Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 194

The Invitation: A Dinner Party of Nightmares

The awkward dinner party—featuring forced conversation with friends who’ve gone down a different path, or the agony of seeing an ex with a new partner—is a situation almost everyone is familiar with. It’s also usually ripe material for comedy, but in The Invitation, the director Karyn Kusama turns a reunion into a shockingly tense horror film. Set in a modern home high in the Hollywood Hills, the film is a moody nightmare that plays on fears as narrow as the Manson murders and as broad as the discomfort of peer pressure. Picture being trapped in a conversation with someone who won’t stop talking about their fad diet—only imagine also worrying that person might want to murder you.

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The Witch Mines the Quiet Terror of the Unknown

The titular “Invitation” is the name of a broader lifestyle fad, an online self-help group with culty overtones and vague messages of personal improvement. Will (Logan Marshall-Green) attends a dinner party at his old home with his new girlfriend Kira (Emayatzy Corinealdi), and becomes suspicious of his ex-wife Eden’s (Tammy Blanchard) fervor for The Invitation. He’s downright hostile to her new husband David (Michiel Huisman), who introduced her to the trend. Kusama, working from a script by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi, flashes back to Will and Eden’s happy life together to turn the screw; the audience knows that someone’s going to snap, but not how or when. It’s simple stuff, but it’s remarkably effective, working to a sinister climax that largely pays off after 90 minutes of build-up.

Eden and David are creepy in just the right way—a little too forward, eager to keep everyone’s glasses filled, and insidious in their propagandizing about their new lifestyle. Through (often clunky) flashbacks, viewers learn about the terrible trauma that ended Will and Eden’s marriage, but it’s enough to keep the viewer guessing about Will’s growing paranoia. Is he infuriated by his ex-wife’s new-found calm after the pain of their divorce, or is he correct in guessing that they’re hiding something? Buried in a thick beard, Marshall-Green looks like a cut-rate Tom Hardy, quietly brooding around the house and murmuring at Kira, with whom his relationship is equally murky.

The Invitation is both difficult to spoil and best experienced with as little plot detail as possible.

Huisman and Blanchard are the real stars of the film, though. Best known for his work as the sinewy warrior stud Daario Naharis on Game of Thrones, Huisman takes all of that role’s mellifluous European charm (he’s Dutch) and molds it into something much more aggressive here. David is like an amiable camp counselor with flashes of menace; there’s an unmistakably threatening edge to his laid-back Kumbaya routine. Blanchard, best known as a Broadway veteran, fully inhabits the role of the high-strung hostess, whose good cheer and passion for her new life seems to hide some darker torment. Most of the other guests are pleasantly drunk sorts, but the fellow Invitation devotee Pruitt (John Carroll Lynch) is a more ominous figure, probably owing to Lynch’s famously terrifying cameo performance in David Fincher’s serial-killer drama Zodiac.

Kusama broke onto the indie scene in 2000 with the phenomenal Girlfight, which introduced the world to Michelle Rodriguez as a young female boxer making her way in the sport. Since then, Kusama has struggled to find the right material for her precise, mood-focused style; neither the bonkers sci-fi drama Aeon Flux with Charlize Theron nor the horror pastiche Jennifer’s Body quite clicked, despite each possessing moments of unique flair. The Invitation is a much smaller-scale project and Kusama benefits from the little character moments she can pump into it. She invests the mysterious motivations of her leads with real feeling, even as the tension dials further and further up, and she perfectly renders the distinctly L.A. vibe of the whole affair.

The Invitation is both difficult to spoil and best experienced with as little plot detail as possible. The viewer knows something’s going to happen, but Kusama does well to hold back just what, and why, until the film’s crisp denouement. This is a tense drama first and a genre flick second, but there’s a mundane horror that grips the film from the start. I got goosebumps when a party guest tried to initiate a game of I Never, and started blathering on about the burden of human inhibitions: essentially, my worst nightmare as a dinner guest. That’s how The Invitation buries into the brain—by hitting on the universal fears of the viewer and slowly, but surely, ratcheting them into chilling specificity.

