Tag Archives: Zoey Deutch

Buffaloed

I have an innate (and probably unfair) dislike for celebrity kids who slide into the business. Dakota Johnson (daughter of Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith) may never win me over. Scott Eastwood (son of Clint) seems like he isn’t even trying. There are definitely exceptions to the rule (loving John David Washington, son of Denzel) but Zoey Deutch (daughter of Lea Thompson) wasn’t one of them. However, even my black heart and mega-level skepticism can occasionally be warmed by excessive and persistent charm.

In Buffaloed, she plays Peg Dahl, a low-level Hustler on the mean streets of Buffalo, New York. She’s not so much criminal-minded as highly motivated by money and not particularly phased by laws. Which is inconvenient when she starts dating the lawyer who once sent her away for a 40 month stint (Jermaine Fowler). However, her biggest entanglement is with her former boss and current rival, Wizz (Jai Courtney). Their business is debt collection, a dirty business even when you do it legally, which no one does, because money. Money money money.

The movie’s uneven, or going through an identity crisis. It’s got the heart of Wolf of Wall Street, a breath of The Big Short, the soul of Hustlers, and a light freckling of The Departed. But since those are pretty good references, it’s not much of a problem. Director Tanya Wexler pulls the best out of the chaos, and if you’re not sure what to expect one scene from the next, rest assured Deutch is will be your bewitching, effervescent guide through the bedlam. She’s so dazzling I wish the script had thrown a few more layers her way. Peg is clearly amoral and dare I say it – ruthless – but the script is so sympathetic toward her we don’t dwell on the darker side of her character. Deutch hints at it with a maniacal smile and her balls-to-the-wall performance.

Zombieland: Double Tap

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Ten years later, the gang’s still together, living in the White House like one big semi-content family, and even more improbably, still alive. Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg), Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), Wichita (Emma Stone), and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin) have been together long enough that their zombie battles are like a well-choreographed ballet. They know each other intimately. Columbus and Wichita have somehow remained romantically involved, even if it’s stale (the lack of options might be keeping them together), and Tallahassee has appointed himself Little Rock’s substitute father, whether she wants or needs one or not.

You don’t even have to read between the lines to know that one day, the boys will wake up and find the girls gone. Sometimes you’d rather risk your brain being slurped out of your face holes than spend another night watching Netflix with your smarmy, curly-haired, concave-chested boyfriend.

The only hitch is that while these 4 bozos have gone stagnant this past decade, their zombie counterparts have not. The zombies are evolving, becoming harder to kill and better at killing. Which is depressing. Anyway, against their will, circumstances will see them all hitting the road with some new comrades in arms, hitting up Graceland and a hippie commune and literally an ice cream truck in between. Rosario Dawson joins the crew as Nevada, a badass innkeeper, and they pick up Zoey Deutch as Madison, a woman who has thus far managed to survive the zombie apocalypse because she’s absolutely brainless. It’s a role that you will make you hate her AND admire her for performing it just a little too well.

I’m naturally skeptical about sequels and I bet you are too. And yet this one reunites the whole gang and manages to recapture the magic. It leans on some of the things that made the first film unique, but doesn’t shy away from trying new things out. It finds the laugh more often than not.

I was particularly mesmerized by the clever set design; the White House is full of funny sight gags and Easter eggs that the movie doesn’t even pause to appreciate. The commune, while wholly different, is also very generously designed and outfitted. Everything in the movie is amped up – especially the violence. A head caving made even stoic Sean flinch. Or maybe he was suppressing a sneeze. The point is, my head was so firmly turned away from the screen in self-protection that I was watching him rather than the movie. Which only sounds like a complaint. In fact I quite enjoyed myself. There was really no need for a Zombieland sequel and it’s not overly concerned with justifying itself. But director Ruben Fleischer and company manage to make blood and guts endearing – go ahead and get splattered with good times.

Before I Fall

Rebel In The Rye

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J.D. “Juvenile Delinquent” Salinger gets thrown out of schools just to piss his father off. It’s his mother who encourages him to enroll in a writing class, while his dad doubts there’ll be a single paycheque in his future. In his writing program he meets professor Whit Burnett, a hard-ass he grows to love. “Jerry” writes because he’s angry and he needs to express it somehow. Burnett shows him how to do this without alienating his reader. He’s also the one who encourages him to turn Holden Caulfield into a novel, and the one who worries him when he goes off to war.

Salinger (Nicholas Hoult) returns from war a better writer perhaps, but messed up in other ways, unsurprisingly. Catcher In The Rye is an enormous hit. That messes him up lead_720_405 too. I wondered how I’d come to miss this movie, with notable subjects and stars, but I didn’t have to wait long to figure out the why if not the how: Kevin Spacey. He co-stars as the beleaguered, bloated professor, which means the accusations against him would have left the producers scrambling, and they buried it in a shallow Hollywood grave.

