Rough Night: A misbegotten mess

Rough Night (2017) • View trailer 
One star. Rated R, for raunch, profanity, crude sexual content, drug use and violence
By Derrick Bang

Well, this one lived down to lowest expectations.

And then some.

The calm before the storm: Jess (Scarlet Johansson, center) bubbles during a cheerful
call from her fiancé, while her friends — from left, Blair (Zoë Kravitz), Alice (Jillian Bell),
Pippa (Kate McKinnon) and Frankie (Ilana Glazer) — try to hasten the chat, so they
can continue their debauched evening.

Director/co-scripter Lucia Aniello’s unholy mash-up of Bridesmaids and Weekend at Bernie’s is a ghastly failure on all levels; it’s a forced and thoroughly tasteless comedy, which repeatedly attempts to mangle humor from material that never could have seemed funny on the printed page, let alone on the big screen.

This is a desperation flick ... as in, every cast member looks desperate at all times, no doubt seeking the nearest exit.

“Dying is easy,” Peter O’Toole’s Alan Swann insists, in 1982’s My Favorite Year, as he quotes an apocryphal Hollywood chestnut. “Comedy is hard.”

The actual attribution remains in question, but the sentiment is truer now than ever, because far too many of today’s so-called comedy writers take the lazy way out. As with horror films that splatter gore on the screen in an effort to conceal their inability to induce actual terror, Aniello and co-scripter Paul W. Downs clearly believe that relentless dollops of vulgar, randomly inserted remarks about bodily functions, along with repeated glimpses of penis-shaped sex toys, represent the height of humor.

Not. Even. Close.

When an actress of Scarlett Johnasson’s skill can’t make headway with the steady barrage of clumsy one-liners that pass for dialog in this film, All Concerned should have recognized the failings of the source material.

A brief college-days flashback illuminates the sisterhood bond between Jess (Johansson), Alice (Jillian Bell), Blair (Zoë Kravitz) and Frankie (Ilana Glazer). A decade later, life and careers have frayed this connection. Blair has become an immaculately dressed, high-profile businesswoman; Frankie is a hyper-politicized, save-the-whales activist; Alice is — by her own definition — a much-loved schoolteacher.

The image-conscious Jess, running for Congress, is losing ground to an opponent who gains favorable media bumps for tweeting dick pics (a scenario which, sadly, isn’t far removed from reality). Jess is engaged to marry nice-guy Peter (also Downs), which gives micro-managing Alice the perfect excuse for the “ultimate” bachelorette party, in flesh- and sin-laden Miami.

Margin Call: Grim tidings

Margin Call (2011) • View trailer for Margin Call
Four stars. Rating: R, for profanity
By Derrick Bang

Moving into the third act of writer/director J.C. Chandor’s Margin Call, I was reminded of the war room discussions in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 adaptation of Dr. Strangelove, particularly when Peter Sellers’ U.S. President Merkin Muffley and George C. Scott’s Gen. Buck Turgidson argue over “collateral damage.”

Having survived a devastating company layoff, Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto)
attempts to settle down for a "normal" day's work. But a financial time bomb is
ticking away in his pocket: the parting gift from a veteran risk analyst who was
escorted out of the building that same morning. Eventually, as day turns to night,
Peter will examine the files on that flash drive ... and then nothing will be the same.

“Mr. President,” Turgidson finally insists, “I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than 10 to 20 million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks.”

The point, of course — delivered with every possible ounce of chilling satire — is that nobody in this room, filled as it is with people responsible for the safety of the entire United States, has the faintest idea what would happen during an all-out nuclear war. And yet they still argue over “acceptable losses.”

Just as everybody in the board room of the fictitious investment firm in Margin Call debates the acceptable losses certain to arise in the wake of a proposed we’re-first-into-the-lifeboat desperation ploy.

Hell, it’s worse than that. They’re not simply commandeering the first lifeboat; they’re scuttling all the others.

I’m not sure the public is ready for this suggestion of how the 2008 financial crisis kicked off; my own interest was guarded, upon entering the theater. It’s simply too soon: The real-world wound remains too fresh, the resulting carnage still plain in every drawn and desperate face, every freshly foreclosed and empty home that once contained a family that still believed in the American dream.

I worried that Chandor would trivialize actual history, or — worse yet — attempt to build sympathy for the greedy, soulless bastards who fiddled while Wall Street burned.

But, as it turns out, Chandor is much smarter and shrewder than that. He’s also a sharp scripter and a damn fine director, and Margin Call is an extremely impressive feature debut for a fellow whose sole previous credit was a short back in 2004.

Granted, Chandor also had the good sense to assemble an impressive cast ... but a director still needs to know how to encourage excellent work. And he draws fine performances from all concerned.

Chandor’s most brilliant stroke, however, was to resist the temptation to imagine what truly occurred in the late summer of 2008. We can assume that his script evokes Lehman Brothers, and that the two days depicted here offer a guess as to what may have gone down behind closed doors, before that august firm filed for bankruptcy on Sept. 15, 2008.

But it doesn’t really matter. Chandor’s build-up is absorbing, and the subsequent character interactions generate the intensity of a solid, well-acted stage play. We eventually share the horror of those who recognize a catastrophe only after it’s too late to attempt a recovery.