Post by Dracula on Sept 24, 2022 18:44:44 GMT -5
Cha Cha Real Smooth(9/10/2022)
The most buzzed about movie coming out of this year’s Sundance Film Festival was most likely Cooper Raiff’s Cha Cha Real Smooth, a quarter-life crisis movie about a college grad who finds himself working as a “party starter” at New Jersey area bar mitzvahs. The film was picked up by AppleTV+ for $15 million, not a record breaking number but certainly an attention-getting sum and one that naturally had a lot of people asking “is this the next CODA?” Well, no, it isn’t. In fact I kind of suspect that if this had been released to theaters like a normal movie it would not have made that $15 million back and that this would have one of those movies that people went nuts for at Sundance only to not connect when released to “the wild.” That does not, however, mean it’s bad. It’s not, it’s fine. I think if this were made something like ten years ago it would have been made as a “mumblecore” movie though I’m not 100% sure I can prove that it isn’t already that outside of the fact that it has a slightly larger budget than those movies tended to and no one is literally mumbling in it. The “Bar Mitzvah party starter” premise is mostly just a hook for this to rest on, it’s mostly about a love triangle in which the Cooper Raiff character comes close to starting a relationship with a woman in her thirties with an autistic daughter and a fiancé. That plays out well enough, but there are some problems here. For one, I’m not sure Cooper Raiff was quite the right actor for this even though he’s essentially playing himself in certain ways. The film is very specifically about a twenty two year old and Raiff reads older than that even though looking it up he’s actually only twenty five and was likely even younger when this filmed so this might be an irrational complaint but it did stand out to me. I also think the film just generally could have used a bit more comedy in general because it all feels a touch grim for a film about a situation which, in the grand scheme of things, isn’t that high stakes. Beyond that my response might just be a touch persona, this is a movie about a guy who’s an extreme extrovert, and that’s just not going to be the easiest thing for me to relate to and I think relatability matters with this kind of movie.
*** out of Four
The most buzzed about movie coming out of this year’s Sundance Film Festival was most likely Cooper Raiff’s Cha Cha Real Smooth, a quarter-life crisis movie about a college grad who finds himself working as a “party starter” at New Jersey area bar mitzvahs. The film was picked up by AppleTV+ for $15 million, not a record breaking number but certainly an attention-getting sum and one that naturally had a lot of people asking “is this the next CODA?” Well, no, it isn’t. In fact I kind of suspect that if this had been released to theaters like a normal movie it would not have made that $15 million back and that this would have one of those movies that people went nuts for at Sundance only to not connect when released to “the wild.” That does not, however, mean it’s bad. It’s not, it’s fine. I think if this were made something like ten years ago it would have been made as a “mumblecore” movie though I’m not 100% sure I can prove that it isn’t already that outside of the fact that it has a slightly larger budget than those movies tended to and no one is literally mumbling in it. The “Bar Mitzvah party starter” premise is mostly just a hook for this to rest on, it’s mostly about a love triangle in which the Cooper Raiff character comes close to starting a relationship with a woman in her thirties with an autistic daughter and a fiancé. That plays out well enough, but there are some problems here. For one, I’m not sure Cooper Raiff was quite the right actor for this even though he’s essentially playing himself in certain ways. The film is very specifically about a twenty two year old and Raiff reads older than that even though looking it up he’s actually only twenty five and was likely even younger when this filmed so this might be an irrational complaint but it did stand out to me. I also think the film just generally could have used a bit more comedy in general because it all feels a touch grim for a film about a situation which, in the grand scheme of things, isn’t that high stakes. Beyond that my response might just be a touch persona, this is a movie about a guy who’s an extreme extrovert, and that’s just not going to be the easiest thing for me to relate to and I think relatability matters with this kind of movie.
*** out of Four
