Real Housewives" era.  It quietly aired for 24 years and amassed 277 episodes.  I knew that the host, James Lipton had passed away in 2020, and I assumed that "Inside the Actors Studio" had ended as well.  However, I didn't know about the show's move to the Ovation Network in 2019, or the final season that featured interviews by a revolving collection of different hosts.  As far as I'm concerned, the show ended in 2018 after 22 seasons, with Lipton's final interview with Ted Danson.  

I watched a ton of "Inside the Actors Studio" in my college years.  It was one of a very few long form interview shows that survived on the air into the 2010s.  The other major one was "Charlie Rose," which ended in 2017.  "Inside the Actors Studio" was more fun, of course, because it featured well-known actors and other celebrities.  Its format was dictated by its origins as a seminar for the Actors Studio Drama School, of which Lipton was Dean Emeritus.  He sat with each interviewee on a stage and went through their whole career, from soup to nuts, intent on provoking thoughtful discussion, and treating acting (or directing or stand-up comedy) as serious artistic work.  Every episode ended with questions from the real students of the Actors Studio seated in the audience, and the famous Bernard Pivot questionnaire.  The show's detractors found it all stuffy and self-serious, but I loved that the interviews were put in an academic context, lending them an air of gravitas and importance that we didn't see anywhere else on television.

Of course, it was very easy to make fun of the show, and to make fun of James Lipton, who took it in stride and gamely played himself in many parodies and guest appearances on other programs over the years.  He became a beloved celebrity, who I was happy to see every time he popped up on "The Simpsons" or "Conan O'Brien."  His professorial persona was so theatrical and larger-than-life, it might have seemed ridiculous if it weren't backed up by those meticulously researched, thoughtfully conducted interviews with everyone from Roseanne to Steven Spielberg.  The comedian interviews were often my favorites, because it was a chance to see silly people like Robin Williams and Mike Meyers take a pause and give some serious, honest answers about their craft, if they were so inclined.  Mike Meyers did, and Robin Williams elected to perform a comedy set for ninety minutes, riling up the audience to the point where it took Lipton more than ten minutes to ask his first question.  Bravo replayed that episode a lot.  

I stopped watching "Inside the Actor's Studio" roughly around the time I stopped paying for cable television.  It was never appointment television for me, but rather a show I watched when the interviewee was someone that I recognized, or it happened to be on when I was channel surfing.  I feel like the show peaked around 2003, when it started doing the group interviews for the casts of television shows, and some stars like Tom Hanks and Val Kilmer started coming back around for second interviews.  The best interviews were with the performers and creatives who had a substantial body of work behind them, and some of the later shows were with interviewees who were only there because they were popular at the time.  Jennifer Lawrence famously turned down a chance for an interview in 2013, around the time the second "Hunger Games" film was released.      

In 2025 the show has largely fallen out of the cultural consciousness.  This was inevitable considering the age of the program, but it's likely also because it's one of those series that is not streaming anywhere officially and is thus difficult to access.  Amongst the data hoarders, it's one of the most commonly sought-after programs, and pirated versions of various interviews are constantly popping up on Youtube and other video platforms.  I'd love to be able to see some of the early episodes myself - a lot of those director interviews with the likes of Norman Jewison and Stanely Donen sure would have come in handy - but the full archive only seems to be available to students of the Actors Studio.   

And finally, yes, no, attention, stress, laughter, leaf blowers, unfuckingbelievable, screenwriter, apiarist, and "Welcome."  

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Watch Out for "Weapons"

Zach Cregger's new horror film "Weapons" is a very satisfying film to watch, even if you're not a horror film.  Telling a single story from multiple perspectives is a tricky proposition, but if it's done well, it's so much fun to watch all the pieces fall into place, and all the reveals and payoffs play out.  It also helps that "Weapons" has one of the best hooks for a horror movie that I've come across in a long time.  In the Pennsylvania town of Maybrook, we are told, seventeen children from the same third grade class mysteriously vanished in the middle of the night, all at the same time.  They simply got out of bed, ran out of their homes into the darkness, and disappeared.

