'Babes' 'In A Violent Nature' Are An 'Oddity'
Catching up with Day 2 of the Chicago Critics Film Festival! [5/6/2024]
A delayed May the Fourth Be With You to all! While others were binging Star Wars movies with a glass of Yoda Soda, I was on the ground at the Music Box Theater looking into the latest from the greatest. Here are my short-form reviews of the movies I saw on Day 2 of the CCFF. If you want to get these first, join my subscriber chat where you can comment, tell me I’m wrong, and chat with other readers.
Babes
Babes surprised me! While the trailer focuses more on the Apatowish improvisational style of cringe-adjacent comedy, the film has strong comedic bones. The premise is incredibly low concept. A pair of close friends (Ilana Glazer and Michelle Buteau) find an ultimate test of friendship when the single one of the two (Glazer) becomes pregnant from a one-night stand while the other (Buteau) deals with the tests of a second child upon her marriage and her happiness. The specificity with which writer director Pamela Adlon (who had an out-of-body-like QnA after the film) captures this dynamic was what shook me out of my tiredness with modern comedies.
Although there are too few pure comedies in theaters unmuddled by action movie violence (Fall Guy innocent), the ones that have made the big screen are often dull improv showcases. Nobody writes jokes anymore; they write prompts for comedy actors to be funny. Fortunately, Babes doesn't suffer the same fate. While huge personalities certainly saturate the screen, they are specific enough to be characters', not actors'. The jazzy New York vibe of the piece brings back the influences of Nora Ephron and *whispers* Woody Allen to question the coming of age for those that struggle to grow up in an ill fitting society. The ending leaves a bit to be desired, as our pregnant protagonist seems to learn very little but validation, but if you're looking for an old classy comedy of piano scores, warm park strolls, and brightly lit skylines that's not afraid to have several poop jokes, you could do worse than to hang with the Babes. 3.5/5
In a Violent Nature
What is this subsection of film fans that love horror in particular? What do they want from clearly true legends, restless spirits, masked slashers, and absolutely endless plotlines about young people having sex? In a Violent Nature seeks to cut away all that and try something different. You already know the story. An obnoxious bunch of young people hang out in a forest where someone is killed and mess with something they shouldn't so that someone must come back in a mask with a distinct weapon to kill them one by one as they endless squabble over their pointless melodrama. Except this Halloween Massacre on 13th Street almost exclusively focuses on the perspective of the killer stalking his prey. The human melodrama that makes the campers so killable happens almost entirely out of focus and in short disposable snippets while long stretches of plodding screentime is devoted to the back of our killer's head as he bobs through the woods.
Conceptually that sounds cool, but this trope-laden experience is too slavish to genre hallmarks to make much of interest. What do slasher villains do when they're not on screen? They walk. A lot. Critic Katie Rife excitedly introduced the film with comparisons to the films of Terrence Malick and Jonathan Glazer. But the modern slow cinema pioneers use silence, quiet, and serenity to allow audiences to fill this space with their thoughts and feelings. Think of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which allows us time to breathe in and exhale new thoughts on creation, evolution, artificial intelligence, and humanity's place in the universe. The walking sequences here give us time to pee before the next kill happens. A standard slasher like this one usually delivers a sensation of fear and disgust that thrills us. From the crazy old man with a legend to the hormonal sexpots skinny dipping, the tropes have crystallized for maximum impact on those fronts. To strip them away and replace them with nothing makes for a pretty poor and cheap gimmick. 1.5/5
Oddity
There's something very Hallmark about ODDITY, in its own terrifying way. After the murder of his wife, a man and his new girlfriend encounter her blind twin sister, an antique shop owner claiming divine insight as she tries to discover the truth of her sister's death. Also there's a creepy mansion, a psych ward, and a man-sized creepy wooden puppet involved.
Pulling you in with one-dimensional characters that are exactly what they appear, it's fascinating that Oddity works so well. But the creepy filmmaking, the rug (or trapdoor) pulling plot, and the variety of "villains" wandering about to jump out at the camera keeps us on our toes. Although it wasn't too special, as a midnight showing before a long commute home it made for a harrowing and lovely theater experience. 3/5