"The Patient" Needs Some Patience

FX's "The Patient" is an odd, but ambitious piece of serialized fiction.  It's a serial killer story told in ten half hours, which probably works if you're spacing out the installments, but feels repetitive and overlong if you're binge watching.  The premise is strong, and the actors are good enough to keep your attention, but I couldn't help thinking that the whole thing probably would have been a lot more compelling if it were a nice, compact, two hour movie.

Steve Carrell plays Dr. Alan Strauss, a therapist who has been kidnapped by one of his patients, Sam (Domhnall Gleeson), who is secretly a serial killer.  Sam has decided that he needs help, and the best way to get it is to make Alan live in his basement and be available for psychiatric consultations 24/7.  While Alan does his best to placate Sam and figure out a way to escape, he also uses the time to grieve his recently departed wife Beth (Laura Niemi), and work out his issues with adult son Ezra (Andrew Leeds).  

I appreciate that the series isn't too sensationalistic. The writers, Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg, are the creators of "The Americans," and keep the character drama at the forefront.  A lot of the time is spent with Sam and Alan in their therapy sessions, but we also follow them separately - Sam struggling to keep his impulses in check, and Alan trying to stay ahead of him.  Alan eventually starts having his own imaginary therapy sessions with his own therapist, Charlie (David Alan Grier), and flashing back to episodes from his past.

The performances are very good, and there's always a wonderful uncertainty to the characters.  Sam is clearly dangerous and unpredictable, but he's struggling to do the right thing, and often shows signs that he has the capacity to become a more mentally stable human being.  His logic may be warped, and he makes bad decisions, but there's a salvageable person there.  Domhnall Gleeson does a good job of making him simultaneously sympathetic and off-putting, someone who passes for an average oddball on the surface, but is hiding some serious problems underneath.  Alan has reason to hope that he might be able to speed along the therapy successfully, but rightly fears for his life at every turn.

Steve Carrell is the main event here, giving one of the better performances I've seen from him.  Viewers might be surprised at how much of the series is about Alan grappling with his own emotions and relationships.  Some of Carell's earlier work could come across as unintentionally comedic, but that's never a problem here as Alan battles Sam's dark side.  A significant subplot involves him looking back on his estrangement with his son, his mistakes as a parent, and his relationship with his Jewish faith.  This is a man who was in the middle of a personal crisis before he was kidnapped, and that doesn't stop just because a serial killer decided to insert himself into Alan's life. 

Despite what I think about the show's structure, it's well paced and the various twists and turns are deployed with skill.  As you'd expect with a serial killer as a main character, there's some violence and upsetting situations.  However, this is not a horror series, and the camera doesn't linger.  The worst is usually kept offscreen.  The ending is also pretty atypical for a thriller, and I appreciated that the show's creators were willing to take a significant creative risk. 

If you have the patience and the inclination, there's plenty to like about "The Patient."  I don't think that it achieved everything that it wanted to, but I hope that these more interesting, unusual character dramas keep getting made.  

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"The Bear" and "Only Murders," Year Two

I knew from the outset that "The Bear" wasn't a series I was going to be much inclined to like, but the glowing reviews won me over.  While I don't regret watching the show, and acknowledge that it's extremely well made, I think I was right that "The Bear" is not to my tastes at all.  The show follows Carmen Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White), who has inherited a struggling Chicago sandwich shop after his brother's suicide, and has given up a career as a rising gourmet chef to try and keep the place afloat.  He clashes with the restaurant's colorful staff, including his cousin Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), new sous chef Sydney (Ayo Edibiri), and long-timers Tina (Liza Colon-Zayas), Marcus (Lionel Boyce), and Ebrahim (Edwin Lee Gibson).  He owes money to his uncle Jimmy (Oliver Platt), is avoiding his sister Sugar (Abby Elliott), and is still processing the death of his brother.

I don't know what it is exactly that puts me off of "The Bear."  It's one of a steadily growing number of good half-hour dramas, very authentic in its portrayal of the restaurant business, very diverse, and features a nice mix of strong performances.  Jeremy Allen White and Ayo Edibiri are the standouts, easily carrying the bulk of the show, and never making me question for a second whether they knew what they were doing in the kitchen.  However, this is a series with a lot of yelling and a lot of intensity, where the main character is constantly miserable, and everything seems to be going wrong all the time.  The much lauded "Review" episode, shot all in one take, following the staff during a terrible day, is close to brilliant, but I found the material difficult to get through.  Richie is a stereotypical aggressive asshole, cursing and provoking people constantly.  Maybe I shouldn't have binged so much of "The Bear" at once, because the Safdie-esque level of anxiety it created really wore me down.  I understand why people like the show, but personally I'll be approaching the next season with caution.  