Freedom for Kevin Dawes

The FBI had said the freelance photographer traveled to Syria in September 2012, via Turkey. He was last heard from the following month. Dawes’s release was first reported by The Washington Post, and later by the AP and others.

John Kirby, a U.S. State Department spokesman, said an American citizen was “released by Syrian authorities,” but did not name the American.

The Post noted:

Dawes’s case drew little attention in the media but his release is believed to be a positive sign in securing the freedom of journalist Austin Tice, another American hostage and former U.S. Marine who disappeared in Syria in 2012.

U.S. officials reportedly suspected the Syrian government or a group allied with it had detained Dawes—though Damascus had never acknowledged that.

M83’s Junk: The Joy of Schmaltz

It may be time to declare the strip-mining operation that is the new millennium’s repurposing of ’80s pop culture complete. We live after “Too Many Cooks.” After The Goldbergs. After chillwave. Six years after Jaden Smith’s Karate Kid. Fifteen years after the first M83 album.

Correction: M83’s first two albums could be consumed with nary a flashback to feathered hair and Falkor. Listening to the synthesizer-heavy, shoegaze-influenced space-rock act’s 2003 masterwork Dead Cities, Red Seas, & Lost Ghosts is like scraping away the clutter of culture and time to tap into an eternal reservoir of whatever the feeling is when you suspect you’re starring in a really great movie. It wasn’t until the overt hair-metal swipes and fantasy-film monologues of 2006’s Before the Dawn Heals Us that the musician Anthony Gonzalez began to remind people that what’s now considered Reagan-era kitsch was actually decadence (perhaps not coincidentally, this was the album when M83 went from being a duo to mostly Gonzalez’s solo project). His next two proper full-lengths majestically presided over a wider ’80s revival, and the squeaks-and-sax propulsion of 2011’s “Midnight City” nearly made him a household name—or at the very least, someone whose work 100 percent of the developed world heard in one movie trailer or another.

M83’s follow-up, Junk, has been greeted with a few reviews that seem perplexed and embarrassed at its homages to Punky Brewster, Yngwie Malmsteen, and post-Eagles Glenn Frey. This strikes me as a strange criticism: Listening to M83 always involves the suspension of cool, and if Junk is dorkier than his past few albums, it’s only marginally so. Gonzalez has long seemed to believe that his talent for conjuring swelling grandeur is inseparable from the decade in which he was at the age when the world was all swelling grandeur. So for listeners also born around 1980, his music may actually achieve one of the highest aims of pop, which is to physically deliver adults back into the headspace of childhood. Others’ relationship to the ’80s ephemera in his music will be akin to their relationship with ’80s ephemera more generally, whether characterized by ironic affection or visceral rejection or simple unfamiliarity. Under the junk on Junk is the same adrenaline rush Gonzalez has always provided, delivered with more irreverence than usual but also with occasional brilliance.

The opener and lead of a single, “Do It, Try It” is, on a few levels, a demonstration of the dumb pleasure of defying expectations. The ragtime-y piano at the start doesn’t really align with the rhythm of the singing; that singing is manipulated to sound like a troll doll come to life; sometimes, “do it” comes before “try it” and sometimes it’s flipped. Gonzalez is definitely trying to bug you. But the itchy sensation subsides in the classically M83 liftoff of a chorus, and after a few acclimating spins, you may forget what seemed off about the song in the first place.

Then comes “Go!,” an even more ingenious contraption of tension and release. It opens aimlessly, with dewey synths, slow stuttering from the singer Mai Lan, and a far-off saxophone trill—an omen of the glorious cheese to come. Then Lan performs a countdown, the drums pick up, and everything is cannonballed into a bouncehouse of melody and rhythm. Later, Steve Vai, the prog guitarist of legend, delivers exactly the solo you’d hope. A heaving, ecstatic effect arises from the various elements—it’s as fun a song as I’ve heard this year.

