Irresistible review – Jon Stewart’s political non-satire for liberals is as dull as it gets

Jon Stewart made his reputation as a smart political comedian and commentator on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show on TV, before quitting in 2015 to develop movie projects, of which the first was his excellent Rosewater. But this – heartsinkingly – is the follow-up. It’s a flaccid, toothless, supercilious political non-satire for liberals too fastidious to take sides or take action. The film perches on a fence of wry disdain and makes droll gestures of disapproval at the wasteful big-money awfulness of everyone’s political campaign. And it’s leading to a big tortuous plot twist which frankly isn’t convincing, despite the talking-head expert interviewee who is wheeled on over the closing credits to assure us that it is. What we’re left with is a bland cop-out, which incidentally won’t worry anyone yearning for Donald Trump’s second term.

Steve Carell finds some of his dullest form playing Gary Zimmer, a Washington DC political strategist for the Democratic party, desperately searching for the next big thing after the debacle of 2016. (Stewart may have been inspired by Stanley Tucci’s media-manipulator in the small-town political satire Swing Vote.) To Zimmer’s astonished delight, one of his minions finds a viral YouTube video of a retired Marine Corps veteran called Colonel Jack Hastings, played by Chris Cooper, giving a passionate speech about caring community values at a town-hall meeting somewhere in Wisconsin, where folks have been financially stricken by the recent army-base closure. The holy grail: a tough guy who’s also a progressive.

Cunning Zimmer duly shows up in hicksville (wrinkling his nose at all the niceness thereabouts) to persuade the grumpily authentic Hastings to run as a Dem for mayor and maybe something more if it all works out. Soon the top brass in Washington are excited; the cash rolls in for his campaign and the Republicans get fired up too – bringing in their ice-queen spin-doctor Faith Brewster, played by Rose Byrne, who seems to have some history and toxic sexual chemistry with Zimmer.

There are, arguably, one or two reasonable touches, such as the observation about punctuation on billboard ads, inspired by the notorious “Jeb!” campaign for the hapless Jeb Bush. But really, any single TV episode of Veep or Parks and Recreation has far more wit, fun and political zap than this great big laugh-free feast of self-congratulatory dullness. Zimmer himself never has any funny lines and the rules about making the leading man relatable – and making the Democratic guy basically nice – mean that he is never allowed to have any of that Satanic political glamour of pure wickedness that might have made his character interesting. The movie never permits itself the forbidden fossil-fuel of cynicism that might have given it some movement.

The talents of Topher Grace and Natasha Lyonne are thrown away in the tiny roles of pollsters and online number-crunchers that Zimmer has brought in. It could be that much of their characters were lost in the edit, but certainly the film is not especially interested in the hot-button issues of Facebook and data-harvesting. The eerie absence of race as an issue in the film is also naive.

The story runs on predictable lines, with the underdog Hastings making exciting gains on the Republican incumbent; then his momentum stalls and there’s a dilemma – how nasty are his team prepared to be to clinch their win? And there’s that very exasperating ending, to which I can only say that in the real world, Zimmer, having raised serious amounts of cash from hedge-funders and the like, would take a pretty close interest in the bottom line.

The real finale, however, comes in the typography: the word “RESIST” is eye-catchingly picked out in the middle of the title, in fine Michael-Moore-lite style. Resist? Really? How? The movie has signed off with a pert little flourish to the effect that the whole system is broken, so maybe we should wish a plague on both their houses or neither. Either way, the supposed satirical attitude of Irresistible can’t conceal the fact that it’s contrived, unfunny and redundant.

The Lovebirds review – wacky Netflix murder-mystery romance

Creating unforgettable cinema isn’t easy, but neither is creating forgettable cinema: goofy, likable comedy of the sort that slides through your mind, leaving behind that most easily patronised of movie effects – a good feeling. The Lovebirds, by screenwriter Aaron Abrams and director Michael Showalter, is like this, a wacky romcom romp (rompcom?) showcasing a bizarre, spoofy twist on Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. It’s something you might watch on a plane. Right now, that’s no putdown: an unappreciated comfort from happier times.

