What “The Spy Who Dumped Me” Shows about Kate McKinnon’s Comedy

I nearly always make a snap judgment about Kate McKinnon in a movie. I’ll feel like she’s over-the-top or cringy in those first few seconds. Then I’ll feel like an ass for that snap judgment. Feeling like an ass is appropriate in this case. This is the exact same path I followed in her first few moments in “The Spy Who Dumped Me”.

It’s appropriate to have that moment of calling myself out because Kate McKinnon sets a lot of men off. Even if I’ve worked on undoing elements of toxic masculinity, there are still in-built reactions that need confrontation.

Nobody ever really stops every single impulse of sexism, or racism, or ableism (the list goes on). You can unlearn some, and others that are more ingrained you have to learn to recognize so that you can confront yourself about them. It’s constant work, not something you magically get over, and McKinnon leans on a place where a lot of men still need to do that work.

The same brashness that at first might set me off is one of McKinnon’s greatest strengths. Her comedy often calls me out for judging her characters, and it’s a reliable talent because it feels like her characters are judging themselves at the same time. Whatever ingrained bias I might be recognizing and confronting ends up directly at odds with my empathy. Because her characters often confront the impact of that bias, and show the emotional scars it can create in someone else, she doesn’t just evoke it; her comedy converses with you about it.

The limit of McKinnon’s characters is only the medium in which they appear. Her characters that get full movies can be broader than what’s allowed in a 5-minute sketch on “Saturday Night Live”. She welds a massive amount of heart into every character she plays, and she knows how to lend it to other actors who share scenes with her. When she’s invested in someone else, you get invested in them, too. She knows how to be 90% of the energy on screen, and still make that scene orbit someone else.

“The Spy Who Dumped Me” is one of the best examples for how well this can make a comedy work. McKinnon is paired with Mila Kunis. Essentially, Kunis’s Audrey discovers her ex-boyfriend was a spy who’s gone missing. Assassins come after her and her roomate Morgan (McKinnon). The pair escape to Europe in search of answers, and get increasingly involved in spy shenanigans.

Is it the best movie? A few elements fall flat, but it works as one of my favorite recent comedies for one major reason. To describe it requires a bit of a tangent:

I once read an article that described Ralph Fiennes as the actor who guarded his characters from the audience and never let anyone into them. There’s ego associated with that, and that fuels characters in a very interesting way. It intrigues and enraptures an audience that invests in wanting to see past those barriers.

I bring that up because McKinnon’s the exact opposite. She doesn’t guard her characters in any way. She gives performances that imagine there’s nothing worth guarding. The seemingly brash ego that announces itself in that first minute is often the result of a fear that you learn about throughout the rest of a performance. That can be heartbreaking, but then you see how fiercely she guards the people around her in movie after movie – not just as a character, but as a performer.

It’s not that McKinnon’s incapable of guarding her characters, it’s that she reliably guards the characters around her while opening her own up to vulnerability. That’s a difficult and pretty thankless task, and it makes incredibly modern, relatable characters.

McKinnon’s characters are sometimes over-the-top as a distraction to herself, to escape that self-judgment. She doesn’t need to guard herself if she can shift attention onto anyone else. In that way, as over-the-top as her performances can be, they communicate something very real, restrained, and down-to-earth.

The rest of the movie around her in “The Spy Who Dumped Me” is pretty good. It’s not great, but it’s elevated into higher territory because of the comedic pairing. Mila Kunis has performed a lot of B-characters and sidekicks over the years. She’s not the comic lead that McKinnon can be, but she doesn’t need to be. She may not be able to step outside complementary roles the way McKinnon can, but Kunis is extremely solid within them. She can be the straight man or the over-the-top performance, and she’s especially good at creating space that highlights other actors.

The magic in “The Spy Who Dumped Me” is that these are two actors who give to each other constantly. It’s not just their characters placing value in each other. In every scene, their performers keep elevating and valuing the other in that scene. The list of comedy pairings where two actors could lend attention to each other so completely is very brief – it mostly includes combinations of Madeline Kahn, Cleavon Little, Richard Pryor, and Gene Wilder, as well as the Marx Brothers. (I’ll come back round to Wilder in a second.)