The action picks up a month later, when the school reopens.  Starting with the missing children's teacher, Justine Gandy (Julia Garner), we follow the POVs of six different characters who are either investigating what happened, or inadvertently stumble across pieces of the truth about the disappearances.  Justine is drawing a lot of ire from angry and frightened parents, including Archer (Josh Brolin), one of the fathers.  She's also concerned about a child from her class who didn't disappear, Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher), who appears withdrawn and isolated.  Other major characters include Justine's policeman ex-boyfriend Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), the school principal Marcus (Benedict Wong), Alex's eccentric Aunt Gladys (Amy Madigan), and a local drug addict and petty thief, James (Austin Abrams).  

"Weapons" had a fantastic teaser trailer that showcased the film's inciting incident, where the missing children are running through the darkened streets at 2:17 AM.  This is one of those rare cases where the movie is as good as the trailer, much better than I expected.  Zach Cregger does a great job of orchestrating his nightmare imagery, jump scares, and thrilling reveals to build on each other, leaving some parts of the story on cliffhangers that don't get resolved until later.  It's similar to how his first film "Barbarian" was put together, but "Weapons" is better written with a much more compelling group of characters.  It helps that the budget and the caliber of the acting talent have both gotten a boost.  However, the storytelling is the main event.  I love how multiple characters come to the same conclusions via different routes.  I love the use of jump cuts to get laughs.  I love that the real protagonist of the film isn't revealed until the last third of the film, and that the villains are as funny as they are terrifying.  And boy are there some potent terrors in this one!

Much of the chatter that I've seen around "Weapons" so far has come from people trying to read hidden meanings into the film ("the real villain is alcoholism!"), and I think that's a result of the worldbuilding being as good as it is.  Without ever drawing too much attention to it, you can see the way that characters are separated by class and social strata, with hints of more complicated histories everywhere.  By using all these different POVs, you get to spend time in each of these characters' private worlds, and see how they think and react.  In the first part of the movie with Justine, notably, all the other POV characters appear, but some are on the edges of the frame, or not quite in her field of vision.  And as the movie goes on, it becomes clear how very important things can be overlooked by those who are only focused on what they want or care about.         

All the performances are good, but I want to single out Cary Christopher and Amy Madigan, who shoulder a significant amount of the film, and do a great job of it.  I'll refrain from being mean to a similar film from last year that "Weapons" reminds me of, but Amy Madigan's performance is exactly how the creepy/funny line should be handled in a film like this.  Aunt Gladys has surely secured her place in the horror movie pantheon.

Finally, despite the participation of so many kids, this is not a horror film for kids.  Many of the deaths are pretty upsetting, which I appreciate is warned for right up front.  However, there are no naked hijinks like there were in "Barbarian," and the ending is - well let's just say it's a little out of left field for a horror film, but in a good way.  I heartily recommend "Weapons" for all your scary movie needs.  It's easily the one I've enjoyed the most this summer.  

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Watching Trailers on Youtube

I went back and forth on whether I wanted to write this post, but I've already sunk way too much time into the research and data gathering to turn back now.  

So, I'm still under the likely misguided impression that if I interact with Youtube enough, I can make its algorithm work for me.  I can get it to understand what I want to watch and improve the quality and relevance of the recommendations and search results that it sends me.  How is this going?  Well, here's a brief example that I found telling.

One constant goal I've had with Youtube for years now is trying to get it to recommend new trailers for movies and TV shows.  I think that this is a fairly simple request, and Youtube has been under a lot of scrutiny lately to improve trailer search results because of the whole fake trailer kerfuffle from earlier in the year.  "Trailers" is definitely a content category on the site, and a "Trailer" button regularly appears on my Youtube front page next to "Podcasts," "Film Criticisms," and "Variety Shows."  I also run searches for trailers often enough that Youtube should have enough information to know what I'm looking for.