Schmaltz is schmaltz, and it can make life worth living.

The rest of the album is not quite as good as its two opening tracks. But if you come to M83 for excess, which you should, you shall find it in a number of places. The ache of “Solitude” climaxes in a strings arrangement that’s Hitchcockian in intensity—it’s more agitated, more unresolved, than what you might expect from violins in a rock ballad. The short and lovely instrumental “Tension,” built on guitar figures that spin and glints like a ferris wheel at night, should keep Gonzalez’s licensing income healthy. Late in the album, “Laser Gun” and “Road Blaster” are back-to-back potential singles, with the former culminating in a series of interlocking chants perfect for backseat karaoke and the latter riding a swinging, sax-assisted beat that recalls a few George Michael hits mashed into one.

Inevitably, not everything here blows back hair as successfully as M83’s best work does. The weirdest misstep is “Time Wind,” where guest vocalist Beck threatens to rupture the entire M83 universe by introducing elements that should not exist in it—irony, jadedness, enervation. And on the most obvious nostalgia bids, listeners might be faced with questions of correlation vs. causation. Are you moved because the disco soundscape of “Moon Crystal” reminds you of TV shows from long ago, or because those high, whining violins over funk guitar are eternally gorgeous? Gonzalez’s entire catalogue posits that this kind of question doesn’t really need to be answered. Schmaltz is schmaltz, and it can make life worth living.

Deadly Shootings at Lackland Air Force Base

Updated on April 8 at 11:27 a.m. ET

James Keith, a spokesman for the Bexar County, Texas, sheriff, said two people are dead after an apparent murder-suicide at the U.S. Air Force Base in San Antonio.

Earlier, the department tweeted:

We have two dead at Lackland Air Force Base, deputies are still inside the building

— Bexar County Sheriff (@BexarCoSheriff) April 8, 2016

The base, which is in San Antonio, has a population of nearly 10,000.

The Resumption of Deportations From Greece

The second group of ferries left Greece for Turkey Friday with migrants to be returned across the Aegean Sea as part of a deal between the European Union and Ankara.

The boats left the islands of Samos, Kos, and Lesbos with 120 migrants for the Turkish town of Dikili. Many were Pakistani, Turkey’s interior minister said, and others were from Egypt, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

The deportations began Monday as part of a deal to slow the influx of migrants to Europe, and also reduce the human-smuggling business. Under the controversial deal, any migrant who arrived after March 20––and who had not filed for asylum––would be deported to Turkey. In exchange, the EU would take an equal number of Syrian refugees. One challenge the EU has faced amid the worst migrant crisis on the continent since World War II is differentiating between those it considers genuine asylum-seekers, typically Syrians, from those it doesn’t. The deal is meant to address those concerns. The agreement also would give Turkey around $3.2 billion to help with the millions of Syrians who’ve fled there since the start of their civil war five years ago.

After Monday, the first day that boats ferried migrants back to Turkey, protests on the Greek islands shut down further deportations. Some migrants sat in the middle of roads and refused to move. One man, inside the Moria registration camp, climbed to the top of a utility pole Wednesday and threatened to hang himself. Even Friday, as the boats readied to depart, local Greek protesters swam in front of a boat, hoping to stop it. Eventually, the coast guard pulled them from the water and took the protestors to a police station, The Guardian reported.

Protesters dive into sea as ferry carrying #migrants prepares to leave #Lesbos returning them to turkey pic.twitter.com/q1Gz608HAG

— Sophie Long (@S0Long) April 8, 2016

European countries had at first allowed migrants to cross the borders freely. But in early March, Macedonia, Croatia, and Slovenia closed their borders, creating a bottleneck on the migrant route and backlogs in Greece.

About 325 migrants have now been expelled from Greece—with Friday’s second round of deportations. Meanwhile, Greek authorities said that in the past 24 hours about 150 more migrants had crossed the Aegean Sea. Many arrived on the same islands from which the others had just been deported.

