SXSW 2022, Report 3: SPIN ME ROUND, THE PRANK & THE COW
I’d be remiss if I didn’t state that this next batch of films were some of the weirdest of the bunch (so far) and that’s saying something. Also saying something: me likey. Also, these are three that I feel like I may have enjoyed more than others, which is perfectly okay. Hey, we all love cinema for its ability to divide and conquer, yeah? I love the subjectivity of film criticism and movie love. Report 3, here we gooooo:
Spin Me Round (Jeff Baena)
When Amber (Alison Brie) gets invited to come to Italy by her job (the Italian Eatery, a chain restaurant: Tuscan Grove), to attend a prestige management course, she accepts openly, anticipating some adventure, and hopefully, some love. When she arrives, along with several other interesting and hilarious managers including Molly Shannon, Tim Heidecker, Debby Ryan, Ayden Mayeri, and Zach Woods things quickly become, well, not as unexpected. She isn’t staying in the idyllic villa shown in the flyers, the guide (Ben Sinclair) seems to be content on making every situation uncomfortable, a joke, or both, and there’s a curfew that means they are relocated to their small quarters, and basically just, each other.
The owner, Nick Martucci (Alessandro Nivola) seems to be enamored by Amber and has his assistant Kat (Aubrey Plaza) snatch her away to spend a romantic day together. Their next date doesn’t go quite as planned and when some of the people at the program begin missing Amber becomes skeptical. Kat and Amber grow closer, but there’s a certain frustration for her boss that Kat tries to insist upon Amber. Mysteries and suspicions abound, and this interesting group’s eccentricities become even more evident.
This is Jeff Baena all the way, not holding back from the surprises or the confusions, or the utterly bizarre. Some characters will flit in and out, others becoming wildly undone, and others unexpected heroes. In a lot of ways, these hilarious actors are just thrown out there to make their own chaos, testing their boundaries and running with it. The script is written by Jeff Baena and Alison Brie, and it meanders as much as it mulls, making its crisscrossing ways upbeat and unsurprising, to say the least.
The Prank (Maureen Bharoocha)
Judging from some of the other reactions of critics, I may be in the minority here but I thought The Prank was quite fun. It starts off as a comedy (and its comical head pops its way out here and there) turns into a drama, an uncomfortable satire gone wrong, and then veers into horror territory. That last one becomes my favorite.
When two teenage friends decide to play a vicious lesson on their teacher (I got some Teaching Mrs. Tingle vibes if things went much, harsher) and things turn into quite a mess. Ben (Connor Kalopsis) and Tanner (Ramona Young) are seniors, and Ben is trying to ensure a scholarship. To do so he needs to get great mid-term scores, but when his AP physics teacher Mrs. Wheeler (Rita Moreno), the harshest at school with a nasty reputation, states someone cheated on the test – her response is that everyone will fail unless someone fesses up. This makes the two hatch a plan. Tanner is a whiz online and decides to spread the rumor that Mrs. Wheeler is responsible for a student that went missing years before. It sticks, becomes a media frenzy, and she loses her job even when she’s innocent because of the negative attention is spawns.
Suddenly the weight of their lie becomes as heavy as it should, and the two are left reeling on what is the right thing to do. There’s a brief period here where the consequences really come into frame. It teeters on a real drama for a time, making you think about how easily someone’s reputation and life can be ruined. It is a bit mismatched with the tone of the rest of the film, which I think may be the biggest issue for some, but for me, it whiplashed me back into being a thriller soon enough, that I didn’t mind so much. The Prank goes through growing pains, much like our cast. Eventually, the student in question is found, alive, and things return back go normal. Well, sort of…
I won’t go into where the third act goes and even if you can figure it out (or have hoped) it doesn’t spoil the joy of the events that follow. There are some interesting twists, and the performance by Rita Moreno is truly reason enough to see it. I thought Ramona Young was perfect in Santa Clarita Diet, and she’s equally hilarious here. The film does have somewhat of an uneven middle and some dialogue here and there that doesn’t flow as easily as its stellar bookends do, but my attention never wavered.
The Cow (Eli Horowitz)
The Cow starts as a mystery, dabbles in a romance unraveled, and then continues its exercise as a question mark until the end. The film doesn’t move chronologically, it bounces around, delivering insight into what is really happening in doses, broken into small digestible courses, until the final pronouncement of what the hell exactly is going on hits, and you’re either full or left desiring more. I was kind of both? Mostly though, I was satiated with how it closed.
Kath (Winona Ryder) and her younger boyfriend John Gallagher, Jr. go to a cabin for the weekend in the woods. Being a city woman and someone who doesn’t like to go on too many “adventures” this is new for her, and she wants to please her boyfriend, and feel like she can keep up with him. In fact, age, and hers, in particular, is frequently brought up. When they arrive there is another couple also renting. A mix-up or something more? Owen Teagues and Brianne Tju especially nail this bit, being the right level of suspicious. They decide to all stay there for the night since they made the journey, have an awkward exchange, and the next morning, Kath wakes up to find that things have changed, and her boyfriend and the girl, are gone.
Without giving a lot I will also say Dermot Mulroney enters the picture, and the two do some detective work of their own. But who can trust who? What really happened? At times I found myself thinking “tell me damnit!” However, the cast is great, and I found both alternating timelines, each developing differently, to be fascinating. The ending was also specifically, well done, that it made any earlier problems forgettable to me.
With two writers (Eli Horowitz and Matthew Derby), I wonder if they had differing opinions about the identity of the film, or maybe perhaps thought the mashup of genres, and misdirections would suit the story. Either way, it did occasionally require a renewal of my faith to keep me going. There are specific areas where I could sense the grip on the story loosening, and I’d guess that’s where many viewers dropped off. Maybe I’m a sucker for a thriller/horror, or maybe I’m a sucker for Winona Ryder (I am), but I thought The Cow had enough value to be worthy of a complimentary appraisal.
The decision to focus on age and our reluctance to accept the finality of our lives and our eventual withering (regardless of disease etc.) is a boasting theme in the film. Sometimes I wished the writing had focused more on that in a way that felt genuine instead of obvious. Still, there’s a shot mirrored at the beginning that is also at the end, that I thought spoke volumes. It focuses on Kath and to a level of acceptance that she eventually has, that many others just can’t fathom.
While it has some issues, for the most part, I was sold on The Cow. Winona Ryder is terrific and there’s an interesting seed of a story here about age and our obsession with youth.
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