We’re not used to comedies where the protagonists build each other up instead of constantly undermining each other. It’s strange for a comedy to bypass schadenfreude for 90% of its runtime.

“The Spy Who Dumped Me” shows that a comedy can still be very successful without it. More than that, the laughs come from a wider range of places. There really aren’t many recurring jokes in this. Recurring jokes aren’t bad, but many comedies like this can lean on them to supply the bulk of the humor. This avoids that pitfall.

It also doesn’t over-rely on either actor shouldering entire comedic bits entirely on themselves, such as in a Will Ferrell comedy. Sure, that can be funny, but it usually means a scene’s story and stakes have to stop in order to show the actor off. If one person is carrying the comedy, the comedy becomes reliant on that one person. It becomes about what they do in a scene, not what the scene does in a movie. That can be successful, but I tend to like comedies that take other approaches. They feel more substantive and stick with me. They’re comedies that I find myself wanting to re-watch.

If everyone’s carrying the comedy like in “The Spy Who Dumped Me”, you don’t have to veer away from the narrative in order to be funny.

I don’t imagine either that it’s a coincidence a film like this comes along co-written and directed by a woman (Susanna Fogel) and starring two women. If the film starred Adam Sandler and Kevin Hart, for instance, the narrative would be stopping to make its jokes five times a scene. The characters would never build each other up until they were capable of navigating the climax. Instead, they’d be tearing each other down until they lucked through it. There’s a place for comedies like that. There should be more of a place for comedies like “The Spy Who Dumped Me”.

McKinnon’s comedy is a mix of loud left turns and dry observations. It can mix the interruptive with the deeply complementary within moments: She can be a central figure one moment and then step back to raise the entire cast around her the next. It’s an undervalued quality and range in comic actors and it’s ideal for a good buddy pairing or ensemble work.

A number of other actors have done this over the years. Gene Wilder comes most prominently to mind and it’s one reason he could work so well spoofing so many different genres, and paired with so many different actors. You trusted him to take you down otherwise ridiculous plot developments one moment, and the next he could background himself and direct your focus to those around him. McKinnon has that breadth, and I’d love to see her given vehicles across genres like Wilder was.

If you enjoy what you read on this site, consider subscribing to Gabriel Valdez’s Patreon. It helps with the time and resources to continue writing articles like this one.

The Most Thankless Role of 2015

How do you describe a thankless role? Movies are filled with actors who do great work in B-projects, or who are unfairly blamed for a film’s larger failings. Sometimes, a film is superb, but it’s dismissed because its genre isn’t taken seriously.

Last year, one actor considered was Megan Fox for “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.” The movie itself was terrible. Fox herself wasn’t even great in it, but that’s not always what we ask from leading actors in action films. She held together what was otherwise un-watchable. Like appreciating the ringleader of an out-of-control circus staking down the tents as the performers themselves lurch into the audience, she alone helped the film avoid complete disaster.

Yet, she was still targeted as the reason the film didn’t work. It wasn’t the ripoff of a plot, or the shoddy CG, or the nonsensical attempts at humor. Those were all excused. Even Will Arnett was given a pass for a far worse performance. Fox was held uniquely accountable when, in fact, she was dragging the rest of the film along by her teeth. That’s what a thankless role is.

(Last year’s award went to Perdita Weeks for “As Above, So Below,” but Megan Fox is a more well-known example of what we’re talking about.)

So who inhabited those thankless roles last year? Our seven voting writers decided these five actors did the most work for the least thanks in 2015. Then we chose a winner.

Reg E. Cathey, “Fantastic Four”

Contrary to the critical pile-on, “Fantastic Four” wasn’t a terrible film, let alone the worst of the year or decade. It was merely bad. Its young, unproven cast failed to lend the film any gravitas. No, the only one who felt he actually lived in and cared about the world of the film was Reg E. Cathey, doling out moral lessons, character background, and expository dialogue in equal measure as team mentor Dr. Franklin Storm. His is the definition of a brilliant performance in a lackluster film.

