Bernard & Huey

Bernard & Huey is based on two characters who showed up in Jules Feiffer’s cartoons for The Village Voice and Playboy starting in 1957. The cable network Showtime commissioned, and then declined, a screenplay from Feiffer in 1986; with some semi-topical tweaks here and there (texting, phrases like “scene-adjacent”), that 30-year-old script is what has been filmed here. So it’s no wonder that the movie feels a tad … musty? Beside the point? And is this #MeToo era the worst or best atmosphere in which to release the satirically-styled musings of Huey, an alpha male who says things like “If I had any respect for chicks I’d never make out,” and Bernard, Huey’s beta friend, whose neuroses anticipated the early Woody Allen persona?

It doesn’t help that Feiffer, a playwright and novelist as well as cartoonist, more or less already wrote his Bernard and Huey movie — 1971’s Carnal Knowledge, directed by Mike Nichols and starring Jack Nicholson as Jonathan, the Hueyest Huey imaginable (Art Garfunkel brought up the rear as Bernard — I mean, Sandy). Carnal Knowledge is a bitter classic as well as a useful time capsule; Feiffer and Nichols were grappling sincerely with what it meant to be a man in the time of what was then called Women’s Lib. More recently, too, films like 1996’s Swingers gave us Vince Vaughn as a slickster neo-Huey and Jon Favreau as a befuddled Gen-X Bernard. Swingers even ended on a Feiffer-esque note of embarrassment for the unjustifiably self-confident Vaughn.

Bernard & Huey feels like a throwback in more ways than one; it’s another microbudgeted, Kickstarted indie film that might’ve had an easier time of it twenty or forty years ago. Now here it is, being tossed into an overflowing bucket of streaming content and somehow expected to stay afloat. It’s smoothly helmed, though, by indie vet (and Slamdance Film Festival co-founder) Dan Mirvish, who’s clearly an actor’s director. Not only does he find the perfect Bernard (Jim Rash) and Huey (David Koechner), he finds younger actors (Jay Renshaw and Jake O’Connor, respectively) who match up terrifically with their older counterparts. Mirvish also provides space for smart actresses — Sasha Alexander, Nancy Travis, Bellamy Young, Mae Whitman as Huey’s grown aspiring-cartoonist daughter — to interrogate the men’s antiquated notions.

The movie flashes back to Bernard and Huey’s college days in the ‘80s, which makes for some weird anachronisms; the era is supposedly post-punk, but the attitudes and even some of the dialogue (“I dig it, man”) are clearly ‘60s — when, of course, the flashbacks were originally set. Most of our time, though, is spent in the present day, when Bernard has become a ladies’ man and Huey, a divorced father, is at loose ends. After a 25-year hiatus, a drunk Huey finds himself at the door of Bernard’s spacious but sparse apartment, and soon the men revert back to their younger vibes, Huey sleeping with every woman in sight while Bernard slips into bed with Huey’s daughter Zelda, whose comics are puerile man-bashing until she meets a man who writes better material. On some level, Bernard & Huey still isn’t especially progressive.

Is it supposed to be, though? On another level, it’s a valentine to Feiffer, a near-nonagenarian who’s still going strong (his most recent graphic novel, Cousin Joseph, was published two summers ago) and who has been there for just about every social tremor, earthquake and tsunami that has shaped who we are now. In the philosophically and somatotypically opposed Bernard and Huey, Feiffer had his voices of bewilderment and resentment that both prefigured second-wave feminism and remain relevant in the era of the intersectional fourth wave. Neither Feiffer nor the film has any answers. That’s not for art to provide. We may have many questions, though, starting with this: Why, a full six decades later, are we still meeting the grandchildren of Bernard and Huey in the noxious form of incels and MRAs/PUAs? The OG B&H, here, are made to look sad, scrubby, essentially lonely (though everyone gets a Hollywood ending that almost reads parodically). Maybe that’s the point.

Game Night

It’d be nice if a dark comedy called Game Night were more … playful. It has a few good laughs, and no shortage of clever little twists. Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams are the lead couple, united in love and marriage by their shared passion for games — tabletop, trivia, charades. Stressed out by his competitive streak tied to his resentment of his more successful brother (Kyle Chandler), Bateman is having trouble producing viable sperm, and that’s one more trait than McAdams’ character gets. Anyway, big brother Chandler invites Bateman and MacAdams’ usual game-night group over to his swanky rented house for a murder-mystery game involving kidnapping, though the kidnappers turn out to be quite real.