So, what happens when I open up Youtube on a random day and navigate to the "Trailers" category?

The first four displayed videos are trailers for upcoming films and shows.  Then there's a clip of "Promising Young Woman," a Red Letter Media review of a recent superhero film, a clip of "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy," two "Honest Trailer" spoofs, and a film essay on "Alien v. Predator," before the next trailer for an upcoming film.  Then come three more trailers, three commentary/reaction videos about trailers, and then three more trailers before the page refuses to load further results.  That's eleven actual trailers and nine videos that can broadly be called film/TV promotion, but not trailers.  There are also ads interspersed after every five or six displayed results.

I also searched "Trailers" to see what would come up.    The first twenty or so results are trailers for upcoming movies and TV shows, but often grouped into particular categories.  After the first six results (and three sponsored ads) I get three results that were "Popular in my area," then three "popular today" and even a "Previously Watched" category.  However, I'm not counting the multiple attempts to steer me towards the "Shorts" section of the site that is essentially Youtube doing TikTok.  The further down into the results I get, the more older trailers and non-trailers start coming up, including a "South Park" clip, reactions, "Honest Trailers," "Pitch Meeting," "SNL" parodies, and a random news alert.  I was appreciative that about half of the sponsored advertisements were actually trailers themselves, but these results still struck me as pretty dire.   

I expect better from Youtube, and I know they can do better, because there's another, less visible recommendation algorithm on the site.  If you click into any video on the site, a sidebar of similar videos will populate.  If you open a movie trailer, the accompanying sidebar videos have their own category buttons, including "Trailer."  What happens when you click on this "Trailer" button?  The first recommended video was for a new movie review from one of the Youtube channels I'm subscribed to.  Following that, I counted thirty-seven movie and TV trailers and one "Honest Trailers" video before the recommendations stopped loading.  And there wasn't an ad in sight.  Why weren't these the results on my front page?  

Well, the answer is sort of obvious, isn't it?  Once you start watching any video, Youtube wants you to keep watching videos, and will give you the more relevant recommendations at that point to keep you engaged.  The front page and searches want to push sponsored ads and channels that have longer content than the ones that publish official trailers, which rarely run more than three minutes a pop.  

The long and the short of it is that Youtube isn't very helpful to me for keeping up with recent trailers because it insists on focusing on the most popular hits, and then prioritizes showing me content that is popular in related categories.  It doesn't show me anything new until it hits a certain popularity threshold.  Trailers for independent and arthouse films often don't get enough views to hit that popularity threshold, so they require more specific searches.  You can sort search results by "new" to just get a listing of everything uploaded with certain keywords, but even here older results won't show up if they don't hit a certain view count.  

The one thing that I will commend Youtube for is that I no longer see any fake trailers or "trailer concepts," when they used to be all over my search results.  However, that just means that Youtube is perfectly capable of improving their results sitewide.  They just don't want to.      

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A "Superman" For Today

I had my concerns about James Gunn being put in charge of  "Superman."  I've found his superhero movies very hit-or-miss, a little too crass and a little too cynical for me.  After a decade of Zack Snyder and Henry Cavill's grimly god-like Superman, I was definitely ready for a change, but was Gunn the man to do it?  Yes, it turns out.  Maybe this isn't the best "Superman," but it's exactly the right "Superman" for 2025.

We begin not with Issue #1, but somewhere around Issue #200.  Clark Kent/Superman (David Corenswet) is already in a relationship with Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan), and is the sworn enemy of industrialist Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult), who is devoting considerable resources to destroying him.  In the opening scene we watch Superman in a heated battle with an armored warrior who Luthor controls, and later his superpowered henchmen, giant monsters, and other foes on his payroll.  This is a universe where "metahumans" are plentiful and very active, so Superman also regularly encounters the corporately sponsored Justice Gang, made up of Guy Gardner/Green Lantern (Nathan Fillion), Kendra Saunders/Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced), and Michael Holt/Mr. Terrific (Edi Gathegi).  Superman doesn't know much about his origins, but he has his Fortress of Solitude, with a couple of robot helpers, and also a loveably destructive superdog named Krypto.