The True-Crime Power of The People v. O.J. Simpson

There were likely people who heard about FX’s American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. last year and assumed it would be, at best, an ill-advised highlight reel of the Simpson murder case. The Bronco chase, the glove, the Mark Furhman tapes, the way the country came to a standstill when the verdict was announced: Ironically, some of the show’s most surprising scenes came from these very well-trodden moments, including the smaller ones. (Consider the prosecutor Marcia Clark’s decision to get a perm—a move brutally mocked then and now.)

But in the hands of The People v. O.J., the hairdo mishap wasn’t an unfortunate, colorful bit of trivia. It was a window into the current of sexism that coursed through the trial—one that manifested as disdain for domestic-violence victims or scorn for working mothers with child-care needs. It was decisions like these, to recontextualize and elevate the familiar or mundane, that ultimately proved the show’s mettle as an incisive work of true crime.

Unlike with Making a Murderer, The Jinx, or Serial, the question of whodunnit is completely besides the point in The People v. O.J., which aired its finale Tuesday. Americans have had 20 years to pore over the (widely accessible) body of evidence, and decide whether Simpson killed Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman, before the FX show came along. So by disowning that burden, the writers were able to treat the show as a different kind of detective story: an examination of the processes, procedures, and errors that led to Simpson’s acquittal. The result was a series whose ending may have been written 20 years ago, but that still felt like a necessary addition to the canon of Simpson-related works, mostly for the way it used the trial to tackle the other ugly crimes of the age, including racism, sexism, domestic violence, and media bias.

The show succeeded largely because its creators—and viewers—could approach the story with the luxury of hindsight and reconsider the nuances of a subject everyone thought they already knew about. It took years for a majority of black Americans to agree with whites that O.J. did it—but it took just as long for others to grasp why that change of heart didn’t come sooner. As the linguist John McWhorter recently wrote in The New York Times, during the trial “America learned the difference between what the cops mean to black people versus what they mean to most others. Too few got the message at the time.” But the killings of unarmed blacks such as Sandra Bland and Michael Brown in recent years has led to significant changes, McWhorter noted. “I suspect that the black response to the verdict, if it happened today, would surprise far fewer whites than it did 20 years ago.” That real-life shift translates into a People v. O.J. that resonates that much more strongly with viewers today.

Twenty years of critical distance has also made it easier for the show’s viewers to appreciate the technological and legal ramifications of the case—recalling how Making a Murderer delved into the evolution of DNA technology. Anyone watching The People v. O.J. Simpson today—in the age of bloated Law and Order and CSI franchises—would probably be stunned to see how the defense managed to undermine the prosecution’s supposedly airtight physical evidence. Though circumstances at the time—the constant media coverage and Simpson’s vast legal resources—put the DNA evidence under stronger scrutiny than usual, the outcome of the trial sent a message to forensic scientists around the country to be less sloppy, as The New York Times reported in 1995. And the Associated Press noted 20 years later that lab technicians (at least those in Los Angeles) have become far more careful in hewing closely to procedure as a result of the case.

The People v. O.J. proved to skeptics that there can be enormous value in dragging up seemingly closed cases—even ones that American culture seemed to have endlessly rehashed. Which is why the upcoming ESPN 30 for 30 documentary, O.J.: Made in America makes so much sense as the next work seeking to unpack the Simpson trial. The film promises to be a more sober and stripped-down work with something different to offer than the FX show. To make the series more weighty, the filmmaker Ezra Feldman said he avoided including the Kardashians or interviewing the key-witness-turned-celebrity Kato Kaelin. “Maybe this is going to sound a little pretentious,” he told Vanity Fair, “but I would at least like to have the appearance of seriousness that maybe would be co-opted by [Kaelin’s] presence.”

