Palm Springs - Review Thread

Palm Springs(7/25/2020)

Warning: Review contains what could be considered spoilers.

I’ve gotten something like five months into the COVID-19 pandemic without cheating too much on my convictions of only giving full reviews to movies made for theaters but I’ve been slowly chipping away at that standard and don’t know what to think about that. I first made an exception for Bacurau because it did play in NY/LA and had a planned expansion and ultimately played on a service which gave money to theaters. Then I made an exception for Spike Lee’s Da 5 Blood, which never officially played in a theater anywhere but I suspect it would have if the world wasn’t mired in shit and, frankly, it’s a Spike Lee movie and I wasn’t missing out on a major release from that guy. The latest movie I’m twisting my rules for is the Andy Samberg starring comedy Palm Springs, a movie that isn’t from a major auteur like Spike Lee and which isn’t being released in a way that’s meant to benefit any theaters. So what’s my excuse this time? Well, there was intended to be a theatrical release from the movie. When it was picked up at Sundance for a record setting $17.5 million and sixty nine cents (nice) it was meant to be a joint release by Neon (who would handle the theatrical end) and Hulu (who would hold streaming rights afterwards) and that is exactly the kind of release schedule I would like to encourage in the industry, but of course that theatrical release was derailed by COVID (though I have been told it did play in some drive-ins, not near me though) and for my purposes it was released straight to Hulu, which is where I saw it.

Palm Springs is a movie that almost impossible to describe efficiently without invoking the movie Groundhog Day as it is another movie that uses that film’s high concept. It’s about someone named Nyles (Andy Samberg) who is living the same day over and over again, but the twist is that the film starts long after he’s already been living this day over and over again: he wakes up with his not terribly bright girlfriend Misty (Meredith Hagner) in the Palm Springs home they are staying in for purposes of attending a fairly mundane wedding that evening where Misty will be the Bridesmaid. We don’t immediately know about the time-loop thing until late in the evening when Nyles starts hitting on the bride’s sister Sarah (Cristin Milioti) only to suddenly and inexplicably be attacked by a nutty guy named Roy (J. K. Simmons) and tries to escape by crawling into a glowing cave nearby and warns Sarah not to follow him but she does anyway and suddenly wakes up the previous morning and is now living in the same single day time loop that Nyles has been stuck in and comes to learn that that Roy guy has also been stuck in it. From there we go into an exploration of a life without consequences and what it would be like to share that kind of life with other people.

I was pretty skeptical going into Palm Springs in large part because this whole “time loop” concept has kind of been done to death, especially as of late, and I’d generally like Hollywood to give it a rest. It’s been applied to action movies (Source Code, Edge of Tomorrow), horror movies (Happy Death Day), video games (Outer Wilds), tons of one off TV episodes and the idea of applying it to a comedy seems particularly blasphemous considering that the movie that kicked this whole trend off was itself a comedy: Groundhog’s Day. However, I do think the film was ultimately able to overcome my doubts, in part because having more than one person in on the time loop does shake things up a little and in part because Andy Samberg just generally has a different, younger, and more R-rated sense of humor than Bill Murray does. Samberg is an actor who has always intrigued me going back to his early days on “Saturday Night Live.” He had kind of a fratty aura, but always seemed to manage to stay on the right side of cringey, even when he was charting such perilous waters as his highly Caucasian comedy rapping with The Lonely Island. He’s also managed to age up his comedic persona pretty well on his sitcom “Brooklyn Nine-Nine.” The one thing he hasn’t really managed is a successful movie career. He made two movies with his Lonely Island compatriots (Hot Rod and Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping) which have cult followings but which bombed at the box office. Those movies were both broad comedies in which he were maybe leaning to hard into that fratty side of his persona. Making a semi-indie comedy like this was probably a smart move for him as his usual persona fits well into the slightly immature character without going too far with it.

There are definitely some nits for me to pick about some of the time loop logic here including a couple things that could definitely be called plot holes… like why Nyles felt the need to crawl into the cave at the beginning and in doing so leading Sarah into his hell. However the film’s fun with its high concept that ultimately proves to be its biggest asset. I wouldn’t say its comedic elements alone really made the movie, in fact I didn’t laugh out loud at it all that often though that’s almost something that’s inherent in watching something like this at home rather than with a raucous crowd at a movie theater. Instead I mostly found myself fascinated with watching this dude go through his predicament in a sort of state of detached acceptance until he doesn’t. That combined with his dynamic with Cristin Milioti make the movie work and keeps you interested for the whole movie. I do wonder how I would have responded to this in a more normal film year but in this year where we have to fight for whatever scraps come to streaming I found this to be a real breath of fresh air that I’ve enjoyed a more than I have a new movie in months.

**** out of Five

Yeah, i liked it for the most part. I'm a fan of Samberg's. While this is no Popstar, it's still really good and a nice, fresh take on the time loop idea.

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Hulu, unlike Netflix, has ads. If the viewership is strong, which I think it is, they likely had a higher ad rate.

Regardless... if the movie does well, it keeps people subscribed. I'm sure Disney didn't "make money" from Hamilton and Beyonce's Lion King thing but it kept people subscribed for two extra months.

That would be me

I personally see it the opposite of Dracula. I don't see the point of paying four dollars for no ads. Personally I'd rather watch ads so I can have four dollars.

Four dollars is the price of a cup of coffee at Starbucks.  For that small amount you can watch The Handmaid's Tale without having to hear about Geico every ten minutes. 


Now, if they were offering the service for free with ads that would be different but if I'm going to pay these bastards anything I don't want them trying to sell me insurance while I'm watching.

I guess getting Hulu with Ads with the Spotify Premium subscription is an additional thing coloring it for me. If I weren't already getting Spotify premium I might have gone for Hulu premium.

Well if you watch those ads they may deceptively find ways to make you waste your four dollars on some bullshit, so paying for ad-free is like an investment preventing you from wasting even more in the future.