August 2025

The Naked Gun

It’s no secret that the studio comedy is an endangered species. I may be a forlon, dead-inside grumpass these days, but I really, really do love a wholesome giggle on occasion - and whilst I’ve satisfied my funny fix from the niche offerings of Hundreds of Beavers, Bottoms, and more recently Friendship, general and mainstream audiences are left gasping for the goofs. Maybe there’s a stigma that laughs aren’t substantive, as I feel many a comedy now has to ‘say something’ to be a viable hit: sprinklings of humour throughout the ponderous dissections of womanhood in Barbie, and the perhaps more mature moniker of ‘dark comedy’ attuned to Poor Things and Anora, have potentially become the accepted mainstay. Don’t get me wrong, I hugely enjoy all of the aforementioned, but the riotous hyena-ry they elicited from me and many of my copatrons, I found, strangely came with a whiff of self-consciousness; a mousy side-eye after blurting out an orgasmic, cathartic cackle. Luckily, a certain dopey detective has been unleashed to end this era of embarrassment: Frank Drebin Jr. is amuck, seemingly thawed from a 2007 cryogenic preservation, where cinematic silliness was king. His mission? Spreading the good gospel of bone-headed, dim-witted, brainless, breathless laughter.  

I’m not going to pretend that there is some profound, deeper undercurrent to 2025’s The Naked Gun: when a movie establishes a MacGuffinous thingamajig literally labeled ‘P.L.O.T Device’, you know seriousness and a worthwhile story is laid bare before gales of torrential hyucks and stupidity. The film is a teeming, swollen, joke-stuffed whopper of a picture; a sumptuous turducken of batty slapstick, wordplay, and visual treats so delightfully daft that my guffaws chugged like a steamtrain over agape, head-shaking disbelief: you’ll never look at a snowman the same way again. Is every gag a zinger? Unfortunately not, but before you can dwell on the duds, another howler almost instantaneously materialises like a speeding bullet, delivering a complimentary chortle that kicks you back onto its side, and it hits you again, and then again, and then again. However, the maddening rhythm of such excessive lampoonery is a true testament to both the sisiphyean mite of Liam Neeson, excellently composing a constant deadpan gruff whilst engorged in clownery, and the directorial maestro Akiva Schaffer, illustrating just how meticulously arranged and interwoven these wisecracks are: you gotta be smart to be oh so dumb.

Schaffer directing feels like a match made in heaven; being a founder of the musical comedy troupe The Lonely Island, and helming similar feats of mindlessness such as Hot Rod and Popstar, you can hear reverential echoes to the original comedic daffiness of Zucker, Abrahams, and the granddaddy himself Nielsen - both parties pioneers of the weird and the zany for respective generations. A torch-passing moment, perhaps The Naked Gun proves that comedy is cyclical; for if the destructive, skibidi-ing brainrot humour taints the impressionable youth and leaves a zombified plague in its wake, take comfort in knowing a simple verbal misunderstanding or nonsensical pun will surely live forever.

Fixed

There’s nothing more wearied than hearing a cartoon character say “fuck”. I’d imagine there was a time where it would have been some kind of paleolithic, fire-taming discovery of this seminal comic dynamite: “What if kid thing did adult thing?” the people would wheeze, hoarse-throated and eyes-tearful, several decades ago. The uber-text to this sensation is arguably Ralph Bakshi’s Fritz the Cat, with the poster parading in gaudy typeface, “We’re not rated X for nothin’ baby!”. Fritz shags, smokes, swears, and is generally a filthy little lech, much to the uptight swoons and hearty knee-slaps of many a most-likely-zooted 70s moviegoer. But in a post-South Park generation we now find ourselves in, all that stuff is pretty par for the course; I personally still view Fritz the Cat as provocative, although completely detached from its zoophilic, smutty infamy. The anti-authoritarian cries of Fritz’s “Revolt!”, in contrast to a jive-talking crow being viscerally gunned down by the moronic, literally piggish cops, still manages to retain audacious, genuinely offensive shockwaves. The perennial, pressing tensions have been somewhat ignored for a more salacious (and digestible) reputation of ‘tabby titties’ - and now over half a century later, Genndy Tartakovsky’s Fixed is just all titties. Its idea of provocation is repeatedly swinging a pair of pendulous gonads right before your eyes, awaiting you to keel over in rapturous hysteria: to put it simply, I didn’t laugh once. 

