The wacky, tacky fun of ‘Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar,’ plus the best movies in L.A.
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Hello! I’m Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.
As you are reading this, I am with a team of LAT colleagues in Park City, Utah, for the Sundance Film Festival. Though there are many promising films premiering here this week, it may take some effort to get folks to focus on the art, given the continuing fires in L.A. and a political vibe shift in D.C.
Festival director Eugene Hernandez noted, “This year the festival lands on the calendar at a moment when I think we need it most. I’ve been chatting a lot in recent days with filmmakers, industry, audiences and staff who were displaced or much worse in the past week. Folks who’ve lost so much. Everyone continues to tell me that they need this festival right now, to come together as a community and look ahead.”
For that same festival preview piece I also spoke to writer-director Mary Bronstein for “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” director and co-writer Andrew Ahn with “The Wedding Banquet” and writer-director-star James Sweeney with “Twinless.”
Ryan Faughnder took a reading on what the business side of Sundance might look like this year. As Ross Fremer, an executive at Cinetic Media, said, “There’s going to be an abundance of creative discovery that tests people’s assumptions of what Sundance is, which is a good thing, because Sundance is in a place where it’s constantly needing to reinvent itself.”
And Amy Nicholson, Joshua Rothkopf, Vanessa Franko and I all wrote about some of the titles we are already excited by, including Amanda Kramer’s “By Design,” Amy Berg’s “It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley,” Geeta Gandbhir’s “The Perfect Neighbor” and Eva Victor’s “Sorry, Baby.”
I also spoke to representatives from the three cities vying to be the future host of Sundance beginning in 2027 — Cincinnati, Boulder, Colo., and a combined Salt Lake City/Park City — to give some sense of what the festival might be like in each of those locations.
Be sure to sign up here for our special daily Sundance dispatches.
‘Barb and Star’ gets a moment at last
The Los Angeles Film Critics Assn. continues its series at the Egyptian Theater next Thursday with Josh Greenbaum’s 2021 “Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar.” The film was recognized by LAFCA for Steve Saklad’s production design and he will be there along with Greenbaum and co-star and co-writer Annie Mumolo for a Q&A moderated by Jen Yamato and Katie Walsh.
The film’s theatrical release was canceled due to pandemic concerns and it went straight to streaming, so for most people this may be the first and best chance to see this vibrant, wacky concoction on a big screen. Written by Mumolo and Kristen Wiig as the follow-up to their smash hit “Bridesmaids,” “Barb and Star” has Wiig and Mumolo playing the title characters: middle-aged best friends who take a vacation from their small Nebraska town to a Florida resort. I could try to recount the plot from there but would fail to capture its dizzyingly madcap charms.
In a review at the time, Walsh wrote, “The cinematic style of ‘Barb and Star’ seems to be ‘gawd-awful on purpose’: The eye-searing tropical colors are overblown and everything’s shot in a shallow depth of field. But the visual jokes are dense and the look works for the setting and comedic ethos, reflecting the junky tourist-trap aesthetic that Mumolo and Wiig celebrate. The film is the visual equivalent of a cheaply made, heinously charming and diverting trinket that one can buy at a beach hut boardwalk kiosk. And I mean that as a compliment. … ‘Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar’ is an optimistic and unabashed celebration of many things that are taken for granted: culottes, friendship, women doing comedy so aggressively silly that you can’t help but marvel at whoever gave them the money to make this.”
When the movie began streaming on Hulu, Yamato spoke to Wiig and Mumolo. As Wiig then said of the response to the film, “Knowing that people did find a little escape with this movie and some joy in it makes us so happy. Comedies are supposed to bring joy, and Annie and I — that’s part of our M.O., really. It was a very nice response that we weren’t expecting.”
As Yamato noted, “There are musical numbers, a Celine Dion-fueled bender, an extended riff between Barb and Star about an imaginary water spirit named Trish, and talking animals. But not as many as Wiig and Mumolo originally planned. ‘You have to pick your crazy,’ said Mumolo.”
Paul Newman and ‘The Color of Money’
The Academy Museum’s tribute to Paul Newman celebrating the centenary of his birth wraps up Sunday with a new 35mm print of Martin Scorsese’s 1986 “The Color of Money.” For his performance in the film, Newman won his first competitive Oscar only a year after receiving an honorary Academy Award. Returning to the role of “Fast Eddie” Felson from 1961’s “The Hustler,” Newman creates a portrait of a man who knows he has only one chance left to win, if that. As a pool player, he fears his best years are behind him, and after he stakes an unpredictable young player, Vince (Tom Cruise), he finds something reawakening in him.
Leave it to Scorsese to take a premise that could have resulted in a tame legacy sequel and turn it into a film brimming with energy, passion and life. In her original review of the movie, Sheila Benson wrote, “The result — a bold, exhilarating, nearly perfect dramatic comedy — belongs in the six-pack of Great Paul Newman Performances, and it won’t disappoint Tom Cruise fans, either. ‘The Color of Money’ may lack the dead-ahead purity of ‘The Hustler,’ and ‘Money’s’ pivotal scene — the hustler hustled — may not come to us with the life-changing thunderclap that it does to Eddie. But the film is quick, keen, astonishing-looking and full of the joys and the juices of acting and movie making.”