Meanwhile, "Only Murders in the Building" has returned for a new season.  If you liked the first year, the second is about on par.  This time Charles, Oliver, and Mabel are trying to solve the murder of Arconia board president Bunny Fogler (Jane Houdyshell), and Mabel is a prime suspect.  Many of the famous guest stars from last season drop by again, and they're joined by plenty of new ones, including Amy Schumer, Shirley MacLaine, Michael Rapaport, and Cara Delevigne.  The show's success has also emboldened the writers to push their characters in some new directions.  Charles gets a new daughter-figure in teenage Lucy (Zoe Coletti), and a chunk of the mystery revolves around his shady father.  Oliver is in crisis when his son Will's (Ryan Broussard) parentage is called into question.  Meanwhile, Mabel confronts more painful events from her past, and gets a new love interest in an artsy newcomer played by Delavigne.    

While being a hit show has its perks - like a snazzy, fully animated opening sequence, and the clout to attract bigger names - I worry that "Only Murders" might be getting a little too big too fast.  The charm of its first season was in its oddball nature, having a pair of senior citizens team up with a sarcastic youngster, and make a go at being amateur detectives and podcasters.  Everything in the second season feels much more calculated and polished.  The cameos are more self-aware, and the plotting frequently overcomplicates itself, and big reveals are spaced out to try and deliver bigger moments.  A lot of this comes at the expense of the main characters just getting to hang out and be silly or bored together.  Instead, they're constantly being hustled along from one big calamity to the next, so the more casual character moments tend to get lost.  Mabel goes through a lot this season, and it all feels rushed, despite ten episodes feeling like a few too many.  The performers are good enough week to week that I didn't much mind, but "Only Murders" is frequently in danger of biting off more than it can chew.

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"Resurrection" and "Prey"

I could write a pretty lengthy paper about the shared images of body horror found in both "Resurrection" and Alex Garland's "Men" from earlier this year.  Both movies are psychological thrillers that gradually edge into horror territory.  Both are about women who are terrified of men.  Both contain hallucinatory imagery and depict impossible events, possibly the products of the disordered minds of their protagonists.  "Resurrection" is more grounded than "Men," taking place in a fairly normal, recognizable world.  Our main character, Margaret (Rebecca Hall) is only afraid of one man, her abusive ex David (Tim Roth), who reappears in her life after decades.

At least, she thinks it's David.  There's every reason to believe that the menacing figure might be a phantom, a wholly imagined creature she's using to justify her increasingly erratic behavior and emotional instability.  Her apprehensions about the safety of her nearly-adult daughter Abbie (Grace Kaufman) and her lover Peter (Michael Esper) begin to spiral into paranoia.  Roth's David is a subtly chilling madman who makes unreasonable demands of her, and Margaret is the only one who can placate him.  If that means walking to work barefoot, performing obeisances in the dead of night, frightening her loved ones, and letting her life unravel, that's just how it has to be.  Written and directed by Andrew Semans, the movie smartly never gives clear answers.  Does David exist?  Did he ever exist?  Does it matter either way?

In the wrong hands, a premise like this could have been a mess, but instead it's a great showcase for Rebecca Hall.  She doesn't convince us that any of the strange events in her life are real, but she makes it clear that Margaret believes that they are real, and is tormented by them to the point of desperation.  She gets us to treat absurd notions as deadly serious, because she's utterly committed to their reality and never flinches.  Hall has played several similar roles, such as Christine Chubbuck in "Christine" and the heroine of "The Night House."  This is the first time one of her performances has really gotten to me, maybe because the manifestations of her pain are so clearly tied to past trauma and guilt and motherhood.  It's absolutely riveting to watch, and "Resurrection" largely works because of her efforts.

Another great performance, of an entirely different kind, is delivered by Amber Midthunder in "Prey."  I have no particular attachment to the "Predator" franchise, but I have to admire Dan Trachtenberg and Patrick Alson for coming up with such a fun concept for a new entry.  Set in 1719, "Prey" depicts a tribe of Comanche encountering an alien Predator (Dane DiLiegro).  Our heroine is an aspiring hunter named Naru (Amber Midthunder), who has to use her wits to find a way to defeat the Predator, because she and her brother Taabe (Dakota Beavers) can't hope to match it in strength or technology.  There are some Easter eggs here and there for the established Predator fans, but "Prey" is more interested in being a pure cat-and-mouse action film, and is very good at it.     

