Hululoop

Palm Springs


starring Christin Milioti, Andy Samberg, Camila Mendes, Tyler Hoechlin, Meredith Hagner, Jacqueline Obradors, Peter Gallagher and J.K. Simmons

directed by Max Barbakow (a bunch of stuff that are not feature films)


---

HEY! LISTEN! This is a review of a movie that is already out AND WHICH I have already seen. I'm going to talk about it, including--and I want to make this absolutely clear--critical plot points that the internet youngs used to call "the spoilers." If you would prefer not to be exposed to such things, now is the time for you to kindly fuck all the way off.

---

It's mid-late July of an election year. A responsible, civic-minded blogger would be spending his time picking through the leavings of the latest news cycle for those rescuable, plantable, viable nuggets of Whole Truth I could lovingly bury and water, nurture into a sprig, then a whole plant, then neglect until it dies and dries out so I can light it on fire and people will have to come look when I scream out FIRE FIRE FIRE FIRE OHMYGOD THE FIRE!!!!

I'm sorry, but there's just not that much out there to work with. At this point it looks like there might not even be any conventions, or at least I would be able to say that with some confidence if the GOP one hadn't been moved within the jurisdiction of a governor motivated primarily (we can only guess by his actions) by seizing the opportunity to let loose some all-natural population control. So that one will almost definitely happen, but since there's no way to predict how literally anything will look more than about 49-60 minutes into the future, there's no point speculating how that will go. Between now and the convention opening prayer (you know there's going to be a fucking prayer) may just be the time the kraken wriggles ashore out of the western Atlantic and eats its way through the smorgasbord of slow-moving Floridians, its progress unimpeded by topography.

Meanwhile the Biden strategy seems to be (to paraphrase an old aphorism): if you see your enemy eating his own dick, let him. If Trump wants to run for president of the Confederate States of QAnon, cool, I'll just be Uncle Joe over here being neither creepy nor weird in any embarrassing way...

So there's nothing going on. Seriously, less than four months from the election and for a news story I wanted to link to, I swear to Christ I googled "trump beans."

Know what else is going on at the moment, outside of politics? Thanks to the pandemic, fuck all, that's what. And my kids are spending extended time with their mom, so there's even less stuff going on here than normal.

The future of the republic is at stake, so I did what I think my ancestors who bled and died for this country would want me to do: I watched a hulu.

Now, I'm pretty sure I don't have hulu. I have a few very close, very dear friends with whom it is POSSIBLE some streaming passwords have been exchanged in one way or another. In this hypothetic arrangement, there is a not-zero chance that I was offered a hulu login and password by one of these alleged scofflaws, but I have no memory of ever logging in and/or using it in the past. Nor do I ever quite remember paying for hulu myself. So imagine my surprise when I fired up the app on my smart TV and it just... worked? So my theory is I'm the world's greatest intuitive hacker and I got hulu for free OR I'm 46 and I can't remember all the tech stuff I've signed up for, meaning I've been paying for hulu (for... months? could be years!) and never once using it. Probably the first one, right?

The hulu I hulu'd, you will not be surprised to learn given the header of this particular blog post you are still inexplicably investing your time in, is called Palm Springs. Are you surprised I sat down to watch a romantic comedy by myself? OK, fair, but last week I wrote a whole fucking post about how I sat down to watch a musical by myself, so go gender-conform at someone else, wo/man. This is the newer, more open-hearted me. The one who is running out of Asian import action movies on Netflix.

It's not just a rom-com, it's a high concept rom-com, meaning it's a rom-com someone definitely thought of while they were high and watching Groundhog Day. I did a scrunchy-face-of-doubt when I saw the trailer, but then I realized Groundhog Day was 27 years ago. Maybe it was time.

Speaking of time, the time-loop conceit is re-used here, but the focus is altogether different. The theme of the Groundhog Day was that with each repetition, the world around Bill Murray become grayer and grayer around him, collapsing in on itself until the only actor (ha) with any agency at all was him, the increasingly desperate protagonist, a tiny cue ball of variation and intention among the inert rack of target balls that will never know the inside of a pocket. The interiority reaches levels of such intensity that the actual solution to escape the loop is an act of pure internal growth by this same, solitary man. And because he bones Andie McDowell I think? I don't know, it's been a while since I've seen it.

Andy Samberg basically starts out as an identical character, but plucked out of Groundhog Day like 60 minutes in. It's a weird combination of omniscience and powerlessness: knowing everything, but incapable of applying the knowledge to anything meaningful or lasting because "lasting" no longer exists as a concept. What you get is a person unanchored by any kind of eschatology, even a personal one, which can only manifest in a kind of nihilism, both existential and literal. He dies a lot.

The central plot of the film is not how the sci-fi conceit works but the fact that he accidentally ropes in Christin Milioti, someone I'd only seen on bits of reruns of How I Met Your Mother (a show I don't watch) and on one episode of the schmaltzy but very sweet Modern Love on Amazon. I find Andy Samberg charming and I trust his gifts to get the most comedy out of any single line or a take. Christin Milioti however is my favorite kind of comic actor, grounding the jokes in human language and behavior so they mean more than one thing, drawing you in with an effortless background vulnerability. She's not just objectively good; that's exactly the quality something this out-there requires to make you give a shit about these people as people.

Making the piece a two-hander as opposed to the solo journey of Groundhog Day is smart. It takes away some of the rapey undertones of one person acting on others trapped with incomplete context, but not before allowing them to be addressed and affect the central relationship. That's where this one worked for me, in the liberation of the characters (Samberg and Milioti and the similarly afflicted J.K. Simmons) from the strictures of the plot. The very repetition of the events means the events don't matter. What you get is how the central pair affect one another. And the female character in this case is not relegated to reacting to or being saved by the spent gravity rainbow of the Male Growth Arc that nearly every fucking thing ever is tied to. She runs through the most complete set of emotional spikes and dips. And in the end, she is unapologetically (and literally) the hero of the piece.

In the end it comes down to the writing and the ability of the performers to pull it off. This thing is practically bursting with human charisma, which is a credit to the performers and possibly also to director Barbakow, but this is his first feature, so it's hard to say. Milioti and Simmons could make a lot of people look like geniuses. They do so here.

Overall it's good. How good? It ends with a shit-ton of C4 plastic explosive, that's how good. Either way, it's set in Riverside County, where I live and where almost nothing is ever set. It's nowhere near my house (this county is fucking huge. The Coachella Valley is at the opposite end to me, a whole other world), but we get our voter registrations at the same country registrar, so I'll claim it. This review comes less out of the motivation of having seen a pretty good movie (it is!) and more out of civic responsibility. You are welcome.