It’s an understandable sentiment; it’s so easy to tire of the tabloidization that turned the trial into a circus and obscured the real matters at hand. But The People v. O.J. cared deeply about showing how this sensationalism affected the trial and all involved. It showed how the main players—the prosecutor Marcia Clark, the defense lawyer Johnnie Cochran, the judge Lance Ito, Brown herself—all became ugly caricatures, and, conversely, how Goldman was relegated to being a “footnote in his own murder,” as his father said. Still, the co-writers Larry Karaszewski and Scott Alexander have spoken about how they never wanted the show itself to be “exploitative” or “cheesy.” “All the shows we get compared to are documentaries,” Karaszewski told Vulture, adding that he admired Serial and Making a Murderer. “We are a work of drama, and that sometimes allows us to go dig deeper.”

It’s possible that the upcoming O.J.: Made in America will be the more meticulous and comprehensive of the two projects. But if the amount of serious collective reappraisal spurred by the FX  show (which has garnered nearly 8 million viewers) is any indication, The People v. O.J. may be the best vehicle thus far for bringing up complex, broader questions about American justice, without losing sight of the human toll. No surprise then, that the show already appears to have inspired another successor of sorts, continuing the genre revival that Serial began in 2014. The same day as the finale, NBC announced a new anthology series from Dick Wolf, titled (what else?) Law and Order: True Crime. The subject of the first season? An infamous Los Angeles slaying that preceded O.J.—the Menendez Brothers murders.

David Cameron and the Panama Papers

In an interview with ITV News, the British prime minister said: “We owned 5,000 units in Blairmore Investment Trust, which we sold in January 2010. That was worth something like £30,000 (about $42,000).”  

Here’s more of David Cameron’s comments:

I paid income tax on the dividends. There was a profit on it but it was less than the capital gains tax allowance so I didn't pay capital gains tax. But it was subject to all the UK taxes in all the normal way.

I want to be as clear as I can about the past, about the present, about the future, because frankly I don't have anything to hide.

He added that he’d received a £300,000 (about $420,000) inheritance from his father, who died in 2010, but acknowledged he couldn’t be sure if that money came from an offshore source.

Cameron had been urged to disclose details about family’s finances after the release this week of the Panama Papers. The documents contain revelations that several prominent global figures held shell accounts overseas—including Iceland’s prime minister who resigned over the claims. This in itself isn’t illegal—though it does raise questions about the types of tax-avoidance plans available for the world’s wealthy.

The Star Wars Empire Rolls on With Rogue One

The release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the seventh episode in a four-decade-long film saga, was the main event for Disney’s revival of the franchise, a multi-billion dollar gamble that’s so far paid off handsomely. Part of the studio’s plan, now that the film series has been wrested from George Lucas’s grasp, is to give audiences a new Star Wars story every year, even if they’re not directly connected to the ongoing series. Rogue One (subtitled A Star Wars Story), due out this Christmas, is the first such effort, and from the teaser trailer released today, it looks like an extremely appetizing side dish.

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Directed by Gareth Edwards, who successfully revamped Godzilla to critical acclaim in 2014, Rogue One is being described as a sci-fi heist movie, set before the original 1977 Star Wars and following the Rebel spies who stole the plans to the Empire’s Death Star (the ones R2-D2 carries around at Princess Leia’s behest). It exists in the margins of the main series, but that could be freeing: Rogue One doesn’t need to adhere to decades of continuity or set up several future sequels, and it still gets to exploit the powerful nostalgia of the Star Wars world and all of its grimy detail. Best of all, like The Force Awakens, it’s got an exciting, diverse cast at its disposal, with a compelling female lead.

Felicity Jones plays Jyn Erso, a soldier in the Rebel Alliance with a history of insubordination and a planet-sized chip on her shoulder (“This is a rebellion, isn’t it? I rebel,” she clunkily quips). She’s dispatched to figure out the weakness of the Death Star, a mission that will eventually give Luke Skywalker the chance to blow it up in the original Star Wars, and she has an intriguing ensemble in tow to help her out. The teaser doesn’t spend much time on anyone else, but there’s Diego Luna (Y Tu Mamá También) as her right-hand man, Forest Whitaker as some sort of grumbling mentor, and the Hong Kong action star Donnie Yen whipping a bunch of Stormtroopers into shape with a stick. Ben Mendelsohn (Bloodline), Hollywood’s favorite new brooding villain, plays an Imperial officer of some sort, dressed all in white.