Superman has never faced the kinds of challenges that he faces in this movie.  The new Lex Luthor is not only greedy, but obsessive in his hatred of Superman, and using all kinds of crazy technology to attack him on multiple fronts.  This includes an intense online hate campaign using a deluge of misinformation.  The public isn't sure what to think of him.  Metahumans are common, but Superman is an alien from another world, and there are deep suspicions about his motives.  However, the important things stay the same.  The one thing that hasn't been modernized at all is Superman himself.  He's still the same aw-shucks small town reporter from Kansas, raised by loving human foster parents (Pruitt Taylor Vince and Neva Howell), who staunchly believes in helping humanity and doing the right thing.  He's naive about geopolitics, not sure about his place in the world, and has a lot to learn about public relations, but he wants to be a good person wholeheartedly.  David Corenswet gives him the right physicality and heroic gravitas, but also a fair amount of relatable frustration and existential doubt.  This Superman can believably beat up an army of robots and still feel like an underdog.  

And the casting is great all around.  Brosnahan is a fantastic Lois, who is smarter, savvier, and more pragmatic than Superman, but there's never a doubt they're perfect for each other.  Nicholas Hoult is channeling petty tech-bro on a power trip, and it's so satisfying to see him get what's coming to him.  Comic relief characters Jimmy Olsen (Skyler Gisondo) and Eve Tesmacher (Sara Sampaio) get their own ridiculous subplot, and prove to be a lot of fun.  The Justice Gang is made up of the typical James Gunn-style abrasive oddballs, who would be a better fit in the "Peacemaker" corner of this universe, but they're mostly just around to provide a contrast to Superman, and not in the movie too much.  I really love that Ma and Pa Kent are played by non-celebrity actors, and come across as just ordinary, average people.  

The cast is what keeps the overstuffed plot and the in-media-res narrative from being too overwhelming.  Gunn and company decided to throw us in the deep end more or less, introducing us to all kinds of super-powered characters, pocket universes, secret conspiracies, crazy creatures, and other common comic book devices.  There's a cameo cavalcade, naturally.  You couldn't have made a "Superman" like this ten years ago, but after so many years of superhero movie saturation, audiences can be expected to keep up, more or less.  And even if they do get lost, "Superman" offers plenty of action and spectacle that needs no explanation and should satisfy even the nitpickiest fan.  Plus, there's a cute dog, and who doesn't love a cute dog?

My biggest complaint, ironically, is the same one that I had with "Man of Steel," which is that "Superman" isn't kid friendly enough.  I like that this version involves more interactions with kids, and uses a few kid performances to great effect, but there are some intense sequences and a few instances of questionable content that make this hard to recommend to anyone under the age of twelve or so.  (No parent wants to explain what a harem is to a second grader.)  And that's such a shame.  

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My 2025 Holiday Wish List

Well, this has been an eventful year for everybody, Hollywood included.  Focusing just on the entertainment industry, I don't think anything is going the way we'd hoped, but such is the nature of living in interesting times.  And though there have been some tough blows, nobody is down for the count yet.  I'm actually kind of heartened by some of the shifts in the culture I've been seeing over the last few months, and I have every reason to expect better in the year ahead.

I never addressed much from last year's list, but I will express my deepest appreciation for the "KPop Demon Hunters" soundtrack becoming the new favorite in my household.  I don't know how Netflix did it, but the speed at which that movie took over the attentions of the under-twelve set was truly breathtaking.  

