Film Review of the Week

Comedy

The Invite (15)

Review: Let’s talk about sex. Coyly, candidly, crudely and comically. The characters in Olivia Wilde’s provocative comedy bump and grind through animated conversations about carnality, and the emotional fallout from these deep dives into desire is shattering. Adapted by screenwriters Will McCormack and Rashida Jones from the 2020 Spanish comedy The People Upstairs, which began life as a stage play, The Invite is a skilfully executed four-hander that explores the shifting power dynamics in modern relationships with barbed humour.

San Francisco music teacher Joe (Seth Rogen) arrives home with a sore back from riding his fold-away bike, hoping for some peace and quiet so he can continue to marinade in the unrelenting misery of his life and, perhaps, avoid another argument with his wife Angela (Olivia Wilde). No such luck because Angela has invited their upstairs neighbours for an impromptu dinner party, comprising an impressive charcuterie and a cheese souffle baking in the oven.

Joe isn’t the biggest fan of Pina (Penelope Cruz) and Hawk (Edward Norton), whose high-decibel lovemaking echoes through the ceiling and repeatedly wakes Joe and Angela in the early hours of the morning. When the neighbours descend armed with a homemade tart, Joe makes scant effort to conceal his disdain. “We love a contentious environment,” grins retired firefighter Hawk, who is used to putting out bigger blazes than the bonfire of social niceties being lit in front of him. Pina calls upon her training as a psychotherapist and sexologist to dissect the disharmony between Joe and Angela and she asks challenging questions about fidelity and freedom. As wine flows and lips loosen, the bohemian guests openly share their sex positivity and the intrigued hosts quiz Pina and Hawk about “the procedural protocol” of polyamory.

Prefaced by one of Oscar Wilde’s pithy bon mots about matrimony, The Invite is a smart, sexy and frenetically paced English-language remake of an award-winning study of kinky consent, which never enjoyed an official cinema release in the UK and Ireland. For her third feature in the director’s chair after Booksmart and Don’t Worry Darling, actor Wilde approached the material with its stage origins in mind, rehearsing dialogue-heavy scenes then shooting in chronological order so actors experienced the same tumult as their characters. Shifts in tone from playful inquisition to piercing interrogation are abrupt but feel largely organic on screen.

Rogen and Wilde deliver a masterclass in snide asides and bickering, talking over each other and Devonte Hynes’ intrusive and discordant string-led score while a visibly amused Cruz and Norton join us as witnesses to the mounting emotional destruction before they deal with their own issues. Perhaps Oscar Wilde was right – the proper basis for marriage is a mutual misunderstanding.

Animation

Minions & Monsters (U)

Review: Lights, cameras, catastrophe! If the gobbledygook-spewing yellow sidekicks ever stormed Hollywood, California’s filmmaking capital would be reduced to rubble. So it proves in the seventh computer-animated adventure in the sprawling Despicable Me universe. This heartfelt valentine to the art of filmmaking directed by Pierre Coffin spends so much time celebrating more than a century of moviemaking magic that it forgets to carve its own footnote in that rich and sprawling history.

An amusing framing device set in the present day follows cheerful tour guide Olivia (voiced by Allison Janney) through an exhibition dedicated to Hollywood, replete with sight gags. The centrepiece is a statue of Minion duo James and Henry. “They are legends!” gushes Olivia, “They changed Hollywood forever”. Olivia educates her clueless tour group about how Minions have gleefully served the most diabolical figures on Earth for centuries. One of the lovable lackeys, James (Coffin), was more interested in sketching fantastical stories in his notebook than serving villainy and his fanciful imaginings attracted a like-minded buddy, Henry (Coffin again).

The pair’s antics led the eponymous critters to 1927 Hollywood where the Minions stampeded a bank robbery sequence being shot by director Max (Christoph Waltz) and his crew. Max screened the ruined footage to his financiers – the hulking Bright Brothers, Frank and Elwood (Jeff Bridges) – and the studio execs unexpectedly loved the “sickly children” gate-crashing the set. Subsequent fame and fortune permitted James and Henry to begin production on their own monster movie populated with real-life beasts conjured from a spellbook of dark magic that they ‘inherited’ from a warlock master. The first creature they summoned, Goomi (Trey Parker), helped Jay and Henry to realise their creative vision but did the green tentacled menace have an ulterior motive?

