On a scale of one to Adam Sandler screaming, Kyle Mooney would rate a solid six on the comic manchild-o-meter. Watch the YouTube videos he shot with his old sketch group GoodNeighbor or his Saturday Night Live shorts (we recommend his ill-advised freestyle battle against Kanye West), and youll see how hes carved out a tiny corner in the beta-male niche. The comedian can do delusional, full-frontal dude-ity, but his sweet spot is a shuffling, stammering awkwardness held over from early adolescence the shy, just-south-of-geeky guy whose development isnt arrested so much as incarcerated in solitary confinement.
Mooney is the main reason to see Brigsby Bear, the sort of indie dramedy that wears its on-the-spectrum quirk on its sleeve. Which, in this case, is attached not to some tight-fitting hipster jacket but a cartoonish bear suit specifically, the costume of a fuzzy-wuzzy TV character named Brigsby, who fights off a goateed Mlis-ish moon named Sun-Stealer. Imagine a cheesy 1980s kids show set in a candy-colored postapocalyptic setting, one where the hero ends each installment by intoning, Prophecy is meaningless, only trust your family unit! Something seems more than a little off with this lo-fi sci-fi saga, but the oddball aspects dont bother James (Mooney). The twentysomething gentleman is well, obsessed is too mild a word for how he feels about this serial. He owns every episode on VHS tape. He endlessly debates storyline minutiae. His room is a shrine, from Brigsby bedsheets to a poster of the beloved animal declaring that Curiosity is an unnatural emotion!
2017 Alt-Summer Movie Preview: Haunted Dolls, Docs and Tupac 18 Great Bruce Springsteen CollaborationsTop 30 Stephen King Movies, Ranked
Mom (Jane Adams) and Dad (a jedi-bearded Mark Hamill) encourage their boys fixation, just so long as he doesnt go out into what hes told is a polluted, ravaged world. Then one day, the cops bust down the door, and James folks are hauled away. It seems they arent his actual parents the couple abducted him when he was a baby, and have raised James as their own, in complete isolation, ever since. (Take another look at the name of the villainous TV-show moon again.) Even worse, in the young mans eyes, is that there is no real television program called Brigsby Bear it was simply something that Pops filmed in a nearby warehouse solely for his wards own entertainment and edification, a cult series with a rabid audience of one. Reunited with his birth parents (Matt Walsh and Michaela Watkins), assigned a therapist (Claire Danes) and forced to reintegrate into society, James is lost without his heroic intergalactic grizzly to guide him. Theres only one thing left to do, he decides: bring his furry idols final, winner-take-all adventure to life himself.
What follows is a sort of typical freaks-and-geeks free-for-all laced with pathos, as our hero recruits a motley crew of friends, family members and the Fed (Greg Kinnear) investigating his case and who believes his true calling might be on the stage to help him film a big-screen Brigsby Bear blockbuster. Director Dave McCary,an SNL writer who goes back a long ways with Mooney, knows how to work this particular subgenre of Sundance flick: the bonding-misfits-make-good story keen to remind us that social outcasts theyre so like us! (Its not surprising that it premiered at the Park City festival, given that the film doubles as a huge valentine to the communal yet monomaniacal notion of D.I.Y. moviemaking.) Hes also aware that it means dialing back on the more unique aspects so as to emphasize the triumph-of-the-underdog spirit, however, and by the time you get to the whimsical group-hug third act, you genuinely miss the uncomfortable, stand-out sense of weirdness.
None of which detracts from what Mooneys doing here with this recessive dude, all confused looks, dorky overenthusiasm and nerdy drill-down chatter about his favorite shows mythology. As the films co-writer, hes partially responsible for the storys slouch toward familiarity. But hes also the one that keeps Brigsby Bear from feeling solely like an over-extended SNL digital short not for nothing is this produced by the Lonely Island guys or simply an eccentric goof. Watch how the comedian commits to this grown-up kid whos seen his world come crashing around him, and then takes solace in the belief that you cant spell catharsis without art. Theres an investment here on his part that almost make up for the storys stock beats. Mooney is the one that gives Brigsby Bear and Brigsby Bear a soul.
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar