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Thursday, May 18, 2017
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
ARTS
‘Snatched’ gives
empty laughter
By ARYA NAIDU
Daily Arts Writer
Following the blatant wildness of
his last movie, “The Night Before”
(2015), director Jonathan Levine’s
“Snatched” eases up on comic raun-
chiness, instead striving to be a
wild, yet touching, take on a mother-
daughter vacation gone wrong.
The beginning scenes show Emily
Middleton (Amy Schumer, “Train-
wreck”) preparing for her upcoming
romantic getaway to South America
with her boyfriend, Michael (Randall
Park, “Trainwreck”). She’s promptly
dumped, leaving her begging for
her homebody mom (Goldie Hawn,
“The Banger Sisters”) to fill the non-
refundable space.
Hawn’s Linda Middleton reluc-
tantly agrees, and the disastrous holi-
day ensues. Emily meets hot stranger
James (Tom Bateman, “B&B”) at
their resort, and she and her moth-
er get kidnapped because that’s
what happens when you try to have
adventures with hot strangers in
foreign countries. They ride around
in trunks, accidentally kill South
American mobsters and spend 20-ish
minutes designing an escape with a
useless and relatively unnecessary
Christopher Meloni (“Holding Pat-
terns”) — you know, vacation things.
Both leads are
basic
enough
to
be
unsurprising
— neither Emily
nor Linda have the
character
depth
to make the film
complex — and the film doesn’t
have the intricacy to make them any
deeper. Schumer is the blunt force
fans love her for being, playing the
ditzy, social-media-obsessed gal who
drinks too much and feels the need to
yell everything. Hawn is the cautious
mother, never taking risks and being
overly-critical of her daughter’s life
choices. They have their differences,
they argue about these differences
with harsh words and poorly-timed
wisecracks in an underwhelming
jungle scene, one of them sacrifices
themselves to prove their love, their
relationship is then fixed and they
party together forever. Easy.
While the heart of the movie is in
Emily and Linda, the film’s support-
ing characters are arguably its best
parts. Ike Barinholtz’s (“Storks”) Jef-
frey Middleton, Emily’s agoraphobic
and laughably charmless brother, sits
at home, repeatedly harassing the
State Department via telephone. His
never-ending efforts to save his fam-
ily, combined with the way he chirps
“Mama” every 10 minutes, makes
Barinholtz one of the brightest tal-
ents in the film. Perfectly understat-
ed, he earns himself a place among
the top funniest actors on camera by
not overdoing a plight to get there.
Ruth (Wanda Sykes, “Bad Moms”)
and Barb (Joan Cusack, “Popstar:
Never Stop Never Stopping”) are two
platonic vacationers who meet the
ladies at their resort. They’re eccen-
tric and entirely neurotic, with Ruth
barely introducing herself before rat-
tling on about the statistics on being
kidnapped. She’s funny, as is to be
expected of Sykes’s characters, but
next to Barb, it’s hard to concentrate
on what she’s saying.
Maybe I’m just writing this
because I’ve absolutely adored Joan
Cusack ever since she tepidly flipped
out over Stevie Nicks in “School of
Rock,” but she was the funniest part
of this film. An elusive badass, she
has zero lines because Barb’s past
involves her having cut her own
tongue out after being tortured for
information. It’s a dumb backstory
in a dumb movie, and I loved it all.
To compensate for her lack of talk-
ing, Cusack brings such a gusto to
her ridiculously aggressive body lan-
guage and contorted facial expres-
sions. Silently, she renders the loudest
laughs of everyone on screen.
Released Mother’s Day week-
end, the main pitfall of “Snatched”
is that it tries too hard to be more
than just a kidnap romp. The focus
of the movie is diluted, wanting
to be Emily and Linda’s relation-
ship yet overflowing with outra-
geous situations and the comedic
life forces of its focal actors. Stir-
ring lines are somewhat muddled
by the brash wit that always seems
to exude from Schumer, creating
a few moments when the film was
reaching too far to be heartwarm-
ing. The unbelievable situation
these women are in lends itself to
crafting a light-hearted summer
flick. Sitting safely in this zone, it
doesn’t need to strive to be any-
thing bigger. It’s entertaining, and
that’s enough.