Kumail Nanjiani and Issa Rae play Jibran and Leilani, young professionals in New Orleans who hooked up three years before the action begins, moved in together shortly afterwards and found that their relationship began to deteriorate.

Domestic intimacy has made each partner profoundly unimpressed by the other’s professional life. Jibran is a self-described documentary film-maker who is reluctant to show his great work to anyone and will reveal only that it is about financial irregularity in the world of education, a subject that stuns Leilani with pure boredom and irritation. As for Leilani, she works in an ad agency and owes her career to a commercial for body wash, based on her own experience in college of experimentally having sex with an unattractive man due to his pleasant skin aroma.

Driving one evening to a dinner party, they have another argument and realise simultaneously their relationship is over. Jibran takes his eyes off the road to gaze sadly into the eyes of his now ex-partner who gazes sadly into his. There is melancholy and even grief in both – and then they crash into a murderous criminal situation involving an occult secret society. Jibran and Leilani must run for their lives, and use their wits to solve a crime that the cops might be about to pin on them. Could it be that this appalling new scenario will reignite their love?

From here on, the movie depends on simply getting the couple skittering from one farcical situation to another, to the accompaniment of an ironised bantery-squabbly argument about what they are going to do: the 21st-century equivalent of screwball. They argue about the meaning of “fuckboy”; they argue about the element of spontaneity necessary for an orgy; they argue about whether it is pretentious to call a fire escape a “catwalk”; they argue about the lyrics, “Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do.”

There is a strange moment when they are imprisoned by the bad guys and threatened with a certain type of torture: being kicked by a horse, which has apparently been brought here for the specific purpose of meting out barnyard related violence. Then it is over, and the surreality consists in never giving the horse a backward glance.

Nanijani and Rae work well together, although “chemistry” is perhaps a stretch: there was more of a genuine romantic spark between Nanijani and his erstwhile co-star Zoe Kazan in his 2017 film The Big Sick, which was also directed by Showalter, and that probably had more jeopardy and more about being in love. The Lovebirds is pretty lightweight – which is how it can take off.

A Russian Youth review – horror and heartbreak on the eastern front

Alexander Tolotukhin, a 31-year-old film-maker from Belarus and a pupil of Alexander Sokurov, makes his feature film debut with what might be called a brief cine-novella set on the eastern front of the first world war. It certainly shows Sokurov’s influences in its soft, painterly compositions and extensive dubbing that makes the dialogue sound often like a subdued murmur. It also feels like classic Russian movies such as Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood or Klimov’s Come and See.

What makes it distinctive – and, unfortunately, not as good as it might have been – is an odd framing device. We don’t see the film straightforwardly. We periodically see a modern-day orchestra rehearsing the musical score that is to go on it – pieces by Rachmaninov. This is an interesting quirk in some ways, but the film would have been better without it, impeding as it does your emotional reaction to the drama and not enhancing the musical accompaniment’s meaning.

Yet the story is absorbing. Alexey (Vladimir Korolev) is a fresh-faced boy with troops at the front who is blinded in a gas attack and from then on employed to listen out for advancing German aircraft. He does this at a strange monitoring post with a great funnel, which Alexey is strapped into, like a pilot – and he does well to warn everyone of an imminent attack. There are grisly episodes: despite his blindness, Alexey is beaten with Dickensian cruelty for spilling food on an officer. He has to have a tick removed from the side of his face with a knife and is always having to shake the lice out of his jacket.

Eventually, the Germans close in, and poor Alexey is not much worse off than his cowed comrades. Perhaps the point is that war makes blind cattle of them all. It is a well-made little film, though the orchestral meta-level was a mistake.