So, this year for the holidays, I want…

For Stephen Colbert to make every remaining moment of "The Late Show" count.  The end of "The Late Show" is going to be one of the big cultural moments of 2026, and though I'm not happy about how things have turned out, I can't wait to see the fireworks.  As someone who has kept an eye on the late night ecosystem for decades now, weird and wonderful things tend to happen when these shows are in turmoil, and nothing says turmoil like the highest rated late night show on American television being abruptly cancelled for sketchy reasons.  

For the non-franchise films to score some wins.  I'm not even going to try and distinguish original films anymore.  At this point anything that's not a sequel, prequel, or reboot is getting scarce.  So I don't care if you're adapting the Booktok flavor of the month, or if the cartoon is about a robot beaver, or you're a horror director who has had way too many chances and the trailer was awful.  I am rooting for you.  We have "Scream 7" and "Toy Story 5" incoming, and I'm just so tired.

For more theatrical releases.  Studios are getting the hint that they're leaving money on the table by premiering promising titles on streaming, especially films for family audiences.  "Moana 2" is the biggest example so far of a project that was originally intended as a streaming exclusive turning out to be much more lucrative as a theatrical experience.  There's been a significant shift in the attitude of Hollywood toward the streamers lately, and we're seeing cracks in the resistance to theatrical releases everywhere, even at Netflix.  And I'm all for it.

For the AI bubble to bust more quickly.  I know it's holding up the American economy, but it's so obviously a bubble and it's so aggravating to watch the grifters try to convince everyone that generative AI is some kind of cure-all that's worth paying attention to and investing ridiculous amounts of money in.  So far, aside from some very limited, specific tasks, it just seems to be leading the mentally unstable off of a cliff and further straining the economic prospects of the creative community.  And the amount of AI slop my relatives keep sending me is just excruciating.  

For a long break before the next major merger.  The concept of the Paramount Skydance Warner Brothers Discovery union is still difficult to get my head around.  I knew that Warner Brothers Discovery was looking for a buyer, but any further consolidation of the studios can only be bad for everybody.

For more gainful employment for film critics and other media critics as the legacy media companies continue to reconfigure themselves.  I have never been more aware that I am and always be a hobbyist when it comes to writing about movies and television.  

For "Doctor Who" to find some way forward, even if it means a hiatus.  After twenty years, the show could do with a rest, but it would be a terrible shame if it were mothballed for good.  

For Netflix to take care of my friends at "Sesame Street."  

And finally, for everyone making my favorite shows and movies to keep being able to make money doing what they do best, and have every opportunity to do that work.

Happy Holidays.  

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Exploring "A House of Dynamite"

Katheryn Bigelow's latest thriller, "A House of Dynamite," is one of the most frustrating films I've ever watched, and I strongly suspect that this is the point.  The subject matter is the stuff of typical thrillers and action films, where a nuclear missile is discovered inbound for the continental United States, and those in charge only have minutes to deal with it.  However, this is not one of those universes where everything works like clockwork, and all the systems created to handle this situation function as intended.  Instead, the message here seems to be that if a nuke ever really was launched at the US, the response would be chaotic and insufficient, and the decisionmakers would be woefully unprepared.  The movie is good, but deeply unnerving and purposefully doesn't follow the rules of a typically Hollywood thriller.  The ending in particular is going to make a lot of people very upset.

Past this point, I'm going to spoil the whole movie, because the structure of the piece is important to any analysis of what it's doing.  Also, knowing what's going to happen may better help set expectations.  The actual missile crisis in "A House of Dynamite" only lasts for roughly fifteen minutes, and it's replayed three times from different points of view.  First, we see it unfold from the White House Situation Room, being run by Captain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson).  Then, we follow the Deputy National Security Advisor, Jake Bearington (Gabriel Basso), who is trying to provide advice to the decisionmakers.  Finally, we follow the President of the United States (Idris Elba), as he gathers information to decide what the US response should be.  There are additional POVs from the Secretary of Defence (Jared Harris), the First Lady (Renée  Elise Goldberry), the commander of a US military base (Anthony Ramos), the commander of STRATCOM (Tracy Letts), an NSA expert on North Korea (Greta Lee), the military aide in change of the nuclear football (Jonah Hauer-King), and others.