Minions & Monsters cheekily inserts the capsule-shaped chaos-bringers into seminal moments of cinema, anointing them glittering big screen stars in hit films including The Good, The Bad And The Stupid and Look Behind You And Down, then reduces the Hollywood heroes to zeroes with a casually convoluted plot that combines the suffragette movement, a lovestruck robot and monstrous megalomania. The script, co-written by Brian Lynch and director Coffin, earns sporadic smirks and chuckles by adopting a spaghetti-flinging approach to sight and verbal gags, hoping that something will stick.

An appreciation for early, silent-era cinema certainly helps in the opening 30 minutes: Coffin recreates Buster Keaton surviving a falling wooden house facade in Steamboat Bill Jr and Harold Lloyd dangling from a skyscraper clock face in Safety Last! There is also a sweetly sincere attempt at Minion diversity and inclusion with the introduction of Ed, who communicates using sign language. During pre-production for the monster movie, director Max offers James some advice: “A very cool monster movie needs a very cool monster!” Coffin’s picture almost delivers – Goomi and his hideous kin comfortably serve their purpose – and that’s ultimately the story of Minions & Monsters. The almost very cool sequel.

Comedy

Nirvanna: The Band - The Show - The Movie (15)

Review: In Back To The Future, which is lovingly referenced in Matt Johnson’s hare-brained mockumentary, Doc Brown adapts a DMC DeLorean into a time machine with a flux capacitor so when the acceleration reaches 88 miles per hour, he and Marty McFly can turn back the clock 30 years. Nirvanna: The Band – The Show – The Movie gleefully defies the same laws of rationality and physics with a poorly maintained RV on the streets of Toronto and clocks up an impressive rate of guffaws per minute. To echo Marty’s delight when he returns to Hill Valley: Everything looks great.

Best friends Matt (Johnson) and Jay (Jay McCarrol) have harboured dreams of playing a concert together at The Rivoli music venue in their home city for the best part of two decades. For their latest attempt at self-promotion to secure the gig, the double-act decide to skydive off the top of the CN Tower into the Rogers Centre stadium through the retractable roof. Hidden camera footage captures the pair buying pliers at a hardware store. “Be careful man,” remarks a nervous sales assistant after he learns Matt intends to use the tool to cut through the safety harness of the hands-free walk on the CN Tower roof. “I really don’t think it’s worth it.”

The vertiginous escapade almost ends in disaster and Jay finally loses hope. However, Matt persists and hatches an outlandish plan to convert the RV in their backyard into a time machine so they can convince the people of Toronto that they are bona fide time travellers. Except the ludicrous scheme works, the vehicle jumps back to 2008 when the speed reaches 88mph, and a hilariously discombobulated Matt and Jay encounter their younger selves, which creates ripples in the past that could have cataclysmic repercussions in the present.

Nirvanna: The Band – The Show – The Movie incorporates archive footage from the duo’s 2007 web series, which was shot on mini DV tapes and presented in a different screen ratio. This fusion of old and new, stitched together by Curt Lobb and Robert Upchurch, allows the hapless heroes to coexist with their fresh faced selves, blatantly ignoring Doc Brown’s warnings about a paradox that could unravel the space-time continuum. The aesthetic is DIY and polished at the same time, sparing us of digital visual effects to pull off the illusion of two misfits accidentally travelling back three decades to re-experience early iPhone mania and billboards of Heath Ledger as The Joker in The Dark Knight.

From the opening scene, this is a delightfully unhinged underdog story, anchored by the double-decker delusions of Johnson and McCarrol’s pals for life. Hysteria moshes with heartwarming sentiment and we root for these misguided dreamers every faltering step of the way.