The film is getting a lot of attention for its rare indigenous heroine and portrayal of Comanche culture.  The filmmakers even went to the trouble of preparing a Comanche language version of the film for those who want a more immersive and historically accurate viewing experience.  However, at the end of the day the movie still needs to deliver on the action and the thrills, and "Prey" has no trouble doing this.  Amber Midthunder makes for a solid underdog, and gets a cute dog for a sidekick too.  I've seen her in a couple of projects now, and I'm so happy to see her getting more of the spotlight.  Dakota Beavers is apparently a complete unknown, but his screen presence is excellent.  And then there's the Predator itself, who is clearly less experienced and less deadly than some of the ones who have featured in other films, but still a significant threat.  We get to see a few of its early bouts with CGI animals, including a bear, to set up its deadly capabilities.  

When the Predator finally sets its sights on humans, I think the resulting clashes should satisfy anybody who likes the other films in the franchise.  And for those new to this universe, I couldn't think of a better introduction.          

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"Thor: Love and Thunder" and "Top Gun: Maverick"

Minor spoilers ahead.

I'm generally a fan of Taika Waititi's films, but I confess that I didn't understand why "Thor: Ragnarok" had the overwhelmingly positive reception that it got.  Sure, it helped transition Thor into a more comedic character, and introduced Tessa Thompson's Valkyrie, among others.  However, what I've always liked about Waititi is his ability to pair the irreverence with more heartfelt stories, and "Thor: Ragnarok" was pretty much all irreverence.  I think that's why I was so pleasantly surprised by "Thor: Love and Thunder," which is much more of a movie about emotions and personal growth than any of the marketing let on.  It's also very much a kids' film, in a summer that has suffered from a dearth of good kids' films.  

Thor, who we last saw with the Guardians of the Galaxy, is still adventuring through the cosmos.  We see him check in with Valkyrie, find an injured Sif (Jamie Alexander), and learn about a new threat - Gorr the God Butcher (Christian Bale), who is on a quest to rid the universe of all the deities he can get his hands on.  Meanwhile, Thor's ex-girlfriend Jane Foster has been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and winds up gaining his powers through some mystical shenanigans with his hammer.  Jane and Thor cross paths again, sparks fly, and you can guess what happens next.  Parts of the story are incredibly dark and bleak with Gorr's young daughter (played by Hemsworth's daughter India) dying in the opening pre-title sequence.  Parts of the story are incredibly silly, like Thor being rewarded for his exploits with the gift of two giant goats who scream a lot.  

And how does Taika Waititi get these two parts of the film to mesh?  Well, that's the film's biggest problem.  He doesn't.  "Love and Thunder" swings wildly between the funny, lighthearted parts of the film where Thor trades jokes with Korg, and the more serious, heartrending material where Jane is dying of cancer, and a grief-stricken Gorr is not coping well with the loss of his daughter.  The former works better, because we get plenty of the usual Marvel spectacle, and a lot of the humor is specifically aimed at the very young and immature.  The plottier stuff feels more rushed, with muddled stakes, and clearly there was a lot left on the cutting room floor, considering the amount of people announced for this film who are nowhere to be found.  Still, it mostly works, and Waititi is able to keep all the balls in the air.  There's a gorgeous black and white battle sequence.  Russell Crowe shows up as Zeus.  Though some of the execution is clumsy and odd, I appreciate having a Marvel film that is willing to go this hard on genuinely risky material.

On to "Top Gun: Maverick," which I've put off writing a review for because I can't imagine I can say anything about it that far more eloquent reviewers haven't already said about it.  Yes, this long-gestating sequel to 1986's "Top Gun" military action adventure film is a rare legasequel that works, and is actually better than the original film.  Yes, Tom Cruise at sixty is still as much of a movie star as he's ever been, and watching him woo Jennifer Connelly, and corral youngsters Miles Teller, Glen Powell, Lewis Pullman, and Monica Barbaro makes it clear he hasn't lost an ounce of charm with age.  Yes, the glorification of the American military industrial complex is blatantly obvious, but the film is such a piece of fantasy that the enemy is not only unnamed, but totally anonymous throughout - barely glimpsed enemy pilots are always fully covered in black face masks.   