Keira Knightley, “Everest”

Being the emotional heart of a film when you’re literally phoning your role in is a lot to ask. Yet as the pregnant wife left home while her husband and business partner encounter disaster on Mt. Everest, Knightley held a film together via a series of heart-wrenching, one-woman scenes. In a film that boasts some intense storm scenes, capable procedural storytelling, and way too many questionable accents, Knightley is the one who lends the film its emotional relevance. It’s rare that a film’s heart exists in a series of on-the-phone scenes, but that’s what Knightley brings to the table.

Mila Kunis, “Jupiter Ascending”

Kunis is criticized in “Jupiter Ascending” for not delivering any character arc as Jupiter. Essentially, after witnessing intergalactic thunder palaces and Soylent Fountains of Youth and corporate space vampires, Jupiter remains pretty much herself. This is not the kind of thing we expect from science-fiction, the critics roared. No, and that’s the point. After the temptation of love and riches and vast empires at her bidding, Jupiter chooses to remain herself. She’d sooner give up her family and her life than betray what she knows is right. We almost never see a film where a leading woman is already who she needs to be, and it’s the universe around her that’s criticized.

Julianne Nicholson, “Black Mass”

There’s a scene in “Black Mass” where Julianne Nicholson’s Marianne begs out of dinner by pretending to be sick. Her husband, corrupt FBI agent John Connolly, has lost face. Gangster Whitey Bulger goes up to check on her. Connolly has no power to stop him, and we’re given to understand Bulger could do anything he pleases and suffer no repercussions. He talks to Marianne about taking care of herself, her duties to John, and then puts a hand to her neck and face. Anything could happen, and Bulger communicates this to her without ever needing to say it. She has no power, and her realization in this moment is terrifying. It’s a shame her role in the film wasn’t larger than her handful of scenes. In what is there, she may give the finest performance in a film full of them.

Angela Winkler, “Clouds of Sils Maria”

(not pictured)

Although only appearing in a few brief scenes, Winkler communicates two entire lives to the audience: her own and that of her late husband. It’s the type of role that goes by unnoticed, but actors in these more limited parts often need to be the best in your cast at communicating complex characters quickly. Not everyone can communicate loss and the quiet struggle for acceptance inside a few minutes of screen time. It’s a different kind of thankless role, but one that struck us as worthy of mention.

THE MOST THANKLESS ROLE OF 2015:

Mila Kunis, “Jupiter Ascending”

Screw character arc, Jupiter’s already who she wants to be. She just hasn’t been challenged to know it until, you know, she goes through some space dinosaur fights. When men say screw the world and refuse to change and embrace their violence by becoming Batman, or John McClane, we celebrate that violence. When women embrace the world and refuse to change and reject violence, we criticize their failure to embrace the violence men demand of their heroes.

Yes, it’s worthwhile and necessary for women to be able to embrace that violence and kick ass in our screen mythologies, a la “Mad Max: Fury Road.” Yet if the violence itself is patriarchal by nature, it’s also necessary to have representations – for women and men – of what rejecting that violence looks like. Jupiter is a hero to us for remaining exactly who she is even as her entire perception of the universe around her changes. She may need help at points saving her own life, but she saves Earth all on her own, before the hero even gets there.

Kunis isn’t the best actor on this list by a long shot, though she has a good sense for reacting to dialogue and generating comedic timing. However, she is the one whose role is the most important to take out of the theater with ourselves. The commentaries “Jupiter Ascending” makes – on feminism, on capitalism, on gender fluidity – all are deeply valuable. The movie has some issues, but Kunis’s role of Jupiter is one of the most important, one of the most discussion-worthy, and one of the most overlooked characters of the year.

Those voting are: S.L. Fevre, Eden O’Nuallain, Cleopatra Parnell, Amanda Smith, Rachel Ann Taylor, Vanessa Tottle, and Gabriel Valdez.

Where did we get our awesome images? Reg E. Cathey is from If You Want the Gravy, Keira Knightley is from The Sun, Mila Kunis is from Starlog, and Julianne Nicholson is from Coming Soon.