I truly had my hopes for Fixed. Tartakovsky’s Samurai Jack I consider to be one of the most elegant and visually esoteric cartoons of all time, and I even have a soft spot for the madcap nature of the Hotel Transylvania films. I was grasping onto my precious, tiny light of optimism as the opening credits began to roll; after about ten minutes, it was snuffed, or more appropriately, neutered to oblivion. That age-old parental adage of “I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed” feels like an apt summation of my thoughts, as a miserably limp orgy of balls, dicks, sex and profanity really isn’t worth getting annoyed about: the most shocking part of Fixed is that it is so ploddingly, numbingly dull, so much so that I began yearning for the crumbs of introspective substance of Sausage Party. Sausage Party. And as if my drooping, morose visage couldn’t stoop any lower, the comedic moneyshot, the apex cherry on this dog’s dinner, is a rape gag. Did I mention Genndy had been developing this since 2009? Glad to see the ‘male sexual assault played for laughs’ trope survived the sixteen-year hiatus, and is here with us tonight, ladies and gents. 

However, the tedium of the raunch is one thing, but Fixed functions on a one-two-woof of agonising. The fact that it simultaneously reminds you that Tartakovsky is a master of his craft is the genuine stinger, as the character animation itself is to die for. It’s like some sick, tricksy succubus, a true monkey’s paw - my steely expression captive to the Chuck Jones-inspired artistry, as it brought to life concepts so insipidly tired and outdated. It’s a film that challenges you to be reviled and outraged with a smarmy, fatuous grin, but quite frankly, I’m too jaded to even care; it’s anything but the dog’s bollocks. 

Materialists

Fresh-faced singletons and war-torn veterans, allow me to pose a question to you: Is the dating world this fucking bizarre? Is being 6ft really so imperative?! If that’s the case, then I’m already halfway there! Score! But then again, Celine Song has made me never want to touch that viper-pit with, well, an ‘ideal height of a male’ length pole. Solely based on the marketing for Materialists, one may anticipate a frothy, affectionate romance, only to be solemnly deceived with a bleak, cynical take on the commercialised, algorithmic hellhole of modern courtship - “...capitalism is trying to colonise our hearts and colonise love” Song states; I believe this ethos successfully grants the film it’s most interesting and successful edge, functioning more as an anthropological study of the ravenous, savage want for the perfect partner - literally opening with a neanderthalic scene of the primitive ‘first love’. Although the problem with Materialists is that it firmly and welcomingly strides away from both rom and com, but you still get the sense that it also secretly wants to embrace those elements. The result, therefore, is this cold, alien mess of emotional dissonance and juggled tones that I found utterly bemusing. 

When traversing the dire and hostile landscape of relationships, I feel as though an archetypal ‘straight man’ (or woman) would provide a down-to-earth reprieve or anchor for the audience; the issue is that none of the leading trio in Materialists possess any form of relatability. Song’s dialogue here is so inorganic and unnatural that you can almost hear the clickity-clack of the typewriter sealing the characters’ words to the confines of a page, and not to an actual, identifiable living human. Coupled with Dakota Johnon’s strangely sarcastic and stilted delivery, I cannot decipher if any of this is supposed to be sincere, or if she specifically is in on some joke and I’m being punked: there’s a scene between her and Pedro Pascal surrounding the debacle over a height increase surgery, that straddles the line between uncomfortable, intimate, goofy, seductive, and just plain awkward, to many nervous, befuddled titters in my cinema screen. What it called to my mind however, was Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster; I would have forgiven it if it went down a similar path of full-on, nightmarish satire, but then there are contrasting moments that are clearly attempting to capture a traditional rom-com gooiness: a slapsticky farce of Chris Evans stepping on a used condom or a hearfelt, confessional finale feel plucked from different movies, and when succeeded by an, admittedly humourless and respectfully handled, assault side story, I was left in stupefied dissarray of concluding just what on earth the film wanted to be. 

