‘Babes’ Review: Ilana Glazer and Michelle Buteau Are a Couple of Babes Raising Some Babes

May 15, 2024

jmunney Cinema, Movie Reviews , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Hey, Babe. (CREDIT: Gwen Capistran/NEON)

Starring: Ilana Glazer, Michelle Buteau, Hasan Minhaj, John Carroll Lynch, Stephan James, Sandra Bernhard, Oliver Platt

Director: Pamela Adlon

Running Time: 104 Minutes

Rating: R for Filterless Conversations

Release Date: May 17, 2024 (Theaters)

What’s It About?: Eden (Ilana Glazer) and Dawn (Michelle Buteau) are at that stage of life when maintaining annual traditions necessitates taking four different subway lines and futilely attempting to have one last great restaurant feast before going into labor. They’re the titular Babes, insofar as that’s a term of endearment for platonic life partners. But “Babes” also refers to actual children, who make quite an impression on this story. There’s Dawn’s toddler son, who’s quite the handful when he starts regressing after his new baby sister arrives. And then there’s the bun growing in Eden’s oven after a life-changing one-night stand. When she decides to keep the baby, Dawn is right there to support her along the whole journey, but this could just be the ultimate test of their friendship.

What Made an Impression?: Same City, New Broads: In addition to starring, Glazer co-wrote the screenplay of Babes (alongside Josh Rabinowitz), while Pamela Adlon handled directing duties (in her feature debut). Glazer is best known for the Comedy Central sitcom Broad City, which she co-created and co-starred in along with her good buddy Abbi Jacobson, while Adlon is most recently known for the FX sitcom Better Things. While I’m sure there’s plenty of overlap in the fandom of those shows (myself included), they represent two tonal extremes. Whereas Broad City is whimsical and boisterous, Better Things is much more low-key and sarcastic. Glazer and Adlon’s collaboration unsurprisingly turns out to be a real peanut butter-and-hot sauce situation, with the slang-heavy exaggerated dialogue that is Glazer’s calling card proving to be an odd fit with the more grounded approach of just about everyone else in Babes. But that clashing sensibility might just be the point. One could theorize that Better Things is the mellowed, middle age version of Broad City, with Babes serving as the missing link to motherhood in between.
A Question of Family: One common reason for friendships drifting apart is the onset of parenthood for one friend, while others remain childless. But what Babes presupposes is, maybe that drifting apart can happen even when both friends are having kids. In the case of Eden and Dawn, it’s a matter of evolving values and possibly incompatible expectations of their relationship. The way Eden sees it, she and Dawn are more family than friends, especially because they’ve known each other longer than Dawn has known her husband (Hasan Minhaj) or either of her kids. Alas, her perhaps co-dependent demands to maintain some sort of status quo don’t sufficiently reckon with practical matters of reality. Nevertheless, her desire brings up a fair and urgent crossroads that demands to be answered: when friendship stops being convenient, how do you define the terms in which you show up for each other?
Use Your Head: If you were a regular viewer of The Drew Carey Show in the 90s and early 2000s, and a time-traveling visitor from the 2020s showed up and asked you to guess which cast member of that sitcom would eventually play a gynecologist who tries to please his wife with a series of toupees and other ineffective baldness solutions, do you think you could correctly guess the answer? Of course you could! Who else could it be besides John Carroll Lynch?! As Eden’s OB-GYN, he’s a sadsack clown of a man. But he’s also a fully trustworthy professional. In other words, he’s exactly the sort of medical figure who can manage to sufficiently match wits with an Ilana Glazer character and guide her into the messy miracle that is a vagina yawning wide enough to release a new human into the world. John Carroll Lynch: Total Babe.

Babes is Recommended If You Like: Stretching out your vowels, The messy fluids of life, Character actor dads

Grade: 3.5 out of 5 Breast Pumps

This is a Movie Review: With ‘Lucky,’ Harry Dean Stanton Left Us One Final Great Performance

September 27, 2017

jmunney Cinema, Movie Reviews , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

CREDIT: Magnolia Pictures

This review was originally posted on News Cult in September 2017.

Starring: Harry Dean Stanton, David Lynch, Ron Livingston, Tom Skerritt, Beth Grant, James Darren, Ed Begley Jr.

Director: John Carroll Lynch

Running Time: 88 Minutes

Rating: Unrated, But Keep an Eye Out for Old Farts Who Don’t Hold Their Tongues and Occasionally Get High

Release Date: September 29, 2017 (Limited)

Not many actors – nay, not many people, period – get to a point in their lives and careers that Harry Dean Stanton got to. He was still performing as he reached his 90s, thereby allowing him to quite naturally play a role that served as a meditation on preparing for death. And while he appeared relatively healthy for a man nearing the century mark (he was healthy enough to work, after all), there is always the chance that a death from natural causes could come calling at any point. Thus, Stanton has left us with the parting gift of Lucky, released only two weeks after his passing at the age of 91.

The directorial debut of prolific character actor John Carroll Lynch (Fargo, Zodiac, Shutter Island, Drew Carey’s brother on The Drew Carey Show), Lucky screams, “Made By and For Harry Dean Stanton Fanboys.” The whole film is basically an excuse for the iconic rail-thin character actor to stomp around and insist that life should be exactly as he demands it should be. As the titular coot, he is a 90-year-old atheist living in a quiet desert town, making him the ideal embodiment for irritable libertarianism. He is the kind of guy who gets banned for life from one bar and then spends all his time in the town’s other bar insulting all his friends. But everyone still loves him, probably because it is impossible for Stanton not to give a deeply humanistic performance.

As a species, we are still reckoning with how to live to an age when our biological functions are partially or completely shutting down. Lucky’s (the film) answer is mostly that the best we can do is make arrangements for death so that our left behind loved ones will not have to deal with the stresses of funereal and actuarial bureaucracy. Lucky (the person) is open to this sort of Zen practicality, but as someone who does not have any close family or friends, his perspective is a little more prickly and a little more ambivalent. Ultimately, the answer is that we really don’t know with absolute certainty how to live and how to die, but we do what we can. And if that includes hearing Lucky’s friend Howard (an always delightful on-camera David Lynch) wax poetic about his pet tortoise President Roosevelt, then it will have all been a little bit worth it.

Lucky is Recommended If You Like: Harry Dean Stanton’s career, David Lynch’s acting career, Gran Torino

Grade: 3.5 out of 5 Lollipops Up the Ass