Mila Kunis vs. Space Vampires or: Bad Movie, Great Art — “Jupiter Ascending”

by Gabriel Valdez

Action movies are often criticized as being “color by numbers” and following the same, basic plot we’ve seen dozens of times before. What happens if you take all the color by numbers pages you have, crumple them together, and glue like a madman? Some parts might be recognizable, but the seams where the pages meet won’t make any sense.

It’ll be a surreal mess, but it might still be fun to look at. This is the approach Jupiter Ascending takes. It follows Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis), a young girl with a tragic past who works as a house cleaner, but is really the reincarnation of one of the universe’s most powerful CEOs. Before we get the chance to know her, she’s targeted by bounty hunters and saved by a hunky space wolf played by Channing Tatum. We take it on faith he’s a space wolf despite the only evidence being pointy ears and the occasional growl, but everyone in the movie keeps telling us he is, so why not? Oh, and he has anti-gravity boots that let him speed skate through the air at jet speed.

Have you seen Underworld, Stargate, Dune, The Fifth Element, or Star Wars? Read any Douglas Adams? Seen any Disney princess animation ever? Good, because they’re all smashed in here. Do you want a movie that makes a lot of sense? This isn’t the place. Do you want one that crazily shoves every sci-fi cliché into a blender and holds on for dear life? Welcome to Jupiter Ascending.

You can’t take the movie’s surface seriously. It’s thoroughly B-grade. There’s a sequence where Tatum fights aliens on earth, hops onto their frigate, rides a wormhole through space, and then raids an intergalactic thunder palace – all without putting on a shirt. The number of costume changes Kunis undergoes, from hospital gown to space jumpsuit to ever more extravagant and revealing evening gowns, becomes a running joke.

Jupiter Ascending is trolling science-fiction and our expectations of it, trying to get a rise by being like everything and nothing all at once. It’s more along the lines of directors The Wachowskis’ Speed Racer than The Matrix. Does that make it as good as either? That’s complicated. It’s constantly skirting the line between clever and disastrous. It’s a worse movie. It’s better art.

Kunis anchors the film by playing straight man to the film’s zany antics, and she’s better than expected. Tatum is too glum for the kind of chances the film is taking and Sean Bean nods and winks his way through a paper-thin mentor role. The biggest shortcoming is Eddie Redmayne, currently up for an Oscar for The Theory of Everything. It’s difficult to overact without being campy, but he finds a way, mumbling half his lines away.

The movie’s biggest problem is a lack of signifiers in the action scenes. We need to know where everyone is so we can marvel at the amazing visual effects and feats of heroism taking place. When our heroes hijack an alien fighter over Chicago, for instance, we’re treated to a few minutes of high-speed chase. The only problem is that all the fighters look exactly the same and have extra moving parts that distract the eye. This is Grade-A Transformers disease: which fighter are we rooting for in the mess of fantastic visual effects? Who knows? We’re rooting for the effects, I guess.

The solution is as simple as painting a red streak on the side of our heroes’ fighter, or lighting the cockpit a different color. Audiences thrive on context, and lacking it is a mistake Jupiter Ascending makes repeatedly. The movie gets a pass on being zany; it doesn’t get a pass on bad fundamentals.

Characters, realizations, and scenes don’t emerge; they crash into the rest of the plot. The film’s latter half revolves around the intergalactic espionage surrounding who owns Earth: it’s Jupiter and her space wolf versus the infighting dynasty of space vampires. Think the shenanigans of Twilight meeting the corporate metaphors of Dune, if you can do so without your brain breaking. The movie starts becoming more solid as it becomes clearer just how big of a riff it all is.

Jupiter Ascending is a one star movie with a four star ability to keep your attention. I want to like it more than I actually do. In this case, that makes the difference. Maybe it’s Kunis’s charm, or the Wachowskis’ kitchen sink approach. It could be the costume drama antics or the blue collar message it trumpets throughout. The movie’s multi-layered anti-oligarchy conceit is brilliant, it’s just not as brilliantly fused together into a cogent whole. Right now, it’s a lot of really good ideas sprinkled around.

