Comedy is hard and this team makes it look easy.) (Praise must be given, too, to cinematographer Adrian Correia and editor Grant Surmi, who proceed with certainty and control. Screwball requires timing as steady as a metronome, a talented director who films in a way that doesn't let the rhythm dissipate, not to mention (most importantly) extremely talented actors. As someone who loves screwball-its rat-a-tat dialogue, and the virtuosity required of the performers-it is great to see it so alive and well. She then feels bad, helping him wash out his eyes as he moans, " I'm going to have to wear two eyepatches to work." She, folding up a wet washcloth, snaps, " Nobody wears two eyepatches." And you know, she has a point. He tries to stop her from leaving, and she warns him repeatedly to back off before spraying mace in his eyes. The dialogue is snappy and feels spontaneous. There's a physical gag with a treadmill that is worth the price of admission. "Night Owls" has many funny moments, broad and subtle. Like Cary Grant in "Bringing Up Baby," Kevin is a workaholic nerd who has a hard time controlling this ditzy, intelligent dame, until finally, the question of control disappears. That sense intensifies over the course of the film, and Madeline is at first exasperated and then infuriated by it. Kevin is almost hurt that his idol is obviously a hypocrite who doesn't practice what he preaches. They don't just have romantic chemistry, they have that much rarer kind: the chemistry of conversation. Actors Adam Pally and Rosa Salazar, who carry the entire film, are not just game for this kind of material, they feel born to it. "Night Owls" has this sensibility running underneath it, the script understands it, and Hood knows how to film it. Screwballs feature cranky, nerdy men whose dignity is ripped away by wisecracking Dames of Mayhem, but somehow the nerds start to like it. But then they find the riverbed's changed and they're in over their heads. Love is chaos, men and woman are separated by an abyss, and to get to one another they have to leap. It's sad, because there's such anarchic pleasure in watching, say, Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn plunge into the deep river in "Bringing Up Baby," Hepburn gasping as they swim to shore, " The riverbed's changed!" Or Hepburn capturing Grant in her butterfly net. Slapstick comedy is practically a lost art. It's a bit of well-played physical business that comes out of the crisis of the moment, and it works because he looks truly distressed. This was the moment when the movie "got" me. When she starts to pass out against the tiled wall, he panics, and starts scooping water out of the flow coming from the showerhead, tossing it on her, a gesture both desperate and feeble. Once he discovers her suicide attempt, he makes her vomit, almost vomiting himself in the process, and then drags her into the shower. When Kevin wakes up after sex and can't find her, he walks through the house, calling out, tentatively, " Lady? Hey, Lady!" He sounds polite and gentlemanly even though it reveals he doesn't know her name. The film has more in common with 1930s screwball (films filled with obvious coincidences) than the more clunky, often-humorless films that pass for "rom-coms" today. However, director Charles Hood (who co-wrote the script with Seth Goldsmith) has such a gift for capturing the rhythms of conversation as well as slapstick elements (of which "Night Owls" has many) that it doesn't matter. That's a lot of artifice and coincidence. Hence: he and Madeline must spend the next 12 hours in that house.ġ2 hours follow, in which the two fight like cats and dogs, play darts, eat food, fight again, but maybe also. Kevin, in a panic, calls the Assistant Coach who orders Kevin not to call 911 (to avoid scandal for the football program) and tells Kevin not to the let the girl-who has supposedly been stalking the coach and threatening to go to the press about the affair-leave until Assistant Coach can get there by morning to do some damage control.ĥ. Meanwhile, upstairs, Madeline swallows a bottle of pills and nearly overdoses.Ĥ. Kevin realizes that he has inadvertently broken into his boss' house and had sex in his boss' marital bed.ģ. The morning after, Kevin finds out, horrified, that the house is not Madeline's house at all, but the house of his boss (and mentor), a revered and very married football coach at the local college. Two wasted people, Kevin ( Adam Pally) and Madeline ( Rosa Salazar), meet in a bar and stumble to her house to have drunken sex.Ģ. "Night Owls" has a very obvious set-up, established in the first 10 minutes of the film:ġ.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |