Comedy Care — “Only Murders in the Building”

“Only Murders in the Building” is a love letter to New York that translates even to people who loathe New York. It’s a multi-faceted comedy that features two greats from the 80s who have evolved with the times: Steve Martin and Martin Short. It anchors Selena Gomez as an exceptional actor. It features one of the best ensembles in recent memory. It’s a mystery that’s more successful and intriguing than most of what passes for a mystery.

Steve Martin plays Charles, the former TV star of a terrible detective show. Martin Short is Oliver, a has-been Broadway producer who’s heavily in debt. Selena Gomez is Mabel, a woman who’s recently moved into the same expensive apartment complex. The three exist in separate worlds until one day they enter the same elevator as a man who’s minutes away from being murdered.

Their sudden discovery of loving the same true crime podcast (“All is Not OK in Oklahoma”) sends them barreling down the road of producing their own. After all, they have a murder in their building. One of them’s a producer, one an actor, and Mabel turns out to be a natural investigator. They can be first on the scene for any developments. The police suspect it’s a suicide, but three random New Yorkers with nothing else to do know better, right?

The show starts out with each episode considering a different suspect, but quickly gets more complex. The supporting cast is ridiculous: Nathan Lane, Tina Fey, Amy Ryan, Aaron Dominguez, Jane Lynch. Even Sting makes an appearance. It plays with the idea that it’s usually the famous guest star who’s guilty on a show. If half the supporting cast is famous, that assumption’s out the window.

“Only Murders in the Building” remembers the art of the red herring, the false clue that leads our investigators down the wrong path. The episodes sometimes mirror their podcast’s episodes, toying cleverly with ideas of filler and overdramatization.

What really makes “Only Murders in the Building” special is its understanding of being surrounded by people and yet being lonely. Charles, Oliver, and Mabel are each painfully lonely in unique ways, and each of them responds differently.

Charles follows daily routines that anesthetize him to the world. Their structure creates a space where he can’t get hurt, or feel much of anything. He’d rather perform an emotion than let someone witness a real one. What we can forget about Steve Martin’s comedy is how melancholic it can be, how aching he can make a moment, how he can share shame and embarrassment in a way that’s universal.

Oliver keeps on reaching out, garrulous, friendly, charming in an often desperate way. His isolation isn’t a finely-tuned discipline like Charles’s, but rather chaotic and uncontrolled. Too many productions of his flopped. Too many people have loaned him money. No one trusts him anymore, and the minute they let him back into their lives, he’s asking for something. Martin Short walks the fine line of someone who’s honest but doesn’t know when to stop, who’s sure the next idea will be the one to save him instead of dig him deeper.

Mabel is determined. Her loneliness is created out of trauma and loss, though it takes us time to understand it. She’s still figuring out who she wants to be. Her concern is keeping people at a distance for their own safety. If everyone around her suffers tragedy, why would she keep anyone around her? Charles and Oliver are in many ways safe because they’re set in their ways. She may hide things from them, but she doesn’t imagine she can influence their decisions.

Selena Gomez is the standout here. That shouldn’t be a surprise by now, even when paired with generational actors. It might be easy to dismiss her as a pop star, but she’s had a few awards-worthy performances over the past decade. She’s the dramatic core, and matches Steve Martin’s acerbic wit while often carrying the show.

So everyone’s lonely and tragic. Sounds like a hoot, right? Yet “Only Murders in the Building” is one of the funniest shows of the year. It humanizes these things rather than exploiting them. It finds the identifiable and empathetic in them. That’s where the comedy comes out. These three people can understand each others’ loneliness. Because they understand it, they can poke fun at it as a way of drawing closer and building trust. They can communicate out of it. It’s a private grammar they understand and the rest of the world doesn’t. The situational and physical comedy, the mystery and true crime parodies – these all work because of our fundamental empathy for these characters. They speak to parts of us on a level not many things do.

I love a parody that can poke fun at its genre, but when it houses itself in that genre, believes in it, and understands how that genre captures us, even manipulates us – then it can exist both inside that genre and as a comment on it, it can create its own world with its own comedic logic that we’re willing to follow because its humanity feels more transparent and honest. When it gets abstract or shifts into performance art, or has a celebrity play themselves, there’s a trust that’s been earned that many other shows couldn’t even imagine is a possibility.

“Only Murders in the Building” is about a murder mystery, the true crime industry, dry wit and pratfalls, sure. What it really speaks to is our desperate need to build community around whatever we can get our hands on in a world that evokes more loneliness by the day. Making a joke of that has to be done a certain way – to disarm it rather than exacerbate it. “Only Murders in the Building” helps us feel in on that joke, helps us feel seen, gives us moments where we can have power over that lonely part of ourselves, even if only for 10 episodes.

You can watch “Only Murders in the Building” on Hulu. It has been renewed for a second season.