I personally wasn’t huge on Song’s debut feature Past Lives, as it often felt like an inferior, blander version of great cinematic romances I was already familiar with: In the Mood For Love lite, I coined it. Alternatively, Materialists is an absolute landslip of botched tone, yet is so unfathomable and unintentionally(?) outlandish that it’s oddly endearing. I know Song has previously cited her admiration for Synechdoche, New York, and there are remnants and breadcrumbs of a Kaufmanesque, form-breaking perplexity here in her follow-up. The possible reading that it’s a piece of Dadaist, anti-art is still on the cards, as I await future endeavors to see if Celine gets fully surreal with it. This is the woman who recreated Chekov’s The Seagull in The Sims 4, after all…

Eddington

In all honesty, I think there are few directors I would trust to capture the Kafkaesque, parodical real-world purgatory of 2020 than the cinematic Icarus himself, Ari Aster. I could sense the scoffy eye-rolls of my recent cinema audience as the trailer for Eddington debuted, and I’d be lying if I wasn’t a tad trepidacious about the prospects of his gung-ho mits on a ‘pandemic movie’ - Beau is Afraid may be my favourite film from Aster, but the crushing weight of auteurist indulgence that permeates that head-trip is undeniable (if, admittedly, a spectacle). Yet, that zonky, fun-house mirror of paranoid neuroses that paints Beau’s hyperworld I found to be exemplary: a blurring of fantasy and reality that would suit the delirium of COVID-19 culture to a tee, it serves as the world-building bedrock here in Eddington. A pastiche on a classic spaghetti western, ‘aint big enough for the both of us’ playground, it’s an appropriately apocalyptic tartarus of big-brother styled billboards, firearms dealers, and the brooding spectre of an AI data centre. And as a beligerantly drunken resident angrily, yet aimlessly, roams the wasteland, I was delighted to see a sign for a queasy-looking Mexican-Greek restaurant, harkening back to Beau’s pitiful Hawaiian-Irish ready meal, and continuing Aster’s streak of sardonic tackiness. 

The Eddingtonians themselves are also just as notable, as what could have easily been a finger-pointing fest at buffoonish, conservative wingnuts is rejected in favour of characterful depth. I was really taken aback to see Aster so empathetic: Phoenix’s sheriff Joe Cross may proudly push his clumsy slogan of ‘YOUR BEING MANIPULATED’ in a paddy of asthmatic, maskless denial, but Aster smartly diagnoses the roots of their hysteria as one of fear. These people are scared - there’s a feverish, fervent sense that they’re desperately searching for any semblance of dear, comforting truth, most evident in Cross’ wife Louise (Emma Stone), using a soothing coping strategy of art as a scapegoat for her trauma, eventually sinking into the TikTokified, conspiring catacombs of cult-like assimilation. Although, the aforementioned cheeky skewering is still plentiful, with Phoenix excellently portraying the leading sheriff as a wet-lettuce sap behind a tough-guy, machismo complex: there is something so inherently funny about his anxiously unsure expression whilst wielding an almighty Gatling gun. And fittingly, Cross’ plight ends in the great ‘Aster-esque’ cruel irony; with a vehement obsession with freedom, our anti-hero ends up bound to a stifling, liminal existence, when just escaping from a worldwide inferno. 

However, it feels strange that Aster’s most shining character work to date would also give way to some of his worst. For on the polar end of this dustball town are the altruistic left: portrayed as loud, annoying, and performative, Aster’s satire here I found to be disappointingly unnuanced, in an almost Boomerish cartoon sort of way. The critique of cushy, well-meaning white kids using a front of ‘wokeness’ as a status symbol, not only seems like an undeserved target, but a very redundant and boring cop-out - especially when Team America did the whole social justice schtick over 20 years ago, with Aster lounging back with Stone and Parker in a collective legacy of petty heckling - except that the former was actually funny. There’s a shot early in the film of Joe Cross’ police department in a rabblerousing hullabaloo with the Gen Z activists, wide and observatory; I couldn’t help but picture a hierarchic pedestal of smug, God-playing centrism adopted by Aster here. Eddington (both the town and the movie) kinda is his playground, for better or worse - excelling in exploring the unanimous fear of the time (natural for a horror prodigy), but then gayly poking around the real-life murder of George Floyd, in some really tasteless moments - just because he can. 

“I’m a special kind of white guy” Bo Burnham prefaced his lockdown-special Inside, a genuinely accomplished and inspired bit of self-indulgence, from someone who, in actuality, is doing pretty swell. I saw this in Eddington a bit: Aster shares the similar self-satisfied puppet-mastery of Burnham in the face of the literal loss of lives, but on the other hand an unlikely selflessness of Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, a post-pandemic study solely about the emotional toll. He’s the rapscalian kid with a magnifying glass and a trail of ants, though sometimes, he truly does set those hearts free.