Points of interest
A ‘Tampopo’ and ‘Big Night’ double bill
Next Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, the New Beverly will show a double bill of Juzo Itami’s 1985 “Tampopo” and Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott’s 1996 “Big Night” — two incredible films about food, so either eat before or be ready to be very hungry after.
When a young widow named Tampopo (Nobuko Miyamoto, Itami’s wife) takes over her late husband’s noodle shop, she doesn’t know what she is doing. With the help of some dedicated regulars, she sets out to perfect her ramen and best her rival chefs.
Writing about the film in 2016, Justin Chang noted, “The social critique in ‘Tampopo’ is gentler and more dispersed, but it animates every scene, and it accounts for why — even in an era of celebrity chefs, food-porn Instagram accounts and cookery-as-contact-sport reality shows — the movie has lost none of its power to revivify the senses, not least of all one’s sense of humor. It has the irresistible freshness of a recipe that many have tried to copy and none have matched: a barbed, sprawling, scintillating vision of a society happily in thrall to its taste buds.”
When the film was first released, Kevin Thomas had lunch with Itami and Miyamoto in Los Angeles. (No description of what they ate.) Miyamoto describes how she learned to make noodles for the film.
“I went to 10 different restaurants to see how they prepared their noodles,” said Miyamoto. “Then I would go home and practice. The hardest part was to learn how to wring the noodles like an expert. I practiced until my hand hurt!”
Made when Tucci was simply a working character actor and not yet a culinary sensation/online heartthrob, “Big Night” was written by Tucci and his cousin Joseph Tropiano and won the screenplay award at Sundance when it premiered. In the film, two Italian immigrant brothers (Tucci, Tony Shalhoub) operate a restaurant in New Jersey, but business is not good. They hope that if they can get singer Louis Prima to eat there while he is in town, it will boost their profile, so they frantically make preparations for his arrival.
In his original review of the film, Kenneth Turan wrote, “As delicately and deliciously prepared as the dishes it features, ‘Big Night’ is a lyric to the love of food, family and persuasive acting. Written and directed by actors for themselves and their friends, it is a sensual feast that understands, as great chefs do, the virtues of taking its time. … Warmhearted at its core but too intelligent not to have a bit of bittersweet bite as well, ‘Big Night’ carefully avoids the overindulgence toward performance that frequently sinks actors’ movies. It’s a mark of how successful this talented ensemble has been that when Primo utters the film’s signature line, ‘To eat good food is to be close to God,” no one will feel in need of further convincing.”
Jane Campion’s ‘In the Cut’
The Cinematic Void series will show a 35mm print of Jane Campion’s 2003 erotic thriller “In the Cut” on Tuesday. Though largely dismissed when it was first released — though not by our critic at the time — the film’s reputation has been revived. The screenplay is by Campion and Susanna Moore, adapting Moore’s novel, and the story finds a New York City woman (Meg Ryan) drawn into an underworld of crime and desire when she may be witness to a serial killing. She also falls into the orbit of a suspicious detective (Mark Ruffalo).
Reviewing the film in The Times, Manohla Dargis called it “astonishingly beautiful” and added it “may be the most maddening and imperfect great movie of the year.” Dargis noted, “Although Campion isn’t as strongly committed to surrealism as David Lynch, the final image of a slowly closing door in this film affirms that she’s never been entirely in the grip of realism. A fever dream and a pitch-dark romance, ‘In the Cut’ takes place as much in the realm of myth as on the downtown streets of New York; in each, women are either the heroines of their own stories or its victims. If nothing else, the film takes it on faith that the old storybook routines no longer apply, which helps explain why ‘Taxi Driver’ — with its frenzied masculine violence and febrile vision of the city as a landscape of fear and desire — hangs over this movie so heavily. Once upon a time, Travis Bickle saved the girl, but then she grew up. Who saves her now?”
In other news
Laura Dern’s letter to David Lynch
There have already been a handful of screenings of David Lynch films around town since his death last week, some already planned, some quickly organized, and so far they have mostly been selling out. Both Vidiots and the American Cinematheque are organizing extended Lynch tribute series.
Laura Dern worked with Lynch many times, on “Blue Velvet,” “Wild at Heart,” “Inland Empire” and the third season of “Twin Peaks.” In her first extended remarks about her longtime friend and collaborator, Dern wrote a letter to Lynch for The Times.
As Dern wrote, “I had been raised by actors, bearing witness to collaborations that I watched my parents find. It was in those friendships, with a language understood only by them and their maestros, that had me fall in love with acting as a dream profession. When I met you, I knew I had found mine. I just never imagined when I was a teenager that I would be so blessed to spend all these years shapeshifting and growing, directed by your guidance on the life ride of art. You gave me an opportunity to explore every aspect of the female psyche, to play out archetypes and then shatter any former understanding of them. You pushed me toward fearlessness. You brought me to haunted spaces of terror, also holy ones, and you even helped me find the hilarious in tragedy. You made me believe in all that is good in our country and fear all that lies beneath.”
Dern added, “Through you, I’ve learned what it means to be loved without judgment, just pure acceptance. You have forever transformed all of art, be it film or music or painting or cartoons or giving the weather report — all of it became a space for dreaming. All of it brought you equal joy and creative bliss and was led in the moment by deep instinct and creative consciousness. You made art every day because you had to. You meditated every day as a dedicated act of service. You lived in gratitude and grace. You never knew bitterness. In life, you always felt lucky.”
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