‘Master of None’ is once
again perfect television
MOVIE REVIEW
NETFLIX
Aziz Ansari peacefully drinking coffee in “Master of None”
Snatched
Rave Cinemas/
Qualtiy 16
20th Cent. Fox
‘Master of
None’
Season 2
Review
Netflix
By ANAY KATYAL
Managing Arts Editor
Empathy. It’s a badge that “Mas-
ter of None” wears with pride
throughout its second season.
While the show’s first run has
been continually lauded for its keen
ability to dissect the simultaneously
absurd and depressing tropes of
modern millennial life, it also had a
tendency to adhere to a rather stale
thematic formula for our protago-
nist, Dev (Aziz Ansari, “Parks and
Recreation”), to convey his malaise
and misgivings about his profession-
al, familial and
romantic future.
That isn’t to say
that
the
tried-
and-true sitcom-
esque format that
co-creators Alan
Yang and Ansari
tried to employ
throughout
the
first season was
objectively bad —
far from it, really.
For what the season was — at its
simplest form, a method of living
vicariously through a young man’s
path toward self-discovery and pur-
pose — the format found itself at
home. But for the considerably bold-
er direction that Ansari and Yang
sought to further move Dev’s story
in, it was only fitting that the show’s
second iteration graduated to some-
thing grander. Hell, Season two’s
opener essentially fashions itself as
a modern parody of early-20th cen-
tury Italian film “Bicycle Thieves” —
black and white filmography and all.
Auteur-ish
creative
liberties
aside, the tone the program aims to
set becomes obvious fairly early-on.
While the program’s first season
covered the ingrained anxieties
that come with the journey towards
(in the very least, the concept of)
becoming an “adult,” its second sea-
son makes it a point to highlight the
very real social and mental anguish
of modern-day adulthood rarely
explored in television. The Dev
Shah of Season one is a confused
actor who doesn’t really know what
he wants out of his life, but the Dev
Shah of Season two is thrust with
very real, difficult deci-
sions and compromises
he has to make to stay
on the long-term path
he finally manages to
start forging for him-
self. What Dev wants
and what Dev needs are
rarely the same thing,
and these quandaries
fashion themselves a
pointed
illustration
of what adulthood in
today’s day and age can actually
look like. There are laughs, there
are jokes — but there are also very
real moments of mental grief that
can speak to most viewers’ everyday
experiences as adults, regardless of
creed or color.
These themes are explored in
a variety of directions throughout
the season — and the multi-faceted
cast Ansari and Yang employ to
illustrate these themes manages
to instill an overarching sense of
empathy that permeates throughout
the program as well. In “New York,
I Love You,” a vignette of storylines
involving a deaf biracial couple, a
group of African taxi drivers and
an overworked Manhattan high
rise doorman intersect in a way that
sees audiences experience familiar
emotions from perspectives they’re
rarely afforded exposure to. In the
poignant “Thanksgiving,” Denise
(Lena Waithe, “Transparent”), a
childhood friend of Dev’s, and her
mother are shown to slowly come to
terms with each other’s differences
in personality and identity over the
course of a decade of Thanksgiv-
ing dinners. Both episodes are the
strongest exercise in Ansari and
Yang’s creative liberties, and consid-
ering the stories they told (and the
audience takeaways), they make for
gems that represent what much of
the rest of the season is all about.
All in all, “Master of None” pro-
vides no antidote for these very real
modern conundrums. You’d be mis-
taken in thinking that was its pur-
pose, though. The program shows
that such dilemmas are genuine and
real, and happen to families of color,
to young adults, to geriatrics, to gay
and straight individuals alike. The
program provides no real resolu-
tion for its overarching storyline,
but its conclusion functions as an
exercise in audacity — and it pays
off. Ansari and Yang show no hesi-
tance in posing difficult questions
in every corner of the show, but it
doesn’t seem as if they’re attempt-
ing to provide answers. If any-
thing, “Master of None” shows us
that coming to an answer may not
nearly be as important as dwelling
on the question.