Porridge Radio: Every Bad review – DIY rockers go from guttural to the stars

Porridge Radio frontwoman Dana Margolin recently gave an interview to the NME that took its headline from one of her quotes: “I’ve always known that we’re the best band in the world.” Margolin went on to suggest the current burst of interest in her band was woefully belated (“Obviously we’re really good and we know it … where have you been?”) and that their destiny lay in performing to arenas and sports stadiums around the world: “I wanna be Coldplay, obviously.”

This swaggering bravado is standard practice from a certain kind of alt-rock band. The same gobby self-assurance helped propel the Stone Roses, Oasis, Kasabian et al on to the front pages of the music press. The difference here is that every one of Margolin’s statements seems to come accompanied by a roll of the eyes. Porridge Radio are a product of Brighton’s fertile but subterranean DIY scene: a world of cassette-split EPs with American noise bands, debut albums recorded in garden sheds, lo-fi covers of Daniel Johnston songs and free all-day festivals in tiny venues alongside bands called Satanic Ritual Abuse. Whatever you make of all this, you certainly couldn’t accuse the people involved of being fuelled by vaulting commercial ambition.

How we got here, with critics already tipping Porridge Radio’s second album for a Mercury nomination and the NME not merely turning Margolin’s sardonic pronouncements into irony-free headlines but agreeing wholeheartedly with them, is an interesting question – one that is answered by Every Bad. It’s slick by comparison with some of Porridge Radio’s early releases, but in an era when most putatively alternative rock arrives coated with such glossy depth that it is indistinguishable from chart pop, the production feels appealingly rough around the edges.

There’s nothing particularly new about their sound: (Something) maroons an Auto-Tuned vocal over heaving shoegaze guitars; Don’t Ask Me Twice and single Sweet are among a number of tracks that rest on dynamic, Pixies-esque shifts between quiet and loud. This reveals Margolin as one of rock’s great screamers: her hoarse, guttural sound seems dredged up from somewhere deep within, an authentic expression of something dark and tormented rather than an edgy embellishment. Elsewhere, it doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to picture Porridge Radio’s spindly guitars, shouty backing vocals and shadings of violin and cheap-sounding synth arriving 40 years ago, being signed to Rough Trade and heading out on a package tour alongside Essential Logic and Swell Maps.

Their skill lies in rearranging familiar elements into something that sounds fresh, largely down to their curious take on songwriting. Porridge Radio are melodically strongest when they seem to be trying the least hard. Their most obviously pop-facing material, recent single Give/Take and the prosaically titled Pop Song, lands in the middle of the album and feels a little flimsy and forced compared with the songs around it, where the standard verse-chorus structure tends to dissolve into the insistent repetition of a single phrase.

The first track, Born Confused, has an attention-grabbing opening line – “I’m bored to death, let’s argue” – and a faintly anthemic chorus, but it’s over and done within 90 seconds. The remaining half of the song is given over to the phrase “thank you for making me happy”, which starts out sounding bitterly ironic (Margolin has a great line in delivering lyrics in a bruised tone that suggests their very opposite) – but gradually becomes first cathartic and then weirdly, straightforwardly joyous. It’s a strange way to go about getting audiences to punch the air, but it really works.

Lilac, meanwhile, turns that emotional journey on its head. This time around, Margolin repeats: “I don’t want to get bitter, I want us to get better, I want us to be kinder to ourselves and to each other.” What looks like a self-help platitude on paper slowly builds up a power at odds with its sentiment, becoming increasingly frenzied and raw-throated, in a way that completely undercuts any optimism. By the end of the song, it sounds confoundingly like a threat.

This tension of opposites is a recurring theme, not just in Margolin’s ability to destabilise a lyric with her voice, but in the words themselves. They’re big on inconsistency – “I don’t know what I want, but I know what I want” – and frequently sound like frantic internal dialogues that capture a very twentysomething brand of angst, where the realisation that you’re now an adult crashes against uncertainty about whether you’re doing adulthood correctly.
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Every Bad is an album made by a band who are something of a contradiction: from a resolutely uncommercial background, they’ve somehow ended up making something that could be – and certainly deserves to be – big. But without losing their strangeness.