It’s just insane enough to make me applaud its ambition. It stands out not because it achieves what it sets out to accomplish, but because it wants to accomplish so much. Falling on its face makes me admire the movie a lot more than if it didn’t try at all. Is it a good film? Absolutely not, but it is relentlessly interesting. You have to know what happens next. It’s a fine line to walk, as if the Wachowskis took the “There is no spoon” line from The Matrix and applied it to a movie instead of silverware.

Does it Pass the Bechdel Test?

This section helps us discuss one aspect of movies that we’d like to see improved – the representation of women. Read why we’re including this section here.

1. Does Jupiter Ascending have more than one woman in it?

Yes. Mila Kunis plays Jupiter. Tuppence Middleton plays space vampire extraordinaire Kalique Abrasax. Nikki Amuka-Bird plays Diomika Tsing, a capable captain in what amounts to the space police. Doona Bae plays bounty hunter Razo. Gugu Mbatha-Raw plays Famulus, Lieutenant to one of the space vampire sons. Jupiter’s own immigrant family may be patriarchal, but is dominated by women – her mother and aunt, especially.

2. Do they talk to each other?

Yep.

3. About something other than a man?

They rarely talk about men. The film’s biggest accomplishment is that Jupiter is the same person whether she’s cleaning toilets and getting yelled at by her family, or deciding the fate of Earth. This is a strong female character who always seeks to sacrifice for the greater good, even at the expense of herself or her family. It doesn’t matter if she’s discussing financial woes or intergalactic economics.

On the whole, I oppose character development the way we use it now. We’ve taken an element of storytelling that is a tool and, in Western narratives, we’ve turned it into all but a requirement. It’s like asking we build our houses out of hammers and screwdrivers instead of wood and brick. Character development is a great tool when used in the correct circumstance. It is not the essence of narrative.

The few times when we are gifted with characters who don’t develop, it’s because they’re thrown into a world where their personal strengths are turned from uselessness into dominance: Mel Gibson’s Max in Mad Max, Christian Bale’s Batman in The Dark Knight trilogy, and the progenitor of all these steadfast characters in American film – Clint Eastwood in any Western or Dirty Harry movie.

These are stories where unhealthy traits are suddenly turned into heroic qualities because the nature of their world demands it. It’s no mistake that the unhealthy traits that are presented as heroic almost always belong to male characters.

Rarely, do we see a normal person on film whose world is turned upside down, yet who is healthy enough to end up the same on the other side regardless. Almost never is this character a woman.

When this happens in Jupiter Ascending, it’s not stressing the need for dominance or vengeance or violence as strengths. It’s stressing empathy and confidence, the courage to understand something wholly separate from your own experience and meet it on its own terms rather than trying to conquer it on yours.

The ideas inside of Jupiter Ascending, especially as they pertain to gender dynamics, are some of the most exquisite and complex you’ll find on film. Does the film live up to those ideas? Enough to communicate them successfully if you’re willing to watch with an open mind, yes.

Our hunky space wolf does rescue Jupiter on more than one occasion. Sometimes it’s needed, but at least once he bursts in and impressively kills dozens for a rescue that’s completely useless. Jupiter’s perfectly fine. Whoops.

Later, he’ll burst in and rescue Jupiter when she’s already won the day. This isn’t to say she can claim what we think of as a classical movie victory – she’s made the decision to sacrifice herself and others in order to save billions of lives. She makes the right decision in a no-win scenario, and more to the point, she’s made the kind of decision people who clean toilets for a living already make every day, and not the one her aristocratic corporate space vampire opponents can even grasp as a viable option. So yeah, she does win, and in case you don’t get it, she’s given the opportunity to go toe-to-toe with the villain later on anyway.

So the hunky Channing Tatum space wolf (who she’s hitting on from first meeting rather than the other way around) does get to rescue her in classical movie form, often as she’s falling out of buildings, but it’s usually after she’s claimed the kind of victories we rarely get to see in movies, the kind that are far more impressive than all the speed skating anti-gravity boots in the galaxy.