But to be fair, Spacey’s involvement isn’t the film’s only problem. It’s too neat, too well-packaged, perhaps even too kind to the author, who no doubt was an interesting, tortured recluse. Hoult is fine as Salinger, and he plays well against the likes of Sarah Paulson, Zoey Deutch, and even Spacey. But this is a pretty ordinary, banal biopic that’s a little starry-eyed about its subject, which dilutes its power and keeps us at arm’s length from the real artist, a man who loved writing but gave it up to live privately, to meditate for his mental health, and to avoid press at all costs.

It’s also, if we’re being honest, hard to reconcile a beloved and important work with so much pain. This movie is both too much (too broad) and not enough (no depth). Rebel in the Rye is more like Mediocre at the Movies.

Set It Up

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Two harried, 20-something assistants work for different demanding bosses in the same Manhattan building. Harper (Zoey Deutch) admires her boss, Kirsten (Lucy Liu), who is a sports reporter. Harper wants to be a writer too but so far she spends her days fetching lunch and racking up steps on Kirsten’s fitbit. Charlie (Glen Powell) is eagerly awaiting his promotion but is still just Rick’s (Taye Diggs) overworked assistant. When Harper and Charlie meet in the lobby of their building, they determine that the only way to free themselves from the shackles of serfdom is to set up their bosses romantically. And it works!

The catch is – and you won’t believe this – Harper and Charlie fall in love themselves while orchestrating this love match between their bosses. Who would have thought (other than every single one of you, plus your grandmas, plus the ghosts of your grandmas’ mid-century pet parakeets).

Set It Up is the original Netflix film billed as the rom-com to save all rom-coms. Were rom-coms an endangered species? The good ones seem all but extinct. And I’m not sure this one changed my mind about that. But it’s not terrible. It’s not as cornball cheesy as these things tend to be. The stars are charming and dripping with chemistry. But it MV5BYmQyM2Q0NzgtZTAxNi00OTk3LTg4NjItM2E2YmE5MGM5YWI2XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNTc5OTMwOTQ@._V1_SY1000_CR0,0,1499,1000_AL_ (1) doesn’t have a unique voice or anything that super sets it apart. It’s comfort food: the kind of mac and cheese you might bring to a potluck. Not gourmet. Not lobster mac. Not truffle mac. It probably doesn’t even have gouda. But it’s warm and creamy and just gooey enough to convince you you want it. Rom-coms are predicable almost by definition. We know they’re going to get together; the “fun” is in how they get together.

Zoey Deutch is cute and glowing and perky and seemingly born to be the quirky, sweet romantic lead (her mother is Lea Thompson). Glen Powell, who previously played John Glenn and has the smug, handsome face of an astronaut, is a good match for her, although he’s the matte paint to her gloss. Tituss Burgess, in little more than a cameo, is high-impact nonetheless, and makes an excellent case for giving him a starring role, stat. But I didn’t get a Tituss Burgess movie, I got two white actors with blindingly white smiles in roles I’ve seen dozens of times before, sometimes done better, and sometimes worse. That’s not a ringing endorsement of a movie, but ringing would be a bit over-the-top for a movie you see coming from 95 miles away. This is a tepid endorsement in 12 point, Times New Roman, which is what it deserves and all I can give.

Flower

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Erica is a reckless, ruthless high school student. She blows dudes in order to black mail them, and she’s saving up the dough for some future project that’s obviously pretty important to her. She’s used to being called a slut, and worse, and mostly she rises above, and copes by drawing dicks and not caring. You might think of her of the problem child her family and maybe she was – until her almost-step-father brings home her future-step-brother Luke, who’s been an unknown quantity in rehab this whole time.

Anyway, Erica (Zoey Deutch) is fully prepared to hate Luke (Joey Morgan) with all her guts, but instead she sort of takes pity on, MV5BMTU3NjQwNDQzNV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwNDE3NTYwMjI@._V1_SX1777_CR0,0,1777,999_AL_ and then awkwardly befriends, the guy. Their bonding is unorthodox, but what else do you expect from a movie in which Adam Scott is constantly referred to as “hot old guy” (he was born in 1973, fyi, if you’re trying to judge whether you should just slit your wrists right now or possibly way til the end of this review).

Flower is directed by Max Winkler, son of Henry Winkler. What drew him to the material, and how does he handle it?

Well he does one thing extremely right: he casts Zoey Deutch. I can’t think of many actresses who could handle Erica’s rebelliousness, her remorselessness and vulnerability. Deutch goes full tilt in a way that’s impressive. She sucks up all the attention and fills the screen like there’s a vacuum leading straight to her luminous face – her performance is so committed I could barely see around it. But looking back – this movie takes some unexpected, and perhaps unexplainable twists and turns. And to be honest, I guess I couldn’t really tell you what the whole point was. This movie is in theatres right now, in limited release. If you’ve seen it, we need to discuss. What the heck is the point?