Waves review – high-school sports star wrestles with his emotions

After disturbing us all with survivalist thriller It Comes at Night in 2017, Texan film-maker Trey Edward Shults – still just 31 – steps up his already impressive game with this vehemently acted and formally audacious drama about an African American family in Miami. It is a parable of redemption, and about a kind of spiritual or metaphysical resonance between the unhappy lives of two siblings.

At film festivals worldwide, Waves has already been much praised for an experimental, anti-narrative approach and a supposed privileging of vignettes, scenes and moods over regular storytelling. Actually, this is misleading. The movie is perfectly legible in conventional linear terms. But where it goes, how it gets there and how it comes back again, is more unexpected. There is a wonderful score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.

Waves has flaws. Some of the emotional transitions are maybe a little forced and Shults, a former crew-member on Terrence Malick films, maybe gets a little too Malickian occasionally. There is only so much value in ambient shots of people putting their hands out of the window of a moving car and dreamily undulating their palms in the rushing wind. The other movie it clearly resembles is Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight and, although not quite as ambitious, Waves is intelligent and heartfelt in a comparable way.

Tyler is an outstanding young high-school student, self-consciously poised for greatness at college and currently a thrustingly aspirational star of the school’s wrestling team, presided over by a fanatical and shouty coach who makes them all chant in unison: “I cannot be taken down! I am a new machine!” The cult creepiness of all this, combined with Tyler’s not-so-subtle air of being pleased with himself, is disquieting.

He is played by Kelvin Harrison Jr, combining an air of calmly submissive worthiness with a hint of something destructive and bottled up, rather as he did with a similar high-school role in the movie Luce. Tyler is forever addressing throwaway greetings over his shoulder at his parents as he arrives home at the end of a school day, trotting upstairs to his bedroom to do his homework or jerk off to porn. He is dating beautiful fellow student Alexis (Alexa Demie) and their relationship is in still in the state of euphoric infatuation. Yet how well do they really know each other?

For the present, Tyler’s real problem is his impossibly demanding and overbearing dad Ronald: a fierce performance from Sterling K Brown. Ronald requires absolute commitment from his son in everything (while ignoring his daughter) and insisting with tragic absurdity on training with him, even challenging him to an arm-wrestling match at a family supper when Tyler presumes to mock his dad. (Maybe he is a little like Robert Duvall’s gruesome basketball-playing father in The Great Santini.)

Ronald is married to Catherine (Renée Elise Goldsberry) who is the counterbalancing carer in this family, all too aware that star-student golden boy Tyler is sucking the attention oxygen away from his quiet, smart, shy sister Emily (a lovely performance from Taylor Russell). But there is serious trouble ahead. Ronald uses opioids to manage residual pain from an injured knee, and Tyler is in the habit of stealing these from the bathroom cabinet to medicate his own worryingly painful shoulder. The film shows that he has inherited denial, an intensified and less manageable state of denial than the one Ronald is used to, but – rather terrifyingly – he has been made aware of his own fragility and even mortality in a way that his middle-aged elders have learned to ignore.
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When Alexis sends him a disturbing text, Tyler’s life spins out of control, generating a parallel drama in the life of Emily, who is to find a connection with classmate Luke (Lucas Hedges), who we last saw getting beaten at wrestling with rule-breaking violence by Tyler. Whatever agonies Emily is suffering on Tyler’s account are being salved by her relationship with Luke, and Shults shows that Emily’s story has a kind of mysterious spiritual equivalence to Tyler’s. She acts out the workings of some secular form of divine grace.

There are big scenes, big performances, big emotions here, and audiences will have to recalibrate their antennae for these, especially for the stunning shock that arrives around halfway through. The waves of emotion can get very high, yet they bring exaltation with them.