Chris Braak writes more on this in an article that considers the feminism in Jupiter Ascending and how the film’s messages may reflect on co-director Lana Wachowski’s gender transition.

IN CONCLUSION

This is one of those films that the more I write about it, the more I think about it, the more I find in it. I can tell I’m not done writing about it by a long shot. Roger Ebert once said that you have to rate a film based on its own terms. Not is it good or is it bad. Does it succeed at what it’s trying to be?

It’s very difficult to tell what Jupiter Ascending wants to be. Earlier, I said it’s a one star movie with a four star ability to keep your attention. It’s five star performance art. It’s a six star discussion topic. It’s seven star feminism. It’s an eight star science-fiction conceit. It’s just very hard to get at those other things because it is a one star movie on the surface.

Where does that leave it?

As a box office flop (at least in the U.S.) that mainstream criticism will reject. And you can’t really blame them because their jobs are to rate movies as movies, not as discussion topics or meta commentary or performance art. That’s the critical industry dragging its heels on responding to the way movies are changing, and I’m not about to blame individual critics for rating movies as movies first.

As an inevitable cult classic a few critics will be championing for years, to either be remembered for how ambitious it was in reaching so far beyond the theater, or to be forgotten for how it failed to sell itself well enough inside the theater.

Where does that leave me?

See it. Be prepared to dislike it. Be prepared to love it. Go in with no expectations. Be prepared to not understand how a friend can feel the exact opposite of you after you watch it. Either way, you’ll be discussing it long afterwards. Be prepared to dislike it and love it in the same breath. Be prepared to see it and think I’m an idiot. Be prepared to see it and want to write 2,000 words on it. Be prepared to think it’s genius. Be prepared to think it’s trash.

In the end, do not try and rate the movie. That’s impossible. Instead… only try to realize the truth.

What truth?

There is no movie.

There is no movie?

Then you’ll see, that it is not the movie that’s awesome, it is only yourself.

Or something like that.

Trailers of the Week — What Else Would It Be?

by Gabriel Valdez

First off, there were so many good trailers from Australia and New Zealand this past week that there will be a special edition of Trailers of the Week tomorrow, focusing exclusively on movies made Down Under.

Now, for the most obvious Trailer of the Week in our brief history:

INHERENT VICE
Debut Trailer

Where to even start on Paul Thomas Anderson’s 70s crime comedy? Joaquin Phoenix is unrecognizable, and we haven’t exactly ever seen him as a pratfalling comedian before this.

Last year’s American Hustle played up the East Coast glitz and glam of the 70s. Inherent Vice looks like it’s playing up the seedier, Hollywood habits of the decade. What astounds me about Anderson are those little touches that cheap 70s movies have – when Phoenix clambers to his feet in a stairwell, the sound is horrible. His shoes clap the floor with every step. And it’s not that Anderson lets this detail pass – it’s that this is a detail he consciously seeks out in the first place.

I can picture him in the editing bay, insisting, “No, Joaquin’s shoes need to be louder, louder even than the dialogue, louder even than the gunshot!” I assume that’s how PT Anderson talks. It’s the attention to detail Anderson’s taken to both drama and horror; I’m excited to see him tackle a period comedy from a period Hollywood has chosen to forget.

BLACKHAT
Debut Trailer

Michael Mann was unstoppable a decade ago. He’d added The Insider, Ali, Collateral, and the movie adaptation of Miami Vice to a resume that already boasted Manhunter, The Last of the Mohicans, and Heat.

And then he disappeared. Well, not really. He’s still been producing. But as a director, the only movie he’s helmed since 2006 is Public Enemies, the middling Johnny Depp-as-John Dillinger film you probably forgot about.

So it’s big news when Mann returns to directing, confident again in his grainy-yet-sumptuous digital video style that feels like a brand of hard-boiled, 80s crime television that never actually existed. The cast? Chris Hemsworth, who has yet to prove himself outside of Thor; Viola Davis, who has proven herself in so many roles I wouldn’t blink twice if she was recast as Thor; and Wei Tang, an Ang Lee alum who showed her dramatic chops in Lust, Caution.

