Post by Dracula on Jul 23, 2023 17:43:19 GMT -5
No Hard Feelings(6/24/2023)
The film has Lawrence playing a bawdy and kind of hard drinking woman who grew up in Montauk New York who has a rather antagonistic view of the various rich people who come to live there during the summer months who are raising property values beyond what she can afford and after getting her car repossessed she’s so desperate that she finds herself entertaining an ad she finds on Craigslist for a woman willing to be hired to “date” and deflower the awkward nineteen year old son of a pair of very nosy helicopter parents who believe said son needs such an experience before he goes off to college, and much of the film’s comedy comes from this woman’s rather frustrating experiences trying to get this “unfuckable” young man to finish this process. That whole concept is kind of creepy at its core but that’s sort of the point, the movie certainly isn’t an advertisement for this manipulated route through rights of passages and the ultimate satirical target is the helicopter parenting. Along the way there are some decent laughs but probably not enough of them. Ultimately I think the premise at the center doesn’t have quite enough to it to sustain a feature, it feels more like it should be a B-plot on “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” or something. Beyond that it just kind of feels warmed over and tired, if Hollywood wants to bring comedy back in a big way they’re going to have to find some new formula because the old one really truly isn’t doing it anymore.
**1/2 out of Five
The complete and utter death of the mainstream studio comedy is one of the more obvious and yet oddly under-discussed trends in cinema today. Comedy isn’t just a transient trend in cinema, it’s been something of a keystone for Hollywood since the earliest days of cinema and yet they almost seem to have been discarded out of nowhere over the course of just a couple of years. And much as I generally like and have affection for the wave of Judd Apatow produced and inspired R-rated comedies that came out in the mid-to-late 2000s, it does seem like the fact that Hollywood kept trying to produce and replicate them long past their sell-by date rather than try to find a new replacement for them seems to have contributed a lot to the decline of the whole genre. And we do still from time to time get those attempts to get that train rolling again, and the most recent of those is the Jennifer Lawrence sex comedy No Hard Feelings, which I must say I doubt is going to be the one to bring comedy back to box office glory.
The film has Lawrence playing a bawdy and kind of hard drinking woman who grew up in Montauk New York who has a rather antagonistic view of the various rich people who come to live there during the summer months who are raising property values beyond what she can afford and after getting her car repossessed she’s so desperate that she finds herself entertaining an ad she finds on Craigslist for a woman willing to be hired to “date” and deflower the awkward nineteen year old son of a pair of very nosy helicopter parents who believe said son needs such an experience before he goes off to college, and much of the film’s comedy comes from this woman’s rather frustrating experiences trying to get this “unfuckable” young man to finish this process. That whole concept is kind of creepy at its core but that’s sort of the point, the movie certainly isn’t an advertisement for this manipulated route through rights of passages and the ultimate satirical target is the helicopter parenting. Along the way there are some decent laughs but probably not enough of them. Ultimately I think the premise at the center doesn’t have quite enough to it to sustain a feature, it feels more like it should be a B-plot on “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” or something. Beyond that it just kind of feels warmed over and tired, if Hollywood wants to bring comedy back in a big way they’re going to have to find some new formula because the old one really truly isn’t doing it anymore.
**1/2 out of Five