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Go Watch This: Auralnauts Redubs

by Gabriel Valdez

What if Star Wars: Episode I had featured an epic dance battle, hard-partying Jedi, and a deranged C3PO obsessed with wearing the skin of Jar Jar Binks?

These are just a few of the important questions that Auralnauts asks and, I have to admit, I’m late to the party on this one. Let me back up a bit:

It’s funny how you come across new tastes. I was having a Facebook debate one day about Michelle Rodriguez’s insistence that minority actors “stop stealing all the white people’s superheroes.” While Rodriguez would later contextualize the statement in a way that was more reasonable (although still not realistic to me), it was obviously worth talking about.

My view? In superhero movies: Tony Stark’s adversaries were changed from Vietnamese to Afghans in Iron Man. Superman, arguably, should be Jewish. While 1930s comics publishing wouldn’t allow a superhero to be Jewish, his creators did everything that era allowed to hint he was an analogue for the Jewish immigrant experience. He’s never been portrayed that way on film. I heard not a peep when Latino character Bane was cast with Australian actor Tom Hardy, or when the Arabic Ra’s al Ghul was cast with an Irish actor in the Dark Knight series.

If you read here often, you know that I’m in favor of recasting regardless of race across the board. We may not be a post-racial society, but if movies treat it as normal, we may one day pick up the cue.

Regardless, the same voices that express moral outrage over white comic characters being recast fail to speak up when nonwhite comic characters are recast. While I don’t agree with that outrage, it would be nice if it were at least a consistent outrage.

So I insisted that Kevin Costner should appear to Superman in a dream Obi-Wan style and tell him, “Actually, we’re Jewish.” Have the Afghans appear in the next Avengers film and reveal themselves as Vietnamese secret agents. Have Tom Hardy’s lines in The Dark Knight Rises re-dubbed by Selena Gomez. Use CGI to replace Liam Neeson with Omar Sharif.

Once that’s all done, anyone who wants can complain about white superheroes being stolen or adapted, but not a moment before.

Needless to say, we haven’t fixed the world just yet, and I learned a valuable lesson: once you suggest Selena Gomez play Bane, any serious conversation goes out the window.

The number of Bane redub videos I’ve been sent since is…catastrophic. I really need to re-evaluate my life. Most of them were horrible. The only good one, to tell the truth, was by Auralnauts, and it featured the wonderful Bane rap at the top of this video.

So I checked out their channel, and it’s what I never knew I always wanted from redubs, and I never even knew I wanted redubs. Take a look at their reinterpretation of the Star Wars prequels, where the entire plot centers around Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon skipping the bill at a Space Hooters and regional manager Darth Maul becoming obsessed with beating them in a dance-off. I’ll start you at a good bit in the middle of the first one, so you can get a taste of what’s in store.

I haven’t looked at all their work – there’s a lot of it – but I intend on following them for a long time to come.

2013’s Most Overlooked Films

I have two criteria to determine the most overlooked films of 2013. First, the film had to have made less than $25 million in its theatrical run. Now, $25 million is a lot of money; I certainly wouldn’t turn it down. When it comes to movies, though, 99 made more than that in their U.S. runs last year. I may champion Oblivion as a sci-fi classic and argue that The Lone Ranger is cleverly subversive, but they both made a good chunk of change last year. That means audiences saw them. They’re not allowed on this list, especially when I can sneak them into my introduction. Second, to be overlooked means the film earned no major awards consideration. Dallas Buyers Club and Inside Llewyn Davis each earned a handful of Oscar nominations, so they’ll get four straight hours of advertising on March 2. Here are my most overlooked films of 2013:

In The East, a corporate intelligence agent, Sarah, goes undercover with a domestic, eco-terrorist group. Star and co-writer Brit Marling herself spent time with an anarchist group in order to research the role. The film is both a criticism of the mega-corporations that consider undrinkable water or unthinkable side effects the costs of doing business, as well as a judgment against the groups that claim the answer is drastic violence. As is the case with many terrorist acts, Sarah reveals that the group’s ideological claims are nothing more than excuses for vengeance based on personal grudges. She is caught between two groups too invested in destroying each other, obsessed with winning rather than doing the right thing. The East is thrilling and has some profound points to make. Marling sticks to the most independent of indie films, but she’s on her way to becoming a terrifically important actress. The East also proves that Ellen Page (Juno), as one of the anarchists, can do more than just play a quirky kid. It’s rated PG-13.

In a World, one of the best comedies to have come out last year, stars Lake Bell (who also wrote and directed) as Carol, a vocal coach who trains actors how to get rid of or develop an accent. Her father, Sam, is an iconic voice-over actor whose booming voice accompanies the most legendary of movie previews. It’s a big deal for both when a new trilogy of films announces it’s bringing back the most epic of voice-over gigs, starting with the words, “In a world…” Sam insists a serious movie can’t advertise with a woman’s voice-over, and Carol does what most kids do when a parent tells them they can’t do something. It’s a simple premise done well as the two compete for the role. Unlike most movies about Hollywood, this one avoids industry in-jokes and plays more like a romantic comedy. Comedian Demetri Martin, Rob Corddry (“The Daily Show”), and Eva Longoria (delightfully butchering a cockney English accent) co-star. It’s rated R for some brief sexual references.