THE TALE OF PRINCESS KAGUYA
U.S. Trailer #1

The style of this film still enchants me, and that soundtrack is so evocative it can send chills up your spine inside a few seconds flat, let alone two minutes.

If we hadn’t declared an earlier clip Trailer of the Week a month ago, this would probably be up top, but I like to vary it up.

JUPITER ASCENDING
U.S. Trailer #3

This was intended to come out last year, but the Wachowskis delayed it so they could perfect the effects work (or the studio got cold feet, depending on which reporter you believe).

Either way, it looks like those extra months payed off. When Jupiter Ascending trailered last summer, it had awe-inspiring vistas and moments of spectacle, but the person-to-person action (especially Channing Tatum’s anti-grav boots) just didn’t look right. That appears to have been fixed in this most recent-trailer.

There’s not enough good sci-fi out today, especially featuring women. Mila Kunis wouldn’t normally be my first choice to anchor an effects-heavy sci-fi epic, but that was once true of Keanu Reeves as well. The truth is, the Wachowskis need lead actors with comic ability and easygoing charm to make their occasionally too self-serious mix of anime and opera influences more palatable.

I just hope she’s not always the damsel in distress and, like Keanu, gets to kick a little ass by the end of the movie as well. Maybe she takes the place of Sean Bean when he inevitably buys it.

LAGGIES
U.K. Trailer #1

I’m just going to harp about the cast here: Keira Knightley, Chloe Grace Moretz, and Sam Rockwell. They could all read the phonebook together, and I’d pay to go see that. I’m actually not a huge fan of the premise, but you can’t buy the kind of comedic timing Knightley and Rockwell possess.

We sometimes lament the days when Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn would command the silver screen, or when Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks teamed together for a romantic comedy. We still have those kinds of talents, and this is a pair that can pull it off. My favorite comedic duo of the year already contains Rockwell (that’s Rockwell and Olivia Wilde in the one-less-cameo away from being perfect Better Living Through Chemistry), and if you’re looking for the reason Pirates worked so well, I hope you’re not thinking it’s Orlando Bloom’s timing with Johnny Depp that did it. It was Knightley’s, and any time you have two comedic powerhouses like these two joining together, it’s a must-watch.

I’ve now said that in approximately six different ways. I’m excited for Laggies.

THE GOOD LIE
Debut Trailer

This is the kind of heartwarming I’m wary of, but I also have a weird kind of faith in Reese Witherspoon. I don’t know why, since I’ve never actually liked her in any of her roles, but at the same time I trust her reputation as a cutthroat exec who only does projects she feels are worth her time.

So I have faith in her, but don’t get me wrong – if the two of us were trapped in the Andes after a plane crash, I wouldn’t willingly fall asleep for fear I’d never wake up again. I mean, I had to sit through Sweet Home, Alabama one whole time. How do you trust after that?

Anyway, this movie could be something honest and heartfelt, helping to educate and expand viewpoints, or it could be “watch the white person save the foreign people” feelgood schlock. There’s no way to tell at this point.

Worst Trailer of the Week:
THE SCAREHOUSE
Debut Trailer

“Slutcam games!” Girls in lingerie! Torturing naked women! Good job, Gavin Michael Booth, you’ve made Hostel for Dummies, and Hostel already was Hostel for Dummies.

This column has a rule – we’ll never rag on indie or amateur films for looking cheap or lacking the budget for effects or award-winning actors. Some of my favorite films are amateur, made for a nickel, and contain whatever friends and family the director could scrounge up.

That’s why Worst Trailer of the Week is never an indie film. But this week, in the words of Denzel, “I’ll make an exception.”

Look, I get exploitation, I like a lot of self-aware exploitation films that understand their genre – warts and all. I even like some exploitation films that don’t understand their genre at all, much for the same reason people slow down to look at car wrecks.

But The Scarehouse? This is one more bolt in the framework of posing women as victims and sluts and getting off on watching them helpless and tortured. We get enough of that in the damn real world; I hardly think we need this tripe to reinforce it.