Jerry and Marge Go Large: Hugely entertaining

Jerry and Marge Go Large (2022) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, for brief profanity

Available via: Paramount+

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 6.24.22

On an otherwise ordinary day in 2003, 64-year-old Jerry Selbee, a recent retiree living in the tiny Michigan town of Evart, drove to a small store in Mesick, roughly an hour away, and bought some lottery tickets.

 

Twenty-two hundred of them.

 

Convenience store owner Bill (Rainn Wilson, right) reacts with understandable surprise
when Jerry (Bryan Cranston) and his wife Marge (Annette Bening) explain how many
lottery tickets they wish to purchase.

His subsequent winnings totaled $2,150, for a slight loss on his $2,200 investment.

Quickly realizing that his statistical sample had been too small, the next time around he purchased 3,400 tickets … and won $6,300.

 

Jerry, whose varied professional career had included a lengthy stint as a materials analyst for Kellogg’s — yes, the cereal company — had discovered a mathematical flaw in Michigan’s Winfall state lottery game.

 

What happened next is depicted with cheeky merriment by director David Frankel and screenwriter Brad Copeland, adapted from Jason Fagone’s fascinating 2018 article in the Huffington Post (which absolutely is worth a read).

 

Bryan Cranston is perfectly cast as the quietly unassuming, buttoned-down Jerry: one of those mysterious mathematical savants capable of spotting patterns, where the rest of us would see only numbers (assuming we even looked in the first place). Cranston is ably supported by Annette Bening, as Jerry’s pragmatic wife Marge; the two actors are wholly persuasive as this adorably devoted couple.

 

Copeland’s screenplay condenses Jerry’s peripatetic working life to just a lengthy career at Kellogg’s: a forgivable shift from actual fact, since the only important detail is that the story begins as Jerry retires, and — not the type to feel comfortable without some project to occupy his whirlwind mind — frets about what to do next.

 

It certainly won’t have anything to do with the fishing boat that his family and friends surprise him with.

 

Nor is Jerry interested in any of the many suggestions — travel, buy a flash car — that come from their amiable friend and accountant, Steve (Larry Wilmore).

 

But Jerry does become intrigued, after picking up a brochure for the state’s new Winfall lottery game. A scan of the rules, and odds, quickly reveals a defect in one aspect of the game. (This involves a “roll down,” which is too mathematically complicated to describe in this review. Fagone’s lengthy article explains it.)

 

Cranston’s blend of disbelief, dawning awareness and excitement, is priceless.

The Lovebirds: Nothing to tweet about

The Lovebirds (2020) • View trailer 
Two stars. Rated R, for violence, crude sexual content, and relentless profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 6.5.20

Personality compensates for very thin material — to a modest degree — but that’s hardly enough to make this needlessly vulgar rom-com worth anybody’s time.

Having successfully evaded a killer — a second time — Leilani (Issa Rae) and Jibran
(Kumail Nanjiani) attempt to blend with a crowd of typical New Orleans tourists.

The Lovebirds is little more than a two-person stand-up routine occasionally interrupted by plot. The script — blame Aaron Abrams, Brendan Gall and Martin Gero — aspires to be a profanity-strewn update of Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, but that dark comedy had a much sharper script (Joseph Minion, take a bow).

Actually, director John Landis’ Into the Night, which also arrived in 1985, covered similar territory: a white-collar couple unexpectedly enduring a night of hell when circumstances prompt them to venture into dodgy, big-city neighborhoods laden with all manner of creepy individuals.

The one fresh element here: Issa Rae and Kumail Nanjiani mine sharply perceptive humor from their racial heritage. Rae’s Leilani, in particular, gets a lot of comedic mileage from pointing out that white cops never would believe the increasingly convoluted mess that has ensnared them.

Granted, Rae and Nanjiani are adept at well-timed one-liners. But you won’t find much “acting” here; they essentially play themselves. Leilani is feisty, forthright and empowered; Nanjiani’s Jibran is a petulant, under-nourished milquetoast who masks his physical insecurity with higher-education haughtiness. He’s been that guy many, many times before.

The credits unspool over a meet-cute montage that turns them into a couple; after director Michael Showalter’s name appears, we leap forward three years, at which point Leilani and Jibran are inches from a spiteful separation. They’ve fallen into a rut, and sniping at each other is easier than working through it.

The bickering is quite crude and offensive, which (much too frequently) is what passes for humor these days. Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised if viewers bailed within the first 10 minutes of this Netflix original.

In fairness, things improve. Marginally. (Not enough.) Showalter and Nanjiani are working way beneath their talents here; their previous collaboration — 2017’s The Big Sick — is vastly superior.

Café Society: Order off the menu

Café Society (2016) • View trailer 
Two stars. Rated PG-13, for suggestive content, occasional violence and a fleeting drug reference
By Derrick Bang

Once or twice each year, I come across a film whose mere existence is baffling.

They’re not bad, at least not overtly; they’re simply bewildering. We endure them for somewhere between 90 and 120 minutes, and then the lights come up, and we frown at each other with the same unspoken question: Is that it? Seriously?

It's love at first sight, at least for Bobby (Jesse Eisenberg), when Vonnie (Kristen Stewart)
agrees to show him all the wonders of Hollywood's film colony. Alas, the course of true
love never is steady in a Woody Allen film.

And why, precisely? What was the point?

Woody Allen’s newest is just such a film.

The package is attractively wrapped: Production designer Santo Loquasto transports us back to 1930s New York and Hollywood with an opulent level of verisimilitude. The actors are luxuriously garbed by costume designer Suzy Benzinger, every member of the large ensemble cast well selected for each part.

Allen supplies narration throughout the film, often with the same passionate, poetic devotion that he displayed for the Big Apple in 1979’s Manhattan. The various characters seem reasonably interesting, the story’s unusual romantic triangle an intriguing hook on which to hang what we expect will be an homage to Golden Age cinematic classics.

Doesn’t work out that way.

Café Society is a textbook case of a movie being all dressed up, with nowhere to go. I’ve no idea what Allen intended us to gather from his bizarrely random script, unless it’s the oft-stated cliché that people are remarkably adept at screwing up their own lives. But even that doesn’t seem quite right, because several of these characters do get their heart’s desire.

With an oeuvre as lengthy and varied as Allen’s, we tend to categorize each new film on the basis of its many predecessors; this one feels like a clumsy blend of Crime and Misdemeanors and Radio Days, if the latter’s young protagonist were half a generation older. That’s a rather unholy mash-up, to say the least, and Allen doesn’t do anything remotely interesting with it.

Café Society also is burdened with far too many sidebar characters, many of whom don’t get the attention they deserve. Their various side issues don’t integrate well with the core narrative, leaving us to wonder why they were included in the first place.

The storyline, more or less:

Bronx-born Bobby Dorfman (Jesse Eisenberg), not satisfied with joining his father’s jewelry business, decamps for the much more exciting life he imagines awaits on the opposite coast, in Hollywood. Bobby has an entry of sorts: his uncle Phil (Steve Carell), a high-powered agent who drops famous names, like adjectives, into every spoken sentence.

At first blush, Phil seems a superficial, puffed-up phony who merely talks a great show, but no; turns out he really does know and represent everybody from Errol Flynn to Judy Garland. Even so, he’s too self-obsessed to waste much time with a nephew, and so hires Bobby as a glorified gopher and assigns his secretary/assistant, Vonnie (Kristen Stewart), to look after the kid.