More than anything, it’s exciting to see a film that gets to play in the sandbox of Lucas’s original trilogy, rather than echoing and remodeling it as The Force Awakens, which was set 30 years beyond it, had to. The Rogue One trailer brings back some memorable pieces of architecture, from the lumbering AT-AT walkers to the Death Star itself (which is still being assembled), not to mention the glorious ’70s costuming of Star Wars (Mendelsohn’s flowing cape is a particularly welcome throwback). In other words, it’s got the look: a distinct blend of old favorites and new design wrinkles, like the jet-black Stormtroopers hunting Jyn or the hodge-podge samurai armor worn by Whitaker.

For all its nostalgic appeal, Rogue One is still a bit of a gamble by Disney. There was almost no doubt The Force Awakens was going to be a financial smash (and indeed it was, earning more than $2 billion worldwide), since it continued the main story and promised a turnaround from George Lucas’s derided prequel trilogy. It remains to be seen whether audiences will have the same rabid enthusiasm for a side-story. If so, Disney’s plan for future “anthology films” (including a Han Solo prequel and a possible Boba Fett movie) will be a license to print money; if not, franchise fatigue could set in, and the studio’s plan to release a Star Wars movie every single year might need tweaking.

For now, things seem to be on stable ground—Rogue One looks splendid, Felicity Jones should be an exciting new heroine for a franchise still relatively bereft of major female characters, and the cast is an intriguing mix of established character actors. Disney can worry about franchise fatigue later. Right now, there’s still a halo around anything and everything with Star Wars in the title.

Who’s The Boss?

Let it be stipulated: Melissa McCarthy is a national treasure. In Gilmore Girls, she found a way to make Sookie, the show’s “ditzy chef,” warm rather than cartoonish. In Mike & Molly, she proves that “relatability” can also be clever and wry. In Bridesmaids, she showed off her mettle with physical comedy. In Spy, she proved her deftness with an insult—not to mention a handgun. McCarthy has radiated by turns subtle sweetness and foul-mouthed charisma. She has effortlessly channeled the everywoman. She has done it all charmingly, and seemingly effortlessly, and quite often hilariously. Like I said: national treasure.

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The latest McCarthy vehicle, The Boss, has revealed another McCarthy talent: the ability to rock a spiky mullet, as well as a series of outfits in the style of “Bedazzled Chico’s,” in a way that manages to be as dignified as it is absurd. McCarthy plays Michelle Darnell, a self-made tycoon—think Suze Orman meets Martha Stewart meets Tony Robbins meets Tony Wonder—who, as the “47th richest person in America,” is on top of the world … until a rival gets her busted for insider trading. She’s hauled off to minimum-security prison, Stewart-style, for a few months—only to discover, upon her release, that the SEC has repossessed her assets and frozen her accounts. Newly penniless, if not newly humbled, she shows up at the Chicago apartment of her former assistant, Claire (Kristen Bell), and Claire’s tween daughter, Rachel (Ella Anderson), and the two reluctantly take her in.

Michelle takes Rachel to a meeting of her Dandelion (think Girl Scout) troop, where she learns, to her horror, that the girls are regularly selling cookies—at high markups, too!—without directly profiting from the effort. Michelle, after happening to sample one of Claire’s “family recipe” brownies, starts a spin-off business, Darnell’s Darlings, recruiting her sellers from the ranks of the Dandelions—the sales are door-to-door, but this time it’s brownies serving as the capitalistic baked good. Michelle founds the new group for the same reason she does anything, and everything, else: to make money.

The Boss is sketch comedy, with none of the lines colored in.

