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

May 15, 2024

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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

‘National Champions’ Presents Its Melodramatic Case for Student-Athlete Compensation

December 9, 2021

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National Champions (CREDIT: Scott Garfield/Courtesy of STX Films)

Starring: Stephan James, J.K. Simmons, Alexander Ludwig, Lil Rel Howery, Tim Blake Nelson, Andrew Bachelor, Jeffrey Donovan, David Koechner, Kristin Chenoweth, Timothy Olyphant, Uzo Aduba

Director: Ric Roman Waugh

Running Time: 116 Minutes

Rating: R for Big Boy Executive Language

Release Date: December 10, 2021 (Theaters)

National Champions is certainly timely, as the subject of student-athlete compensation has made its way up to the Supreme Court, and players are now permitted to financially benefit from their name, image, and likeness. But I don’t imagine that this conflict will play out in real life anywhere near as operatically it does in this movie. That’s not a criticism! I’m in the theater to be entertained, not to confirm that they get all the facts straight. And for the most part, I was thrilled, amused, and riveted.

Stephan James is at the center of it all as star quarterback LeMarcus James. James (the actor) played Jesse Owens in his breakthrough role, so he’s building up a bit of a resume of athletes who take a historical stand. LeMarcus is a senior playing his last college game in the looming title bout who’s also the presumptive number one pick in the upcoming NFL draft. But he’s calling an audible, as he announces that he’s boycotting the game unless and until the NCAA agrees to recognize varsity athletes as employees and pay them accordingly. He’s got about three days to convince his teammates and his opponents to join him, while also ducking out of the way of his coach (J.K. Simmons), various college football administrators and executives, and the NCAA’s ruthless outside counsel representative (Uzo Aduba).

Director Ric Roman Waugh and screenwriter Adam Mervis (adapting his own play of the same name) have painted a massively cynical portrait of the state of college athletics. Some of their tsk-tsking is well-founded, but my god, is it breathtakingly overwrought. It kinda has to be, considering that pretty much every line of dialogue frames everyone’s decision in life-or-death stakes. This could be a formula for unbearable soul crushing, but thankfully the premise has to allow at least a hint of optimism to poke its way in throughout. That lightness helps us realize that the ridiculousness of all the melodrama is a plus, as laughing at the moral righteousness of this exploitative system is a healthy reaction.

One other noteworthy observation before I go: several real-life athletes and sportscasters appear as themselves, which would add some authenticity, but that’s undercut by the lack of real-life branding. The teams in the championship game are from fictional schools, and ESPN (or any other sports network for that matter) is never once mentioned. I’d argue that the fakeness is weirdly the right choice (though I imagine it actually wasn’t a choice at all); this isn’t the real world after all, but a slightly heightened version of it.

National Champions is Recommended If You Like: Over-the-top line deliveries, Sports movies without any sports, Kristen Chenoweth performances without any singing

Grade: 3.5 out of 5 Salaries

This Is a Movie Review: Barry Jenkins is as Sensitive and Empathetic as Ever with James Baldwin Adaptation ‘If Beale Street Could Talk’

December 10, 2018

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CREDIT: Tatum Mangus/Annapurna Pictures

This review was originally published on News Cult in December 2018.

Starring: KiKi Layne, Stephan James, Regina King, Teyonah Parris, Colman Domingo, Bryan Tyree Henry, Ed Skrein, Emily Rios, Finn Wittrock

Director: Barry Jenkins

Running Time: 117 Minutes

Rating: R for Longtime Friends Becoming Lovers and Their Families Yelling Awful Things at Each Other

Release Date: December 14, 2018 (Limited)

One of the strength of Barry Jenkins’ films is that they work much like how the human brain works. They process their stories from a clear beginning to end, but along the way they take detours, often expressionistic and dreamlike, because in their associative natures they have tendencies to temporarily disassociate. The narrative focus in If Beale Street Could Talk is on the effort to free Alonzo “Fonny” Hunt (Stephan James) from jail after he has been (obviously and egregiously) falsely been accused of rape. We stay close with his family and pregnant girlfriend Tish (KiKi Layne) as the weeks tick by and they do whatever they possibly can for a young black man in 1970s America. Interspersed with this steady passage of time are flashes of Fonny and KiKi’s memories, hopes, and nightmares. The images in these moments are often idyllic and tranquil, but there is an undercurrent of imprisonment demonstrating that the worst of reality cannot be fully escaped as it infects our psyches.

If On Beale Street Could Talk is based on James Baldwin’s novel of the same name, and Jenkins’ smooth hand ensures that Baldwin’s conception of Harlem is brought to tactile, contemporary life. Layne’s sweet, mischievous, and unapologetic narration; Nicholas Britell’s smooth score; and James Laxton’s crisp cinematography make for a sensuous feast that altogether works to achieve a remarkable feat of empathy generation. All films that are worth their weight put us in their characters’ headspaces and let us discover what they were all about, but Beale Street is a special case. Every moment is especially intimate and familial, and it is thus an honor to be invited in. Like most stories about false accusations and systemic discrimination, this one is frustrating to anyone who cares about justice, but amidst all that there is to be angry at, Jenkins somehow manages to achieve an odd sort of peace by the end. Everything is far from perfect, but the love between Tish and Fonny is real and worth celebrating.

If Beale Street Could Talk is Recommended If You Like: Moonlight, The Harlem Renaissance, Love & Basketball

Grade: 3.75 out of 5 People Who Love Each Other