Joseph Kosinski and his collaborators treat "Maverick" as a throwback, replicating the opening aircraft carrier sequence with a new version of the "Top Gun" anthem blaring through the speakers.  The whole story is a lead-up to a big final mission, leaving aside all the complications of the politics and ethics of war, in favor of the video game simplicity of achieving new benchmarks and powering through tricky flight parameters.  What really sells it is the past three decades of filmmaking advancements, that allow the cameras to now be in the air with the fighter planes, or right alongside the speeding motorcycles, ridden by a Tom Cruise who is doing all his own stunts.  It's a vast improvement from the first "Top Gun," where all the aerial combat footage was obviously acquired separately, and had to be written and edited around.  There are several shots in "Maverick" that echo shots from "Top Gun," except executed the way we all wished they could have been the first time around. 

So, I understand why filmgoers have flocked to the film.  It's an uncomplicated, scintillating action spectacle that just wants to deliver an adrenaline high and have the audience leave feeling like a million bucks.  The characters and performances aren't great, but they're good enough.  The mission isn't really plausible, but it feels just plausible enough that you can set disbelief aside for a while and enjoy the ride.  And it's nice to see Val Kilmer again, though I have to wonder how Kelly McGillis is doing these days.  And the cult of Cruise is still weirding me out something fierce, but it's also nice to know that his clout means that I don't have to worry about a "Top Gun 3" for the foreseeable future.  

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Can't Nope Out on "Nope"

Minor spoilers ahead, limited to what was in the last trailer.

Usually, I try to avoid reading any of the critical analyses of a film until I can get some of my own thoughts down.  With "Nope," however, I've been doing the opposite. I want to hear everyone's takes.  I want to be clued in on all the little details I missed after watching the movie twice, still feeling like I wasn't grasping everything there.  As a piece of summer spectacle, I found "Nope" kind of messy and disjointed, with the action and thrills not really kicking in until the last third of the movie.  However, this is one of Jordan Peele's films, and there's all kinds of interesting thematic stuff going on, making it way more interesting as a giant allegory for a bunch of different topics that I've been having fun unpacking.

OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) and Emerald (Keke Palmer) work as horse trainers, trying to keep their recently deceased father's ranch and business going.  Times are tough, and OJ has sold several horses to a nearby western-themed amusement park, Jupiter's Claim, run by a former child star named Jupe (Steven Yeun). One night, OJ spots what appears to be a flying saucer near the ranch, and he and Em decide to try and capture the thing - dubbed "Jean Jacket" - on film.  A visit to Fry's Electronics for a camera surveillance system gets IT guy Angel (Brandon Perea) in on the scheme.  Eventually they also manage to enlist a filmmaker, Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott), who is obsessed with capturing the impossible.  Other parties, however, have also taken notice of the phenomena, and have their own plans in motion.  Jupe, for instance, is up to no good.  

"Nope" has a lot of very fun ideas, and Peele has recruited many good actors and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema to help bring them to the screen in the best form possible.  However, there are ellipses all over the story, and the narrative has to be actively pieced together by the viewer in order for it to make any kind of coherent sense.    And I'm not sure that this is the kind of story that can get away with that.  For many, less discerning members of the audience, I expect that "Nope" will feel like a confusing bore until OJ and Em  put together their big plan to bait and film Jean Jacket in the last act.  It's truly a great action set piece, featuring Kaluuya on horseback,  Palmer on an electric motorcycle, dozens of inflatable skydancers littering the landscape, anime references, and one of the most memorable screen monsters that we've seen in years.  

On the other hand, how do we account for the disturbing flashbacks to young Jupe's time on a '90s sitcom, where a chimp actor went on a rampage and grievously harmed a cast member?  What about the TMZ reporter who shows up out of the blue, or the insane behavior of Antlers Holst? A big theme of the movie is the unacknowledged contributions made to cinema by black creators, represented by the unknown black jockey who appeared in the very first assemblage of stills that made the first motion picture - Muybridge's "Animal Locomotion."  Peele gives him a name and makes OJ and Em his descendants, and custodians of his legacy, as they try to make their own mark on film history.  Black cowboys, too, are often missing from American cinema, from the westerns that are a uniquely American genre.

Trying to make all of these different pieces fit together is where Peele seems to run into the most trouble.  Much of the film's horror is derived from the folly of human beings trying to exploit wild animals for spectacle, or reckless artists letting their egos run amok, with awful consequences.  I don't think that Peele does enough to make it clear what distinguishes OJ and Em from the others.  I don't think Peele does enough to distinguish OJ and Em as characters, period.  Kaluuya and Palmer are excellent onscreen, but I never found myself rooting for them.  Steven Yeun's traumatized, deeply misguided Jupe was more interesting as a tragic figure.    

