In Revue: One Night in Bangkok

By John Semley

Because Toronto’s more movie obsessed than a Quentin Tarantino screenplay (yuk yuk), Torontoist brings you In Revue, a weekly roundup of new releases.

A monkey in a vest will make even the hardest man humble. Illustration by Chloe Cushman/Torontoist.

As we get closer and closer to summer movie season’s sweet spot (we can almost taste you, Green Lantern), we’re stuck in another lull. The Hangover II, one of the season’s most-hyped franchise entries, is severely disappointing. And a couple of this week’s art- and artish-house foreign offerings are also, well, not great. But maybe you’ll like something. All we can do is give our two cents. We can’t account for taste.

The Hangover Part II Directed by Todd Phillips

The Invisible Eye Directed by Diego Lerman

Little White Lies Directed by Guillaume Canet

Say what you will about 2009’s The Hangover (that it’s crass, misogynist, homophobic, infantile, etc., etc., etc.) but it was, in a lot of ways, a major film in the narrative of contemporary Hollywood. With the highest-grossing R-rated comedy of all time, Todd Phillips and his Wolf Pack (Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis) proved that a comedy could be as formidable a blockbuster as any CGI action beat-em-up or superhero origin fable. And it was funny. Infantile, sure. But so is farting. And farting is literally never not funny.
It’s sad then, but not at all surprising, that this rushed-out followup would play as nothing more than another summer tentpole: another entry in a bankable dick and fart joke franchise. Following the beats of the original with grating precision (you’d hate to throw fans for a loop with, you know, something new), Part II plunks the Wolf Pack in Thailand for another lost weekend of boozey debauchery. Again, a tame bachelor party commemorating one last night of prenuptial freedom bleeds into a head-achey morning of bloodshot eyes and refrains of “Dude what happened last night?” (only now it’s Helms’ Stu whose getting hitched, to a Thai woman we learn next to nothing about). As in the original, the Wolf Pack have a day to round up a missing member of their party, Stu’s would-be brother-in-law (Mason Lee).
Cooper, who served as the Pack’s dashing de facto leader in the original, here recedes. It’s Helms who takes centre stage, displaying the impressive comic range he’s long seemed capable of. This time around, Stu seems real, more than just another of Helms’ panicky, doe-eyed dopes. As the the bearded oddball Allan, Galifiankis does his thing, competently line-reading all the eagerly “random” non sequiturs that have been written for him. Even Mr. Chow (Ken Jeong) reappears, packing an overnight bag of homophobic slurs and teeny-penis jokes. Though refreshingly funny in the original, Jeong, like most things about this sequel, wears out his welcome pretty quickly.
The film isn’t abysmal or anything. There are some funny bits. But it doesn’t bust up the ol’ gut like the original. Phillips takes a darker turn here, with the sense that real consequences might actually come to bear on our post-blackout heroes. But, of course, they don’t. Even the thematic undercurrent that all men ere inherently bad and struggle with some internal demon of self-destruction—which you can understand if you’ve ever woken up lethally hungover in Bangkok, or fully-clothed on top of your bed sheets with Nick Cave’s From Her to Eternity spinning on repeat—doesn’t really go anywhere, suggestive though it may be.
But it hardly matters. The movie will make a bunch of money and the Wolf Pack will likely be back to do it all over again in Hungover 3: This Time They Go to Like Berlin Or Something. It’s like the old saying goes: what happens in Bangkok, will probably make millions and millions and millions of dollars.
The Hangover Part II opened Thursday, May 26, in wide release. Click here for showtimes.

As far as allegories of fascism go, Diego Lerman’s Invisible Eye isn’t, well, light-handed. Set six years after the military junta seized political power in Argentina in 1974, Eye diagrams the operations of dictatorships with about as much subtlety as Chaplin playfully putzing around with an inflatable globe in The Great Dictator. But then, Chaplin’s image of Hitler’s voraciousness wasn’t necessarily bad. Just broad.
Likewise is Lerman’s lensing of a severely repressed teacher at a top-drawer Buenos Aires private school. Marita (Julieta Zylberberg) struggles to maintain order over her already plenty-well-behaved pupils. At home, she tends to her ailing mother who chastises her for being unable to get her own life in order. Unmarried, unloved, and—it’s implied at least—a virgin, loneliness hangs over Marita like one of those perpetually storming clouds that trail around downtrodden cartoon characters. Her only friend appears to be the school’s hardass supervisor, Mr. Biasutto (Osmar Nunez), whose repeated passes at Marita are pathetic and sinister in a way that pretty much defines his character.
Herr Biasutto encourages Marita to patrol her students more diligently, sniffing out any inklings of bad behaviour. In the process, she develops a crush on one of her students and ends up only sniffing his underwear while rifling through his bag. The tension Lerma drums up between repression and sexuality, and how the former is bound to buckle under the primal throb of the latter, is Freud For Dummies stuff. (In one scene, Marita pleasures herself in the boy’s bathroom and, just as she’s about to climax, Mr. Biasutto comes banging on the stall door. Blah.) Still, even if subtlety’s not the film’s strong suit, Invisible Eye is gorgeously photographed and boasts a fine performance by Zylberberg, who hits the one or two notes her character’s afforded with conviction.
The Invisible Eyeopened Thursday, May 26, for a limited engagement at the TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West). Click here for showtimes.

It’s weird seeing Marion Cotillard slum it. On this side of the pond, we’re used to seeing her svelte and sleek, injecting flicks like Inception or Public Enemies with some lithe European charm. So it’s a bit jarring at first watching her play a scruffy stoner, under the direction of her current beau, in Little White Lies. But a dressed-down Cotillard is only one of an extended ensemble cast in Canet’s latest, his take on reunion pictures like Arcand’s The Decline of the American Empire and, most obviously, Kasdan’s The Big Chill, right down to the soundtrack of American oldies standards.
Lies opens on Ludo (Jean Dujardin), a hard-partying Parisian who ill-advisedly hops on his scooter to boot it home from a club in the wee hours of the morning. In a masterful bit of mounting tension and incredibly fluid cinematography, Canet’s camera trails Ludo until he is T-boned by a truck, landing him in the hospital. Next, a gaggle of friends briefly visit their severely injured buddy in the hospital, only to decide that their annual summer vacation shouldn’t be stymied by his condition. Led by well-to-do restaurateur Max (François Cluzet), the procession of 30- and 40-somethings proceed to their summer villa, bringing some petty-bourgeois problems with them. Max, for example, is thrown for a loop when his best friend (Benoit Magimel) admits to having a crush on him.
Little White Lies unfolds as a series of character vignettes: the gang will hang out laughing, and then one member will break off to deal with some sort of personal issue. To his credit, Canet does a fine job of balancing his cast, with most of the dozen-or-so principals being fleshed out in at least two dimensions. It’s just hard to care about any of them, especially after they callously leave their buddy in traction in the film’s opening scenes. In the end, Canet’s film plays out like an advertisement for wealth. And an over-long one. But if you like hearing beautiful people speak French for two-plus hours, you’ll likely be charmed by it.
Little White Lies opens Friday, May 27, for a limited engagement at the Varsity (55 Bloor Street West). Click here for showtimes.