Mud is the very definition of waiting for the other shoe to drop. Two Arkansas kids, Ellis and Neckbone, sneak out at night to explore the swamps along the Mississippi River. They dock at a lonely island and come across a drifter named Mud (Matthew McConaughey). He’s waiting for his girlfriend, Juniper (Reese Witherspoon), but needs the boys’ help. See, he can’t go into town because cops and bounty hunters are looking for him. Neckbone comes from a broken family and Ellis’s is breaking around him, so Ellis increasingly looks at Mud’s plight as his last chance to have faith in family and love. The tension is first-rate and McConaughey delivers a spellbinding performance. “Mud” is rated PG-13, and reminds me of a less fantastical version of the slow-boil movies Steven Spielberg made when he was first getting started.

Side Effects is allegedly Steven Soderbergh’s last feature film, so I’ll bend my $25 million rule just this once. He’s the most dynamic director of our time, best known for Ocean’s Eleven, Erin Brokovich, and Traffic. Here, Rooney Mara (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) plays Emily Taylor, a woman suffering from manic depression. Her husband, Martin (Channing Tatum), is a Wall Street banker just being released from jail. Soderbergh hits a lot of points early on. The same way convicts develop gang connections in high-security jails, Martin uses a minimum-security prison to develop his Wall Street connections. Emily goes through a retinue of pharmaceuticals, each with new side effects, before her psychiatrist, Dr. Jonathan Banks (Jude Law) decides to try her out on a new, experimental drug. Soonafter, Emily begins to sleepwalk. Tip of the day – don’t sleepwalk and try to dice vegetables with a kitchen knife at the same time.

Side Effects goes through a lot of twists and turns. It lets you outsmart it just long enough to outsmart you. What starts as psychiatric drama becomes a legal thriller, and as soon as you’ve settled into that, you’re watching a family drama turn into a conspiracy film with shades of Hitchcock’s man-on-the-run films. If there were an Oscar for Best Twists and Turns, this’d be the film to get it. Soderbergh’s career is defined by changing style from one film to the next, so if this is his swan song, it’s a fitting one. A film that changes genre, tone, and protagonist so quickly can’t just pass a genre sniff test; it can’t just be functional. It has to be a very good movie in each of its genres. That’s where Soderbergh is better than any other director, and that’s where he takes most advantage of Mara and Law – their characters suffer the drama and threat, but there’s always a hint of the actors having fun with it. It’s an approach that keeps heavy material very light on its feet. Side Effects is rated R.

Spring Breakers. I’ve already written a good amount on the qualities of the film and the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink performance of James Franco as rapper/courtroom-pickup-artist Alien, so let me preface by saying this: Spring Breakers is not appropriate for anybody. It’s a film that levies judgment on a materialistic, celebrity culture by being absolutely obsessed with it. We follow four college girls to spring break in Miami, where they’re arrested on drug charges. Alien bails them out with an offer to chauffeur them around the city for a day. He introduces them to a hedonistic lifestyle that hits on the darkly possessive side in many.

One in particular turns away from the temptation, a girl named Faith (Selena Gomez), while the others draw into Alien’s wiles. I have my doubts as to whether Gomez is capable of succeeding as a serious actor. She’s got more than enough comedic timing and popularity to lead her own sitcom, so I applaud her for taking on thankless roles when she could still be printing money out of Disney. Sometimes a role is lightning-in-a-bottle, and her last scene opposite Franco, the moral tatters of one girl being broken down by a remorseless, consumptive creature without conscience, is the terrifying, overwhelming heart to a film that’s simultaneously very difficult and disturbingly easy to watch. Spring Breakers might be the film we most deserve right now, a hard-R-rated movie so sex-and-drug filled that it numbs the viewer to either, edited the way rap songs are tape-looped, constantly recursive to the point of cannibalizing itself. It’s balanced between the repercussion-free zone of absurdism and your own conscience. It’s a brilliant achievement.

You’re Next is both my favorite horror movie and dark comedy of 2013. The set-up seems familiar. Three masked attackers invade a home and terrorize a helpless family, but there are a few things that make You’re Next different. The first is how passive-aggressive this family is. Even as they get picked off one by one, they can’t stop bickering. The second is the twist, halfway through the film, that gives the attackers’ actions their logic and turns everything on its head. The third is that one son brought a date, Erin (Sharni Vinson), who was raised as a survivalist in the Australian outback. Setting traps and fighting back, she’ll quickly become one of your favorite horror movie heroes. You’re Next is rated R.