"Nope" is definitely worth seeing, and I got plenty out of it, but it suffers from a lot of the same problems as "Us," and doesn't quite cohere the same way that film does.  I think this would have been a much better film with a few tweaks to the writing, but it's hard to be too negative on a film that is so wholly original and weird and ambitious.  And the more I think about the film, the more I like it, which speaks well as to its longevity.   

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"Crimes of the Future" and "Flux Gourmet"

I feel a certain obligation to write about the latest films from David Cronenberg and Peter Strickland, who have made such wonderful, singular auteurist genre films in the past.  However, I didn't really get much out of either "Crimes of the Future" or "Flux Gourmet."  Maybe this is because both films center around performance artists, who are perhaps the most insufferable creatures on Earth.

"Crimes of the Future" almost feels like a throwback, one of the first Cronenberg films in some time to fully embrace the body horror and high concept phantasmagoria of his early work.  It takes place in the indeterminate future, in a world where human beings no longer feel pain, and no longer get sick.  Their bodies have been modified and evolved to such an extent that it's questionable that they're still human.  We spend most of the film observing a pair of performance artists, Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) and Caprice (Lea Seydoux), who perform surgery as part of their act, ridding Tenser of the organs he grows because of his "Accelerated Evolution Syndrome."  Don McKellar and Kristen Stewart play government researchers, and Scott Speedman plays an evolutionary radical, part of a group that has modified themselves to digest plastic. 

Cronenberg made a film in 1970 called "Crimes of the Future," with a few themes in common, but the 2022 film appears to be almost totally unrelated.  However, Cronenberg fans will recognize that we're in familiar territory nonetheless.  I like that this it feels very much like "Videodrome" or "Existenz," full of acts and images that suggest sexuality without ever being explicitly sexual.  There's a mood of unease and conspiracy, with multiple factions clashing over shadowy agendas.   Also, Cronenberg's monstrous, organic props are back, including a maw-like operating table and a writhing  chair, covered in bony protrusions, meant to aid with digestive issues.  Some of these visuals are wildly disconcerting and alien, none moreso than the opening sequence where a small boy casually eats pieces of a plastic garbage can.     

Where the film stumbles is with the characters.  The cast is great, but the roles are caricatures and grotesques, so divorced from normal humanity by construction that they're not especially compelling.  The most human character is Scott Speedman's radical, Lang, a conundrum because his humanity is derived from embracing the inhumanity of others.  Mortensen's Tenser is positioned as our lead, caught between the competing desires of multiple parties, and struggling to emotionally connect with any of them.  He and Seydoux are constantly trading technobabble about surgeries and biological mutations in the most muted, unaffected tones.  I get that the intention here is to show that the absence of pain and suffering has rendered humans less able to access positive experiences, but it does make it more difficult to be invested in any of the characters' fates.  "Crimes of the Future" is fascinating for its ideas and aesthetics, but rarely moving.

Now on to "Flux Gourmet," which is about a collective of performance artists who have won a prestigious residence with The Sonic Catering Institute.  This involves Billy (Asa Butterfield), Lamina (Ariane Labed), and Elle (Fatma Mohamed) creating performances through cooking, processing, and manipulating food.  They blend, they chop, they create skits about the agony of going to shopping markets, all with a special focus on the sounds being produced by their efforts.  Their experience is being recorded by a man named Stones (Makis Papadimitriou), an outsider who is experiencing gastric issues, resulting in embarrassing bodily functions.  Overseeing all of them is the Institute's leader, Jan Stevens (Gwendoline Christie), who is always fabulously dressed and not shy about voicing her opinions on the artists' work.

Most of Strickland's films up to this point have been horror and suspense pieces.  Here, while there are still anxious tinges of dread, "Flux Gourmet" leans more toward satire and comedy.  Once you get past the lovingly orchestrated performance art ASMR, the absurdity really comes through.   The collective is a mess of constant drama.  Jan and Elle have clashing visions.  Elle is abusive toward Lamia and Billy.  Billy and Jan end up in bed together, though Billy is suspicious of Jan's motives.  Tensions rise, the performances become more extreme, and poor Stones just wants his poor stomach to leave him alone.   Everything is played straight, especially when it comes to the dizzying heights of sonic catering arts.  Jan and Elle nearly come to blows over a flanger being used in the performance.  A major sequence involves the threat of coprophagia.