Because the situation unfolds so fast, there's no time to cover all of these different characters' experiences in a single narrative, which I believe is the main reason for the repetition.  Also, having that structure in place, where we already understand what the outcome is going to be after the first run-through, makes the audience more aware of the futility of some of the characters' actions, and how small delays and technological snafus can have a massive impact.  Every single character is caught off guard by the crisis, and everyone reacts in very human ways to what they consider an unthinkable scenario.  A significant amount of time is wasted dealing with simple communications issues.  Bearington is on his way to work, and we watch him clumsily try to hold a video call while walking through city streets and navigating a security checkpoint.  The President is in the middle of a youth basketball meet-and-greet when he learns about the situation.  Greta Lee's character, amusingly, is watching a Battle of Gettysburg reenactment with her young son.  Everyone seems to be in a state of shock as they watch the events unfold, often asking if something is really happening, or if anyone knows what's going on.  

Written by Noah Oppenheim, a former broadcast news producer, "A House of Dynamite," offers a degree of realism that I appreciate seeing onscreen.   The security provided by our armed forces and military hardware is largely an illusion when it comes to a nuclear doomsday scenario like this one, and I like that Bigelow isn't afraid to show us the ugly truth of mutually assured destruction strategies up close and personal.  Some of the people in charge stay calm and collected.  Others disintegrate.  This film fits right into the genre of anti-nuclear proliferation films that were common in the 1980s, and since the nukes might be making a comeback, it's fitting that the films warning us about nuclear war should be back too.    

The performances are great, a few questionable accents notwithstanding, though only a handful of characters are onscreen long enough to give us more nuanced portraits of the people involved.  Idris Elba stands out as a President having a bad day that turns into a much worse one, admitting that he's unprepared when the time comes to make the big decisions.  I like that Bigelow includes several brief moments with characters like a Secret Service agent played by Brian Tee, and a FEMA official based in Chicago played by Moses Ingram, to give us more reactions from those on the periphery.

Because the treatment of the material is so unorthodox, I expect that "A House of Dynamite" is not going to get much traction with audiences.  However, its unusual candidness will keep it in the conversation whenever anyone tries to make a similar film in the future.  I certainly won't ever look at a typical "launch the missiles" scene the same way again.

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The Simplicity of "Multiplicity"

I saw the poster for the Harold Ramis comedy "Multiplicity" so many times in 1996, but it was one of those movies that I just never crossed paths with.  It was a box office bomb, and never entered the rotation of syndicated movies that would play constantly on our local television channels on the weekends.  We all knew who Michael Keaton was, but he wasn't enough of a draw in the mid-90s to sway my family to rent one of his movies instead of the latest Robin Williams or Jim Carrey vehicle.  Still, "Multiplicity" seemed to be a movie that I would enjoy.  It had a goofy sci-fi premise.  It had Andie MacDowell, who I generally like, as the female lead.  So, this was definitely on that endless running list of movies that I meant to check out eventually, someday.

Well, someday turned out to be yesterday.  "Multiplicity" is currently available on Tubi, so I went ahead and took the plunge.  The movie is not very good, but it's fascinating to look at as an artifact of the '90s, so I gotta write about it.  Spoilers ahead.