This is not generally my favorite brand of mash-up — when a comedy imports a crime plot. It put a dent in Date Night and ruined whatever chance Let’s Be Cops had to be worth anything. Here, though, it works for a while because all the characters are steeped in pop culture and are self-aware; once they assume everything they’re experiencing is fake, they behave accordingly, oblivious to the very real dangers, the very genuine bullets. Eventually they catch on, but the synthetic nature of the plot is dispiriting. Every little detail and flick of the brush is meant to be filed away for future reference. The whole creaky construct is so “clever” it barely breathes.

When it does breathe, though, Game Night earns its spot at the bloody-farce table, mainly by pairing the players off and watching them respond to the challenge. One couple (Lamorne Morris and Kylie Bunbury) gets stuck on the possibility that she had an affair with a celebrity, whose identity she won’t share. In this sort of film, we sort of expect a real celebrity playing himself to make an appearance as the cuckolding culprit, but the joke goes another, not necessarily funnier direction. Another couple is made up of an idiot (Billy Magnussen) who usually attends Game Night with equally stupid dates, and the smart ringer (Sharon Horgan) the idiot has brought this time. Their subplot doesn’t go much of anywhere either. But all the actors are committed and fun to watch, even if, say, neither Bateman nor McAdams does anything we haven’t seen from them before.

The MVP is Jesse Plemons as Gary, a next-door police officer still grieving his divorce. Plemons has bland, mashed-potato-eating features, sort of a cross between Matt Damon and Michael Shannon, and he puts awkward pauses in everything he says. He wonders why Bateman and McAdams exclude him from their Game Nights, which he used to attend with his now ex-wife; everyone finds him creepy and hasn’t invited him. The great thing is, Plemons never violates his unhappy, suspicious character, assuring the audience that his feelings are funny. They’re very real, as real as the bullets and the kidnappers. And yet he gets laughs — uneasy laughs, weird laughs. He’s clearly been given the go-ahead to bear down on his divorced, lonely cop and ground his absurdity in painful reality.

Game Night doesn’t amount to much, but it’ll make a decent rental for a Movie Night, with friends invited over for a breezy, occasionally gory spot of goofiness. There’s a cute dog, drenched in blood (someone else’s) but otherwise coming to no harm. Movies like this, where people are bashed and shot, should probably refrain from putting dogs front and center in their advertising; dog lovers may squirm through the whole thing waiting for something terrible to happen to the pooch. Nothing does, but then we wait for some sort of reckoning connected to the dog’s owner discovering all the blood on it. It gets blown off in a line of dialogue having to do with the collateral mess the dog leaves. A farce like this needs to click together mercilessly, inhumanly, uniting all its aspects into one finished puzzle of bad behavior. But we’re to believe this particular character finds his beloved doggie spattered with gore and has nothing to say about it?

Black Panther

The entire bloated, interlinked, resource-eating Marvel Cinematic Universe may have justified itself by having made possible Black Panther. It’s a rich and shining tapestry, in deep African reds and golds and purples. Being a Marvel movie, it is unavoidably corporate and Manichean — might makes right in the eternal war of Good and Evil. Fortunately, the artists behind Black Panther are interested in how one defines good and evil. Is it that hard to be good if you’re a royal, a member of the warrior elite of a technologically advanced society (Wakanda)? And if you grow up the resentful, brutal product of living in a much poorer society that resents and brutalizes you, can you truly be described as “evil”?

Director Ryan Coogler and his co-writer Joe Robert Cole make Black Panther a battleground of philosophies — isolationism vs. generosity, revenge vs. justice, even vibranium (the element that gives Wakanda its power) vs. Jabari wood. It is never at any point black vs. white, or African vs. Caucasian, even though one of the villains is white (he is shown to be an equal-opportunity slimeball who will ally with and then betray whoever can most benefit him in the moment). Unlike the unredeemable adversaries of the DC universe — the unreachable anarch the Joker, the megalomaniacal Lex Luthor — the rogues’ gallery at Marvel tend to have some shading, some humanity, even if appalling humanity. And the heroes are often impeded by guilt, doubt, hubris. Thus, T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman), newly crowned king of Wakanda, represents a kind of naïvete born of privilege; his opposite, Erik Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan), came up outside Wakanda’s embrace and has a more bitter view of the world. Erik often makes good points, and T’Challa sometimes sounds fatuous.

Wakanda represents what the whole of Africa might have been without colonizers — an African-American’s warming daydream of a black Shangri-La, unmutilated by whites. It’s a dream of superiority, too; Coogler and his artists take command of a medium that has spent far more of its history demeaning people of color than not, and they make sure this example of the medium gives us people of color who are demonstrably smarter and tougher than anyone else. (There’s a white CIA agent, played by Martin Freeman, who is generously made a brave and competent fighter.) That an empowerment fable on this level — a $200+ million sci-fi fantasy opening in 4,000 theaters nationwide — is only thinkable due to its association with a larger, otherwise pretty pale-skinned corporate concern is probably not the sort of irony Marvel fans would appreciate. Yet Black Panther may ultimately stand apart from its wider mythos the same way Wonder Woman did.

