![]() ![]() ![]() Andy Samberg in "Palm Springs." (Courtesy Hulu)įestival fever is a very real condition, especially at Sundance. (The weird thing about movies on subscription services is how it feels like you’re getting them for free, even though you pay every month.) Watching “Palm Springs” again at home I even chuckled a couple of times, as opposed to back in January when sourpuss here sat scowling with my arms folded in the back row of the sold-out Eccles Theatre while 1,200 people around me laughed and clapped like crazy. With theatrical plans scuttled for COVID-related reasons, the film premieres on Hulu this weekend, where its modest ambitions are much more agreeable than if you’d shelled out for tickets, popcorn and a babysitter. In a way, the pandemic is probably the best thing that could have happened to “Palm Springs,” a genially mediocre time-killer that feels more at home on your television set than it ever did on a big screen. For every “Little Miss Sunshine,” you’ve got dozens of expensive wipeouts like “Happy, Texas,” “Hamlet 2,” “Late Night,” “The Way Way Back,” “Patti Cake$,” “Brittany Runs a Marathon” or “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl,” all of which sold for $10 million or more before being roundly ignored by audiences. The trek is especially brutal on comedies. It’s always around this time during the summer that the biggest deals from Park City tend to dribble their way into multiplexes, proving that festival hype rarely makes it all the way down the mountain. Cheekily adding 69 cents to the previous record-holding $17.5 million Fox Searchlight spent on “The Birth of a Nation” back in 2016, the mega-sale immediately positioned “Palm Springs” as yet another one of those Sundance sensations that was bound to be a theatrical disappointment. Palm Springs, which debuts on Hulu tomorrow, and The Old Guard, premiering on Netflix tomorrow as well, make for a fascinatingly of-the-moment double feature.A hundred years ago back in January, the affable time-loop comedy “Palm Springs” made Sundance history when it was purchased by distributors NEON and Hulu for the largest sum ever paid for a film at the festival. However, differing quality and artistic goals notwithstanding, both feel exceptionally poignant today than they might have under more conventional circumstances. It may be simplistic to say that both films sting ever sharper in an era when many of us are trapped in a certain day-to-day irrelevancy, both due to the current pandemic and because our voices seem to be ignored (or willfully mocked) by those in power. ![]() It struck me how the weekend’s two biggest (by default) new movies, the excellent romantic comedy and the merely okay (but worth seeing) action flick, are both rooted in the trauma and challenges faced when mortality and consequence are removed from the equation of one’s day-to-day existence. There is an unapologetically cheesy romantic monologue at around the halfway point that acts as a dare to shame the major studios and the major franchises to do better in this arena. Two of our heroes (Marwan Kenzari and Luca Marinelli) are a couple, having met and fallen in love while fighting on opposite sides during the Crusades. The one area where The Old Guard stands out in its unapologetic and comparatively casual LGBTQIA representation. For example, Matthias Schoenaerts gets a grim monologue about watching everyone you love grow old and die, while Theron is haunted by a colleague who ended up eternally punished. Alas, the action is almost painfully conventional, and the A-plot is almost irrelevant, and thus the best moments are where characters discuss how the “can’t die” variable has wrecked them emotionally and psychologically.
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