Movie Review

Keanu Reeves and Seth Rogen lead pleasant if pappy film Good Fortune

Keanu Reeves and Sandra Oh in Good Fortune.

Photo by Eddy Chen

Actor/writer/director Aziz Ansari is best known for his role on the sitcom Parks & Recreation and for creating and starring in the Emmy-winning Master of None on Netflix. While he had directed multiple episodes of Master of None, he had not been given a chance to test out his filmmaking skills on the big screen until now with the comedy Good Fortune.

The film is centered on Gabriel (Keanu Reeves), a guardian angel who’s assigned the task of helping people avoid accidents while texting and driving. This gig puts him in the orbit of Arj (Ansari), whose mostly aimless life has him working at a hardware store and doing odd jobs through an app called Task. Gabriel, hoping to become a more senior angel, sees Arj as a “lost soul” who he might be able to rescue.

When Arj delivers food to tech entrepreneur Jeff (Seth Rogen), Gabriel sees an opportunity to get through to Arj. The idea is to have Arj switch lives with Jeff to understand that money is not the solution to all problems. But things backfire when Arj becomes comfortable in his new opulent lifestyle, and Gabriel has to scramble to undo what was supposed to be a temporary detour.

Written and directed by Ansari, the film is a pleasant but unfulfilling twist on the body swap genre. The idea that the switch is being controlled by a desperate guardian angel who’s only hoping to move up in the world is objectively funny. The more Arj enjoys the rich life, the worse things become for Gabriel (and, by extension, Jeff). This results in some funny scenes between Gabriel and his boss, Martha (Sandra Oh), as well as some fun discoveries Gabriel makes about life as a human.

However, each of the three main characters are so broad that it’s difficult to care about anything that happens to any of them. Ansari never goes beyond surface level on any larger issues the film confronts, like the gig economy and wealth disparity, and so most of the jokes in the story are equally superficial. He’s clearly aiming for Gabriel, Arj, and Jeff to learn lessons by the end of the film, but the message becomes muddled along the way.

A big part of the issue is that neither Ansari nor Reeves are very good in their line deliveries. The stilted way in which they speak doesn’t lend any believability to their characters’ motivations, thereby diminishing the audience’s desire to see them succeed. Even worse, Ansari cast the dynamo Keke Palmer as a love interest for Arj, and then saddles her with a role that makes her about as boring as possible.

Rogen, who’s on a TV hot streak with the Apple TV shows The Studio and Platonic, is one of the lone bright spots in the film, but even he is given a role that doesn’t play entirely to his strengths. Oh is great in her very brief time on screen, and the film could have used more of her. A cameo by Matt Rogers also makes you wish he could have had a bigger part.

Ansari, trying to make a comeback after a #MeToo controversy in 2018, has made a film that remains watchable throughout even as you wish he had executed the details better. He also seems to match Reeves’ odd acting style, something that serves neither their characters nor the overall film well.

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Good Fortune opens in theaters on October 17.

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Movie Review

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma gives horror a surreal twist

Photo courtesy of MUBI

Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.

The horror genre really ramped up in the 1970s and ‘80s, bringing with it a new subgenre - the slasher - that gave audiences new visuals of gore, but also a reliance on sexism and homophobia that would come to define the era. The new film Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma wrestles with that legacy in ways that are funny, thought-provoking, and downright strange.

Kris (Hannah Einbinder) is a queer filmmaker who has been hired to reboot the moldy IP that is the Camp Miasma franchise, one that was fresh in the 1970s but which numerous shlocky sequels have rendered irrelevant. In an attempt to get to know the property better, Kris has scored a meeting with the reclusive Billy (Gillian Anderson), the star of the original film who has shunned the public eye for decades.

Turns out that Billy lives deep in the woods at Camp Rivoli, which served as the location for the first film. As Kris tries to get to know Billy and convince her to be a part of the new film, she starts to fall under Billy’s spell and the lore of the franchise as a whole. That includes believing that the movie’s villain, Little Death - a transgender person who has an air conditioning vent as a head/mask - may not just be a character created for the movies.

Written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun (I Saw the TV Glow), the film at first feels like it’s going to go the straight-up comedy route, with comic explosions of blood, a strange fascination with candy brands, and a production design that does nothing to hide that the two main actors are on a movie set with painted backdrops. This is backed up by Kris’ phone conversations with her girlfriend, Mari (Jasmine Savoy Brown) and her agent (Sarah Sherman), as well as numerous other details.

But the film starts to go down the surreal route the longer Kris stays at the camp with Billy, especially when they sit down to watch the original Camp Miasma. An extended sequence shows a good amount of that film-within-the-film, demonstrating why Kris and Billy have a love/hate relationship with the property. For Kris, though, the lines between the film and the real world start to blur, and Schoenbrun uses a variety of out-there elements to drive the point home.

The final act of the film can barely be described as Kris goes deeper down the rabbit hole, with Schoenbrun using her film to comment on the horror genre as a whole, its treatment of women and LGBT people, the movie industry, and more. All the while the “camp” of Camp Miasma maintains a presence, with candy wrappers showing up everywhere and the tongue-in-cheek references to Little Death (the French term La petite mort, which means “the little death,” is a euphemism for orgasm).

Einbinder, an Emmy winner for Hacks, is the perfect person to inhabit her role. Her established real-life and fictional personas color everything she does in the film, with her enthusiasm and curiosity shining through. Anderson leans heavily into another reference - Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard - to create a character that is as mysterious as she is alluring. Supporting actors like Brown, Sherman, Patrick Fischler, Dylan Baker, and Eva Victor keep the movie at the right pitch all the way through.

While other films have made fun of horror movie tropes before, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma finds a wholly unique way of doing so. It’s a funny and daring trip into the psyches of two women who may be victims of their own obsessions, and of the movies that made them that way.

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Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is now playing in select theaters

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