Considering the strain he must have been under — here you go, a massive blockbuster all your own; try not to disappoint Marvel or the black audience; no pressure or anything! — it might be too much to have expected Chadwick Boseman to manage anything other than a noble performance, with occasional brushstrokes of rage and grief and one or two fleeting bits of humor. (I look for the sequels — don’t worry, there’ll be some — to let T’Challa and Boseman have more fun.) Michael B. Jordan, on the other hand, knows he has a juicy wounded-martyr role and rips into it with gusto, thoroughly enjoying playing a large-scale villain on an enormous canvas. Boseman more or less gives the movie to Jordan and to the many beautiful, brilliant women surrounding him: Lupita Nyong’o, Angela Bassett, Danai Gurira, Letitia Wright. The Dora Milaje, Wakanda’s all-female special forces, could give the Amazons in Wonder Woman a rough time of it.

Wakanda is heaven, a dream of unity and equality of all kinds — though I imagine we’d have to wait for Black Panther 3 or 4 to find out how LGBTQ people or the disabled are treated there. Wakanda feels like the perfect land we all should have had, a utopia (though one ruled by a techno-warrior class). The place has great beauty, but it doesn’t look like much fun, truth to tell; it looks like a stolid land of solemn traditions and tests of strength, its loyal subjects pledging to defend its borders from the outside world. (And a benevolent monarchy is still a monarchy, no?) In a much-discussed quote at the end, T’Challa tells the United Nations, “In times of crisis the wise build bridges, while the foolish build barriers.” It’s hard not to hear in that a rebuke to … well, you know. Somebody.

 

The Misandrists

The only moment I freely enjoyed in Bruce LaBruce’s erotic satire The Misandrists comes when a woman dressed as a nun, walking on the grounds outside an all-girl school, suddenly and randomly breaks into the Charleston while music plays (coming from where? We don’t know). Then, as inexplicably as it started, the music stops, the dance is cut off, and the “nun” resumes walking. This happens roughly fifty minutes into the movie, and it’s the only bit with any spontaneity or life. The rest of The Misandrists is more porno-tinged, half-serious “radical” agitprop from LaBruce, a founding father of the queercore movement of the ‘80s, who has made this as a quasi-sequel to his 2004 film The Raspberry Reich.

For LaBruce, homosexuality is revolutionary, and he literalizes that by linking gay sex with terrorism, or at least with terrorist rhetoric. I see the point: In certain quarters of supposedly free Western societies (LaBruce hails from Ontario), if you’re LGBTQ you may as well be ISIS. So why not give homophobes something to be genuinely phobic about? Filmed in Berlin in twelve days on a Kickstarter budget, The Misandrists concerns a lesbian separatist group — the Female Liberation Army — disguised as a convent. Their leader is Big Mother (Susanne Sachsse, from Raspberry Reich), who uses gender-swapped words like “womansplain” and says things like “We must tell the world to wake up and smell the estrogen.”

If this is your cup of camp, drink up. I found it largely boring, especially a slow-motion pillow fight that goes on for eight or nine weeks, or so it seems. Filmed in early 2016, The Misandrists can’t really be faulted for not anticipating the atmosphere in which it would eventually be released (after a year or so of bouncing around festivals worldwide). You can’t read a room if you’re not expecting it to be on fire in two years. But maybe now isn’t the time for a jokey send-up of gay, female and transgender rage. Maybe it also isn’t the time for scenes like the one in which an transgender young woman is ostracized (temporarily, but still) while a wounded young man is subjected to forced gender reassignment surgery (shown in gory, leering close-ups in actual vaginoplasty footage as the man screams in pain). This may be a shot at the TERF mentality, but in this particular landscape it lands poorly. As Roger Ebert wrote about the lumberjack jokes in Blue Velvet, “Sorry, but I just couldn’t get my lips to smile.”

This sort of japery was done funnier and filthier by John Waters in the pride of his midnight-movie shining, in films like Desperate Living and Female Trouble. I’m not sure whether LaBruce wants us to chuckle politely — that dignified whitebread titter you hear in audiences for art-house flicks — or to nod in meaningful mute assent to the heavy points he’s making. One of the points is a good one: extremism used to control people is bad; used in art, as in the pornifesto the young women produce at the movie’s end, it’s good. Would that The Misandrists were an example of the latter. As it is, it employs graphic, unsimulated sex and blood for an upsy daisy assortment of self-consciously subversive blackout sketches. Which may have worked in the somewhat gentler ‘90s. These days, more is needed and deserved.