I was thinking, as I left the theater, that I would love to see a list of movies that involve stand-up comedy, and perhaps especially, most interestingly, stand-up that isn’t especially good, but also isn’t bad. There’s something really intriguing to me about staging an intentionally so-so comedy performance. It seems like an art form in and of itself. Then there’s the question of whether the comedy is actually supposed to be good or not (I heard someone ask this about Seinfeld awhile ago and it stuck with me — is Jerry supposed to be a good comic?). In this movie, I think it’s clearly supposed to be so-so, which was curious to me, because I tend to think of stand-up in more all-or-nothing terms. And I think most movies/shows that portray it contribute to that idea. Like, in The Baltimorons, which I saw last summer and really loved (I don’t think it’ll happen, but Liz Larsen absolutely deserves an Oscar nomination. Her face is extraordinary), there’s what I think of as a kind of stock trope of stand-up comedy performance, where it’s like, terrifyingly on the verge on being a disaster, and then miraculously turns out really good.
Anyways. This movie was reasonably entertaining. Arnett’s performance is very charming. Laura Dern is good but I feel like she’s playing the same personality type she always does. Bradley Cooper is ridiculous but he pulls it off. It’s nice to see a movie about 40-somethings that isn’t totally fixated on how it’s about 40-somethings and midlife crisis. There are no sex scenes, which is kind of weird, but there is some nice chemistry. Emotionally, though, it’s a little thin. The dialogue about “tough” parts of relationships is a little cliche, the ‘good’ parts feel idealized in a slightly dopey way, and there’s a lot that feels sort of un-thought out, like, uh sure how about he works in finance, whatever, it doesn’t matter. Time passes in strange ways (like, how much time is actually elapsing when the screen goes black?) and the movie dragged a bit. But it was fine.
Kasia Reads 