This is all, its weird specificity not withstanding, a promising premise for a wacky comedy: a little bit Troop Beverly Hills, a little bit Bad News Bears, a little bit—via a balletically violent street fight between the Dandelions and the Darlings, whose uniforms channel Che Guevara but whose motivations channel Donald Trump—Reservoir Dogs. But it’s a lot to balance. And The Boss, for all the star-power the film has behind it—indeed, for all the Melissa McCarthy it has behind it—can’t seem to decide what kind of movie it is. Or even what kind of comedy it is. Is it bringing heart to slapstick, the way those other McCarthy vehicles, Spy and The Heat, did so effectively? Is it bringing slapstick to heart, à la Bridesmaids? It’s unclear. Instead, The Boss is a whiplash-inducing muddle, pratfalling one moment and heartstring-ing the next.

The only thing that is very, very clear: The movie revels in its R rating. It takes gleeful, snickering, often sneering pleasure in its ability to swear and otherwise be-potty its mouth. Michelle’s former mentor, Ida (Kathy Bates, excellent but also sadly underused here), refers to Michelle as “a businesswoman, a visionary, a leader” and also “a cocksucker” and “a professional fuckface.” Michelle at one point hisses to an adversary, “You’re a real B-I-T-C-U-N-T.” She announces to Claire, “I’m going to give you a raise so big you’ll cream your jeans and shat your chaps.” There is much more in this vein, but you get the idea.  

The movie also takes childish delight in swear-saying of a more figurative variety. Michelle and the guy who sold her out to the SEC, Renault (Peter Dinklage), used to date; we get lots of scenes of them acting on their continued attraction to each other—scenes supposed to be hilarious, apparently, because of the differing proportions of the actors involved. One of The Boss’s other long, drawn-out gags finds Michelle and Claire feeling (and squeezing, and slapping) each others’ breasts—the point of the whole exercise seeming to be the excuse for Michelle to explain to Rachel, when the girl inevitably walks in on them, “We were jostling each other’s bosoms.” There are also jokes about vaginal rejuvenation, and the self-tanning of the crotch, and … well, again, you get the idea. And there is, overall, a toss-it-to-see-what-sticks tone to the proceedings. (At one point, indeed, via an unruly sleeper couch, the film literally throws McCarthy up against a wall—one of its few non-predictable gags, maybe, but one, too, that treats its star like so much human spaghetti.)  

It’s a whiplash-inducing muddle, pratfalling one moment and heartstring-ing the next.

Another spaghetti element: the many, many clichés The Boss relies on for its LOLs. The girls are selling brownies! Think they’ll set up a stand in front of a weed dispensary? Will a mention of Michelle and Renault dating in the ’80s obligatorily flash back to the pair sporting shoulder-padded suits and Flock of Seagulls-esque hairdos? Will Michelle, while babysitting Rachel, decide that the two should watch Texas Chainsaw Massacre together? Yes. And yes, and yes. Will the film have a lot of fun at the expense of a bitchy, wealthy suburban mom? Will there be jokes about tennis lessons at Michelle’s minimum-security prison? Will Michelle, an orphan, have intimacy issues? Will the movie make those issues clear by having her repeat a version of the line “families are for suckers” approximately 15 times? Will The Boss try to excuse its own reliance on tired tropes by having Claire inform Michelle, “You’re such a cliché: You’re getting close to people, so then you have to push them away”? Yes. And yes. And yes. And yes. And yes.

The Boss was written by McCarthy and her husband, Ben Falcone (he directed it, as well), and it gives an additional screenwriting credit to Steve Mallory, who also collaborated with the pair on Identity Thief and, less successfully, Tammy. The trio are friends from their Groundlings days; Michelle Darnell is a character who was born in the improv theater. Which makes The Boss, perhaps, a case study in the many bad things that can happen when improv-ers fashion themselves as screenwriters: You get a few moments of very funny set pieces—and many more slightly funny ones—that are all strung together, awkwardly and discordantly. You get characters who, being designed not really as full people, but rather as animate vehicles for lines like “I dinged my pelvis again!,” never get fleshed out. You get motivations—minds changed, hearts opened, vendettas erased, inexplicably but always conveniently—that don’t make much human sense.

