Comedy

dir: Tyler Spindel

2025

It could be seen as something of a strange coincidence that I watched two movies this week about women faking pregnancies. The other film, a Jordanian film called Inshallah A Boy, focusses on a woman who pretends she is pregnant (with a boy) in order to not lose everything after her husband dies. Its point is to emphasise and underline the inherent unfairness and chauvinism of Jordan’s legal system in terms of how it is structured against women, which is the very definition of misogynistic, patriarchal systems in action.

This movie, Kinda Pregnant? It’s purpose is just to remind Netflix audiences that Amy Schumer is still around, and that faking a pregnancy is just a bit of fun.

This seems like maybe an idea Schumer had long before she became a parent herself, that she’s pulled out of a bottom drawer, and handed to Adam Sandler’s nephew, no shit, and said “eh, we’ll just improvise a heap of stuff when the cameras start rolling.”

Why does her character pretend to be pregnant here… for shits and giggles, I guess.

Because she feels left out when her best friend Kate (Jillian Bell) tells her she’s pregnant? Because she sees how well pregnant women are treated on the train, and at Brooklyn cafes? Because she ‘accidentally’ befriends another pregnant woman, and her brother while wearing the fake baby bump, and she can’t afford to be caught out in the lie?

Those don’t seem like solid reasons, or even shaky reasons, but really, would we care if we were laughing at her antics and her comical stylings?

I don’t think, collectively, people would have judged the premise as harshly had they found the film funny enough. That it’s not as strong as Trainwreck, whose main character is an alcoholic and drug abusing fuck up, and is about as entertaining as I Feel Pretty, in which a brain injury leaves Schumer’s delusional character relating to the world the way she imagines a supermodel would, shows that in translating Schumer’s comedic sensibilities into romcom formats, the movies seem to overly rely on complicated conceits in order to give her something to do other than crack jokes. Another way of putting it is there is this strange weaponised self-deprecation aspect that requires the characters she plays to abase themselves horribly for our amusement before making us sympathise with their sometimes horrible actions.

dir: Shawn Levy

2024

Shame…shame…shame. I feel like I’ve been paraded through the streets of King’s Landing, much to my eternal regret for my shameful crimes, after watching this amalgam of references loosely aspiring to be a ‘movie’.

Watching and laughing as much as I did while watching this flick only filled me with deep shame, after the laughs wore off. I would almost argue that it was involuntary, as in, against my will and my supposedly rational mind, but that’s pretty much the same every time we laugh. It bypasses rationality and hits us in the centre of our lizard brain, that same part that laughs and then immediately recoils when you giggle at someone walking into something or getting hit in the groin.

I did not expect to ‘enjoy’ this flick, but then I discovered that either they programmed me years ago to enjoy things like this like the Pavlovian dog that I am, or, based on some kind of horrifying download directly from my brain, they figured out how to make something entirely for the very nerdiest parts of my entire being.

I mean, the only way they could have made it more for me is if they actually had references to me, like Deadpool himself saying “yeah, drew, you’re really going to like this next reference, who’s a clever boy?”

The thing is, part of me knows how wrong it is to find Ryan Reynolds and his smarmy antics so funny. It makes me feel soiled, contaminated in so many ways. I tell myself I am old enough not to fall for his bullshit, not to be amused by such lowbrow Freudian anally and orally fixated idiocy, and yet there I am, laughing until tears course down my haggard features.

dir: Joanna Arnow

2024

Occasionally, a film comes along, and you think maybe you’ve accidentally seen a parody trailer for something so outlandish that it can’t be real. And then you watch it, and you find out that’s it’s not a parody, and it’s something of a horrifying shock. It slowly dawns on you that what you thought was a sketch taking the piss out of arthouse flicks is a full length film, and it’s a comedy that you’re meant to take seriously and laugh at. And that’s when the depression kicks in.

The Feeling that the Time for Doing Something Has Passed is the second longest title for a movie that I think I’ve ever seen or reviewed, at least this year. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World beats it by one scant word. But while the latter Romanian film was nearly three hours long, and profoundly nuts, that was a breeze to enjoy compared to this 87 minute film that was agonising to get through. I hate watching videos of actual surgeries, and this film was like watching an 87 minute surgery video, except the patient / victim was / is me.

Excruciating doesn’t even get close to covering the cringing experience I had watching this. Maybe I’m lacking in sufficient maturity. Maybe I’m too squeamish when it comes to the depiction of ‘mature’ sexual relationships between practitioners of consensual BDSM. Maybe my expectation that scenes that start and end should have something happen in between to justify their presence in a film is unreasonable.

Maybe I’m just not on the filmmaker’s wavelength. It’s not that I don’t want to be; I really wish I understood where she was coming from. I’ve read a couple of interviews with her, and what she was going for, but the idea that this, as billed, is an actual comedy, utterly perplexes me.

Maybe if I watched this at an open air cinema on the top of a tenement building in Brooklyn with a bunch of film students or arts poseurs, I might have seen the level upon which this works. As it is, though, I watched it far from Brooklyn, alone, probably with an involuntary look of bemusement on my face.

The director plays the main character here too. That is her right. If she’s going to make a movie, she can cast herself as herself. From beginning to end she delivers almost all of her dialogue in a flat, emotionless monotone that Daria herself would have envied. She is also naked for much of the movie. She’s the only one naked throughout the movie. It’s an almost aggressive level of vulnerability.

dirs: Tricia Cooke & Ethan Coen

2024

I have to admit that I went into this flick a bit annoyed from the get go. The knowledge that Pedro Pascal was in the flick was definitely something that attracted me towards it. Seeing him killed within the first few minutes is… a guarantee that I’m going to be off-put or put off, take yer pick.

Classic bait and switch. Worst of all they seem to reference what was for me one of the most horrific onscreen character deaths in a tv show that I’ve ever seen, being the brutal death of Oberyn Martell in Game of Thrones.

Too soon. You don’t get to joke about that, to me. Still hurts.

So. Chap nervously cradling briefcase is murdered, presumably the people who acquired the briefcase have alternative plans for it. Those plans involve transporting the briefcase, and a bag with Pedro’s head in it, to Tallahassee, Florida. Instead of doing so with a modicum of forethought or intelligence, the criminals somehow fuck it up.

Enter our two protagonists, onto the scene. Two friends. One is a confident and assertive lesbian called Jamie (Margaret Qualley) shown cheating on her cop partner as the flick begins. The other is a less assertive, more insecure lesbian called Marian (played by Australia’s Own Geraldine Viswanathan), who isn’t cheating on anybody anytime soon. She is more inhibited, which we know because she wears tight-laced blouses that seem to be strangling her throat.

For…reasons, they end up driving a rental car down to Tallahassee. The car happens to have the briefcase and the head loosely stored in the trunk.

So, is this a comic caper, a violent Tarantino-esque lolfest with pithy dialogue and a score of soon-to-be-classic lines? Or is it a serious crime drama about two completely different people realising how deeply incompatible they are, deciding after much travail to go their separate ways?