The trouble is, if this is supposed to be taken as satire, it's not especially insightful or interesting satire.  The culinary collective is a pretty dire group of wannabes and pretentious auteurs who backstab each other at every opportunity and let their pretentiousness run amok in predictable ways.  Stones is supposed to become enamored with and eventually join their ranks, but I don't think Strickland makes a good case as to why.  "Flux Gourmet" offers the occasional good visual gag and deadpan line reading from some committed actors, but otherwise spends too much time wallowing in its own indulgence.  

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My Terrible Sense of Humor

I've mentioned multiple times in previous posts that I have a terrible sense of humor.  I think I should clarify a bit.  When I say I have a terrible sense of humor, what I mean is that my sense of humor has been completely incompatible with mainstream comedy for as long as I've been aware of it.  I've totally failed to respond to most major comedians and comedic trends from 1994 (the dawn of Jim Carrey and the Farrelly brothers) to roughly 2014 (the tail end of the Adam Sandler era).  It's only recently that I've found a few alternatives that are more in line with my sensibilities.

As a kid, I remember watching a magician special on television, and one of the segments involved Penn & Teller out on a pier, with a volunteer from the audience.  They were there to do a comedic bit.  They put the guy in handcuffs and asked if he could get out of them.  He could not.  Then they locked him in a crate and asked if he could get out.  He could not.  They proceeded to nail him in the box, while the man inside started to protest and shout, before they dropped the crate in the ocean and it sank.  Now, at the time I was old enough to understand that it was probably a trick of some kind, because people didn't just kill random people on television, especially on cheesy magician shows.  However, I was also very creeped out by the sequence of events, and not totally sure that I hadn't just seen Penn & Teller murder somebody for real.   

I mention this incident as an example of how sheltered I was, and how out of touch I was with mainstream culture for a big chunk of my life.  As a child and teenager, I was more liable to be frightened by media than most of the kids my age.  I almost never watched horror films.  At the age of fourteen, I was disturbed for weeks by a trailer for a film about Nostradamus, because it had apocalyptic imagery of buildings collapsing.  I often took things more literally and more seriously than they were intended, and assumed sarcasm was meant as hostility.  I watched a lot of sitcoms with my parents, things like "Cheers" and "Golden Girls," and occasionally the more family friendly output of comedian-turned-actors like Robin Williams, Eddie Murphy, and Steve Martin.  However, I had little exposure to the more aggressive, subversive humor of shows like "Saturday Night Live" and "In Living Color," and this was the humor that became much more popular in the '90s.  Adam Sandler and Jim Carrey broke out when I was in high school, but I only saw the very tamest of their output.  It wasn't really until college, and a lot of exposure to Comedy Central, that I approached anything close to an understanding of what mainstream humor for adults actually looked like. 

And it quickly became apparent that it wasn't for me.  I couldn't stand toilet humor.  I couldn't stand "idiot manchild" behavior.  Cringe humor was an ordeal to withstand, not something I would willingly subject myself to.  Embarrassment humor, especially when ramped up to the level of public spectacle, was excruciating.  Grown men who acted immature and selfish and mean were immediately off putting.  I couldn't relate to them at all, and had no sympathy for them.  And if you've been paying attention to the last three decades, that rules out most of Judd Apatow, the Farrelly Brothers, the Frat Pack, the Wayans, "American Pie," "South Park," "Jackass," and 90% of the rest of theatrical comedies produced by Hollywood.  These movies were very masculine, very sophomoric, and very testosterone-driven.  Even the ones starring women all seemed to involve drunken hijinks and humiliation.  There were some that I liked, here and there, but for a very long time I just gave up on the R-rated comedy.  I accepted that I was not the target audience, and watched something else.

It's only been in the past few years that I've quietly been edging back into the theatrical comedy space.  The number of R-rated comedies I've actually liked has crept up - "Barb and Star," "Blockers," "Game Night," "The Big Sick," "Brittany Runs a Marathon," "The Death of Stalin," and the latest Borat movie.  I suspect a big reason for this is the decline of the mid-range film, pushing more theatrical releases to either be shoestring productions or massive ones that have to appeal to global audiences.  Comedies are more niche, more oddball, and more personal.  Television and web series are where the real innovation is now.  And as all this new talent has been coming in, and we're finally getting different POVs and different voices in the mix, it turns out that some comedy is for me.  I like stand-up.  I like funny movies when they're smart and well-written.  I can relate to comedians.          

Has mainstream comedy gotten out of a rut, or have I finally matured enough to appreciate it?  Hard to say, but it's been a relief.

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