The broad arc of the movie—that thing sometimes referred to as “the story,” sometimes also as “the point”—exists, it seems, only to get us from one pratfall to another. The seams show. Or, they would if there were any seams at all. Instead, the scenes here are glued and taped and safety-pinned, sloppily. The Boss is sketch comedy, with none of the lines colored in.

The girls are selling brownies! Think they’ll set up a stand in front of a weed dispensary?

In that, it certainly isn’t the only recent film to fall victim to sketch’s sketchiness. Given the massive revolving door that’s been built between the studios and the SNL stage and the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater, the remarkable thing is how many comedies have managed to escape it. What makes The Boss especially disappointing, though—really disappointing, in the manner of the kid who’d do so well if he’d only apply himself—is how much potential it had to be awesome. One of the other things McCarthy is great at is managing to get comedy out of the smallest, subtlest moments (see, in The Boss, Michelle’s awed, earnest, perfectly delivered, what-is-this-foreign-foodstuff assessment of the “Doh-REE-toh”). And The Boss, to its credit, repeatedly confirms what Spy suggested: There is, at this point, no one better at delivering a cinematic insult than its star. “You’re dressed like someone who grocery shops at CVS,” Michelle informs Claire, and the line is elegant and cutting and glorious.

But many of her insults are aimed not at Claire, but at the young girls who are loyal Dandelions. We are meant to understand that these girls are terrible, and thus that they deserve to be terrorized by a middle-aged woman former tycoon; in its haste to get to the next pratfall, though, the movie never really establishes their badness. “You’re such a loser,” one of them mutters at Michelle, after she’s taken over a Dandelion meeting and mocked the organization’s entire purpose; this is about the extent of it, though. In response, Michelle spends the rest of the movie referring to the tween girl as a boy, and informing her about her future lesbianism—news to the girl, it seems—and otherwise bullying her. The treatment extends to the girl’s mother, the requisite bitchy suburbanite, whom Michelle, at one point, tackles on a street, in order to gleefully grind some Dandelion cookies into some awkward places.

These are not proportional responses. Just as it is not a proportional response when Michelle, given bad news by her lawyer, beans him in the face with a tennis ball.

That wouldn’t matter; comedy needn’t be realistic. But they contribute to the tonal flaws of the film, and they also reveal, in their way, something bigger: the weird, mostly unwarranted delight The Boss takes in its own meanness. Michelle, the star of the movie, is a jerk, and that’s fine; the trouble is that we are meant to find the movie’s manifestations of her jerkiness—insulting young girls, punching their mothers, etc., etc.—to be funny. Had The Boss been better executed, they might well have been. But there’s a fine line between being a boss and being a bully, and the movie regularly crosses it. And then, for good measure, it falls down some stairs.

The Abduction of Syrian Workers by ISIS

Syrian state TV says more than 300 workers from al-Badia Cement Company were abducted, while Agence France-Presse put the figure at 250.

Here’s AFP on the significance of the fighting outside Damascus:

Dumeir is divided between IS control in the east and rebel control in the west, but several key positions around it, including a military airport and a power plant, are still in government hands. ...

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitor, said the fighting was heavy but the jihadists had not managed to gain significant ground. ... IS had seized five regime positions in the area, including two checkpoints, since Monday…

ISIS’s offensive against government positions east of Damascus began this week after a series of setbacks suffered by the militant group. Although ISIS has shown an ability to strike at the heart of Europe, and has inspired people to carry out attacks in the U.S., the group has, in fact, lost much of the territory it controls in Syria and Iraq (though it has made inroads in Libya). Wednesday’s attacks outside Damascus—and the abduction of the workers—may be an indication ISIS is trying to reverse those losses.