There is very little that surprised me about "Multiplicity."  It fits very well in that vein of 90s comedy based on material taken from "National Lampoon," mining the base instincts and preoccupations of the Boomer male for comedy.  Doug Kinney is a sympathetic protagonist, at least at first.  He's an overworked construction foreman who never has enough hours in the day for his job, his family, and himself.  Through the magic of Harris Yulin in a lab coat, Doug gets his very own clone to help out - meaning a Xerox copy of himself with the same memories up to the point of cloning.  Then another clone.  Then another clone.  These clones are initially referred to by number - Two, Three, and Four - before getting their own names.  Two spends all his time working construction and comes across as very masculine and assertive.  Three does most of the domestic wrangling, has a lot of feminine behaviors, and is very gay coded.  Four, who was cloned from one of the other clones, and thus not as "sharp," is a walking dumbbell who is there for comic relief.  It's obvious why Michael Keaton signed on, because he gets to play four funny versions of the same guy.  Keaton does a decent job, but the writing really doesn't do him any favors.

Though one of the four credited writers is a woman, "Multiplicity" is a product of the male id.  Doug has let his life get so overbooked that he needs two other versions of himself working full time to get a break.  His wife Laura is a flimsily constructed creature who creates a lot of Doug's problems by going back to work, but this isn't a "Mr. Mom" scenario where the couple really feel like partners sharing their struggles.  All the extra work falls on Doug's shoulders and Laura is so preoccupied that she doesn't ever realize that there are three additional Dougs living out of the family shed to help pick up the slack.  Doug insists that the clones should never be intimate with her, as his unbreakable "Rule One," but she ends up sleeping with all three of them inadvertently.  To sidestep any difficult moral questions and emotional fallout, Laura just never finds out the truth.  She takes what she thinks are Doug's wild personality shifts and forgetfulness to be symptoms of a failing relationship, and temporarily leaves with the kids.  Doug, who by this time has been fired from his demanding job, and has learned that too much free time is bad, is able to win her back by finally fulfilling his promise to remodel the house.  He proves his devotion through manual labor and the promise of a job change.  Then, even though there's no sign that Doug's life will get any less busy, he sends the clones off to Florida together to start lives of their own.    

The obvious joke here is that Doug can't handle a situation that many working parents have been handling forever, even with all the extra hands.  However, that's not really fair, as Doug is never shown to be anything but a loving and well-meaning father, who tries to do the right thing with the wrong methods.  The bigger issue is that Doug being overworked is really just scaffolding for all the clone humor, and the movie never really takes his troubles all that seriously.  The scripting also shows a lack of imagination, barely exploring the consequences of having the clones around.  Nobody notices the grocery bill going up or the other extra expenses.  Laura never catches on about the clones, but neither do the kids or anybody else.  The cloning lab is so inconsequential that the clones may as well have been made by magic.  Even the sexual hijinks are pretty tame.  The moral implications are the only interesting part, which are skipped over entirely.   

Instead, a lot of "Multiplicity" hinges on the audience being impressed by the gimmick of multiple Michael Keatons onscreen at the same time.  The effects are very good - good enough that I forgot about them a lot of the time - except that the camera kept drawing attention to the double/triple/quadruple act in distracting ways.  The characterization of the clones also gets overly cartoonish in a hurry.  Two was initially interesting in that he lets Doug see what his life would have looked like if he'd stayed single and unattached, but this doesn't really go anywhere.  When all three clones are interacting, they come off as three completely different personalities - which is great for the comedy, but it all feels arbitrary and convenient, with no attempt to explain why each clone has such different traits.  Three in particular just comes across as bizarre, especially since the implication is that doing housework makes you more feminine.  

Am I overthinking a silly comedy?  Sure, but "Multiplicity" came out a few years after "Mrs. Doubtfire" and "The Nutty Professor" already covered much of the same material much more thoughtfully and successfully.  I can't think of anything that "Multiplicity" did that a dozen other movies of the same era did better.  Keaton's performances just end up reminding me of when he played similar characters in prior films.  Apparently there was quite a bit of improv in the "Multiplicity," and Keaton only had himself for a scene partner a lot of the time, which didn't help.  

I'm glad that I finally watched this, but I don't think I missed much by not having "Multiplicity" in my regular movie rotation growing up.  Keaton's made plenty of movies I like better.     

    

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